Yardening: How to Grow Cool Weather Vegetables

I know, this is technically not a book but I may need to refer to this in the future. This is a video made in 1987 which is a good treatment of how to garden. Now, I am a complete neophyte to the gardening scene, however this video gives you a good vision of how wonky you can be about vegetables.

Jeff Ball is the host and is likeable and not embarrassing to watch, if a little stiff. His big deal is "intensive gardening". Since this video is on cool weather vegetables he gets to show off his tunnel set up for lengthening the growing season. Since I live in the Mid-Atlantic, I don't think it's worth that amount of work to add some more months, but if you live in Minnesota, you might take the trouble. One good point he makes is that if you garden on a more year-round basis, you can get by with storing less food.

Good info on soil conditioning, disease, etc., which are the harder parts if you want to garden properly.

An Army of Davids

So, I've been spending some time with Glenn Reynold's book (Glenn being of course the seminal and highly influential Instapundit ), and I must say that it gives me lots of language I can use to talk about phenomena that are easily observable right now. I think you could say that Glenn Reynolds has done for technology what Virginia Postrel did with design topics . Which is to say, they beat the drum and say, hey, look at what this democratization of knowledge can do for you! In that vein, the book is really pretty visionary, pointing out the magic of the internet age. And I for one see it as magical. You know how Laura Ingalls Wilder's Pa in Little Town on the Prairie said to Laura that it was an amazing time to be alive (that was in the 1890s)? I've been actively thinking that to myself for the past few years, and An Army of Davids gives me ample evidence to back that up with its talk of citizen empowerment and the "comfy chair revolution." The theme of "

Public sector information design

Here's an article from the UK's Design Council talking about how information design is important in public-sector efforts. Of course, it's helpful to everyone, but this is a good example of the universal need for better presentation of information--and more design.

Get Out of Your Own Way

This book, by Robert K. Cooper, was on the library's newly arrived shelf. It's pretty good, although if you read biz books a lot, there's a lot you'll want to skim. Still, the principles he talks about are good to think on. The subtitle of the book is "the five keys to surpassing everyone's expectations." These keys are: 1. Direction, not motion 2. Focus, not time 3. Capacity, not conformity 4. Energy, not effort 5. Impact, not intentions Each key has three or four supporting chapters that talk about subprinciples. Some things that I identified with from key one is that a) "good and great are the enemies of possible," a quote Cooper attributes to his grandfather. It's pretty self-explanatory though. The other thing is he talks about "what's automatic, accelerates." Basically, if you can put effort into something until it becomes automatic, you've won the battle. So focus resources on issues and behaviors that will eventually

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