The book I read to research this post was Triathlon Training For Dummies by Deidre Pitney et al which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. This book is primarily for novices looking to enter their first triathlon for which it recommends doing a sprint event which if you are a good athlete you can do in 1 1/2 hours although some take up to 4 hours to complete. It’s also of interest to those looking to up the type of triathlon they do and the ironman events cover more than 140 miles and take around 15 hours to complete. Triathlons are a combination of running, cycling and swimming over various distances. In the ironman events they run a complete marathon in addition to the cycling and swimming. If you are looking at increasing your endurance at running you should try fartlek which was developed in Sweden and consists of a combination of walking briskly and running which stops your body coming to a complete stop when you are worn out and is done over considerable distances. Swimming training in a nutshell should consist of trying to cover a distance in as few strokes as possible and you should aim to do 25 m in 14-16 strokes, many novices do it in 18 or more. At the beginning ignore how long it takes you and work on that at a later stage. The cycling should be done at a reasonably low gear to prevent lactic acid build up in your legs that too should focus on covering a distance with as few revolutions of the pedals as possible and look at reducing your time later. With both swimming and cycling these are the biggest factors in speeding up your time. With diet you should focus on complex carbohydrates as opposed to simple ones as that helps endurance. A lot of people don’t realise fat is a nutrient and you need a certain amount. Energy drinks are important and you should twice what it appears will cure your thirst although obviously this is supplemented with water. I really enjoyed this book and thought it makes a great blog although I have no plans to do a triathlon at least not for the time being. It does contain a lot of information on health and fitness in general.

The book I read to research this post was Behavioural Economics For Dummies by Morris Altman which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book is about a subject that has only recently started to be taken seriously and in certain other quarters especially among economists alot of people dismiss it. With economics it’s often assumed most people will respond to market forces in a certain way often favourable to the economist which simply doesn’t happen. You might find a product is the best of its type on the market and gets favourable reviews but sells poorly. Equally you might find a company making good profits and its products doing well but its shares perform badly. Of course this is about human nature and this book would best suit someone interested in economics. This book is about why people are so fickle and is there a way to predict what is going to happen. Interestingly if someone has to give up a small amount of money to gain a larger amount most people won’t risk it because losing the money upsets them more than the potential happiness they are set to achieve by the profit. Equally some people were asked if you lost $50 you were due to buy a concert ticket with would you still buy the ticket and most people said yes but if they lost the concert ticket most people said no. This book only delves into this subject a little as it is a very complex subject and the book isn’t as easy to understand as some for dummies books. A final point is if a country has rich ores and mineral resources you would think it would be wealthy but many countries have corruption and bad government which keeps the general populace poor. Equally some countries are the complete opposite where what mineral wealth they have is well managed.

The book I read to research this post was Pour Your Heart Into It by Charles Schultz which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. A while back I reviewed Onward also by Charles Schultz about how he came back into the CEO job at Starbucks and helped make the company much more successful. This book is the prequel to that book and is about how he started the company and follows his first stint as CEO. Charles had a holiday in Italy and came up with the idea of trying out having restaurants that specialized in gourmet coffee. In Italy they had these places where they had newspapers for you to read and had gourmet coffees like espresso which served a discerning clientele. He thought the same could be done in Seattle, Washington. Seattle was facing a bad recession with one of there major employers slimming down its workforce from over 100,000 to just 38,000. Initially when he was working in a restaurant he talked the boss into turning part of it into a gourmet coffee section but had only been given a small area which was so tiny customers had to stand and there was no tables. They did however get some coffee machines. He left this company and started his own gourmet coffee restaurant. He had difficulty getting financing. They ran at a loss for the 1st 3 years due to the amount of financing needed. After that they made a profit and later he was able to buy the company he used to work for and he took their name Starbucks as the name of his company mainly because it was better known but also because he liked the name. Later on they started a mail order business for discerning coffee drinkers. Eventually they even invested in their own research and development centre where scientists would try and develop new products centred around coffee. I really enjoyed this book and it’s a reasonable length at around 340 pages but is also a wealth of information. I think this book is even better than Onward.

