2019 British Arrow Awards

We've been going to the Arrow Awards for a long time. I won my first tickets in a drawing at TR and when they got more popular with the younger crowd (I assume that's what happened when I quit winning tickets after about three-four years), we switched to buying them.  We generally make it an anniversary event (26 years this year) with dinner.  This year was my first anniversary working downtown, so I met them at Christo's.  We should have given ourselves a bit more time.  It was pretty rushed to get through dinner and over to the Walker.  I had the added gift of taking the Route 18 down Nicollet.  That's the route I took 30 years ago when I was working at Third District Nurses.  Back then, I expertly avoided working during rush hour traffic.  So after a quarter century, it finally caught up to me.  It was PACKED.  I offer this anecdote:

I took the 18 down Nicollet to meet my family for dinner. The bus was a sardine can. One more person tried to get on and was turned away. There was a pause and then a guy near me said, "What? No. The bus is like county lockup. There's always room for one more."

The Amazon commercials were funny, both the Alex voice variants and the variants where individuals watching binge-able shows began to exhibit the characteristics of the main characters.  The Old Spice ones were funny.  The Rang-Tan in my bedroom one explains a piece of paper I saw when we went to a very strange movie at the Trylon: The Final Level: Escaping Rancala".

And Viva La Vulva is an experience.

BBC One's spend time with your kids one had me thinking they'd go Doctor Who somewhere during the play.  And I'd Rather Get Paid by Secret about equal wages was very well done.

December 2019 Reading

December reading...

• 12/31/2019: Dead Astronauts - Jeff VanderMeer
• 12/30/2019: Dead Astronauts - Jeff VanderMeer
• 12/29/2019: Dead Astronauts - Jeff VanderMeer
• 12/28/2019: Dead Astronauts - Jeff VanderMeer
• 12/27/2019: Dead Astronauts - Jeff VanderMeer
• 12/26/2019: Dead Astronauts - Jeff VanderMeer
• 12/11/2019 - 12/25/2019: "I Remember Nothing" - Anne Billson, The Best Horror of the Year: Volume 11 (2019) ed. by Ellen Datlow  and all the following.  Ellen's recommendation in this volume is what got me to read Rutger's The Anomaly last month which I really enjoyed.  I ordered one or two other of her recommendations as well, although my current queue is like 20 books lone.
• Monkeys on the Beach by Ralph Robert Moore
• Painted Wolves by Ray Cluley
• Shit Happens   by Michael Marshall Smith
• I enjoyed this one - I get along with his writing style.
• You Know How the Story Goes by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
• Back Along the Old Track by Sam Hicks
• Masks by Peter Sutton
• The Donner Party by Dale Bailey
• Interesting alt history, although I intuited the ending far in advance.
• Milkteeth  by Kristi DeMeester
• Haak by John Langan

• Maybe my favorite.  Peter Pan alternative.  Genuinely Cthulhu lore style.
• Thin Cold Hands by Gemma Files
• A Tiny Mirror by Eloise C. C. Shepherd
• I Love You Mary-Grace by Amelia Mangan
• The Jaws of Ouroboros by Steve Toase
• More scifi than horror in my opinion, but scary scifi, I'll give it that.
• A Brief Moment of Rage by Bill Davidson
• Golden Sun  by Kristi DeMeester, Richard Thomas, Damien Angelica Walters, and Michael Wehunt
• White Mare by Thana Niveau
• Girls Without Their Faces On by Laird Barron
• Thumbsucker  by Robert Shearman
• You Are Released by Joe Hill
• End of the world tale.  More realism than horror story.
• Red Rain  by Adam-Troy Castro
• Split Chain Stitch by Steve Toase
• No Exit by Orrin Grey
• Haunt  by Siobhan Carroll
• Sleep  by Carly Holmes
• 12/10/2019: Challenging SQL on Hadoop Performance with Apache Druid
• 12/9/2019: Basic Druid documentation
• 12/8/2019: Accessing data using Apache Druid (Hortonworks)
• 12/7/2019: Introduction to TWO approaches of content-based Recommendation System - not my favorite ML breakdown
• 12/6/2019: Druid: A Real-time Analytical Data Store - a more technical paper about time series and Druid.
• 12/5/2019: An Introduction to Event Data Modeling
• Read a LOT more from Snowplow besides this article.  A lot.  So much.  We've been talking event tracking and streaming, so I was interested in their details.
• 12/4/2019: Why We Don't See Many Public GraphQL APIs
• 12/3/2019: A Beginner's Guide to the OKR Framework - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/beginners-guide-okr-framework-ragavendran-madhusudanan/
• OKR = Objectives and Key Results
• Company, team, and personal >> line of sight (in my old org)
• Not the how, the goal.
• Objectives: "ambitious, qualitative, time bound and actionable "
• Key results: numeric-based expressions of success or progress towards an objective.  No more than 4 per objective.
• My concerns...these are experiments.  And the boldest changes are true experiments with concrete demos in front of real customers.  See the Sprint book >> you might not know what you're going to produce until you dig in (so maybe the goal is to dig in before the quarter starts).
• Business specific.  Ambitious.  Less is more.  Not a task list.  Public.  Grade them mid-term.  Grade between 0 and 100 (0 and 1).  .6 to .7 is success! (woo, we are C to D students!)
• Cascading OKRs.  (line of sight)
• 12/2/2019: The Root Causes of Product Failure by Marty Cagan at Mind the Product San Francisco [49:14] - Ofeliya had me watch this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dccd8lihpQ
• 12/1/2019: