Sean’s Mental Walkabout

Will your next meeting pass the “blizzard goggles” test? - (37signals)
I need to start doing this a lot more. Meetings suck off way to much actual productive time.

Obama/Clinton support visualizer that rocks - (37signals)
Ok, I’ll stop linking in 37 signals blog posts soon, but it’s impressive how much good stuff is in this backlog. This is a brilliant visualization tool.

Workplace Experiments - (37signals)
It’s reasons like this that while everyone wants to become google, google wants to become 37signals (and I really wish I still had that graphic around somewhere).

Cooking For Engineers - Step by Step Recipes and Food for the Analytically Minded
The cook charts are just amazing. I’m going to have to check out a few more things on here.

“You have to treat your employees like customers” - (37signals)
In an era where most of a companies actual resource is it’s people, this hits the nail on the head

Dunning-Kruger effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“the phenomenon wherein people who have little knowledge (or skill) tend to think that they know more (or have more skill) than they do, while others who have much more knowledge tend to think that they know less.”

Public Speaker - ActiveWiki
Seriously? Active worlds users only get to hear the 50 closest people to them?

Phusion Passenger™ 2.0 RC 1 and Ruby Enterprise Edition released « Phusion Corporate Blog
Interesting, they also support django now. Passenger is definitely a great piece of software.

Popularity: 16% [?]

I was in the middle of this amusing exchange the other day. Names removed to protect the innocent, and summarized a bit. I like and respect everyone involved in the exchange, but it just shows a difference of world view.

Manager: We’re told there is a list of 9000 non compliant people corporate wide. We think there are about 300 in our organization. I think it will be easiest to just email all the affected managers and figure out who is compliant and who isn’t.

Engineer: Wait, there is a text parsable list of those 9000? Can we get a copy of it? It should only take about an hour of scripting to bang out something that rips through that list, looks in the directory, and sees who eventually reports to our VP.

Manager: really?

Engineer: Yeh, plus it will mean less people have to do busy work. If we send it to all the managers, they’ll just send it to employees to sort it out, which will end up being a whole lot of man hours and time lost, and get everyone grumpy with more paper work.

Manager: right, good point.

Of course this means that Engineer has signed himself up for that hour of extra work, but that’s ok, it saves everyone else a lot of time, and Engineer in question doesn’t get to code often enough anyway.

Popularity: 7% [?]

The last two days of work weren’t actually work per say, they were the Leadership Excellence class here at IBM. I’d heard really good things about the class from people that I very much respect that have gone through it, so was rather intrigued in what it was going to be like. This ends up being 3 - 4 weeks cumulative of classes over the course of the year, so there will surely be more on it here later.

Our first module was the 2 day Collaboration Class. What this class really was, was about Communication. We started with a behavior test, to determine our own behavior types, and that was used as the basis of a series of team exercises over the course of the 2 days. We were using the DiSC method, and I came out a strong DC, for those who know what that means.

After 2 days of group activities, including a group activity to resolve behavior conflicts over the building of the first rail road, my brain is quite full, but I am looking at the world slightly differently. If all the classes are as good as this one, I really can’t wait to see what is next.

Going through the DiSC test did make me start wondering about Myers-Briggs again however, so I was amused to find the Harry Potter MB test this morning on science blogs. I am:

Not all that scientific, but amusing none the less.

Popularity: 6% [?]

About 3.5 years ago, I finally got all the piece parts together for the LUG. Beyond the standard reasons of getting together like minded technical people, which is always a good thing, I also had no idea if I could get a group off the ground from scratch, of complete volunteers, into a vaguely functional group. In every other instance in which I’d taken a leadership role, it was for an entity that already had a course and speed. Building from scratch is “a whole other country”.

There have been plenty of bumps and bruises along the way, and lots of learning how people function. One of the most important lessons is people have short memories. If a meeting isn’t announced a few days in advance, as well as the same day of the meeting, the attendance drops. This happened by accident a few times, with noticeable effect. Just this single piece of info is massively valuable, as it plays out in all kinds of other arenas.

For instance, if you want people to do something at/for a meeting, you need to ask them. Not as a herd, as a mass broad cast, but to the individual themselves. And remind them a few days before the meeting happens, just in case it slipped their mind. We’re all busy people, and we all let certain things drop, so there is no malice here, it’s just the way we are.

The thing I’m surprised about, is the number of people that should have learned that lesson, that haven’t. I guess everyone should start a LUG. It would make the world a better place in more ways than one.

Popularity: 7% [?]