Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 07, 2023

Reading January 2023

This was an absolutely fascinating month for reading.  It was a bust. I have three books I didn't finish and never intend to finish.  I listened to a lot of podcasts.  I streaming service binged, which I seldom do, but I've been trying to ramp up my excercise regime before spring gets here.  I went walking at the expense of sitting and reading just so I could listen to all of Ultra.  Great series.  Amazing and Minnesota ties.
  • I won't finish The Living Dead because it is beyond boring.
  • I won't finish Buckaroo Banzai because, despite being an absolutely beautiful book - it feels like a book should feel and the cover is glorious - it is almost incomprehensible for long sections.
  • I won't finish Hitler in Los Angeles because Maddow's Ultra was almost a perfect depth and Hitler in LA just takes it into the weeds.
But I finished two other books right?  I did.
  • The Paradox Hotel was not particularly original in my opinion and the main protagonist....she was horrible.  I could not relate to her.  I don't have a need to relate to all the characters I read about.  But I don't want to actively dislike the protagonist in a way that makes me feel glad I never have to emotionally engage with that personality in real life.  As was the case with several of the people who interacted with her in the book...one of us would likely die as an outcome and neither of us would shed a tear or even slow down to consider the loss of the other.  If you've read Use of Weapons by Ian Banks.  You know something about how truly abysmal as human beings some of those characters are. If you've read Donaldson's Gap Series.  Ditto.  For f^^^s sake are there some characters you wouldn't want within a galaxy of you or your family.  I liked those characters better than January from Paradox Hotel.
  • I totally get where Yu was going with SFU.  I can appreciate a really interesting attempt to map space travel to familial relationships, the dad that had dreams that never came to fruition, the frustrated mother, the heartache everyone causes each other, and how the present moment is literally a type of time travel.  There were some exceptionally funny moments.  But overall it just started to drag.  I got it.  So when it kept going, it began to feel a little like being beat over the head with the book.  The finished book.  Not the one being written real time in the TM-31 book creation thingamabob.
But, I will credit the two books for two good things.
  •  TAMMY the AI from SFU and Ruby the little floater AI [much likes the robots in Banks' Culture] were wonderful characters.  Both of them were better than the characters they were supporting and to which they served as foils.
  • This quote from SFU, page 232: "The path of a man's life is straight, straight, straight, until the moment when it isn't anymore, and after that it begins to meander around aimlessly, and then get tangled, and then at some point the path gets so confusing that the man's ability to move around in time, his device for conveyance, his memory of what he loves, the engine that moves him forward, it can break, and he can get permanently stuck in his own history."  It reminded me a bit of Sank talking in a post about winding down as we [men in general] get older.
The Media for January:





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Sunday, November 28, 2021

Reading December 2021

 



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Thursday, April 08, 2021

April 2021 Reading List

I learned I'm not a fan of Grant Morrison.  Just not my thing.  But Toil and Trouble and LaGuardia were both excellent.  Great books this month.  Got them primarily off the NPR Concierge.  I was amused at the bad reviews for The Only Good Indians listing the cadence of the language and the slang being issues to enjoying it. Aka...it was written by a Native American.  I recommend the Youtube series Patrick Is a Navajo if you want a fun immersion in Native American culture and memes.  I was surprised at what I had picked up from him [and his co host and guests] that made the book more enjoyable.  Mexican Gothic was also a great book...definitely nailed the gothic part.









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Monday, June 08, 2020

June 2020 Reading

June 2020 Reading:

Lot more video and podcasts and all sorts of media.  Bit crazy to be honest, but part of it is that I've been focusing on exercise since work from home started due to coronavirus and I find it a bit more difficult to slot in reading around my brain being tired.  I'm starting to track a little better, and there's no question I'm getting a lot of media in if you look at all the video and podcast content below.  I think I even missed some career-related reading I didn't bother to track.  Lot of doubles for days as well, so I'm stuffing in a lot.  Wish more of it was board game related.  Maybe that's a July goal.
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Tuesday, December 03, 2019

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:
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Tuesday, November 19, 2019

Bus Ride

Below is a picture of me reading short horror stories during the express bus ride into Minneapolis in the morning.  It still hasn't been the coldest I expect.  I'm not looking forward to that.  But the average ride is about half an hour one way if I don't screw around.  A little longer if I walk to the stop and walk home from the park and ride.


