Review: Maybe I'll Pitch Forever: A Great Baseball Player Tells the Hilarious Story Behind the Legend

Maybe I'll Pitch Forever: A Great Baseball Player Tells the Hilarious Story Behind the Legend by Leroy Satchel Paige
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

What a great story, by a larger-than-life storyteller. You never know if what you read is 100% true, or exaggerated, but what Paige describes is a hard scrabble life of a guy who knows how to make money by capitalizing on his freakish abilities to play baseball, and who knows how to spend said money. Time and again, Paige tells of needing money, often after realizing a big payday or signing a playing contract. You learn a lot about his life, the ups and downs, family life, his difficulty in driving a car below the speed limit, and you learn about baseball at the time. You learn a lot about baseball, from the Negro League to pro ball, international play, and barnstorming for entertainment over the decades that Paige played. Paige has wonderful things to say about Bill Veeck. Paige also drops a couple of ethnic slurs along the way. But what I’ll remember about this book is how much of a character Paige was, and how funny he could be. This was one of those audiobooks I found myself guffawing at while driving. Quite a hoot.

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Review: The Oracle Way to Consulting

The Oracle Way to Consulting: What it Takes to Become a World-Class Advisor by Kim Miller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this take on “how to be a computer consultant”, although I found it a bit of a mixed bag. If this book were a consultant, I’d say it was very professional but with a chip on their shoulder. The advice leans to dealing with the customer and with co-workers about evenly. I found this mix to be excellent. Near the end, I did sense a bit too much grandstanding as the author says if you don’t believe something that was stated in the book, start over again from the beginning. And this is stated multiple times, which is just a bit too cocky, but fits in with the personality of many computer consultants I’ve dealt with. I think this would be a good book for those wanting to be a consultant who don’t have long experience or training from a top competitor like Oracle. It would also be good for the people who hire Oracle or other top-line consultants, as a way to understand how good consultants make projects work.

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Review: Onward

Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul by Howard Schultz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

""Onward" covers roughly 2005 - 2010 in the life of Starbucks, a time when the stock hits a long-term low and starts to recover, and the author returns as CEO. Schultz spends a lot of time describing his and others angst over decisions and cheerleading about passion, which are all too common in these types of books. Schultz comes across as passionate about his shops, but also quite pompous. His story about the foray into social media makes it sound like Starbucks took big risks early on, but that is being over dramatic. There were four sections I appreciated for their business insight. One was the consideration of working with the "World of Warcraft" folks to try to draw the young male demographic into their shops. It didn't pan out, but this anecdote showed how Starbucks was open to odd ideas. Second was the description of one of Schultz's trips to China. This story illustrated well that Starbucks employees, in China even, have the ability to try things out, like new foods, even if they will likely never be sold by Starbucks. The story about Via instant coffee showed the company's willingness to do extensive research on a product extension. However, Shultz undercuts this story by mentioning that instant coffee detractors are mostly in the US, but instant coffee sells much better in overseas markets -- makes you wonder why they didn't speed that product to market more. The best part was the description of the Clover brewed coffee machine and the theater of espresso-based drinks. I hadn't noticed the theater aspect until I read this, but I see his point - baristas face the customer while working these drinks but not others. The Clover machine sounds wonderful, but even now, two years after the book was written, they aren't in many stores, and that isn't explained in the book. Schultz describes using "lean" concepts in optimizing store operations, and that, along with the Clover story, shows great use of the "time and motion" school of optimization. He even describes how the stores went from bean grinding once a day to once a pot to better optimize the customer experience of the smell of the coffee shop. On reflection, Schultz comes across as Steve Jobs-anal, but not all that Steve Jobs-brilliant. The book does explain why Starbucks is Starbucks, and is worth reading for that.

