Lifelong Learning From 42 Joseph Campbell Quotes: Were in a freefall into future. We dont know where were going. Things are changing so fast, and always when youre going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a […]

Lapham Rising by Roger Rosenblatt. Kind of in the A Man Called Ove genre, with a little farce thrown in, a crotchety aging man comes to terms with his life. Later by Stephen King. Less horror and more detective. King is pretty darn good at making you empathize with a character very quickly, I was […]

Building simple web apps I have the need to start building some simple websites and web apps.  This is probably the 3rd or 4th time in my career Ive jumped into building simple sites.   React is awesome but is a very large pile of technology.  If you just want to hack together a website for a limited […]

Malevolent Republic by K. S. Komireddi. A virulent criticism of current Indian politics. I don't know enough about India to really know how to think about this topic. I need to read and learn more. Exo by Fonda Lee. YA novel about a young soldier caught between the sides warring over the future of Earth. […]

What to read AsCharlie Kindelpoints out, you can't trust Amazon reviews anymore (if you ever could).The entire system has been gamed and broken, in every product category.I am constantly on the prowl for better ways to find accurate product ratings. How does one find good books to read?  First and foremost, I rely on friends and […]...

Fundamentals by Frank Wilczek. An easy read about the fundamental particles, forces, fields that make up the universe. All very simple at one level, though allows obviously for a massive amount of emergent complexity. The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders. Eh, a little bit inventive situation, but characters all […]

Leadership Basecamp announced a policy change this week, limiting internal political discussion.  It has not been received uniformly well on Twitter.  I totally get it though.  When I first joined Xevo, people were using internal tools for divisive and contentious discussions. Xevo provided software to some of the...

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale. It was ok but i had hoped for more info about the development of the detective job and the societal changes. A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. A solid start to a series, and appreciate the development of the main character, but not enough action and […]

Health Well my normal reading and learning cycle has been turned sideways over the last two weeks as I have had the chance to learn about Eisenhower Health, septic arthritis, staphylococcus aureus, vancomycin, rocephin, arthroscopy, PICC lines vs midlines, the travel nurse industry.  And I got to meet so...

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. Gosh I wanted to love this book, and there are some fascinating snippets in it about the amazing role of fungi in our world and lives. But a little too much telling me what I should learn, and not enough examples and stories, which are the memorable and instructive elements. […]

Ego Surfing You canpip install ludwig.No relation.sammcknoted: jesus it sucks in a lot of packages. Various and sundry cloud technologies Azure has a notion of digital twins as part of its IoT solution, there are similar ideas around the AWS IoT platform.  I have never found this abstraction to help me.  Ian Mercer has some...

Roy G. Biv by Jude Stewart. A collection of anecdotes and facts about color, not as deep as I would like, but interesting and amusing. Secrecy by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Relevant when he wrote it, relevant in the Iraq WMD era, relevant now. Secrecy supports a lot of bad behaviors, whether in a government or […]

Cloud Computing Cloud computing turns 15 today  15 years ago AWS S3 was launched.  I certainly didn't realize the full impact of this launch at the time. In my last few years at Microsoft (1998, 1999), we were talking about related ideas internally (often under the name megaserver), and I admit I wasn't the most enthusiastic […...

The Price of Peace by Zachary Carter. I never realized what a fascinating, rich life Keynes led. And I never understand the moral basis for Keynes views (at least as…

OK this is maybe 2 weeks of things, I am a little behind. Edge hardware and software I installed EEROs this week after a horrible install experience with Netgear ORBIs.…

Or maybe this should be titled "Rabbitholes I Went Down This Week." Basic Research Im reading the The Price of Peace right now — the life and legacy of Keynes.…

Technology strategy Steven Sinofsky is writing a great memoir of his Microsoft years, Im avidly reading. Chapter 3 links to the story of David Weiss and Murray Sargent figuring out…

Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker. Quite the story of a family plagued by schizophrenia, their attempts to survive, and the slow growth in understanding schizophrenia. A Children's Bible by…

CapEx A meandering tour through capital expenditures. First the semiconductor industry, where it is now estimated to cost almost $20B to create a state-of-the-art fab. Fab is now primarily done…

My last day at Xevo is tomorrow. I've been reflecting this week on how fortunate I have been to work with so many great people. I met some great people…

Sharpe's Rifles by Bernard Cornwell. Enjoyable historical novel set during the Napoleonic Wars, a part of a series detailing Sharpe's rise. Good character, good pacing. Business Adventures by John Brooks.…

