Lunch with Buddha – An entertaining, engrossing, thought-provoking American road-trip novel – #bookreview

Lunch with Buddha
Roland Merullo
(PFP/Ajar, Kindle, paperback)

To be honest, I was not really aware of Roland Merullo until his publisher contacted me offering a review copy of an enticingly titled new novel, Lunch with Buddha.

I could blame my “Who?” reaction on my intense focus toward reviewing technology books over the past two years. And I could blame it on empirical evidence that it’s really tough to sell works of fiction these days.

Indeed, several writers of novels and short story collections have told me they don’t get much publicity help from their publishers. Some also have declared they were taking up self-publishing so they could (a) get their books into print (or its digital equivalent), (b) keep more of their paltry earnings, and (c) try their hand at book promotion. Furthermore, I have data — very hard data — showing that virtually no one on Planet Earth has yet read my novel, Erwin’s Law, nor my experimental novella, Jump.

Thus, bottom line, I have not been paying very close attention to the world of fiction lately.

Immediately, I was impressed  (and jarred) to learn that (1) Roland Merullo’s seventh novel, Breakfast with Buddha, is now in its 14th printing; (2) Lunch with Buddha, published late last year, is his eleventh novel and already in its second printing; AND (3) Lunch with Buddha’s completion and publication was funded, at least in part, with significant Kickstarter contributions from Merullo fans.

Intriguingly, Roland Merullo turned down a six-figure advance from a major publishing house and chose a small, independent publisher to bring out his new book.

So he must be good, right?

He’s better than good, actually. Roland Merullo is one of the best, most entertaining writers I’ve encountered in a long time. Seldom am I hooked by a book’s first few paragraphs. But, in Lunch with Buddha, Merullo blends verbal calmness, clarity, wit and depth to create an engaging, absorbing story that flows smoothly from darkly humorous opening to meaningful end.

His new tale is a road-trip novel that covers an odd, yet very American, route: from Seattle to North Dakota, in a borrowed, battered pickup truck nicknamed “Uma.”

Otto Ringling, a New York editor of culinary books and recent widower, is taking the journey with reluctance, while searching for peace of mind and new meanings for his suddenly altered life.

His traveling companion on the drive is his sister’s former guru, “His Holiness” Volya Rinpoche, a Siberian “semi-Buddhist” who now is the sister’s husband and father of their young daughter, Shelsa. Volya still has many questions and misconceptions about life in these not-so-United States. But he also has an infectious spirit, an unshakable spirituality, and plenty of confidence that all will be well and work out in the end.

Otto, meanwhile, is just trying to get a renewed grip on existence. “One of the side effects of losing a spouse–at least for me–had been a peculiar inability to perform the most mundane tasks,” he says in the book, adding:

“Making plane and hotel reservations, shopping for food, setting out the trash on time–these duties, which ordinarily I would have completed with a practiced ease, now seemed as daunting as the learning of a Chinese dialect. I let things slide. For the first time in family history, bills were paid late. The dry cleaners had to call three times to remind me to pick up my shirts. My children could be harsh with me about these failings, but I took their casual criticisms like a battered old fighter takes punches. I would stand. I was determined to stand. I was determined to stay sane, and love them, and help them envision a new life after our old one had been ripped to pieces.”

While Otto and Volya drive across Washington state, Idaho, Montana, and into North Dakota, Otto’s sister, Cecelia, her young daughter Shelsa, and Otto’s children Anthony (20) and Natasha (22), are all riding Amtrak, taking a separate route. They’ve been to Whidbey Island, off the coast of Washington state, to witness Otto scattering his wife’s ashes. Now they are heading for Dickinson, North Dakota, where Celia and Volya live — in Otto’s view – “on the far side of some line that marked the boundary of ordinary American reality.”

Along the way, Otto and Volya have several humorous–and sometimes troubling–encounters with contemporary American culture and values. Otto, for example, tries to explain to Volya the meanings of some strange signs they see along the highway, such as “REPTILE ZOO AND EXPRESSO” and “EAT BIG FOOD.”

