Recently updated blogs

I’d like to share a few things I’ve learned about conducting skip level 1-1s. What is a skip level 1-1? Skip level 1-1s are a way to sense what is happening in your organization. The basic idea is: You schedule meetings with your “skip levels”. A skip level is the person two levels down. Your direct reports’ direct report. So if you manage Alex, and they manage Beth, you would …

September 30, 2024 No Blog Next Week I’ll be out of town Oct. 6-11 (Sunday through Friday). I’ll be competing in the Huntsman World Senior Games on Mon & Tue (Oct. 7-8) in Saint George, Utah. Then I fly directly to Houston for the US Table Tennis Hall of Fame Inductions and Banquet on Thursday (Oct. 10), where I’ll be doing the presentation for Dennis Taylor. I’ll write about this …

Shift networks (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Jeremy Kun asks how to permute vectors using few vector additions, elementwise multiplications, and rotation operations, for an application involving homomorphic encryption. Our fractional universe (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Jim Propp and his guest columnist Jeff Glibb parody those breathless but vague pop-sci expositions of new mathematical discoveries. Byrne’s Euclid (\(\mathbb{M}\)), the one with colored diagrams replacing all the symbols, newly digitized and available online from the Harvard library. Noted …

If anything looks wrong, read on the site! Hi there! As September ends, it's time to wake up for a new edition of Cool Links! This month's links are mostly web development related, with a couple ideas on how to build some fun components, a brilliant jab at the current state of commercial web, a jab at React and a jab at Safari. Honestly, it's a pack of somewhat negative …

We're just coming off of another heat wave in the Bay Area; temperatures have returned to a comfortable low-to-mid 70's Fahrenheit and humidity is hanging out around 30% (or so my weather station tells me). Temperatures in the 80's and 90's don't sound like much unless you don't have air conditioning (which many Bay Area homes don't) or insulation (ditto). This means that, under such conditions, life kind of sucks …

Cheiracanthium sp. – yellow sac spider, Boulder, Colorado, September, 2024. I found this spider inside the house the other day and managed to get a picture showing the 8 eyes. In case you were wondering what it is like to be a bat, think about what it must be like to be a spider. Spiders have simple eyes, as opposed to compound eyes like those of a dragonfly. Because the …

Could 2024’s hype beer, cask Bass, ever replace the traditional hazy, hoppy keg pale ales British drinkers have enjoyed for years? Its fans, a small group of contrarian hipsters, seem to think so. They share intelligence on the internet and trek to obscure out-of-town pubs to find it. And they boast about drinking it on social media and in blog posts. It seems to be as much about bragging rights …

Criterion did a giallo series and I went straight for the John Saxon movie. Nora is a young “New Yorker” visiting Rome (Letícia Román, also of a Russ Meyer erotic comedy and an Elvis flick). Her Aunt Ethel was being cared for by Dr. Saxon, dies almost instantly after he leaves, then Nora runs outside for help and is immediately mugged – tough town. She has a Blow-Up fever dream …

Books On Main, Friendship, WI (Like The Indie Bob Spot on Facebook and follow The Indie Bob Spot on X)Even now, over 600 bookstores into my journey, I continue to enjoy new experiences with the owners I meet. They come to their ownership with a wide range of backgrounds and talents. Jean B, the owner here at Books On Main has a talent and interest in an activity that I …

Streaming is a great way to listen to classical music. You have to ignore essentially all algorithmic recommendation features, which are generally oriented around tracks and playlists, but this isn't a terrible general policy anyway. Find the music you want to hear, and listen to it. If there are tools that help you find stuff, that's great. If there are tools that are supposed to help you find stuff, but …

Ah, Xcode Previews. The absolute best, worst thing Apple has ever shipped for developers. When it works, which for me is around 90% of the time, it’s absolutely essential to my workflow. Other times? It crashes, spins, indexes and loads for an eternity — and I end up sitting there and waiting for it to work again out of nothing else but pure, unadulterated spite. And, as I launch my …

Pnårp discovered a novel way to keep the voluminous amount of trash blowing about his front yard under control.

Online readingFirst, novelist Thea Lim on the many harms of algorithmic systems and the stultifying context their corporate owners want us all to be stuck in, where “every notification ping holds the possibility we have merit”:If there’s an off-duty pursuit you love—giving tarot readings, polishing beach rocks—it’s a great compliment to say: “You should do that for money.” Join the passion economy, give the market final say on the value …

Florrie Butterfield has cherished her independence all her life, so losing a leg in her mid-80s was devastating. Forced to leave the cottage she loved, she found a residential community in Oxfordshire that accepted people in wheelchairs, Babbington Hall. But just as Florrie has settled in, things start to go wrong. When the story begins, she is mourning Arthur Potts, a friend who fell out a window and died four …

The Session goes through periods of getting spammed with automated sign-ups. I’m not sure why. It’s not like they do anything with the accounts. They’re just created and then they sit there (until I delete them). In the past I’ve dealt with them in an ad-hoc way. If the sign-ups were all coming from the same IP addresses, I could block them. If the sign-ups showed some pattern in the …