3 posts tagged “books”
What was the worst job you ever had?
Submitted by salaryman.
Working book rush at the Barnes and Noble in the Michigan Union one spring. The job was mostly straightening and shelving books, and no one ever wanted (or needed) any help on the sales floor. When book rush was over the job disappeared suddenly one day.
Not a career for me!
How To Solve It by George Polya is a book on heuristics, the technique and method for getting closer to the solution of a problem. It's disguised as a book on mathematics, and generally all of the examples are given as math problems to solve, but if you hold the text sideways and squint you can see some patterns that can be reused in other parts of your life.
The last time I did a full-on job search I used How To Solve It as the organizing principle. Polya starts you out with a nicely organized list of questions to ask about problems - "have I seen this problem before" the first and most obvious one - and there's some relentless pursuit of all angles of attack that it encourages.
If you ever lived through doing math proofs wondering just why you were working down a particular line of reasoning, Polya is great - he's not afraid to work backwards from a possible solution to see how the line of logic or reasoning might go, and thus reconstruct an approach based on a presumed (or desired) outcome.
Here's some more ideas and feedback for media types that Vox could scoop up and make collectable and bloggable, and some sources for same.
For audio, it would be really spiffy if you could record directly into Vox (or am I missing that?) so that there doesn't need to be a separate encode to MP3 and upload step. (Think Odeo, let's say.) That's the sort of thing that could give you spontaneous audio clips.
For books, I'd love to see an interface to LibraryThing. LT has a tag system, lets you do user-uploaded covers so that you can get images of books not in Amazon, and is generally amazingly cool and library-geeky.
In a fit of academic weakness, I'd like to see some interface to CiteULike, so that there was a straightforward way to cite papers. Again, that system has tags and a rating and recommending system, which speeds up the process of finding things and keeping track of them. Failing that, if there were some way to upload PDFs and then show thumbnail images of front pages, that would go a long ways.
All that said, this is a really great setup, and already I find it a lot easier to navigate through than the equivalent number and scope of regular blogs.
