cellio | Entries tagged with books

I recently read Corey Doctorow's novel Walkaway. It's set in a post-scarcity world where the super-rich (zota rich, or just zotas) hold their power by stomping everyone else down. There's enough to go around, but people have to work (at crap jobs for crap wages) anyway, while the zotas sit back. Some people hate this and decide to opt out by walking away and forming their own communities off the grid. The book follows some of these walkaways, as they're called. (And no, the zotas are not cool with this.)

Another theme of the book is conquering death -- that's how the characters view it. More specifically, their goal is to be able to back up a human's essence, at which point if you get killed you can be restored from backup (initially as a digital simulation, eventually into a new body). This is an attractive idea in SF and this book is hardly the first to explore it, but I always get tripped up by the same issue, including in this book.

That issue is: sure, it'd be nice if I could back up my brain so that "Monica" would never have to cease to exist, but that doesn't mean that backup is me. It would think so, of course; it would have all my memories. But from my perspective, my body dies -- I die. If I'm dead, do I really care if there's a simulation of me running out there somewhere?

This is not conquering death. At best it's mitigating it. Which makes it hard for me to relate to stories where people say "great, ditch the meat body and come back digitally or in a robot or a perfect body or whatever". Would people really do that? I find that hard to swallow.

Despite this point, I mostly enjoyed the book. There's one place where there's a jump in time that I found rather abrupt, and the story is far more dialogue-heavy than I'm used to, with a lot of philosophy in that dialogue. (In other words, large blocks of philosophy-dialogue or exposition-dialogue, as opposed to short, interactive dialogue.) But many of the characters are engaging and walkaway-land sounds like a cool place to live, when the zotas aren't trying to quash it.

A couple years ago somebody recommended Scott Meyer's Off to Be the Wizard, the first book in the "Magic 2.0" series. The premise is geek-fantasy: the point-of-view character, Martin, is a hacker who discovers a file (out there somewhere) that, when you edit it, changes reality. In other words, it's the file that defines the world and everything in it. After experimenting a bit (always meant to drop 20 pounds, that kind of thing), he decides to improve his quality of life by altering his bank balance. That's fine because he's creating money, not actually stealing it from anybody, right? No, not such a bright move, and soon he finds himself making a temporal change to escape the feds. His plan is to flee to medieval England and pretend to be a wizard. He's not the first person to think of that, or the last -- the other wizards put him through trials to decide if he can join the guild or if they'll revoke his access and send him back to his time to deal with the feds. It's a fun read.

I also enjoyed the sequel, Spell or High Water, in which we find out more about where female wizards (sorceresses) go, medieval England not being so great for them. We see more interactions among the main characters, and of course some problems they need to solve together. Another fun read.

The third book, An Unwelcome Quest, was less fun, in large part because of the setting. This is the first book where we don't see much of the world the wizards are in; an enemy wizard has caught the gang in a trap and most of the book is spent trying to escape it. Because my reaction to this one was solidly mediocre, and also because the next one existed only as an audiobook for a long time, I didn't go further. Recently I noticed that two more books were available on Kindle.

The fourth, Fight and Flight, starts with the wizards making a stupid mistake with consequences, which they spend the rest of the book cleaning up. The humor (including some actual laughing out loud) of the first book was back, and the resolution of the problem seemed to start down a good character-development path. On the basis of that, I read the fifth.

Out of Spite, Out of Mind was a major disappointment. Many of the characters' actions are just stupid, and in a not-fun way. That growth suggested at the end of the previous book is nowhere in evidence. The plot also revolves around some time-travel paradoxes that have been there since book 2 and always been a little annoying, but now they've taken over. In book 2 we met Brit the Younger and Brit the Elder, who are really the same person at different points in their personal timeline because bad things happen when you time-travel and meet yourself. They don't agree that they're the same person, by the way, and arguments about predestination break out. In this book that all ramps up, and we meet Brit the Much Elder and Angry Brit and Brit the One Hour Older and I think there's one more running around in there... and y'know what? I never liked Brit all that much to begin with. And in the process of messing with the Brits, the author messes with some characters I like and then ends with a very obvious setup for a sequel at the expense of resolving a major thread. I kind of feel like the author broke the contract with the reader here, especially since the earlier books all at least resolved even while leaving openings.

