My Facebook friends have heard me complain a few times that I have apparently exceeded my brain’s capacity to keep track of people. At Google, I have worked with hundreds of people, and it’s entirely embarrassing when one of them sees me at lunch or elsewhere on the Google campus and says “Hi Eric!” and […]
Expertise as exception handling
A few months ago, I wrote a post claiming that expertise was doing difficult tasks consistently and Rif challenged me on that. And I’ve been thinking about it over the past few months and have another model I’m going to throw out there: expertise as exception handling. One example of this is my experience as […]
Maximizing collisionability
Last night, Tony Hsieh of zappos.com spoke at the Long Now on the topic of Helping Revitalize a City. He described Downtown Project, which is the company he designed to create a thriving community (tech, art, fashion, family) in downtown Las Vegas. As he discussed the project, he brought up a great concept that I […]
Hosting update
I should have known better than to keep pushing my luck with textdrive.com after last year’s catastrophic meltdown, but I didn’t want to deal. Unfortunately, textdrive went down without even an email to its users a couple weeks ago, and their provider deleted all their data on Friday. Oops. At least I had a backup […]
Don’t act like a special snowflake
Disclaimer: This post is not about you. Please do not take offense. It is an exaggerated amalgam of people for the sake of making a point. Over the past several months, I have talked to a number of people looking for jobs or practicing company pitches. And what I see is people getting frustrated that […]
Antifragile, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Amazon link Taleb is known for his book The Black Swan, which I own and have read but apparently never wrote a review for. While his writing style is a little annoying, the central concepts of nonlinearity and power-law distributions are worth remembering (described in a Long Now talk here if you want the short […]
2013 review
I’m a little late to this, but a 2013 review is an easy post to kick off my theoretically renewed commitment to blogging in 2014. For the first time since joining Google in September of 2008, I wasn’t completely swamped by work, and thus had time to invest in the rest of my life as […]
Inequality, Globalization and Technology
There has been a discussion about economic inequality on an email list I’m on. It started with a link to this CNN summary of “must reads” on inequality, and has continued over a few other threads the past couple months. I’ve written a few thoughts in those threads, and thought I would assemble them here […]
Consistency
As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve gotten back into playing volleyball this summer at Google, and have been really enjoying it. The sand court on Google’s main campus is in regular use, and I’ll occasionally stop by and watch to pick up some pointers. One Wednesday at lunch, I was watching the really […]
Being a good teammate
As those of you who follow me on Facebook know, I have gotten back into playing volleyball this summer, specifically sand doubles volleyball. I have been playing with a variety of folks on the main Google court. We typically get 4 people together to play, and then rotate through teammates, so everybody plays with everybody […]
