The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

I finished The Spy Who Came in From the Cold last night. It was an excellent book, compact, enjoyable, and worthy of the praise it has been receiving since its first publication in 1963. See the original New York Times review from January 12, 1964. As the book’s title indicates, the protagonist, Alec Leamas, is …

Coworking

Dawn’s excellent comment on my last post prompted me to research current office trends further revealing a second, more insidious, reason behind the office space boom in my fair city: coworking. At face value coworking spaces seem innocuous. According to Wiki, Coworking is an arrangement in which workers of different companies share office space, infrastructure, …

Activity Based Working

I can’t think of anything that generates jargon faster than business management. Reading the paper on the weekend I ran across a blurb in the real estate section that said Graz, where I live, needs 75,000 square meters of new office space. This is equivalent to 14 football fields and is an increase of roughly …

Happy Solstice & Great Conjunction Day!

Winter began at 11:02 in Graz (GMT+1) and at 17:20 Jupiter and Saturn will be only 0.1 degrees apart causing them to look like a single elongated star. Unfortunately, we have been socked in with fog and low hanging clouds for two weeks and today is more of the same. So, we will be watching …

Holiday reading

So, I have my recreational reading picked out for the upcoming holidays and lockdown number three lasting until January 18 in Austria. I’ve never read a John le Carré novel. Given the praise awarded him in his New York Times obituary earlier this month it seems I have clearly missed something: [His] exquisitely nuanced, intricately …

Making a difference

I was filled with a sense of pride and accomplishment when I read the above email from Google. A photo that I posted to Google Maps has been viewed 81,855 times! As Google so justly noted, I am helping others make better decisions. What a contribution to humanity. I am indeed an altruistic paragon and …

How many makes a plural?

This recent headline in the New York Times caught my eye. Trigger Warning: Fair citizens of Wilmington Delaware, before I continue, please allow the following clarification. The views of the New York Times regarding your city do not reflect my own. I have never been to Wilmington and have no opinion regarding your city’s degree …

The Great Reset Initiative

Yeah! The World Economic Forum has launched The Great Reset Initiative to “improve the state of the world” following the COVID-19 pandemic. In their own grand words…  As we enter a unique window of opportunity to shape the recovery, this initiative will offer insights to help inform all those determining the future state of global …