Broadcasting Brain - different thoughts about thinking differently

Posted in book reviews by markdykeman on August 29th, 2010

Here are a couple of quick book reviews, based on stuff that I’ve received from the kind people at O’Reilly Media:

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution – 25th Anniversary edition by Steven Levy

This is a great read. I read the original edition of this book a number of years ago. It’s about the rise of the hacker movement and the open source concept, back when open source meant keeping printouts of programming code in unlocked drawers for other amateur programmers to use. This started back in the day when you had to enter programs by punch card, flipping switches or, rarely, typing the code in machine language or assembler using an actual keyboard. Those days seem like a distant memory now.

This is not a book about programming techniques. It’s a book about people who loved the idea of democratizing the use of computers, their quirky personalities and how the personal computer eventually came to life. It also talks about entrepreneurship, including the good and the bad. Still relevant today and a recommended read. Rating 8/10 Affiliate link: Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution – 25th Anniversary Edition

Create Stunning HTML Email That Just Works by Matthew Patterson

I am not a programmer, although I do have some knowledge of how HTML works, so some of the stuff in this book goes over my head. Basically, it’s about creating E-Mails using HTML techniques that make them look attractive. So, honestly, I don’t know how well these techniques work. They aren’t beginners techniques. I will say, however, that this book is well organized and well written so it looks good. I’m not including an affiliate link because I’m out of my depth here but it looks like it could be a good resource if you’re into this sort of thing. Here’s a non-affiliate link to the book, since I’m not so knowledgeable about this stuff – it could still turn out to be quite good.

Until next time!

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Something for you to consider – an offer of free consulting

Posted in Uncategorized by markdykeman on August 25th, 2010

Hi. Long time no talk. I’ve been pretty busy with Thoughtwrestling and a couple of other projects. I am working on some new posts for Broadcasting Brain, but they’re taking awhile to sort through.

However, I wanted to make you aware of some free consulting time that I’m giving away. You can find more details over at Thoughtwrestling.

Thanks!

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Final thoughts – #ReadItAll

Posted in blogs I read by markdykeman on July 26th, 2010

I made it through the Read It All challenge.

Sort of. It’s more like I “ran” a marathon but got a ride on a golf cart for at least 6 of the 26 miles.

I focused pretty exclusively on the feeds that I consume within Google Reader. I did not follow my Google Buzz items with the same diligence.

I started the week at around 300 subscriptions. I’m currently at 284 (except that I have no idea how Google Reader calculates that number and I expect it may be highly inflated). I suspect most of those blogs are infrequently published at best.

Here are a few observations:

Actually going through all of my feeds and every item was painful, at least at first. I’d built up a habit of looking at the number of unread items and just marking them all as Read (although I would sometimes glance at the headlines before doing the mass Read).
If a blog didn’t publish a full feed and I only saw a partial feed in Google Reader, I just read the partial feed information. If I found it interesting, I clicked on to the actual blog. That didn’t happen very often.
This exercise is forcing me to acknowledge something that I’ve known for awhile, but refused to admit to myself: I don’t get a lot of value out of Google Shared items. I don’t like the way that the same item appears in Shared items multiple times when different people share it and/or leave comments on the Shared item. I also get a lot of tech news items in there which really don’t interest me these days. So I’m probably going to stop following some people’s Shared items (alas).
I might have discovered a few interesting tidbits through all of this reading, but not that many. Sadly.
Then there’s the problem of the Starred Items in Google Reader, the ones that you mark but never seem to get back to because it seems like too much work to do it… fortunately I didn’t add many new Starred items this week. I’m considering nuking them all, if I can.

After all this, I’m going to:

Cut back on my feeds even more.
Stop following some people’s Google Shared items.
Try to make more of an effort to read the stuff in Google Reader.
Force myself to go through all of my Starred items and finally deal with them one way or another.

Thanks to Justin and Ian for coming up with this idea. It was worthwhile, even if it wasn’t very fun at times.

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One glass or several – a reused cup of minutiae

Posted in life by markdykeman on July 24th, 2010

This morning, as I coax my dulled brain to active duty after a unsatisfying night’s sleep, I’m wondering about drinking glasses.

