Book Review: The Black Swan

The Black Swan By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It has been some time since my last book review, I have been reading a number of average books that I didn't think worth reviewing. The Black Swan is the first really thought provoking book I have read in some time.

Swans are white. Whiteness was considered to be a distinguishing feature of being a swan. Then black swans were discovered in Australia. This one, unpredictable, event changed the concept of what it means for an animal to be a swan. This book is by the well read and ever self-confident author of Fooled By Randomness, another great book.
I give this book 9 out of 10
Full review here

Australia Remixed

This week has been overflowing with action. After landing in Sydney I flew to Melbourne last Sunday for Australia's Remix event. A compressed rerun of all things good at MIX 07 that happened a couple of months ago in Las Vegas.

I presented a session on Windows Live Services to a crowded but tiny room. It was hard to get everything in and we ran over just a bit ;)

I met heaps of people, some old friends, some new, including Stephen Price from LittleVoices.com. Stephen is a cartonnist and a software developer (amongst other talents) and he saw fit to put his new Wacom tablet to task and draw a little cartoon of me and my gadgets.

On one hand I like his idea of drawing cartoons of the geeks he meets, on the other hand I dont know where he gets the idea that I have so many gadgets, on the other hand I do have planety of mobile business utilities, on the other hand..... :)

Now I must get back to work, there is some serious fun going on right now with Live Services and Silverlight, but more on that later....