Libraries! One of the Best Deals Around

If you want to save money on books, videos, CDs, magazines, internet access, newspapers, entertainment for your kids,.....

...oh, heck, just get yourself down to your local library!

I live right between two small towns, Azle and Springtown. Both have excellent libraries. Thanks to them, I have been able to, in the last few months

• Read Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat for free.


• Read David McCullough's The Path Between the Seas for free.


• Read the entire Dean Koontz Odd Thomas series for free.


• Read the entire Shopaholic series for free. (Yes, I do enjoy Bex's adventures, though in the real world, someone with her attitude would soon be both broke and divorced. Seriously.)


• Watch the entire Masterpiece Theatre series, I, Claudius, for free. Also Bleak House. Also the extended version of The Return of The King.


• Read Newsweek, Time, National Geographic, Consumer Report and half-a-dozen other magazines for free. (Okay, so I don't read all of them every visit.)


• When I was wrestling with both a new computer operating system and a cranky dialup connection (now replaced with broadband, thank God) I was able to use my library's internet-connected computers, broadband fast, to find information I needed...for free.

And those are only a few examples of what a good library can provide.

If I had kids I could also have taken them to the library's Saturday afternoon puppet show, or checked out and let them watch The Land Before Time I, II, III, IV (how many of these sequels are there?) the requisite twenty times straight without buying or renting tape after tape. They could have browsed through a dozen shelves of children's books, or gone to the library's Childrens Reading Hour. Or they could have used the library's "kids only" computers, hooked to highly filtered connections, to explore the internet or play games.

If I was a job seeker, I could have searched through a list of companies, then gone on the internet to browse job listings or even apply for jobs. If I was a student, I could have used those internet-connected computers to do research.

Or I could have checked for everything from recipes to home repair information, in the book stacks, in the magazine room or on the internet.

A library is a terrific grab bag of free information and entertainment, and all you need to gain access is a library card. And a library card is almost always free to anyone who lives in that town.

Stop by your local library. It's a treasure chest just waiting to be opened.

Book Review: "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century"

The other day, I did a live chat with a Vonage support person who identified herself as “Jennifer.” She was smart, she was helpful, she was patient, and she answered all my questions. Because Vonage has live chat support, and because Jennifer impressed me as someone who knew her stuff, I’ve switched from Skype to Vonage. (More about that in another post.)

I have to wonder, though, if Jennifer is her real name. These days, it’s quite likely that her real name is Arabic or Hindi or Mandarin, and she’s chatting online with me from her cubicle in Bangalore, India, or Pakistan or Hong Kong.

I read Thomas L. Friedman’s bestselling book “The World is Flat” a few months ago. (I’m waiting for his newest book, “Flat, Hot and Crowded” to arrive at my local library.) Published in 2005, “Flat” is a description of Friedman’s voyage of discovery into the matrix of the digitalized global economy.

It’s a fascinating trip. Friedman details how technology and especially the internet have, in his opinion, irrevocably broken down both trade and employment barriers, creating a “new world order” that is largely commercial, not political, though it is increasingly affecting politics. From people printing their own plane tickets off the internet, to the send-money-anywhere-in-the-world convenience of Pay Pal, from open-sourcing to outsourcing, from Wal-Mart’s moment-to-moment control of its inventory to FedEX’s moment-to-moment knowledge of the location of every package it handles, from Google as world-wide library to Google as targeted-advertising giant, the digitalized flow of information has changed everything, and Friedman provides a detailed and fascinating description of that change.

In India, he found 2500-person call centers, with clusters of people answering questions for customers of Microsoft, Dell and innumerable credit card companies, highly educated, twenty-something kids identifying themselves and Joe or Susie or Bob to make the callers more comfortable. He talked with executives of Japanese companies now outsourcing their manufacturing to China. He describes a conversation with an online airline ticket agent who works out of her home in Salt Lake City, and while visiting Iraq, watched the operation of a camera-equipped surveillance drone controlled by an Army operator at an Air Force Base in Nevada. He describes news stories and interview pictures recorded on cell phones and transmitted to news websites for instant broadcast throughout the internet.

Then he gives a history of the ten "flatteners" that converged to create this new digitalized world, from the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 to the rise of mobile phones and virtual realities, and how everyone, from individual workers and consumers to global corporations, is being affected--and he provides this information in an example-rich style that’s fascinating.

If you want to understand how these changes are affecting you, I stongly recommend “The World Is Flat.”

Some of My Favorite Quotes...From Books You Should Read

"We aren't making a living, we're making a dying." Your Money or Your Life, Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, Penguin Books, 1992

"Pace yourself! Tease yourself with anticipation. Ease the fingers of your aspiration up the inner thigh of your cupidity. Tickle your fancy. Of course money buys happiness! But both will last longer if you remember the importance of foreplay." Andrew Tobias, Money Angles, Avon Books, 1984

"I drink scotch and two kinds of beer--free and BUDWEISER!" A multi-millionaire when asked if he'd like to be served expensive wine. The Millionaire Next Door, Thomas J. Stanely and William D. Danko, Longstreet Press, Inc., 1996.