Book: Vital Friends

As a member of the Gallup poll, I get to regularly voice my opinion that President Bush is doing a terrible job. If that weren't satisfying enough, a couple of weeks ago Gallup sent me a book, Vital Friends by Tom Rath. This past weekend, I was looking for something to read and I came across it again. With a shrug and a sigh, I sat down and started to read.

The premise of the book is that people in general can become happier, healthier, and more productive by focussing on their relationships. According to the author, vital friends (friends who you can't do without) fall into eight categories that describe what you get out of a relationship. Builders are great motivators. Champions stand up for you. Collaborators are friends that share your interests. Connectors are friends who introduce you to new people. Companions are always there when you need them. Energizers are the "fun" friends. Mind Openers introduce you to new things. Navigators are great at giving advice. The book breaks down each type of friend, describes what they do, how you'd describe the friend to someone else, how to strengthen that type of friendship, how to acquire more of that type of friend, and how to be a better friend of that type.

Friendships are not always mirrors in terms of what roles the parties play. For example, my wife is a builder, a companion, and a navigator. To her, I'm a companion, a navigator, and a connector. One of the nuggets of advice in the book is to appreciate the roles that your friend is best at and not dwell on the roles that your friend may not excel at. One of the biggest fights that my wife and I had was when I tried to get her to be more of a Collaborator in a hobby that she had absolutely no interest in doing.

One of the "bonuses" with the purchase of the book is access to the VitalFriends.com website. One chapter of the book describes how to use the site. On it, you can answer questions and figure out what roles each of your friends plays in your life. But there isn't a way to sign in without the code from the book. So you can recommend that a friend try it out, but in order to access the site, she would have to buy a fresh copy of the book and hope that no one grabbed the code from the book while it sat on the shelf at Borders. I appreciate that the authors want to be paid for their work, but in the age of MySpace, FaceBook, and other social networking sites, there ought to be a way to make the service available to someone without them having to purchase the book.

Favorite cheap places to take the kids in St. Louis

1) The Zoo - An obvious choice, it's good all year round. Educational and free - how could you go wrong.

2) The Science Center - Another obvious choice. That it is all pretty much indoors only adds to the appeal in the winter.

3) Tower Grove Park - There are a lot of play areas and playgrounds. But what makes Tower Grove different for me is the Fountain Square wading pool. Free and open to the public, this area is a lot of fun for the munchkins and easy for the adults. Just remember to bring a dry change of clothes.

4) It's Party Time (on Watson) - They are extremely flexible in terms of what food you can bring in and adults are free. Both of our kids loved it. Just watch out on entrances and exits from the inflatable equipment - I didn't think there was nearly enough padding.

5) The pharmacy - There is a pharmacy right down the street from my house. The attraction of the pharmacy is that we can go and pick up some nickel and dime candy for Oliver and Daddy. Each time he can try something new, so it is always an adventure.

6) The Metrolink station - Oliver loves trains. The nearest Metrolink stop is within walking distance. We can usually see three trains in fifteen minutes. And when we're done, we can walk home.

7) The Mills mall play area - Another indoor play area. This was a godsend last summer when it was too hot to go outside.

8) The library - The library is a great place to go with your kids. They have puzzles and books and movies.

9) The firehouse - Not all firehouses are the same, but if yours is anything like ours, it's a great place to take the kids. When the firefighters are not out fighting fires, they are more than amenable to showing the kids the fire engines and the ambulances. And with each visit, they get a plastic fire helmet (I really need to figure out a way to gracefully refuse them - we are frequent visitors and I'd like to make sure that there is enough for other people).

I'll add more as I think of them. Do you have any that I missed?

Interesting Java behavior

I recently was working with a generic list that was being populated by Hibernate.

List fooList = getFooFromHibernate();
for (Foo foo : fooList)
{
// do stuff
}

I was getting ClassCastExceptions while iterating through the list. It took a while to figure out, but the getFooFromHibernate method had a join to the BAR table in it without selecting the fields. Because of this Hibernate dumped a Foo into the list AND a Bar. When I iterated through the list, I got the exception.

This behavior can be caught with integration tests by iterating through the lists retrieved from the database.

Learning from a bad book

This past weekend my wife picked up Rich Dad, Poor Dad from the shelves at my parents' house. The book is a "non-fiction" fable of a self-made man who has become rich from the advice from his rich father figure. His actual father, aka Poor Dad, is the source of the traditional advice of Study Hard, Word Hard, and Get a Good Job. The author argues that this usually translates into someone becoming a wage slave by increasing their standard of living as their wages increase. The advice from Rich Dad falls into the usual investment nuggets of Pay Yourself First, Buy Assets, and Don't Be Afraid to Take Risks.

In general, the content of the book was mixed - some good information and some bad information. The material was persuasively presented but contained little new and/or different advice. Often the interests of the author shown through as he advised the reader to purchase his board game, Cash Flow, to buy books (he's an author), and attend lectures on how to become rich (he's a motivational speaker).

The lesson I took from the book was to wake up, to get off of our collective keesters, and to do something about building up an investment portfolio that has a non-trivial return. I'm not exactly sure how to do that (the book was unclear on specifics), but I'm at least more motivated than I had been in finding out the answer. Despite being a completionist, I doubt that I'll be following up in order to read more by the author, but I can say that it was a good book at the instant I read it.