Alright

Actually, you can never say for sure. In fact, more often than we care to admit, not everything is going to be all right.

But enough will be. The rest? That's what makes life interesting.

Stand Out

It seems that there are only two ways to make a name for yourself in the modern workplace:

Be spectacularly bad at what you do.

Be unbelievably good at what you do.

Either way, you're bound to be top of someone's mind.

On the other hand, if you happen to fall anywhere in between you're likely to be glossed over -- assuming anyone even remembers you matter.

So given the alternatives, the choice is easy, isn't it?

P.S. Hugh MacLeod suggests that there is a third alternative: be the only one in the world who does what you do. Quite right...but much harder.

The Internet is a Playground

I first learned of David Thorne and the blog 27b/6 because of an email exchange he posted on the internet between himself and his electricity provider, wherein he attempts to question a seemingly exorbitant bill he received.

It was hilarious.

Now I find out that Thorne has collected a good deal of the material from 27b/6 (yes, even the aforementioned post) into the book The Internet is a Playground: Irreverent Correspondences of an Evil Online Genius.

First impressions? It's occasionally mean. A tad obnoxious. Sometimes inappropriate. Rather off-kilter. But yes, often just as hilarious.

For anyone who hasn't spent some time browsing through 27b/6, this is all you really need to know: it's like fringe social commentary, wrapped in satire, by a seemingly angry author with what somewhat twisted sense of humor, intent on annoying people -- and that's paying it a complement. See, what Thorne is good at is making a point, often in the most convoluted, biting and nearly-offensive way possible. He responds to hate mail from readers by engaging them in the most ridiculous email banter imaginable. He deliberately annoys his co-workers with correspondence filled with all manner of non sequiturs (sometimes with a "By the power of Grayskull" thrown in for good measure). He writes back to people of authority with any number of humiliating and obtuse references just to get his way. And all of it is posted on his blog, with the best (worst?) of it collected in The Internet is a Playground.

Yes: it is much rather like that train wreck about to happen that you just can't help but watch. But it is a train wreck that will amuse you, amaze you, and maybe even offend you a little. But that's okay. Sure, sometimes the writing can be a bit much -- it is idiosyncratic, often nonsensical, and mostly glib -- but it is, in its own way, quite riveting. In this sense, the title is quite appropriate: The Internet is a Playground is all about what happens when one puts the Internet in the hands of otherwise smart, talented and slightly unhinged people with perhaps too much time on their hands -- and even then, the joke may really be on all of us.

[The Penguin edition of The Internet is a Playground: Irreverent Correspondences with an Evil Online Genius will be published on 28 April 2011. A review copy was obtained from NetGalley.]

Liberal Democracy [Presentation Thursdays]

View this presentation on Slideshare

That course I once taught on Political Thought was actually designed to allow students to better appreciate the intricacies of liberal democracy. Hence, I put this short slide deck together as a summary of key difference between democracy's substance and its form.

[Confused about Presentation Thursdays? Then read the first in the series].

Run for It Marty! [The Internet Is Down]

Found this on the "user-powered Twitter directory" WeFollow.com:

I don't know what I dig more: the non-sequitur of it all, the pop culture reference, or the fact that the reference is from Back to the Future (quite possibly my favorite movie of all time).

[Confused about The Internet Is Down? Then read the first in the series.]

Moonwalking with Einstein

Joshua Foer's personal story is fundamentally intriguing: how does an otherwise ordinary journalist develop the skills necessary to be crowned the 2006 USA Memory Champion? This is the subject of his compelling new book Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.

But the book is more than just an exemplary piece of participatory journalism chronicling Foer's rise through the ranks of elite memory champions. It is also a wonderful reader on the science of human memory that waxes philosophical on the frontiers and limitations of our ability to remember things.

It is this delicate balance that makes Moonwalking with Einstein both very informative and highly entertaining. Foer begins by introducing the challenge before him, but soon thereafter deftly takes his readers on a journey through neuroscience as it applies to the art of remembering. Just as adeptly, he discusses many different tricks -- memory palaces and other mnemonic devices -- that allow people to commit to memory random numbers, names and faces, and decks of cards with unbelievable effectiveness. Many colorful individuals are also introduced along the way, from eccentric competitors at different memory competitions, to probably the most forgetful man in the world, to a "savant" whose genius may amount to no more than an exceptional memory.