I see the sixth book is coming soon. I won't be reading it.

(By the way, I've read two other books, not in this series, by this author that were fun. Perhaps he does better with one-offs?)

The last of the books I read on our trip was The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, translated from Chinese by Ken Liu (after which it won a Hugo). I enjoyed the novel for both the science-fiction plot and the view into Chinese culture and history, and the translator did an excellent job of not just translating words but making the context accessible to western readers while still feeling Chinese. This kind of translation task is as much art as science.

The story takes place over several decades (and the novel jumps around some), starting during the Cultural Revolution. One of our point-of-view characters, Ye Wenjie, sees her physics-professor father murdered by the Red Guards and is sent to the countryside (where she is branded as subversive), but her own physics research was ground-breaking and eventually attracts the attention of a military research team. She needs protection and they need her brain, so off she goes. While working for them on the search for extra-terrestrial life she eventually finds something.

Another point-of-view character, Wang Miao, is a nanotech researcher who starts having disturbing visions. During his investigation he stumbles across a VR game called "Three Body" and begins playing it (rather obsessively). The game is set on an alien world where civilization has risen and fallen many times. This is because their star system is unstable; they have periods of stable time when they can settle, grow food, and live normally, but from time to time they are interrupted by chaotic times that pose grave danger. Each time Wang plays he is dropped into a new iteration of their development and learns a little more about this world.

You know these threads are going to come together, right?

There are other threads; the story is neither simple nor completely linear. But it's not one of those books where you need to keep notes to track what's going on, either. And despite a character list at the beginning that made me think "many of these names are too similar", I didn't have trouble keeping track of who was who because the characters are presented with some depth.

While there are some fantastical elements (including the mechanism by which inhabitants of the other world survive chaotic times), the hard science in this book is, as far as I can tell, real. The translator provides footnotes for both scientific and cultural references, which I found helpful.

I picked up this book when it was the Tor free e-book of the month a few months back. (If you don't know about that, check it out.) There are two sequels, both of which have now been translated to English, which I look forward to reading.

Small disappointment: Wang finds out about game via a URL he sees on someone else's computer. We're given the URL. But the publishers don't seem to have claimed it and done anything interesting with it. Oh well.

A while back a friend recommended Wool by Hugh Howey. She described it to me roughly as follows: a city-sized group of people live in a dystopian underground silo because outside is dangerous. The rule is strict, and when somebody is convicted of a death-penalty offense, the sentence is to go outside and clean the sensors so those in the silo can continue to monitor what's going on out there. (The environment is toxic, which is why this is a death sentence.)

But wait, I said -- if somebody is being sent to die, what on earth is his motivation to help the people who did that to him on his way out? Why in the world would people actually clean?

My friend said that answering that would be a spoiler, but the "books" are not book-length and the first one is free (as a Kindle book). So onto the Kindle it went.

During our trip to Europe I was facing a smaller chunk of time on a plane -- not enough to start a novel, but about right for this. It's a nominal 56 pages -- longer short story or short novella or what, I'm not sure.

The first story stands alone; in fact, from what I've read, the author didn't intend to write any more than that. Midway through I thought I knew where it was going, and the author managed to surprise me later. Yes, we get an answer to my challenge to the premise.

Since then I've read the rest of the five-book series. (There's also a prequel series that I haven't read.) The books increase in length as they go, with the fifth a nominal 264 pages -- so still shorter fiction as modern trends go. The first one is free, the next couple are 99 cents, then $1.99, then $2.99.

Each of the first three books focuses on a different main character; the last two books have multiple foci. As the series progresses we learn more about the real power structures in the silo and how things came to be this way. The series ends in a satisfying place but there is room for more stories to be told.

The first book stands alone. The second can, but ends a little tantalizingly so I wanted to immediately read the next one. The third through fifth are more joined at the hip; I don't think it would be very satisfying to read 1-4 but not 5.

I recommend the series. I especially recommend investing an hour and a half (maybe less for you; I'm a slower reader) in the first book.

I recently spent a lot of time on airplanes without an Internet connection -- a perfect time to catch up on some reading. First up: Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor.

