Giancarlo Angulo's Blog
Will most definitely be buying an android 2.2 phone.
I will still probably buy an iPhone some day because they are very cool. However, I will never develop for it, because I’m a crazy one. A misfit. And I’m not fond of rules.
Now where did I pick up that idea?
via The Future of Apple’s Curated Computing.
Well I’m as unreliable, lazy, and entitled as the next guy, but that’s not why I’ve hopped jobs in the past. People in my generation have a very low tolerance for bullshit, and software engineering, in general, is a very high bullshit career. If you couple that with the standard load of bullshit you would get from a non-technical Harvard MBA type boss — like many CEOs that you find trying to get rich in Silicon Valley by hiring some engineers to “code up this idea real quick” — it’s no wonder that a good engineer will walk off the job after his one year cliff vesting.
As an engineer, you are told that you’re “lucky to have a job”, because there are “a hundred people lined up outside, ready to take it”. (As chance would have it, there are at least a thousand lined up to take the job of rich prick who tells people what to do). This backlash is the product of diseased thinking. A CEO who makes an engineer work 80 hours a week is a driven entrepreneur, but an engineer asking for a comfy chair is a prima donna. So, when we are up to our knees in golf-course, martini-lunch bullshit, don’t be surprised when we jump ship for a higher salary.
via Why Engineers Hop Jobs.
Was listening to this episode of This American Life and what hit me was how much these autoworkers were proud of their work. I hope we can all have this attitude towards what we do.
A car plant in Fremont California that might have saved the U.S. car industry. In 1984, General Motors and Toyota opened NUMMI as a joint venture. Toyota showed GM the secrets of its production system: how it made cars of much higher quality and much lower cost than GM achieved. Frank Langfitt explains why GM didn't learn the lessons – until it was too late.
via NUMMI | This American Life.
I have to admit a certain affinity towards how Ternovskiy feels. It is an impulse I try to fight against constantly.
By “the world,” of course, Ternovskiy means the Internet, which is also where most of his friends are. His closest confidant is a Russian immigrant named Kirill Gura, who lives in Charleston, West Virginia. Every night for the past five years, Ternovskiy has turned on his computer, found Kirill on MSN Messenger, and talked to him until one of them fell asleep. “He’s a real friend,” Ternovskiy says … Ternovskiy says that he sees the computer as “one hundred percent my window into the world.” He doesn’t seek much else. “I always believed that computer might be that thing that I only need, that I only need that thing to survive,” he says. “It might replace everything.”
via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Not addiction; dependency.
Must forward the linked study to the boss. harharhar
# A comprehensive study by Ernst & Young showed that the longer the vacation their employees took, the better they performed. Yet more than half of all Americans now fail to take all of their vacation days and 30 per cent of Americans use less than half their allotted vacation time.
via The Productivity Myth – The Conversation – Harvard Business Review.
3. Last summer, Kerr had to sign Nash — only the face of his franchise, the most popular Phoenix athlete ever and the heart of his locker room — to a contract extension. Kerr knew Nash couldn’t stop rehashing the past four years, thinking of all the couldas and wouldas and whatmightabeens. He knew Nash wondered if Kerr and Sarver knew what they were doing. He knew that, if this were anyone else, Disgruntled Superstar X would have demanded a trade or made it clear, “I’m playing this last year out, and if we fall short again, I’m out of here.”
But he also knew Steve Nash isn’t wired that way. He’s loyal. He’s Canadian. He’s old-school. He believes in things like, “I am the leader of this team, so as soon as I say that I might want to leave, I can’t lead anymore.” Nobody else would have stayed. Steve Nash stayed. Kerr promised him things would be better, that the window hadn’t closed, that he would, for lack of a better word, fix this. He even believed it.
via Bill Simmons: Phoenix Suns trying to erase 40 years of stomach punches – ESPN.
The most likely ones to accept such proposals are women who are unsure of their “quality,” either on the mating market or in unmarried life. Accepting the proposal takes on one kind of risk but relieves the woman of another.
Overall it seems that women are today more certain about the utility value of their alternatives to a surprise marriage proposal and that means they turn them down. The proposals may seem like harmless “cheap talk” (propose to lots of women above your station in life and thus the custom persists, even if it rarely succeeds), but Google-savvy, credential-savvy women can evaluate men better than ever before and the lower status guys don’t get close enough to them to try a shock proposal, much less make it stick.
Is it a prediction that rapid, surprise proposals are more common in societies where male high achievers are hard to identify in advance? How important is inequality of income and volatility/uncertainty of income?
Perhaps for aesthetic reasons, I find the decline of the surprise proposal slightly sad (though in part reflective of some positive societal developments), and I am pleased to reaffirm that I do not believe in the consultative approach.
via Marginal Revolution: What has happened to surprise marriage proposals?.
Placing the spreadsheeting-of-the-self trend in the context of the social-networking trend, Wolf observes, “You might not always have something to say, but you always have a number to report.” To give it a different spin: Who needs imagination when you have the data?
via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Sunday rambles.
I need a new laptop.
Blizzard reveals street date for long-awaited Wings of Liberty, the first installment in three-part sequel to the popular sci-fi RTS.Many-a-PC gamers' summer plans were ruined this afternoon, when Blizzard Entertainment announced the long-awaited launch date for its real-time strategy game, Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty. The first installment in the three-part sequel will launch worldwide–China excepted–on July 27 for the PC and Mac and will retail for $60 in the US. The game will also be available in a deluxe $100 Collector's Edition that will include a 176-page art book and a flash drive preloaded with the original Starcraft and its Brood War expansion.The Terrans will lead the Starcraft II charge July 27.Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty will focus on the human Terran campaign with a 29-mission single-player campaign. However, the multiplayer component will also let gamers wage interstellar real-time strategy warfare as the hivelike Zerg and technologically advanced Protoss factions. Eager gamers who preorder the RTS via GameStop will be able to join the ongoing Starcraft II beta. Orders cannot be canceled once GameStop sends out the beta key.
via Starcraft II launches July 27 – News at GameSpot.
Excellent advice. Read the whole thing!
“Know yourself” includes knowing when you excel as a principal and when you excel as a lieutenant. Many entrepreneurs I know think of themselves as CEO material. Generic ambition points to the top. But not everyone is best suited for the top job all the time, even if they are sufficiently capable.
You are not either a principal or lieutenant. Teams and circumstances vary. Part of being a good team player is knowing your role within the team. Most of the time I find myself a principal / CEO, but there is at least one area where I excel and enjoy more a lieutenant role: basketball.
via Ben Casnocha: The Blog: Know Yourself: Principal or Lieutenant?.