Masha Gessen draws a fascinating comparison between Comey and Trump:
The true subject of “A Higher Loyalty” is the goodness of James Comey. The premise is that a man whose value is truth is superior to a man whose value is loyalty, and Comey’s understanding of “truth” is as basic as Trump’s understanding of “loyalty”: he believes that there is such a thing as “all the truth” that exists outside of history, context, and judgment.
In his recent interviews (with Terry Gross on Fresh Air and David Remnick on The New Yorker Radio Hour) to promote his new book, A Higher Loyalty, James Comey defends his decision to call out Hillary Clinton’s “extremely careless” use of email to let the people know the integrity of the F.B.I. He could have just said case closed and no further comment was needed. Why was he trying to defend the integrity and honesty of the F.B.I.? The reputation of the Bureau has never been compromised. Robert Mueller has not said a word in public and no one is questioning his integrity. He also spoke up about the reopening of the email investigation close to the election. Whether he admits it or not, Comey had tipped the election to the guy who ended up fired him. That is something he has to live with for the rest of his life.
I started to listen to WorkLife with Adam Grant last week and the episode on “A World Without Bosses” struck a chore. To be your own boss, you need to work for yourself. With a family to feed and my sans-savvy business skills, working for myself is not an option. Fortunately, I have built a responsible, reliable reputation for myself that I can be my own boss in an institution.
My boss has given me the complete freedom to do my job. I have earned her trust to make my own design and technical decisions. I still run them by her, but she lets me make the call. I work directly with members of the law school community as well as the people outside. The freedom allows me to balance my work and life. I take complete ownership of all my responsibilities. For example, I don’t mind making an update to MODX in the middle of the night when no one is using the system. Likewise, I can take time off when one of my kids got sick.
Flexibility is the key to employee retention. With three kids and one more on the way, flexibility is crucial to me and my family. I cannot work in an environment that lock me in from 9 to 5. I had been there before and I was miserable and depressed. I do not want to go back to that.
Before I was promoted to Director of Design and Web Services, I was interviewed for another position. When I asked about flexibility, the new supervisor told me that she can be very flexible but I have to earn it. That’s fair and I understood her perspective, but I didn’t have a year to build up the trust. One of my kids would probably needed me the second day on the job. How am I going to earn her trust? When she made the offer, the salary was good, the people seemed nice, the job was not bad, but the flexibility had me worried.
I thought about it some more and decided to talk to my current boss. I was honest with her about the whole situation. She understood and valued our working relationship. She not only promoted me, but also matched my new salary with 10 percent more. I decided to stay and turned down the new job. I am glad that I talked to her. My wife and I were pleased that I stayed.
My boss also promised to get me a part-time web developer and she did. He has been helpful in taking care of daily requests, which allows me to focus on bigger projects. I want to get him to the point where I don’t have to send him tasks. I would like him to take ownership of his responsibility just like what my boss has done for me. My goal is to improve our web experience by making pages load faster and more attractive. When requests are low, he can find issues to work on such as cleaning up pages with spaghetti markups or creating new banners. I would also love to see him initiates projects that are beneficial to our sites. We are not quite there yet, but I really appreciate his contribution so far.
Mỗi lần hai cha con đi bộ, Xuân nhặt rác lên và đưa cho ba. Từ loang nước ngọt đến giấy gói kẹo, nó thấy rác là tự lượm lên và tôi phải bỏ vào thùng rác chứ không nó không chịu. Mới hai tuổi mà nó đã biết gìn giữ môi trường. Như thế cũng tốt. Đó giờ tôi cũng rất ít xả rác và cũng rất ít nhặt lên rác người khác bỏ. Giờ đây thấy thằng con làm việc này nên thôi mình cũng làm theo. Không biết nó học ở đâu ra dĩ nhiên là không phải từ ba nó. Hay tính nó đã vậy.
Thằng Đán thì tài lanh. Nó biết được chút nào là đem ra sài liền. Hôm trước tôi, thằng Đạo, và nó nói chuyện về chim. Thằng Đạo nói nhà mình có con chim gõ kiến (woodpecker) làm tổ trong cây cột trụ trước nhà. Thằng Đán không biết con chim gõ kiến là gì nên tôi giải thích cho nó nghe. Hôm sao nó trò chuyện với thằng học bơi chung. Không biết chúng nó nói gì về chim mà thằng Đán giải thích chim gõ kiến y như những gì tôi đã nói với nó.
Đạo thì thích đọc sách lịch sữ về chiến tranh. Nó kể cho tôi nghe hết Đại chiến thế giới lần thứ nhất rồi qua Đại chiến thế giới lần thứ nhì rồi qua Nội chiến Hoa Kỳ. Ngày xưa tôi ghét nhất là môn lịch sữ nên thật thú vị khi được nghe thằng con say sưa kể.