Otto and Volya also have debates over religion and spirituality as the widower seeks understandable meanings he can attach to life, death, and whatever lies beyond our mystery-shrouded finality. For example:

 “What is the goal?” I asked, trying to slip away from it. “What’s the whole point? Enlightenment? Eternal life? What?”

He patted me on the shoulder for the millionth time, and said, “You purify. You go and go. Life cuts you and you try and try and try and pretty soon–”

“You become beautiful.”

“Yes. Good.”

“But toward what are we going and going? What does the beauty look like?”

He shrugged almost helplessly, and for a moment I was gripped hard by the hand of doubt. He seemed only an ordinary man then, and I wanted more than that from him, more than cryptic answers and shrugs. A small inner voice suggested he’d been fooling us all these years, playing a role, maybe even working a scam.

“I can show you,” he said. “I can’t tell you.”

“All right. Please show me, then. I’m having a crisis of faith. I’m a little bit lost.”

He nodded sympathetically. “We find you,” he said. “Don’t worry too much….”

Lunch with Buddha has the same key characters as Roland Merullo’s best-selling Breakfast with Buddha. And a third book, aptly titled Dinner with Buddha, is said to be in the works.

Fortunately, Lunch is written so it can be picked up and immediately enjoyed by those who have not previously read Breakfast. Indeed, Lunch with Buddha will make many readers go back and devour Breakfast, then eagerly anticipate Dinner–and check out some of Roland Merullo’s other works of fiction and nonfiction while waiting for the next serving.

Geoffrey Chaucer and Jack Kerouac are the two names that  pop most quickly to mind when the debate topic is “classic road-trip novels.”  I move that we now add Roland Merullo to that short, but esteemed, list.

– Si Dunn

Steven Saylor’s ‘The Seven Wonders’ – A fine intro to Gordianus the Finder, famous sleuth of ancient Rome – #bookreview #in #mystery #fiction

The Seven Wonders: A Novel of the Ancient World
Steven Saylor
(Minotaur Books, hardback, list price $25.99; Kindle edition, $12.99)

To be honest, until I picked up this book, I had paid zero attention to best-selling author Steven Saylor’s long-running Roma Sub Rosa series of mysteries set in ancient times, in the Roman Empire. The hero in that series’ 10 novels and two short story collections is Gordianus the Finder, Rome’s most sought-after investigator.

I’ve never been keen on stories (or movies) where people run around in togas and sandals, swear upon assorted gods and goddesses, and kill each other with swords or poisons.

Also, my notion of private detectives has tended to go back only as far as Sherlock Holmes. I’ve mainly been a Spenser/Marlowe/Hammer kind of guy. You know, fists and firearms, not swords and sandals.

The Seven Wonders, the new “prequel” to the Roma Sub Rosa series, has, however, just expanded my horizon quite a bit. Saylor has created a mystery- and adventure-packed tale that introduces Gordianus as a young man, before he has assumed the mantle of “The Finder” from his father.

The tale is set in 92 B.C., a time when the Roman Empire still dominates Greece. But rumors of war are afoot (literally), spies are everywhere, and even the most seemingly trustworthy friend cannot really be trusted amid all of the anti-Roman political intrigue.

It is also the year when Gordianus has reached – and at last crossed – the dividing line between childhood and getting to wear the “manly toga” of an adult. He’s now ready to leave home – Rome – and have some adventures.

He soon gets much more than he expects as he travels with his tutor and travel guide, the aging Antipater of Sidon, “one of the most celebrated poets in the world, famed not only for the elegance of his verses but for the almost magical way he could produce them impromptu, as if drawn from the aether.”

A real figure in history, Antipater has been given at least some of the credit for coming up with the famous list of the Seven Wonders of the World.

In the novel, the poet leaves Rome under mysterious circumstances but takes Gordianus along as he revisits each of the Seven Wonders. He carefully tutors the young Roman, yet things quickly and repeatedly go awry. At their first stop, for example, the Greeks’ wondrous Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, a young girl drops dead unexpectedly during a major celebration. And Gordianus stealthily investigates, using skills learned from his father, a man who “called himself Finder, because men hired him to find the truth.”

The Finder’s son soon determines that the young girl was murdered. Meanwhile, another young girl has been blamed and will die if Gordianus can’t solve his first case fast enough. He succeeds in a clever way, kills his first bad guy, and also has his first sexual encounter, thanks to the sensuous generosity of a beautiful slave woman who has helped him trap the murderer.  