Somebody recommended this to me but I don't now remember who. I'm very glad to have been exposed to speculative fiction from a culture not my own. (This will be a continuing, though unplanned, theme; book #2 was The Three-Body Problem.)

The story is set in Lagos, Nigeria (the author's home country). Aliens have just landed in the nearby ocean and they bring change. These aliens feel alien; they are not just humans in different skin or with different appendages like aliens sometimes are in fiction. Their motives and methods are mysterious, and I'm still not sure if they're good guys, bad guys, or...something else. I like the ambiguity.

To this American reader, Lagos feels a little alien too, and the author does a good job of conveying the feel of the city.

There are three primary characters, and a whole bunch of others, some major and many minor. The three have been chosen by the aliens for, well, something. They're an unlikely group -- a marine biologist, a soldier, and a rap singer -- who don't know each other at the start. Over the course of the book we learn their individual stories.

The storytelling jumps around, showing us vignettes involving different characters whose stories, naturally, will come to intersect. And they're not all human (or alien); the point-of-view character in the opening scene is a swordfish, and there are others later. A bat that seems to be a throw-away detail in an early scene shows up later; it's all connected. We see characters grow, change, scheme, and sometimes fall apart.

In reading the book I was challenged by one thing: the author sometimes writes characters speaking Pidgin English, and I came away from those scenes thinking I had the gist of it but hadn't gotten everything. It was also a reminder that the rest of the time these characters weren't speaking English at all, but of course the book is in English. Having the dialogue that, in the story, is the closest to English be, in written form, the farthest from English took some getting used to. I didn't notice until I got to the end of the book that there was a glossary in the back.

I enjoyed getting to know the people and the world of Lagoon.

We went up to Cooper's Lake on Sunday to help with Pennsic camp setup. It sure is weird to not have the house in camp. But we're only going to be there for a couple days (middle Sunday and Monday), because we have other plans for that vacation time later in the year.

There is now a solar panel on the pantry roof in our camp. It has begun.

Earlier this summer I finally read Pangaea, a shared-world anthology that also has an overall story. It includes a story by

mabfan, which is how I became aware of it in the first place. I quite enjoyed it and wrote a post about it on Universe Factory. A second volume is due out later this year.

I picked up the first three books in Jody Lynn Nye's Mythology series (the first book is Mythology 101) in a Story Bundle a few months back. I almost didn't get it because I see Story Bundle as a way to get exposure to new authors/series/concepts, so having three of the ten (? around ten, anyway) books in the bundle be from the same series was counter to that. But I've now read them all and bought the fourth separately, so that turned out to be a win. The books revolve around an eccentric college student who finds out that the Little Folk are real, and living under his college's library. Antics ensue.

In June my employer sent me to a conference (to work, not to attend) in Las Vegas. Now I know, from TV and general media, that Las Vegas is larger than life. And I was still surprised. I was also not prepared for it to take a long time to get anywhere within the hotel complex, because of course they need to route you through the casinos that are everywhere. Casinos are not smoke-free, so I hurried through. Also, my hotel room -- the base room type, nothing fancy -- was larger than my first apartment.

No, I did not play any casino games. Casinos have two kinds of games: games of chance that favor the house, and games of skill that I'm not good enough at and that favor the house. I don't like those odds.

I've been with my current employer for a bit over two years now and I'm still loving it. My coworkers are great, I get a lot of control over what I work on, and I can tell that even though I am the single remote member of my group, I'm still able to teach and mentor and inspire. I think I know a thing or two about technical writing in the software world, and I am glad that I can flex those muscles and impart some of what I've learned. And they appreciate me (including tangible demonstration of same), and that matters too.

FiOS has finally come to my neighborhood, years after many others in the city. The installer is here now. It sounds like a big production; I hope there aren't too many surprises. One surprise already: my "HD" TV package won't actually deliver HD signal unless I pay to rent a fancier box. This was not disclosed. The guy I called about it today offered me three months of movie channels but I'd have to remember to call and cancel that or they'll start charging me; not interested in that. I only got the bundle with TV because (for the next two years) it's cheaper than just getting phone and internet, so in that sense it hasn't particularly harmed me, but it still leaves a bad taste.