I have a contradictory relationship to drinking glasses. For one thing, I tend to use more than I should during the day. There are times that I could easily get by with a single glass, but I often don’t. I’m convinced that this behavior is informed by a combination of laziness and cognitive overload. Dealing with the latter first, I say cognitive overload because, like many of us, I tend to be trying to think about too many things at once.

I don’t know exactly where I fall on the scale of being able to juggle between 5 – 9 thoughts simultaneously. However, I have no trouble of finding at least nine things to ponder at any given time. This facilitates the ability to forget what I’ve been doing and, more importantly, what I was doing and where I was doing it. Thus, orphaned, partially empty glasses of water occasionally wind up in unexpected places like bathrooms, bookshelves and the occasional closet. (Remind me to tell you about the time I found orange juice in the cupboard with the glasses – otherwise, I’ll forget. I’m blaming this one on cognitive overload, where my brain decides, somewhat randomly, to drop thoughts much like Sawyer jumping out of the helicopter so his fellow LOST castaways could make it safely to the freighter. Well, not actually because a) they saw him jump and b) the freighter blew up anyway. Maybe it’s more like dropping books when you were carrying too many in the first place. Yes, let’s go with that.) At any rate, trying to remember too much at once leads us to forget things – fun paradox. Which will be my defense in this case.

Laziness, meaning the lack of desire to reuse a glass when it’s so close to approaching empty status that one might as well consider it to be empty – another classic case of too small to measure being too small to matter. And yet… for some strange reason it seems like more work to refill an old glass than to reach up and get a new one.

Or does it?

The real reason that we (um, I) don’t want to reuse an old glass is that it somehow seems dirty and less pure that when we filled it in its clean state. To say that this is ridiculous is… ridiculous. I mean, it is ridiculous. Dirty? Pshaw, it’s only as dirty as you are.

Here’s the other ridiculous thing: I don’t mind reusing a dirty glass if it’s had a different liquid, like the old milk-to-water switcheroo, which encourages frequent looks of disgust in my household.

Hey, don’t judge me, man – I do rinse it out.

Mostly.

Whatever it is, I blame the modern dishwashing machine, which gives the illusion of making it just as easy to clean multiple things at once instead of a mere few, just because you’re not the one doing the work. Except for the loading of the dishwasher. Which kind of negates the whole point. But illusion rules.

N.B. Apologies to the late David Foster Wallace, whose writings I’m starting to work my way through. But man, I can’t write sentences like he does, ones that take a complete cigarette to read (or so I guess).

Tags: drinking glasses, life, minutiae |

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Update on Read It All (subtitled My Brain Hurts)

Posted in blogs I read by markdykeman on July 21st, 2010

I’ve been trying like the dickens to be faithful to #readitall (see my previous post for some details) but man, it’s tough.

There have been some times when, if the blog doesn’t post a full text RSS feed, I’ve just looked at the summary and said, “OK, that’s enough for me.”

I probably broke the rules a bit, but I’ve deleted one feed from my reader. As it turns out, it:

a) tends to duplicate entries (it’s a feed from one of the Alltop groups)

b) contains some links to premium content that I can’t read anyway

c) contains some feeds that I subscribe to elsewhere

So what’s the point of continuing on with that one?

One thing that I’ve noticed, at least more clearly, is that Google Reader Shared Items actually makes up a huge portion of the content I see in Google Reader. Read It All is forcing me to pay much closer attention Shared Items than I have in the past. I’m certainly getting a much better handle on what I’m really interested in reader. It also highlights one thing about Google Reader Shared Items which has always annoyed me: if multiple people Share the same item, it appears as separate entries instead of aggregating everything together. I can sort of see why it works that way, but it’s a bit annoying to me to encounter the same story more than once, especially if it’s just a Share with no additional comments.

I’d say this is a worthwhile experience overall and I’ll definitely be making some changes to my content consumption habits after this (if not sooner).

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Read It All – The Iron RSS Challenge

Posted in blogs I read by markdykeman on July 19th, 2010

So I know of these two crazy young guys: IanMRountree and Justin Kownacki. They have this vision for a week long project called #readitall.

They describe this challenge in two separate posts, but here’s the gist of the challenge: you have to read everything you subscribe to: blogs, magazines, etc.

This is kind of a daunting thought, considering how many blogs that I subscribe to and how often some of them publish material. And it brings forward a good point: there’s an awful lot of it that I don’t read regularly.

So I’m going to make the effort this week and see what I discover.

Are you in?

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