Serendipity Book

A day at the airport

Due to a bad connection through to Korea I have been sitting in the first class lounge at Hong Kong airport for the last 7 and a half hours. Could be worse I suppose. I could be down below with everyone else.

Photo credit: 62Lofu (my camera is in my luggage)

Ella completes her first rollover

Created with Dumpr's Flickr Tools

Living in the Maldives

Most people can only dream of living in a place like this. Ahmed Zahid works as a freelance designer in the Maldives. When he's not working he takes pictures like this which he anotates and shares via his Flickr photostream:

Pelican Books & The History of the Social Sciences

I've been collecting the old Pelican books - particularly those on sociology, psychology, economics and politics - for 5 years or so.

Pelican was the non-fiction paperback imprint of Penguin Books which was introduced in 1937 to cover serious contemporary issues.

Far from being arcane, many of them are classics and have stood the test of time. Sure, there are big contextual shifts but many of the observations made in these books still deserve to be read today, if only to get a sense of historical perspective on the social sciences.

Unfortunately, I'm not the only person who thinks these books are wonderful so they tend not to be as cheap as Penguins. If you look in charity shops rather than second hand books shops, and you aren't too fussy about the condition of the covers you can pick them for 50p or a pound. However, they go for £3 to £5 each regardless of condition if you look in the tourist-orientated book stalls under the arches by the river at Waterloo.

You can find out more about the history of the Pelican imprint here at Penguin Books. The Penguin Collectors Society publish a book about the series which you can buy online here. These images are from a set of Penguin book covers by joe_kral_tpc on Flickr which you can peek at here.

My favourites are the books The Rise of the Meritocracy by Michael Young (father of Toby Young, journalist and author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People) and the anti-psychiatry sociology book The Death of the Family by David Cooper (read chapter one here).

Success is ...

"You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play."

Attributed to Warren Beatty

The Drudgery of Office Life

Gareth points to this fantastic home video called my cubicle about the mundanity of office life.

More on work introspection ...

Workstations, Cubicles and the Sonare Babble (in this blog)
After Success: Fin-de-Siecle Anxiety and Identity (sociology text from the late 90s)
The Office (TV series)
The Office USA  (TV series)
How to Be Idle (book)
Bonjour Paresse (book)
 Overheard in the Office (site)
Willing Slaves (book)
The Idler War on Work Special (book / periodical)
The Living Dead: Switched Off, Zoned Out - The Shocking Truth About Office Life (book)

Wired on the Pitchfork Network Effect

Wired has an article on the increasing influence of the Chicago-based indie music review site Pitchfork Media who first turned me on to Yo La Tengo, Modest Mouse, Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene. The reviewers at Pitchfork have directed much of my iTunes experimentation ever since I took the plunge and decided to buy into Apple's DRM a few years ago.

"Though the music industry has seen drastic changes in recent years, what has remained constant is the fact that most listeners still find their music with the assistance of a filter: a reliable source that sifts through millions of tracks to help them choose what they do (and don't) want to hear.

The filters we traditionally depended on – music magazines, radio stations, music video channels, even the recommendations of a trusted record store clerk – have diminished in influence enough to give a player like Pitchfork room to operate.

Pitchfork is a small site: The traffic it draws is too tiny to be measured by Nielsen//NetRatings. But like the indie bands that are its lifeblood, Pitchfork has found its own way to thrive in an industry that is slowly being niched to death: It influences those who influence others."

"The priorities of the mainstream media are to give the audience what they believe they want," says Matthew Perpetua, who writes about indie rock at Fluxblog.org. "Pitchfork goes for things that are not obvious, or aren't on the radar at all. They write about things simply because they're interested in them."

On Procrastination

Uploaded by omit

Great quote on procrastination from Thomas Edison:

The first requisite for success is to develop the ability to focus and apply your mental and physical energies to the problem at hand - without growing weary. Because such thinking is often difficult, there seems to be no limit to which some people will go to avoid the effort and labor that is associated with it.

The Importance of Disappointment

This is a psychology textbook I once bought on the basis of the title alone. The thesis of the entire book is summed up by the title: you cannot be happy if you have never been unhappy, happiness is a relative concept and those who have been never been disappointed never understand true happiness.

Disappointment is such a powerful emotion. Always manage expectations!

We Are The Living Dead

Another great find from an Ottaker's bookstore, David Bolchover's The Living Dead is billed an expose of modern office life.

In contrast to the common perception that we are all grossly overworked and stressed in our jobs, Bolchover claims that the modern workplace is actually full of underutilised, poorly managed people who are barely contributing to the organizations they work for. He draws memorably on his experience of working for a large corporate who managed him so badly that they forgot he even existed.

Far from blaming the workers, he blames a system of line management which fails to nurture the talents of individuals or motivate them to be productive.

Some great statistics on office life from the sleeve ...

• 40 per cent of all casual drugs users in the US (people who use drugs just once a month) still choose to do it at work. 19.6 per cent of people who take drugs at work do so at their workstation.
• One in three mid-week visitors to the theme park Alton Towers has taken the day off work on a dishonest pretext.
• One in five US workers has had sex with a co-worker during work hours. Full sex, that is. 44 per cent of men and 35 per cent of women have had at least some sexual contact at work.
• One third of UK young professionals are hungover at least twice a week on working days. Two thirds admitted to having called in sick due to alcohol at least once in the previous month.
• 70 per cent of Internet porn sites are accessed during the 9 to 5 working day.
• More than half of the UK's 14.5 million pet owners say they would need between two and five days off work to grieve for a dead pet, while 10 per cent said they would need as much as two weeks.
• Monday (23 per cent) and Friday (25 per cent) are the days most commonly taken off sick by UK employees. Wednesday is the most rarely taken (8 per cent).
• UK doctors receive 9 million 'suspicious' or 'questionable' requests each year for sick notes.

Despite being the overachieving author of the 90 Minute Manager and the holder of an MSc in The Politics and Government of Russia from the LSE and an MBA from Cass Business School, Bolchover manages to strike an engagingly populist tone by throwing rocks at the incompetent management bogeymen whilst making excuses for the indolent workforce.