Daily Thoughts 3/28/2009

Reading Statue

Daily Thoughts 3/28/2009

I spent some time this morning clearing off my desk, adding some files to my filing cabinet, and transferring numbers into my phone book from notes left on my desk. I have a nice pile of things to do in my inbox now. It is a bit more organized. I have a tendency to do things immediately and not wait until they go in the inbox. I check my mailbox first thing in the morning and then check my email after that.

I have a pile of books to read on the subway, two science fiction books; Shambling Towards Hiroshima by James Morrow and Claws That Catch by John Ringo and Travis S. Taylor; two business books; Up the Organization by Robert Townsend and How The Way We Talk Can Change The Way We Work by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey; and one book on libraries, Putting Service Into Library Staff Training A Patron Centered Guide by Joanne M. Bessler. The last book is supposed to focus on the patron centered library concept.

We have a program called Professor Teaches for self paced instruction for Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Publisher. I am hoping that I can get in a half hour each day to improve my Microsoft Office skills. I started with Word today.

I finished reading the Everything Managing People Book on the train home. It was rather boring. It is not something that I can recommend to read except for its practicality. The writing is rather lackluster and the examples are not that interesting. There are two sections which I found kind of interesting, how to handle layoffs if you are a manager, and how to handle holiday parties. Other than that there was very little to recommend reading this book.

I also watched the ending of Slam Nation which is about the National Poetry Slam of 1996. The producer Paul Devlin has won five emmy awards for his work. There is a website for the movie, http://www.slamnation.com This movie is very enjoyable. Taylor Mali is really interesting to watch. I can understand why people like Marc Smith more than they like Bob Holman. It makes sense to me. I learned a lot about poetry watching this movie. The most interesting aspect to me in the film was how the poets rehearsed and projected emotion. You do not get to see poets emotion on the page.

I have been reading a lot of professional literature recently, not as much fiction. I think I am going to read Up The Organization by Robert Townsend next. I talso think I might pick out a few graphic novels to break up what I am reading and change the focus for a bit. I think people like my science fiction and fiction reviews better.

Web Bits

I took a few minutes to look at http://www.thedailyme.com/ which is supposed to be a personalized news service. I think the site needs a little bit of work. It allows you to set keywords for news articles so you can personalize the service. It is an interesting, but not fully developed idea.