botwerks

after a rather brutal couple of weeks on the road and a series of weekend projects, we decided to take a really low key approach to the holiday weekend.  this resulted in copious amounts of reading  getting done.  some nuggets that i thought were interesting …

• i finally finished the black swan (nassim nicholas taleb – NNT) a week or so ago.  yeah, i know, it came out in 2007 and pretty much everyone has read it by now.  i’m suffering from a horrible reading backlog.  this of course triggered a cascade of adding a bunch of stuff from his web site to my instapaper queue and the papers collection.  of particular interest here is a blurb that NNT did for the drawbridge, be a gentleman on the treadmill.  a delightful spin on the notion that the fungible nature of entry level jobs provide greater freedoms than highly specialized and narrow job profiles.  this gives one a little pause when people talk about the dead-end nature of various jobs.  corollary - don’t let your expenses expand to match your earning potential and you can keep your FYI in alignment.
• foreign affairs – a crude predicament – TL;DR – you bought a big ass SUV in the past couple of years and you’re bitching about gas prices?  STFU and think things through.  wild gas price variability is here to stay.  oh and get on your bike.
• my philanthropy – george soros - we need more of this.  couple this with a reasonable interpretation of the political mind (get the newer edition) and if you can find some democrat strategists with some stones you might be able to move something progressive forward.
• michele bachmann’s holy war (rolling stone) – why, oh why does this crazy shit have to come from my state?
• don’t ask me where i find this stuff - a few hundred words on obsessive camera stuff for stanley kubrick.  there’s no getting around the fact that kubrick was a cinematic genius.  i don’t know how he ranked on the continuum of camera geeks, but i’m guessing a few SD from the mean.

i just whacked a nascent relationship with shelfari. i had poked at shelfari a year or so ago, but i was non-plussed with the manner in which i could interact with my “bookshelf”. in poking around various facebook applications, i was looking for something that would have some interesting integration with the social networking component from a reading perspective. it would have been nice to simply export my reading list from delicious library into something that would facilitate sharing my library with friends and family.

my thought here was to simply use the shelfari to FB integration and do a fresh export of my delicious library into shelfari and link the shelfari profile to FB. done.

no dice. first my shelfari profile required some serious scrubbing to eliminate a bunch of stuff that i’d eliminated and new acquisitions. this proved to be an exercise in we’re just going to keep your stuff data grabbiness by shelfari. after a moderate amount of swearing i was able to get this resolved.

then i tried to import my library. turns out that they’re not used to libraries as large as mine? i find this shortsighted but splitting the library into 3 chunks w/vim seemed to get it to accept the first chunk of the import. then i was presented with what looked to be screen after screen of cover art verification. although i was never really given the opportunity to test that theory. after i hit “next” to proceed to the next it just crapped out on me. apparently importing just 18 books. that sucked. at this point i had no interest in proceeding any further.

the reviews for the FB application aren’t particularly plussing either. i’ll cut my losses while i’m still ahead. feh.