HR Conference

Tomorrow I am going to a conference up in Salt Lake for the Society of Human Resource Management, of which I am a memeber. We will discuss important and boring HR issues such as current employment law and strategic planning. I've got a lot to get finished before I go so I'm going to stop writing in my blog and get to it. Ready...go.

Book Review: Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

So I read this back in July but am just getting to post it now. It still hurts...

It is with a heavy heart that I write this review. What went wrong? Why this feeling of emptiness, disappointment, malcontent? Perhaps nothing could live up to the expectations I had for this book, an expectation caused by two years of eager anticipation. Reading it was like seeing the Cubs disintegrate after the Bartman debacle all over again.

I should make it known that I'm a huge Harry Potter fan (despite the constant urges it gives me to practice witchcraft and sorcery), I even wrote my own book 6 because I couldn't stand waiting for the real one. You can see it here if you want. I think that's the problem--I had thought about it so much that I had enormous expectations and was dissapointed when I saw how it turned out. I have more specific gripes about it, but I don't have the heart to go over them. They are here if you care to read them, post #44.

Anyways, HBP is a good book but it didn't do it for me. By all means check it out. Don't NOT read it because of my review. Me? I'm going to go get a new hobby.

I give it a 7/10.

The Weekend

This weekend we went to Sand Hollow State Park in Hurricane with some friends. None of us had ever been there, but we had heard it was fun so we went on faith. It was awesome--picturesque, not too hot, water not too cool, and me and Nick Sidwell went cliff-diving. I really shouldn't have, as I sprained my ankle on Labor Day and had fallen on some rocks on the way to Sand Hollow, cut open my hand and almost broke my thumb. Mmmmm....But I did it anyway. I love cliff jumping...

Sand Hollow reminded me a lot of Lake Powell, another one of my favorite spots in the world, except that it was much smaller, not as crowded, and the water was a much healthier color. I'll get some pic's up later.

Book Review: Post Captain

My latest read is Post Captain by Patrick O'Brian. Remember the movie Master and Commander with Russel Crowe? That was the film adaptation of 2 or 3 Patrick O'Brian books. There's 20 total (not counting #21, which was being written when O'Brian died) and they are very good reads. It's amazing--half the time I don't even know what's going on in the books as they are filled with nautical jargon (booms, pulleys, yards, top-gallants, royals, etc), yet somehow I'm enthralled with it all the same. At first this worried me, until my step-dad Jim (who is a big sailor himself and was the one who recommended the books to me in the first place) told me he doesn't understand most of it either.

The books take place in the early 19th century during the Napoleonic wars and center around the adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey and his surgeon friend Dr. Stephen Maturin. I don't feel like writing a summary, so go check the book out yourself. I'd recommend starting with Master and Commander first though.

I give it an 8/10.

I'm officially an old man.

Remember being a kid and hearing your parents and grandparents say, "When I was your age, gasoline only cost 25 cents a gallon!" and you realized that, perhaps 50 or 60 years in the future, you would be saying the same thing to a similarly ignorant and uninterested kid?
Well, that moment has come about 30 years early for me. The other day Amy and I were driving home from work when we passed a gas station posting $2.99 per gallon and I said, "Man, when I was in high school gas was only $1.10!" I then realized that by saying this I had unwittingly come one step closer to becoming an elderly man (at least in mind-set), as I already think teenagers today dress stupid, have despicable music, and are much more superficial and directionless than I was as at their age. All I need now is to hike up my trousers and get an indescribable urge to move to St. George...

Dancing

First there was the enigmatic All Your Base Are Belong to Us. Next came the hefty hillarity of the Star Wars kid. Then the Numa Numa dance came on the scene and revolutionalized the way we look at fat kids with a computer camera and too much time on their hands. Just when I thought the internet couldn't possibly provide another nugget of joy of this caliber, I come across Matt Harding's Dancing. Go see it.


Now here's a guy who has life figured out.

Trip to England

Our trip was actually back in July but I'm working on getting it up now. I should have a new one each day.