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Review: Personal Archiving

Personal archiving : preserving our digital heritage by Donald T. Hawkins
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have worked most of my career on enterprise content management, a way for organizations to keep track of the many kinds of content that they create and use. This involves a variety of areas of focus, including long term archiving, records management, management of special types of files like CAD drawings or digital assets like audio and video files, searching, viewing, conversions, and more. I find the concept of personal digital archiving a close cousin to what I’ve been doing for years, and this was my first chance to read about the concept from the academic/library side.

The book consists of 13 chapters, or short papers on varying subjects regarding personal digital archiving by different authors. As expected in a book such as this, there was no flow between chapters, this was more a collection, written with different voices. Many of the papers repeated the same basic tenets of digital archiving, and I found there is plenty of overlap with commercial solutions for enterprises. Where the enterprise solutions fail is not in the software engines that maintain the records but in the simple interfaces and, often, in the way the software works, or doesn’t, in a cloud environment. And in the cost – tools for corporate use are priced for corporate use. I found this very interesting, but didn’t run across anything I hadn’t been exposed to in the corporate world, which really wasn’t discussed in this book. I was surprised to not see any mentions of e-discovery software, which offers many of the functional features only starting to be considered with the tools discussed here. These e-discovery tools (and extensive user experience with them) existed when the book was written, as have corporate-aimed tools using faceted search, personal taxonomies, and tagging, leading me to believe this lack of coverage reflects siloed thinking in the personal archiving community. I hope this has changed.

There were pointers here for additional study, including the Library of Congress’ website. There were also discussions of specific software solutions from academics, but in perusing these websites, I didn’t find usable software. As can be expected in a 5 year old book on technology, much of the technology content regarding solutions is dated and not useful. I see there’s a newer book with a similar title by the ALA, that might be a good alternative to this. It’s on my to read list. This is an important topic, and this contains a serviceable introduction to the issues.


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Review of John Henry

John Henry by Steve Haskin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As I work my way through the Thoroughbred Legends series, I have found that many of the stories were quite similar. The horses have been superstars, obviously, and many, especially the more modern horses, had similar stories. Those stories revolve around breeding, training, racing, and retiring to stud. And a large majority of these books cover the owners, breeders, and horsemen, and after reading a few of the books in the series, these people and these topics kind of run together. It takes a good writer and a novel subject to make a book in this series stand out, and “John Henry” stands out.

The writing itself is OK. The way the author chose to tell John Henry’s story was distinct for this series, and that made this one more interesting. The author foreshadows the future a number of times as you read through this short (200 page) book. And he is able to use many more modern sources like articles from Sports Illustrated for material, strangely including an evaluation of John Henry by a psychic. This was written well, and I’d look forward to reading more by Haskin, but I already read the one other in this series.

What really makes this book interesting in the world of race horse books is the subject. John Henry was one of the more recent subjects in the series, and there are many sources available and most of the principals were still alive when the book was written. John Henry had a very different life than most of the horse superstars. He was unwanted at first. He was passed around quite a few owners, including a dog groomer. He was a gelding who raced until he was 9, and likely had more races than other of the superstars. And he seems to have lost more than the others – no perfect record here, nowhere near.

Many of the people in this book are characters right out of Central Casting. The aforementioned first owner was a dog groomer. The owner for most of John Henry’s life was a hard scrabble, street wise business man who made his money, after trying many things, importing Japanese bicycles. He always had a quip, and I laughed out loud a few times while reading. The horsemen all seemed to be characters, mostly portrayed here as occasionally flawed good guys. Many of the people covered here could carry a book by themselves. The biggest character is John Henry. He is mean and smart, a potent combination for stories. You keep reading about how the horse destroyed dozens of feed buckets or squeezed someone into a corner, and how people responded. There were many mostly humorous stories.

I have a personal interest in this book as well. Of all the 24(?) racehorse subjects in the Thoroughbred Legends series, the only horse I ever saw in person was John Henry, at the Kentucky Horse Park a couple decades ago. Still mean, still smart, and still the source of stories. Good book on a great topic, and probably the book in the Thoroughbred Legends series I’m most likely to remember the longest.

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