Good Grades Certainly Don’t Hurt
How to Get a Job at Google - NYTimes.com:
Don’t get him wrong, Bock begins, “Good grades certainly don’t hurt.” Many jobs at Google require math, computing and coding skills, so if your good grades truly reflect skills in those areas that you can apply, it would be an advantage. But Google has its eyes on much more.
The Cloud is Watching You
It's obvious if you think about it, but this article drives some points home. If you use some kind of web service to read, listen, watch, charge, use, borrow or share stuff, that company not only knows what you've (read, listened to, etc.) They also know much more specifically how you did so: Did you stick with it to the end, did you do it from a particular place, at a particular time? Did you do it in one sitting or over a day or a week or a month?
If you then combine such observation across a farily large group of peope you can learn amazing things. Like how many people finish your book, or how far through it they get before abandoning it. Do they listen to the whole song? At what episode of a series do people abandon it? A little scary as the 'art' we 'consume' gradually morphs into the 'art' we 'like'.
Not only will be be offered to buy new products that we are likely to buy, but the products themselves will be designed in a way that we will like them. Or the art will be created in such a way that we will want to experience it.
Good or bad?
As New Services Track Habits, the E-Books Are Reading You - NYTimes.com:
Scribd is just beginning to analyze the data from its subscribers. Some general insights: The longer a mystery novel is, the more likely readers are to jump to the end to see who done it. People are more likely to finish biographies than business titles, but a chapter of a yoga book is all they need. They speed through romances faster than religious titles, and erotica fastest of all.
Blue Jasmine – Woody Allen
I just saw Blue Jasmine, the latest Woody Allen movie. It is excellent and I recommend it. I also happened to read Nicholas Kristof's column in the New York Times where he reprinted many of the allegations against Woody Allen repeating various allegations that make him sound really evil in his personal life. I also saw the Golden Globes telecast where they showed a montage about his career and hear Diane Keaton give a speech on Allen's behalf.
Suffice it to say that I was confused about what to believe but biased agains Woody Allen, even though I continue to love his movies. This article is very helpful in that regard.
The Woody Allen Allegations: Not So Fast - The Daily Beast:
Twenty-one years after the first allegations that Woody Allen abused his adopted daughter, that incident is back in the news thanks to the director’s ex-partner, Mia Farrow, and estranged son, Ronan Farrow. But what does a closer examination reveal?
Interview Skills
This article: The Only Interview Question That Matters" makes a pretty good case for this being the most important single interview question:
What single project or task would you consider your most significant accomplishment in your career to date?
Goodbye to BlogBridge…
After
a glorious run of almost 10 years, regretfully, I've decided to decomission
BlogBridge. My longtime freinds and blog followers will remember that I and
Aleksey worked on BlogBridge quite intensively for several years, and then
gradually less and less.
Over the last several years BlogBridge was more or less on auto pilot, but still with a decent set of devoted users. And every week and month brought in additional users. Not a huge amount but enough to keep it interesting.
Our pricing model was very lopsided, with most of the features being available for free, and then two levels of paid use, the basic (for $20 per year) and publisher (for $100 per year.) While we should have done more experimenting on the pricing, the fact is that there were lots of good alternatives available for free. So it was a tough (bad?) market fromt he start.
It was a labor of love. A comparitively tiny amount of money was actually spent on it but really compared to the labor that went into designing and implementing BlogBridge, it was truly a labor of love.
So herewith the news that BlogBridge is no longer available as a supported product. While it still has innovations that have not been copied in newer products, the fact is that the interest in dedicated rss readers has passed and it does not make commercial sense to continue. Actually, it hasn't made commercial sense for several years, but I am sentimental about it!
If you are a user, subscriber, or fan, you can read some more of the nitty gritty here.
How does that song go again? "Thanks for the memories….."
Aruba vs. Curaçao
I admit I am always a little bit offended when I hear that a friend of mine (François?) chooses Aruba as a vacation destination. And it happens pretty regularly. Oh I always say that the two islands are very similar, but the truth is that I've spent very little time in Aruba, so… Anyway, for those of you who want to explore this delicate topic more deeply I present to you:
Aruba versus Curacao: Caribbean Showdown - Curaçao Chronicle:
At first glance Aruba and Curacao seem very similar. They're both Dutch islands, they are about 75 miles apart from each other off of the coast of Venezuela and they even have most of the same cultural influences. But believe me; the two islands couldn't be more different. These differences aren't a bad thing; it's just that some travelers will prefer one over the other depending on the type of vacation experience they're looking for.
Box.com – 50 gig for free!
Forget Dropbox , I just heard that Box.com gives you 50gig for free upon signup. I just signed up and it seems like I got it. Pretty cool:
Box | Secure content-sharing that users and IT love and adopt:
Box lets you store all of your content online, so you can access, manage and share it from anywhere. Integrate Box with Google Apps and Salesforce and access Box on mobile devices. Learn More
But I wonder: how can they do it? Is storage so cheap now? Yahoo gives 100Gig free with Flickr.com.
