Month: April 2008

service packs

I installed XP SP 3 on my home desktop machine today, and Vista SP 1 on my laptop. I needed to do the fix I mentioned in yesterday’s post to get the XP SP 3 install to run, but it was smooth sailing after I did that. The Vista SP 1 install on the laptop went fine, no hitches. Both installs took about an hour. (In both cases, I was running the install off a CD/DVD burned from an ISO aquired via MSDN.)

I don’t expect much from the XP service pack; it’s mostly just a rollup of fixes I probably already had on my machine. I’m hoping that the Vista SP, on the other hand, might improve speed & reliability a bit. I guess we’ll see!

Windows XP SP 3

I downloaded Windows XP SP 3 from MSDN yesterday and installed it on a few machines at work, no problems. I tried installing it on my home desktop machine today, and got an error partway through the install. The SP removed itself cleanly, from what I can tell, so no harm done. Poking around on the internet, I think this article may provide an answer to my problem. I haven’t tried it yet, though. Maybe tomorrow.

Flannery O’Connor

I’ve gotten a good number of books through Bookmooch since I joined up a couple of weeks ago. I just got a Flannery O’Connor short story collection in the mail today. I’ve only read a few of her stories, so I’m looking forward to reading more.

And I also just got approved for a free account on britannica.com, through their WebShare program, so I guess I’m a bona fide “web publisher” now. Either that, or they just rubber-stamped all the applications for this program. Either way, the Flannery O’Connor link above is to a Britannica article. The Britannica site is OK, but some of the bells & whistles they’ve got on it make it a little difficult to actually read the article, at least through Firefox.

Wikipedia has a reasonable article on her too, of course.

weird WSJ news

Some weird Wall Street Journal news this week. First, editor Marcus W. Brauchli is resigning, which looks like it will just speed up the changes that have been going on with the WSJ since Rupert Murdoch took over. Newsweek has a fairly lengthy story this week about Murdoch’s plans for the Journal, which include adding more political and general-interest news, and generally trying to make the paper more of a competitor with the NY Times.

There’s a fun little parody of the WSJ available here. (The Times has an article about it here.) I’ll have to see if I can pick this thing up the next time I’m in New York.

I still find the WSJ to be a useful paper, and I’m not regretting renewing my subscription last year. I largely ignore the editorial pages. Mostly, I just read the business news and some of the oddball stuff they tend to throw in. (For instance, today’s paper has a front-page article about opera prompters.) It sounds a bit like Murdoch might cut down on the quirkier articles, which would really be a shame, but we’ll see what happens there.

Last Lecture

I bought The Last Lecture in Kindle format a few days ago. I’m almost done reading it. It’s a pretty good read. Lots of short chapters, mostly random anecdotes from Randy Pausch’s life. There’s nothing in the book that’s likely to change my life, I think, but just a lot of interesting little insights, and some fun stories.
This is also the first book I’m reading, in its entirety, on the Kindle. It’s been a pretty smooth reading experience. Certainly no worse than reading an old-fashioned paper book, but not necessarily any better. Of course, there are some photos in the book, and they really don’t look at all good on the Kindle, so that’s a concern. In the future, I’ll probably avoid buying any book for the Kindle if I know it’s heavy with photos or other graphics.

more on BookMooch

After my post about BookMooch last night, I wound up listing some more books, about 30 in total. And, this morning, I had requests for a number of them. I’ve now got eight packages ready to bring over to the post office tomorrow morning. I’m sending most of them media mail, so it shouldn’t be too expensive. One’s going to Canada, though, so I think I’ll send that one in a flat-rate Priority Mail envelope. It’ll cost me a few bucks, but BookMooch gives you three points for shipping internationally, so I should get three books out of this one trade.

On the receiving side, I’ve got three books coming to me. I’ve added most of the books on my Amazon wish list to my BookMooch wish list. Aside from the three that are coming, I don’t think any of the others are out there in the BookMooch system anywhere right now. I’ll have to look around and see if anyone’s got anything I’m interested in, so I can use up some of the points I’m getting from sending out so much stuff.

Bookmooch

There was an article on CNET today about Bookmooch. This is a book-trading site, basically, similar to LaLa or Peerflix, only for books. The setup is pretty simple. You get a point for every book you send out; every book you “mooch” from someone else costs a point. You get a tenth of a point just for listing a book in your inventory. So I got one point by listing ten books, and now I’ve got a William Gibson novel on its way to me. And I’m sending out a Star Wars novel, so that gets me another point. I don’t know if this will result in overall fewer books in my apartment, or more books, but if nothing else, I’m at least moving some stuff around.

For Many Employees, A Dream Job Is One That Isn’t a Nightmare

And one more WSJ article! This ties into the stress factor mentioned in my last post. And here’s an article on burnout from CNET. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about job-related stress, and what I can do to minimize the amount of stress, both for myself and for the people who report to me. I really think I *do* like my job, though it’s challenging at times. I do get stressed out a lot. I’ve found that a quick afternoon trip to Starbucks helps out, if I’m feeling weird. And I try to shift gears between different projects often, if one particular thing is driving me nuts. And of course I try to remember the advice of people like David Allen and Randy Pausch, in terms of keeping things in perspective and keeping things organized.

read more | digg story