A Spork in the Road

Jonathan Follett, in one of two current articles posted on A List Apart, discusses The Rules of Digital Engagement:

When it comes to work style and culture, virtual teams—especially groups of contractors—are inherently less formal and more flexible than traditional office-based organizations. We are, as William Gibson puts it in his novel Pattern Recognition, “post-geographic”—operating beyond physical boundaries. But when workers no longer collaborate within a particular physical space, they must adopt a disciplined devotion to process. In digital space, the physical artifacts of day-to-day business we share are gone—what remains are discussions and deliverables. The way we hold discussions and create deliverables becomes increasingly important.

I love collaborating online, except when I’m dealing with someone who has poor communication skills. These are never people we enjoy dealing with, but the problems are magnified by geographical distance. When you can’t sit down with a person and hash out what she’s trying to tell you—in person—it can double or triple the amount of time it takes to complete a simple task.

I’m always discovering ways to improve electronic communication. For example, I try to limit emails to one topic or main question, and I use a lot more paragraph breaks than I otherwise would. I agree with Follett that, a decade into mainstream electronic communication, we’re still figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

My beloved O’Reilly Linux News newsletter this week included a link to an article that itself linked to a free software tool called Workrave. It’s designed to treat and prevent repetitive stress injuries (RSI) from sitting too long in front of the computer.

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And this is a fabulous one, described by Campfire NYC’s Michael Monello:

…the b-movie producer William Castle is a hero of mine. Those of you who lack the appreciation for kitsch that I have might know him as the producer of the Roman Polanski film ROSEMARY’S BABY, but in his day he was known as the “King of Gimmicks.”

Gimmick is an unfortunate word, however, as much of what he did was bridge the gap between the safety of the silver screen and the audiences lives. His most famous invention was PERCEPTO for his Vincent Price film THE TINGLER. The Tingler was a worm that burrowed into your spine and would kill you. The only way to kill the worm was to scream as loud as you can.

During the film, the Tingler crawls into a movie theater and then the screen goes dark. An announcer is heard:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, the Tingler has entered this theater! SCREAM, SCREAM FOR YOUR LIVES!”

The seats were wired with PERCEPTO, which administered small electric shocks to your bottom. He didn’t just break the third wall, but turned his movie into a physically immersive experience.

— Michael Monello

(This reminds me of the Alien Encounter attraction at Disney’s Magic Kingdom, a ride which has since been replaced. I’ve heard friends pan Alien Encounter, but I loved it.)

What do you do with a dead computer? Certainly not throw it out. It’s hazardous waste, people! But I’ve discovered recently that this is not common knowledge — or at least, not as common as it should be.

So a quick tip: when it comes time to get rid of an old computer, either donate or sell it (if it’s still working) or dispose of it properly (if it’s good and truly dead).

Check out Ten Tips for Donating a Computer, and investigate trade-in and recycling programs such as Costco’s GreenSight.

If you have to dispose of a non-working computer, contact your municipal waste and recycling facility to find out where you can drop off the computer. Also, some computer stores (such as Dell or Apple) have pick-up recycling programs of one sort or the other, and some office supply stores will let you drop off recyclable computer equipment for a nominal fee.

And if you happen to live in Pinellas County (or even if you don’t!), check out the excellent Pinellas County “Get Rid of It” page for extensive resources on how to effectively reduce, reuse, and recycle.

A good piece in Wired about Secret Websites, Coded Messages: The New World of Immersive Games.

This is, of course, of more than average interest to me for several reasons, including this one.

As is my wont, I’d like to celebrate the combination of whimsy and insight that characterizes the best software development approaches.

Today’s exhibit comes from the programming language Ruby. Duck typing is a concept that is summarized in Chapter 23 of Dave Thomas’ excellent Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide:

…the type of an object is defined more by what that object can do… If an object walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then the interpreter is happy to treat it as if it were a duck.

Non-programmers may find the exact meaning of that quote obscure, but hopefully you can appreciate the humor and common sense of looking at the currency of everyday code (integers and characters and files and arrays and other, more complicated elements) through the lens of the old “walks like a duck/talks like a duck” cliche.

Still no time to write my own posts, so here’s another interview excerpt, this time an interview with Burmese monk Sayadaw U Tejaniya in the Winter 2007 Tricycle:

…when wisdom grows, it leads you by the nose. You can’t stop. That’s why I like the atheists. There’s hope for them. There is no need to believe anything. People become atheists because they think—they cannot believe, but they still want to know.

In the beginning, just start with wanting to know. Everyone has some curiosity, some basic need to know. Just encourage that. A good education is motivating a person to want to know for himself. All the cramming and rote learning is never a good education. You won’t get the best out of people that way. Their potential is stifled. Only people with an inner urge to learn will keep developing.

—Sayadaw U Tejaniya

Another pseudo-post, this time cribbing a fabulous excerpt of an interview with Kelly Link. I hope to someday be bored again…

Boredom is useful for writers. I need a certain amount of boredom to get work done. But I also need to do other things besides sit at a desk and write. If I weren’t involved in various editing projects, I would have to find something else to do. You need other kinds of work, and you also need significant periods of stillness in order to have time to think. Boredom allows time for thinking. Even in writing, boredom serves a useful function — if I’m boring myself when I write, it means I need to stretch myself, try something I haven’t done before. I can only keep at one kind of work for so long and then I need a change. For the past couple of years it’s been kind of nice to have months in which I am writing, then to move from that to editing the books, thinking about design, print runs, fonts, et cetera. — Kelly Link in Locus Magazine

…I’ll post this:

(via Maureen McHugh).

I’m reading a fantastic book about agile software development: The Art of Agile Development by James Shore and Shane Warden. And as I’m reading, I’m thinking about how to scale some of these principles — designed for and derived from teams of approximately 3-20 people — down to a team of 1.

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