Books
- A Memory Called Empire: this one had some elements that ended up intersecting in interesting ways with Foundation (the show at least)
- Echo: a challenging and beautiful younger-reader book that I recommend listening to, as they do some interesting things with the audio
- Anxious People: I started off disliking this one, but the things that annoyed me at first turned out to make sense as it went on, and it ended up being something I enjoyed very much
- Altered Carbon: great start to the series, and it was good to see the written version
- The Resisters: interesting mashup of baseball and speculative fiction
- Parable of the Sower: another great series start, one that I had put off reading too long!
- Abaddon’s Gate and Cibola Burn: Expanse #3 and #4, the former of which was a very rare 5-star book for me
- Harrow the Ninth: #2 in the series…a very-challenging-but-very-rewarding “all the genres at once” book
- The Testaments: #2 in the series, and a worthy successor to Handmaid’s Tale
- A Canticle for Leibowitz: I was surprised this was written decades ago, as it feels like modern speculative fiction
- Ursula K. Le Guin: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations: full of her cutting insights and beautiful wit
- Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty: summarizing how political and economic are intertwined and how extraction leads to downfall
- The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains: we are getting better at some ways of thinking and worse at others, and it’s important to understand the modes and tradeoffs
- Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art: fascinating look at the development of our faces, how breathing affects health, and various breathing experiments & exercises
- The End of Alzheimer’s: The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline: while I’m not high risk (due to not having the genetic variants), I wanted to learn more about this topic, and this book is a very interesting deep dive full of detailed guidance and information that is relevant to any person’s health
- The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century: the description of this book made me think I would hate it, but it ended up being one of the most interesting things I read this year
- Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony: as a Methodist-turned-Mennonite, Hauerwas is probably “required” reading for me, but it took until this year for me to finally read this one
- Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: another classic that I finally read to get back to the principles that started a movement
- The Fate of Food: What We’ll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World: highly speculative, but a fascinating overview of the various areas in which we’ll need to meet challenges
- Plough Quarterly: I love engaging with their challenging blend of radical and conservative (published by the Bruderhof, an Anabaptist common-purse denomination)
- Anabaptist World: similarly, the publication for my Anabaptist denomination (Mennonite)
- New Philosopher: a thoughtful periodical with each issue being dedicated to a topic
- Indianapolis Recorder: the best local newspaper
- Your Local Library and Libby for borrowing ebooks and audiobooks
- Bookshop for purchasing books and supporting your favorite bookstore
- UpNext for read-it-later (note: I will likely move to Readwise Reader once I get through the waitlist)
- Readwise.io to automatically manage & resurface highlights and notes from all of the above and more
- Storygraph for tracking books
- Inkl for lower-hassle news from a variety of sources
- Bandcamp for trying and buying music
- MusicHarbor for finding out about new music releases for bands who have made the poor choice to not be on Bandcamp
- iTunes match to make your music collection available across multiple devices
- Marvis Pro for listening to that library on iOS
- Plex for serving up your whole media library and Plexamp for an incredible listening experience wherever you’ve made that library available (note: I’m looking for Plex friends!)
- Last.fm for tracking listening, including from Marvis and Plex (above) or from Web Scrobbler in the browser
- JustWatch for seeing where a show or movie is currently available and tracking watchlists/watching without losing your place when a show moves to another provider
- Overcast for podcasts
- Craft for fun notetaking, writing, shared documents, and impromptu websites
- Fastmail for email, calendar, contacts
- Micro.blog for blogging, microblogging, social media that’s not a dumpster fire, and (optionally, additionally) POSSE, a newsletter service, read-it-later service, bookshelf service, podcasting service, and video service
- Mars Edit 4 for revising, tagging, managing, or deleting micro.blog posts or importing/adding a backdated post
- NextDNS for blocking a lot of bad stuff (including trackers and ads)
- Signal for direct messaging and calls
- DuckDuckGo for search that respects you
- A digital password vault
- Multi-Factor Authentication for everywhere that supports it, especially for your main email provider that all your other accounts are tied to (note: avoid text messages as the 2nd factor whenever there are better options)
- A couple hard drives and an alternate location (such as a family-member’s home or a safe deposit box) for periodic swapping of backups outside of your cloud storage
- Parcel for tracking packages and deliveries
- CloudMounter for accessing cloud storage on your Mac
- Magnet for turning OSX into a tiling window manager
- Vivaldi for a full-feature independent browser that still works on most of the Internet
- Levels for learning about how different foods, activities, and events affect your glucose and health
- A periodic home cleaning service
- A personal trainer to help with physical therapy and fitness
📚 loving the New Testament: First Nations Version 🕊
📚 Four Thousand Weeks: it’s as good as they say.
