darragh murray

I just don’t know about The Alchemist, the mid ’80s novel by Brazilian author Paulo Coelho.

Well, I do know about it - I have recently read it after all - but I just don’t know if I like it too much. The BBC, amongst others, have told me that I should like it; it is one of their top 100 ‘must reads’, but I think that perhaps you can get away without reading it. I have read better books (though I guess, I’m not too sure if I’ve read 100 better books).

In case you did not know, The Alchemist is the story of a young Spanish shepherd who dreams of fulfilling his destiny. As we soon find out, this destiny roughly equates with to a trip to the pyramids of Giza in Egypt for a jaunt of treasure hunting. This density is revealed to the shepherd in a series of repetitive and identical dreams. He initially has some reservations about undertaking such a trip and experiences conflicting feelings over the prospect of abandoning both his flock as well as his potential romantic interest. However, a mysterious old man convinces him to follow his heart, inferring that completing this task will reveal the ’soul of the world’, and thus fulfill his fate.

Along the way, the boy encounters a series of potential setbacks that threaten to derail his journey as he travels from Andalusia, to Tangier, then across the Sahara towards Egypt (such as thieves, tribal warfare and even new love), which often lead him to question the task at hand. However, such doubts often foiled by new characters, usually wise men archetypes that reinforce the rectitude of his journey to the pyramids. Indeed, the Alchemist, for which the book is titled, is one of these archetypes and reveals to the boy that in order to find joy, one must complete such journeys. Using the Alchemist character, Coehlo infers that destiny is not actually fatalistic, but rather composed of whatever you truly desire.

“Listen to your heart” is the ultimate message of the novel (perhaps Swedish pop duo Roxette had read this book prior to penning their 1988 hit of the same title). Spiritualistic idioms frequent the text. For example, the idea that the universe conspires to bring the individual the true thing they desire, omens appear to guide the individual towards realising their ultimate dream. Coehlo calls this evidence of the Soul of the World communicating to the individual. This sounded a lot like the guidelines for the fad self-help technique ‘The Secret’. Actually, I must admit, perhaps my opinion of ‘The Secret’, increased my skepticism of the message of the book, and consequently effected my enjoyment.

This is all well and good, and many of the passage do get your head whirring about ‘fulfilling your own potential’, but in the end, it reads like new-wave spiritual propaganda; the kind of words that would have would-be spiritualists salivating, the kind which the average person would think were not entirely in today’s realities (it seems Madonna is a fan, she wrote some words about the book being great on the back of the dust jacket and, if you go by what the media say, Madonna doesn’t seem all that right in the head most of the time).

Look, it’s not bad, but it is nothing too groundbreaking. The writing while idealistic, flows well and it makes the novel an easy read. Coehlo gets his ideas across in a fairly straightforward manner; but the book reads like an extended biblical parable, which occasionally makes the characters seem two-dimensional and not entirely real. All in all, if you yearn for complex plot with flawed and real characters, perhaps it might do to look elsewhere.

Rating:

I really find it annoying when people pronounce the acronym SQL as “Sequel”. Does anyone go around pronoucing RACQ as “Racque”?

Really really quick tip

It seems that if you use dashes (-) in your field names for any table, and try to run functions on them in VBA like “DCount()”, you’ll keep encountering a Run-Time Error ‘2001′ “You canceled the previous operation”.

My recommendation: get rid of dashes and underscores in your table field names.

Edit: You will also get this error if you request incorrect fields names in the table. For instance, you are trying to ask for a count of customerIds and write the code as “DCount(”customerId”, “tblCustomers”)”, when the field in the actual table is ‘intCustomerId’ or something along those lines. Sounds obvious but Jet gives you back a non-helpful error message.

So I downloaded and installed Google Chrome the other day, used if for about a half hour, found it wouldn’t work as I expected in GMail (it wouldn’t allow me to access my spam folder, I wanted to delete some stuff). I didn’t really investigate why. Loaded up Gmail in IE7, deleted it all, then uninstalled Chrome.

Quick review: Crap. Needs improvement.

Firefox forever.

