Like many people, I work for an under-staffed segment of a remarkably under-staffed company. Before transitioning to professional services, I worked for support, and they are even more under-staffed. I see a simple solution to this problem, but the company is too short-sighted to implement anything like this, sadly. Problem: We need new people. Desperately. [...]
Category Archives: ideas
preparing for change (part the second)
Friday, March 14, 2008
As with knowledge capture, so must any successful organization pursue training. Training need not be formal. It can be self-paced, on-the-job, as-you-go, or formal. I know that I have learned the most about the product I support not from formal training, but from actually supporting it. Part of that is because we have had a [...]
if i ran the zoo…
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
…or, more accurately, the apartment complex. I was talking to a couple friends this past weekend, and told them I’d like to offer a per-minute lease on an apartment. It turns out that $0.02 per minute is $864/30-day month. For another penny a minute I’d include all utilities. Ok, so it’s a little off the [...]
sloshing dessert
Monday, January 14, 2008
So, I was sitting at Cold Stone in Chapel Hill with a buddy of mine Saturday evening, enjoying my mint and peanut butter ice cream with pineapple and coconut mix-ins, when I piped-up with “this would be so much better with rum”. Then it hit me: I need to open a bar and ice cream [...]
screen… but for x
Thursday, November 8, 2007
I’m sure most Linux sys admins are familair with screen – it’s a virtual terminal multiplexer that allows single logins to be ‘detached’, then resumed later. This is fantastic because it means what you’re doing can survive connection failures, you can share it with other users, etc. Windows has a similar tool called ‘Remote Desktop’, [...]
i know why search is broken
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Search is broken. Google, Yahoo, Ask, Alta-Vista, and on, and on the list goes. Hundreds of companies, thousands of individuals. I know why search is broken, and I know what needs to be fixed. Now to figure out the how of fixing. When you’re looking for information, you search on keywords. Google’s been nice enough [...]
a flying ‘bus’
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
Public transit is an interesting concept, and as I’ve written about before, is not a panacea. However, I’m wondering if it might be reasonable to apply the concept to flying. Bear with me a minute here. Let’s say you fly – maybe a lot, maybe not a lot, but when you do, you pretty much [...]
the future of interfaces
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Apple recently introduced a convergent device that is a media player (iPod), cell phone, wifi device, and widget player (mini OS X) – I’m going to call it the iCon (since the current name is under trademark dispute). There’s one whole walloping button. Everything else is done via hand motions. Want to zoom in on [...]
it’s not my problem
Thursday, November 2, 2006
Security, air quality, water potability, land use, and the list goes on and on. When any one thing is too big to be one person’s problem, it becomes a problem for the populace, and once it’s everyone’s problem, it’s no one’s problem. Securing airports is too complicated for one person to do, so a committee [...]
what’s your business strategy?
There only seem to be about two strategies that work: you can try for growth (like most companies seem to do), or you can try for the niche that will consistently pay for your product. I don’t know if there are other models out there that work, but these two do. The growth, aka ‘monopoly’, [...]