Hola!

So I'm using Hola Unblocker to watch US Netflix and stuff on Hulu. It's fantastic but makes me sad that this content isn't available to us in Canada without finding a work around. Personally, I don't think I'm doing anything wrong. I pay monthly for the Netflix streaming service. So what if I'm streaming from the American library instead of Canadian one. There's so much more content readily available. As for Hulu, I'm watching the ads so again, I doesn't feel like I'm doing anything wrong. As I write this post I'm watching the second season of Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes! which is as strong as the first season. Nice way to spend an afternoon.

Last night I watched the new Fox show The Following. It seems like a decent enough show but mainly it piqued my curiosity regarding Edgar Allen Poe. I haven't read anything by Poe but I do have an interest in detective fiction. I thought this started with reading Raymond Chandler but I realize I've been reading mysteries my entire life. When I was a kid, my parents used to read the old Hardy Boys stories to me (never the new ones, oddly enough). We must have read TONS of them. Like a two or three a month for at least two or three years between the ages of 4-7. Then, I would read Encyclopedia Brown. Man, I loved those stories, especially since you could actually solve the cases if you knew enough / read carefully. So today I bought a book of Poe's Dupin detective stories. Excited to read it eventually.

Also I got a copy of Hacking the Xbox. Got an old Xbox I'm thinking tinkering with so that should be fun.

Reviews and boing boing

This is an excellent review of Cory Doctrow's newest book For the Win. Doctrow is one of the founding editors of boing boing, a truely fantastic blog if there ever was one.

That's all for now.

Don't Rely on Your Resume

According to this blogger, your resume should end the application process rather than start it. This is an interesting concept that makes a lot of sense. You can write and re-write your resume but in the end it can't really speak for you. Resumes, like all official correspondence, are dead documents. All your resume can do is show you're qualified for the job. Yes, I know it's difficult to filter out the crap when anyone can apply online, but still.

I'm in the process of looking for a new job. Not sure exactly what I want to do, I'm applying for things that look interesting, even if I'm not exactly totally qualified. I've gotten better at writing my cover letter and I believe my current resume is decent. It's good to be looking while I still have a job.

What I need to do is start a blog with mini-reviews of the books I've read over the last couple of years. Set it up as a part of my website, and make it a resource for educators or other interested people. Could work well. First I need create my own website, buy the domain name, and make it good and interesting.

It's always hard the first time

I ran a workshop for hopeful middle-school teachers at OISE the other day. Being the first workshop I've ever run, it didn't run as smoothly as I would have liked. I learned a lot. Mistakes were made (like ending the session a little too early) but overall it was a positive experience. It was challenging but in a good way. There were several benefits. It made me re-consider what I want out of my job and the opportunities at my fingertips. Still, I'm not looking forward to moving lots of heavy boxes over the next month.

Reading makes you feel good

I have to read three young adult novels by the end of the week so I can run a workshop for teacher candidates. This is my first opportunity to do something like this for my job. I'm pretty excited. I may prepare way too much but I'd rather that than come up short. My plan going into it is to overload them with information/books/ideas and hope something sticks. This might not be the most effective solution but at least I can get feed back to figure out how to improve. Group work is key.

Foucault's Pendulum

I got my undergraduate degree in semiotics. The director of the undergraduate program was friends with Umberto Eco and spent most of the first year course convincing us that Eco was one of the foremost thinkers of the late twentieth century, especially when it came to semiotics. This lead me to read several of Eco's novels, including Foucault's Pendulum. Being a naive young man, I thought the title's Foucault was Michel Foucault, not Leon Foucault. This mistake meant that I was very confused by Eco's novel and never finished it. It wasn't until I read the picture seen here that I understood who Leon was and what he had done. A decade later.

Summer Reading

My summer reading list included these two excellent young adult books by Canadian authors.

Restoring Harmony by Joelle Anthony deals with a world reeling from a global economic collapse fueled by a lack of oil. Agriculture, preserving foods, bicycles, and bartering have become the standards in a society without cars. Molly, the sixteen year old protagonist, shows courage, independence, and compassion while on a mission to save her grandparents and bring them back to her family's island farm community. This book is an excellent introduction to the topics of peak oil, sustainability, and consumerism.

No Safe Place is a gripping, eye-opening novel about displaced peoples. Deborah Ellis' characters are on a journey from their former homes to Britain in search of a better life. Through its characters, the novel discusses the treatment of Iraqi Kurds, Roma people in Europe, and orphans in Russia through a lens of the illegal traffic of immigrants. This is another great novel from the author of the Breadwinner trilogy.

Fortress Round My Heart

I attended, as the bookseller, the 2010 Canada-US Gang Summit held here in Toronto. The keynote speaker was Father Gregory Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries. His book, seen above, details his remarkable journey assisting Los Angeles gang members to become positive and contributing members of society. Told through personal stories arranged by themes, Boyle inspires and humanizes those who have fallen through the cracks. An excellent resource showing a different side of gang culture. My only criticism is that Doyle's Jesuit background influences his storytelling. It was filled with references to Christ, God, and Catholicism. The story, and real changes Boyle made in former gang members, is remarkable and if you can get beyond the language it's a fantastic and inspirational book.

Eating the Dinosaur

Chuck Klosterman's new book was my pick of the month. Once again Klosterman gives us a variety of essays on wide range of topics. There's his personal essay, his sports-as-metaphor essay, his reflection-on-pop-culture essay, and his meta-essay. I enjoyed it but there wasn't anything totally new. I like Klosterman's style but his point of view is the exact same as his previous three books. Maybe I need to read his fiction. So yes, I liked it but I have reservations.

This month's pick

Beige is a book about a girl going to spend the summer with a father she's had little contact with. It's set in LA and her father is an old school punk with substance abuse. The girl is nerdy and knows nothing about her father's life or the punk rock subculture. This is a coming of age story. Each chapter is named after a "classic" punk song. I enjoyed this book and read it in one day.

The World is Not Enough

It's the end of November 2009. That means best of the year lists are starting to trickle out. Because it's also the end of the decade, the best of the decade lists are also coming out. So far I haven't been impressed with what I've seen except for this best books of the last ten years list. Hope there's more good ones come out soon.

Where's Waldo?

One of the larger Canadian book publisher invited the employees of several Toronto independent bookstores to a presentation of their new fall line-up. After the wine and food, there was a table of free books that we could pick from. I got a couple of neat free books but the best was the complete Where's Waldo series (pictured above). That's all I learned. Free books are awesome. That's all

New Pick

So I finally got around to updating the staff picks' page. This time I picked Eye of the Crow, a boy Sherlock Holmes novel. It's by Canadian author Shane Peacock, who was one of five speakers at a conference I went to last Saturday. The book does a decent job of describing Victorian London and its class structures. The author took some liberties with Holmes' childhood to fit his storytelling needs but A.C. Doyle didn't go into great details in any his stories. The plots moves at a good pace, paying attention to the facts and clues but not getting bogged down in them. While it wasn't the most exciting book I've ever read, it was still good and an excellent choice for 11-14 boys who like mysteries.

In September

This is what I do when I work 13-hour days. Put out lots and lots of books, sell them, and then pack it all back up. It's very tiring. More of these coming up.
These books have the exact same pictures on the cover. They're not published by the same company, nor are the authors from the same country. I'm thinking about emailing the respective publishers and pointing it out to them. See if I can the famous No-Prize.
This what UFC made me to remind me to eat my fruits and vegetables. It's very cute.

It's almost like that scene in Brazil

The beginning of the school year is a very busy time for the store. Right now there's more stock in the store than there's very been before. It's fucking crazy. People are starting to get stressed out. Me, I'm just happy to not be sick. UFC bought organic milk. It's really tasty.

On a completely different subject, I've been editing the couple posts for mistakes. Small words forgotten here and there that when read quickly aren't missed.

My Picks

Gettin' Through Thursday by Melrose Cooper &NNeka Bennett

Empress of the World by Sara Ryan

Making Comics by Scott McCloud

These three books are my current picks at the bookstore. I'm suppose to be publishing these on the website but the FTP server isn't cooperating and I don't know the password to fix it. Instead I'm publishing them here. The first book is a picture about a low-income family dealing with day before payday when there's no money left for anything. The second is a young adult novel about a girl discovering that she likes other girls. It's very sweet and deals with the subject matter in a very mature way. The final book is the third "how-to" book from Scott McCloud, probably the most popular North American comic book theorist. This book discuss the issues and theory about actually creating comics. It's a must for anyone interested in comics.

The coffee shop I usually go to gave me green tea instead of Earl Grey. Green tea doesn't taste good with milk and sugar. Oh well...

Books On Tape

There are books piling up around the apartment. They're mostly books I haven't read. Having worked at various book stores for almost a year, you start collecting books; books that were on sale, books that people recommended, books that generally looked cool. I've read a bunch of them, started all of them. I think I need to stop buying books and start reading them instead.

Michael Cera is Scott Pilgrim

I attended a friend's wedding this weekend.





I'm having difficult finishing the rest of this story. Going to a wedding doesn't seem like a terribly difficult story to tell. And it's not like anything really crazy happened; No one tried to stop the wedding; It didn't rain. No, nothing like that. In fact, overall it was a very pleasant ceremony and reception. Didn't stay too long because we had to drive home afterwards. No, the reason I'm having difficulty recounting the story is because I was "tricked" into attending a Mormon wedding.

Okay, I wasn't tricked. I just wasn't aware that part of the bride's family belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (I'm friends with the groom). Now, it wasn't all Big Love or anything. In fact, if you set aside the heavy emphasis on family commitment and covenants with everything under the sun, it was just a traditional wedding ceremony. Still, it freaked me out a little bit. The language unnerved me a bit. I guess I'm living in a pretty protective progressive bubble at the moment. There was definitely no discussions about the lack of trans-gender young adult literature at this event. There was, however, an open bar which is always a good thing.

On a completely different note, I went to some used bookstores in Peterborough and found a copy of Colin Wilson's An Introduction to New Existentialism. I love randomly finding out of print books. Maybe that's why there's a gap between wedding ceremonies and receptions. So guests can find awesome books at the local retailers.

You Keep Me Hanging On

I'm trying to finish off the month with a bang. So, check out my picks at my new work place (it's under Ryan's Picks)! One of them is kind of obvious but what can I say? I'm obvious.

New Job

These are the good things about my new job:

• full-time
• better pay
• humane hours of operation
• sick days
• real vacation time
• close to home (within walking distance)
• discounts on books
• no uniform
  

The only negative is that I have to start yet another job. At least it's same industry I'm currently in (books) and I'm able to use my training (education) too.