There are then six more Wonders to see, and at each stop, Saylor provides the reader with mysteries rich in history, legend, danger, plot twists and engrossing entertainment as the youthful Gordianus struggles to puzzle them out.

Steven Saylor, who lives in Berkeley, California, and Austin, Texas, is a rare kind of writer, one who deftly blends scholarly detail with fast-paced fiction and makes dead worlds seem to come alive again.

I’m now a Spenser/Marlowe/Hammer/Gordianus kind of guy when it comes to detective fiction. And, thanks to this clever prequel, I’m ready to stop ignoring and start reading the Roma Sub Rosa series.

The Seven Wonders will be available starting June 5, 2012 and can be pre-ordered on Amazon.com.

#

– Si Dunn is a novelist, screenwriter, freelance book reviewer, and former software technical writer and software/hardware QA test specialist. He also is a former newspaper and magazine photojournalist. His latest book is Dark Signals, a Vietnam War memoir. He is the author of an e-book detective novel, Erwin’s Law, now also available in paperback, plus a novella, Jump, and several other books and short stories.

Making Embedded Systems (for things that blink & go ‘Beep!’ in the night) – #programming #bookreview

Making Embedded Systems
By Elecia White
(O’Reilly, paperback, list price $39.99; Kindle edition, list price $31.99)

Elecia White loves embedded systems. “The first time a motor turned on because I told it to, I was hooked,” she writes in her new book, Making Embedded Systems. “I quickly moved away from pure software and into a field where I can touch the world.”

In that world, she has “worked on DNA scanners, inertial measurement units for airplanes and race cars, toys for preschoolers, a gunshot location system for catching criminals, and assorted medical and consumer devices.”

It is a world where “embedded systems don’t have operating systems. The software runs on the bare metal. When the software says ‘turn that light on,’ it says it to the processor without an intermediary.”

So this is not a book about embedded operating systems. Just embedded systems. And the intended audience is intermediate and experienced programmers seeking new challenges.

The author’s basic definition of an embedded system is “a computerized system that is purpose-built for its application.”

She says she wrote her book (and it is well-written, by the way) “almost as a story, to be read from cover to cover. The information is technical (extremely so in spots), but the presentation is casual.”

So she hopes readers will not treat Making Embedded Systems as “a technical manual where you can skip into the middle and read only what you want.” With that approach, “you’ll miss a lot of information…[and] You’ll also miss the jokes, which is what I really would feel bad about.”

Embedded system compilers typically support only C or C++ (and often just a subset of that language), she notes. And: “There is a growing popularity for Java, but the memory management inherent to the language works only on a large system.”

Meanwhile, debugging an embedded system often can be challenging, because it’s not always easy to tell if a problem lies in the software or in the associated hardware.

Elecia White’s 310-page book is divided into 10 chapters, with illustrations, code examples and a good index:

1. Introduction – (Discusses embedded systems and how their development differs from traditional software development.)
2. Creating a System Architecture – (How to create – and document – a system architecture.)
3. Getting Your Hands on the Hardware – (Dealing with hardware/software integration and board bring-up.)
4. Outputs, Inputs, and Timers – (The simple act of making an LED blink is more complicated than you might think.)
5. Managing the Flow of Activity – (How to set up your machine, how to use [or not use] interrupts, and how to make a state machine.)
6. Communicating with Peripherals – (“Different serial communications forms rule embedded systems.…” But: “Networking, bit-bang, and parallel buses are not to be discounted.”)
7. Updating Code – (Options for replacing the program running in a processor.)
8. Doing More with Less – (How to reduce RAM consumption, code space, and processor cycles.)
9. Math – (“Most embedded systems need to do some form of analysis.” Make your system faster by “[u]nderstanding how mathematical operations and floating points work [and don’t work]….”)
10. Reducing Power Consumption – (Your system may run on batteries. Better system architecture and reducing processor cycles can help cut power drain.)

Making Embedded Systems also includes helpful information on how to read a schematic diagram, why it’s best to run tests on three of the same prototype devices, not just one, and what interviewers look for when meeting with applicants for embedded systems jobs.

