Posts tagged "books"

I’m a big fan of Cal Newport and his books. Currently, I’m reading his latest one: “A World Without Email”

Every email comes at a small cognitive cost to the sender, and a small cognitive cost to the recipient. It has become easier than ever to “just send an email”, instead of diving deeper, solving the issue, or using a more appropriate, more efficient, or less stressful way of communication. Multiplied by the amount of companies, employees, emails per employee, the wasted time and cognitive cost of (over)using email for everything has become enormous. And instant messaging only amplifies the problem again.

I’ve become very good at filtering and processing email over the last years. But this is just trying to solve the receiving end of the problem. Now I’m curious about learning ways to fix the problem at the source. Not just for me, but for my colleagues, too.

A guy I know once said: “If you follow the herd, you’ll end up as lunch.” (Actually, he said “Schnitzel”, since he’s German, but you get the idea).

Well, here’s a guide, a manual if you wish, for avoiding the fate of leading a dull, boring and unremarkable life. This is not just a self-help or success guide type of book, it’s much more. It’s a manifesto for personal freedom that can apply to all of us, if we choose to follow it.

In some ways, it’s like the red pill/blue pill thing from The Matrix: Do you want to stay in the normal world, do normal, boring things like getting a job, applying for a mortgage, going on vacation once or twice a year, and feeding the ducks in the park after you retire?

Or do you want to decide for yourself what to do with your life, create your own rules and live your life the way you want?

A while ago, we tried defining ebooks, and figure out what they are, and what they aren’t. Now, let’s have a look at some success factors, or barriers, business implications and the (un)necessity of DRM.

In a recent blog article about the future of IT admins, my MUCOSUG-Buddy Wolfgang wondered whether the new generation of self-managed, appliance-like systems like Oracle Exadata (no link, page no longer exists), Oracle Sun Storage 7000 (no link, page no longer exists) and their friends from other vendors are making IT personnel redundant, or what kind of jobs IT people are supposed to be doing in the future.

This reminded me of Dan Pink’s book “A Whole New Mind” (Amazon.com|co.uk|de, BooksOnBoard (no link, booksonboard.com no longer exists)). Pink argues that today’s “left-brainish” jobs are threatened by “abundance, automation and Asia” (the latter really meaning “outsourcing”) and that today’s knowledge workers need to learn how to better employ their “right-brain” and add creativity to their jobs, as a new competitive differentiator.

How does this relate to Technology or IT jobs?

Science Fiction stretches our imagination and makes us dream about cool, future, distant worlds and realities. And it’s fun, too.

But Science Fiction also serves an important purpose: It prepares society for the future. What will happen when technology X becomes available? How will our work, social and emotional lives change? What challenges and opportunities will we face, once certain new technologies become available?

There’s also a feedback circle around scientists, engineers and SF writers: Scientists discover new laws of nature, engineers apply them to create new technologies and SF authors show us the possibilities, inspiring the scientists and engineers where to look next, what new principle to explore and which new technologies to make real.

Here are my top 3 Science Fiction, but realistic novels of all time that help us prepare for the future. They are all based on solid futuristic research, still they are mind-boggling and thought-provoking. When you read them, you’ll get a true glimpse of the future - and view the present and the past in a new light.

2010 is going to be the year of the ebook. If it wasn’t obvious before, it became so overnight after Apple entered the ebook reader and distribution market big time.

I’ve been eying ebook and ebook reader developments for some time and decided to become an ebook early adopter: Over the holidays, I bought myself a Sony PRS-600 Ebook Reader (no link, page no longer exists). In this new blogging category, I’ll explore a few aspects of ebooks, formats and the ecosystem while trying to figure out what’s in it for you and me and the geeks in us.

Before we dive into ebook-land, it’s probably useful to figure out what the point of ebooks is in the first place, what we want from them and what we should expect of them. This is useful because today’s consumers, vendors, and the whole industry seem to be distracted by features, hype and old habits, sometimes missing the point.