That's how I started my day.  I finished my day by getting ill by having an allergic reaction to prepackaged fish.  I don't known when they changed their ingredients, but my wife says the fish tastes different with the new packaging, and I agree; so we both suspect they did.  This is the second time I've had a reaction to the tilapia, so I'm pretty sure that's what's causing it.  The reaction follows a pretty consistent pattern: 1.) sleepy and back hurts (diaphragm spasming), 2.) stomach problems, lots of belching, probably precipitated by the spasms, 3.) ride my bike or exercise to try and blow through the worst of it unless my back hurts to much from the spasms or I belch so much I can't really breath, 4.) feel like I have to take a big dump, not because of the food allergy and my bowels, but because of the spasms.  It's what I traditionally get from fresh tomatoes and certain casks (particularly rum) as well.  The fish nonsense is completely new.  Maybe I'll slowly become allergic to a few new things a year until I'm sitting around eating nothing but ice cubes.
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Friday, March 01, 2019

March 2019 Reading

Look at that....generated with Python.  Like a champ.  I feel cool.  Sort of.  Vaguely. Definitely easier than typing it by hand.  Did you see February?  All 28 days and then some.  Rocked it.

Ha....lots of book reading this month, so I'm cheating and I get credit for 50 pages a day, because it's brutally hard to keep up otherwise.

