Author Archives: Ron Bieber

Hey, they’re writing an SVK book!

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I didn’t notice this before (I haven’t really been to the SVK site in a while), but they are actually writing a full blown SVK book. They make quite clear that the book is still a work in progress, but I’m glad to see this kind of work going on to further explain this great tool and wanted to make sure people using SVK (or trying to use it at least) knew it was there.

It looks like the book is being authored in the the same way the Subversion book was written — authored in XML and transformed to HTML. Could an O’Reilly book be in SVK’s future as well?

Dirty Jobs on Discovery Channel

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I do not like what we today call Reality TV. You know, shows like Survivor, Big Brother, Wife Swap, and all of those shows like that. They are all fake and pretty much stupid.

I do, however, like TV about real stuff. Shows like Mythbusters, Cold Case Files, Biography, and shows like that. At times, I’m even enjoying Dog the Bounty Hunter. The best shows are shows in which you can learn something and still get a laugh out of them (Mythbusters is the role model for shows like that).

Andy has been telling Jonna and I about a show called Dirty Jobs that he thought was hilarious. At first we resisted watching it, thinking it was just another stupid reality show. We finally gave in over the last week and watched an episode.

This show is great. The host, Mike Rowe, is nothing short of hilarious. The premise of the show is that the host finds the dirtiest jobs that people do for a living, and attempts to do them on the show. In the episode we saw this week, he attempted to make a surfboard (dirtier than I thought it would be), harvest honey from bees (creeped Jonna out to no end), and clean a ‘sludge tank’. During each of these tasks he was brilliantly funny, in a very dry way. We laughed all the way through the show.

If you are a Mythbusters fan, chances are you’ll love Dirty Jobs. Check it out (it’s on Tuesdays at 8pm CT) and leave comments up here telling me what you think.

Feder Rips Dahl for ‘Floating Corpse’ Drink Recipe

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Robert Feder on Thursday reported on a bit that Steve Dahl did on his radio show (and later continued in his blog) in which he was joking about creating a drink recipe called the ‘Floating Corpse’.

The article insinuates that Dahl was making light of the deaths in the New Orleans area.

Dahls response to Feder (middle of page) was published on Friday, asking Feder to clarify that he was actually referring to the corpses from the above-ground graveyards and not the hurricane victims.

Dahl then ends, in standard Dahl fashion, with the following statement:

I intend to commemorate the plight of the victims with ‘Looter Lasagna’.

Current Books on the Reading List

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I’ve currently seen in increase in the reading queue. I just finished The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell, and it was great. I hope to post a review on this one soon.

After that, I picked up Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by the same author. I got halfway through that (also very good by the way) when Tom The Architect hit me with another recommendation called The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls (also in the Gillmor Gang) and David Weinberger. This one looked intriguing and so I set aside Blink to read this one.

This book is also available for free via an online edition, but for some reason I need the physical book lying around. This is some interesting stuff and even though I’m only a small way through the book I can already say this is something I would recommend those in business (and especially management) read.