An embedded system, the author says, often is viewed as a jigsaw puzzle that only fits together one way. But she challenges readers to see the puzzle as also having “a time dimension that varies over its whole life: conception, prototyping, board bring-up, debugging, testing, release, maintenance, and repeat.”

Embedded system design presents many challenges, she says, and demands constant flexibility.

“Our goal is to be flexible enough to meet the product goals while dealing with the resource constraints and other challenges inherent to embedded systems.”

– Si Dunn

A Bug Hunter’s Diary: A Guided Tour through the Wilds of Software Security – #programming #bookreview

A Bug Hunter’s Diary: A Guided Tour through the Wilds of Software Security
By Tobias Klein
(No Starch Press, paperback, list price $39.95; Kindle edition, list price $31.95)

If your passion or desire is to find and kill software bugs and fight hackers, you should check out this well-written how-to book.

Tobias Klein, an information security specialist, has tracked down many difficult bugs and identified security vulnerabilities in some of the world’s best-known software, including Apple’s iOS, the Mac OS X kernel, web browsers, and the VLC media player, among others.

Using a diary approach, plus code examples and illustrations, Klein describes a bug he has just discovered in a software package. Then he illustrates how it creates a security vulnerability that a hacker could exploit, and he describes how to fix or at least reduce its risks.

Chapters 2 through 8 each focus on separate bugs, and Klein includes a list of “lessons learned” for programmers who want to avoid creating similar problems.

Klein’s well-illustrated book is organized as follows:

• Chapter 1: Bug Hunting – (a brief overview.)
• Chapter 2: Back to the ‘90s - (shows how he discovered a bug and vulnerability in a Tivo movie file that allowed him to crash a VLC media player and gain control of the instruction pointer.)
• Chapter 3: Escape from the WWW Zone – (illustrates how and where he found a bug in the Solaris kernel and the “exciting challenge” of demonstrating how it could be exploited for arbitrary code execution.)
• Chapter 4: Null Pointer FTW – (describes “a really beautiful bug” that opened a vulnerability into “the FFmpeg multimedia library that is used by many popular software projects, including Google Chrome, VLC media player, MPlayer, and Xine to name just a few.”)
• Chapter 5: Browse and You’re Owned – (discusses how he found an exploitable bug in an ActiveX control for Internet Explorer.)
• Chapter 6: One Kernel to Rule Them All – (focuses on how he decided to search for bugs in some third-party Microsoft Windows drivers and found one in an antivirus software package.)
• Chapter 7: A Bug Older than 4.4BSD – (how he found an exploitable bug in the XNU kernel OS X.)
• Chapter 8: The Ringtone Massacre – (how he found an exploitable bug in an early version of the iPhone’s MobileSafari browser that enabled him to modify ringtone files and access the program counter.)
• Appendix A: Hints for Hunting – (“…some vulnerability classes, exploitation techniques, and common issues that can lead to bugs.”)
• Appendix B: Debugging – (about debuggers and the debugging process.)
• Appendix C: Mitigation – (discusses mitigation techniques.)

Tobias Klein is the author of two previous information security books that were published in Germany. Because hackers use many of the same tools as those seeking to keep them out, there is an important limit on how much detail Klein is able to impart in this book.

As he notes in a disclaimer: “The goal of this book is to teach readers how to identify, protect against, and mitigate software security vulnerabilities. Understanding the techniques used to find and exploit vulnerabilities is necessary to thoroughly grasp the underlying problems and appropriate mitigation techniques. Since 2007, it is no longer legal to create or distribute “hacking tools” in Germany, my home country. Therefore, to comply with the law, no full working exploit code is provided in this book. The examples simply show the steps used to gain control of the execution flow (the instruction pointer or program counter control) of a vulnerable program.”

– Si Dunn

A gift for the programmer who has everything? The Art of Readable Code – #programming #bookreview

The Art of Readable Code: Simple and Practical Techniques for Writing Better Code
By Dustin Boswell and Trevor Foucher
(O’Reilly, paperback, list price $34.99; Kindle edition, list price, $27.99)

The software world is full of bad code.

