As I try to ramp up my reading I'm converting my GoodReads habit to BookWyrm on the Fediverse. See my main Fediverse profile on Friendica at: friendica.myportal.social/profile/hankg
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An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the heart of one of the most …
This just arrived, in hard copy form in case Zuck pulls some shenanigans to get it pulled from ebook stores, so I'm just going to sit down and power through this for the rest of the weekend...
In “one of the most important athlete memoirs of its generation” (Kate Fagan, #1 New …
There is a certain amount of unhealthy balance and toxicity that these ultra-high performance environments and scenarios create for people. There will always be making enormous sacrifices of everything from long term health, relationship with friends and family, et cetera to make sure you get one of the handful of spots in the world every 2-4 years. Reading about how strenuous those environments were, even with supportive minded coaches can make me a bit tense. What is discussed here is the incredibly toxic, rules skirting if not outright breaking, psychological abuse, and even sexual assault on athletes by people in power at the Nike Oregon Program.
There is more to this book than just that. The author and her co-writer wove a very conversational/blogpost style covering everything from early childhood through to personal experiences well past her time in the Oregon program. It was a very open discussion about her …
There is a certain amount of unhealthy balance and toxicity that these ultra-high performance environments and scenarios create for people. There will always be making enormous sacrifices of everything from long term health, relationship with friends and family, et cetera to make sure you get one of the handful of spots in the world every 2-4 years. Reading about how strenuous those environments were, even with supportive minded coaches can make me a bit tense. What is discussed here is the incredibly toxic, rules skirting if not outright breaking, psychological abuse, and even sexual assault on athletes by people in power at the Nike Oregon Program.
There is more to this book than just that. The author and her co-writer wove a very conversational/blogpost style covering everything from early childhood through to personal experiences well past her time in the Oregon program. It was a very open discussion about her personal highs and lows throughout her entire life up to that point. You really get into the mind of an Olympic athlete. It is a shame that so much of it documents truly horrific behavior by Nike staff at the behest of program director/trainer Alberto Salazar and people he brought into the program.
In “one of the most important athlete memoirs of its generation” (Kate Fagan, #1 New …
Based on this and what I hear from a couple of the running podcasts I listen to hosted by college runners in the 1990s disordered eating ran rampant in men’s and women’s running teams in the quest to be as light as possible. I wonder if that has gotten better, or god forbid worse, as awareness of this issue has improved in recent decades.
An unknown benefactor supplies an orphaned blacksmith's apprentice with the means to be educated in …
I'm really struggling to want to finish this. I'm not finding the story engaging. The characters are acting in believable ways. The plot twists are eye rolling to me. I just want to pick up something else.
There are plenty of dry details about the entire prehistory and history of the development of the first release of the WindowsNT operating system. The handling of those details alone would have me rate it five stars. It really got into the development issues of each part of the OS, the hows and whys, and the timeline. It did much ,ore than that though. It fleshed out many major and minor team members’ back stories and personal experiences through the development cycle. It gave some sense of the usual emotions and boiler room environment around early releases, missed deadlines, pivots on approaches late in the game, and the inevitable burn out and post release feelings. It really put me in the developers mindset and flashed me back to those days of computing. If you have an interest in retro computing it is a must read.
It's incredible to me that Microsoft was dog fooding NT with the NT dev team in early-1991. First stage was when it was just a CLI without networking. Then graphics but no networking. Then all three. Looking forward it made sense since shipping to production was supposed to be mid-1992 but knowing it didn't get out the door until Q3 1993 it's impressive how raw a state it was in when they were in the "build the aircraft as we fly it" mode. #windows #history #ComputerHistory #RetroComputing
Reading through the book I'm doing internet searches to see what the people on the Windows NT team mentioned in the book look like, where are they now, et cetera. It's interesting how many went on to other well known big things. Unfortunately some have already passed away, in some cases at relative young ages, like Kent Diamond who died at 54 from a heart attack back in 2016.
