On month four. That's a good run...
- (BOOK/STORY) 5/31/2018: The Good Guys by Stephen Brust
- I liked it, quite a bit, but it didn't blow me away. I've met Stephen at Gameholecon and he's friends with Emma Bull and the Scribbly folks from the Twin Cities. I've read two of his books and I think he and I have a slightly different writing style, which is probably more accurately a slightly different story telling style, which is probably more accurately a slightly different way of thinking. I'd actually recommend it, although I'm not sure I'd read a sequel.
- (BOOK/STORY) 5/30/2018: Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love
- Excellent...I think I need to do a different post I have so many notes.
- 5/29/2018: Immersive Learning in the Target Dojo - because we're looking at Dojos at work.
- T shaped developer vs. I shaped.
- No managers.
- Come in different flavors
- Target has a lot more dojo material including tours.
- 5/28/2018: Dungeons & Dragons, Volume 3 - Shadowplague (graphic novel, reading on Hoopla)
- 5/27/2018: Dungeons & Dragons, Volume 2 - Shadowplague (graphic novel, reading on Hoopla)
- 5/26/2018: Dungeons & Dragons, Volume 1 - Shadowplague (graphic novel, reading on Hoopla)
- 5/25/2018: Queens of Infamy: Anne Boleyn on Long Reads by Anne Thériault
- I never had the opportunity to use "noted Tudor fuckboy" during my undergraduate degree. I'm not sure Retha Warnicke would have appreciated it, but then again, she seemed pretty fun.
- An entirely amusing paragraph on Anne bringing the blow job to England.
- "Sadly, this A++ dick joke did not persuade the papal legate" is the best response I've ever seen to the "been to Spain" consummation tales about Arthur and Catherine.
- "Henry, of course, could never resist the chance to be a tacky asshole." - probably spot on and, even more spot on in reference to Henry 8's wives, "they were all Henry's victims."
- This made me wonder if people of the time ever said "Not my Harry" and "Not my King" and referred to him only as 8, implying a 9, or at least post-8, couldn't come soon enough.
- 5/24/2018: The Theory of the Case: Competitive Intelligence Tips for Attorneys - University of Georgia Law, Suzanne R. Graham
- I love the term "anecdata" based solely on a single incident.
- More of a list - a comprehensive list - than a dig. But the idea of "triangulation" as a way of validating the data is interesting. And I respect her end-of-essay points about the unpredictable and that tools that "claim that past performance is the best predictor of future results" are not the only answer.
- 5/23/2018: Analyzing the Analytics: A Review of Legal Analytics Platforms - The CRIV Sheet 39.2 (February 2017). - Diana J. Koppang, Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg, LLP
- I liked her contention that she wants transparency in the search/results methodology and that's what she gets by crafting her own search.
- "know how we can trust the data and to what extent"
- She also says you should always ask to have a dev in the demo for precisely those reasons.
- Go find her PDF!
- 5/22/2018: Why Is New Orleans' Black Female Mayor Secretly Working With White Nationalists? - Splinter
- Robert E Lee Beads, reinstalling racist statues, all sorts of crazy that surprised even me (who likes to read about crazies)
- 5/21/2018: azn2azn (November 2017) - An Asian-American Twin Cities Zine.
- I liked the poems, but the word "trigger" is used a little loosely. From truly triggering events like police brutality, rape, and abuse, to questionable uses like Bollywood music during yoga (because it's traditionally a space for the elite pre-immigration and your ancestors might not have been elite? reminded me of the Singh story about the guy practicing yoga/healing who wanted to kill his faux-brother the king only to find out the king wanted to leave him material concerns so he could focus on spirituality), and being angry with friends only to say in the next statement the author got sober. Triggering wasn't the issue there (presumably), alcohol was. If it was, own it.
- It was enlightening to read something so clearly different from my experience due to race, sexuality, identity. A reminder that the world is very different through different lenses.
- 5/20/2018: What's Next in Computing? - Chris Dixon (2016!)
- Interesting to see the predictions from 2 years ago. His focus on VR was pre-Pokemon Go (but not Ingress) and I saw an article for the first VR "kit" for online maps the other day, so it's coming of age. IoT...yes, but still pretty quiet/centralized in some ways. Machine learning/AI...spot on.
