Download or read book Microserfs written by Douglas Coupland and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-06-21 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the era-defining author of Generation X comes a novel of overworked coders who escape the serfdom of Bill Gates to forge their own path. They are Microserfs—six code-crunching computer whizzes who spend upward of sixteen hours a day “coding” and eating “flat” foods (food which, like Kraft singles, can be passed underneath closed doors) as they fearfully scan company e-mail to learn whether the great Bill is going to “flame” one of them. But now there’s a chance to become innovators instead of cogs in the gargantuan Microsoft machine. The intrepid Microserfs are striking out on their own—living together in a shared digital flophouse as they desperately try to cultivate well-rounded lives and find love amid the dislocated, subhuman whir and buzz of their computer-driven world.

Download or read book Microserfs written by Douglas Coupland and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1996-05-30 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Young people working for Microsoft decide to make a bid for freedom by founding their own software company. The novel--narrated as an online journal by [email protected] the ups and downs of raising money for a new business. By the author of Generation X.

Download or read book Microserfs written by Douglas Coupland and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2004 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At computer giant Microsoft, Dan, Susan, Abe, Todd and Bug are struggling to get a life. The job may be super cool, the pay may be astronomical, but they're heading nowhere, and however hard they work, however many shares they earn, they're never going to be as rich as Bill. And besides, with all the hours they're putting in, their best relationships are on e-mail. Something's got to give.

Download or read book JPod written by Douglas Coupland and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2011-03-18 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lethal joyride into today’s new breed of technogeeks, Coupland’s JPod updates Microserfs for the age of Google. Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workers whose names start with J are bureaucratically marooned in jPod, a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive Vancouver game design company. The six workers daily confront the forces that define our era: global piracy, boneheaded marketing staff, people smuggling, the rise of China, marijuana grow-ops, Jeff Probst and the ashes of the 1990s financial tech dream. jPod’s universe is amoral and shameless. The characters are products of their era even as they’re creating it. Everybody in Ethan’s life inhabits a moral grey zone. Nobody is exempt, not even his seemingly straitlaced parents or Coupland himself, as readers will see. Full of word games, visual jokes and sideways jabs, this book throws a sharp, pointed lawn dart into the heart of contemporary life. JPod is Douglas Coupland at the top of his game.

Download or read book Bit Rot written by Douglas Coupland and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thought-provoking, binge-worthy new collection of essays, stories, and musings from Douglas Coupland, Bit Rot explores the different ways in which twentieth-century notions of the future are being shredded, and it is a literary gem of the digital age. "Bit rot" is a term used in digital archiving to describe the way digital files can spontaneously and quickly decompose. As Douglas Coupland writes, "Bit rot also describes the way my brain has been feeling since 2000, as I shed older and weaker neurons and connections and enhance new and unexpected ones." Bit Rot the book is a fascinating meditation on the ways in which humanity tries to make sense of our shifting consciousness. Coupland, just like the Internet, mixes forms to achieve his ends. Short fiction is interspersed with essays on all aspects of modern life. The result is addictively satisfying for Coupland's established fanbase hungry for his observations about our world, and a revelation to new readers of his work. For almost three decades, his unique pattern recognition has powered his fiction, his phrase-making, and his visual art. Every page of Bit Rot is full of wit, surprise, and delight. Reading Bit Rot feels a lot like bingeing on Netflix... you can't stop with just one.

