Things I Liked in 2011: A Summary
31 Dec 11
The second annual year-end post, sadly with only four other posts sandwiched between this and the 2010 edition.
Movie: Midnight in Paris was excellent, and inspired me to read more of and about Hemingway. Who doesn't love Owen Wilson?
Documentary: I don't think I watched any documentaries, so I'm going to put Moneyball here because I liked it a lot, and it was loosely based on truth.
Book - Non-Fiction: In the Plex by Steven Levy - I loved this book as an ongoing Google fan and lover of all things Silicon Valley. Great writing style, lots of interesting anecdotes and a much better pseudo-biographical attempt of a company and its founders than Issaacson's book on Steve Jobs. I was entertained by that book, then I listened to this podcast, and nearly all the criticisms made perfect sense to me and drastically lowered my opinion of the book. Willpower by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney was a close second.
Book - Fiction: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carre - Obviously this book didn't come out this year, and I actually read it before I had heard about the movie after reading The Spy That Came in From the Cold. I immediately read the rest of the series and started seeking out other realistic spy thrillers, but with little luck.
Song: No standouts in iTunes' 'Most Played' playlist, but I will give the nod to Exile Vilify by The National, since it's not on an album and it's high on the list.
Album: Bon Iver by Bon Iver - would have been the Social Network soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, however that was released in 2010. Close runner-ups are Torches by Foster the People and El Camino by the Black Keys.
Blog: Nothing new to my list worth noting. XKCD, Danger Room, SvN, Marginal Revolution, and Kottke are still favorites among others.
Place Visited: Rome!
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Slicehost to Linode migration, finally.
3 Dec 11
Over the last two weekends I finally motivated myself enough to move away from Slicehost, which has been completely stale as a service for well over a year now (ever since they were acquired by Rackspace). They've been rock solid - my VPS has been up for 396 days and counting - but their prices no longer reflect the marketplace, and they do not support any new OS versions.
First impressions of Linode are all positive - $20 for 512MB vs $40 on SH, cheaper backups ($5 vs $10 on SH), great DNS management, good OS options (CentOS 6 compared to Centos 5.5 on SH), easy setup, extremely fast responses to support tickets and so forth.
That said, Slicehost's articles/tutorials are much better (I refer back to them all the time when setting up new servers).
Also, the slicedns2linode script was a signifcant timesaver for migrating all the DNS entries over to Linode, which could have been a nightmare.
Looking forward to the next 396 days on Linode (hopefully)!
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Quick productivity tip
2 Oct 11
Logout of any social networking or distraction prone site when you are done reading, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Quora, Google Reader. I frequently find myself randomly clicking to one of these sites whenever I encounter a delay or waiting period at work, whether I'm waiting for something to download, a server to restart, someone to respond over IM or something else that makes me wait for a period of time that's greater than 5 seconds. Clicking to one of these sites will occupy you for minutes to quarter and half hours if you're not careful.
If you're logged out, you get this wall where you HAVE to type in your login credentials, rather than instant content gratification. I then find myself checking back to what I was waiting for to find that it's ready, rather than checking back 5-10 minutes later after looking through someones photo album.
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Thinking About Productive Teamwork
29 Jul 11
I recently read these two posts: "Teamwork ground rules" and "How to work with me". Both resonated with me, so I spent some time thinking about and compiling these posts into 10 maxims that I believe result in healthy team environments.
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- Communicate clearly and consistently - be professional, concise, save the BS.
- Don't assume people will dig through noise to discover important details, communicate them up front.
- Updates on progress are good, but don't say something is in the process of being done without saying when it will be done.
- If a deadline needs to change, say so, and don't wait until the last minute.
- It's not actually done until everyone knows it's done.
- Don't be afraid to ask for clarification, especially if it prevents wasting time on an incorrect approach.
- Don't point out a problem without suggesting a solution or course of action.
- If there is bad news or a time sensitive issue, report it immediately, and don't be afraid to interrupt whomever it needs to be reported to.
- Most people will forget to respond or take action unless something is delivered to them in writing.
- Do the homework to justify requests, especially if they involve dollars.
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Some Assorted Thoughts on the Bin Laden Raid
4 May 11
1. The government would have been better served by revealing far fewer details about the recent raid.
2. The operation is a great example and reminder of the value of being a quiet professional.
3. Discovering Bin Laden's location could be considered lucky, however the time and resources spent towards this pursuit were so great that it was only a matter of time before the stars aligned and enough leads panned out.
4. While I don't think Obama deserves any credit for *finding* Bin Laden, the decision to undertake the raid was incredibly gutsy.
5. Burial at sea was a stroke of genius.
6. The whole stealth helicopter thing is awesome.
7. If you didn't think Twitter was great before, you surely must now. Game changer.
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