Code that was badly written; code that has been reworked — badly — by dozens of undisciplined programmers; code written in haste to patch or hide a problem; code written without comments that can help you decipher what the previous programmer was thinking — or not thinking; code written by people like me, who didn’t know much at all about programming but had to produce some emergency code anyway, because the real programmers were away on vacation.

The Art of Readable Code could be a very useful book to give the programmer in your life — whether he or she is new to computer programming or an open-minded mid-career professional looking to make some improvements in how they work.

The book focuses on “basic principles and practical techniques” that programmers can apply each time they begin a new coding project or find themselves patching an old one.

The authors present what they call their “Fundamental Theorem of Readability.” In their view: “Code should be written to minimize the time it would take for someone else to understand it.”

For example, “smaller” may not always be better. A one-line expression may be more understandable to other programmers if it is broken into two lines of code.

The 190-page book illustrates its concepts with examples of code from several different programming languages, including C++, Python, JavaScript, and Java. The authors add: “We’ve avoided any advanced language features, so even if you don’t know all these languages, it should still be easy to follow along. (In our experience, the concepts of readability are mostly language-independent, anyhow.)”

The Art of Readable Code has 15 chapters and an appendix and is structured in four parts:

• Part 1: Surface Level  Improvements – (Naming, commenting and aesthetics that can be applied to every line of code)
• Part 2: Simplifying Loops and Logic – (Refining loops, logic, and variables so they are easier to understand)
• Part 3: Reorganizing Your Code – (Higher-level ways to organize large blocks of code and go after problems at the function level)
• Part 4: Selected Topics – (Applying “easy to understand” to software testing and to a larger data structure coding example)

The authors state: “It’s a valuable skill to be able to explain an idea ‘in plain English….The same skill should be used when ‘presenting’ code to your reader. We take the view that source code is the primary way to explain what a program is doing. So the code should be written ‘in plain English.’”

The book itself is smoothly written and nicely illustrated, not only with cartoons but with some very clear code examples that can be quickly applied.

– Si Dunn

Programming Concurrency on the JVM – #java #programming #bookreview

Programming Concurrency on the JVM: Mastering Synchronization, STM, and Actors
By Venkat Subramaniam
(Pragmatic Bookshelf, paperback, list price $35.00)

“Faster!”

That’s the word pressuring many programmers today as modern multicore hardware makes it possible to perform numerous actions simultaneously.

“A concurrent program may download multiple files while performing computations and updating the database,” notes the author of this well-written introduction to programming concurrency on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

So speed increasingly is of the essence, but so is improving how well (and quickly) applications respond to users. 

In Programming Concurrency on the JVM, the focus is on introducing Java programmers to “three separate concurrency solutions—the modern Java JDK [Java Development Kit] concurrency model, the Software Transactional Model (STM), and the actor-based concurrency model.” And the goal is to help programmers learn the advantages and disadvantages of each and make the right choices for their applications.

The author states that “[t]here are three ways to avoid problems when writing concurrent programs:

• Synchronize properly.
• Don’t share state.
• Don’t mutate state.”

He explains that “[i]f we use the modern JDK currency API [application programming interface], we’ll have to put in significant effort to synchronize properly. STM makes synchronization implicit and greatly reduces the changes of error. The actor-based model, on the other hand, helps us avoid shared state. Avoiding mutable state is the secret weapon to winning concurrency battles.”

Programming Concurrency on the JVM is adequately illustrated and divided into five parts: Strategies for Concurrency, Modern Java/JDK Concurrency, Software Transactional Memory, Actor-Based Concurrency, and an epilogue focusing on making the right choices.

The book, the author stresses, is not for Java newcomers. It is for “experienced Java programmers who are interested in learning how to manage and make use of concurrency on the JVM, using languages such as Java Clojure, Groovy, JRuby, and Scala.”

Most of the code examples are in Java, but he includes some examples in Clojure, Groovy, JRuby, and Scala, as well. And he has made extra effort “to keep the syntactical nuances and the language-specific idioms to a minimum.”

He adds: “Programming concurrency is hard, yet the benefits it provides make all the troubles worthwhile.”

