4-27
Once in a while a date sticks out as the “overbooked” day. 4/27 is one, and this upcoming Wednesday is another. Why, oh Gods of Scheduling, does this happen? What is so special about that Thursday, and this Wednesday? Hmmm.

world is flat- duh!

Office mate’s friend has quit software engineering in Hydrabad, India (my spelling sorry if bad) to work on a novel. His sounds better than mine. This Saturday at my book club, I plan on bringing up this friend as a (somewhat pointless) example to the boring, anectdotal, and out-of-date book, Friedman’s The World is Flat. I am being induced by my book club to read it. I wanted to read Work as Theater, but no, they wanted some journalists version of technology and economy. My objections? Well, so far it has not told me anything I don’t know already (and I don’t know much), and, it has positions that are from interviews with one person, which you may disagree with but can’t refute, as it’s just an interview, and not a set of evidence, historical or otherwise, to really back up his sweeping statements.

For example: somewhat ironically, on the chapter on collaborative, open-source systems, he mentions a period and a group of people I’m passingly familiar with, but he interviews only one guy, and not anyone else. That’s not very collaborative! Also, he defines things by “looking them up on the web” without mentioning the credentials of the site as related to what he’s looking up. Kind of naive, and a lot of his comments are kind of naive too. Can poeple really write stuff like this and get it published? Amazing. His international “flat” insights seem more like an IBM ad about being worldwide than anything resoundingly deeper. Going back to my friend whose friend is also writing a novel, half a world away, on similar topics to mine- that was occuring before, it’s just that now, I know about it. And I can email him. And we can be writing buddies. But what does that mean, beyond that? He doesn’t go there.

Maybe later on in the book I’ll come to something relevant. I feel like a h.s. sophomore with the green fields calling and a frisbee sailing by, but no, he has to study trigonometry.