Leafing Through Fall

It is really fortuitous that I received all my new books the day after I finished my last one. Now I can get an early start on my reading for this Fall. Although I'm a bit torn between which book I should read first, as all of them seems to be pretty interesting. Anyways, here are the books that I bought:

Everything Matters!
This book tells the story of a guy who knows exactly when the world will end from the moment he was born. This seems pretty tragic, and that sounds interestingly funny.

Zeitoun
A non-fiction book, this is a first hand account from a New Orleans painting contractor who witnessed the catastrophic events in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. I don't know much about what happened there besides what the news gave us. So I'm pretty interested to know the bits and pieces, as well as the personal impact, that got muddied or lost in the mainstream media.

1984/Animal Farm
I've already read 1984, and it's one of my favorite books. But I was looking for a hardcover edition to replace my paperback that I gave away last year. That's how I found this double feature by George Orwell. While I don't have any plans to read 1984 again, I haven't read Animal Farm yet (which most Orwell fans said it is as good as 1984). So I really need to read this one.

There, that's what my Fall reading program looks like. So which book do you think I should read first?

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Book Review: When Skateboards Will Be Free

When Skateboards Will Be Free
9.5 of 10
Author: Said Sayrafeizadeh
Buy Hardcover Edition from Amazon
Buy Kindle Edition from Amazon




I don't buy a book based on its cover art (like I do with music sometimes). But I often fall prey to a book's title. So when I came across When Skateboards Will Be Free at Amazon, I couldn't help but toss it into my cart. I was so captivated with the book's title that I bought it unknowingly of what it was really about. A non-fiction, I thought it was a documentary of the skater culture. But after I had read its synopsis, and saw its subtitle, I realized that the book is about the author's political childhood rather than extreme sports.

I wasn't disappointed when I found out what Skateboards is about, however. It actually piqued my curiosity due to its synopsis and title not adding up together. It's the kind of book that you would want to read just to learn of how or why the author chose such title. Luckily, author Said Sayrafeizadeh was quick enough to quench my curiosity and revealed the origins of his book's title in the first chapter. It's a dream, a political one, of a coming revolution that the author and his mother had clung to during most of his childhood.

The book, of course, doesn't stop from being interesting after the first chapter. In fact, it is only an appetizer since Sayrafeizadeh seems to have emptied his memory bank just to fill this book with funny and depressing anecdotes from his childhood. An Iranian-Jewish descent, Said Sayrafeizadeh is born to parents who are members of the Socialist Workers Party. So his childhood is full of mishaps and adventures like stealing grapes during the Grape Boycott, trips to Cuba to learn about living under a socialist government, or losing friends by supporting the Iranian Revolution.

When Skateboards Will Be Free is probably the only book that I didn't regret buying because of its interesting title. It tells a very beautiful story that will let you glimpse into a life of a socialist in a capitalistic world, of a child with a different ideological upbringing. It's heartwarming as well as heartbreaking. It actually made me appreciate my life as a kid and all the things I had even more. But, at the same time, it also made me envious of the author's unique childhood. If you're looking for a book with an amazing story, then look no further and grab Skateboards.

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Fragmented

It's recommended that you should defrag your hard drive before and after you install a software. It's part of achieving a clean installation. I've been doing this, for years, ever since I read about it in TweakGuides. I've also been doing this in an almost ritualistic way. Whenever I have a new game, I'd always uninstall the older ones that I don't play anymore, then I'd update my drivers, defrag, install the new game, and defrag again. So far, unless the game or application is buggy itself, I've experienced minimal crashes (1 crash on my new PC in almost a year).

For the past couple months, however, I've been installing and uninstalling games without defragging my HD. Not that I got lazy but my Windows Disk Defragmenter have been painstakingly slow. Lacking the patience, I usually end the process prematurely at the third or fifth hour. But since there are alot of games coming up this September, and I have to update my closed beta Aion into its open beta client, I decided to defragment my HD again and sit on it as long as it takes. I opened a book and read it the whole day yesterday while defragging my PC, and then I slept through it. 16 hours later, it was still running!

I knew something was wrong, that some how some program have been rebooting the defragmenter. But since I'm using the defragmenter that came with Vista, I had no way of telling what was up or if the process is almost done. So I went to snoop around TweakGuides again and found out about Diskeeper. So I downloaded the demo over at their website, installed the software, and started the defragmentation. After I had a quick breakfast and a shower, the process was done. The job report was also very detailed (the number of fragments left, performance improvment on my HD, and other things I don't understand).

So far, I'm happy with this Diskeeper. I'm going to keep and use the trial version for another 30 days and I'm going to get the real deal.

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The MMO Schedule

It's September 1st and Champions Online just came out. 21 days from now, Aion will also go live. By that time, I'll be juggling 3 MMOs, other hobbies and some minor aspects of my life. So, in order to make my life much more easier and sane, I made a two-week period schedule (see above, click image to enlarge) that I will follow to the letter.

P.S. Until I've decided which two of three MMO's I'll keep (Aion, Champions, Warhammer), updates on this blog from here on will be scarce, really scarce.

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