Tell All by Chck Palahnuik

I recently read Tell All by Chck Palahnuik. It was pretty good. A compelling read, it was a book where you always want to find out what's next.

The book is the story of the aging movie star Katherine Kenton. Kenton is from the old Grace Kelly/Joan Crawford Hollywood era. It's told from the perspective of her long time live-in companion Hazie Coogan. Hazie has made it her life's work to guide Katherine to success and avoid career, financial and relationship disasters along the way for Katherine as best she can.

Per the title, it's a book about "tell all" books. Using Crawford and Mommie Dearest as the posthumous pitfall that Hazie is trying to avoid. The catch about these tell all revelation books is that the subject must be dead for the tell all to be published. That creates some pressure on Katherine as she meets a charming young gold digger named Webster Carlton Westward III. The book itself is laid out as a kind of screenplay/script with chapter titles like "ACT I, SCENE EIGHT"

Typical of Palahnuik there are crazy twists. Also as in Survivor, the author explores celebrity and some of the manufactured steps taken to maintain a certain public look and image. There's the same kind of cynicism in parts of the arbitrariness and managed element of fame.

It's a good book. A fast read. I still have a few Palahniuk to read and I will continue reading them.

Plague of the Undead by Joe McKinney

I finished another zombie book. It was Plague of the Undead by Joe McKinney.

In this book McKinney takes a different line about the origin of the zombie apocalypse. It's no longer Houston in the aftermath of a slew of hurricanes. This time it's a chemical food additive CDHL. It was realized too late that massive CDHL exposure causes the zombie state, and that everyone reanimates after they die.

The book is set in a town on the Mississippi river called Arbella. It's set 30 years into the ruined future. The residents of Arbella have survived and set up an agrarian pre-industrial society. The community has done well. The population has increased to 10,000 and is looking to expand beyond its walls.

An expedition team is assembled to venture out, see what's out there, and determine potential sites to expand Arbella. The book is about the expedition team and their encounters out in the wilds.

It was a good book. It felt a bit derivative of the later Walking Dead in that the zombie problem is largely under control, and a lot of the dangers are in the people they meet along the way. It's not McKinney's best zombie work. The Houston series is better, especially Apocalypse of the Dead. The book isn't really long and he ends it with a collection of zombie apocalypse short stories tacked on at the end. Some of those stories are strange, world war Z style, but a good read.

Maybe the zombie thing has run its course and I'm ready to move on. Still this was a good book. If I happen to see any more McKinney at the library I would grab it.

+1 for the Halifax Gecko Bus

I'll use this space to put in a good word for the Gecko Bus. I've gone there a couple of times now. The food is tasty. The people are friendly it has a nice vibe there. Prices are good. They seem to be doing well there's always others coming or going when I've been in there.

I've had tacos and a burrito bowl when I've been there. They are usually up by the Kent in Bayers Lake. They have an app, and their website it's good to check. Once we just went up and they were somewhere else that day.

I'd been meaning to go for a while and now I'm glad that I've gone. I will plan to go back.

ATV 6 o clock news sucks

I frequently have the occasion to watch the ATV 6 o clock news aka CTV News at Six. That program is painful to watch. It's so boring. I don't control the controller so I'm stuck with it which sucks.

The basic problem is that it's too long and they struggle to come up with an hour of content. I don't even watch live at 5, and the 6 o clock is mind numbing. How can people sit through 2 hours of that every day?

The ATV 6 o clock news is filled with junk and filler. It would be so much better if they just deleted so much of the crud

• lifeline (please end this terrible segment)
• webpoll (put this out of its misery)
• second weather forecast
• just for last
• weather could easily be made shorter and more to the point. grandma says has run its course
• interview segment could be made shorter easily with no loss in value
• financial markets
• filler fluff pieces

It would be so much better if the 6 o clock cut out the junk. If that makes it a 30, 40 or 45 minute show then great. Live at 5 could be left pretty much as is and just go with a 90 minute segment with far more value to the audience for time spent and a much more useful and entertaining news product.

my will be done

I have now done the long neglected task of getting a will done. I used the employee assistance from work to recommend a lawyer. They referred me to Teryl Scott. The law office was nice. The lawyer Shawn Scott and the paralegal were easy to work with. It all got done start to finish in one day.

There was no special reason to get it done. As far as I know at the time of this writing the end isn't near and there is nothing unusual or different. It's just something that should be done by my age and in general you just don't know when your last day is.

Since it was from eap referral there was a discount so that was good. Well I'm glad to have this done now. It's an important step along the way. There are still let's say some other matters to sort out. This gives me some momentum and I plan to continue to get these affairs in order.

Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! by Nicholas Carlson

I finished another book recently. It was Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! by Nicholas Carlson.

It was a good book. A fast and compelling read. It seems like some time since I've read non-fiction. The book is the story of Yahoo, and their photogenic tech celebrity CEO Marissa Mayer. She took over as Yahoo CEO in 2012 after being a senior executive at Google where she was a wealthy early Googler.

Carlson takes an interesting approach. He spends quite a few pages discussing the history of Yahoo, its founders Jerry Yang and David Filo, and the succession of CEOs during its dizzying rise in the 1990s tech boom, crash, recovery in the 2000s, and subsequent attempts to recapture the excitement of the early years. From about the mid-2000s on Yahoo is dogged by disruptive activist shareholder campaigns, intense competition in search from Google, and the near-acquisition by Microsoft. Yahoo is blessed with a trump card, an extremely wise $1 billion investment in the yearly 2000s that Yang made for a large stake in Chinese portal Alibaba. The Chinese investment turned out to be incredibly profitable and as the fall 2014 Alibaba IPO nears it makes the Yahoo CEO a very desirable job.

Then Carlson discusses Mayer's early life and rise at Google, her first real job out of the distinguished symbolic linguistics program at Stanford. Mayer is highly intelligent, very hard driving and confident. She rose very high up at Google before taking the top job at Yahoo.

That left not too much pages for Mayer's actual time at Yahoo. Still it was a good read and we understand that the Mayer Yahoo narrative is a work in progress. At the time the book closes there is yet another new shareholder activist campaign from yet another hedge fund, this time putting pressure on Mayer.

I've been a fan of Yahoo. I've used Yahoo Mail, Yahoo home page, Yahoo poker, Yahoo chat, Yahoo domains, Yahoo briefcase, Yahoo notes, Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Store over the years. I even just added the Yahoo most emailed RSS to my protopage home page after reading this book.

It was a good book. I'd recommend for anyone interested in the histories of Yahoo, Google and Mayer.