oro en paz, y fierro en guerra
Note: This is part of a series of posts highlighting talks from the BigWP San Francisco meetup at the Henry J Kaiser Family Foundation on the evening of November 6. As both a WordPress VIP Technical Account Manager and a Core Security Release Lead on the WordPress project, I have a rare glimpse into one…
I don’t think there’s anything funny about it. I think Tantaros perfectly explained why so many Americans think they support torture: if you start with the assumption that the U.S. is morally good, then whatever our government did must have been morally justified. That’s the thinking. Alas, that’s backwards. Our morality is based on our actions, not the other way around.
On the one side: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. On the other: Do unto others before they do unto to you. Only one of those mindsets is “good”.
“Hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.”
? Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
via SLAUGHTERHOUSE 90210 : “Hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life….
Man, I just don’t know. Wozniak wanted to show off for his nerd friends. I was ready to sell to Commodore. Xerox was so focused on the 1990s they forgot about the 1980s. NeXT, we just got further and further into the quagmire. Pixar, before Toy Story, it was the only hardware company less successful than NeXT. The iPhone launched without an App Store. But people were drawn to me, and I told them what they needed to hear in order to make each other rich. So do that: Go out there and tell people what they need to hear in order to make each other rich. When something works say that was the plan all along.
via The Sixth Stage of Grief is Retro-Computing — The Message — Medium.
I don’t know what it felt like watching Mathewson pitch, but watching Bumgarner is like feeling an expertly administered epidural nip in between a couple of vertebrae and deliver bliss: it’s a gliding, almost eventless slide through the innings, with accumulating fly-ball outs and low-count K’s marking the passing scenery. It’s twilight sleep; an Ambien catnap; an evening voyage on a Watteau barge. Bumgarner is composed out there, his expression mournful, almost apologetic, even while delivering his wide-wing, slinging stuff. Sorry, guys: this is how it goes. Over soon.
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery, Author of The Little Prince
“No, it doesn’t bother me. If the customer orders Pappy and can talk about fine whiskey, I’ll pour Pappy and talk about fine whiskey. But if the customer orders a Captain and Coke, I’ll make the best Captain and Coke I can.”
This guy is truly a master of his craft. He knows all the technical details of the domain, and is creative enough to invent fantastic drinks. But beyond all that, most importantly, he knows that barcraft is fundamentally about giving the customer what they want. My friends and I wanted to talk about high end bourbon. Brody McBroderson wanted to get hammered.
The true master obliges both.
So many good things about hiring and personnel in this article with Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google.
Q.Other insights from the data you’ve gathered about Google employees?
A. One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything.
And on leadership/management:
On the leadership side, we’ve found that leadership is a more ambiguous and amorphous set of characteristics than the work we did on the attributes of good management, which are more of a checklist and actionable.
We found that, for leaders, it’s important that people know you are consistent and fair in how you think about making decisions and that there’s an element of predictability. If a leader is consistent, people on their teams experience tremendous freedom, because then they know that within certain parameters, they can do whatever they want. If your manager is all over the place, you’re never going to know what you can do, and you’re going to experience it as very restrictive.
Via: CORNER OFFICE: LASZLO BOCK In Head?Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
Perfect doesn’t mean flawless. Perfect means it does exactly what I need it to do. A vacation can be perfect even if the nuts on the plane weren’t warmed before serving.
Any project that’s held up in revisions and meetings and general fear-based polishing is the victim of a crime. It’s a crime because you’re stealing that perfect work from a customer who will benefit from it. You’re holding back the good stuff from the people who need it, afraid of what the people who don’t will say.
Stop polishing and ship instead. Polished perfect isn’t better than perfect, it’s merely shinier. And late.
But I walked away convinced that this wasn’t just one of Google’s weird flights of fancy. The more I used Glass the more it made sense to me; the more I wanted it. If the team had told me I could sign up to have my current glasses augmented with Glass technology, I would have put pen to paper (and money in their hands) right then and there. And it’s that kind of stuff that will make the difference between this being a niche device for geeks and a product that everyone wants to experience.
After a few hours with Glass, I’ve decided that the question is no longer ‘if,’ but ‘when?’
I can’t wait to get my hands on these…