For years, I have expanded my brains to learn on different skills and topics as I have always believed in the principle of constant learning and experimenting. The day where you stop learning is the day you decay. I love nothing more than to keep my brains (and sometimes limbs) stimulated and to me, sometimes, sleep is a waste of precious time ...

So, I have received some emails asking me why the silence on this blog and what is ticking my fancy these days since some people have caught sight of this post and wondering if those books have gone to waste. Well, NO as I believe that for every thing you learn today does contribute to a certain extent of context what you learn and how you absorb new skills tomorrow.

In a nutshell, I have many books, Some bought, some based on the fact that I was a technical reviewer for a certain publisher and I get getting new titles in my mail.

While, I have many titles on my bookshelves. Here is a list of my important bibles throughout the years. It gives a sense of what I did, what I am doing now but in no way tells you what I will be doing next (although I have a brief idea on some shiny stuff that will keep me stimulated next ).

1993:

• Liskin's dBASE IV 1.1 Programming Book
• dBase IV Programming

1995/98:

• Beyond Candlesticks
• The Battle for Investment Survival
• The Art of Speculation
• Reminiscences of a Stock Operator

1998/99:

• Subclassing and Hooking with Visual Basic
• Pure Visual Basic
• Visual Basic 6
• Visual Basic Complete
• Visual Basic Developers Guide to the Win32 API

2001/02:

• Advanced .NET Programming
• Professional VB.NET Programming
• .NET Framework Essentials
• HTML Complete

2003/05:

• Enterprise Integration Patterns
• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
• Design Patterns
• Programming .NET Components
• COM and .NET component Services
• Enterprise Services with the .NET Framework

2006/08:

• The Ruby Programming Language
• Hadoop
• Masterminds of Programming
• The Art of Concurrency
• Simply Rails 2
• Programming SQL Server 2008
• BizTalk 2006 Recipes
• Professional BizTalk 2006

2009 (today):

• Advanced Techniques for the Modern Drummer: Jim Chapin
• Stick Control for the Snare Drummer: George Lawrence Stone
• The Drummer's Complete Vocabulary: Alan Dawson / Jack Ramsay
• Progressive Steps to Syncopation for the Modern Drummer: Ted Reed

While it may seemed that I focused on different things, I do have a list of milestones and objectives set for each learning phrase in my life that I target to achieve before I move on to the next. This will ensure that I really learn deep and not just skim. Yes, I can still code up a decent XML Schema XSD by-hand but I dont think I will get any applause for that .

I do have another blog dedicated to my current interest in music but I will just leave it for the interested and inquisitive minds to find it. So, I hope to perform one day for some of you at Jazz At Southbridge or even more ambitious someplace in New York. I am sure, for this, I will get some slight applause.

Ahhhh - one is allowed to dream or fantasize, arent we ?