Read a great line in Seth Godin’s book, Linchpin, “It’s not an effort contest, it’s an art contest.” The point being that no one cares how hard you worked, they care how great your product is. Of course, great products tend to result from hard work along the “necessary-but-not-sufficient-condition” lines, but that’s a whole different…
I owe Victoria Brookhart an apology. One day, we were in the graduate student lounge discussing research methods and she burst out, “Isn’t this great? Here we are warming ourselves at the fires of knowledge. These are the times we’ll remember our whole lives as the good old days.” The rest of us threw spitballs…
This is a blog about blogging. On the fun scale, meta-blogging probably falls midway between metadata and meta-analysis but I am going to do it anyway. In stages, because, just like if it has bullet points it must be serious business, if it has stages, numbers and units you’ve never heard of, like petapixels, it…
There are two kinds of people in organizations; those who can count and those who claim to have “people skills”. When David Wechsler created the most commonly used intelligence test in America, the results gave two IQ scores, Verbal and Performance Intelligence. Dr. Wechsler said he had noticed that there are some people who were…
Back when I was in college, there was a group advocating burning rock albums. A major investigative journalist wrote a story on their motivation (I think he either wrote for Rolling Stone or Playboy, the latter of which, yes, I really did read for the articles. Despite having competed on my college track team and…
I’ve been in business for over twenty years. All of that time, I have run a small business, by choice. During those twenty years, I have had a sick husband, been widowed, had four children – so I had some reasons that becoming the next Oracle was not my priority. However, I have made a…
So, I am writing a paper on how you know you (or someone else) is a “real” programmer. That is, they don’t fit in that “new user” box any more. But how do you make that decision? Is it like pornography, you just know it when you look at it? (Not that I ever personally…
When I was in high school I had a very defined career path. I told anyone who asked me (which was very few people since no one cares what a high school kid thinks) that my career goal was to be president of General Motors. I even applied to the General Motors College. (Bet you…
A large part of my day is spent playing with new software and trying to break it. Yes, there are actually grown-ups who get paid to do this for a living. I find it hard to believe myself. The theory, which actually works well, is that whenever someone has a question about something he or…
A miracle has occurred and I have had time to spend evaluating two things that have been on my to-do list forever, JMP and SAS Enterprise Miner. Both of these products are produced by SAS and the first interesting point is that knowing SAS won’t really help at all. That isn’t to say that having…