Rajat Arya

Listened to eAudioBook in July 2006.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that my local library now offers audio books for download that can be transferred to a portable media player. I downloaded this book and listened to it on my way to Portland this past weekend.

This is the story of an educated woman that tries to live on minimum wage alone. She hides/lies about her credentials and does her best to live within the means of a service-class person. Her jobs vary and her locations vary, but overall she finds it very difficult to make ends meet.

The book is well written, and doesn’t make any judgments on the service class, but rather makes many comments on the educated class and how the service class are often forgotten. The author does take some time to discuss her life at Walmart, which is highly entertaining. The author also makes several attempts to articulate the limitations of the welfare reform that has been passed in recent years – specifically that the calculations minimum wage and poverty rate do not include the cost of housing in a particular locality.

I found the book reminded me of my time working at Staples and Redner’s when I was in high school. This further encourages my philosophy that all young people should have service-oriented jobs when growing up so they can be introduced to this lifestyle. The author was often shocked at learning the lifestyle many of the full-time service workers experienced (no health insurance, living in cars/vans, no work = no food next day). This was less surprising to me since at Staples and Redner’s I was exposed to the full-timers at the job and got to hear about their lifestyle.

Read more about the book from Amazon.

Read from April 2006 to July 2006.

This is the story of the Oakland Athletics‘ manager Billy Beane, and how by using certain statistics ignored by Major League Baseball he was able to take one of the cheapest teams in baseball to the playoffs consistently. His approach to using these statistics to manage players points out the deficiency in management of major league teams, and snubs the “old school” thinking of baseball scouts.

This book was given to my entire team by our product unit manager, Hillel. Oddly enough, though none of us are baseball fans, Billy Beane’s actions epitomize some of the goals of my team – to constantly re-evaluate the metrics on which we measure our success, and work to improve the metrics to improve our performance.

Michael Lewis writes casually (at times too casually for my taste) but keeps the story lively and entertaining. He does not require the reader to know about baseball, as he himself writes mostly as a novice. The book has a couple chapters about the history of baseball statistics that are somewhat dull, but they provide the context for the rest of the book.

Overall this book was entertaining (even for someone like me who finds baseball in all forms to be boring) and insightful on how every organization can take a lesson is improving its metrics for evaluating success. You can buy it or read more about it from Amazon.

Pictures from hiking this weekend. Partha, Prashant, Brian, Stephanie, and myself hiked Rattlesnake Ridge in North Bend, WA. Beautiful scenery considering the proximity to Seattle. The hike was moderate and very enjoyable. Highly recommended.

See the pictures here.

My Pictures from Matt & Gina’s wedding pictures from recent hiking and trips (here, here, and here) have finally been uploaded. Took me a long time to get WordPress to play nicely with Gallery2, and to export using Picasa2.