Such is the book's charm: for as many different directions as the book branches out into, there is an unmistakeable clarity and cohesiveness to the book as befits no less than a person with an uncanny ability to remember disparate pieces of information without losing sight of the bigger picture. And he's a capable storyteller, too.

So how best to describe this first book from Joshua Foer? A compendium of scientific facts about the human brain? An exploration of various tips to improve one's memory? A memoir? Yes, yes, and yes. Moonwalking with Einstein is all of these things, and a great book besides.

Define: Friendship

Favors you don't have to repay (but will, anyway).

Long conversations about nothing in particular.

Short conversations about what really matters.

Shared aspirations, frustrations, memories.

Inside jokes that don't stop being funny.

Picking up where you left off, each and every time.

NetGalley

Lately, I've been thinking of sticking my neck out by reaching out to authors and publishing houses and offering my services as a book reviewer. It's true that my reading list has increasingly come to feature titles of more recent publication (more so now that I'm armed with a Kindle); yet putting myself in a position to write about upcoming and soon-to-be-published titles has so far been an elusive goal.

Then I discovered NetGalley.

To put it simply, NetGalley is a service that gives people who write about books access to electronic galley proofs or advance copies of titles due for publication. Users (that is to say, reviewers) sign up for an account, provide information about themselves such as where their writing may be featured (note: blogs count), and then browse catalogues made available by a variety of publishers. Any user can request access to a title that catches their fancy. These requests are then processed by the title's publisher; if granted, the requesting user is then provided the galley, access to press kits about the title (if available), and a facility to send their written review to the book's publisher as a courtesy, if so desired.

Galleys can be read a variety of ways once approved. Naturally, the site itself has a preview function for quick and easy viewing; but there is the added convenience of downloading the title or having it sent to one's Kindle. In the former case, Adobe Digital Editions is required, and the galley will be presented in a pre-publication PDF format with a time-bound DRM license. On the other hand, the alternative is to have NetGalley send a converted version of the file in .azw format directly to one's Kindle (you'll need the appropriate settings for this). However, it would appear that the Kindle option is not available for all titles, nor can one tell beforehand which titles support it.

My first foray into NetGalley perhaps provided me with the entire spectrum of possible outcomes one can expect from the service -- a baptism by fire, so to speak. I requested three titles, and was approved access to two (it seems you get a polite email stating that your request has been denied, if that happens to be the case). Since I hadn't tried the Kindle's document conversion feature, I had the first title delivered to my Kindle's @free.kindle.com address. Although that galley was readable and I could now take it anywhere, its formatting unfortunately left much to be desired (like most PDFs on a Kindle). It was readable, though, and I was willing to live with it.

The second title for which I received approval did not have a Kindle option, forcing me to download it to Adobe Digital Editions. In this format, the downloaded copy was a pre-publication proof with a license that would expire after 55 days. Personally, it would seem this route is a better way to go about reading these materials, especially with a supported tablet (or in my case, an 11" Macbook Air).

These quirks notwithstanding, I'm glad I happened upon the site. It's a valuable resource for book bloggers, a great means to discover new titles, and an accessible way to build one's portfolio of reviews as a writer. Who knows? Maybe in the not too distant future I'll make a name for myself as a celebrated book reviewer, all because I signed up at NetGalley.

The Imperfectionists

To be at the top of one's game, employed in a dynamic workplace, in an industry on the rise, with one's personal life in harmony -- that is the perfection to which many professionals aspire.

But what of the opposite: of being washed up, working someplace dysfunctional, in an industry on the decline, while one's private life slowly falls apart? Wouldn't this qualify, in contrast, as the height of imperfection?

Such themes lie at the heart of The Imperfectionists, a novel by Tom Rachman that has received no shortage of critical acclaim, all well-deserved. The book is largely about the final days of an English-language newspaper headquartered in Rome, told through the perspectives of the broadsheet's various staff. The beauty, however, lies in its understated complexity, with Rachman methodically peeling away layers in order to give readers a more nuanced picture of the events that are unfolding.

This is achieved partly through strong character development. Indeed, Rachman's characters in The Imperfectionists are written so well that it is hard not to empathize with them and feel for their struggles. Whether it's the intelligent business correspondent who embraces the dead-end relationship she finds herself in, or the obituary writer who discovers his own writing talents following unmistakeable tragedy, or the talented editor-in-chief who appears to have it all together but is quietly falling apart, each of Rachman's characters has an uncanny human quality about them -- imperfection? -- that is utterly believable.