The book I read to research this post was How To Use Pinterest For Marketing Purposes A Beginners Guide by Jeff A Hamilton et al which is a very good guide which I bought from kindle. Pinterest has 21 million members and is the fastest growing social network on the planet behind Facebook & Twitter. It’s even bigger than linkedin & google+. Added to that where is an unusually high proportion of women and people into things like crafts, the right product can really sell like hot cakes. To get an account with Pinterest they have to give you an invite which isn’t a problem and you have to link it to your twitter and facebook accounts to help them avoid spam accounts. When you go on the website there is a kind of revolving display of popular repins and you can either repin, follow or comment on an item you are interested in. A lot of people look for a narrow niche they are interested in and concentrate on that. Whatever you offer on this site has to be interesting and avoid spam as this site is very much geared up to penalize that and most members are very much against it. With the right product marketed in the right way you can get a lot of business. A lot of what this site is about is giving something back whether that be special offers, free gifts or free information etc. One word of caution be careful what you repin, you can repin ie someones website but that can infringe on copyright and the same goes for images. Pinterest make it clear in the event of a lawsuit you are responsible for any legal costs etc although if they are sued they will defend their interests. There is no cut legal agreement as tried and tested in the courts so you must be careful. I don’t currently have a pinterest account as I think it would be difficult promoting my blogs on there but it does look interesting as a source of information. I did really enjoy reading this book which I think was free and I would recommend it

I am reviewing the action movie Gravity which stars Sandra Bullock & George Clooney & is an excellent film. Sandra has a much bigger role than George but both give excellent performances. The film starts with a space shuttle mission where both Sandra & George along with another astronaut are working in space. A rogue missile has caused a chain reaction that threatens to knock out the communication satellites and anything else in its path including them. Only George & Sandra survive the initial devastation. George is in charge of the mission and advises Sandra to keep talking because maybe mission control can hear her even though she has lost touch with them. The space shuttle is destroyed and they have to go to the International Space Station in the hope they can hitch a ride on the escape pod. That doesn’t work out and George is presumed lost in space. Actually the space station is badly damaged in the explosion that destroyed the space shuttle and there is a raging fire going through the station. I think Sandra has to try a chinese space station which is less badly damaged and by then George has done the longest space walk in history. There is a reasonably happy ending and it would have been nice to see George in a larger role but although most of the film just features Sandra it does keep your interest throughout. I did read before that Sandra does a big budget movie once every few years but likes to do mostly indie films. Obviously this is a big budget film which is also in 3d. I think this film is a winner.

I am reviewing the film Wings which is very good and which a friend lent me on dvd. I think this film is Russian but on the dvd there is an english language option. It’s quite a charming film and the animation is pretty good. It is very much a children’s film but I think it very much deserves a wider audience in the west. The plot is there are airplanes which are most of the characters along with things like tanks. An airplane happens to be in the right place at the right time and gets mistaken for another plane who was due to be sent to another airfield for training in acrobats for a contest. At the airfield is a lady plane who is in a relationship with the current acrobats champion plane and he isn’t too happy to see he may have competition. Apparently he has only won the contest through cheating. Anyway at the airfield the coach has disappeared in a kind of retirement and the newbie has t o convince him to come out of it. The newbie turns out to be pretty good at acrobatics and it looks like he is going to win the acrobatics but the current title holder will go to any lengths to hold on to his title and his girlfriend. One interesting thing about the film is how the modern aircraft have to share the airfield with other older aircraft & all are military. I remember reading quite a long time ago how the Russian army never retires vehicles like tanks and even has some from the Second World War where as in the west they retire them after a decade or so and mostly scrap them or put them in a museum. I think this is nicely captured in this film. I really enjoyed this film.

