Charlie Wilson’s War – the book

Back on December 24, I wrote about going to see Charlie Wilson’s War, a movie I enjoyed and highly recommend. Turbo Todd suggested I read the book.

He was right.

The book (unlike the movie) claims to be true — and it makes the movie look tame. Like the movie, it starts out in a hot tub in Las Vegas, and it has Gust Avrakotos telling his division chief to do something anatomically impossible (I try to keep this a family blog, but the precise phrase ends with “You”) — twice. And there’s plenty of sex and drugs (not much rock ‘n’ roll, though), not to mention guns and roses.

It’s hard to believe that the US Government works the way this book claims. Or maybe it’s easy to believe and hard to swallow. Read it and judge for yourself.

The book does have some weaknesses, especially when it’s being repetitious. But I found it hard to put down, and I strongly recommend it.

Fluid Twittering

On Monday, I read a posting on 43 Folders about using Fluid to create site-specific browsers. The author created a browser for I Want Sandy (a tool I plan to check out one of these days), but I thought it would be perfect for Twitter.

But since I was at work and mostly busy when I read the posting, I contented myself with posting it to del.icio.us for “later”.

That evening, though, I was on Twitter and noticed that Firefox was suffering from Spinning Beachball Syndrome — it didn’t die on me, but it spent a lot of time gazing at its own navel. Restarting it helped, but only for a short while. Then someone mentioned Flock, which I’d tried early in its life but hadn’t looked at since (I even managed to pass by their booth at Macworld, though it wasn’t intentional on my part). I didn’t really want to install Yet Another Browser, but the conversation made me think of Fluid.

I downloaded it and fired it up; less than a minute later, I had a Twitter-specific browser on my system. Since it’s Webkit-based, it doesn’t have the extensions and add-ons that I’ve laden Firefox with — and it’s fast. And since it’s an independent browser, it survives when I forget myself and close Firefox (or when it closes itself).

I just wish I could figure out how to make F5 the refresh key; instead, I have to remember to use Cmd-R. Which doesn’t work in Firefox.

Highly recommended, and the price is right: free (as in beer). That’s http://fluidapp.com — check it out!