Studs
The Studs Terkel talk was pretty good. He just extemporized for about 25 minutes about various topics of today and days past, included some anecdotes in and around the book Hope Dies Last. I just read the foreward and found several of them there. He took questions from the audience for a while and then [...]
Popularity: 9% [?]
Unhappy Companies
In another post by Esther Derby, she points to this article in Industry Week by John Brandt about unhappy companies. Here is one of his ways he thinks unhappy companies are all alike:
A belief that employees are dangerous and lazy.
Unhappy companies invariably believe that their employees are out to sabotage the business, and they [...]
Popularity: 8% [?]
Chicago Stuff
Here’s links to a few things I found on Gapers Block. This weekend starts the Christkindlmarket in the loop. It sounds interesting, a lot like the Saturday Market in Portland. We’re planning on hopping on the El and heading down there today.
A really cool resource is ChicagoPlays.com. I realized as I was looking at it [...]
Popularity: 10% [?]
QA Blog
You’d think a quality and testing blog would be perhaps non-thrilling stuff. Having recently discovered James Bach’s blog devoted to just these issues, I was surprised how interesting it all is. He has two great recent posts, one about why things in development described as too obvious to document are trouble spots and the trouble [...]
Popularity: 10% [?]
How to be Happy
An article in the Guardian explores how to be happy. It discusses “positive psychology”, a branch that focuses on understanding when and why things are going right, rather than the traditional exploration of what went wrong and getting back on track. I had never heard of this before this morning, but reading and browsing led [...]
Popularity: 9% [?]
Jeffrey Sachs on “The Bottleneck”
At Another World is Here, they link to an essay by Jeffrey Sachs on small steps that can lead to a more stable and sustainable world. I like this essay - neither doom and gloom nor blue sky, it is a pragmatic look at the trends leading towards and away from worldwide stability.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Popularity: 7% [?]
Big Mouth Billy Penguin
Here’s a heartwarming story of reusing those novelty presents from XMases past that have been in the attic ever since. A group of crazed hackers are adding embedded Linux to Big Mouth Billy Bass. They have a stepwise project plan, and ultimately they want to have this thing networked with microphone and camera and serving [...]
Popularity: 7% [?]
28 Days Later
Perhaps not the best holiday film, nonetheless I enjoyed 28 Days Later. I watched it while the spouse (who hates scary and gory movies) was otherwise occupied. I liked it a lot. Despite bursts of extreme violence, it was actually less violent than I was expecting. Most of the horror is from the prolonged feeling [...]
Popularity: 10% [?]
Studs Signing
Here’s something I should attend - Gapers Block reports that Studs Terkel will be signing at the Barnes & Noble at 1441 W. Webster on Sunday, November 30 at 3:00 PM. He’ll be doing a discussion and then signing his new book, Hope Dies Last. Reading his work of touching vignettes and slices of peoples [...]
Popularity: 8% [?]
Happy Thanksgiving
Happy Thanksgiving, everybody everywhere. May your lives be full to overflowing with things to be thankful of.
Popularity: 9% [?]
Popularity: 9% [?]
Real Life Kill Bill
An 80 year old woman used her husband’s sword to fight off two teenaged attackers, reports the BBC. Wow, that’s a spunky octagenarian. I like her quote in the article:
“They were big men and I am not big at all.
“I was trying to keep them away from a chair in the far corner of [...]
Popularity: 9% [?]
Old(ish) Tech
I still have the Apple LaserWriter 16/600 that was the office printer at JStream, the first start up I ever worked for. When I walked in the door in 1998, this thing was the printer. After its assets were bought by Intertrust and offices merged, I ended up taking it to telecommute and have had [...]
Popularity: 10% [?]
Thanksgiving Travel
We considered travelling home for Thanksgiving, but decided against it. The Thanksgiving weekend is always a big pain, I think. It’s nice when everyone is close together, but when you are distant from your people, it’s horrible. The weekend is too short for lots of travel, everyone else in the country is getting on the [...]
Popularity: 8% [?]
Gearing up on JMS
For my side project, I’m now getting to the point where I want to start learning about JMS, in preparation to use it. I’m particularly interested in the “durable subscription” type queue, and am looking for a good way to do this. I have seen OpenJMS as a possibility. Right now I only have Tomcat [...]
Popularity: 10% [?]
The Pause that Depresses
I’ve never smoked, but I’m going through my own habit kick right now - trying to cut back on the amount of Diet Coke I drink. The key moment was last night doing the recycling, when I found three empty 12 pack boxes for the lemon Diet Coke. I’m the only one in this house [...]
Popularity: 10% [?]
The War on Copying
Here’s an article/op-ed piece on DRM, stressing that current schemes lack flexibility and convenience. A quote:
Many companies mistakenly focus on the technology when trying to understand DRM and fail to consider the real social issues that managing content involves. For example, DRM schemes that tie content to a single PC fail to address the [...]
Popularity: 11% [?]
P. Craig Russell Art for Auction
There’s this guy who is the original art agent for P. Craig Russell and I’m on his mailing list. I’ve never bought anything, but I’ve had moments of deep temptation. My favorite story in the recent Sandman: Endless Nights was “Death & Venice” and a great page from it is for sale on eBay right [...]
Popularity: 9% [?]
Hibernate book from Manning
It used to be a few years ago that when I needed a programming book, I would go straight for the O’Reilly book. Later, my loyalty shifted to the hard-nosed pragmatism of the Wrox books. Both of these publishers have (had, now that Wrox is out of business) distinctive, well branded books. Either jumped off [...]
Popularity: 13% [?]
Uganda has the Digital Bookmobile
I’ve started looking at World Changing, and today they have a fascinating reference to this digital bookmobile in Uganda.
Inside the Bookmobile is a PC and laser printer provided by Hewlett Packard, a paper cutter, and a hot-melt glue binding machine created by Berkeley, CA-based Powis Parker.
With this equipment loaded into a four-wheel [...]
Popularity: 10% [?]
Chicago Weather
From what I’ve been able to tell from my brief time here, Chicagoland residents are completely obsessed with the inclemency of their weather. In August I arrived in Evanston with the moving truck on the hottest day of the year, and even then people were talking about how bad the winter would be. Almost every [...]
Popularity: 12% [?]
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