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Here’s more on Octavia Butler, if anybody’s curious. (Requires clicking through a free ad first.)

Octavia Butler died two weeks ago. I’d just finished her most recent novel, Fledgling, a week before that. Very good; I think of her as really hitting her stride, for while I seem to recall enjoying her earlier novels, I thought Parable of the Sower was great. I should go and reread that book and […]

As a manager who is drawn to XP, one question that reading First, Break All the Rules raises is: how compatible are agile methods with the book’s recommendations? Let’s start by going through the questions. 1. Do I know what is expected of me at work? This is a strength of XP (and other agile […]

We spent the middle of the day yesterday at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. The first time I’d been there; quite nice, I will go back again. Though my favorite part was just listening to Miranda and Jordan talk to each other while they were walking through the galleries together. Anyways, I bought […]

I just finished taking a new manager training class at Sun. (I’ve been managing for a year and a half now; I only recently learned that I was supposed to take this class. Oops.) They gave us a copy of a book called First, Break All the Rules which, despite having a title guaranteed to […]

It will take me a while to process Plain and Simple. (Which I learned about from the bibliography of the XP book, for what that’s worth.) Some facets: There can be well thought-out, stable systems of behavior that are strong enough to exist for quite some time next to American society without being absorbed. It’s […]

I e-mailed the author of the blog I mentioned recently, and he was kind enough to put together a lean manufacturing reading list.

The last section of The Fifth Book of Peace talks about Thich Nhan Hanh a lot, so I decided to read one of his books next. One of his big themes is “mindful behavior”; as I understand it, this means that, when you do something, you should simply be doing that, not thinking about or […]

The chapters of The Fifth Book of Peace are titled Fire, Paper, Water, and Earth. This, of course, sets up an analogy of paper with air. Which I can relate to, but after thinking about it, it’s either a bit too specific or a bit too general for me. Words = Air: sure, I can […]

Two authors I respect, Gerald Weinberg and Samuel R. Delany, have both recently published books on writing. I haven’t read either of them yet (other than the lengthy introduction to the latter in a recent New York Review of Science Fiction), but I bet they’re both well worth reading. Johanna Rothman recommends the former.

So I was just ordering a book for my dad’s birthday. (Cartographica Extraordinaire; I haven’t looked at it, but it’s recommended here.) Amazon was incorrectly claming that it hadn’t been published, and the publisher’s web site was a little strange, so I didn’t feel like ordering from either of them. After a few days of […]

One thing I forgot to mention about Broadway Melody of 1940: I liked the way they showed the differences in ability between Johnny (Fred Astaire’s character) and King (George Murphy’s character). Right at the start, they’re dancing together; to my untrained eye, there weren’t obvious differences in the quality of their dancing. (I’ll watch it […]

Interesting article by Richard Gabriel. Something to add to my list of things to do when I have more free time. Or my list of things to consider creating time to do; maybe if I just tried to write one haiku a day, I could work it into my current schedule…

Some management writers that I respect think that it’s worth learning about Meyer-Briggs personality types, on the theory that you need to realize that most people are different from you, and that there are concrete differences in their motivations, approaches, and so forth that can be helpful to know. The Meyers-Briggs types categorize your personality […]

I just read On Talking Terms with Dogs: Calming Signals. Its core is a list of about thirty different signs that dogs do when trying to calm themselves or each other dog. Some of which make sense in retrospect, like not walking straight at a dog if you don’t wan tto make it nervous (arc […]

Anybody have any good Thomas Merton recommendations? I really liked his autobiography, and I get the impression that he’s the sort of person who might well have written more books that I’d like, but neither New Seeds of Contemplation nor Zen and the Birds of Appetite did much for me. For that matter, any other […]

Something else Rorty and Latour have in common: they both answer their e-mail quite quickly. I got a short note from Rorty saying, among other things, that he particularly liked We Have Never Been Modern, and a longer note from Latour gently chiding me for completely misreading him. (“ah readers, readers…”) Latour’s point (unless I’m […]

I’ve been reading Rorty’s Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, and he reminds me a lot of Bruno Latour, especially his We Have Never Been Modern and Politics of Nature. Both of them, as far as I can tell, see statements about science having a special direct relationship with reality as, at best, not adding anything to […]

I recently read Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace, by Ricardo Semler. Pretty amazing; they give a remarkable amount of control to their workers, have remarkably few layers of management, and are remarkably open, flexible, and responsive. And, if the book is to be believed, it works extremely well. I was […]