Over the past seven weeks (good golly, where does the time go?) at Google, I’ve noticed a funny habit of mine. Whenever I overhear a conversation involving something that is related to my team’s work, I drop whatever I’m working on and wander over to listen in. Now, one might guess this is due to […]
Category: thoughts
Age of Conversation 2 is now out
A few months ago, I volunteered to contribute an essay to a compendium called “The Age of Conversation 2”. The first “Age of Conversation” book resulted after two editors collected submissions on the topic of conversation from one hundred bloggers and self-published the result at lulu.com. The second book, in which my essay appears, is […]
Switching Costs
Earlier this week I switched my RSS reader from Bloglines to Google Reader. I’d been meaning to check out Google Reader for months, if not years, but had never gotten around to it, as Bloglines was serving me well enough for what I needed, and I’d gotten used to its quirks. But over the past […]
Story Metrics
So I want to build on my last two posts (which both have excellent comments that you should check out, even though I haven’t managed to be coherent enough this week yet to respond). In particular, if I treat everything as a story and I’m asking what the purpose of a design is, the obvious […]
What is the purpose of your design?
Ferran Adria (yes, that Ferran Adria) stopped by Google today while in town for his book tour promoting A Day at elBulli. He spent most of the hour talking about innovation and his approach for trying to invent a new culinary language within the universal language of cuisine, with pictures of some amazing nature-inspired desserts, […]
Everything is a Story
I’ve been thinking on and off about this post for weeks, and it’s not coming together, so I’m just going to write up what I have and see what happens. Or at least put it up to instigate comments that will help me clarify what I mean (as the comments on my “Faking it” post […]
Meeting Dynamics
As I am learning the lay of the land at Google, I’ve been initiating one-on-one meetings with people around me so that I can learn what they do and gain some different perspectives on what my group produces. I wrote up my notes after my meeting with one coworker, and after he reviewed what I […]
Self Haxx0ring
As noted in my last post, this is my first week as an employee of Google. I’m trying to get up to speed on the types of things that I will be doing, which meant spending most of today learning about the ad system, revenue forecasting models, how the Google backend works, etc. Unsurprisingly, there’s […]
Language Games
My last post on faking it engendered some discussion that made it clear I hadn’t communicated my point very clearly. To paraphrase one uncharitable commenter, one interpretation is that I’m looking for ways to justify my tendencies towards self-aggrandizing attention-seeking egotism. And there’s certainly an element of that, as I thought I covered in that […]
Faking it
I have a bad habit of trying to fake knowledge when I don’t have it. Whether the topic is world politics or art history or technology or postmodern sociology, I like to pretend that I am knowledgeable on the topic and keep on talking. This habit drives some of my friends crazy, as they feel […]
