I was talking to a friend today who’s turning into a manager, and using Microsoft Project to lay out schedules and the like. And I was horrified, given my aversion to such things. But he pointed out that it was handy for him to be able to point at his schedule and say he couldn’t […]
Political training with Democracy for America
Democracy for America is the political action committee started by supporters of Howard Dean to represent “the Democratic wing of the Democratic party”. I happened to hear of a training course they were doing on political campaigns in conjunction with 21st Century Democrats. Given my recent interest in politics, I was curious, so I signed […]
Travels in Hyperreality, by Umberto Eco
Amazon link I picked this up at the library, because I really liked Foucault’s Pendulum and the snippet I read of the title essay intrigued me. The book is a set of essays by Eco, obviously. Eco is a well known semioticist, where semiotics is the study of signs. These essays were written for a […]
Ultimate frisbee video
The college national championships of ultimate frisbee were televised this year on the College Sports TV network. Unfortunately, that’s not one I get – I think it’s on deep cable someplace, or maybe only satellite. But they kindly have decided to post the video to several of the games online (they are archived down the […]
Self promotion
In the spirit of Paul Graham, I’m going to start this entry with a question that re-occurred to me a couple days ago: What is the right balance of self promotion to do? I was sitting in a project update meeting and noted the difference in how much detail people put into their various updates. […]
Pepsi Can Fu!
Pepsi Can Fu! Yay. Much like the ping pong Matrix-style video.
Paul Graham on essays
Paul Graham wrote a new essay this month about the process of writing an essay. Some interesting observations about the essay form, and why he writes essays. I particularly liked this nugget: An essay is something you write to try to figure something out. Figure out what? You don’t know yet. And so you can’t […]
Bush and Rove
A couple links about Bush and Rove today. Link 1 was that I happened to catch Fresh Air on the radio today, and Terri Gross was interviewing Wayne Slater, co-author of the book Bush’s Brain : How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. Slater was apparently based in the Austin bureau for the Dallas […]
Joel on Software on social interface design
As many of you know, I’m a total fan of Joel on Software. I even went to a fan club dinner of his when he was in the Bay Area (he posted that he was going to be at a restaurant in Berkeley about a week in advance, and about 30 software geeks of all […]
Google management
In a Good Morning Silicon Valley last week that a friend forwarded to me, there was an interesting excerpt from Playboy’s interview with Larry Page, one of the founders of Google. He described Google’s project tracking system: We also have systems that automate and track the management of all our projects. This allows an enormous […]