– Si Dunn

QuickBooks 2012: The Missing Manual – Solid Focus on Pro Edition – #bookreview

QuickBooks 2012: The Missing Manual
By Bonnie Biafore
(O’Reilly, paperback, list price $34.99; Kindle, list price, $27.99)

 In late September, Intuit released the 2012 versions of its popular QuickBooks financial software. Just a month later, O’Reilly Media was hot on Intuit’s heels with QuickBooks 2012: The Missing Manual, a new entry in O’Reilly’s popular “The book that should have been in the box®” series.

Written by veteran author and project management consultant Bonnie Biafore, this new guidebook provides clear, well-illustrated, step-by-step instructions on how to use the Windows edition of QuickBooks 2012 Pro, the most popular version of Intuit’s product, particularly in small businesses.

The 734-page book also gives some basic how-to information and advice on accounting – enough to get you past some confusing stumbling blocks as you set up a business and its accounts, but not enough to substitute for real training in accounting and keeping books.

“QuickBooks isn’t hard to learn,” the author says. “Many of the features that you’re familiar with from other programs work just the same way in QuickBooks—windows, dialog boxes, drop-down lists, and keyboard shortcuts, to name a few. And with each new version, Intuit has added enhancements and new features to make your workflow smoother and faster. The challenge is knowing what to do according to accounting rules, and how to do it in QuickBooks.”

Two words of caution: This book does not cover non-USA versions of QuickBooks 2012 Pro. And, the author points out, “QuickBooks for Mac differs significantly from the Windows version, and unfortunately you won’t find help with the Mac version of the program in this book.”

QuickBooks 2012: The Missing Manual is divided into five parts containing a total of 26 chapters and two appendices.

Part One covers “Getting Started.” It starts with “Creating a Company File” and “Getting Around in QuickBooks” and advances to setting up accounts, customers, jobs, vendors, items, lists, and managing QuickBooks files.

Part Two’s focus is “Bookkeeping,” and its chapters covers everything from tracking mileage to paying for expenses, invoicing, managing accounts receivable, generating financial statements and performing end-of-year tasks.

“Managing Your Business” is the focus of Part Three. The chapters cover managing inventory, budgeting and planning, and working with reports.

“QuickBooks Power” is the title of Part Four. It covers using QuickBooks with online banking services, configuring preferences in QuickBooks to fit your company, integrating QuickBooks with other programs (Excel integration has been improved in QB 2012), customizing QuickBooks, and keeping QuickBooks data secure.

Part Five contains two appendices: “Installing QuickBooks” and “Help, Support, and Other Resources.”

The book does not contain a CD, but it provides a link where “every single Web address, practice file, and piece of downloadable software mentioned In this book is available….”

QuickBooks 2012 Pro, according to the author, “is the workhorse edition” of a software package that is available “in a gamut of editions, offering options for organizations at both ends of the small-business spectrum.”

Her book is good enough that it can help you get a small business set up and off the ground while you are learning the QuickBooks 2012 Pro. But if you don’t have some solid background in bookkeeping and accounting, do not try to rely on the software alone to save you. Get the training any way you can, as soon as you can. And then, once you can afford it, hire good people to help you with the bookkeeping and accounting, while you focus on the bigger picture, using QuickBooks 2012’s budgeting, planning, forecast, report, contact synchronization, lead tracking, and to-do list features.

One other caution: QuickBooks has a specialized edition specifically for nonprofit organizations. It is more expensive than the Pro package. So some people try to save money and use the Pro package to manage a small nonprofit. But there can be confusions involving some of the terminology, transactions and reports. In this book, Bonnie Biafore provides “notes and tips about tracking nonprofit finances with QuickBooks Pro (or plain QuickBooks Premier)” and modifying the program’s standard reports to meet government requirements.

By the way, QuickBooks 2012: The Missing Manual can be used to learn features in earlier versions of QuickBooks. Of course, doing so and seeing what’s missing may convince you to upgrade.

– Si Dunn

Buying the Right Photo Equipment – #photography #bookreview

Buying the Right Photo Equipment: 70 Tips from the Top
By Elin Rantakrans
(Rocky Nook, paperback, list price $19.95; Kindle, list price, $9.99)

You’ve been shooting snapshots of family and friends for a long time with a simple digital camera. Now you want to amp up your game and gather up the gear necessary to become a serious, dedicated, well-equipped photographer.

