10. Solace (novel / paperback)
Realistic & authentic characters and relationships. I like that.

09. A Monster Calls (novel / audiobook)
Surprisingly good for young adult fiction which I don’t (purposefully) read.  It hit all the marks that Skippy Dies failed to.  Great artwork in the paperback version (which you don’t get with the audio.)

08. At Home: A Short History of Private Life (Narrative Non-Fiction / audiobook)
Even though it’s not his best, I do love a good dose of Bill Bryson – a hotch potch collection of trivia, loosely connected to the rooms we live in.

07. The Help (novel / audiobook)
I  was surprised to enjoy this so much, considering it has the whiff of an Oprah book club all over it. I think the performances of the Audiobook possibly helped, including Octavia Spencer, who won an Oscar for the same role in the Movie.

06. The Good, the Bad and the Multiplex (Narrative Non-Fiction / audiobook)
More Kermodian Rants. Amusingly this is like a collection of rants from the radio show fleshed out and written down. Actually I probably didn’t need to hear the “Sex and the City Rant” and the “3D rant” again, but lot’s more ranting besides.

05. Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything (Narrative Non-Fiction / Kindle)
Joshua Foer’s highly amusing story of memory and mnemonics chronicling his discovery of and training for the World Memory Championship. Full review.

04. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary (Fables / Kindle)
I loved this. Dark haunting animal fables. Or sometimes plain silly but hilarious animal fables. All in the inimitable style of my favourite essayist David Sedaris.

03. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Narrative Non-Fiction / audiobook)
Perfect blend of intriguing characters, a history of cell culture, and a fascinating true story.  A perfect piece of narrative non-fiction.

02. I, Partridge: We Need To Talk About Alan (Comedy Biog / audiobook)
The perfect audiobook. Could not imagine reading this on paper when I can listen to Steven Coogan in character. Seven hours of comedy gold.

01. When God Was a Rabbit (novel / audiobook)

I fell in love with this book within the first thirty pages, an adorable, slightly quirky story, about a girl called Elly and those she loves. I find it hard to separate the book from the audiobook in this instance. The audiobook was such a perfectly complete piece. It’s read by the author, Sarah Winman, with great warmth and perfect nuance already knowing and loving her characters so well. She has a fantastic voice both as a writer and narrator. I loved the cheeky voices of the children. Adult narrators often really over-do the chirpy voice thing, and ruin audiobooks that feature children.

Though the children are such adorable characters, you miss them when they’ve flown the coop, all too soon for my liking. Its hard not to be a bit disappointed when the book suddenly jumps to their adulthood. I wanted to stay immersed in the wonderful world of childhood that bit longer. But such is life. Like it or not, Adulthood comes knocking and Sarah Winman does her best to hold on to the things we hold dear from our formative years.

“And from that moment, I watched her. Watched her with different coloured eyes, until the raging energy that coursed through my body finally revealed itself and gave itself a name: envy. For I knew already that something had taken me from me, and had replaced itself with a desperate longing for a time before; a time before fear, a time before shame. And now that knowledge had a voice, and it was a voice that rose from the depths of my years and howled into the night sky like a wounded animal longing for home.”

It’s all too easy for novelists to make BIG things happen in their books. It’s too easy to give characters great luck, or bad luck, or great health or wealth or disease, or fame or fortune. I often wince when some authors use these tropes as easy plot devices but Sarah Winman hilariously turns that on it’s head and does it all! You could retitle it to When God Was A Novelist.

Adorable book. Book of the year. Audiobook of the year.

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It wasn’t until  I made this list that I realised just how much more I enjoyed non-fiction over the year. I’ve felt like this before; almost giving up on fiction in favour of non-fiction. I found a lot of novels a little bit… Meh. And there was something more to some of the non-fiction that I couldn’t quite put my finger on – until Jackie at Farm Lane Books drew my attention to a genre called Narrative Non Fiction. They’re non-fiction books but they usually have some kind of story arc, heroes, villians, a plot of sorts, an array of interesting characters and other devices derived from fiction.

Take the Immortal life of Henrietta lacks for example, a standard non-fiction version could be a relatively boring story about the history of cell research. But no, it’s a fascinating story about the Lacks family, and how Henrietta’s cells came to be used in every stem cell lab in the world. And the author is just as much a part of the story, another common Factor in Narrative Non-Fiction. See more examples on http://www.farmlanebooks.co.uk/2012/the-best-narrative-nonfiction/. I’ve created a goodreads shelf here with more additions.

