Posts

I actually tried to negotiate a sabbatical after five years before coming to the new gig (particularly since I’d just given one up leaving Amnesty at the end of three years). No dice. Great little talk on the benefits of taking time out from work.

Of course, what happens is I just take mini-sabbaticals in between jobs though would really like to plan for one in a few years time from this gig (though often think I am kidding myself that I’ll ever take time off properly - when will those books get written?).

Great little video from Jason Fried (ostensibly flogging Rework, 37Signals’ new book) on why modern offices are constructed to optimize interruptions and why you and I spend all our time on weekends and after work getting real work done.

Offices are optimized for interruptions and interruptions are the enemy of work, creativity, and productivity.

And yeah, the fact, I am working at home while penning this, instead of out surfing today, is probably a good indication of it as a truism.

Really liked this post on whether employment contract are needed . (I can hear all my HR friends gasping now and sharpening their pitchforks/lighting their torches).

At least, it’d work for most small places I’d like to believe. I remember at my last place the minute detail we were adding to every job description in the default which made it impossible to separate out what a person actually did from the jargon-eze. I know I quipped at one point that we don’t put that we expect people to wear clothes to work in the JD at one point since I thought the convo had jumped the shark.

I know this is data geekiness on an incredible level , but I actually find the issues with the US Census (which is horrendously important from a representation by population and funding perspective) to be really fascinating.

It should be noted that the census is baked into the US constitution to occur every 10 years.

Really like this simple, clever campaign video.

And as an extra bonus, it must’ve been really cheap to make.

This makes me ill. If you ever needed even more argument that waterboarding is indeed torture of the most insidious and despicable kind (precisely because some people don’t think it is torture and condoned it), go spelunking through these Salon memorandums on what was done to Guantanamo detainees.

Waterboarding for dummies - Torture - Salon.com

… what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding ‘session.’ Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to ‘dam the runoff’ and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second ‘applications’ of liquid in each two-hour session - and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session - a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding - the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

I have to admit to have become more and more enamoured of heroku for production class hosting of Rails and Ruby applications. It makes things pretty painless (see my first post on gotchas for my first deploy there) and for Nunemaker’s rather strong sentiment, You’re An Idiot for Not Using Heroku .

It does kick ass if you’re getting stuff up fast, but if you’re moving into more serious production environments with multiple devs and you also need a staging environment, the simple git heroku push master gets to be too simple. You really need something capistrano -esque for managing deployment even to heroku.

Fantastic Do lecture from “Vagabonding”’s Rolf Potts, traveller extraordinaire, on taking some lessons from approaching travel to how you should live your real life. Definitely worth your time to watch the whole thing.

Best quote: “Life does not reward you with free time, you need to create it.”

Let’s face it, no one really knows what scientists mean when they refers to a one metre rise in sea levels. Information is beautiful tries to make it clear for everyone through the Guardian’s Data Blog .

Just wondering where Vancouver and Sydney would rank on the graph.

Fantastic presentation from Derek Silvers’ 3 minute TED talk.

The best way to start a movement is to be that first follower.