Where do you start?

You may be overwhelmed by the wealth of equipment choices, how-to articles and opinions available online. Indeed, you may buy a lot more more gear than you actually need, or you may gather the wrong stuff for the types of photographs you really want to take.

Spend some time first with this small but effective book by professional photographer and journalist Elin Rantakrans. Well focused and well written, Buying the Right Photo Equipment gives succinct explanations for why you need certain items, such as specialized filters or accessory flash units or certain lenses, to achieve particular effects.

Excellent photographs by the author and 14 other professional photographers illustrate the key points.

Not all of the recommended equipment is expensive. The book covers such topics as why you may need gray cards, viewfinder eyecups and spirit levels, as well as remote camera releases, portable reflectors and lens bags.

It also delves into underwater housings, studio flash setups, computer monitor calibration hardware and software, stitching software and photo printers, to name just a few. And it doesn’t ignore the big issues, such what types of lenses and lighting situations are best when shooting landscapes, architecture, portraits, wildlife, etc.

Buying the Right Photo Equipment won’t answer every question — and doesn’t try to. But it can make you better equipped to ask the right questions and make good, money-saving choices once you start your search for the right photographic gear. 

– Si Dunn

Treasure Hunter by W.C. Jameson – A memoir that’s a treasure itself – #nonfiction #bookreview

Treasure Hunter
By W.C. Jameson
(Seven Oaks Publishing, paperback, list price $14.95; Kindle, $2.99)

We’ve all had the great fantasy. We turn over a spade of dirt while doing some yard work and suddenly uncover Spanish doubloons or a rich cache of 19^th-century silver dollars or some long-lost loot buried by a famous outlaw.

W.C. Jameson’s name is now virtually synonymous with “buried treasure.” Of his 70-plus published books, more than 20 of them are focused on treasure hunting, lost treasures and lost mines in the United States and North America.

Jameson’s huge and diverse literary output includes books of poetry, plus books on outlaws, cooking and even writing itself. Yet many of his fans think of him as a master treasure hunter first.

His newest book, Treasure Hunter, is a treasure in itself: an adventure-packed memoir that recounts and reflects upon his five-plus decades of expeditions – sometimes successful, sometimes disastrous – to find and recover long-lost gold and silver artifacts.

In treasure hunting, Jameson points out, if the rattlesnakes, rock slides and cave-ins don’t get you, state and federal laws and private landowners likely will, especially if you don’t keep stay completely quiet about what you are doing and what you have found.

Indeed, he stresses, “Anonymity is a great ally for a professional treasure hunter.”

So, before you quit your office job, cash in your 401(K), dress up like Indiana Jones, and head off for the mountains or desert, Jameson urges you to plant some harsh realities very firmly in mind:

“It is important to understand that almost everything treasure recovery professionals do is illegal,” he warns. “Thus, the bizarre and unreasonable laws related to treasure recovery have turned honest, dedicated, and hard-working fortune hunters into outlaws. Announcing a discovery often leads to negative and unwanted developments, primarily the loss of any treasure that may have been found. As mentors explained to me years ago, the fewer people involved, the better. Silence is the byword.” 

Throughout most of his fortune hunting career, Jameson has worked only with a small group of partners, none of them identified in this book, except with names such as “Poet” and “Slade” and “Stanley.”

At one point in Treasure Hunter, after a complicated expedition ends in disaster and near-death experiences, “Poet” sums up the “glamour” of their many quests:

“This little trip reminds me of most of our expeditions. Lots of action, nothing goes as planned, we get shot at, and we come back empty-handed.”

But Jameson has had some successes in his long and often arduous career: “From a few of these excursions, my partners and I acquired enough wealth to pay off houses and purchase new vehicles. With some of the money, I paid college tuition for myself as well as for my children.”

And, despite his long career and advancing age, he remains “on the hunt” for more treasures, he says.

Not surprisingly, Jameson identifies library research as one of the toughest and most essential parts of treasure hunting. And the lands around certain “lost” treasures may be accessible only after paying bribes, dealing with unsavory characters, surviving potentially fatal double-crosses, dodging deadly snakes and being willing to risk cross-border smuggling.

If that sounds like exciting “adventure” to you, pay close attention to Jameson’s additional cautions:   

“The truth is,” he writes, “adventure was never an objective, merely a byproduct. Anyone who has ever been on a quest will tell you that adventure happens when plans go awry. The great explorer Roald Amundson once said, ‘An adventure is merely  an interruption of an explorer’s serious work and indicates bad planning.’ Our plans often turned out badly, which may give you some idea of our collective ability to arrange and organize a perfect expedition, to prepare for any and all contingencies.”

For some readers, the many quests described in Jameson’s book likely will fuel or refuel a passion to go out anyway and search and dig for riches. But, for many others of us, some of the armchair adventurers of the world, his book will provide entertaining hours of safe reading, absorbing escapism and comfortable daydreaming.

And that will be treasure enough.

– Si Dunn

Microsoft OneNote 2010 Plain & Simple – #bookreview #training

Microsoft OneNote® 2010 Plain & Simple
By Peter Weverka
(Microsoft Press, paperback, list price $24.99 ;  Kindle  $9.99)

Employee training is one of the first things cut during an economic downturn. And in today’s long-depressed employment market, you are expected to learn many different software packages on your own, at your own expense, before you apply for a job.

The Microsoft Plain & Simple book series represents a good and affordable way to learn how to use Windows 7, Microsoft Office and several individual Office products, including PowerPoint, Word and Excel.

This new addition to the series, Microsoft OneNote® 2010 Plain & Simple, helps you jump right into using OneNote 2010 with little explanation and virtually no “computerese.”

Unfortunately, if you’ve never seen or used OneNote, you aren’t given a clear, concise statement of exactly what the program does, until page 16: “The purpose of OneNote is to make it easier for you to record, store, organize, and find notes.”

A feature called “the ribbon” also is mentioned several times before it finally is specifically defined on page 6: “The ribbon is the assortment of tabs, buttons, and commands that appear along the top of the OneNote screen.”

These minor flaws aside, Microsoft OneNote® 2010 Plain & Simple does a fine job of showing new users how to dive right into using the program and mastering its features. The book is richly illustrated with screens, clearly numbered steps, and tips boxes, plus “Try This!” exercises, “Caution!” statements and “See Also” suggestions.

Peter Weverka’s writing generally is clear and concise, and the book is divided into 20 chapters featuring small chunks of specific how-to information. The 241-page book also has a nicely detailed 15-page index.

OneNote 2010 has some screen changes and several new features that users of older versions may wish to learn, and this book can help.

“Unlike its predecessors, OneNote 2010 offer a Styles gallery for quickly formatting text and gives you the ability to create links between [OneNote] notebooks, sections, and pages so you can jump from place to place quickly,” the author notes.

“You can also dock OneNote to the side of the screen, which makes it easier to take notes from a Word document or web page.”

A new Page Versions command lets you summon older versions of a OneNote page. And the “Mini Translator” feature can translate a foreign word or phrase into English, and vice versa.

The Translation Options box displays all of the available To and From language pairs. If the language you need is not listed, a “Try This!” tip guides you to OneNote’s Research Task Pane, where you can find and add other languages.

“OneNote,” the author adds, works hand in glove with two other Microsoft Office 2010 applications: Microsoft Word 2010 and Microsoft Outlook 2010.”

For example, you can use Word 2010 to open a OneNote 2010 page, and “[a]ll formats except styles transfer to the Word page.” The OneNote page also can be saved as a Word document.

Meanwhile, you can create Outlook 2010 tasks in OneNote without having to open Outlook. “And you can get information about a meeting directly from Outlook as well,” Weverka points out.

“Outlook offers the OneNote button for copying data from Outlook to OneNote. After you select an email message, meeting, contact, or task in Outlook, you can click the OneNote button to copy the item to OneNote.” In the process, you also get “a link that you can click to return to Outlook when you need to.”

Small starting glitches aside, this new addition to the “Plain & Simple” series solidly lives up to its billing as an “easy, colorful, SEE-HOW guide to OneNote,” a software tool you may need to learn for your next job or your present job or for boosting your productivity in your self-employment.

– Si Dunn