Oct. 23rd, 2010

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[livejournal.com profile] derien made a post about the Heifer Project and I was surprised to see she didn't mention, what was for me, the most amusing part. This catalog is filled with lots of pictures of children from various less developed countries with their Heifer Project animals: Thailand, Latvia, Nepal, Armenia,Ecuador, Boliva. The Heifer Project really provides developement opportunities all over the globe. On one page there is a picture of a girl holding an adorable fuzzy lamb. The caption on that picture reads, "In Houlton, Maine, a loving child adores her sheep." Houlton. Maine.

The Heifer Project is based on a really great idea. It deserves your support if you've got a few dollars, pounds, or euros to spare.
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It has been a long time since I finished a book. That is in part because I have been busy doing other things. It's also in part because I had started a book, then stopped in the middle to read another, then started a third to relieve myself of the second. Well, now I've finally finished two of them! This is about the second book, which has eaten my reading time for the last month or so.

I picked up Jesse Liberty's "Programming ASP.NET" to keep me focused on ASP. I had been intending to add some current technology to my abilities and I needed the brain challenge. At about the same time I decided these things, the ability to use ASP.NET on a project at work came along, so it dovetailed fairly well.

I don't think many people are going to read this book cover to cover. The few who do, will probably read it while in front of their computers, trying the examples. I did read it cover to cover, over 800 pages in all. I wasn't in front of the computer. So I didn't get to try out the examples, but I did have to think about the code bits and the implications a bit more, I think.

As a technical book, it is very well written. It provides a fair amount of detail on a huge topic. It doesn't get down into the kind of details that you'll need once you dig into the trenches, but provides you enough to have an idea of where to start your trenches and how the different trenches you might dig could connect. I think it's a good level of detail and any more would have made the book unpublishable and unreadable.

The book did suffer from lack of proofreading. The proofreaders got tired after somewhere around page 400 and the incidents of errors went up quite a bit. Most of these are in the text parts of the book, I can't remember if I found errors in the code (outside of one glaring one in a code comment). I read the 3rd edition of the book, but there was no doubt lots of new material in it because of technology changes.

23. Jesse Liberty "Programming ASP.NET"
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I started reading this book about two weeks ago, as a reading break from ASP.NET. I would read as much programming as I could stand, then switch to garlic before going to sleep.

"Growing Great Garlic" by Ron England is a pretty easy read. It has a large section on the history of garlic and another section on the varities. The remainder of the book covers the stages of growing garlic: preparation, planting, growth, harvesting, and storage. Much of the advice is general because growing garlic is so very location specific. England tries to make general statements that apply to regions or climates rather than specific do this now statements. As such, the book is designed to encourage you to experiment, observe, and learn from your own plants in your own situation. I liked the history, but found it amazing that so little was known at the time of the writing about the varieties of garlic. I wonder if more progress has been made in the last 20 years or if people are still just blundering around between the one extreme of calling all garlic one variety and the other extreme of a different names for the same plants grown in multiple regions.

I picked up a lot of tips from this book and will certainly open it back for reference if I find my crop in trouble or feel the need to step my productivity up a notch.

24. Ron L. England "Growing Great Garlic"

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