Posts from — December 2007

This video shows a guy who flies on a helicopter and fixes high-voltage power lines:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nX3SxRrqWA

The end quote is priceless:
“There’s only three things I’ve ever been afraid of: electricity, heights, and women. And I’m married, too.”

It’s a long read, but lots of gems in this year’s edition of The Year in Media Errors and Corrections. My favorites are the ones from UK tabloids where they retract entire stories. Example:

An article about Lord Lambton (”Lord Louche, sex king of Chiantishire”, News Review, January 7) falsely stated that his son Ned (now Lord Durham) and daughter Catherine held a party at Lord Lambton’s villa, Cetinale, in 1997, which degenerated into such an orgy that Lord Lambton banned them from Cetinale for years. In fact, Lord Durham does not have a sister called Catherine (that is the name of his former wife), there has not been any orgiastic party of any kind and Lord Lambton did not ban him (or Catherine) from Cetinale at all.

Part two of Joel Spolsky’s talk at Yale was the most interesting, I think. It discussed the differences between in-house programming and software development, and seemed dead-on from what I’ve seen in my limited time in both camps.

This paragraph struck me as particularly interesting, especially in light of a few conversations I’ve had with people recently:

The assumption there was that managers exist to tell people what to do. This is quite upside-down from the way management worked in typical west-coast high tech companies. What I was used to from the west coast was an attitude that management is just an annoying, mundane chore someone has to do so that the smart people can get their work done. Think of an academic department at a university, where being the chairperson of the department is actually something of a burden that nobody really wants to do; they’d much rather be doing research. That’s the Silicon Valley style of management.

From Boing Boing, another good video about THE INTERNET from Gabe and Max:

Only the first half of the video is with them (and worth watching):

I’ve slept in 4 different states (not in vehicles) in the last 24 hours. Plenty of difficulties encountered during this trip, but it’s been a good adventure.

States are: CA, AZ, IA, and CO.

An exercise for Kowalski:

100 Quotes From 100 Movies Counting Down From 100

See how many you can name.

My 20% project is a tool that allows people to publish HTML commentaries that play alongside youtube videos. Commentaries could be informational cross-referencing, opinionated point/counterpoints, or whatever. For now, we’ve been working with the Des Moines Register to use the first version of this tool for there presidential debates. The first debate was today, the second is tomorrow.

You can take a look and try it out here:
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=debaterepafter

The commentary there is a good start, I’m excited to see much more interesting things go into it in the future. It’s easy to imagine lots of interesting possibilities with this, I think.

I have a lot more to write about this, but I’m too tired right now. It’s been an exhausting week. Hopefully back to regular posting soon… I’m ~ 1 month behind!

Testing something, move along…

As of this week, over half of the employees at Google have been there for less time than me (not including my internship!).

Of full-time engineers, 1/3 started after I did.

Normal posting and stuff will hopefully resume later this week. Christmas is going to be a much-needed break.

I’ll be really busy for the next week, so don’t expect too much posting. The good news is that my 20% project will hopefully be launching in some form soon (and I might be doing a bit more travel). Until then, it’s going to be “heads down, power through” as Michael Bluth would say…