Pink Flamingos are corny and kitschy as hell, but this is freakin’ amazing!

Coral Hare: Atomic Agent (A WW2 Spy Novel) Inspired by actual historical events by Clive Lee

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Disclaimer: I received this book for free for review purposes

Let me just say this up front: I believe Clive Lee deserves high praise for his writing in Coral Hare for maintaining a balance of spy thriller tropes and historic realism. So, yeah, Mina (our main character) is going to somewhat improbably meet up with certain nemesis at nearly every turn and somewhat more improbably continue to fight after having endured grave bodily harm. At the same time, the novel maintains its historicity; Mina is brave, but has moments of weakness; and the spy gadgets are grounded in reality.

The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations by Robert L. Cross

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is a must read for anyone in supervision or management. It will change the way you look at your employees’ interactions and the relationships they form. There may be hidden networks that are hindering your work. Conversely, there may be hidden networks where the loss of just one person would cause the whole thing to crash like a house of cards.

Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents by James T. Reason

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I had to read this book as part of my graduate work and I’m glad I did. It is an important look at how we can better work on reducing industrial accidents like oil rig explosions, airline crashes, and nuclear power plant explosions. A large part of the problem, in the author’s studied opinion, is the way we assign blame. We blame the person who had an accident rather than the system that created the situation for the accident. Except for extreme cases of negligence or criminal activity, this shouldn’t be the case and causes us to learn the wrong lessons; preventing a chance at stopping it from happening again.

A little while ago I wrote about watching Netflix on Fedora 20. Also works on the latest Kubuntu with the latest updates installed. Also, at least with Kubuntu, I didn’t need to modify the user agent. It just automatically worked with Google Chrome. I didn’t try with Chromium, but I’d read that didn’t work.

But reading @Scalzi’s response to GamerGate jerks just demonstrates how few companies run the media world and how important it is for us to maintain an open internet so that people can express themselves without being gated by companies that, as a whole, tend to be conservative (not in the political sense, in the business sense)

Scarlett slept all night last night. But for the past week it’s been something like every other day that she sleeps through the entire night. But I can’t figure out the variables. I try to copy them from night to night. Oh well.

This is completely unacceptable and these people are complete jerks for doing this to Sarkeesian.

I’d love to see either (or both?) Quentin Tarantino or Kevin Smith take on an updated film adaptation of Catch-22. The dialog is so important in the book and those guys are masters of dialog.

These instructions are from this site, but I don’t trust sites to stick around.

1. Make sure Netflix is setup to prefer HTML5. This is in Your Account-> Playback settings.
2. I have the latest nss (has to be equal to or better than 3.17.1)
3. Need Google Chrome (you can PROBABLY do this on Firefox with a similar plugin)
4. Get the User-Agent Switcher.
5. Fill it in with:
   • Name: Netflix Linux
   • String: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2114.2 Safari/537.36
   • Group: (is filled in automatically)
   • Append?: Select ‘Replace’
   • Flag: IE
6. Click on Permanent Spoof list and put netflix.com in the domain (and select the rule you just made from the drop-box). Then click the add button.
7. Go to Netflix and watch instant videos.
8. And it works! So linux is perfectly capable, but apparently it’s not supported. I guess I can understand not wanting to support the infinite versions of Linux, but why not Ubuntu or Fedora? Maybe it’s coming? That’d be great.

I’ll later check if if it works on Ubuntu, too, with with this method.