- 5/19/2018: A NEW LOOK INSIDE THERANOS’ DYSFUNCTIONAL CORPORATE CULTURE - Wired
- Great article about a truly dysfunctional culture. Interesting to read this in light of Sprint and Inspired where the customer should be the focus, not the product. Clearly, the product (and money and dates) were the focus for Theranos.
- 5/18/2018: The Victorian Belief That a Train Ride Could Cause Instant Insanity
- Kyle recommended this one from Atlas Obscura. I don't think it delves enough into whether the train (and now, planes) causes the issue, exacerbates an existing issue, or for some people is an excuse because they have a foreign environment where they don't feel they have to behave.
- 5/17/2018: Leaving Omelas: Science Fiction, Climate Change, and the Future by Vandana Singh.
- Online essay.
- "those who walk away do so because the Omelas paradigm allows them no agency in striving for a just and equitable social system."
- I think she conflates dystopias and apocalyptic literature in some respect. Per my thesis in college, I don't think a real dystopia has an escape, so the "great person" aspect is moot. There might be an individual, but in the end they don't matter, only society can change society.
- She's big on neartopias - finding the positive/ecological and societal change in society.
- I very much enjoyed her Newtonian paradigm view of scifi. That cause-effect isn't the end all of scifi, that everything is connected, and everything is interrelated. Came through strongly in her story collection.
- "Nature is objectified, transformed into a machine that is predictable and controllable, and we are outside it - masters of the machine..."
- "Not all complex systems are sensitive to initial conditions..."
- Posits place shapes the people....solid idea and one that makes scifi where there are so many places and inbetweens and emptiness-es, very interesting.
- (BOOK/STORY) 5/16/2018: Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories by Vandana Singh: Requiem
- A novella about global warming and Eskimos/Inuit and whaling. Interesting story - very well written. The scifi aspect had to do with the main character's aunt trying to create ways to live with other animals such that they could really start to understand them, and how animals were starting to communicate to eliminate human impacts to their environment (drilling machine/etc).
- 5/15/2018 - Scalzi reread
- (CODE) 5/14/2018: Data Science Essentials in Python: Collect - Organize - Explore - Predict - Value (The Pragmatic Programmers)
- Chapter 2: Core Python for Data Science
- Wrote a Top x words in a URL file program.
- Wrote a file that indexes words and maps them to files in a directory using a dictionary.
- Wrote a file that looks for phone numbers in a file. That last one was only partially successful. The 1- numbers not at the front or back of a file don't work as well.
- Used PYTHONPATH to get to BeautifulSoup4 in my Anaconda3 directory (using IDLE usually, but I also have PyCharm and Sublime) as I'm in dev.
- Used import sys and print(sys.path) to validate PYTHONPATH was returning the values I needed (BeautifulSoup wouldn't let me do a dual install and had dependencies of its own. Could have mapped a path file in the project, but I'm playing, not pushing out production code).
- (CODE) 5/14/2018: Data Science Essentials in Python: Collect - Organize - Explore - Predict - Value (The Pragmatic Programmers)
- Chapter 1: What is Data Science - wrote a "Hello Scott" program.
- (BOOK/STORY) 5/13/2018: Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories by Vandana Singh: Ambiguity Machines: An Examination
- Three separate subtales about "machines" that transcend time and space and individuality. They are generally structures/patterns.
- (BOOK/STORY) 5/12/2018: Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories by Vandana Singh: Wake-Rider
- This one felt incomplete. Han Solo type (female) goes after a body that can stop a corporate-induced plague. Ended with her floating and waiting.
- (BOOK/STORY) 5/12/2018: Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories by Vandana Singh: Cry of the Karchal
- I liked this even though it isn't strictly scifi. More Arabian ghost story tying past to present via a woman who's a little like the mummy (in the modern movies), but...nice? And a bird.
- (BOOK/STORY) 5/12/2018: Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories by Vandana Singh: Sailing the Antarsa
- Good story! About finding a different form of matter that flows between the stars and that it's comprised of life that can ride that matter. Being immersed in it transforms the traveler. Very "we're all in the same ecosystem" sort of story, but a great take.
