fighting the lack of good ideas
I hate not being home. I travel for a living now, performing site installations, upgrades, customizations, and on-site support for our customers. The travel’s a blast – see new places, try new food, drive different car. But not being home except weekends does kinda cut into one’s social activities. At this point, I wouldn’t trade…
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….
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…
I have recently been preparing to change jobs within my company from Support to Professional Services. This has lots of caveats, concerns, and corners to shine light into, alleviate, and circumvent. The first thing that I did when I found out that I would, in fact, be able to move to ProServe from Support was…
Or at least, they were built for people who speak English. Evidence for my claim: the first electronic computers were built during WWII by the British and Americans for code breaking; the first programming languages were designed, written, and implemented by Americans and British; the transistor, which led to the IC, was developed by Americans;…
As I was walking to get my turkey pot pie today that was cooking in the microwave in our break room, I looked at the parking lot below and realized that parking lots are approximately perfect hash functions. Think about it: cars come in in some semi-random order; spaces are available in semi-random fashion; cars…
Carpool lanes do not alleviate traffic. They encourage folks to either a) ignore the ‘carpool-only’ signs, or b) get pissed-off at other drivers ignoring the signs. I’ve been in California for a few days on a working vacation, and the carpool-only lanes are stupid. Because I’ve been driving by myself to work, I do not…