If you've been caught up in the "AOL/Yahoo email addresses not playing well with mailing lists" problem, or if you haven't but you've heard something about it, you might want to read this summary of the problem from

siderea. I guess some people assumed that mailing lists don't matter any more and everybody does web fora, or something.

Last week was Shavuot. There's a tradition of staying up all night studying torah; we have a community-wide study that runs for three hours (from 10PM to 1AM) and then several local synagogues take it from there, for those who want. The community one has 6-8 classes in each 50-minute slot, so there are choices. There seems to be a tradition of giving them not-very-informative names; I went to one called "speed torah" just to find out what it meant, and it turned out the rabbi leading it had prepared several very short texts to look at in small study groups (ideally pairs, but people seemed to want to do trios), moving groups every 3-4 minutes and moving on to the next text. So "speed torah" in the "speed dating" sense, but without the scorecards to keep track of who you'd like to meet again. Cute. There was also one on social media, which the rabbi had expected to be populated primarily by teenagers. He did get some teens, but mostly us older folks. He did a credible job of adjusting his plans on the fly.

I started a new job a couple weeks ago. It's a good group of people; I'm looking forward to getting past the administrivia and initial-learning phases and doing work that really contributes. My manager (who's not local) spent a day with me here, during which he observed that I needed a better monitor or two (because of vision) and no of course he understands about things like Shabbat and Jewish holidays. (Pro tip: if you observe Shabbat, try to never start a job in Standard Time -- let them see that you're good before you start disappearing early on Fridays. But we were talking about Shavuot and why I needed to take a day off so soon after starting.) This week I got email from him: the 24" monitor I wanted (key features: 16:10 aspect ratio, can rotate) wasn't available, so would I accept the same monitor in 30"? Yeah, that should work... (Getting one now, and after checking it out we'll decide what to do about the second one.)

I recently read the first two of Rick Cook's "Wiz" books (Wizard's Bane and Wizardry Compiled). They're great fun, even if they feel a little like geek-flavored "Mary Sue". A programmer from our world is whisked away into a world that has magic -- for reasons unknown, and the guy who summoned him is now dead. While there he figures out that magic spells can be implemented in a way akin to programming; he doesn't understand magic, but he understands programming. So... The books have some nods to programmers that others might not pick up on, but they don't seem like they'd get in the way for those who aren't. They're quick reads, and I was looking forward to continuing on with the third one, until... brick wall! Baen published the first two as ebooks and has published the rest as ebooks but not currently, and they're not to be found in ebook format now as best I can tell. (If you know otherwise, please help.) I don't expect free (I happily paid for one of these); I do want to read them on my Kindle -- because yes I read paper books and ebooks, but I'm finicky about keeping sets together. (I don't even like mixing hardbacks and paperbacks in a series because it messes up the shelving.) There's not even an explanation on Baen's site; just "not currently available" where the "buy" button should be. Drat.

It's funny the things that do and don't trigger suspension-of-disbelief problems for me. I enjoy speculative fiction -- science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, etc. This means accepting some basic premises -- faster-than-light travel, teleportation, magic, time travel, or whatever. I'm totally cool with all that.

I had two recent experiences with other factors in such stories.

First, last night I finally saw Looper (Netflix: last year's movies this year, which is fine with me). I enjoyed it in general (the ending moved it from "ok" to "I liked that"), but some of the implementation details gave me pause. (Everything I'm about to say is revealed in the first ten minutes of the movie.) The basic idea is that "the mob" in the future sends people they want to kill back in time 30 years to have hired assassins do the deed and dispose of the bodies in the past -- easier to get away with. That's fine. But the assassins know that they aren't going to be allowed to live past that point in the future -- you get 30 years of high pay and then at some point the guy sent back is going to be you and you "close the loop" by killing him. Ok, I can work with that.

So...why does the future mob need assassins in the past? Why not just send bodies back? Or if the time-travel device only works with live people, then -- given that we've seen them land very precisely in geo-space and time -- why not send them into a live volcano? And if they need assassins, why not go back 100 years and then not have to worry about them catching up?

As I said, I enjoyed the movie -- but I couldn't help wondering about such obvious questions, which could have been addressed with a few sentences of dialogue but weren't, while at the same time accepting the time-travel premise just fine. Maybe I'm weird.

In a similar vein, I recently finished reading The Domesday Book by Connie Willis, which coincidentally also involves time-travel. In this case they're sending a historian back to the middle ages for direct observation. She's got an implanted recording device, something like a universal translator (also implanted)... and neither a homing beacon (should they need to rescue her) nor a beacon she can drop at the rendezvous point (matched up to an implanted detector). The history department has budget for a time-travel net but not homing beacons? Bummer. (I realize that this would totally mess up the plot of the book.) Also, apparently in the future they only have land-lines. I enjoyed the book (which I read because of the song (YouTube, lyrics)), but I couldn't help noticing.

I guess it's the little things that catch my eye.

Going to the eye-doctor and having my pupils dilated seems to cause the day to become bright and sunny. But this is Pittsburgh, where sunny days are relatively uncommon. Does this mean that most people in Pittsburgh never have their eyes checked this way, or are we all mysteriously choosing the same few days for this?

I posted the preceding on the "great unanswered questions" page on our wiki at work. In keeping with the name, I've received no answers.

Why does Windows 8 hide the control to shut down the computer? The discussion in the (currently-)top-voted answer makes a good deal of sense. And I actually didn't know that it's now considered safe to just turn a running computer off; decades of "don't do that" have trained me not to.

Back in July 530nm330hz posted a review of a new book of lessons from the talmud, specifically tractrate B'rachot (blessings). Based on that review I recently bought the book and I'm quite enjoying it so far. It's organized by talmudic page, so I first jumped to the entries on particular pages that I know and love -- how does God pray, different themes of concluding blessings, the tussle over leadership where they deposed Rabban Gamliel (I previously wrote about that one), and one or two others. Now I'll go back and read the rest. I hope this book is the first in a series.

I forget where I came across this special "de-motivator" image, but why should I keep all the fun to myself? (Image behind cut.) ( Read more... )

This parlor game comes via

talvinamarich:

Comment to this post and I will pick seven things I would like you to talk about. They might make sense or be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.

He gave me: Lisp, On the Mark, Accessibility, Books, Role-Playing Games, Filk, Faroe Islands (one of these things is not like the others).

( Read more... )

I've owed these answers for, um, a while. Sorry about that!

( Read more... )

There is never enough shelf space for all the books, of course. If there is, it's just temporary. When we moved into this house we allocated various bookcases to (broad) topics, and we've been adding bookcases and patching the distribution over time, but in recent months it totally broke down. With some clever furniture re-arrangement we were able to buy about another 22 shelf-feet of bookcases, and by removing the LPs and cassette tapes that we've digitized and will never play again in original form we were able to reclaim about another 18 feet. With that apparent wiggle room we set about to re-zone the books.

We sure don't have 40 shelf-feet of spare room, I'm just sayin'. We're not done yet, but I suspect that we'll end up with something reasonable that we may get away without revisiting for a couple years. I hope. :-)

The tension between sorting, within a section, by height (to optimize shelf placement) versus by sub-topic is challenging. Dani and I draw that line in different places. In practice, I think this means that some sections will tend one way and some the other, depending on who is more interested in (and pedantic about) that particular topic. We'll see.

Writing prompt: "Based on the books on your bookshelf, what conclusions would people draw about you?"

They will see several major categories of books, which are a combination of my books and Dani's books. In the front hall are two full-height bookcases. One holds Jewish books (reference materials, prayer books, Hebrew dictionaries and grammar books, bibles, several titles in Hebrew) -- and tucked in at the end of one shelf you'll also find the two volumes by Real Live Preacher, who is decidedly not Jewish. The other holds assorted history books, as do many shelves in the living room. In the living room they will also find quite a few shelves of music books, and a set of shelves containing renaissance art, comics collections, and graphic novels. In the dining room they will find many cookbooks, ranging from The "I Never Cooked Before" Cookbook to reproductions of renaissance manuscripts. Here they will also find an eclectic blend of philosophy, literature, mythology, humor, etiquette, and miscellanea. On the way into the house they may have noticed the two bookcases waiting to be assembled and added to the dining room.