We have been moving houses this week so not as much time as I would like to dig into some things but still a few nuggets. The information passed between…

Your strategy is what you ship. I didnt learn this so much as I relearned it. The story of the Edsel in Business Adventures is instructive. The Ford team dreamed…

I aspire to be a lifelong learner. I do read a lot — books and online — and I find increasingly that if I don't take a few moments to…

The End of Everything by Katie Mack. In the midst of all our current political and social turmoil, you can read this book and either a) have even more to…

This year I read or attempted to read 75 books. There were some dogs but also some great ones. I tried to come up with the best book of the…

Slow Horses by Mick Herron. Great tale of intrigue inside MI5. Started a little choppy but then the story took off and the characters rose to the fore. Intuition Pumps…

The Dragon Factory by Jonathan Maberry. Would have been a good graphic novel — evil albino twins, gene-engineered monsters (scorpion-dogs!), Nazis, a plot to end the world. Just a so-so…

Collapse of an Empire by Yegor Gaidar. Good look at the unraveling of the USSR, it's inherent fragility, and the human costs of the unraveling. Recommended by my Russian friends.…

The Blizzard by Vladimir Sorokin. A book about a terrible storm written by a Russian author? I expected some serious gloom, but this story was trippy and strange. Memorable but…

Kent State by Derf Backderf. The Kent State shootings stand tall in my memory, but I don't think I ever knew all the details of the events. This is an…

An American Sickness by Elisabeth Rosenthal. An anecdote-driven walk through the dysfunctional health care industry. Some enraging anecdotes, and some useful how-to's at the end. Would have liked even more…

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. This didn't really float my boat, I suspect the difficulty of translating from Chinese is significant, it is not just the straight translation but…

Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. Pretty damning. If you still somehow believe that America is the perfect embodiment of the "shining city upon a hill", this book will but that notion…

Expanding beyond books! Euphoria is an explosive series. High school like I never experienced, kids struggling with big issues, and I was rooting for them all and blown away by…

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips. I have read 0 books set in Kamchatka, an interesting look into the lives of isolated and distressed women on the peninsula. Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour…

Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry. Another great novel by Barry, two men's lives explored over the course of an evening, great characters and dialog. Story by Robert McKee.…

The Price of Time by TIm Tigner. What a crappy suspense story. Poor characters, poor plot, just bad. I don't know why I stuck with it, I am embarrassed. Transitions…

Im looking over a bookshelf that I havent looked at in a while and there are some books I really fondly remember there. (And also a lot of books I have no memory of.) I am reflecting on how I really want to spend my time reading I want to read more of these impactful books, and probably read fewer of the ones that are basically junk food. Some o...

Upheaval by Jared Diamond. Not as breakthrough as his earlier work, but an engaging look at crises and how nations react to them. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on Finland…

The Clockwork Dynasty by Daniel H. Wilson. Fun story about automatons who have been hiding within human society for eons, and their struggle to understand their own morality and purpose.…

wow, no thank you. by Samantha Irby. The title is exactly the reaction I had, couldn't finish. Just didn't relate to anything in here, I may not be the target…

Cleaning up the bookshelf during the pandemic — a little eclectic. What's the Least I Can Believe and Still Be a Christian by Martin Thielen. I was raised Presbyterian but…

Cleaning up the bookshelves while we are shut in… Planet of Adventure by Jack Vance. If you like Burrough's Mars books, then you will like this. I read the Burroughs books when I was very young, and they have not […]

Range by David Epstein. Strong argument that creativity, invention, excellence are driven by breadth of knowledge, not depth. Important to read, learn, use tools outside your focus area. Lost in Math by Sabine Hossenfelder. Great book about biases in modern […]

Narconomics by Tom Wainwright. They may be criminals, but they have all the same economics and behaviours of commercial enterprises. Good insight into why attempting to eradicate narcotics at the source is such a waste of time. Brown Dog by […]

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides. A woman murders her husband and is found insane, and a therapist digs in to get the truth. Very twisty and fun. Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters. A suspense story set in a […]

Circe by Madeline Miller. Excellent retelling of the story of Circe, making her the central and most human part of so much of Greek myth. Very good. The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz. Eh, just didnt care enough […]

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern. I am ambivalent. Certainly the story is creative, and much work was done to plot it out. But I am not really convinced the story went anywhere. I was compelled to finish but I […]