Funds Raised for Global Literacy:
$4,856,147.00
Books Saved From Landfills:
13,498,011

What We’re Reading: SF Edition

Posted by Jack on 09.30.2008 at 12:59 pm

Now that you know “We [heart] Books” I thought I’d tell you what we’re reading here at the SF Office.

Justin: Always Be Testing, Collapse (Audiobook), Watchmen
Cory: The Big House, The Glass Castle
Geoff: Obama’s Challenge
Eddie: Web Analytics an Hour a Day, Watchmen
Xavier: Let My People Go Surfing
Jack: Blink, Doctor Zhivago
Ryan: Where the Wild Things Are, Post Office
Elina: Lonely Planet Travel Guide: Barcelona (lucky!!!)

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Better World Books Volunteers at 826 Valencia

Posted by Jack on 09.29.2008 at 3:54 pm

The SF office of Better World Books is the newest collection of volunteers at Dave Eggers‘ group, 826 Valencia.  Starting next month we’ll be helping at a local SF school with college essays by high school seniors.  After that we’ll be spending 3 hours each week at the center, tutoring kids from 6-18 in various subjects.  Besides that, some of us will be doing more work on our own time in workshops, in-school tutoring and editing of the publications of the students’ work from the center (guess who’s doing that).

From the site:

826 National is a family of seven nonprofit organizations dedicated to helping students, ages 6-18, with expository and creative writing at seven locations across the country.

Our mission is based on the understanding that great leaps in learning can happen with one-on-one attention, and that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success.

Each chapter offers drop-in tutoring, field trips, workshops, and in-schools programs — all free of charge — for children, classes, and schools with particular interests or particular needs.

826 is especially committed to supporting teachers, offering services and resources for English language learners, and publishing student work. Several locations offer unique retail experiences as well.

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SES: Search Engine Strategies Conference

Posted by Jack on 08.20.2008 at 2:49 pm

Hey all, today I’m with the other betterworld.com guys at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose.  I’m rocking the “social media” track and sitting through hour after hour of lectures about twitter, facebook and all the like.  A certain book keeps coming up though and everyone I’ve spoken with says it’s a social media bible of sorts: Groundswell by Charlene Li.

I haven’t read it yet but consider it ordered.  Anyone read this one?

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A Friendly Reminder…

Posted by Jack on 08.01.2008 at 11:52 am

After a hearty dinner, it’s nice to have a sorbet to quell the strong tastes.

A friendly reminder from your fave book blog and the San Francisco Office: metal in the microwave, even if it’s in the inside of your Google mug, will spark and may cause something to explode and may even make the bottom to blow off.

What have we learned?  If you’re going to be academic for the day and you try to reheat your tea and walk away from the microwave in a metal travel mug, make sure that there’s a fire extinguisher.

Have a great weekend, readers, and if you like my hijinx, try this great kids book:

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The Destruction of the SF Office

Posted by admin on 07.24.2008 at 10:57 am

Posted by Jack Hanlon, CBO & Evangelist

We’re hiring at the San Francisco office!  With the amazing benefits of working for us and the obvious benefits of how awesome this office is, you’ll have to swallow a difficult fact: you’re going to get hurt.

I know, it seems ridiculous, who would take a job knowing they would get hurt, and why am I so sure?

Well, you may recall that I’m in a sling due to a torn rotator cuff (hit by motorcycle while riding my bike with coworkers):

IMG_0722.jpg

Geoff was also recently run over by a car on his bike (clearly he’s a little more casual about his foot/ankle injury):

Justin just had surgery having hurt his knee saving orphans from a burning building (or at least that’s what I’m telling the ladies…):

Xavier is promoting the destruction of the office by being himself:


(I’m the one who boxed his stuff, and yes that is a Santa Claus costume on top)

Meanwhile, Elina is assuredly plotting our destruction, having put up with our boyish antics for too long.

Come aboard, it’s an exciting company with nothing but growth ahead of us.  We love to read and hang out and nothing but opportunity awaits, just make sure you take the big insurance plan…

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On Loneliness

Posted by Jack on 07.10.2008 at 1:46 pm

As you may recall, I moved out here from working solo on acquisitions to now being in an office with the other SF lads.  Little did I know that they would all go on vacation simultaneously and leave me here alone.  Even Elina has left back to her home country of Ukraine.  Being that I’m feeling a bit Wall-E (the movie was awesome, seriously), left here alone amidst the wreckage of Xavier’s desk and Geoff’s “filing system” as I scoop up assorted info and spit it out in a neat form for you, I’m going to fight this by going up to the couch and reading my lil brown eyes out.

I’ve just picked up Tom Robbins’ fantastic Jitterbug Perfume and the following is the “Prologue” of sorts, which he calls aptly “Today’s Special.”  If this doesn’t get you to read the book I simply don’t know what will…

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Slavic people get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip…

The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

The beet was Rasputin’s favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.

In Europe there is grown widely a large beet they call the mangel-wurzel. Perhaps it is mangel-wurzel that we see in Rasputin. Certainly there is mangel-wurzel in the music of Wagner, although it is another composer whose name begins, B-e-e-t—.

Of course, there are white beets, beets that ooze sugar water instead of blood, but it is the red beet with which we are concerned; the variety that blushes and swells like a hemorrhoid, a hemorrhoid for which there is no cure. (Actually, there is one remedy: commission a potter to make you a ceramic [expletive]—and when you aren’t sitting on it, you can use it as a bowl for borscht.)

An old Ukrainian proverb warns, “A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil.”

That is a risk we have to take.

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What We’re Reading: SF

Posted by admin on 06.24.2008 at 1:35 pm

Here at the SF office we have 5 employees, all of whom work in some way or another on www.betterworld.com.  Here’s what we’ve been reading lately between the hours of meeting and phone calls and “networking” at the local watering hole:

Xavier: The Landmark Herodotus (seriously it’s like 980 pages of history)
Geoff: Let My People Go Surfing & Crossing the Line
Justin: The World is Flat & The World Without Us
Elina: Chinese Takeout: a Novel
Jack: Made to Stick & Jitterbug Perfume

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