It’s absolutely amazing that Google has created a virtuous information arms race in which experts are competing with each other for web traffic by giving away their most interesting information.
Interesting content means links which means organic web search traffic which means more clients.
How amazing is it that businesses have been incentivised to be interesting.
Ok it’s lame but I don’t care
Real programmers often end up explaining stuff to the person who started off explaining it to them
Real programmers have written programs for imaginary hardware
Real programmers think that maybe one day the web will take off
Real programmers regard databases as ‘cheating’
Real programmers make their girlfriends compose shopping lists in RDF
Real programmers think the next big thing will be usenet
Real programmers have sold scripts for in excess of $1000 a line
Real programmers remember ‘No Hireing’ DHH because his indenting was not up to scratch
Real programmers have written programs for an operating system that less than 100 people use
Real programmers think SICP has too much fluff
Real programmers have both recieved and given death threats in comments
Real programmers sold at least one university assignment to a bulgarian they met on irc
Real programmers steal Steve Jobs’ cars’ license plate
Real programmers have proposed marriage based on code quality alone
Real programmers have joined billion row tables unnecessarily to irritate a DBA
Real programmers can often detect a sites PageRank by smell alone
Real programmers have considered ways of programming via musical instrument
Real programmers have requested the job title of “The Big Kahuna”
Real programmers were granted the title
Real programmers have telneted into an mmo
Real programmers used to whistle 1200 baud modem handshakes back in the day
Real programmers still talk about it
Real programmers still remember the bbs that Mel used to hang on
Real programmers have broken hardware with software
Real programmers have asked a programming question on a date
Real programmers profiled and optimized their first hello world program
Real programmers tried to get funding for Knuth.tv
- Infographics can be very viral. People love infographics, I know I do.
-Post frequency / schedule matters a lot. Posting every day can be very powerful.
Every so often I come across a people person. Someone who is more interested in who than what or how or even why.
You can recognize them pretty easily, they say things like
“Oh yes that’s Marks project” and “Yes yes, I know Kerry is interested in that”
and you think “why did they say that ? It’s irrelevant to the discussion which manager’s manager is in charge of it.”
People people are the opposite of technical people. People people see the world in terms of power, people and status. They have almost no interest in the substance of the work they are supposed to be doing.
People people are very demotivating to deal with because the message they keep broadcasting is “Success is not dependent on things you can control such as quality and attention to detail, success is dependent on who thinks what of whom”.
You could probably describe the people I am talking about as status sycophants.
Not all people people are terrible though, there are obviously degrees.
Jason Calacanis is a people person. Listen to him talk about startups, how long does it take him to move from the product to the ‘Who’. He is a pretty good kind of people person though.
Kara Swisher strikes me as a people person, I get the impression she isn’t actually interested in technology, she is interested in who is doing what with (or to) whom.
Perhaps the best way to deal with people people is to treat them as though they are specialists in some technology that is required for your project but not the central theme.
Consult them when their area of expertise is important but otherwise ignore them.
Edit : Looking for a Windows app
I am looking for an application that I can configure to pop up a reminder when I type in a certain word or phrase.
I want the reminder to appear regardless of which application I type the word/phrase into. It would also be great to be able to specify regexp type patterns to look for.
The reminder should be a little window that doesn’t take focus but does appear on top of all other windows (this might be tricky ??)
I don’t want the program to record a log of all my keystrokes but to merely be resident checking as I go whether I have just typed a trigger word/phrase.
I think this app, if it doesn’t exist, might have some commercial potential.
Imagine a government department that could pop up a security/privacy warning every time an employee typed in a passport number or customer id number.
There must be other uses… hmmm
Things I’ve noticed in my 31 years that surprised me:
I was surprised to find how unimportant knowledge is and how important practice is. I have found this to be the case in all the situations in which I didn’t expect it to be the case.
When I was at university I thought it was half-assed and the work was lacking in rigor, just play time. When i got out into the working world I was surprised to find it more half-assed and the work less rigorous.
I was surprised to see how many businesses are run based on relationships not product or service quality. I was surprised to find many business managers literally see product and service quality as tangential to their business.
I was surprised at how hard it is to play a steel string guitar and how fun it is to play a nylon string guitar.
I was surprised to realize that everyone thinks they are a little smarter than they appear to other people. I think this is because we experience our own thoughts directly but experience everyone else’s thoughts dulled by their ability to express themselves. It was frustrating to find how difficult it can be to communicate an idea that is easily conceived.
I was surprised to find Employers who provide training and ‘professional development’ simply ask their employees “what training do you want to do ?”. I had assumed they would all have a master plan for the organisation and would be the ones directing who was to be trained and in which area.
I had assumed that the most effective and honest way to deal with problem staff was to discuss the problem and possible solutions directly. I was surprised to find that managers with a deft hand can solve problem while appearing to do nothing. Often this route leads to less long term disruption all round.
I was surprised to realize that who is speaking is usually more important than what is said. Go and find some before and after images of people who have lost a lot of weight. Cover over the after picture with your hand, look at the before picture and imagine they have walked into a meeting at your workplace or you are talking to them at a party. Honestly think about the immediate assumptions you make about the person. Now cover the before picture and imagine the same scenario with the person in the after picture. I’m not saying these kinds of non-verbal value judgements are evil, just that they are more important than I realized.
The pace of change has been a lot slower than I expected. In politics and economics but also in technology. People talk about the amazing pace of change in technology but it has always seemed pedestrian to me.
I didn’t see why Stirling’s ideas shouldn’t apply to all areas, and in particular to writing: literacy was clearly of great importance, and anyway writing interested me, and I wanted to infect the children with enthusiasm.
I tried getting them to send secret notes to each other, and write crude comments about me, and so on, but the results were nil.
One day I took my typewritter and the art books into the class, and said I’d type out anything they wanted to write about the pictures. As an afterthought, I said I’d also type out their dreams – and suddenly they were wanting to write. I typed out everything exactly as they wrote it, including the spelling mistakes, until they caught me.
Typing out spelling mistakes was a weird idea in the early fifties (and probably now)-but it worked. The pressure to get things right was coming from the children not the teacher. I was amazed at the intensity of feeling and outrage the children expressed , and their determinate to be correct, because no one would have dreamed they cared.
Even the illliterates were getting their friends to spell out every word for them. I scraped the timetable and for a month they wrote for hours a every day. I had to force them out of the classroom to take breaks.
When I hear that children only have an attention span of ten minutes, or whatever, I’m amazed. Ten minutes is the attention span of bored children…
- from “Impro – Innovation and the Theatre” by Keith Johnstone
This idea isn’t perfect / complete but there might be something the kernel of something useful here.
www.improclassroom.com is available.
The Class can decide whether to publish their text to the public web or delete at the end.
The City and class age group could be published with the text but no identifiable info.
The class can view what other classes have written about the image.
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I was inspired by Patrick Mckenzie’s Solo Founder rap
Of course I don’t really think this a great song or that I can rap, just a bit of fun.
Yo, I wanna tell you story about a man who loved the power of technology so much, a solo founder.
Cubicle land, you know we’ve all be there,
Ideas keep coming, the next big thing,
It’s risky, you’ll fail, you haven’t a chance.
post on hacker news, watch mixergy interviews,
Starts off slow, no sales or downloads,
What you gunna do ? give up and cry,
Fast forward two years, the business has grown,
With every email comes another sale,
the effort was worth it,
looking around you suddely wake
(god dammit, this is bullshit, gaah, where’s my TPS reports… |
Boxing Day Cricket Test Pakistan Vs Australia December 2009