Friday, August 08, 2014

Weekend Reading: The Rather Short Edition

I don't have that many links this week- I have been busy with the job search ebook, which now has a title: Navigating the Path to Industry. I incorporated my editor's suggestions and sent her a final draft for proofreading on Wednesday. She sent back the final version last night, so today I fixed the mistakes she found and started formatting. It turns out formatting ebooks is mostly a matter of marking them up in HTML and creating an appropriate stylesheet... so I had a lot of fun. I'm starting to believe I might actually get this thing published this month. I should have a cover to show you soon.

Anyway, here are the few links I gathered this week:

I really liked this profile of Rainbow Rowell, and I haven't even read any of her books.

Bad news for people trapped in windowless offices: they seem to mess with your sleep.

A tweet that demonstrates why representation matters:



The common concern that white children won't identify with and love characters of different races mystifies me. My children have, at various times, identified with and loved two pigs (Peppa and Olivia), a bunch of puppies (Paw Patrol), and whatever the hell the characters on Yo Gabba Gabba are. They currently identify with and love Doc McStuffins and the fact that she is black has not phased them in the slightest. Pumpkin even chose to buy a big Doc McStuffins play set when she had money from her birthday earlier this year. I suspect any problems these characters have in catching on with white families comes from the grown ups, not the kids.

Max Schireson's blog post about why he quit his job as the CEO of MongoDB has made quite a stir, so I suspect most of you have already seen it. If you somehow missed it, go read it now.

And here's some things from my other feed:

Google finds that predictability is one of the most important traits in a leader/manager.

Esther Derby argues against performance appraisals

If you missed the fact that I have another Twitter feed and blog, the details are here. I tweet out links and other things about management, productivity, and the like over there, and I'll write about those topics, too. In fact, doing some research for my next post over there was another thing I worked on today- I needed access to some journal articles, so I had to drive up to UCSD and spend some time in the library there. It was quite a trip down memory lane! Mr. Snarky used to work on campus, and I spent some time teaching an extension course there.

And for our ending giggle... You've probably seen this one, too: Dilbert did  a great job skewering the "make it so simple your mother could understand it" saying.

2 comments:

  1. Cloud - your blog is my main view into the internal discussions in the techie world, (and I'm guessing it might be for others, too) so please keep including the links to the articles/stories that "most of you have already seen".

    I read Rainbow Rowell's "Attachments" novels a few years ago and liked it a lot (including the original plot, halleluia! - finally a novel whose plot doesn't involve the repercussions on the main character from someone dying and/or the main character inheriting a house from someone dead.)

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  2. I've actually met the divine Ms. Rainbow Rowell twice, years ago - and she is a wonderful, inspiring person, indeed. It makes me so happy that she has achieved serious literary success. She certainly was not born with a silver spoon - she definitely made it on her own merits. Her old Omaha World-Herald newspaper columns are really good reading as well - just hella good writing.

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