It seemed that everywhere I went in South America every gringo I met had read Gregory David Roberts’s ‘Shantaram’. It must a be a travelling reader phenomena, similar to Alex Garland’s ‘The Beach’, where the backpacker searches for inspiration amongst written texts - inspiring them to take journeys, searching for the backpacker nirvana; a quest for complete liberation from the drudgery of their everyday lives.

Well, I have already digressed. Recently, I managed to knock ‘‘Shantaram’‘ off my large ‘to read’ list and it was quite pleasing to do so.

The premise of the book is based upon the experiences of former heroin addict and wanted felon ‘Lin’ (Robert’s assumed name) after he escapes from an Australian jail, and manages to flee to Bombay, India. Determined to rebuild his life, Lin drowns himself in the culture of his new adopted home, and attempts to bring back some sort of meaning to his existence, which had all been but stripped away by drugs and crime in Australia.

Lin forms a tight friendship circle including other foreigners as well as natives. Many of his new friends dabble in crime, being involved in black market money scams, drugs, document forgery as well as common mafia activities. Many don’t, simply living out humble existences in the slums of Bombay. Despite choosing to participate in some the morally questionable activities, Lin also manages to wrack up some serious karma points by providing health care facilities for the poor (despite having no medical training!), and going out of his way to help the communities he inhabits. It is his choice to dwell amongst the poor as well as the criminals that Lin manages to realise, or at least hypothesise, about the true nature of India, as well as the true nature of being human. Lin revels in the joy expressed by the everyday native Indians, despite their comparatively poor lives, realising that while they may be poor by western standards of success, Indians had so much more joy, honour and loyalty in their hearts than the average westerner.

Lin sees through the stereotypes to the virtue of the individuals who enrich his life. In Lin’s mind, these ‘criminals’ have only turned to crime because society has failed them. A skeptic might think that perhaps Robert’s was trying to justify his own reasons for turning to crime and their might be some traction to this claim – Lin does commit crimes in the book with little thought of the consequences. Indeed, Lin seems to remain apathetic to the consequences. Saying that, the character does seem to be wholly regretful for the crimes he committed in his previous life, which seems a slight bit strange - it almost says to me that because it is acceptable for certain people to commit certain crimes without fear of vengeance within certain societies, and thus it is OK for Lin to be involved without fear of moral reprisal.

It is quite a large read, coming in somewhere around 835 pages in its paperback format and that alone may be imposing for the average reader. However, after completing it – it doesn’t feel like an overly long read (I managed to read it in a week and a bit), and the reason for this is simply because it is a ‘ripping yarn’ so to speak. Most of the intertwining events and stories are very interesting, particularly Lin’s time in prison, as well as his experiences as a slum doctor – they are engaging and keep the reader turning pages. The only parts that were frustrating were the overblown discussion on philosophy, and perhaps Lin’s adventures in Afghanistan could have been shortened. One part of the story that I thought would have been really interesting would have been a discussion of Lin’s crime’s and family in Australia. A lot of the time, I found myself asking “what kind of relationship breakdown could scar or change a person this much”, and I was keen to know more. Unfortunately, you don’t get much more than “Lin was a bad husband seemingly with commitment issues”. Gregory David Roberts has written that ‘Shantaram’ is only part of the complete story. Presumably he is working on the rest.

Still, ‘Shantaram’ is a great read, particularly for long arduous tube journeys to and from central London each day!

Rating:

Back in the last year of my information technology degree (which, depressingly, feels like a long time ago now) I was involved in a team project which required us (the team) to write a large document called a Software Requirements Specification, or SRS. This document was the liek the parent documetn that drove the project and all subsequent project management tasks.

It was an incredibly helpful document to have close at hand. I must say that since graduating and working in a few IT related professions, I have only ever once had to ever write one. I guessed that despite the value of this document, not many companies, IT-centric or otherwise, actually know about the document. The web hasn’t got a huge amount of very relevant/helpful information - at least - in my opinion.

I stumbled across a great article on what a SRS is, what it is composed of, and how to write it, published by the Technical Communications Community. So if you ever want to know what it is all about, simply click here.

NERD EOF