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Most Overated, and ultimately dissapointing books of the Year

One Day
Old Filth
Before I go to Sleep
Skippy Dies

Seems a lot of folk have gone through the same route. RSS readers were there main source of information/entertainment at one stage. And they spent years subscribing to more and more feeds. And then Twitter, Facebook etc took over. Or apps like Flipboard and Zite got better at curating our interests.

So now it’s a lot easier to forget about your trusty rss feeds, you blink and you’ve 2000 unread items. Inevitably there are loads of articles that tell you how to prune your feeds.

But they always seem to get it backwards.

The message is always to get rid of the quiet ones. I don’t get that. Unless it’s some kind of self-preservation from the big blogs.  The quiet ones are exactly what RSS readers are good for. Some of my favourite blogs only update once a month, and less and less because of all of the above. They’re the ones I don’t want to miss.

I think the important thing to do is to only show unread items, then who cares if you’re subscribed to a feed that’s only updated twice a year?

Here’s a recent post from Lifehacker. There are a few good tips there. But main message is the pointless “kill the quiet ones”. Here’s the pruning that had a major impact on reducing my feeds quite quickly.

Kill the noisy ones
Take your noisy ones; like Lifehacker & likecool.com both great but extremely noisy.  And there are many more like that. I got rid of all my noisey ones and the reduction in traffic was instant. They all post to  Twitter & Facebook anyway now. So if I want to kill 15 minutes online,  the posts are there for me while I’m killing the time and not clogging up an unread count when I’m not. I don’t get to read the ones posted while I’m not killing time, and that’s just fine by me. So just kill anything noisey from your rss and follow them on Twitter.

Separate business from pleasure
I also moved all the professional feeds I subscribed to;  web / ux design etc, to a Google work account. That killed off a hell of a lot more traffic.  I got a bit sick of opening up Reeder on a Sunday morning and being bombarded with the stuff that I do from 9-5. Lots of web people seem to eat, sleep and breath web tech. I confess, as much as I enjoy it, I need a break from it at weekends & evenings. Truth be told: I don’t read much of these in work either. SO I’ve pretty much killed off all web design feeds for now, bite me bitch.

No more obligation subscriptions
Then I unsubscribed from every blog that  I was subscribed to just because they were part of the Irish blogosphere or once left a comment on my blog. Obligatory shit like that.  There were just too many that  I wasn’t even reading.  There are lots of those that I still love and am still subbed to – but any blogs that I subbed to out of obligation: Hi Ho Silver. Got to be honest with yourself here; if you always click ‘next’ after reading the first sentence, unsub straight away. Get rid of your blogroll while you’re at it. Conscience cleared!

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Those 3 simple things really worked for me. Massive reduction in my rss inbox now, it only contains stuff I don’t want to miss, am genuinely interested in seeing, isn’t work, and isn’t something that I’m going to see on Facebook / Twitter anyway.

And I’m probably gone from your feed reader too! Which is why you saw this on Twitter / Google plus. Or not? let me know.

p.s. I find the same on Twitter I have a list for my friends and “The Quiet Ones”. They’re the updates I want to see more than people who post 100 times  day.

Long live the quiet ones!

- Ireland
- Oregan?
- No, Ireland
- Arlington?
- *Slowly* I R E L A N D
- *Slowly* A R L I N G T O N?
- No, I R E L A N D! It’s this little country in Europe right beside the UK, you know, where the leprechauns come from?
- Oh! A I R L A N D? Very good sir, our technicians will definitely look into that straight away. Please check back soon, and sir? YOU MAKE SURE AND HAVE A GREAT DAY NOW!

Still getting the error today.

Minutes later – I was in the appropriate lane, a bit flustered, having JUST learned to drive and, you know, having JUST narrowly escaped death. But I somehow made it to California in one piece and collapsed onto a hotel bed. It all seemed a grand adventure. Not sure why anyone trusted me to make such a voyage on my own! I sure didn’t. I’d just got my driving license but not sure I should have been awarded a Fully Functioning Mature Adult License just yet. Somehow there’s no test for that.

The next morning, a completely overdressed weirdo from Dublin arrived at the Palm head office in Sunnyvale. I somehow got it into my head that my never-worn weddings/funerals/interviews suit was the way to go.  First guy I met was a cool looking dude in ripped jeans, a punk t-shirt, and some nice tats.

