This week at work we were asked to start using timesheet software to track the hours that we work on various projects. I hate timesheet software. Hate with a fiery passion. But when a coworker asked me why, I had to confess I really didn’t know. He pointed out that it only takes a couple […]
Innovation and optimism
A couple weeks ago, a coworker of mine and I were talking about outsourcing and how it will affect the economy and things like that. It arose out of a humor bit that somebody apparently posted at Slashdot about how they told their boss they were telecommuting, outsourced their work to a guy in India […]
Flying business class
In case any of the three readers I have was wondering why I didn’t update last week, it was because I got called unexpectedly to visit the home office in Toronto for training. I walked into work on Friday the 13th, and was told to call the company’s travel agent because I was flying to […]
Burn Rate, by Michael Wolff
Amazon link Subtitled “How I survived the Gold Rush years on the Internet”. I had seen this book around and had some vague interest in reading it, but never got around to it until a friend of mine was giving away a free copy. So I borrowed it and read it. It was pretty nondescript. […]
Phil Agre on Conservatism
I’m on Phil Agre’s Red Rock Eater mailing list. Agre is a wonderful thinker about information systems and how they integrate into society. He hasn’t posted as much to RRE as he used to, but he posted a new article today, which discusses the conservative movement in detail, what it represents, and how we should […]
Decentralized intelligence
As usual, I love the pointers over at Many-to-Many. In particular this week, Clay Shirky pointed to this great article over at Slate by Duncan Watts on the shortcomings of centralized intelligence. Duncan Watts runs the Small World Project, which seeks to test the “six degrees of separation” hypothesis. He’s written a book about it, […]
Changing my mind
So picking up the threads of my post about harshness, I realized that one of the possible sources of people not wanting negative feedback is that people never want to admit they’re wrong. In fact, they don’t even want to admit they don’t know (thanks to my father for pointing that out). They want to […]
Transit villages
There was an interesting article in the San Francisco Chronicle the other day about the rise of transit villages in the Bay Area, where transit villages are little groups of residences and shops that sprout up around public transit stops on BART and Caltrain. Since I am growing to detest driving and like the idea […]
Instant Community and Values
In a slight departure from my rants about organizations and responsibility and harshness, I’m going to go off on a digression here for this post, one brought on by a thought I had while writing up my experience at Greg Maddux’s 300 wins. I was wondering why I cared. I mean, this multimillionaire did his […]
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace
Amazon link Several people have highly recommended to me Wallace’s novel, Infinite Jest, but I’ve been too intimidated by its 1000 page length (of which 300 pages are footnotes) to try it. But when I saw a collection of his essays in the used bookstore, I figured that might be a way to ease in […]
