The title of this post is a bit of a misnomer, but writing the full titles of these two books would’ve been insane. This post is about two books from John Perkins - Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and The Secret History of the American Empire.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

Just the title of this book had me thoroughly intrigued. This non-fiction, fast-paced book guides you into a cloak-and-dagger world that is usually reserved for CIA spies. The main characters are economic hit men (EHM) of which John Perkins was one, jackals and the military. The goal of an EHM? To gain control of a country, more correctly its resources, without having to invade.

If only half of this book is true, it paints a scary picture of how the US Government operates. The stories told are of assassinations and of one-sided deals that were a boon the American companies involved.

The Secret History of the American Empire

This book is a follow-up to Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. It goes into greater detail regarding the events mentioned in Confessions. It discusses John’s meteoric rise in the EHM ranks and his moral awakening.

Although a truly a great book the last chapter was too preachy for me. I understand his plight and why he’s trying to motivate the reader but I feel that it is misplaced and it better suited for another book.

Wrap-Up

If you’re interested in clandestine operations of the United States these books will prove to be a great read.

—I have read and thoroughly enjoyed both of these books. In the interest of full disclosure, this post contains Amazon affiliate links.

I am a programmer, a de facto project manager and anal when it comes to organization. I code for a living, code on the side and I’m also on the board of a local young professionals organization. My life is quite hectic at times and tasks can come at me from any angle. Unfortunately none of the task managers at my disposal ever really met my approval.

My latest foray into this arena comes from REXwireless. Their todoMatrix application does not fail to impress. Task organization is very natural - your tasks are organized by “drawers” and then by “folders.” A task takes under a few seconds to create, this is a great deal quicker than any of the other applications I’ve used.

Why I Love It

Another nice feature they have is named “injection.” todoMatrix installs an injection option to the menus provided by your Blackberry. Injection allows you to take the text currently displayed into a new task, saving a great deal of time.

Those few things made me fall in love with the application, but one feature really clinched it for me - rexDesktop. rexDesktop allows full CRUD on your todoMatrix data from the web.

Quirks

todoMatrix is not without its quirks. It would be nice if there was option on the menu that displays the shortcuts available. I’m sure they’re in the documentation but I’m too lazy to read it and I couldn’t carry it with me.

Also, I find the UI to be lackluster. I’m going to break that comment into three separate parts - 1. The Main Screen, 2. The Folder View, and 3. The Item View.

A Lackluster UI

The Main Screen

The main screen displays a tree which contains all of your drawers and folders. Although you can configure the colors of the folders, it still feels clunky to me. In Rex’s defense, I’m not sure what more can be done with a tree.

The Folder View

This view shows all of the tasks that are stored under a particular folder. The top quarter of the screen displays information related to the selected tasks and the bottom three quarters show all of the tasks.

The task detail section is too small. So small that labels for the six data elements that are displayed contain acronyms. These acronyms, although logical, I can’t get their meaning as quickly as I’d like to. I’m forced to look at their values in order to determine what I’m looking at. It seems to me that there is room to expand this section or at least expand the label names.

The tasks displayed give you a hint as to their status but there are only two colors used - a light blue for uncompleted tasks and a light gray for completed ones. I would like configurable colors for each status or priority. I understand that this could lead to confusion for the user, but if the colors are configurable, then the user could use as many or as few as they like.

The Item View

The Item View suffers from the same problem as the top portion of the Folder View but at least there’s a line that explains the meaning of each label.

RexDesktop

This is probably my favorite feature of this application. Unfortunately, it too suffers from a UI problem - it sucks. In a world full of Ajax and flashy UI’s this web app still looks like something from the late 90’s. It is fully functional it just looks ugly. But I’ll still choose function over form.

Wrap-Up

Although I write a great deal about the things I don’t like, todoMatrix is a great application. I feel that its strong points speak for themselves. I can’t wait to see how this application matures in the coming versions.

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todoMatrix can be purchased at rexWireless.