Reading Off The Web

By now you have worked out that pure Sharepoint content is not the point of this blog, no matter how I try to keep it on-topic. But then, it was named for one of those things that happen out in the real world, a cross-pollination, as it were. This is more to do with what happens when a straight arts and lit person discovers they are pretty good at puzzles, uses this ability to strip the skin off the systems running the world for money, and is, accordingly, horrified at what lies beneath.*

*Disorganization and people, mostly.

In order to escape the horror that is realizing the people who made these systems are, for real, people, and the biases are now hard-coded, I have become a reader. Readers have book lists. Other people know they're readers, and ask for book lists. Some of mine are long enough to reveal my profound disappointment with reality as it stands; this is not one of those. This is my short list.  Most of these are pop culture or pop science. All of them have roots in quite recent research or benefit strongly from broader background reading, but stand well on their own.

All of these are affiliate-linked, of course. But you can probably find them in the TPL, and I recommend you do so.

1. vN, Madeline Ashby – Read this book! She’s local, it’s recent, it’s AMAZINGLY WELL DONE for a brutal story about all the weirdest bits of the internet. SO GOOD.
2. Burning Your Boats, Angela Carter  – the collected short stories: I’d been recommending The Bloody Chamber to all and sundry, and, truly, it deserves it – but this has all that and more.
3. Mauve, Simon Garfield – the history of organic chemistry through the development of artificial dye.
4. Stiff, Mary Roach – What happens to people when they are no longer people, per se.
5. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel – memoir is everywhere. This one is an excellent graphic novel.
6. Stolen, Annette LaPoint – not for everyone, but for most people; a novel of the praries and contemporary geekdom and theft and murder.
7. Gun Machine, Warren Ellis – Again, the violence may be too much, but I loved it.
8. The Information, James Gleick – A survey of the history of information as quantifiable product. I’m reading it for class, but why shouldn’t others benefit?
9. Zero History, William Gibson – the ending is a bit weak. I like his writing anyway. I want to live in that world.
10. Ready Player One, Ernst Cline – I was ambivalent to this but in the end re-read it twice. So I suppose, if we’re going to Other Worlds…

Smartphones and Museum Security

This is almost unrelated to Sharepoint, but directly related to management issues within software development. And museums.

I recently acquired a smartphone, one of them new-fangled pocketglass businesses. It is from Google because my friends are hackers and therefore when they hand down phones, they hand down the best phones, flat glass things with changeable batteries made in Korea like fashion will be for the next ten years, and the phones are generally scraped absolutely clean of nonsense. After receiving their phones, I place them in plastic boxes and use them until they are run over by cars.
Number Of Phones Lost To Being Run Over By Cars, Last Three Years: Six.
Suspicion of Value of Phones Generally: Very High.

As an outsider to how systems are supposed to work, this new pocketglass causes me deep-set suspicion.  Every major piece of software I have ever touched has seemed, once I got inside it, hideously broken. I am aware in my bones that things rot. For example, there is almost certainly a botnet in nearly every major museum, all over the world, because as museum staff we just don't have the money to prevent them; bureaucracy, of which proper software security is an evolved form, is hopelessly expensive. Having gone through the wringer of Microsoft's idea of the future, always a relay race of catch-up, I wonder how long it will be until these tiny perfect glasses begin to break. My hacker friends say not long.

There is an interesting problem here: banks tend not to store things that are actually irreplaceable, in the sense that more cannot be printed, but museums sure do. Whatever it is a given museum stores, it is almost certainly not multiple. We don't do multiples. There are no copies of this work. The work is the work and the whole of the work, and though there may be records, scans, and 3D prints of it, once it is gone, it is gone. And museums are almost always going broke, but lately, they are going broker, faster. The things we store are valuable because they are the sort of thing that is not taxed as income, and cannot be easily shared, except, of course, that it can. We hold the cargo cult in our bellies and our basements and our records-keeping. We are no longer truly funding or valuing our own research, but the things we were once researching still need to be preserved, at great cost.

A pocket glass radio that can control everything, including electronic locks, and that talks to other pocket radios by touch. I am wondering what their common cold is going to look like, and what doors it will pop open with its coughing.

Soon To Be Hungover, Still Full Of Bears

What's this blog about, anyway? Menswear that remains flattering? Software giants having difficulty navigating the quick rate of change despite their massive cash reserves? The desire of said giants to maintain reserves of cash and walled gardens rather than simply making things better?

All of the above! Sharepoint 2010, new in 2013. There will be a new release of Sharepoint this year, and it has been said through the grapevine that Microsoft has caved. We are to be allowed Nice Things, like normal web-development administration privileges. Using text editors. Fewer of the Madd Haxx. This seems pleasant, in theory, although I could wish they'd released it five years past; it seems promising, on the surface.

Like cake. We all like cake, correct?

I am sure at this stage that it can be taken as understood that said cake is, in fact, a lie. You're still going to have to administer legacy systems. You're still going to have to use terrible haxx to do it, and you still have a pretty sweet gig breaking broken things and being angry for a living. But today, today is the day before New Year's Day, and therefore it is safe to assume that one of us is preparing for a hangover.

Because it is the slow patch, and because you will soon begin the painstaking work of repairing and styling an installation of Sharepoint 2007, take today to permission some things, then go read some of the Top Ten lists that were supposed to occupy your time over break. While you in reality slept and read and slept some more.

Here are some ever-adorable Pizzly Bears on Melting Ice by Masahiro Minami.

Perhaps you could review the Comprehensive List of Internet Emoticons, hosted by wikipedia. ಠ_ರೃ

Mykki Blanco is an awesome artist and this video is very good.
As is Ane Brun's Do You Remember
It fades nicely into Rae Spoon's Ocean Blue/Death In Venice.
Then you get to the Azealia.

It is New Years Eve, so the only conceivable reason you are working at all is for the money. At the same time, it is safe to assume there's shit-all to be done at your office, so here is some stuff from The Billfold, like my rental history as of last year - non-comprehensive - or bits on the best things people have done when they've quit their terrible jobs. Use that to kill some time. Poke around the neat corners of the web. Take a break already. You'll have more fighting to do soon enough.