Download or read book The Age of Earthquakes written by Douglas Coupland and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-03-24 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A highly provocative, mindbending, beautifully designed, and visionary look at the landscape of our rapidly evolving digital era. 50 years after Marshall McLuhan's ground breaking book on the influence of technology on culture in The Medium is the Massage, Basar, Coupland and Obrist extend the analysis to today, touring the world that’s redefined by the Internet, decoding and explaining what they call the 'extreme present'. THE AGE OF EARTHQUAKES is a quick-fire paperback, harnessing the images, language and perceptions of our unfurling digital lives. The authors offer five characteristics of the Extreme Present (see below); invent a glossary of new words to describe how we are truly feeling today; and ‘mindsource’ images and illustrations from over 30 contemporary artists. Wayne Daly’s striking graphic design imports the surreal, juxtaposed, mashed mannerisms of screen to page. It’s like a culturally prescient, all-knowing email to the reader: possibly the best email they will ever read. Welcome to THE AGE OF EARTHQUAKES, a paper portrait of Now, where the Internet hasn’t just changed the structure of our brains these past few years, it’s also changing the structure of the planet. This is a new history of the world that fits perfectly in your back pocket. 30+ artists contributions: With contributions from Farah Al Qasimi, Ed Atkins, Alessandro Bavo, Gabriele Basilico, Josh Bitelli, James Bridle, Cao Fei, Alex Mackin Dolan, Thomas Dozol, Constant Dullaart, Cecile B Evans, Rami Farook, Hans-Peter Feldmann, GCC, K-Hole, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Eloise Hawser, Camille Henrot, Hu Fang, K-Hole, Koo Jeong-A, Katja Novitskova, Lara Ogel, Trevor Paglen, Yuri Patterson, Jon Rafman, Bunny Rogers, Bogosi Sekhukhuni, Taryn Simon, Hito Steyerl, Michael Stipe, Rosemarie Trockel, Amalia Ulman, David Weir, Trevor Yeung.

Download or read book Miss Wyoming written by Douglas Coupland and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2001-04-25 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of Generation X and Microserfs, comes the absurd and tender story of a hard-living movie producer and a former child beauty pageant contender who only find each other by losing themselves. Waking up in an L.A. hospital, John Johnson is amazed that it was the flu and not an overdose of five different drugs mixed with cognac that nearly killed him. As a producer of high-adrenaline action flicks, he's led a decadent and dangerous life, purchasing his way through every conceivable variant of sex. But each variation seems to take him one notch away from a capacity for love, and while movie-making was once a way for him to create worlds of sensation, it now bores him. After his near-death experience, John decides to walk away from his life. Susan Colgate is an unbankable former tv star and child beauty pageant contender. Forced to marry a heavy metal singer in need of a Green Card after her parents squander her sitcom earnings, she becomes the alpha road rat. But when the band's popularity dwindles, the marriage dissolves. Flying back to Los Angeles in Economy, Susan's plane crashes and only she survives. As she walks away from the disaster virtually unscathed, Susan, too, decides to disappear. John and Susan are two souls searching for love across the bizarre, celebrity-obsessed landscape of LA, and are driven, almost fatefully, toward each other. Hilarious, fast-paced and ultimately heart-wrenching, Miss Wyoming is about people who, after throwing off their self-made identities, begin the fearful search for a love that exposes all vulnerabilities.

Download or read book Life After God written by Douglas Coupland and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-12-25 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: YOU ARE THE FIRST GENERATION RAISED WITHOUT RELIGION What happens if we are raised without religion or beliefs? As we grow older, the beauty and disenchantments of the world temper our souls. We all have spiritual impulses, yet where do these impulses flow in a world of commodities and consumerism? LIFE AFTER GOD is a compellingly innovative collection of stories responding to these themes. Douglas Coupland takes us into worlds we know exist but rarely see, finding rare grace amid our pre-millennium turmoil.

Download or read book Shampoo Planet written by Douglas Coupland and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1993-05 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite their differing values, Tyler Johnson, an ambitious hotel management student, tries to console his mother, a former hippie, when Dan, his land-developer stepfather, decides to get a divorce.

Download or read book All Families are Psychotic written by Douglas Coupland and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2002 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the eve of the next Space Shuttle mission, a divided family comes together...Warm, witty and wise, 'All Families Are Psychotic' is Coupland at the very top of his form. In a cheap motel an hour from Cape Canaveral, Janet Drummond takes her medication, and does a rapid tally of the whereabouts of her children. Wade has spent the night in jail; suicidal Bryan is due to arrive at any moment with his vowel-free girlfriend, Shw; and then there is Sarah, 'a bolt of lightning frozen in midflash' - here in Orlando to be the star of Friday's shuttle mission. With Janet's ex-husband and his trophy wife also in town, Janet spends a moment contemplating her family, and where it all went wrong. Or did it? Perfect for fans of Halle Butler, Iain Reid and Rachel Cusk.

Download or read book Player One written by Douglas Coupland and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2010 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Story of five people caught inside an airport cocktail lounge during a global disaster.

Download or read book Postwestern Cultures written by Susan Kollin and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Synthesizes topics of contemporary scholarship of the American West. This work examines subjects ranging from the use of frontier rhetoric in Japanese American internment camp narratives to the emergence of agricultural tourism in the New West to the application of geographer J B Jackson's theories to vernacular or abandoned western landscapes.

Download or read book Generation X written by Douglas Coupland and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1991 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three twenty-something young adults, working at low-paying, no-future jobs, tell one another modern tales of love and death.

Download or read book Hey Nostradamus written by Douglas Coupland and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2009-04-03 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four people’s lives are set adrift in the wake of a high school shooting—three can’t escape the loneliness that plagues them, while a fourth races for oblivion, wondering what happened to God. Bristling with Douglas Coupland’s hallmark humor and cultural acuity, Hey Nostradamus! achieves new heights of poignancy and literary accomplishment.

Download or read book Male Sexuality Under Surveillance written by Graham Thompson and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2005-04 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Male Sexuality under Surveillance is a lively, intelligent, and expertly argued analysis of the construction of male sexuality in the business office. Graham Thompson interweaves three main threads: a historicized cultural analysis of the development of the modern business office from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century to the present day, a Foucauldian discussion of the office as the site of various disciplinary practices, and a queer-theoretical discussion of the textualization of the gay male body as a device for producing a taxonomy of male-male relations. The combination of these themes produces a study that is fresh, insightful, and provocative.

Download or read book Strategic Leadership written by Victor C.X. Wang and published by IAP. This book was released on 2018-02-01 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Strategic leadership is broadly defined as utilizing particular approaches in the management of employees. The main objective is productivity. It provides the vision and direction for the long term growth and success of an organization. It requires objectivity and potential to look at the broader picture. It is leaders’ responsibility to incorporate aspects of both the analytical and human dimensions to effectively drive the organizations forward. As an academic subject, it is taught in both education and business. Leaders and mangers have turned to strategic leadership to inspire and guide their visions, and to formulate the directions so essential for the long term growth and success of an organization or a country. Leaders need the skills and tools for strategy formulation and implementation in order to deal with change in our society. Managing change and ambiguity requires strategic leaders who not only provide a sense of direction, but who can also build ownership and alignment within their workgroups to implement change. The goal of strategic leadership is to drive innovation, and maximize team performance to enhance organizations’ long term growth and success in today’s complex world of fastpaced, dramatic change. Research on strategic leadership has been going on for decades. Textbooks on this subject are readily available. If we look deeper, we realize the vast majority of these books were written from a practitioner’s perspective. In other words, these books were not based on empirical research. Naturally, these existing books have failed to better serve the needs of today’s graduate students who should be equipped with empirical research on such an academic subject. This book will investigate emergent administrative techniques and business practices being used within educational establishments and corporate worlds. It will highlight empirical research and best practices within strategic leadership.

Download or read book The Soul of A New Machine written by Tracy Kidder and published by Back Bay Books. This book was released on 2011-08-23 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracy Kidder's "riveting" (Washington Post) story of one company's efforts to bring a new microcomputer to market won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and has become essential reading for understanding the history of the American tech industry. Computers have changed since 1981, when The Soul of a New Machine first examined the culture of the computer revolution. What has not changed is the feverish pace of the high-tech industry, the go-for-broke approach to business that has caused so many computer companies to win big (or go belly up), and the cult of pursuing mind-bending technological innovations. The Soul of a New Machine is an essential chapter in the history of the machine that revolutionized the world in the twentieth century. "Fascinating...A surprisingly gripping account of people at work." --Wall Street Journal