Blog
“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”
– Joan Didion
This is a grab bag of annotations accrued over the many years this site has existed. The topics, style and volume have evolved as the site has gone through many iterations. I’ve tried to preserve most of the content, despite having gone through quite a few migrations (and one malicious hack!). I’ve preserved, also, old content that I no longer agree with.
I hope you find some of it useful or amusing.
– Ana
Tags
· books · career · comics · current-affairs · embroidery · escape-rooms · feminism · fiction · finishedobject · hugo · humanity · indieweb · internetrivia · jobs · knitting · leadership · learning · love · management · meta · own-your-data · photos · poetry · politics · productivity · quotes · random · random-thought · society · software-engineering · sprirituality · startups · tattoos · tech · thinking · women · work · working-better · working-together · writing ·Archives by year
2022
- Book Notes: Light From Uncommon Stars
- Growing Kitty Grass Without Soil
- Embroidery: Clean Your Beans
- Book Notes: Perhaps the Stars
- Book Notes: Fierce Fairytales
- Book Notes: Leviathan Falls
- Book Notes: Braiding Sweetgrass
- Truchas Peak Shawl
2021
- Book Notes: Of Women and Salt
- Book Notes: Remote Control
- Book Notes: Ballad of Black Tom
- Book Notes: Thick: And Other Essays
- Book Notes: Somebody's Daughter: A Memoir
- Book Notes: Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration
- Book Notes: Bullshit Jobs
- Book Notes: A Psalm for the Wild-Built
- Book Notes: The Sympathizer
- Book Notes: Citizen: An American Lyric
- Book Notes: Meddling Kids
- Book Notes: The Department of Truth, Vol 1: The End of the World
- Book Notes: Mexican Gothic
- Book Notes: Frankissstein
- Book Notes: Four Futures
- Book Notes: An Absolutely Remarkable Thing
- Book Notes: Axiom's End
- Book Notes: Can't Even
- Book Notes: The Will to Battle
- Book Notes: Seven Surrenders
- Book Notes: Too Like The Lightning
- Book Notes: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
- Book Notes: Burnout
- Book Notes: Love and Rage
- Book Notes: Nimona
- Book Notes: Fun Home
- Book Notes: Harrow the Ninth
- Book Notes: Fugitive Telemetry
- Book Notes: Days of Distraction
- Book Notes: Who Fears Death
- Book Notes: Gideon the Ninth
- Book Notes: The Nickel Boys
- Book Notes: Network Effect
- Book Notes: Octavia's Brood
- Book Notes: How We Get Free
- Book Notes: The Ministry for the Future
- Book Notes: House of Leaves
- Book Notes: The Light Brigade
- Book Notes: An Orchestra of Minorities
- Book Notes: How to Take Smart Notes
2020
- Book Notes: Attack Surface
- Book Notes: Sula
- Book Notes: Swing Time
- Book Notes: The Haunting of Tram Car 015
- Book Notes: After The Gold Rush
- Book Notes: A Country of Ghosts
- Book Notes: The Haunting of Hill House
- Book Notes: Entreprecariat
- Book Notes: Caliban and the Witch
- Book Notes: Ancillary Mercy
- Book Notes: Ancillary Sword
- Growing Kitty Grass
- Book Notes: Ancillary Justice
- Book Notes: No Time to Spare
- Book Notes: This Is How You Lose the Time War
- Book Notes: The Xenofeminist Manifesto
- Book Notes: Dancing In The Streets
- Book Notes: Lilith's Brood
- Adding Structured Book Data to My Blog Posts
- Book Notes: Living Your Unlived Life
- Book Notes: Are Prisons Obsolete?
