Dennis Sherman

Notes on “Mineral Rights Conversation”, a listening technique from “Fierce Conversations” by way of a WorkingLeadership training course.  I’m not explicating anything here, simply putting notes in a place where I can find them easily for later use.  Want to learn more?  Follow the links above…

1.  Interrogate reality
2.  Provoke learning
3.  Tackle tough challenges
4.  Enrich relationships

Question Matrix:

Probe for a topic that will engage your conversational partner.  When one is found, dig deeper, listen carefully, looking for influences.  When they are found, dig deeper yet, find core beliefs and values on the topic.  Develop a real relationship with your conversational partner.

The Security Now podcast by Steve Gibson with Leo Laporte is doing a wonderful series on how a computer works.  Every other week (or so, depending on security news) Steve takes the listeners through a discussion of how a computer works, beginning with first principles, i.e. logic gates.  Steve has a talent for making technical topics easy to understand, even without visuals.  I think this series is great, and well worth the time for anyone to listen to.

Computer professionals will enjoy the presentation, and find snippets they’ll use when trying to explain to other people what it is they do for a living.

Technical hobbyists will find themselves saying “Oh, so that’s why it does that!”

Non-technical users will learn that it isn’t really a mysterious black box, there are some very simple principles below everything you see.

Episode List

1. 233: Let’s Design A Computer (Part 1)
2. 235: Machine Language
3. 237: Indirection: The Power of Pointers
4. 239: Stacks, Registers & Recursion
5. 241: Hardware Interrupts
6. 247: The Multi verse
7. 250: Operating Systems
8. …(more to come ?)…

Title: Short Science Fiction Collection 21
Author: various
Source: Librivox
URL: http://librivox.org/short-science-fiction-collection-21/

This is a collection of science fiction short stories, by various authors and read by a variety of readers.  As to be expected, the quality also varies.  None of the stories in this collection struck me as anything I’m likely to reread, and several were so uninteresting I skipped ahead without finishing them.    The collection (like all the other Librivox SF collections I’ve heard so far) has no particular theme or plan I can detect, it is just a set of stories that were ready to be released at the same time.  SF fans will appreciate some of the themes, as these stories are going to be among the first that bring them up, but if you’re uncertain about science fiction in the first place, this collection isn’t where to start.

Title: Tom Sawyer Abroad
Author: Mark Twain
Source: Librivox
URL: http://librivox.org/tom-sawyer-abroad-by-mark-twain/

Tom, Huck, and Jim find themselves on a Jules Verne like adventure in a balloon, travelling the world.  Huck is the narrator, and highly entertaining as the fish out of water much of the time.  Tom seems to just know all kinds of things, some of them with a glancing similarity to reality.  Its a fun read (listen), especially if you don’t let yourself get distracted by the currently non-PC vocabulary.

Title: A Princess of Mars
Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950)
Source: Librivox
URL: http://librivox.org/a-princess-of-mars-by-edgar-rice-burroughs-2/

Librivox has multiple versions of this work available.  This is the one read in its entirety by Mark Nelson, who is a wonderful reader.  The story is classic pulp fiction, and influenced many writers to come.  Some of it seems a bit dated now, but only because it was the template followed by many.  I read this work years ago, and revisiting it via audiobook has been great fun.  Highly recommended, especially this edition.

Title: A Man of Means
Author: P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) and C.H. Bovill
Source: Librivox
URL: http://librivox.org/a-man-of-means-by-p-g-wodehouse-and-c-h-bovill/

Moderately entertaining, with some typical dry Wodehouse wit.  It isn’t nearly as good as Jeeves, although it is possible to detect the same authorship.  Wodehouse got better with practice.  This is in effect a series of short stories, with the main character developing from the first through to the last.  I’m not sorry I spent the time listening (while walking the dog, mostly) but I’m not likely to repeat.

Title: Short Science Fiction Collection #20
Author: Various
Source: Librivox
URL: http://librivox.org/short-science-fiction-collection-20/

A mixed collection of 9 short stories, of varying worth.  I found most of these to be pretty predictable.  They may have been innovative when first written, but their themes have been done enough times since then so as to make them familiar and trite.  Worth a listen for completeness sake, but there’s nothing here I consider a ‘must read’ quality work.

A friend mentioned he kept a log of all the audiobooks he has listened to, and that struck me as in an interesting idea.  The first one finished since then is:

Title: Starman’s Quest
Author: Robert Silverberg
Source: Librivox
URL: http://librivox.org/starmans-quest-by-robert-silverberg/

I enjoyed it, although it was clearly written for a juvenile audience.  There are some plot holes one could drive a truck through, but as a boy’s adventure, it was pretty good.

Google Voice has opened a channel on YouTube to help people understand what it is good for.  I think its a great tool, especially at a cost of $0.00!

http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleVoice

Make use of my Google Voice by using the call-in option at the Contact link above.

No surprise to other people who have used it, but SpinRite is a great tool.  From Gibson Research Corp. (http://grc.com) SpinRite is a hard disk maintenance and recover tool.  Not cheap, but a great value.

So why did I need a hard disk maintenance and recovery tool?  Well… another one thing leads to another.  I want to upgrade to the current version of Quicken.  But it requires more memory than my machine has/had.  OK, so I go out to the store and buy a 2GB upgrade kit, and install it.  While I’m in there, I blow out a lot of dust.  And at some point while my back was turned, I heard something go “clunk”.  Hmmmm…

So I put the box back together, plug everything in, and boot.  Mirabile dictu, it boots clean, and the system shows 2GB of memory!  And I turned my back to pick up something, and it crashed.  On restart, it went to CHKDSK, and then froze at 92% of checking indexes.  After half an hour, I said that’s enough, went to another machine (everyone has backup machines, right?) bought SpinRight, downloaded it, ran it and burned a boot CD.  Back to the frozen mchine, use the power switch to cycle it, and get the disk into the drive.

SpinRite at level 2 (recover unrecoverable data) ran for about 3 hours, finding and repairing a block of sectors.  The machine now boots, and runs noticeably faster with all the memory in it.

I’ll have to run SpinRite in maintenance mode every month or two, and think about replacing the hard disk.  But it isn’t the urgent “gotta fix it right now” it might have been, thanks to SpinRite!

CAUTION: before you open your computer to do anything, get a backup!  I did, and it relieved a lot of stress, knowing that all my data was on a USB drive if worse came to worst.