The mechanics of the books’ gameplay are simple and are similar to other series such as Fighting Fantasy: you have some basic character stats, navigate around the book sections by choosing options, roll dice for combat and overcoming obstacles, and so on. The difference with these books is that they’re opened ended and all fit together to provide different regions of the world. Adding more books means more places to explore, different settings to experience and new stuff to acquire.

The first four books are available now on Amazon:

• Fabled Lands 1: The War-Torn Kingdom
• Fabled Lands 2: Cities of Gold & Glory
• Fabled Lands 3: Over the Blood-Dark Sea
• Fabled Lands 4: The Plains of Howling Darkness

The remaining two will hopefully be available soon.

I first encountered these books many years back and liked their opened ended nature as compared to other books of this type I played, such as Fighting Fantasy and Choose Your Own Adventure. They also have some interesting touches like being able to purchase property to store your items, open bank accounts, buy ships and trade goods. The best feature of course is the sheer scale of the adventures, which can take you across countries and have lasting effects on people and nations. These new versions are smaller (physically) than the originals which would make them a bit easier to read, but I can’t help but think the nice maps and large character sheet will suffer.

One problem is that the series was cut short before all of the books were completed. Most of the time you won’t notice while playing but occasionally you’ll run into “walls” and be forced to take a different route since that book doesn’t exist. All of the main continent is available so there’s plenty of space and adventure to be had.

If you don’t already have copies I really recommend buying yourself a set. Perhaps if sales are good the authors, Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson, will be able to finish off the series and possibly expand it even further. An iPad conversion of the books will also released in the near future if you prefer to go the high-tech route.

The first thing to note is that the app is a 30 trial version. After the trial period you have to pay for it, or switch to “Shazam Lite”. Given that this app will likely only hold novelty value for me, I doubt I’ll pay money for it.

Music detection seems to work pretty well. It successfully tagged tracks from The Offspring, Atreyu, Crowded House, The Vines and the Avenue Q soundtrack. It couldn’t handle one the Harry Potter soundtracks, Mephiskapheles or Heartsdales. I guess it will work fine for more common songs but will choke on slightly obscure ones.

The real test will be how it handles songs on the radio or broadcast in a public space – the ones I don’t already know. The Ovi Store also lists a couple other apps of this type so I’ll try those out as well. One even claims to be able to detect songs being hummed. Let’s see how that deals with my tonedeaf humming!

My intention with these books was to try and keep my education going, particularly on topics related to running businesses, since that’s something I was never trained in but is vitality important that I do well. To that end I went looking around the business section of Borders and picked a few books I thought sounded interesting and were varied enough that I wouldn’t run into the same edicts again and again.

The first book I want to mention isn’t actually one I bought by myself but I thought I’d list it here for completeness. Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play by Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig was a book I read a few weeks ago that had a profound impact on me. If you are in the consulting or “sales” arena then this is a necessary purchase. The ideas outlined in this book are crucial for anyone who wants to win, and keep, new business. It’s core principle is that your intention must be for the client to succeed, for if that happens then you succeed as well. Everything else then is using this principle, combined with communication techniques, to cut through the usual fear and bullshit that surrounds negotiations and get to the heart of why the client is looking to buy your product or services and what value they are looking to get from it. I really can’t recommend this book enough – invest in a copy now.

Secondly, I finally got around to reading Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki, which I’ve wanted to read for a while now. Overall it’s a good book but quite repetitive and seems to oversimplify the process of acquiring assets. It does make plenty of excellent common sense points though and I quite enjoyed reading it. Things like “owning a house or car is a liability not an asset” is rather obvious, and something I realised a while back, but it’s good to stress crucial things like this that many may not understand, or may not have really taken to heart. Just because a bank lets you borrow against your house, doesn’t mean it’s not a black hole for your money! This was more about personal finance but understanding money is always an important skill to have.

Currently, I am reading through Business Stripped Bare by Richard Branson. I quite like the style of this book, as its very casual – something it seems Branson values over ‘stuffy business suits’. It’s quite enjoyable to read and many of the points he makes are excellent suggestions for any business. His initial explanation that businesses are there to help people, by making things, does seem a bit too altruistic to me but I can’t really argue with the logic. Something I like to think we do well at work is operate within good ethical rules and that we follow the rule of “don’t be evil” extremely well. It’ll be interesting to see what else come out of this book and whether there are lessons that I could apply directly.

Finally, the book I haven’t gotten to as of yet, The 80 Minute MBA by Richard Reeves and John Knell. From my read of the introduction it seems like this may be useful, particularly in my desire to increase my knowledge of “business topics”.

If any of the above books interest you, I’ve included links to where they can be purchased on Amazon. I’d also love to hear if any readers have further suggestions for books to read along these lines! Is there a book you’ve read that you found useful?

Realestate.com.au is still has a few things missing, such as allowing for more fine-grained searches and displaying a bit more information about each property (such as what type it is). Overall though the site is easy to use and navigate. It’s good to see that some large sites are starting to transition to functional mobile versions as it makes browsing the web from your phone a whole lot nicer.

Try it on your mobile now.

I’ve had an account for a little while but only recently started using it regularly. This is likely because I got around to integrating it with other systems I use – such as Facebook and this very blog.

Another great help is the Twibble! Mobile app which runs very well on my Nokia E71 and allows for easy posting throughout the day. It evens has some features I’m unlikely to use for a while, such as location-aware posts.

So I’m starting to get more use out of Twitter but I honestly cannot see what all the fuss about microblogging is. Maybe I’m just not following the right people.

Some of these are simple code quirks, such as spelling mistakes in code that are repeated elsewhere by necessity (what does the variable $accress do?), others are amusing comments (“TODO: ask Moshe about this”). Most irritating are the features that one might expect, based upon what is already there, but that don’t exist – being able to restrict user access based on store for example.

One thing that I’ve spent a bit of time working on lately is being able to sort products by their average rating. It seems to me that, if you have a rating system and the rating is displayed on products, then it would make sense that you’d be able to sort by those ratings. Apparently not.

Whilst I do hope that some of these major annoyances will be fixed in the future, a part of me also hopes they don’t as it will mean all the work that I’ve put into them will be rendered meaningless! What would be really nice would be if Varien accepted patches for Magento. That way we wouldn’t to expend even more time trying to “extensionise” something that should be in the core system anyway.

Magento as a product continues to progress but sometimes I wish the community had more involvement in direction and helping it move forward.