And I also wonder, who needs 50gig free for non commercial use on Box.com? My first idea was to fill it up with movies, tv shows and so on.
But then I got to thinking: what if box.com is a big front, a magnet, or honeypot if you will, for pirated content? What if the entertainment industry, or even the FBI was behind it? Not that I myself have any such pirated stuff, but I hear that the FBI spends a lot of time trying to track down and shut down such sites.
What do you think?
Never go on deck alone
This is just a great read.
A Speck in the Sea - NYTimes.com:
Looking back, John Aldridge knew it was a stupid move. When you're alone on the deck of a lobster boat in the middle of the night, 40 miles off the tip of Long Island, you don't take chances.
Wikipedia’s tenets
Flying back home yesterday I read this article about Wikipedia in the New York Times: Wikipedia, What Does Judith Newman Have to Do to Get a Page? - NYTimes.com:
The three tenets of Wikipedia articles are "No Original Research," "Neutral Point of View" and "Verifiability" -- terms that, in and of themselves, are open to debate. At any rate, Mr. Wales wanted to make real the words of Charles Van Doren, one of the editors of the Encylopedia Brittanica, who wrote in an essay in 1962: "Because the world is radically new, the ideal encyclopedia should be radical, too. It should stop being safe -- in politics, in philosophy, in science." (He was also at the center of the quiz-show scandal in the late 1950s. It's in Wikipedia; look it up.)
It seems that there have been a number of good articles about Wikipedia recently which prompted me to write this. For example a few months ago, again in the NYT, magazine there was Jimmy Wales is not an internet billionaire."
Anyway the present article is interesting to me because I had not previously seen the 'tenets' spelled out that way:
- Neutral POV
- No Original Research
- Verifiability
In fact the only one I was aware of was "Neutral POV".
I hesitate to mention this (and why will be clear in a second) but there are three wikipedia articles that mention me: Pito Salas, Lotus Improv and Pivot Table.
Let's be honest, being mentioned in Wikipedia at all is an honor and good for my personal brand/reputation. I don't want to mess with that. Because of that I don't know who wrote them and haven't really paid attention to them over the years. And as I write that sentence, I think to myself, "Wait. I vaguely remember fixing a typo or a date in one of them years and years ago; is it safe to make a claim that I didn't touch them? Will I be punished? So I remove the statement that I never touched them."
And I now look at the articles and notice that the Pito Salas article has gotten shorter, and the other two have some inaccuracies that I know for sure because they involve my own first hand experience. But still I hesitate to correct them.
That's why the New York Times article I started with speaks to me. I don't really understand or try to predict how the wikipedia community judges entreies. I am proud to be mentioned even with minor inaccuracies. I think if I try to correct the inaccuracies I might call attention to the entries and lose them altogether. Even writing this post feels a little bit risky…
Design Thinking vs. Lean Startup
Point
Solving Problems for Real World, Using Design - NYTimes.com:
While the projects had wildly different end products, they both had a similar starting point: focusing on how to ease people's lives. And that is a central lesson at the school, which is pushing students to rethink the boundaries for many industries.
A fascinating article about the "Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford" also known as the D.School.
Everyone knows that Design Thinking is great and the new hotness. I love great design, and am in awe of it when I see it or have it pointed out to me. Furthermore, I am blown away by Ideo, which is the famous industrial design company founded by David Kelly (what a mustache!), who is one of the founders of the D.School.
"The school challenges students to create, tinker and relentlessly test possible solutions on their users -- and to repeat that cycle as many times as it takes -- until they come up with solutions that people will actually use."
… "That is how Mr. Kothari, a mechanical engineering graduate student, started his ramen project. He spent hours at local ramen shops watching and talking to patrons as they inevitably spilled broth and noodles. Together with a group of other D.school students, he built a prototype for a fat straw that would let patrons have their ramen and drink it, too"
(from the same article)
This is the same philosophy taught at Olin College where I teach. At Olin we call it UOCD or User Oriented Collaborative Design. In fact at Olin there are numerous interesting courses that come at Design from many different perspectives.
Counterpoint
Now the courses that I myself have taught have been based on so-called Lean Startup and I use the excellent book by Eric Ries called The Lean Startup. The Lean Startup process receommends:
"The Lean Startup provides a scientific approach to creating and managing startups and get a desired product to customers' hands faster. The Lean Startup method teaches you how to drive a startup-how to steer, when to turn, and when to persevere-and grow a business with maximum acceleration. It is a principled approach to new product development." (from The Lean Startup)
As I was reading the New York Times column about the D.School, I wondered if the two approaches are different or the same, in conflict, or just two ways of saying the same thing.And as I am writing this long post, I still am not sure. The easy answer is they are two sides of the same coin. The provocative answer is that two highly acclaimed approaches are 180% opposite to each other.