- Book Notes: Morning Star
- Book Notes: Manifestly Haraway
- Book Notes: The End of Policing
- Book Notes: My Sister, the Serial Killer
- Adding Webmentions to My Static Hugo Site
- Book Notes: The Year of Magical Thinking
- Using Your Site As Your Login
- Book Notes: The Heart Goes Last
- Book Notes: Unfuck Your Writing
- Adding Syndication Urls to My Posts
- Book Notes: Feminism for the 99%
- Book Notes: The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps
- Book Notes: 100 Bullets
- Book Notes: Freedom Is a Constant Struggle
- Book Notes: Sisters of the Vast Black
- Book Notes: Miranda in Milan
- Book Notes: The Four Agreements
- Book Notes: Agency
- What My Book Ratings Mean
- Book Notes: Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life
- Book Notes: Golden Son
- Book Notes: Red Rising
- Book Notes: The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born
- Book notes: How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century
- Book Notes: The Book (On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You are)
- Book Notes: From Chaos to Creativity
- Book notes: Uncanny Valley
- Book Notes: Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists
- Book Notes: The Overstory
- Book notes: Abolish Silicon Valley
- Book Notes: The Witch Doesn't Burn in This One (Women Are Some Kind of Magic, #2)
- Book Notes: Unplugged: How to Disconnect from the Rat Race, Have an Existential Crisis, and Find Meaning and Fulfillment
- Book Notes: Just When You’re Comfortable in Your Own Skin, It Starts to Sag
- Book Notes: The Middle Passage
- Book Notes: A Taste of Honey
2019
- Book notes: How to Be An Antiracist
- Book Notes: The Wise Man's Fear (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #2)
- Book Notes: The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service
- Book Notes: Every Heart a Doorway
- Book Notes: The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
- Book Notes: Team Human
- Rough Consensus And Group Decision Making In The IETF
- On Teams, Families and Crews
- I Play A Lot Of Escape Rooms, But Not Too Many: A Personal Retrospective And A Wish
2018
- Book notes: Everything for Everyone
- Workshop Notes: Reprogramming Yourself
- There are no adults, there’s only us
- Book Notes: The Coaching Habit
- Book Notes: Lake Success
- How To Write Better Job Descriptions
- Book Notes: Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries, #2)
- What Are We Saying When We Say 'Professional'?
- Book notes: Lean Out (Shevinsky, 2015)
- Tactics to Keep Up Your Motivation
- Things Nobody Told Me About Being a Software Engineer
- Why Do We Have “Performance Evaluations”, Anyway?
- There Is No Substitute For Good Judgement, Especially if You Want to Be Data Driven
- The Demands of 'Executive Presence' in the Workplace are Exhausting
- Book Notes: Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World
- Inability To Delegate As A Lack Of Trust And Self Awareness
- On Measuring a Software Engineer’s Performance
- Pomodoro Technique as Self-Awareness Tool
- Blogs as Modern Commonplace Books, and the Pleasures Thereof
- Guinness world record for most escape rooms done in a day
- Book notes: Scrum: the Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
- Be the cog you want to see in the machine
- Mind Lost
- Simple Shortcode to Insert Raw HTML in Hugo
- Book Notes: Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
- Self deprecation as a bad habit
- Book Notes: The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States: A Speculative Novel
- Try not to overthink it
- Book Notes: Dhalgren
- Stop bothering the noise
- What to talk about in a first one-on-one
- Using Git submodules to work on two repos at the same time
- In praise of constraints
- Being more productive by doing nothing
- On Love
- Book Notes: The Power
- Book Notes: All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries, #1)
- Throw more pots
- Book Notes: Black Panther: Long Live the King
- Some Things I Am
- Book Notes: Leadership and Self-Deception
- Book Notes: The Prey of Gods
- Book Notes: The Girls
- Book Notes: Little Fires Everywhere
- Writing gremlins
- Book Notes: Poison Kiss
- Book Notes: Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1: No Normal
- Book Notes: The Art of Asking
2017
- Book Notes: The First 90 Days
- Book Notes: Waking Up White: and Finding Myself in the Story of Race
- Book Notes: Dancing with Fire
- Book Notes: Secret Coders
- Book Notes: Management for Cannibals
- Book Notes: Han Solo
- Book Notes: Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet, Book 1
- My 2016 in books
- ...and we're back
2014
- Book Notes: The Happiness Manifesto
- Book Notes: Mind Amplifier: Can Our Digital Tools Make Us Smarter?
- Book Notes: The Peripheral
- Book Notes: Betterness: Economics for Humans
- How I found my startup job
- Help me decide what to write
- One thing I've learned since leaving Google
2011
2010
2009
- Basta
- Deserted
- Just right
- Become a Californian
- Not a destination
- Whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts
- Bleed, like colors
- When I get home, I take off my shoes
2008
- This is not serious
- A call for revolution against mindless irresponsibility
- An ethos for the early adopter
- Encourage the best industrial design
- A design educadion
- Glocally nomadic life
- The appearance of direction
- The "professional blogging" oxymoron
- Distilled to its essence
- Evolution
- Do you always read the handbook?
