fighting the lack of good ideas
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…
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…
There has been a lot of talk recently about the huge issue of plagiarism among students. Ars Technica had an article about it on 20 October [arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061020-8041.html]. I have also heard the issue discussed on radio talk shows, and been lectured on the consequences of being caught plagiarizing by almost every professor I’ve ever had….