Chris Brooks

What I’m Playing

• Triumph & Tragedy – I’ve got a couple of friends interested in playing this monthly and we had a great, speedy match last weekend. I’m still teaching them and won with some lucky peace token draws, but it was good for them to see: you have to attack the Germans at some point when you get to 1942/43!

What I’m Contemplating

• The Doors defined California cool in the ’60s. How does their legacy stack up 50 years later? – Hard to believe how short their tenure was.
• Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee – Reasonable advice. I definitely took the executive route.
• My Incredibly Simple Guide To Stoicism — Learn Wisdom You Can Practically Use – Very plain English but a decent read and summary.
• Things I’ve learned transitioning from engineer to engineering manager – Great advice!
• The new decluttering trend is called Swedish Death Cleaning and we tried it – This is silly. Sounds more like a motivational mantra than a method.
• Ex-Green Beret Nate Boyer pens open letter to Trump, Kaepernick, NFL and America – Love that kneeling was a compromise position.

What I’m Listening To

• First Listen: Michael McDonald, ‘Wide Open’ – Yep, this is dad rock but it is good rock.
• First Listen: The Lone Bellow, ‘Walk Into A Storm’ – Mix of lead singers brings a nice variety, along with varying music styles.

What I’m Contemplating

• Charity Majors on Twitter – Great career advice here!
• Death at a Penn State Fraternity – So depressing reading stories like these. Will these systems continue to reboot at PSU and similar schools?
• What I Learned About Minimalism in Poland – Think there might be vastly different opinions on what minimalism is based on backgrounds?

What I’m Playing

• Advanced Squad Leader – Weekly plays with Doug, still enjoying our Belgium campaign from the start of the war.
• Fields of Arle – Still haven’t played this solo but enjoying the two player experience and scoring more points each time I play.

What I’m Reading

• Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, the fun-to-read but very alarming sequel to Sapiens. Here’s what I learned:
  1. Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness
  2. Organisms are algorithms and life is data processing
  3. Non conscious algorithms are becoming more intelligent
• I’m using Adventures of an IT Leader for my information systems strategy and management class at WOU. Fun to read novel with good backing material supporting the narrative.
• Finished reading The 12 Week Year and it was very average. Here’s the summary: set goals on 12 week cycles, implement a weekly review and action system to drive progress towards those goals. Maintain a sense of urgency.

What I’m Playing

It was a week of light games with friends and family.

• Eye to Eye
• Five Crowns
• Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper
• Rummikub

I’ve been contributing to Standard Ebooks over the past month or so, working on my first publication as a producer. A bit more about Standard Ebooks:

Standard Ebooks is a volunteer driven, not-for-profit project that produces lovingly formatted, open source, and free public domain ebooks.
Ebook projects like Project Gutenberg transcribe ebooks and make them available for the widest number of reading devices. Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style guide, lightly modernizes them, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to take advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.
Standard Ebooks aren’t just a beautiful addition to your digital library—they’re a high quality standard to build your own ebooks on.

My first book is Something New by P.G. Wodehouse. Producing it was enjoyable, tedious at times, and very rewarding. Reading the book was fun too – it is a short, humorous novel and if you are a Downton Abbey fan you’ll love the book.

Lt. Gen. Jay Silveria at the US Air Force Academy yesterday: