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Posted on Monday, 30 November, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
I’m very interested in reading this book by James Marcus Bach. He’s a self-taught games programmer who scored a swett gig at Apple with little to no direct experience and no management background. The introduction is posted at Gizmodo right now, which offters the following: “The book’s main purpose, as illustrated by the excerpt James has kindly permitted us to publish, is to show how education is not about pieces of paper on the walls, but the knowledge you cram inside your own head.”
“Chris was supportive. “You should not just read about software,” he suggested. “Try to find solutions to our problems in other disciplines.” Maybe Chris was more supportive than he ever knew. I treated that one casual suggestion as permission to spend work time to learn anything. I browsed many of the two hundred or so academic journals that came through the library. Even crazy stuff. I read “Anthropometry of Algerian Women,” and “Optimum Handle Height for a Push-Pull Type Manually-Operated Dryland Weeder.”
–How a HS Dropout Became the Youngest Boss at Apple – Buccaneer scholar – Gizmodo.
Posted on Wednesday, 26 March, 2008 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
Today in the Why We Fail category: Required reading.
I’m constantly enthralled by the intersections between activism and technology. Mostly with the appropriate use of technology within activism. I’m also interested in the flip-side, the strange, sometimes horrifying decisions and their consequences made in the progressive movement. So I’m heading out right away to pick up a copy of Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power or Organizing Without Organizations (which also has its companion blog).
Shirky works on open source collaborative applications that you may already be using. People opposed to reflecting on the futility of a lot of tactics going on in a number of social, environmental and political movements out there (hello you anti-war crowd who have yet to stop a single war) should consider the actions used to bring about actual change, such as Shirky’s oft used example, the Passenger Bill of Rights.
At the website for Harvard’s Berkman Center, Clay discusses the themes in his book, focusing on protest culture and the difference between institutional (what Code Pink does) Vs. ad hoc modes (what the WTO protests in Seattle did which shut that meeting down), and the lack of strategies combining singular acts of protest with ongoing movements.
The lack of ongoing strategy or a focus on tangible, achievable goals continues to wound progressive movements. Shirky’s analysis is well worth hearing out by anyone involved in organizing.
Posted on Monday, 12 November, 2007 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
The word “accommodation” brings to mind the Democratic Party, which was voted into power in Congress in 2006 and which has shown us a pitiful example of what an opposition party should be, accommodating itself basically to the Bush and Republican agenda, accommodating itself to the sort of orthodox political notion that you must be timid and quiet and not speak the truth.
— Howard Zinn speaking on DemocracyNow friday morning
Listen to the segment here.
Just listened to Howard Zinn on Democracy Now’s Friday podcast (the vile in “service” provider Virgin Broadband was down most of Friday and Saturday in London’s lovely SE15 area), discussing a stage version of his book, “Voices of a People’s History of the United States,” called Rebel Voices. The only reason, of course, that I could get this dose of Zinn is because Democracy Now chooses to share its content online for anyone to download. Zinn’s online tech handlers could take a cue from this. So could many others who have their flags planted in the progressive camp, for that matter.
Get some more of this post
Posted on Tuesday, 25 September, 2007 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
Another well-done screed in favor of giving books away online as a way of increasing readership and selling more printed copies by Cory Doctorow appears in Locus Magazine. While he focuses on sci-fi, it’s an argument that can easily be applied to other genres, such as the current cottage industry of Rational-Lit.
Paging Richard Dawkins: If The God Delusion is so damned important for society than you really should consider posting an electronic version on your website with a Creative Commons license. If the goal is reaching people, than it might offer a little more to your site than geeky “scarlet letter” T-shirts and attempts to get people to flyer for your book. It’s cheap, man. Just cheap.
Five NonFic books too important to be kept bound to the paper realm yet which I am linking to:
Posted on Friday, 31 August, 2007 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
So London banned smoking in pubs abou a month back and oyu’ve seen exactly 0 posts on it because that’s how much I’m effected by it, aside from the nice change that I can enjoy a Guinness without filling my lungs with tar.
But this new packaging scheme from Tankbooks speaks to my real addiction and I like the idea of a pack of words to keep rolled up in my T-shirt sleeve à la Brando.
Originally saw these at my favorite design book shop Magma, near Covent garden.
— Link
Posted on Monday, 12 March, 2007 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
An interesting looking new book out on Blackwater, the creepy fundi-started mercenary outfit that is deployed everywhere from the streets of New Orleans to Iraq. Cory writes over at BoingBoing: “Jeremy Scahill’s brave and outraged “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army” renders the story of the Blackwater mercenary group, and other mercenary groups that have seized the economic opportunities opened by the Bush regime’s willingness to offer no-bid contracts and no-liability opportunities to fight America’s wars. Backwater — founded by ultra-right-wing Christian conservatives — hires Pinochet-era Chilean war-criminals, ex-law-enforcement types and former military, and others to serve in Iraq, Afghanistan — and in America. They can and do murder civilians with impunity, they line their pockets with cost-plus multi-billion-dollar military expenditures, and they kill their own men — and the American soldiers they are supposed to be helping — through corner-cutting profiteering.” — Link
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I’m an atheist and that’s it. I believe there’s nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people.
