Get a quick introduction to any field from Amazon for free

1. Go to Amazon.
2. Type keyword(s) relating to the field you'd like to know more about.
3. Filter and sort to find 4-5  top rated/best selling books in the field
4. Download and read all of the free Kindle samples.
5. Skim read the reviews - particularly the bad ones to get a sense of current debates in the field, other book suggestions etc.

This works because the first 10-20% of many books (once you are past any introduction) is often the best written,  has least amount of padding as it's designed to read in shops etc and contains chapter headings which can investigated via other searches.

Crackers can be cooked in a microwave

The missus has returned from the home country with a selection of crackers on the reasonable grounds that they are light to carry and we both like them. Somehow she managed to find some made of seaweed - making them a strong potential candidate to be one of my favourite foods.

But how to cook them? The missus' usual approach is to chuck half a bottle of my best olive oil into a pan and cook them hot and hard - until the fire alarm goes off.

I had a little experiment with shallow frying them the other day with mixed success. 

Was there an alternative approach I wondered?

One of the joys of the internet is you can type almost any dumb question in a search engine and someone will have tried it.  And so it proved true for "cook prawn crackers without oil" which turned up the following instructive video:

So we ran a side by side experiment of pan v microwave cooked and to my taste buds/texture receptors they tasted pretty similar and perhaps even better without the oil. The missus reckoned the microwave ones were a little harder. 

If you are going to try this - do keep a very close eye on any crackers you microwave as it doesn't take long to go from cooked to burnt. 

Five design thinking questions you can ask to boost insight

As an occasional interviewer I am often a bit stumped when coming up with questions at short notice.  This is my go-to grab bag of questions to get the most out of a design thinking interview.

1. Why?
Five year olds* are annoying for their repeated ability to keep asking "Why?" Why do they do it? Because it's staggeringly effective at getting to the heart of something. As an interviewer though, try to find ways to keep building empathy though focussing e.g. Why was that important to you at that time?

*Scratch that I know of one very smart sixteen year old who still does it.

2. What is your most memorable experience of xxxx?
This is a good question for tapping into strong emotion - positive or negative. It can open the floodgates sometimes.  Consider probing to find get more detail.

3. What is the most surprising thing about xxxx?
I've found it near impossible for an interviewee to give a blandly normal answer to this.

I recently asked a homeopath I know what the most surprising thing about their recent trip to India - and their answer involved doing a consultation for their taxi driver on the way to another appointment, why people go to homeopaths there and the near celebrity status some homeopaths have in India.

4. How would you rate your current experience of xxxx out of five, with one being the lowest and five being the highest?

To follow up, ask them why they gave it that rating. And then for additional insight ask them what a five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven or twelve star experience would look like.  You will likely get some crazy answers once you start asking them what it would take to get a twelve out of five rating - but it can also be very revealing and give you some fascinating directions to pursue in prototyping.

5. What is the question I should have asked but was too dumb to think it up?
This is a fantastic question to perhaps finish with as it demonstrates humility/self-deprecation and gives the interviewee the chance to air any final thoughts. If you've had any experience being interviewed then the chances are, you've sometimes walked away frustrated that the question you really wanted to be asked, wasn't.

Bonus tip:
Some of these questions will challenge your interviewee to think so don't be afraid to give them a few moments to mull on them.  Or if you have a chance, send them through in advance.  If your interviewee is really stuck, consider parking and coming back to them later on.

Mini-review: An Occurrence at Owl Creek and other stories

This is a Penguin 60th anniversary sampler of just six of Bierce's short stories. Bierce has an ornate yet appealing style in writing these short tales of satire, mystery and suspense.

There are obvious parallels with modern writers as diverse as Dahl and King standing on his shoulders as they have clearly drawn on his gift for characterisation and slow incrementally disturbing situation to deliver a sometimes devastating twist in their own work.

Based on this, I'll be seeking out more of Bierce's tales.

Mini-review: Henry Ford: A life from beginning to end

A short straightforwardly written biography of the car tycoon - and what an interesting character he was.  Clearly a genius at business who managed to combine several innovations together with a strong sense of what was morally right for the working man - including introducing good wages to improve retention and motivation. Further, he was a pacifist even when it involved ridicule.  And yet, he was strongly anti-semitic and also employed union busting techniques.

The bio does have a few typos and grammar errors here and there.

Improving happiness through random giving

Now that I have enough income to do more than just survive, a little savings and most of the material things that I want, I've been thinking how I can optimise what I get out of the rest.

One idea has to been to try and optimise for happiness - and it turns out one way to do that is to give some of it away.  So for a few months,  I've been running a giving experiment.

Experiment details

Set a random giving budget of up to £20/month.  

I don't decide in advance how I will spend it, and I'm not obliged to spend it. The gift can be anonymous or not. But if I see an opportunity to improve things with a random gift I'll take it.  Note to any future commenters, I don't tend to give to those soliciting gifts. Sorry. 

A couple of examples

 I belong to a discussion forum that is pseudo-anonymous - some posters know each other in real life, others don't. One poster was having a rough time of it with illness and the loss of a beloved pet so I ordered a book I knew they hoped to read and had it posted to them with a message saying the forum wished them well. 

I'm a regular long distance train commuter, and one morning I overhead a young man struggling to get his payment card to work while buying a ticket on the train. He had no other cash and so the ticket inspector said they had to leave at the next stop (one stop short of his final destination).  I quietly paid his fare when the ticket inspector checked my ticket. 

Results

Setting a giving budget takes some of angst out of deciding to make a random gift. I no longer have to think can I afford to help? Is this person deserving? If it is within budget, I can - and who am I to judge. If I've spent the budget, I don't worry about feeling obliged. You can't help in every situation. 

It seems to have some pay it forward type impacts.  The forum poster above posted a thank you and they have offered to help other posters out with posting specialist books they've found in charity shops.  The ticket inspector kindly gave me a tea from the buffet car - and included in the bag a few other goodies (which my colleagues later benefited from during a team meeting).  I was really touched and it genuinely made my day. 

The routine of life can have a tendency to congeal into one unmemorable mass.  But each giving experience has been highly memorable. Sometimes it's the only thing I can really remember from an individual week or even month. 

Randomness works. Sometimes if offers opportunities for creativity and thought, other times it can near instinctual. 

Gratitude from others is something I've often struggled with and this is a good way to exercise those muscles.

And happiness?  Genuinely hard to stay, sometimes the emotions I feel are strong and not always happy ones - depending on the receiver's situation. But I do experience happiness at the chance to be of help. 

Mini-review: Doctor Who - The Doctor Falls

Epic conclusion to a strong final series for Capaldi's Doctor which manages to tie up a few loose ends, riff on previous departure related tropes while musing on both the nature of humanity and death. Plenty of fan service with nods to a comic strip running in the Doctor Who Magazine a long time ago, Capaldi channeling previous Doctors and the potential of Mondesian Cybermen somewhat realised on screen, Bill seeing new self in mirror (a call back to the first regeneration).  Great stuff.