Yet the novel also shines because of the clever way that Rachman tells the story of how this fictional newspaper came to be. For the most part, the novel takes place in the present; but with each chapter, readers are treated to episodes from various points in the broadsheet's history. This serves to make an already compelling story even more so, as it comes to light that the newspaper was but the end result of one man's imperfect expression of his passion, which perhaps destined the entire enterprise for failure from the very start.

There's no denying the timeliness of The Imperfectionists, what with so many newspapers struggling to survive in the Internet age. This is certainly part of its appeal. But there is really more to it than that: it is a good book, perhaps even a great one, a reminder that even in imperfection there is beauty and dignity, too.

Political Thought [Presentation Thursdays]

Learning about the ideas of the great philosophers was what I always wanted to get out of college, so I felt it was a privilege to be asked to take on a course on Political Thought as part of my teaching load some years back. I figured that, either way, I'd get a chance to read material I might have missed as a student. And I was right.

So here's the introductory slide deck from that course:

View this presentation on Slideshare

It so happens that the above slides are the first ones I ever put together in my time as a teacher. Although I was an alumnus, the University that welcomed me to teach required a teaching demonstration for good order. So this was the presentation I prepared for the purpose (well, subsequent "improvements" notwithstanding).

[Confused about Presentation Thursdays? Then read the first in the series].

WIWAG® Business Weeks

Recently, I was asked to prepare a one-pager about WIWAG® Business Weeks, the entrepreneurship program that Bato Balani Foundation has taken on to mark the beginning of its third decade. Since the document would be used to look for program sponsors, I didn't want it to be a typical form letter or brochure. So I decided to work on something more along the lines of an infographic (click on it to enlarge):

Pretty neat, huh? I did the whole thing on Keynote. Of course, I have written about WIWAG® before, albeit tangentially, and now include it in my more recent corporate presentations. But I think this sort-of-infographic summarizes everything that needs to be known about the program much more nicely.

(By the way: if your institution is interested in sponsoring WIWAG®, just drop me a line!)

The Naked Presenter

Compared to writing about presentation design, writing a book about effective delivery is no mean feat. The printed word affords plenty of flexibility to discuss design principles at length, providing authors sufficient space to explain what constitutes appealing and effectively designed visuals as well as to show examples that readers can use as points of reference. In contrast, it is nearly impossible to capture in words all the intangibles about outstanding presentation delivery, most of which gets lost in translation without an accompanying demonstration.

Then comes a book like The Naked Presenter: Delivering Powerful Presentations With or Without Slides, which will make even the most skeptical of readers believe that there is such a thing as an excellent book about presentation delivery.

This third book from Garr Reynolds brings his expositions on modern presentation full circle. With the seminal Presentation Zen, he offered a new approach to presentation design and delivery in the digital age, one based on restraint in preparation, simplicity in design, and naturalness in delivery. In Presentation Zen Design, the subject of design was given a much more comprehensive treatment, covering themes as diverse as font ligatures and kerning, color selection, and negative space. Now, in the The Naked Presenter, Reynolds shows how the Presentation Zen approach applies to presentation delivery whether one uses slideware or not -- resulting in something that is as much a playbook for novice and experienced presenters alike as it is a celebration of modern effective presentation (and thereby a rallying cry against "Death by Powerpoint").

Reynolds' penchant for design thinking permeates The Naked Presenter, in which he employs a constraint as a means to organize his points meaningfully: he discusses what it means to "present naked" (that is to say, naturally) via ten P's. Preparation. Punch. Presence. Projection. Passion. Proximity. Play. Pace. Participation. And a Powerful Finish. Each of these elements is crucial for a person to lay himself bare in front of an audience and make a real connection, and each is discussed in a manner one would expect from no less than a master presenter.

Some might say the magic of The Naked Presenter is how it engenders the belief that, yes, you can be good at presenting, too. But an equally good case can be made that Reynolds' singular triumph with his work more generally and this book in particular is how he has managed to keep his discourse on presentation accessible while at the same time elevating it to a near-philosophical level. The Zen arts clearly have a huge influence in the way Reynolds views presenting, organizes his thoughts, and conveys his message. And his readers are all the better for it.

Restraint in preparation. Simplicity in design. Naturalness in delivery. The Naked Presenter is perhaps best described by these three principles and is arguably Reynolds' most important work to date.

Forward...and Down

Look forward.

Look down.

Look forward.

Look down.

Look forward.

Look down.

And that, folks, is what a teacher sees as students take notes in class.

(Bow.)