Category Archives: culture

My media diet for January, so far

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Watched

I finished watching Reacher S2. I did not enjoy it as much as the first season, mostly because of the backstory. The last episode could have been 20 minutes. They spent too much time after the action was over wrapping up the story lines.

Irma Vep, a short series that ran on HBO a while back. It’s a fictional take about a remake of a French silent film classic, the Vampires. The last few episodes got weird, but I liked it.

Read

In no particular order …
Children of Dune (Dune, #3)Children of Dune by Frank Herbert
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It takes a while for this book to get going, almost like the first quarter should have been attached to the previous book, Dune Messiah, just to get to the action in this one faster. It’s a lot of setup. One the story gets momentum it’s almost as good as Dune. There’s not a lot of optimism here, either, which makes it more compelling.

Starter VillainStarter Villain by John Scalzi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fun, light, & easy read. It follows a lot of John Scalzi‘s standard playbook: fish out of water protagonist, established hyper competent folks who become allies, baddies with obvious Achilles’s heels, fun and unexpected secondary characters, twists, and more snark and sarcasm than you can shake a stick at. I enjoyed this, for sure, but doubt I’d revisit it.

System Collapse (The Murderbot Diaries, #7)System Collapse by Martha Wells
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I should have re-read the previous book, but it did not stop me enjoying this. It is action packed with humor and heart, easy to devour over a weekend, though I read most of it in one day.

View all my reviews

Listened

My tracking through Last.fm might be broken. Stay tuned.

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One of Aaron Rodgers’s biggest strengths as a Hall of Fame–caliber player is his awareness. At his best, the New York Jets quarterback can anticipate the movements of aggressive defenders and use his legs to create breathtaking plays down the field.

If only Rodgers possessed such sharp awareness away from the football field, where he seems to have a knack for creating unnecessary drama and exposing himself as a fake intellectual who can’t seem to stop showcasing his rampant narcissism. He isn’t in danger of jeopardizing his inevitable entrance into the Hall of Fame, but the more he digs into these conspiracies and attempts to moonlight as an infectious-disease expert, the more his moves will overshadow his brilliant career.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/aaron-rodgers-making-it-hard-root-him/677128/

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Chattanooga, Tennessee sits on the boarder with northwest Georgia, northeast Alabama, and is not far from the western reaches of the Carolinas. I’ve noticed that Chattanooga news outlets cover western North Carolina primarily when it is bad news.

24-Oct-2023 Content of Interest

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I’m playing around with a link posting and such with emacs, org, elfeed, elfeed-curate, and org2blog. The posts will get some categorization. I’m working on some editing and formatting. But for now, please enjoy.

No Category (10)

The key points are:

  • Be asynchronous first
  • Write things down
  • Make work visible and overcommunicate
  • Prefer GitHub tools and workflows
  • Embrace collaboration
  • Foster a culture that values documentation maintenance
  • Communicate openly, honestly, and authentically
  • Remember practicality beats purity

Three things that stand out to me:

1 Writing things down, being visible, overcommunicating, being asynchronous are expensive. Getting up on a whiteboard, scribbling in realtime, is fast and cheap. However, you will end up doing that 100 times. If you take the time to “write things down” you avoid the repetition. 2 If you need proof that engineering is a team activity and not a lone coder with a hoody in a dark room, here it is. Nothing of substance gets built by a single person. 3 Remember that you are communicating with people who have different backgrounds, experiences, and cultures to you. You need to write and structure your thinking in a way that will work across all of those people.