Amazon link I was kind of skeptical of this book when Joel handed it to me, but it was surprisingly good. It doesn’t have any original ideas, and didn’t change how I think, but the book was well-written (apparently by Catherine Fredman) and did a good job of describing how Dell had taken some basic […]
Category: thoughts
Identity Construction
I finally got around to reading Jofish’s CHI paper on archives a couple days ago, and an observation that really struck me was that one of the goals of archiving is identity construction. In other words, they observed that some people collected books and papers not to read them or use them, but merely to […]
Getting to Yes, by Fisher and Ury
Amazon link This is a classic book on negotiation, introducing the theory of principled negotiation. The idea is that most negotiations tend to become positional negotiations fairly quickly; I offer a book for sale for $20, you offer me $10, I go $18, you go $12, we end up at $15. Positional negotiations make sense […]
Retconning life
Re-reading my searching for continuity post, I find it somewhat amusing how easy it was for me to construct a story that fits my previous patterns of behavior. The story of our self is always miraculously consistent, no matter how our motivations shifted and changed along the way. It reminds me of the comic book […]
Ultimate culture
I decided to try to find some ultimate frisbee this weekend. The weather’s been really nice, and I just wanted to get out in the sun and run around and have a good time. So I did a bunch of Google’ing and came up with a couple options. Option 1 was an 11am game on […]
The Only Sustainable Edge, by Hagel and Brown
As I mentioned last month, I was reading this book mostly because I enjoyed The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid so much. I finally finished it off last weekend, and figured I should at least do a perfunctory review. It was pretty awful. The writing was terrible – I […]
The fundamental interconnectedness of all things
DocBug wrote up a great post, discussing how he has been trying to “translate” the spiritualistic beliefs of some of his friends “into a form that a philosophically-minded but skeptical materialist like myself can accept.” I think this is a fascinating topic, because I’ve been on a similar journey. The more I learn, the more […]
Humility
I have been extraordinarily fortunate in my life to have things generally go as I hope they will. I got to go to the schools I wanted to, I got the jobs I wanted to, I’ve done the activities I wanted to. Things just seem to fall into place for me. Part of it is […]
Living forever
One of the topics that came up in conversation last night with Wes’s crowd was whether people wanted to live forever. Opinions varied; some people felt that without the pressure of death, we would never get around to doing anything at all – procrastination would always win out. Others felt strongly that life was too […]
The Passionate Self
I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of passion since my post about narcissism. It’s also come up in a variety of places, from conversations I’ve had with friends, to books I’m reading. I don’t know if this is one of those coincidental things, or because the universe is trying to tell me something, […]
