This Joke Put A Happy Ending To My Exhausting Day

I bought the hard copy edition of this book when it first came out years ago.  I however hadn't read it until today when I was riding the taxi back to the hotel.  I brought this book along with me for this work trip because one of my resolutions for 2017 is to always keep one of the unread books that I bought in my briefcase so I could at least flip a few pages during my transit; if not to finish reading the entire book.

It was at the end of page 20 that I came across a funny prank that Zappos.com's CEO Tony Hsieh pulled on his boss when he was working as a part-time computer programmer at a software company during his senior high school year.  One time when his boss was heating the water in the microwave to make tea, Tony stopped the microwave right after his boss walked away so his boss returned to find the cup of water still cold inside the microwave.  Unaware of Tony's prank, his boss just turned the mirowave on for 3 minutes again and walked away.  But soon as he walked away, Tony stopped the microwave again.  When the boss returned again to get the water, he found the water still cold. He cursed the microwave for being broken. This time he set the heating time for 5 minutes instead of 3 minutes out of frustration and walked away.  But when he returned 5 minutes later, he found his cup inside the microwave filled with ice cubes.  This was now somewhere on page 21, and I was laughing out loud.

May be you don't find this joke as funny as I did, I just want to share it anyway...

Thank You Mr. Gates For Sharing

I don't think my grandparents ever imagined having a PC when they were young.  To many people, my grandparents' generation were living in a better world than today.  May be in many aspects it was a greater world then.  But to me, I don't want to live in their world.  I can't image living in a world without my laptop, without my iphone, without my ipad... I really appreciate that Mr. Gates populated personal computing, which brought on such an information revolution in my life time that, instead of reading from the New York Times about what books the richest man in the world had been reading, I can actually hear him tell me in his own voice.

Whatever perks my grandparents enjoyed in their good old days, I appreciate the easy access of information at present. While none of the books on Mr. Gates' list sounds  particularly interesting to me, I'm going to make it my goal for 2017 to read at least one book on his recommendation list. After all, I recently learnt that new experiences can  boost happiness.