Ed's Book Club
Let's hear it for Chapter 11; SuperCrown
(they're a fairly common bookstore down here, but without
the cappucino and fuzzy feel of Borders or Barnes & Noble) is going out
of business, which meant it was time for me to stock up on
books (60% off the jacket price is hard to pass up, even if
the book is a waste of paper). The few decent books I
managed to find (the only books really left in volume were
in the business section and the rows upon rows of cheap
romance paperbacks) were:
- The
Hacker Ethic, Pekka Himanen
Slashdot did a review
of this book a while back, and it caught my attention. It
looks to be a good read, but I have't tackled it just yet.
- Rebel
Code,Glyn Moody
Another book reviewed
by /., this is a good summation of recent years,
starting from Linus' first stabs with Linux, and working
forward to today where open source is viewed as a reasonable
basis for software development models in business. I have to
wonder if the book would have read differently had it been
written during or after the recent layoff frenzy (yes, I
believe the worst is over, sans a few more upcoming
announcements) in the tech industry? I haven't finished this
one yet.
- Why
Should Extroverts Make All the Money?, Frederica J.
Balzano and Marsha Boone Kelley
Another impulse buy; being an introvert
myself, and having a strong interest in MBTI
typing (I'm an INTJ), I
was interested in what she had to say; I've just about
finished this one, and I'm actually fairly impressed, I
expected a feel-good book of self-affirmation, and I what I
found was a book filled with example case studies (which
didn't always work out well) and reasonable approaches to
the problems many introverts have with "networking". It's
geared toward the job-hunter, so maybe some of the
recently-downsized here can find some use in it.
The fifth book's name eludes me for the moment, and since
they're all sitting on my nightstand at home, it's a little
hard to go look it up. ;-) It was what appeared to be a
fairly complete book regarding user interface design for
e-commerce applications. I'll make sure I post the title
here later.
Work
Spent the last two days attending a surprisingly
up-beat all-company meeting, which unveiled our new "image"
and (more importantly) gave everyone in the company a solid
understanding of the product produced by the company we just
acquired, and how it will integrate with ours. I'm surpised
to find myself very impressed with what this tiny group of
folks have managed to create in under a year with a
shoestring budget; it put our own efforts, which were
presented as well, to shame (they have a working product, we
have some lovely PowerPoint slides). (For the curious: their
product is an amazingly complete "coming together" of
responsible online marketing services; opt-in email, banner
ad campaigns, etc, most with the ability to actually track
both the hits you're getting from various impressions, and
the amount of actual revenue you brought in from them, along
with a whole gambit of other handy toys you'll probably want
if you're trying to run a real business with Internet
sales.)
Good things arising from the sessions: we're
committing fairly publically to reducing our current
platform support (how many proprietary software products do
you know that ship on 19 separate platforms? betcha you can
count 'em on one hand), and that we're really pushing to
phase out the old product as quickly as possible after the
new product launch, meaning a much simpler infrastructure to
try and maintain here. The bad things: international sales
are attempting to completely backdoor the entire process,
and artificially prolong the life of our dead product by
foisting it on the European audience, with partners over
there doing all the translations and further development
(with our name stamped on it, of course). Sales seems to
think that we'll manage the infrastructure for all this
development here in the U.S. The CTO has a slightly
different opinion. It'd be fun watching the fireworks, if it
wasn't my infrastructure caught in the middle.
Personal
Erica's Jeep
died yesterday, on her way to lunch from class. Luckily, we
haven't missed a beat; she's driving me to work and picking
me up afterwards, with classes during the day, so all is
good. Hopefully she'll have it fixed by Monday (let's hear
it for 1500-miles-left-on-the-warranty!).
Red Hat
7.1
Almost here. Sounds like the release name is
"Seawolf" from some chatter on a few Red Hat mailing lists.
I'm betting on either a late Friday/Saturday
release, or they'll hold off until Monday to better handle
the flood of support requests. ;-)