Dan Murphy's Blog

So who would have guessed in a 1000 years that I ended up reading this book.  After visiting my mom in Florida and going to the Sarasota Ringling Museum I have to say I was more than interested in reading about this story.  The great news is that it was a Kindle Lending Library Book, so that makes it free so double bonus.  This was a great story told about the circus from a crazy old man in a retirement home.  He details his story about running away and joining the circus and talks about all the crazy hierarchies that existed back then.  He ends up falling for one of the performers and they make a run for it eventually.  I really liked the authors style of writing and almost fell over when I read an interview with her.  I guess that she spent about 2 years putting the book together, although it’s fiction it is a mash-up of about 4 different stories she was able to find.  Also I found it amazing that she is a technical writer for SQL Server and things like that.  Reading this book you would have no idea that was her background.  I really enjoyed this book and it was a little sad, funny, interesting, creepy and a fast read.  I am glad I read this before seeing the movie which will be making my redbox queue the next time I am there

So decided to upgrade the home stereo since the one I had was one that I got for free about 8 years ago.  So after doing tons of research online and being talked out of buying the Bose home system I ended up building my own.  So the receiver is Yamaha RX-A1010.  Plenty of inputs (7 in total) 7.2 surround sound and 120 watts per channel.  It is also internet connected so it can stream music as well as HD Radio.  Tons more facts are out there but essentially that is the important ones.  I was also looking at the RS-A2020 for $500 more but decided I would never setup a 9.2 surround sound system with 3 zones so I decided to stick with this one.

Then came the decision for the speakers and I ended up with Definitive Technology.  I wanted a lot more power in my center channel as well as a bigger sub.  This comes with 300 Watt 10 in sub-woofer and 4 satellite speakers and a center channel.  The range on the speakers is amazing and its nice to finally have no distortion on low hits with the sub-woofer.

After some new speaker stands, 14 gauge speaker wire, new wire strippers, a new ethernet switch (fried the old one when putting everything back together), lots of banana plugs and my center channel bracket bar I bought a few months ago the system is in place.  Took me about 4 hours to setup everything and that was mainly because of the task of pulling everything that was in place out and then putting this in as well as wiring and connecting and then configuring.  One of the very nice unexpected features is the use or ARC in the HDMI which allows controlling signals to be sent to the receiver and also audio out from the TV to be sent.  This means that when I turn on or off the TV the receiver goes with it.  It also means anything from my smart TV makes it to the stereo system.  This is such a nice feature as now I don’t have to remember to turn off the receiver.  The YPAO makes it very easy to setup and get the right sound out of it.  I am still playing with the setup but love it and think it was a great addition to our home as we watch a ton of movies.  Also nice to have HD radio

So continuing on with my WWII theme I decided to read this book.  It was a lot heavier than the last one I read but still nothing too crazy.  This is a story about WWII told from the German point of view as a regular citizen.  The main character in this story ends up working for a furnace company in Germany that ends up winning a contract to make the crematoriums at Auschwitz Poland.  I like this story because you get an idea of what it was like on the German side of things and you can understand how Hitler came into power.  It is also interesting how about 95% of Germany, even some of the people at the camp, didn’t really know what was going on during this time.  There is some great back story on Auschwitz and in the end the author mentions what is real and what is made up.  Nobody really knows too much about Auschwitz as it was totally destroyed by the Germans before the Russians took the land back.  Sometimes while you are reading this book you keep telling yourself ‘this cannot really be true’ a very interesting way to bring history to life and give it some context of what really happened during WWII.

So since I fell asleep in most of my history classes in school, I have recently started reading a lot of WWII books because I find them interesting.  Yes I realize they are historical FICTION, but this book came up as a very well researched historical fiction story.  The timeline of this book is before the US has entered the war and some soldiers from the US went over to fight for Brittan.  The book follows a US general turned British soldier who starts up a commando group to do gorilla type warfare on the Germans in France.  His goal isn’t to defeat the Germans it is to just disrupt their progress and confuse them.  After some very funny events that basically include more dumb luck then skill they start to make a name for themselves and go through all the elite training there is.  I had a great time reading this book and found myself laughing and very interested in what was happening in the book.  If what they were doing are based on true accounts, then the British had some very interesting skills and ideas of what would confuse the German army.