- Sci-fi share
- The planet's dominant life form
- Background radiation
- Pent-up frustration
- Your favorite hobby
- The Economist on Bill Gates
- Targeted advertisement
- Warranty
- Sensible
- 'Unprofessional' deemed unprofessional
- There is nothing new about 20% time
- Competitive disdain
- The Dip
- Absolute
- To separate
- WMD
- No, that won't work either
- Frontal lobes
- Singletons and evil
- Boredom
- Sci-fi, literature of ideas, correlated with higher SAT scores
2007
- Born in another time
- Advertisement break
- No right answers
- DRM in one paragraph
- Wishy washy wishing
- Brain-sprain
- Google talks next week in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia
- Audience
- In the beginning was the control panel
- 'Professional' journalism, a case study: El Pais' coverage of the ISO OOXML vote
- The one who sent you this has been taken up to heaven
- On Intelligence
- Where men can be divas
- Interview with Wiliam Gibson
- Drive: a sure way to distinguish yourself from all those other straight-out-of-college candidates
- The McDonaldization of literature
- The real meaning of work experience
- 10 essential steps to get to the top of your field are 9 steps too many
- Passion and hard work is all it takes
- Declutter your code, declutter your life
- Why not?
- Advertising campaign to women: eat light yogurt or men won't like you
- We need some more self-efficacy, ladies
- A sample skill list
- 6 common mistakes to avoid in your resume
- 6 years later, IT projects still can't cope with change
- Passion, key characteristic of a good job candidate
- This title is more credible than one with 0 numerals
- Online activity as a job-satisfaction indicator? Nah.
- Stop "fine tuning" your resume and, you know, just make yourself useful, or something...
- Remember to "frame" well your work, if you want more recognition
- No frame, no art?
- My blog's audience is not your blog's audience
- For a politician, is a promise a promise?
- Optimizing techie candidate resume pre-screening
- Google Teleco
2006
- The culture of simplification
- On career paths
- xawaaTir blog
- Failing for succeeding
- Must explore teas I don't know about
- Great Mac ads
- Google talks in Spain, the aftermath
- Google talks next week in Madrid and Granada (Spain)
- Gaming and representation of self
- Four things
2005
- Not dead, yet
- Growing up, protectionism and fear
- New planet spotted on the edge of the blogosphere
- Patrick Scoble, child of a blogger
- Making business in virtual worlds
- TailRank testing
- The attraction of night-elves
- Microsoft's new open source licenses
- More patent stupidity
- Bloglines incorporates shortcuts
- How is 'identity' created?
- Do we know our own culture?
- The Business Experiment
- Blogs & Beers Madrid happened
- Agent Provocateur
- Nature freaks
- Blogs & Beers in Madrid
- The origin of the meme meme
- Use your talents to the full
- Grokster analysis from The Economist
- Maker of the knife, guilty of murder
- Moving to Thunderbird
- More about sidebar clipblog links
- Feed juice in my sidebar
- Through the eyes of a child
- Blog anniversary
- Usability beats features
- Chelo's Burden
- D.R. & Quinch
- In the Shadow of No Towers
- Midnight Days
- Spaguetti Western
- Google recruiting video and the appearance of female geeks
- On Note-Taking
- Pattern Recognition
- Testing Yahoo! 360
- Count Zero
- Midsommarvals
- Spain growing, but needs to catch up with technology
- Bump your PowerBook to skip to the next song
- Steffe's winter panoramas and other pics
- Israeli Army discriminates against D&D players
- Born to be (a female) geek
- Exorcism lessons from the Vatican
- On the usefulness of passwords
- Many US teenagers against freedom of speech
- What catches the eye
- The cost of postponing
- Less time in school = better learning?
- First book read in 2005 - Generation X
2004
- Good Luck
- How we stay informed
- Ana's got a limerick!
- Reading update
- Luring women into IT
- Skilled IT staff needed
- Staying informed
- E-mail roulette and a good joke
- Forecasts (?) on the future of the EU
- "The Girl Who Played Go"
- New cool Google service: Google Local
- The importance of using the proper units and other cooking lessons
- Lorena Bobbitt a la Maasai
- Hitchhiker's news
- One more school start
- Humans can be so cute
- Fleas force radio station to close
- Breaking news about the universe
- Huh?
- Two of a kind
- Forbes' most powerful women
- My duplicity was execrable; it was malignant
- Mark Pilgrim on the importance of specs
- Safe software from Microsoft, once again
- Feminism and Spanish ministers
- Irishman's tips for surviving in Sweden
- 404 - Page Not Found
- Golden rule to be a good wife
- Europeans spend more time enjoying life than USians
- My name is Ana and my site was hacked
- UK top Google search
- Flags, Germans and historical guilt
- Quotes on the process of writing
- The Final Virus: A Science-Fiction Story by E. S. Raymond
- Contribute your review for the pro-Firefox campaign
- Multimedia from beyond the grave
- Fahrenheit 9/11
- Newsmap
- Portrait of modern Spain