The book I read to research this post was The Samsung S4 Manual The Complete Galaxy S4 Guide To Conquer Your Device by Daniel Forrester which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book is written in an easy to understand way and although it’s only 68 pages certainly covers all the basics with this smartphone. The processor is a quad core 1.6 GHZ so is only a small upgrade on the S3 but the memory has gone from 1 GB to 2 GB and the software is much more efficient so the phone is much faster at doing things. It has a rear 13 MB camera and a front 1.9 MB camera and has technology incorporated to let you take several shots and combine them into 1 photo and also there is a built in eraser app that lets you remove moving objects from the background if they are a bit blurred for example. It runs the Android 4.2.2 operating system called Jelly Bean. I think as updates become available you can upgrade that as time goes on as with most smartphones. The case and the bezel to this phone are smaller but the screen is actually bigger which does mean things like the keyboard might take a bit of getting used to as they are bigger than the previous version. I did see a review of this phone in a technology magazine and it was rated as the best smartphone available. I enjoyed reading this book and I know it’s quite a new phone but there doesn’t appear to be that many books and ebooks available about it although I am sure that will gradually change.

I am reviewing the fantasy novel Small Gods by Terry Pratchett which is a very good book which I bought from a car boot sale. This is one of the funnier installments in the Discworld series. The Discworld series is a fantasy series about a world which is discworld and populated by various entities like dwarves, trolls, vampires, humans & other things. I think certainly most of the books would appeal to all ages and Terry in his own unique style does away with logic in favour of humor and they are very funny. The story to this book is his take on religion. A god called Om is communicating with a young student at the local boarding school and he tells the monk in charge that they need to travel to a far off land over desert and ocean and convert the people to the Omnian religion. Of course he has got the om word because it’s a well known mantra in transcendental meditation and does make a good name for a god. Anyway a group of them including a tortoise make the journey but all doesn’t go according to plan and some of them decide to settle in the far off land where they have their own ideas about religion. I think it does have a reasonably happy ending. I did quite enjoy reading it and some of the humor did make me laugh aloud.

The book I read to research this post was Rail Centres: Sheffield by Stephen R Batty which is a very good book which I bought from Amazon. Sheffield is one of the great industrial centres of Britain not to mention one of its biggest cities. It’s famous for its steelmaking especially cutlery although nowadays and not mentioned in this book and like many big cities in Britain is going through a transformation. Anyway initially in the steam age Sheffield almost missed as George Stephenson although a renowned railway engineer wanted a 2 3/4 mile tunnel in one place and a very gentle gradient on the railway when asked to design a railway for this city. This resulted in an estimation for a huge amount of money that potential weren’t interested in footing the bill for. In 1840 another engineer was asked to design a railway and he suggested cuttings instead of tunnels and a slightly sharper gradient, which with trains becoming more feasible seemed alright, but this brought the price down. Anyway over the next 50 years Sheffield become a major railway junction linking up places like Hull, Liverpool & London. When one of the railways was being built, a tunnel was being constructed and collapsed and 7 workers were able to jump clear but 6 workers died. I did really enjoy this book which is a worthy addition to the Rail Centres series.

The book I read to research this post was The Thaxton Branch by Peter Paye which is an excellent book which I bought from Amazon. Peter is an expert on the history of the trains in Eastern England and worked for British Rail for many years. Thaxton is a small town in Essex that is now very much part of the London commuter belt. In times past it was a major wool and cutlery manufacture centre in Britain. In fact it is rather remote for getting coal to this area otherwise it may very well have developed into a major cutlery centre like Sheffield. A railway was built here which used the legal definition of light railway which exempted it from a lot of the rules normal railways had to follow which made it viable. A plan went to the planning office for a London to Edinburgh line that would pass through here but it wasn’t taken particularly seriously and several other routes were also submitted before a final one was accepted. When the railway was built as a branch line from Elsenham to Thaxted there was 1 goods train & 1 mixed train per day and the rest were passenger trains. This line is approximately 10 miles long and eventually succumbed to competition from the National motorcoach service which started running coaches here from 1920. Nowadays there is a bus service here just once a week and it is the classic case of a small town that has been drastically changed by economic pressures within Britain. The nearest fairly big town to here is probably Bishops Stortford. I really enjoyed this book and apparently it was the first book written by Peter although later he wrote a second edition.