We attacked one of the bookshelves last night, as part of my continual drive to get rid of things out of the house and out of our lives. Over the last few weeks we’ve thrown away 30 or so old VHS tapes we’ve recorded off the box, and given some commercial ones to charity shops. I’ve also thrown away a dozen cassette tapes, though must be another 100 to go through. I really don’t want to pay the studios again for buying the same music on a different medium (be it CD or MP3), but my options are limited:

• transfer from tape to MP3 - all sorts of simple or complex software out there to help me (and if I had a desktop PC some hardware too), but I think the time consumed per tape will be quite high (fiddle with levels, get the track breaks right, title songs right), and I may well not be delighted with the quality of the resulting tracks. I’ve tried before recording some important items into PCs, and it was always harder than it should have been, and with a loss of high frequencies, and the addition of lots of hiss.
• buy replacements through iTunes - dead simple for those albums available on iTunes - but they will almost certainly be locked with DRM, which limits my options unhelpfully. The situation is improving slowly as the Studios appear to be swallowing DRM-free licensing just avoid Apple getting a complete monopoly of supply. In the UK this includes 7digital which is growing quickly.
• hunt around on BitTorrent sites for others who have shared the files - after all I have paid once for the song already! However, my limited experience in this in the past for some critical tracks showed it was very hit and miss, time consuming, and of course liable to malware.

It’s looking bad. My best bet has to be to take a deep breath and be ruthless about what I really want to listen to still. And pay up for MP3 versions for those that I really want to still be part of my life. Most of the artists I like aren’t chart toppers, so they could do with the money …

Now to the books: we got rid of 35 (novels to the WRVS for the hospital library, some to charity shops, and a few in the bin). Unfortunately that still leaves a whopping 710 according to the catalogue We are managing to part with more novels that we’ve read, so the fraction that are Christian reference books keeps going up. But all of this is less impressive still have calculated that we’ve bought about 100 books so far this year … ahem.

We’ve sold a few DVDs off, but we’ve hardly thought about them, or the CD collection. Maybe I need to ironically buy a copy of It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff by Peter Walsh to further motivate me to keep the de-cluttering going.

“Unleash your inner slob”

Probably an unfair quote to lead with from this book by Stephen Cotterell, but an arresting one. This book was a surprise; I thought it was making the case for reducing busyness and generally downsizing life. Which it was, but only partly. More than that, Cotterell makes the case for real fulfilment coming through community, as emerging from God. And more specifically a God whose substance is Love - the Christian God.

Late on he mentions occasions where we land up “just killing time” - for example, hitting delays at stations or airports. Even if its just semantics, his suggestion to think of it differently, instead “redeeming time”. And “time wasting” should become “enjoying time”. One practical suggestion is to sit in a chair for a few minutes not thinking of anything, but being aware of your breathing. He suggests this as a way of allowing hidden thoughts out, as well as awareness of God to appear. A more orthodox Christian view would be to call this “meditation” and make it directly Christ- or Bible-centred. (To the point that the next book I’m going to read is on Lectio Divina - praying ‘into’ Bible passages.)

I didn’t find it amazing, but it’s a new mixing of ideas, and should have something to say to almost anyone.

One book I won’t be throwing out just yet is Military Intelligence Blunders and Cover-Ups, written by a retired UK Colonel who clearly knows what he’s talking about. I found it a surprisingly easy read for a history book, even managing to make his discussion of the battles I knew nothing about (Barbarossa, Yom Kippur, Singapore and Dieppe) as interesting as the ones I did (Falklands, Gulf War I, 9/11, Pearl Harbor).

He traces the causes of the failures - often on the apparently victorious side as well as the defeated - showing that sometimes it was scared Intelligence Officers saying what they knew the Dictator wanted to hear, sometimes it was a failure of collation, sometimes of not having good enough dissemination, and sometimes lack of direction from the top. The lack of coordination between the intel agencies in the USA comes under particular fire: a full 6 decades after Pearl Harbor, the same structural problems prevented the mass of intelligence ahead of the Al-Qa’ida attacks of 9/11 being collated and acted on. The UK’s Joint Intelligence Community (JIC) approach is normally held up as the example on how to do it, but even then it failed over the Falklands. He also said it failed over its ’sexed-up’ dossier published to the public to persuade them of the need to invade Iraq in 2003, though here his analysis didn’t go far enough. If the press reports are right, this was less of an issue in the JIC, and more the inevitable problem of intelligence from on a few MI6 agents that couldn’t be corroborated.

On almost the last page Hughes-Wilson offers a rather bleak summary and outlook for intelligence:

For whatever pearls of infonnation can be put before any nation’s leaders or policy makers, as long as there are human beings in the system, then the system is vulnerable to the vanities and frailties of humanity: another Mountbatten, too ambitious and concerned with his own personal advancement to worry about collecting proper intelligence: another complacent set of civil servants thinking “it can’t happen to me” like the British in Malaya; or diplomats who could not distinguish good old-fashioned lying and deception to sort out capahilics from intentions, like those duped by Saddam Hussein in the Gulf. Human nature will not change, nor will the relationships between bureaucrats and their masters.

Hopefully he’ll write more to suggest how best to minimise these problems, and to suggest what’s the right balance of funding for intel and conventional operations, given that both will fail some of the time.

Recommended: not just for intelligence buffs, but for those who want to get a quick overview of some of the most pivotal (or at least infamous) military events of the twentieth century.

