Month: January 2009
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Goofus International and Gallant Microsystems
Hostile or charming: Which kind of software company are you?Do you remember reading Highlights for Children as a kid—or having it read to you? Your mom would recite the magazine’s preschooler-friendly lumps of moral and intellectual fiber, which were all done up in simple line drawings and noun-verb sentences.I was deeply affected by one Highlights…
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Work, Love, and Play
No man is born into the world whose work is not born with him.James Russell Lowell
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Lazier than…
We have some amazingly lazy employees in the business line that I support; they give up on a task if the least little thing derails their process. For instance, they are supposed to geocode addresses with a latitude and longitude. To do this, they use a variant of Google maps that we wrote to extract…
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Vision
An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.Charles Bukowski
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Who’s calling the help desk?
Beware the 10 most dangerous species of help desk callersDuring my years working in IT support, I have become more and more interested in the many types of people who call IT help desks. Like a biologist, I have found that having a classification system is critical in understanding the users that I help on…
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Credibility
The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with it’s credibility. And vice versa.Robert A. Heinlein