Quicksilver, Millionaire Next Door, and maybe a little about me

Well I've been a bit bad about keeping up with my self imposed book report. I somewhat recently finished Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver. It's the first of three books (about 900 pages each) which are historical fiction about the Baroque-era. This might not sound like my normal choice of books, but Neal Stephenson is awesome so I figured I'd try it out. It is interesting because it concentrates on the science of the time (and in particular the development of calculus and the fight between Newton and Leibniz). But it is definitely no Diamond Age or Snow Crash.

< tangent > I was skimming the wikipedia article about Snow Crash and it mentioned memetics and now that I actually know what a meme is, the whole book makes a lot more sense. < /tangent >

Anyway, Neal Stephenson seems to have a pattern of jumping into a story that is already somewhat crazy, developing it, and then toward the end going to the next level of crazy (that's part of what I like about his writing, is that his vision starts about where many scifi writers build up to through a whole book). Quicksilver had a bit of an interesting end, but not that much of a twist so I'm hoping that as I get into the next two books he will work his magic. If nothing else he does have a way of taking something somewhat mundane and making it interesting. I guess that is enough praising of Neal Stephenson for now.

To take a break between Neal Stephenson books (no matter how much I might like an author, after 900 pages it is time for a change) I read The Millionaire Next Door. Thanks Mom for loaning it to me. Allow me to summarize: if you want to accumulate wealth live below your means. Done. Actually, there was a bit more interesting info in there, but I think if you get that one line you can move on. The one other point I found interesting is that living below or above your means is somewhat self reinforcing. If you move to a nice neighborhood then it is hard to be thrifty with other aspects of your life and if you have a nice dinning room table you probably don't want the rest of your furniture to be junk. Vs if you live in a less expensive neighborhood you would probably feel odd driving a really expensive car. The two things I found disappointing are: one that the book is 10 years old so it is hard to compare yourself to the numbers in the book because they are vastly outdated, and two that their formula for how much wealth you should have accumulated is age divided by ten times your salary. If you are twenty five and two years out of school it is hard to have accumulated 2.5 times your salary... Perhaps their formula needs to be more generalized or have a minimum age associated with it.

Over Thanksgiving I headed home. It was good to see the family and it was nice to get back on a bike after about a decade (although my butt felt otherwise). It was also good to see some of my friends from high school. It is interesting that up to a certain age a lot of things change over the course of a year, but it seems like a few years out of college and you can ask someone you haven't seen for a year what's new and get the answer not much. I'm not criticizing anyone, just an interesting phenomenon. Although I would like to think that I kept myself out of that category by moving and changing jobs within the last six months, but if I keep that up that could be an issue. I guess when you are in school if nothing else you advance a year and get one year closer to some transition point. I see why at family events everyone wants to talk to the youngins (luckily in my family I'm still a youngin - largely due to me and a few other youngins' lack of bringing other youngins into the world).

Over the weekend I went to see Upright Citizens Brigade Theater with Evan. I had my first celebrity sighting, although I'm not sure how much it really counts since I don't know they guy's name. He is the bald fat one. Unfortunately he was not performing - I just saw him talking to some people in the ticket sales area. We attempted to see the 8 pm show, but due to all of LA heading to something in Griffith Park (I think the observatory may have just reopened) we ended up seeing the 10 pm show, which I have a feeling was amateur hour. At one point one of the actors made a comment about knowing everyone in the audience and I have a feeling that other than Evan and me he wasn't kidding. Since there were so few people, both Evan and I were dragged on stage at some point. When Evan went up he was funnier than the girl that had dragged him on. I think I'll give UCB theater one more chance, but before that I want to try out some of the other improv groups in LA.