One of the many archive boxes in the garage held old christian reference books that we were less likely to need in a hurry. Martha wanted some sketches for her placement, so this provided the incentive to dig it out and have a rummage through. We’ve kept half, and most of the rest I’m going to donate to the library at church (and see if I can interest them in using LibraryThing as a usefully public catalogue). But there a difficult few that I can’t imagine anyone being interested in any more, because they are too dated. For example the almost-non-PC title of “Sex and Young People”. It feels sacriligeous to throw a book away, but that’s what I had to with that and a few others. Please forgive me, bibliophiles of the world!

I’m definitely getting more into the philosophy of de-cluttering your life to de-stress. So, despite buying another dozen second-hand books 2 weeks ago, getting rid of this box means the number of books we have is shrinking. If you’re not scared of big numbers, then read on …

Our LibraryThing profile shows we have 823 books catalogued, though this reduces to 750 if you take out the ones we’ve only had recommended or have given away, and add the ones I’ve not yet catalogued.

Have you seen the rather lovely Library Thing website?

For book lovers it provides a great way of finding information about books, about what other people like, and what you might like. It also lets you host a list of your books, letting you see and search amongst them, even showing their covers in its ‘bookshelf’ view. Here’s our library. (It also has some widgets for bloggers, and that’s how you can see a few books in the right hand column of this one.)

It also has discussion forums around particular books, authors and the like. On it some people have committed to reading and reviewing 50 books this year. Martha’s taken up the challenge, and has started here. Why don’t you put some of your books up? We’d love to be able to discuss books or authors we have in common?

We saw The Golden Compass at the cinema yesterday. The book does give much more depth to the interplay of the characters’ daemons and the growing and changing relationship between Lyra and Mrs Coulter. But still, I enjoyed the spectacle, particularly the airship design, and the altering shapes of the childrens’ daemons.

It’s reminded me that I need to read the last book in the trilogy: The Amber Spyglass. That can be my Christmas light reading. The first film is supposed to have toned down the book’s anti-church sentiment, but it was still there at times. The last book is supposed to have much more of it …

I’ve just finished The Righteous Men. I’m sure Jonathan Freedland or his publisher chose the Sam Bourne pseudonym because it’s structurally similar to Dan Brown, and allows for a similar style on the front cover. He can make you turn the pages in the same way that Brown does, and he’s picked a religious myth theme. But thankfully, the writing style is superior to Brown’s with more believable characters, and (ISTM) built on a much stronger set of facts, rather than than fiction-as-facts of The Da Vinci Code. The one thing that did jar was part of the ending which seemed a coincidence too far.

I really enjoyed it, and it’s been good to relax with a thriller again over the last month. Thanks, Dad, for the loan You got any others by him?

> “Death by powerpoint”

It’s a phrase that’s become a cliche. But we know what it’s like. Long screeds of bullets on a background that’s chosen to be _interesting_, in text that’s a bit too small to be read from where we’re sat near the back.

For many years I’ve tried to find training on how to make PPT-based presentations alive again - whether in work or church. (This isn’t the post to get into the discussion about place of sermons; for now it’s enough to say that as more preachers are using powerpoint to supplement their words, there’s more opportunity to see poor examples of the art.) I first tried to find a course to go on that was more than either a standard presentation course, or a “How to use PPT” course. And failed.

My first real lead was hearing about Cliff Atkinson’s book **[Beyond Bullet Points](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0735620520/ref=nosim/librarythin08-20)**. What he said really resonated with what I’d been suspecting - use fewer words, and more pictures. But I wasn’t prepared for his major theme: you need to **tell a story** in each presentation, and to do so with some passion. To do this well, borrow from Hollywood: you need a setting, protagonists, an imbalance, the balance, and the solution. Since reading it I’ve tried to follow his suggestions, though I’ve had rather few presentations to do recently. Were they better as a result? I think so, though I’m not the best judge. But if nothing else I spent more time preparing them, and more time trying to work out what I felt about the topic, not just the facts of the case, in order to find the story.

Mike Workman helped me after a recent sermon by saying that I needed to put “more of myself” and “more passion” into it, which backs up part of this.

The **[Presentation Zen](http://presentationzen.blogs.com/)** blog has also helped me more recently. Garr posts examples of good and bad presentations he’s found, and gives some analysis, plus plugs for good books. The latest one of his recommendations I’ve started reading is **[Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling Powerpoint Presentations](http://www.librarything.com/work/3793272&book=21861009)**. Its more technical and detailed, and isn’t really to do with Powerpoint at all: what he says should apply to any visual medium you’re using. There’s lots of stuff that’s new to me, mostly related to the psychology, such as why a blue background is better for text than a red background. Half is focussed on graphs and other complex graphics, which I guess isn’t relevant for most people. Interesting, but my recommendation is for **Beyond Bullet Points** if you can only read one book. But do read [Garr's post summarising the 8 principles](http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2007/08/i-spent-the-wee.html) as well.

Couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d get up and do some recycling and shopping as Sainsbury’s opened. Turned out I wasn’t nearly the first in store, with 20+ cars there before me.

Anyway, en route I heard Jeanette Winterson on [Radio 4's Saturday Live](http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/saturdaylive/saturdaylive.shtml) talking about [The Stone Gods](http://www.librarything.com/work.php?book=21869785) (sounds good), by way of obsession with laundry, which she attributed to being a Libra - just like Lady Macbeth. Odd from such an intelligent woman! Particularly as she noticed that no horoscope ever mentions cleaning or the laundry …

I was pleased to find a cardboard recycling point at the Sainsburys there now as well. Means we should almost avoid going to the main ‘tip’ at all. Just embarrassing that despite the plastic bags in the boot to re-use, as usual I forgot to take them into the store.