Vonnegut 1922 - 2007

Player Piano (1952), The Sirens of Titan (1959), Cat's Cradle (1963), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; or, Pearls Before Swine (1965), Mother Night (1966), Welcome to the Monkey House (stories, 1968), *Slaughterhouse Five; or the Children's Crusade: A Dance with Death (1969), Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye Blue Monday (1973), Slapstick, or Lonesome No More (1976), Jailbird (1979), Deadeye Dick (1982), Galapágos (1985), Bluebeard (1987), Hocus Pocus (1990), Timequake (1997), Bagombo Snuff Box (stories, 1999) and on and on ...unfortunately the chain shall stop now...and Kurt Vonnegut, god bless him, will no longer pour out the molten lumpy crackling prose that made each book of his feel like a journey in a amateurish space ship.

I was doing my summer internship in an architects office in Calcutta in the middle of the worst spells of summer that Kolkata has ever seen. Luckily the American Centre was just behind my office, and I took a membership in their library. For a couple of months while I commuted in trams, buses and trains, I was lost in the world of American writing. Not knowing much about American authors apart from irving wallace and robert ludlum etc, I took potluck each time, choosing books based on their titles. It was a good move, and led me to discover authors like Mailer, Styron, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Saroyan, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald et al and I was having fun escaping from the heat of the city, sitting in the airconditioned library, when I should have been standing by a construction site taking notes....but hey...

So one day I chose Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut. With a title like that, you could hardly lose. Had a nice ring to it. By the time I had finished the book, I knew I had stumbled upon a treasure. Soon I had read the entire shelf and it was a lot of heavy reading to pack into a 19 yr olds head in the short span of a month, still I will always remember how it used to feel to dip into the purple-green prose of Vonnegut and emerge later refreshed and weary as if from a long journey.

Read yesterday that Vonnegut had passed away at the age of 84, in Manhattan. A giant, truly.

Links -
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/04/12/vonnegut_obit/

from those who knew him.

the official (sic) website

the wiki

Cold Turkey - An article by Vonnegut

Brief Bio

Quotes by Vonnegut

The essential guide to email writing

Interesting review in the New Yorker, about a book on how to email. This book seems to lay down the rules for this new medium, and it reads ....

Shipley and Schwalbe enumerate six essential e-mail types (the Ask, the Answer, Grovelling, etc.), eight deadly sins (too casual, too vague, too illegal, etc.), and a four-step checklist (S.E.N.D.) that reflects the authors’ broad-ranging e-mail conservatism. “S” stands for simple, “E” for effective, “N” for necessary, “D” for done. Generally, they’d have you hit “send” later and less often. They offer a hermeneutics of the cc, an invocation against the word “please,” and a number of rather chilling but by now self-evident rules (“Never forward without permission, and assume everything you write will be forwarded”). The reader gulps at the thought of unexploded self-incriminations ticking in servers around the world. The authors, astonishingly, come out in favor of exclamation points (“ ‘Thanks!!!!’ is way friendlier than ‘Thanks’ ”), abbreviations (“Is LOL . . . really inherently more opaque than FYI?”), and emoticons (those smiley faces and the like may “bug many people but they make us smile”).

"The Mythical Man Month"

I was browsing through the net and caught a reference to "The Mythical Man Month" and it was nice to be reminded of this awesome book which will teach you all you ever need to know about project management. I had read it a long time back and I used to watch people mismanaging their tasks and projects and wonder why they kept making the same mistakes. All they had to do was read this book, no need for an MBA or PMP or whatever, and yet the same mistakes happen again and again. Look at Vietnam and Iraq or IBM and Microsoft. Then I went to Wiki, and there the following paragraph was a rather neat explanation. ( see part in italics ). You should check out the entire wiki entry here too...its a good read.

Brooks's observations are based on his experiences at IBM while managing the development of OS/360. To speed development, he mistakenly attempted to add more workers to a project falling behind schedule. He also asserted that writing an Algol compiler would require six months—regardless of the number of workers involved. The tendency for managers to repeat these errors led Brooks to quip that the book is called "The Bible of Software Engineering" because "everybody reads it but nobody does anything about it!"

List of Hundred Good Books.

http://www.randomhouse.com/kvpa/smiley100/list.html

this is a rather nice list of books....check it out...