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The best Chronotrigger reference ever
Posted on July 7th, 2009 by Tim.
Categories: General/Misc., Politics.
Arrested Development is one of the finest shows to have ever been made. You should stop what you’re doing right now and go watch the whole thing on hulu.
Anyway, when I was watching it for the first time, I spotted a reference to Chronotrigger that blew me away. The clip below is what I’m talking about:
It’s an island in the sky! And they’re playing the theme from Zeal!
The music is nearly identical to the music played in Chronotrigger when you set foot on the island of Zeal. Coincidence? I think not.
OPB: Dog Part Three
Posted on June 16th, 2009 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, General/Misc..
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=an-immodest-proposal
Sometimes, leadership is pulling the sled
Posted on March 1st, 2009 by Chris.
Categories: Business/The Software Industry, Chris, General/Misc..
There will come a point in your job when you’re pulling a heavy weight, and it’s not you.
Teams can basically function in one of two ways. Loosely speaking, let’s call them the light side and the dark side.
On the light side, everyone is communicating and everyone is focused on the success of the team. People are willing to make sacrifices, and everyone knows who’s making the sacrifices. There is openness and solidarity; the team shares one objective.
If this sounds a little bit doe-eyed and delusional, then I don’t need to introduce you to the dark side.
While I call it the dark side, the thinking that pulls someone over to this side is completely rational. “Why should I give up my time and my effort to get something done for someone who’s just going to claim it for themselves when I’m done, like he did last month when we finished the Spearmint project?” The big question a darksider asks is simple and practical: What’s in it for me.
The other thing about the dark side is that it’s contagious. Once one person starts doing it, everyone gets pulled in.
—
Now, I’m not going to claim that you should do anything for anyone if it’s only going to benefit them. But let’s consider what’s in it for you.
Did you ever think about what separates leaders from everyone else? Is it power? Money? The privilege of belonging to a special class, knowing special people? Education? Yes, all of those things matter. But what fills in the empty space when society no longer places them on a pedestal?
Leadership starts by being the one who acts when everyone else doesn’t.
Leadership starts by being the one who acts when everyone else doesn’t. Did you ever wonder, while you were sitting in the lecture hall, if you would ever stop being driven around by a system of authority beyond your ability to influence? Or why it didn’t seem to end when you left the high school classroom and found yourself in another set of forms and bureaucratic procedures driven by some unseen force?
There are two ways of coping in the workplace. The first way is the way of procedure, rule-taking, what’s in it for me. The rule followers are the dominant breed in high school and bureaucratic monoliths. You can’t change the rules, so you get what you can out of them. But the rest of the world doesn’t have to work that way.
The smaller the organization, and the simpler the bureaucracy, the more likely it is that part of the system and the rules is defined by you. When everyone else abdicates responsibility, that’s not an alarm warning you to rush to the doors while dodging all responsibility. That’s a vacuum, a power vacuum, and you’re going to fill it. If you choose to.
Random trick: Copy current path to the clipboard
Posted on January 8th, 2009 by Tim.
Categories: General/Misc..
A little-known tool for copying things to the clipboard from the command line is the “clip” tool. As an example, here’s a neat trick to copy the current path from a command window:
cd | clip
With no parameters, cd just displays the current path, and piped to clip it’s on the clipboard now.