In the spirit of Paul Graham, I’m going to start this entry with a question that re-occurred to me a couple days ago: What is the right balance of self promotion to do? I was sitting in a project update meeting and noted the difference in how much detail people put into their various updates. […]
Category: thoughts
Bush and Rove
A couple links about Bush and Rove today. Link 1 was that I happened to catch Fresh Air on the radio today, and Terri Gross was interviewing Wayne Slater, co-author of the book Bush’s Brain : How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. Slater was apparently based in the Austin bureau for the Dallas […]
Joel on Software on social interface design
As many of you know, I’m a total fan of Joel on Software. I even went to a fan club dinner of his when he was in the Bay Area (he posted that he was going to be at a restaurant in Berkeley about a week in advance, and about 30 software geeks of all […]
Google management
In a Good Morning Silicon Valley last week that a friend forwarded to me, there was an interesting excerpt from Playboy’s interview with Larry Page, one of the founders of Google. He described Google’s project tracking system: We also have systems that automate and track the management of all our projects. This allows an enormous […]
Is democracy doomed?
A friend clipped this New Yorker article for me entitled “The Unpolitical Animal”, in which the columnist reviews the state of political science with regard to how voters making decisions. In particular, he discusses the article “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics” by Philip Converse, which found that most people don’t have a […]
Good conversation
I really like good conversations. A lot. I was reminded of this a couple weeks ago when my friend Jofish came to town to visit. I organized a big dinner of all the TEP types to see him. Afterwards, the whole crew of us (11 or so) wandered over to Bug’s place to hang out […]
Management by numbers
This week at work we were asked to start using timesheet software to track the hours that we work on various projects. I hate timesheet software. Hate with a fiery passion. But when a coworker asked me why, I had to confess I really didn’t know. He pointed out that it only takes a couple […]
Innovation and optimism
A couple weeks ago, a coworker of mine and I were talking about outsourcing and how it will affect the economy and things like that. It arose out of a humor bit that somebody apparently posted at Slashdot about how they told their boss they were telecommuting, outsourced their work to a guy in India […]
Decentralized intelligence
As usual, I love the pointers over at Many-to-Many. In particular this week, Clay Shirky pointed to this great article over at Slate by Duncan Watts on the shortcomings of centralized intelligence. Duncan Watts runs the Small World Project, which seeks to test the “six degrees of separation” hypothesis. He’s written a book about it, […]
Changing my mind
So picking up the threads of my post about harshness, I realized that one of the possible sources of people not wanting negative feedback is that people never want to admit they’re wrong. In fact, they don’t even want to admit they don’t know (thanks to my father for pointing that out). They want to […]