First impressions last. And here was me, looking like a straight-laced office monkey. Self-concious levels multiplied threefold by jetlag and not entirely sure what I was doing here. Or if I was cut out for this new job. Flying Fish out of water! Would you have offered to bring this weirdo out on the town? Me neither – so I ended up on my own every night in a hotel in the middle of nowhere, thinking I would adore the peace and quiet of childless evenings – but just feeling lost and lonely.

Sunnyvale is pretty dead. The local hokey bar across from the hotel was amusing for one night only. There was nothing around for miles. I was going stir crazy by the end of the week,  I made it my mission to do something I would  NEVER usually do – but suddenly seemed like the best idea ever. I was going to find an Irish bar.

Have I ever mentioned I’ve a sense of direction like a tiger has a sense of humour? Three hours after I left the hotel I was wandering around Sunnyvale with a map, grumbling to myself about the whole place, and then I  eventually found this strip of bars and my final destination, Fibbar Magees!

Unfortunately it wasn’t rammed with other out of town Irish lost boys looking to have a bit of banter. It was full of big-jawed american jocks, and one of which was loudly slagging off the Irish as drunks. In a fucking Irish pub! I bit my lip and went to the bar, and with seemingly the only Irish accent in the place, ordered a pint. And the bar girl goes. “Jayziz where’d the fuck have you come from?” – “Phibsborough!”. “Ha deadly, me too!” she goes. “Jimmy, Lorraine, come over here and meet Phibsborough”. At last!

And indeed, one by one, some other lost soldiers sheepishly sauntered in, swung there heads towards the banter and joined the other Aliens on this remote planet.

The next morning I woke to discover someone had written a drunken blog post and then got sick on my laptop, so I removed both, checked out and drove up to San Francisco a day early where there was plenty to eat, drink, and see  before heading back home the next day.

And for some reason, four years later, I decide to replace that drunken blog post with this sober one.

Pun intended : you may or may not remember that I have a particular interest in memory. If you read this post you can see why my interest would be piqued by a review of a book called “Moonwalking with Einstein – the Art and Science of Memory“, as it’s a very similar story to mine; someone with an average memory (or in my case, a terrible memory) discovers amazingly effective memory techniques, then spends a year memorizing all kinds of obscure things with ease, but ultimately, realises he still can’t remember where he left his car keys, or his car! and also realises that even though these techniques are very handy for some things, it’s still far easier to write down shopping lists and stick people’s numbers in your phone. The one big difference with my story and this is that I didn’t end up entering a national memory competition.

Joshua Foer is a journalist who began writing an article about the U.S Memory Championships, and then a year later gave as good as the other memory masters. “Moonwalking with Einstein” is bookended by those two events; his attendance at the 2005 U.S Memory Championship, and his entry into the 2006 event. What you get between the book ends is a fascinating exploration of the science, art, and history of memory, mnemonics and memory techniques.

When I first heard of the book, I thought it may only be for people like me who have an interest in mnemonics but it’s selling by the truckload and getting great reviews everywhere. The title “Moonwalking with Einstein” is a reference to the kind of mental image that’s all too familiar to anyone who uses these techniques. When the missus asks me for one of my numerous pin numbers, or the WiFi code, or similar, I say something like, “let’s see that’s a bear on a bike trying to eat a cat in a shell…. that’s 94977165.” So I found reading about someone else’s experience with all this stuff a fantastic read. Though everyone else seems to be enjoying it just as much.

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And from a different angle, but wholly related, about a month ago I came across a website called Memrise. I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while, rather than the usual quick tweet when I come across a site I like. Memrise is a really well thought-out site designed to help your learn, or rather, memorize the vocabulary of various languages. I’ve been on beginners Spanish for the last month. I’ve been on/off trying to learn Spanish for years.

Memrise is by far the best tool language tool I’ve ever used. There’s the usual stuff: english / spanish phrases, with audio snippets. But every phrase has a mnemonic suggestion, a mem. It’s crowd sourced too, so you can add your own mem. For example a Fortnight in Spanish is Los quince Dias. My mem for this is: “Picture a fort at night, and on top, Los lobos have Quincy M.E. and Cameron Dias dancing to La Bamba.” How much easier is that to remember than repeating the phrase over and over and hoping it sticks? I’ll never forget that image, another phrase memorised with ease. And at it’s most basic, that’s all the memory champions do, and to some degree Savants too. And Memrise utilises the technique quite well, you don’t even have to come up with your own mental images.

