Tag
Work

Today at work I got to coordinate the creation of a neat thing. That excited me. Tomorrow I defend the first chapter of my product proposal for my master's degree. That's more scary.

Did I ever tell you about the striped straw experiment and deciding to be happy? From a column I wrote about a year ago: ...straw fortune-telling, or bendymancy. For breakfast every school morning, I had …

You are important. You are worthwhile. Your time and effort have value. Right now, a very good way to indicate and articulate and leverage your value is by making sure you get money in return. …

I work in a software firm. I am the only person there, except the office manager, who is not a born-and-bred computer geek. They play video games all the time. Yet I'm the only one …

Yesterday, I sat down over coffee with the Fog Creek system administrator and learned how a specific piece of our network architecture works. As he talked and I asked questions and tried saying things in …

Just got off the column for this Sunday. Something I had to leave out: Mike Daisey wrote about his time at Amazon in his book 21 Dog Years (based on his monologue) and talked about …

Just watched Jay Pipes's 45-minute Google TechTalk, "Performance Tuning Best Practices for MySQL". A few points I took to heart: Even if you're using InnoDB for all your tables, MySQL is still using MyISAM for …

David Stutz's essay on commoditization, software platforms, and the law of "the conservation of attractive profits" reminds me: software is profitable when it is flawed. This is because flawed software allows you to charge for …

Avoiding Projects Pursued By Morons 101: There is much made by people who long for the days of their fourth form debating society about the fallacy of "argumentum ad hominem". There is, as I have …

Once upon a time, my brother-in-law-in-law wrote a bit about working out, Daylight Savings Time, doing stuff alone, and same-sex marriage. John's an interesting guy, and I find all of those topics worth exploring, but …