Taking all of this into account I would expect people to conclude that we are multi-faceted geeks, a "geek" being one prone to deep dives into the target areas of interest.

Should they conclude that we read no fiction I would take them upstairs to the library with its dozen bookcases of SF&F paperbacks (double-stacked) and its several bookcases of hardbacks, children's books, and more miscellanea. If they conclude that we read no technical books I would take them to each of our offices. In my office they will find programming books (including an autographed LISP manual) and, probably, on the computer desk assorted volumes from the Jewish-books shelves downstairs.

Taking all of this into account I would expect them to conclude that we are multi-faceted geeks with too much time on our hands who have never parted with any books we have ever owned. They'd be wrong on that last point; I distinctly remember giving a book away once. :-)

Scattered throughout the house they will find eclectic stacks of books on available horizontal surfaces, from which they will likely conclude that we are parallel-processing multi-faceted geeks with too much time on our hands who have never parted with any books we have ever owned.

I received a Kindle as a birthday present (with recognition all around that this was an experiment in many ways). I have no prior experience with e-books; thus far everything I have read has been either on paper or in a web browser, and I've established that I don't have the patience and/or ergonomic satisfaction to read lengthy works via the computer. (Dani reads novels that way sometimes, but I really want to read novels while sitting in a comfy chair with optional feline accessories.)

Yes yes, I'm concerned about both DRM and Amazon's pricing policies. That's not what this entry is about.

So, first look: reading is comfortable. ( Read more... )

Dani sits down in his reading chair and picks up a book. I catch only a glimpse of a somewhat distinctive cover.

Me: wait, what is that you're reading?

Dani: (holds book up)

Me: (walks five feet to my chair and picks up a book): we have got to coordinate these things better.

Yup, both our copies came today. Oops. :-) (Being Geek. I didn't know Dani was tracking it. Maybe I'll see if I can sell the duplicate copy to a coworker.)

We ran out of shelf space (and pile space) again, so, having long since filled all the good spaces in the house with bookcases, we started eyeing up the not-so-good spaces. This led us to re-evaluate the dining room.

The shorter, wider, not-very-deep cabinet on one wall (holding linens) was clearly not holding its weight. Table linens are important -- and, also, that cabinet was holding dice and other small gaming supplies -- so eliminating that function wouldn't do. What I really wanted was a taller, narrower chest of drawers. This turns out to be hard; everyone expects your dining-room storage to be low and wide so that you can put a lighted glass shelving unit on top of it to show off your fine china. But recently we prevailed -- the magic phrase turns out to be "lingerie cupboard" and you find it as part of a very few bedroom sets -- and the resulting chest of drawers, a glorious 52" or so high and about 22" wide, was delivered a few days ago. The original cabinet has been unloaded into it, leaving a stretch of wall that can hold two half-height bookcases. (Other features of the room prevent full-height bookcases.)

Now, the wall with this cabinet is about four feet wide before large windows kick in, so this leaves room for a 24" bookcase. That shouldn't be hard, right? Most bookcases are 30" or 36" wide; most 24" ones are also short. We found one that's 48" high online in a color that doesn't clash with the rest of the room (or, most importantly, the cupboard that will be right next to it), so tonight we ordered it. We'll have to assemble it ourselves, but bookcases aren't too bad for that. The vendor has a sense of humor: returns are permitted within 30 days in the original packaging.

In the end this project should net us roughly 24 shelf-feet of bookcase, which I'm sure we will fill up distressingly quickly. Such are the challenges faced by bibliophiles.

( Read more... )

I just posted more hints for the music challenge.

A few days ago I read about a skydiver who was doing his first dive, with his instructor stapped to his back. The instructor had a heart attack on the way down. That's sad, but I must admit that my first question was: was the student's technique that scary? :-)

Real Live Preacher is taking an unusual approach to publishing a (paper book), essentially soliciting enough pre-orders to pay for the initial print run. That's probably not unusual for publishing houses, but I'm not used to seeing it from individuals. He's only looking for a bit over 400, so I figured that given his popularity he'd have that in days, but so far no. It's kind of sobering that even that low-sounding goal is a challenge. (It does suggest that the likes of unknowns like me wouldn't muster enough interest to publish on dead trees. Maybe most people don't read dead trees any more, but I still prefer them for many things.)

