“xkcd: volume 0” by Randall Munroe

What can I say? After all the years of reading xkcd.com, buying the book seemed like an obvious “huh, how did I not buy this already” moment.

This was a great wander down memory lane. I found a great many of my favorite xkcd comics, including bobby-drop-tables (therapeutic for anyone with an apostrophe in their surname!), locked-out-of-house, i’m-compiling-code and “the one that makes every Release Engineer I know cringe“.

Somehow, there were even some I’d never seen before, a very happy discovery: chess-coaster (which in turn inspired real life http://xkcd.com/chesscoaster!), the why-i’m-barred-from-speaking-at-crypto-conferences series, girls-on-the-internet, ninjas-vs-stallman, counting sheep…

All in all, a great fun read, and I found the “extra” sidebar cartoons equally fun… especially the yakshaver! If you like xkcd, and don’t already have this book, go get it.

ps: He’s got a new book coming out in a few days, a book tour in progress, and a really subtle turtles-all-the-way-down comic which nudges about the new book… if you look *really* closely! I’m looking forward to getting my hands on it!

After all the fun reading “Meanwhile in San Francisco”, I looked to see if this duo had co-written any other books. Sure enough, they had.

“Lost Cat” tells the true story of how an urban cat owner (one of the authors) loses her cat, then has the cat casually walk back in the door weeks later healthy and well. The book details various experiments the authors did using GPS trackers, and tiny “CatCam” cameras to figure out where her cat actually went. Overlaying that data onto google maps surprised them both – they never knew their cats roamed so far and wide across the city. The detective work they did to track down and then meeting with “Cat StealerA” and “Cat Stealer B” made for a fun read… Just like “Meanwhile in San Francisco”, the illustrations are all paintings. Literally. My all-time favorite painting of any cat ever is on page7.

A fun read… and a great gift to any urban cat owners you know.