Music was the main reason I wanted to move to New York - I wanted to walk the same streets that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the National, Interpol, the Walkmen, the Antlers and Sonic Youth were walking. In my mind they'd meet up and have drinks with each other at the same bars, live close to each other, and I'd just run into them all the time myself. I'm not sure that romantic version of New York ever existed. Paul Banks used to live on a corner inbetween where I live and where my kids go to school now, but that is two decades ago (though for a while, we shared a hairdresser). On one of my first visits to New York before moving here, I had a great chat with Thurston Moore at a café right before taking the taxi back to the airport. And that's as close as I got to living my dream.
But now the documentary "Meet me in the Bathroom" (based on the book of the same name) shows that version of New York that only existed for a brief moment in time.
"Meet Me In The Bathroom — ??inspired by Lizzy Goodman’s book of the same name — chronicles the last great romantic age of rock ’n’ roll through the lens of era-defining bands."
Read the book, watch the documentary (available on Google Play among other platforms), or listen to the Spotify playlist Meet Me in the Bathroom: Every Song From The Book In Chronological Order. For bonus points, listen to Losing My Edge (every band mentioned in the LCD Soundsystem song in the order they're mentioned)
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]]>If you've been wondering why over the past few months you're seeing a lot more "All Teams" meetings on your calendar, it's because language is ever evolving with the time, and people are starting to become more aware and replace ableist language.
Read more:
If your team still has "all hands" meetings, propose a more creative name, or default to "all teams" instead. Take some time to familiarize yourself with other ableist language and alternatives.
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]]>First, some general advice:
Some resources people shared you might find helpful:
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]]>Macey is the guest on Episode 1 of SRE Prodcast, Google's podcast about Site Reliability Engineering. She goes in-depth on some of the core tenets of SRE, including risk, on-call, toil, design involvement, and more. (As a side note, I'm reasonably certain that I'm not the entertaining Belgian that was causing her team failure loops, but I'm too afraid to ask.)
The whole series is worth a listen, but just like the podcast itself - start with macey's advice.
"My definition of toil: toil is boring or repetitive work that does not gain you a permanent improvement."
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]]>Susan Silk's Ring Theory is a helpful model to navigate what not to say during times of grief and traumatic events.
Picture a center ring, and inside it the people most affected by what's going on. Picture a larger circle around it, with inside it the people closest to those in the center. Repeat outwards.
The person in the center ring can say anything they want to anyone, anywhere.
Everyone else can say those things too, but only to people in the larger outside rings. Otherwise, you support and comfort.
Now, consider where in this diagram you are, and where the people you are talking to are.
"Comfort IN, dump OUT."
This model applies in other situations - for example, managers are better off complaining to their own managers or peers, while supporting their own reports and absorbing their complaints with empathy and compassion.
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]]>Bikram co-authored this blog post last year about DASInfra's experience moving workloads from Corp to Anthos. The group I run at work is going down a similar path by migrating VMs to Anthos on bare metal for on-prem.
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]]>David Allen's Getting Things Done is the non-fiction book I've reread the most in my life. I reread it every couple of years and still pick up on new ideas that I missed before, or parts that resonate better now and I'm excited to implement. Before Google, I used to give this book to new employees as a welcome gift.
The book got an update in 2015, and I haven't read the new version yet, so I'm planning an extended GTD book club at work in Q2, spreading the book out over multiple sessions. (In fact, I did just that for the young adult version of the book with my 16 year old godson back home in Belgium) If you've run a GTD book club, drop me a line!
Find out more at Getting Things Done® - David Allen's GTD® Methodology
"Too many meetings end with a vague feeling among the players that something ought to happen, and the hope that it’s not their personal job to make it so. [...] ask “So what’s the next action on this?” at the end of each discussion point in your next staff meeting"
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]]>In honor of International Women's Day 2022 (this past March 8th), some quotes from the 2008 article that inspired the term "mansplaining": to comment on or explain something to a woman in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner.
I've certainly been (and probably still am) guilty of this behavior, and this is a standing invitation to let me know when I'm doing it to you.
Read the original article with a new introduction at Men Explain Things to Me – Guernica
"None was more astonishing than the one from the Indianapolis man who wrote in to tell me that he had “never personally or professionally shortchanged a woman” and went on to berate me for not hanging out with “more regular guys or at least do a little homework first,” gave me some advice about how to run my life, and then commented on my “feelings of inferiority.” He thought that being patronized was an experience a woman chooses to, or could choose not to have–and so the fault was all mine. Life is short; I didn’t write back."
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]]>A while back I copied over AppScript code from an internal Google project to send meeting notes to make a different tool which makes it easy to go from Google Docs draft to a mail in GMail and avoid embarrassing copy/paste errors. I'm happy to be able to retire that little side project in favor of a recently released built-in feature of Google Docs: Draft emails from Google Docs - Docs Editors Help
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]]>March 31 is the Transgender Day of Visibility. The COVID Cocoon is a nickname given for the phenomenon of people discovering their gender diversity during the pandemic environment.
The full report is an interesting read; one recommendation that we can all contribute to is on Culture and Communication: Proactively communicating that gender diversity is accepted, asking staff for their input, and being open and ready to listen helps create a culture where employees can feel safe, welcome, and valued.
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