CNN might be using your bandwidth to publish (link from

goldsquare). Keep that in mind the next time you watch something live and big.

For the locals: Temple Sinai has some interesting presentations open to the public coming up; the first (on February 18) is Christiane Amanpour, CNN's chief international correspondent. I'll post more about this in a few days, but if you want to go, drop me a note. This sounds like a neat series that I want to support, so unless I get flooded, I'm inclined to buy one ticket (for any of the presentations) for anyone I actually know who expresses interest.

( Read more... )

After I saw the movie The Golden Compass I added the trilogy to my reading stack. I finished them a couple weeks ago but didn't get around to writing about it before now. Terse impression: rich worlds and characters I wanted to follow; the first two and a half books hung together reasonably well, but the last half of the last book went off into la-la land, which affected my enjoyment of the whole. Spoilers follow.

( Read more... )

Who thought it would be a good idea to put strobe lights on school buses? Fortunately we're past the time (until next fall) when I ever see them before dawn, but they're still annoying. Clue delivery: drivers are safest when our eyes are on the road, not when we're distracted by something wacky in the peripheral vision! And you're a bus, for crying out loud; you're way more visible than the cyclists.

Harvesting a few browser tabs...

I has a sweet potato made me laugh so hard I couldn't see. Really. Several times. (Link from

hobbitblue.)

In the interest of species equality, cat laws.

Too many books for the available shelf space? Not a problem!. (Source forgotten.)

Time breakdown of modern web design in this entry is spot-on.

The interview "meme" returns. Here are my answers to five questions from

loosecanon.

( Read more... )

If you want to participate, post a comment asking to be interviewed and I'll ask you questions, which you'll then answer in your own journal.

Receiving these questions reminded me that I owed questions to a couple people. I've posted some for you on that entry; if you didn't receive the email, let me know.

( fruit, books, music )

One of the books Dani got me for my birthday is Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager, by Michael Lopp. This was a great read, and I'll now be following his blog, where I gather a lot of this material was first posted. But even if it was, curling up with the dead-tree edition worked better for me.

The book contains a lot of good advice and analysis of the nitty-gritty of being a manager (or, sometimes, a managee) in the high-tech world. His experience is colored by acquiring all of it in Silicon Valley, but I still found myself nodding a lot. The chapters on meetings, detecting agendas, and figuring out where people are coming from (incrementalists/completionists, organics/mechanics, etc) are valuable for anyone. I found myself rethinking my weekly team meeting, my one-on-one ineteractions with my direct reports, and my nearly-non-existent one-on-one meetings with my own manager.

Sometimes the author draws black-and-white lines where, in reality, there are many shades of gray. Almost no one is either an incrementalist or a completionist, for example; most of us are in the middle. But I have seen exactly those tensions play out on the projects I've worked on, enough to find value in the distinctions. He over-simplifies, presumably for rhetorical effect (for example, saying that incrementalists lack vision); there's usually a grain of truth, but don't take any of this as gospel. My take on it is that if it gets me thinking, it's done its job -- even if I disagree on the details.

The writing style is informal, occasionally vulgar, and humorous (as promised in the title). The chapters are short (most originated as blog entries), so it's easy to take it in bite-sized chunks. (That said, I read it cover to cover in two sittings.)

One criticism of the publication rather than the content: Michael, Michael, Michael... people would pay a little extra for the increased page-count that would come with a civilized font size. Trust me. Ouch. (I'm not sure if it's 8pt or 9pt, but it is certainly smaller than I am used to.)

I highly recommend this book to anyone in the high-tech industry. Or, if you don't want to get the book, at least check out the blog.

It looks like Mishkan T'filah, the new siddur from the Reform movement, might actually come out before the moshiach comes. Someone asked on the worship mailing list how people feel about physical aspects of prayer books, such as hard-cover versus soft-cover. This made me think explicitly about things I implicitly react to.

( Read more... )

Monica

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Managing Humans

physical aspects of siddurim

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