What other language courses fail to do is give you the tools to learn. It’s a bit like buying a wardrobe from Ikea but they don’t give you the tools to build it. Memrise supply the phrases, and the tools to memorise them. By the way, I swear I have absolutely nothing to do with the site, I’m just very impressed by it. Oh and it’s also free. Completely free, as in no ads either. It also works quite well on an iPad. It’s as good as an app, without having to install an app.

The site also uses gamification pretty well too, something else I have a passing interest in that’s growing in popularity. Memrise gamifies language learning by daily quizzing you on your phrases. You get points for every correct answer, and creep up the league table. It becomes quite addictive, like in any game, always wanting to improve your high score and go higher in the league.

They also employ the metaphor of a memory garden, which works quite well. You have to plant seeds (new words), and harvest plants (add them to the quizzes), tend to your garden (practise new words) and water your wilting plants (practice old words). I guess it’s a bit like Farmville, except, instead of annoying everyone else on Facebook, you learn a new language. I’m just so impressed by the level of thought and execution that has gone into this site, without any profit in mind.

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And the thing that ties in “Moonwalking with Einstein” with Memrise is that over the course of the book, there are a few characters who coach Foer in his memory techniques, members of the K7 memory masters, whose initiation is memorizing a deck of cards in a minute, drinking two beers and kissing the knees of three women. Or variations thereof. And it is these two guys Ed Cooke, and Ben Whately who have setup memrise. So I feel like i’ve been surrounded by these guys for the last few weeks.

So there you go if you’ve any interest in memory or learning new language, there’s a 5 star book and a 5 star web site.

p.s. I was discussing this with a colleague, very recently, who happens to speak Spanish fluently, and he asked me “why don’t you just remember Los quince Dias, instead of dancing on forts and shit?” and I guess some people can, but he’s just reinforcing my idea that a lot of people make the terrible assumption that everyone else learns, and thinks, and remembers exactly like them.

1. Different people learn new things, and adapt to new things, in very different ways.
2. People are as different to each other on the inside as they are on the outside.

In technology upgrades, two types of people always surface; those who embrace change, and those who resist it and want to stay in their comfort zone. Two valid responses. Two different personas.*

Though there’s also a third type that’s easy to miss. People who couldn’t really give a shit one way or the other.

Years ago, part of a job I had, was to try and make everyone else’s job easier.  You know, automating tasks and tweaking processes. But when I sent out updates, there was always a few groaners. And I found that really surprising at first. I couldn’t comprehend why anyone would groan about something designed with the sole purpose of making their life much easier.

Again it all came down to learning something new and implementing change. Even though the learning something new was ”Just click this, instead of 5 minutes doing that” and implementing the change took just a moment. Some people are naturally inclined to resist change, regardless of the reward. That’s mother nature fucking with your head. As she does in many ways.

I also discovered, that if I researched various methods of carrying out a task, and found one method infinitely easier than the others, there would still be people who preferred another method entirely.

And therein is my point. And I think it’s a big one. I think it’s the most important lesson I’ve learned in the last decade. People are very different to each other. More different than many people allow for regardless of the well known idiom in the title of this post. That’s the problem.

There’s as much, if not, much more difference between you and me in how we think than how we look. The way you think, learn, work, interact, enjoy, hate, feel about something is quite different to other people. Your brain took a completely different path to arrive at you being you.

Keep that in mind, either with colleagues, family, or friends, and some shit will be easier … either for you or whoever you’re interacting with. Life lesson 101 over and out.

*some updates are just shit, regardless of your persona – because of design by committee, or a lack of basic UI Design principles, aka common sense, or again not recognizing different personas – but that’s a different debate. I’m neither arguing for or against the latest Facebook update

• Adult seats facing one way, child seats facing the other.
• Screen at one end showing kids movie, screen at other end showing grown-up movie
• Headphones at every seat.

Everyone happy!

On second thoughts: All seats the same size but they can be clicked into place one way or the other, to cater for different parent/kid ratios.

The sensor is only enabled when there are two people on a seat. So here’s how it works; if one passenger has their legs wider than 60 degrees, (thus preventing the person next to them from sitting comfortably) the sensor is triggered and they get a small prod up the arse and an announcement: “Ay up – don’t be such a selfish fucking cock – this seat is for two.“

I wanted to install automatic knee capping but the Bus Eireann solicitors wouldn’t go for it. The DART guys were game for anything though, suggesting everything from stun guns to full-on ejection seats. But we’re just going to go with the prod/announcement for now.

Installations on all window seats start next month, great news!

SuperFlyGuy 3D Flying Game from Mainframe TV Video Production Co on Vimeo.