All in a week's work

Shop talk
I know the readership here to be smart and varied, so on the off chance some of you may actually be interested in this sort of thing, I'll mention this really interesting blog post the company I work for is promoting.

"This sort of thing" is business software, and the article addresses why so many enterprise resource planning systems fail; the researcher posits that it may be related to the professional allegiances and practices of the employees who use those systems.

If you have ever experienced (or indeed, been the victim of) the disruption of a company-wide implementation of the sort of system that's supposed to make you more productive, I encourage you also to participate in the survey that's discussed in the article.

Cat chat
I'm not a fan of Justin Bieber, but my daughter is, and I've come to terms with this — she will develop her own tastes; hopefully she will grow out of it (and someday soon!).

Now Justin Bieber reads The Cat in the Hat (via Dewey Divas). But not very well. He sounds dumb and bored.

While I can appreciate the attempt to promote literacy, or reading as cool, or the glory of pizza, I think this may backfire. This puzzling PR attempt brings him down another notch in my estimation. If the point is to sound like a (below?) average student being forced to read a text, well,... Is the point for millions of young girls to realize they read better than him? To realize that reading, for some people, is really pretty lame after all? He certainly doesn't bring a performer's verve to his reading. Does he even know what this story is about?

(Note: I couldn't actually watch it to the end. Maybe I'm missing Justin's spectacular finale?)

Life redux
For those who missed out on last year's group read of Life A User's Manual, by Georges Perec, and those of you eager to relive Life, a read-along is being hosted at Conversational Reading, starting mid-March and throughout April.

I'll follow the discussion, and as much as I still think about what an awesome wiki project it would be to annotate Life (and I do hope to dostart it someday), I expect I'll be occupied at about that time reading a Perec work never before translated, the soon-to-be-released The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise.