Coté's Commonplace Book
I’m a Texan, so cold weather is always welcome. Rain and cold weather is even better. Here in Amsterdam, people apologize for the rainy weather, they seem to dread it. I suppose it you’d lived all of your 41 years in a gray and wet city, you’d be sick of it too. Just like I’m sick-numb to the heat of Hill Country. There are other tells to the Amsterdammers longing for sun: many of them have deep tans. I imagine the British are the same way. A deep tan, even that too much sun face patina means you’ve escaped the moist gloom, of only for a few weeks in August. But us over-warmed Texans, we can’t get enough of that chilly gloom. We can actually wear jackets and sweaters now, rain slickers. After two years I’m sure we’ll be sick of it. But that cicada orchestra filled heat is always there, waiting to snuggle you into a puddle.
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Original programming
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION!!1!
I posted to more excerpts from the book I’m working on. In doing so, I also wrote a table of contents page with a punchy introduction. Punch, punch.
An ask
We need more reviews for Software Defined Talk over in iTunes. It’s a sniveling thing to ask, but, really, it’s a joy to see reviews. Hopefully it leads to more listeners. We have around 2,000 to 3,000 downloads an episode now, which is pretty good for the topic and format. Still, think of all the people that aren’t hearing my ranting because the machine learning isn’t getting us high up enough in the you should listen lists. It’s a crime. So, be a dear, go write a review, only a positive one, of course. I’m not an idiot.
Another time
I can never remember the attribution, but one of my favorite quotes ends with the suggestion that the highest form of reading is sheer appreciation of style, over entertainment and “make you think” substance. Those two are fine, of course, but just enjoying the style is the poetic experience. This applies here:
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Computer maths
Just for the survey: A 2017 Gallup report found only 33 percent of US employees said they were engaged at work. This surprisingly low rate has serious consequences: their actively disengaged colleagues are estimated to have cost the US between $483 and $605 billion annually in lost productivity.”
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For internal products, the “customer” is the enterprise, usually their strategy and execution, aka, “grind and stack.” Staff are, often sadly, meatware enablers in the value stream just like any technology. Optimize the VSM, make more paper.
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“The developer shouldn’t have to know how to program NSX, or know what the security isolation boundaries are,” continued Fazzone. “But they should know that their organization has taken steps to unify the networking approach between the containerized applications and the traditional applications running in VMs, and take advantage of that ‘service’ offered by IT to extend the NSX-T support up into their container platform, versus just defaulting to the Layer 2 default that’s available in the open source community — so that their organization can realize that complete connectivity model in a consistent way.”
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“VMware’s ability to strategically partner to respond to shifting market forces is an impressive competency that should not be underestimated.”
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“Service management” considered legacy thing.
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Ops, still a thing.
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“For a cloud computing architecture to effectively deliver value, the bottom layer (IaaS) must deliver cheap, pay-as-you-go HW & the top layer (SaaS) must deliver ubiquitous adaptable access–but is it the middle layer [PaaS] that does most of the work.”
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Reading
I’ve managed to find time to read books this week.
I started Sharper Objects after watching the series. I’m always interested to look at how an author pulls of such a successful story. So far, I don’t have any searing insights. It’s just interesting and easy to read. That’s insight enough.
My highlights so far:
- “I was already tired of talking, and I’d said very little.”
- “I wished then that I hadn’t sucked down so much vodka. My thoughts were vaporizing, I couldn’t hold on to what he was saying, couldn’t ask the right questions.”
- vulpine
Meanwhile, there’s always the Noise in Your Head book. After a good first start, around 75% done I’m still waiting for the parlor trick to be explained so it can be believed. So far, we’re still at “just tell anxiety to punch you in the face harder and then…” it will mysteriously stop punching you in the face?
For example:
Fake it until you make it. Got it.
Hmm, so to change your mind you just get brave enough to be able to change your mind, or at least act as if you’ve changed your mind. Yup.
To some extent, this “be courageous, and accept that you’ll fail and, keep reminding yourself that you’re fucked in the head” advice is serviceable:
The mindfulness stuff is still sort of interesting, if only as a reminder to observe yourself as if it were another self, and manage accordingly, e.g.,
Have the courage to finish the book!
I’ve been reading The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World to my son. He loves it. It fits the bill for a kid who reminds us every day that he wants to be a paleontologist
Turns out
“Consider this: how well can you discern different shades of blue? If you speak Russian, Greek, Turkish, Korean or Japanese, your chances are much better than if you speak English. The former groups have two distinctive linguistic representations of blue. In Russian, for example, dark blue (sinii) and light blue (goluboi) are as distinct as red and pink. But in English, we know blue as a single concept. The deprivation of finer-grained color concepts poses a great perceptual disadvantage. English speakers more easily confuse blue shades, not because we have poorer vision, but because we lack the more granular distinctions in the language we speak.”
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“In the past 7 years, the market for good ol’ fried tater chips has grown at a snackable rate of 4%, pushing the global market for potato chips to.”
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Sounds like a (rightly) sympathetic, interesting take on being a representative.
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It’s hard to figure out what to do with all this, but it sure seems wonderful.
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From the notebook
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And finally...
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