- (GN) 5/11/2018: KINO Volume 1: Escape From the Abyss
- I assume this has to get better as it's primarily about a body in the clutches of a scientist who puts him in the equivalent of The Matrix to get his powers up to speed before he awakes. There are competing companies/governments trying to get him back, but this whole book is just little in-his-head fights. I wasn't enjoying it.
- (GN) 5/10/2018: The Gravediggers Unions: Volume 1 - sort of a Cthulhu slant. So so. I discovered the Graphic Novel section on Hoopla, the online public library system.
- (BOOK/STORY) 5/9/2018: Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories by Vandana Singh: Ruminations in an Alien Tongue
- I liked this one! There's a bit of the Star Trek episode (All Our Yesterdays) where a race abandons their planet by traveling to their own past. In this story, they find alien artifacts that let them travel to other dimensions via the nexuses at the center of stars. Because you can find a universe that best suits you, everyone just vacates. One woman is left, and she tends to a traveler that comes from multiple dimensions (same traveler) and is always confused when he makes his way back to the lab/machines and the scientist who learned to use them.
- (BOOK) 5/8/2018: Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days
- Work-related book I was assigned. We've done something similar on my teams, but there's a new push to determine faster ways to solve problems.
- 5/7/2018: Product Conference (hosted by Dev Jam) at the Minnesota History Museum
- Focus was on products and how to iterate and fail faster.
- Sara Cowles: Data Driven and Human Centered: Learning to Connect the Data for Maximum Impact Talked about Ethnio software, the HEART Framework (Google Ventures), how we speed prototyping, and included some info about five (5) being the optimal number of testers per the Sprint book (above).
- Mike Gillespie - Amazon's Culture of Innovation. Didn't get into enough detail. Kind of boring. The whole bit about no code until a press release, an 8 page product paper, and then a full user manual first really smells like old school waterfall in a way.
- Vivienne Whifield - May you fail....over and over again. Ok presentation. Tied it to her kids and personal experiences with failure in the workplace. I was wearing out a bit by end of day.
- Keynote David Hussman - You're Definitely Wrong.... David looks in pretty rough shape physically, but he still gives a good presentation. Pushing a variation of post-agile, beyond agile, deconstructed agile.
- Jeff Sussna - Continuous Learning: Harnessing Change for Competitive Advantage. I really enjoyed his keynote. All about conversations and user-centered design and cross-functional design. Good speaker - he's obviously been deep in this space for a while as a consultant.
- (BOOK/STORY) 5/6/2018: Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes - Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream
- I think this one is also in Deathbird Stories and I have read it a dozen times. There's quite a bit to unpack in this story, particularly about the characters and whether they got what they wanted or even deserved. It makes sense it's in Deathbird Stories because it's about the worship of money, the worship of beauty, loneliness, and more.
- (BOOK/STORY) 5/5/2018: Delusion for a Dragon Slayer - Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream
- One of my favorites. I think it's also in Deathbird Stories. There are some things it has in common with Lonelyache. But I like how it's handled better here in a magical Heavy Metal-esque world of legend with a harsh ending.
- (BOOK/STORY) 5/4/2018: Lonelyache - Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream
- One of my least favorite of his stories. The personification of dread and the heaviness of life as a thing in the corner.
- 5/3/2018: Overview - Chrome Extensions
- 5/3/2018: Getting Started Tutorial - Chrome Extensions
- Yes, I did read both of those Chrome Extensions articles in full and modified - but not created - an in house Chrome extension for managing session tracking between our error system, session tracking system, enterprise tracking system, and Kibana (AWS logging). Works like a charm, but I only had to do the configuration management to add the Kibana section. Theoretically you could say it was coding because I had to use string concatenation, replacement, and character escape sequences, but that's just silly stuff. It's more impressive that as a manager I checked my code into TFS and overrode the review and other policies (because it was POC, not mainline build). That should scare everyone.
- 5/2/2018: America’s Greatest Horticulturist Left Behind a Plum Mystery
- Kyle posted it. Good article on Luther Burbank.
- 5/1/2018: Kriegsspiel – The 19th Century War Game That Changed History - Military History Now.com
- "all the cats living in the house hosting the game were banished"
- This holds true for pretty much everything, including software teams, over one hundred years later. "By giving his officer corps more responsibility, accountability and better understanding of tactics, the Prussians had a far more effective command structure."
No comments:
Post a Comment