Bill Bryson describes his attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail with his friend "Stephen Katz". …
I read this book back in the 1990s when I went to college near a segment of the Appalachian Trail. The idea of thru-hiking the 2200 miles of it seemed incredible to me. Someone recently brought the book up. As we chatted I realized I remember almost none of it, including some big parts of it. So I'm reading it again. This is not a how-to. This is almost a how-to not because this is a city slicking middle aged writer doing this attempt. That's probably what makes it so relatable. It's even been turned into a movie. Parts of it will tempt you to try it. Parts of it will dissuade you from ever hiking again. It was overall an easy entertaining read.
Rising star New York Times technology reporters, Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, tell for the …
Why do I torture myself reading biographies of people and/or companies I hate? I don't know. But I do, so add to the queue.
This book has a very niche target market. You have to love and care about computer history that surrounds the workstation market of the 1980/1990ss and the rise and fall of NeXT in that milieu. Not only that but you have to care specifically about the minutia around the sales and business side of that world rather than the tech side of that world. I'm in that target demographic. So the contents of the book work for me a lot. However by the author's own admission this book is largely compiled from contemporaneous notes he took at the time. It therefore feels like, and essentially is, a personal journal that got turned into a series of blog posts, that then got compiled into a one book volume. It reads and flows exactly like that, especially the first part. This could have used a good editor to polish it up quite …
This book has a very niche target market. You have to love and care about computer history that surrounds the workstation market of the 1980/1990ss and the rise and fall of NeXT in that milieu. Not only that but you have to care specifically about the minutia around the sales and business side of that world rather than the tech side of that world. I'm in that target demographic. So the contents of the book work for me a lot. However by the author's own admission this book is largely compiled from contemporaneous notes he took at the time. It therefore feels like, and essentially is, a personal journal that got turned into a series of blog posts, that then got compiled into a one book volume. It reads and flows exactly like that, especially the first part. This could have used a good editor to polish it up quite a bit.
Since the author was high up in the sales organization and was sucked in by Steve Jobs there is more than a good bit of apologia about those subjects. It is ironic because the stories he tells about Jobs in action are not flattering but it never gets him over the hump of hero worship around him. His diagnosis of the failure at NeXT isn't wrong as much as incomplete. The way NeXT could have potentially saved himself I think is staring right in his face but he doesn't see it even in hindsight. I could/should write a blog post on that since it is out of scope for a book review.
On content if you are interested in this niche I'd give it five stars. But you really have to care about the business/sales side of NeXT and selling in the workstation market of the 1980s/1990s. The lack of good editing dings it a couple stars but it isn't so bad as to be insurmountable to power through.
A young English gentleman of means, Aubrey is immediately intrigued by Lord Ruthven, the mysterious …
Because it was written over 200 years ago it definitely has some interesting stylistic choices that make it hard to get through. It is interesting seeing which parts of the vampire mythology existed in the early 1800s in Britain, when/where it was written. It is a novella so a short read. I didn't fall in love with it though.
Bill Bryson describes his attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail with his friend "Stephen Katz". …
I read this back in college. I had a conversation with someone about this and realized I forgot almost all of the major details. Time to read again…
A millennium into the future two advancements have altered the course of human history: the …
This was much better than the short story vignettes of I Robot series. You can see where some of the world building components of those short stories made it to this book. Although some of the characters act in unnatural feeling ways to scenarios I still very much enjoyed the story over all and felt engaged by it. The anachronisms provide an interesting snapshot of what mid-20th century views of super far future stuff would be like or the problems we face. The biggest anachronism being that the entire population of Earth or 8 billion could only be supported by using giant factory food production units making yeast based synthetic foods not growing it. There was even a quip about billions starving if they went back to growing food. Meanwhile earth passed that population point a couple years ago.
I thought I had read every book on the history of NeXT. I apparently missed this one! Now starting... #NextComputer #ComputerHistory #history
A millennium into the future two advancements have altered the course of human history: the …
Second book in the Asimov recommend sequence reading through to the Foundation series begins...
