It’s been a quiet couple of months from me on the blogging front, mostly because things have been really hectic. Work continues to keep me occupied during the day, taking up a lot of energy. I keep on taking weekend trips that cut down on my catchup time, with a trip to Ithaca for Jofish’s […]
Nonfiction Roundup February 2007
It’s been months since I’ve done book reviews, so I’ll just wrap up a bunch of quick summaries of things I’ve finished recently. Alas, I still have many books that I am about 100 pages into that I’m not sure when I’ll finish, not because I don’t find them interesting, but just because I don’t […]
The Colossus of New York, by Colson Whitehead
Amazon link Official site I’ve liked Colson Whitehead’s previous work, including The Intuitionist (the title convinced me to pick up the book), and John Henry Days. His writing is just wonderfully sumptuous, so rich that I often have to re-read bits to appreciate the language. A few years ago, he published this book, a set […]
Requirements Management Processes
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m in a master’s program in Technology Management at Columbia. As part of that, I’m working on a master’s project, which I’ve decided to do in the realm of requirements and specifications management, mostly because I’ve never seen it done well and would like to understand the field better for my […]
Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath
Amazon link Official site This is a study of what makes ideas stick. They start it off by relating the kidney heist urban legend, a story that all of us have heard and can probably recount. Why has this story stuck in our memories so successfully? It has no advertising budget, nobody pushing it – […]
Magic Words
One of the classes I’m taking this semester is “Technology and the Law”, for which we occasionally have to read legal cases. One of the ones we had to read recently, PG&E vs. Thomas Drayage & Rigging Company, was surprisingly entertaining and interesting, so I’ve been meaning to write something up about it. The reason […]
On Dilettantism
I just wrote a long comment over at Ei-Nyung’s post about the positive aspects of being a dilettante. As my first comment on that post states, I’m obviously biased as I post under the title of “Unrepentant Generalist”. But I figured I’d include my comment here as well, since it’s a recurring theme in my […]
Media manipulation
This semester, I’m taking a class in “Managing Emerging Technologies”. One of the points of the class is to consider not just the technology itself, but all of the social and cultural and political ramifications of the technology. To illustrate this point, we watched the movie The Future of Food in class last week, which […]
Innovation and community
I went to my second likemind this morning, and once again really enjoyed the coffee and conversation. One person at the table where I sat posed the question of how an artist can be unique or “deviant” in today’s society. There used to be a well-defined mainstream that you could rebel against and do your […]
Design Choices
I was thinking a little bit more about the point I mentioned in my previous post where the iPod Shuffle is actually easier to use because it doesn’t give you a choice about what music to listen to next. With my other MP3 player, I’ll often spend a few minutes trying to decide what kind […]
