Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

Tag
Work

25 Apr 2009, 23:27 p.m.

Hiro-ics Don't Scale, They Say

Now I'm rereading Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash bit by bit. Spoiler ahead: The important thing is, Hiro, that you have to understand the Mafia way. And the Mafia way is that we pursue larger goals …

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25 Apr 2009, 19:56 p.m.

Translation Of A Truth

I reread much of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon a few weeks ago and found this passage: "We're businessmen," Avi says. "We make money. Gold is worth money." "Gold is the corpse of value," says Goto Dengo. …

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23 Apr 2009, 6:45 a.m.

Learning

In the last two weeks, I have learned rather a lot about configuring and troubleshooting usage of Empathy, Telepathy, Synaptic, PPAs, git, TeX/LaTeX/dvi, gtimelog, IRC and bip, RSA SSH, and XMPP. Well, it was a …

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18 Apr 2009, 8:04 a.m.

Ramping Up

In my first week at Collabora, I've learned that I can stand to poke at .conf, .rc, and similar files for at most two hours out of my working day. I've also learned that the …

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11 Apr 2009, 19:50 p.m.

This Retrospective, In Retrospect, Has A Theme

An abbreviated diary of the past few days, mostly for future Sumana's use: Wednesday I went to Supper and the Sci-Fi Screening Room with a journalist who opines that it's his God-given right to drink …

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02 Apr 2009, 8:35 a.m.

If You Read This To The End You Get To See Inside My Marriage

I watched the interview Jon Stewart did with Jim Cramer a few weeks ago. If you're the kind of person who loves Jon Stewart's work, you probably heard about it. Stewart's key critiques of CNBC: …

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01 Apr 2009, 9:17 a.m.

New Awesome Work

Martin and I are co-founding a new firm to produce the PoTeaTo, a food-and-beverage convergence device targeted at the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Simply drop the PoTeaTo into a small pot of …

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01 Apr 2009, 7:40 a.m.

The Long View

Throughout Jody Procter's memoir Toil: Building Yourself, a diary of his work helping build one specific house in a small Oregon city, Procter aches for the weekend, feels hopeful and buoyant working through Friday afternoon, …

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01 Apr 2009, 0:49 a.m.

Cost-Benefit Analysis For Projects: Caution!

We often say that something is/isn't "worth it" based on a reflexive guess. The important thing isn't quantifying all those guesses to the tenth decimal point, it's getting into the habit of interrogating them. How …

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28 Mar 2009, 14:33 p.m.

A Book Review About Leadership

I mostly wrote this book review in the fall of 2008. On the Psychology of Military Incompetence by Norman Dixon 1976 On The Psychology of Military Incompetence is 400 pages long, and worth savoring. Its …

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