Nothing original, but a great collection of wisdom distilled from various traditions (faith, agile/lean, strategy, psychology, etc.).
Live: micro.blog republic of readers! 📚
2021 Recommendations Recap Recap:
📚 This is blowing my mind every page or so. Reminds me of what it was like reading Debt. We lost so much when we lost Graeber.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity a book by David Graeber and David Wengrow
2021 Recommendations - Reading 📚🗞
Note: I’ve collected the recommended books from this post on this bookshop list, where possible. It is an affiliate link (though you can and should change to your local favorite bookshop), but if you buy any of them via my storefront, I will put that money back into getting more books and sharing the good ones.
I read 48 books in 2021. As I mentioned in my 2021 service recommendations I use StoryGraph to track reading, so you can see an overview of my reading there.
But just because I read a book doesn’t mean it was good! Here are the ones I recommend:
Fiction
Nonfiction
Periodicals
Further reading: 2020 Fiction Review and 2020 Nonfiction Review
📚🖋 Nice bonus item from PM Press for the new year.
The Future Is Unwritten journal with quotes on the recto pages.
2021 Recommendations - Products and Services
Reading 📚📑
Further reading: 2021 Reading Recommendations
Listening 🎙🎶 and Watching 📺
Further reading: 2021 Watching Recommendations, 2021 Listening Recommendations
Writing and Communication
Security and Privacy
Other
Luxuries That I Wish Weren’t
Note: This page contains affiliate links. I may receive a discount or commission for things your purchase. Nevertheless, these are real recommendations for products and services I have used.
📚 An interesting exercise from The Scout Mindset.
For these trivia sets, I was underconfident, but
“A couple of hours of practice is all it takes for most people to become very well calibrated…within a single domain
Calibration “will carry over partially” to other domains.
📚 Sunday Quote
Week in Review 2021-12-10....err 2021-12-16
I started writing this on Friday the 10th, but am just now posting, because…
🔒 The Log4j issue is really bad. Security and engineering teams are scrambling to protect against attacks. The best teams started last week or weekend, but many organizations waited until Monday or later to get going. The vulnerability is once again hitting the hard problems of inventory management, 3rd-party software component management, and vendor management. I don’t think I’ve seen something this bad in 20 years of being a security practitioner. The vulnerability is easy to exploit, has the worst kind of impact (it runs the attacker’s code), and is present in many common technologies. In addition, there have been several follow-on problems identified, such as additional attacks, or weaknesses in the fixes for the attack! If you’d like a laugh instead of cry, check log4j memes.
⚽️ After a really great start to the Premiere League (where they were recently top of the table) and Champions League (where they are reigning champions), Chelsea are leaking goals and struggling at this point in the seasons. 3-3 vs. Zenit in the CL means they take 2nd spot (below Juventus), but are on to the round of 16 and matched up with Lille. They got a little lucky in the Leeds PL game to win 3-2, but tied 1-1 in what should have been an easy win at home against Everton.
🛩 I recently had my 2nd business travel since “the beforetimes”. I tested when I got back and am luckily safe. I welcomed my new team members (direct and indirect reports) and honed 2022 strategy with the leaders on my team. It was good getting people together, but still feels a little strange getting back to it! In other work news, I also got the promotion I had been hoping for, bringing me to only 1 to 2 levels below my internal customers and working peers 😆. (Outside my team, I primarily work with SVPs and VPs, and am now an AVP.) Joking aside, I am thankful for the support of my leaders, who have shown trust in me and helped find funding and assistance for the important initiatives I’ve been pushing.
📚 My spouse and I registered for a new library. To be honest, we mostly did it to have another library in Libby/Overdive, but it turns out the library is lovely, too. There’s no public funding in the town for a library and kids had to pay high fees to get access to a library in one of the neighboring towns. So, one family donated the land, funds for the building, and funds for the initial collection of materials. The library stays afloat with donations and a modest yearly fee for patrons. We were charmed by the library, especially their themed puzzle 🧩 collection that you can borrow like books!
🌟🎄 I’m looking forward to a break, soon. We’ll be hosting my spouse’s side of the family, again. All (who can be) are vaccinated (and boosted) and we will be testing before we get together. We have folks with compromised immune systems and/or who are too young to be vaccinated, but we are being safe for each other. We’re very much looking forward to time together, as there has been so little of that in the last two years.
Finished reading: Having and Being Had by Eula Biss 📚
Sunday Quote 📚
Have you tried this method? 🔒
Finished reading: A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. 📚
Incredible. It’s hard to imagine this book is so old, but I can see how it influenced many that have come since (e.g. Anathem)
Finished reading: The Black Prism by Brent Weeks 📚
This had “back in the Sanderson good days” vibes.