I'm Rory Parle, an Irish software engineer living in London.
A brief list of interesting things, culled from the items I shared in Google Reader in the last week:
A brief list of interesting things, culled from the items I shared in Google Reader in the last week:
In Google we have a practice called “snippets”, where every employee writes a short list of the things they achieved over the course of the preceding week, allowing anyone else in the company to keep track of anyone’s progress. It’s a handy way to find out what’s going on, and it’s also a good way for managers to keep tabs on their reports without having to micromanage them.
In the nearly two years that I’ve been at the company, even bearing i mind the kid of superstars that make up some of Google’s employee numbers, I’ve never come close to seeing a set of snippets to rival this day’s-worth of work. If I ever feel like I’ve done enough for a day and can afford to slack off for a bit, now I know that I haven’t and I can’t.
A brief list of interesting things, culled from the items I shared in Google Reader in the last week:
I’m in London for what I was shocked to figure out will actually be my longest ever visit to the UK. I’m staying here for a full seven days—practically an aeon when surrounded by funny-coloured buses and pastie shops. England for me occupies a dedicated spot in the uncanny valley, similar—but not similar enough—to home.
For example, at home I expect toothpaste to come in a tube that’s more than three centimeters long.
Yeah, I’m doing that thing where I link to A-listers again (are popular bloggers still called A-listers?). Jason Kottke linked to a firstshowing.net article on (supposedly) the 19 best movies you didn’t see in 2008.
It’s an interesting list, despite falling down in two crucial respects. First, I have seen one of the movies on the list (and I suspect you’ve seen at least one also, if you’re a movie fan); and second, I’m reasonably confident that these movies didn’t all come out in 2008, at least where I live.
The one film on the list that I did see is Choke, directed by Clark Gregg and based on the book by Chuck “Fight Club” Palahniuk. The article describes it thusly:
A devious and fun exercise in adapting the dark musings of the great Chuck Palahniuk, Choke explores the life of a sex addict trying to deal with a mother who is slipping away. With great performances from Sam Rockwell and Brad William Henke combined with twisted humor that can only come from the mind behind Fight Club, Choke is easily one of the most unique and authentically dark comedies of the year. If you dig deviance, this is one you shouldn’t let pass by.
I agree completely. Choke is one of the best movies I’ve seen in the last few months. It wins on being both funny and dark, and on being quite unlike everything else showing right now.
Despite what most modern commentators would have you believe, there are actually some new movies being made right now that aren’t remakes, sequels, or copies of existing movies. Choke is one of them, and it looks fro the rest of that article that it’s not alone.
There are some films mentioned that I intended to see but haven’t got around to yet. There are others that I specifically decided not to see, and I may or may not change my mind on some of those. There are also quite a few that I never heard of at all, or at least forgot about quickly.
Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist is already on my list to see, and I believe it’s due out here soon (I can’t find a date for it, but I’m pretty certain it hasn’t been and gone.) I’m also going to have to seek out Charlie Bartlett, given Robert Downey Jr.’s hit rate for the rest of the year. Speaking of Kirk Lazarus, there seem to be quite a few movies due out this year that are sure to benefit from his presence.
A brief list of interesting things, culled from the items I shared in Google Reader in the last week:
Happy Still Relatively New Year! I know it’s a week in, and I realize that you may feel hurt by my neglecting you for this long, but as always I have a really good excuse.
I was pretty unwell for a few days spanning the ’08/’09 switch-a-roo. I was laid up in bed being attended to by my carefully appointed transition team. Special thanks to my nominee for Secretary for Buying Me Soup, whom I won’t name because it occurs to me that I haven’t actually asked her yet if I’m allowed to talk about her on the wild-wild-web. She’ll appreciate being called whom anyway.
So here we are, a week into the year, at the point where most people are already starting to give up on their overly-ambitious resolutions (“Exercise how often?”; “Spend how long with Grandpa?”; “Limit myself to how many class A’s?”) and I haven’t even written any. What’s more, I’m not meta enough to make that a resolution itself (though I’m meta enough to make that joke—go figure).
I’m usually a proponent of starting on changes as soon as you think of them instead of waiting for some arbitrary time to pass. Think of it as starting on November 4 instead of January 20. No sense in lazing about with three cigarettes in one hand and a glazed leg of ham in the other, staring at a calendar and waiting for permission to stick a patch on your arm and step on an Obese-B-Gone™ treadmill.
The trouble is that this year—or rather last year, sorry—I was holding off on making any big attempts at changing anything while I waited for the conclusion of some career wrangling I’m trying. The short version of that story is that I’m trying to move into a new job that I have described as, “Same company, same office, same desk, same team, similar work, and it’s taken over six months to get this far with the switch”. I wanted that whole rigmarole to be over before I picked up and moved on with my life from there. So the plan went.
I had expected that to be reasonably close to wrapping up at the end of the year, but it appears that it’s going to drag on for another bit. I now realize that there’s no reason for it to keep getting in the way of me making plans, so it happens that I find myself here at the start of the year thinking about what I’d like to do with myself in the near future.
Expect news of what transpires.
A brief list of interesting things, culled from the items I shared in Google Reader in the last week:
A brief list of interesting things, culled from the items I shared in Google Reader in the last week: