I’m a technology geek, I have to admit.  I take a look back at where we were 5 years ago.  High powered laptops were luxury items (heck, desktops were luxury items just 15 years ago), cell phones were a digital voice communication device that worked everywhere, so long as everywhere was near a major highway.

Compare that to where we are today.  Looking forward 5 years is exciting!  There is no one more in tune with the future than David Houle, a futurist nonetheless.

I stumbled upon David’s blog Evolution …

Reading “Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst” will leave you wondering how you can ever make a penny in the stock market.

Dan Reingold delivers a first hand account from the shoes of a telecom analyst on The Street and in the process reveals the secrets from the other side of the wall that give business and banking firms a hand up in the stock market.

An experience based in the WorldCom era, the amount of greed and corruption that prevails behind closed doors will knock your socks off, and quite frankly anger you if you’ve got …

James Gleick pulls out all the stops in an attempt to convince you that you’re being left in the dust by the rest of the world in his book Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything.

Ironically, “Faster” is about the slowest read I’ve encountered in a long time.  Even more ironic is that Gleick agrees, pointing out in the last few pages that due to all the examples of how microchips, cell phones, and television producers are catering to our desire to do more in less time, it’s a tough book to wrap your brain around.

To be frank, I was a bit disappointed.  The facts are interesting, yet seemingly unorganized and repetitive.  While I could identify with his Type-A personality observations, it was just a short segment of the book that really kept my attention.

We are moving at a record clip in our society, to be sure.  Ever annoyed that broadband speed just doesn’t seem to cut it anymore (even while data from a EvolutionShift.com suggests that  broadband is just now coming of age in lower income households, but still in the shadows in others), or that the two second delay between tracks on your CD is wasting your time, we are definately influenced by the clock.

I just finished the last few pages of Freakonomics last night, and if you’re looking for an easy read to get your mind thinking in a different direction, this book’s for you. It’s not overly long, and it’s dumbed down so you don’t need a degree in economics to comprehend the details.

Steven Levitt is more of a rogue economist and you can see why he doesn’t fit into the typical ‘economite’ crowd.  Levitt looks for what is not present in a set of data instead of taking the data at face value.

Want to know why the crime rate actually fell in the 90’s when major economic experts convinced President Clinton that crime would rage out of control and throw our country into a tail spin?  You need to only look a decade or two earlier in history to figure it out, and it has nothing to do with gun control or law enforcement.

I’ve long heard of people being overcome with their work.  Being owned by that driving force that is the “franchise” and so consumed by the need to excel, to achieve.  This is Jim Cramer.

“Confessions of a Street Addict” is a journal that takes you from the first influence of the business section of the newspaper to the self destruction and eventual submission to a personal demon that is money.  Not his own money; his partners’ money.  The man behind the “fund” had taken a beating and battled back to positive territory on numerous occasions, and on each occurrence, it whittled away the most basic of all human traits.