  • 3/31/2019: Unreleased Book I'm Writing
    • 320 pages of reading.  So overall, I think I read 1500 pages this month easy.  I'm counting this because it chewed up so much of my time doing a slow re-read to edit it.  Done as of 4/1 and I can move on to doing something with it and writing something new.
  • 3/30/2019: Unreleased Book I'm Writing
  • 3/29/2019: Unreleased Book I'm Writing
  • 3/28/2019: Unreleased Book I'm Writing
  • 3/27/2019: The Outsider: A Novel by Stephen King
    • Enjoyed it - sort of a Cthulhu / alien vibe in a part, but lots of his work has an aliens we can't understand they're so strange vibe lately.  Read most of it on the trip to and from House on the Rock with the family. 
  • 3/26/2019: The Outsider: A Novel by Stephen King
  • 3/25/2019: The Outsider: A Novel by Stephen King
  • 3/24/2019: The Outsider: A Novel by Stephen King
  • 3/23/2019: The Outsider: A Novel by Stephen King
  • 3/22/2019: The Outsider: A Novel by Stephen King
  • 3/21/2019: The Outsider: A Novel by Stephen King
  • 3/20/2019: The Outsider: A Novel by Stephen King
  • 3/19/2019: The Outsider: A Novel by Stephen King
  • 3/18/2019: The Outsider: A Novel by Stephen King
  • 3/17/2019:  The Outsider: A Novel by Stephen King
  • 3/16/2019: 
    Hothouse by Brian Aldiss
    • Loved this book - yeah, maybe Blish hated the science, but it was fun.  All about a future so distant the world stops turning and plants start to take over.
  • 3/15/2019: Evolution of Natural Language Generation: An article to draw attention towards the evolution of Language Generation Models by Abhishek Sunnak
    • Great article
  • 3/14/2019: Hothouse by Brian Aldiss
  • 3/13/2019: Hothouse by Brian Aldiss
  • 3/12/2019: Hothouse by Brian Aldiss
  • 3/11/2019: Hothouse by Brian Aldiss
  • 3/10/2019: Doctor Who and The Krikkitmen by Douglas Adams (James Goss)
    • Felt a bit disjointed overall.  Sort of like a Doctor Who episode.  But part of it was the nature of pulling together old material to create a treatment.
  • 3/9/2019: Doctor Who and The Krikkitmen by Douglas Adams (James Goss)
  • 3/8/2019: Doctor Who and The Krikkitmen by Douglas Adams (James Goss)
  • 3/7/2019: Doctor Who and The Krikkitmen by Douglas Adams (James Goss)
  • 3/6/2019: Doctor Who and The Krikkitmen by Douglas Adams (James Goss)
  • 3/5/2019: Doctor Who and The Krikkitmen by Douglas Adams (James Goss)
  • 3/4/2019: The Surprising Power of Simply Asking Coworkers How They're Doing by Karyn Twaronite
    • I've read similar things: ask them how they're doing AND ask them where they see themselves going (for the day, for the quarter, for their career).  Show real interest.
  • 3/3/2019: KeyForge: Match #3, Ben v. Tom [17:05]
    • Ah....there's a Sting in play.  Maybe I missed that on the last game.  It moves fast enough that sometimes you can't tell what they're up to. That makes more sense with all that aember out there.  Three games in and they're still missing basic mechanics, however, so I don't have to feel bad about missing some things.
  • 3/3/2019: How to be Employable Forever by Tom Vander Ark on Forbes
    • What you conceive.
    • mindset--collaborative, interdisciplinary, ethical, empathetic, entrepreneurial and global
    • “Learning things that matter; learning in context; learning in teams. Envisioning what has never been and doing whatever it takes to make it happen. Do that 20 times and you will be employable forever," said Richard Miller, President of Olin College of Engineering. 
    • Very discovery sprint like, but rather than dumping folks into the sprint, they're taught how to channel it at discovery.
  • 3/3/2019: Recruiters Reveal the Buzzwords to Avoid on LinkedIn and How to Better Tell Your Career Story on Inc Magazine by Amy George
    • Use words in line with how you talk. Generally avoid these as vague or hard to define for those reviewing your resume.  I use ideation sometimes, but I don't think it's in my resume: synergize/synergy, tribe, game changer, silo, snapshot, bandwidth, traction, cutting edge, granular, omnichannel, paradigm shift, ideation, deliverable, digital transformation and touch base.
  • 3/3/2019: 3 Ways To Highlight Your Skills In A Job Interview on Forbes by Ashira Prossack
    • It's what I tell people, including the intern candidate last week.  Focus on what you can do for the company.  Use very specific examples.  She recommends showing off your soft skills, but depending on your presentation, that can sometimes come through regardless (listening, asking questions, driving to a deeper answer with more detail).
  • 3/3/2019: Visual GraphQLProgramming - Tomek Poniatowicz on dev.to
  • 3/3/2019: You may need Laziness in your Javascript - by Sergio Marin
    • He's using iterators to only return the needed values one or a few at a time instead of huge duplicated array.
  • 3/2/2019: Battle of the Beanfield - Wikipedia
    • There were 100,000 people at the 1984 festival at Stonehenge!
    • 1300 officers for half as many peace convoy participants
    • There were English hippies in 1985?  That surprised me.
    • There's a 1991 documentary Operation Solstice (Channel 4)
    • Neo-druid leader Arthur Uther Pendragon was arrested on each and every summer solstice between 1985 and 1999 whilst trying to access Stonehenge. [that's very persistent].
    • Roy Harper, Back to the Stones (song)
    • The Levellers - Battle of the Beanfield (song)
  • 3/2/2019: Rose Brash, 20, is led away by police at the Battle of the Beanfield, June 1985
  • 3/2/2019: Keyforge Match #2, Harry v. Tom [30:17]
    • There were so many things wrong here.  The bad terminology doesn't bother me like it does some folks in the comments.  After all, I sometimes call the houses "suits".  But after only playing two total games, even I know he should be turning in his yellow tokens for a key.  It's not an option, it's mandatory.  "If the active player has enough Æmber to forge a key during this step, they must do so."  Lot of other weirdness as well, but that's the one that kept distracting me.
  • 3/1/2019: The battle for the future of Stonehenge - Charlotte Higgins on The Guardian
    • writer Jacquetta Hawkes...“every age has the Stonehenge it deserves”.
    • images of daggers gouged out in the Bronze Age to Christopher Wren’s neatly carved signature. “You’d have thought he’d have known better,” said English Heritage archaeologist Heather Sebire disapprovingly
    • Clonehenge, a blog about Stonehenge replicas: https://clonehenge.com/
    • Victorian Stonehenge was a place of day-trippers, bicycle outings, Sunday school jollies, cricket matches and concerts. The craze for the new discipline of geology saw visitors chipping chunks out of the stones for their collections (a stall rented out chisels).
    • Even Samuel Pepys complained of being ripped off by shepherds and innkeepers.
    • Stonehenge is not even, properly speaking, a henge. 




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Sunday, February 03, 2019

February 2019 Reading




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