Alexandra Lange writes about Susan Kare in The New Yorker:
What Kare lacked in computer experience she made up for in visual knowledge… She also designed a number of the original Mac fonts, including Geneva, Chicago, and the picture-heavy Cairo, using only a nine-by-seven grid.
Kare is a legend.
Những câu chuyện rất ngắn rất ngậm ngùi của tuổi thơ. Một cô gái quyết định phá thai để tiếp tục có cuộc sống rong chơi. Một cô bé nhảy lầu tự tử quên log out Facebook. Một nhà nghỉ ồn ào nằm gần một ngôi chùa yên tịnh. Hoặc một lối sống một mình: “cái giá của tự do là cô đơn mà.” Với lối viết giản dị, gọn ghẽ, và cảm động của Hạ Nguyên, nên đọc để giải trí.
A new study provides evidence of just how sustained an impact reading and playing with young children can have, shaping their social and emotional development in ways that go far beyond helping them learn language and early literacy skills. The parent-child-book moment even has the potential to help curb problem behaviors like aggression, hyperactivity and difficulty with attention, a new study has found.
After reading this article last night, I decided to read aloud with Đán instead of making him read himself. Afterward, he said, “Can we do this again tomorrow?” For weeks, I stopped doing Let’s Read with him because he showed no sign of improvements. He struggled sounding out words and yawned profusely. I was getting frustrated as well so we took a long hiatus. Now we need to take a step back and read aloud together. His teacher also assigned him a word ring. I thought he was doing great until I realized that he memorized the words instead of learning to read them. He just spat out a word before I could flip to the next one. He struggled when I picked the word randomly.
Xuân has shown interests in reading. He loves it when we read together. He also interrupts us whenever I read with Đán. Now that we read aloud, he can join us. Đạo likes to read, but it is his last resort. He reads to distract himself from eating. At night, I give him some extra time to read before we go to bed. He read his book and I read mine. Before we knew it, the time was 10:30 pm.
In a conversation on the update of Robert Slimbach’s classic Minion, Robert Bringhurst pointed out Slimbach’s perfectionism:
You’re famous in some circles for that kind of perfectionism. And for more persistent kinds of perfectionism too. Minion had only been out for a couple of years when you rebuilt it as a multiple master typeface. And in 1999 or 2000, you made the first OpenType versions of Minion, folding the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic, along with the ornaments, the small caps, and everything else into a single font. I studied those fonts pretty closely when they were released, and I was amazed and delighted by what I saw. There was phenomenal attention to detail. For example, all the diacritics were subtly redesigned and repositioned, made a little narrower and lifted farther up above the letterforms. I’m sorry to say it, but in the English-speaking world, most type designers don’t know or care very much about such details. And not everyone takes font upkeep and editing that seriously.
I agree with Bringhurst although I do see some improvements in designing diacritics. I always have tremendous respect for Slimbach for making his typefaces as accessible to many languages as possible. Minion is of his exemplary examples.
I always have a mixed feeling about the annual Computers in Libraries conference. In past years, I hardly found the presentations inspiring. Many of my colleagues probably felt the same; therefore, most skipped this year. I was not planning on going either, but I changed my mind at the last minute before the discount ended. With the group rate and membership discount, the admission is quite cheap; therefore, I don’t feel so bad. Although the venue is in Arlington, Virginia, I get to get away from the office for a few days.
For the first day, I sat in most of the presentations on UX and digital presence. In the first presentation, “Creating Engaging Content Strategies for Maximum Impact,” I had no clue what the speaker what talking about. Followed by “Custom Data Rich Websites Using Information Architecture,” which is another boring talk on Drupal. After lunch, I was half zoned out on “Iterative Design: Users in Learning Object Development.” Worse was “Website Design Winners & Losers!” The title alone made me cringe.
After being fed up with boring web talks, I switched to a different track. Learning about Dash and Dot robotics for the first time excited me. It seems like an excellent way for kids to learn to code. Đạo’s birthday is coming up. I am thinking of dropping $280 on Wonder Workshop Dash & Dot Robot Wonder Pack for his present. It’s not cheap, but it is more useful than buying him Lego. With Lego, he would spend an hour or two building, but Đán and Xuân could just break it in a second.
For tomorrow, I will try to attend presentations that I don’t know anything about.
In addition to journaling, David Sedaris has been creating artworks for his dairies. This book, which compiled and edited by graphic designer Jeffrey Jenkins, showcases collages of items Sedaris had found as well as his original compositions. His natural ability to incorporate images and letterforms added an intriguing visual element to his writing.