June, 18, 2005 archives

tony pierce’s story about jury duty is brilliant. the disappointing part is that he didn’t make it on a jury — imagine the stories if he had.

okay, one more little blo.gs tidbit: the effect of being rid of the service on the bandwidth usage of my server.

the final little spike in outgoing bandwidth (the blue line) is when the final dump of the data was downloaded by the yahoo folks.

the current bandwidth usage is in the 30kbits/sec range. it was generally over 1Mbits/sec before, or at least that’s how it looks from the graphs. (it may have been higher — it appears to get sort of flattened out over time in rrdtool.)

slack: getting past burnout, busywork, and the myth of total efficiency by tom demarco is a book that evan williams, one of the founders of blogger, recommended recently. to briefly and perhaps badly reformulate it, the main lesson of the book is that there is an efficiency vs. efficacy trade-off that needs to be acknowledged, and something that can increase efficacy (even if it decreases short-term efficiency) is to leave some slack. that’s not to say you should work 20% less, but that you may want to spend some percentage of time not working directly towards your main goal.

you can see this reflected, obviously, in google’s 20% time, where employees are free to spend 20% of their time working on whatever they want. but there’s a lot more to the book, and i don’t want you to get the idea that it is just a validation of the idea of google’s 20% time or anything like that.

like most good business books, it is a fairly quick read and at the end of it you’re left with the vague feeling that you knew, or should have known, all of what you just read.

here’s a quote that struck me as noteworthy: “it is success in the absence of sufficient power that defines leadership.”

i sometimes feel a little silly about reading management books like this since i’m not management, and don’t particularly aspire to be. but that quote puts in perspective why i read them anyway. and although i don’t aspire to management, it is still a subject that fascinates me. i guess the role i aspire to is consigliere. at least when sinecure isn’t available.

• hotel by moby
• bleed like me by garbage
• electrified by dressy bessy
• the sound of music by pizzicato five
• take off your shoes and dance like a monkey by chin chin

the last was a bit of clearance-bin randomness. with a cover and title like that, how could i not buy it?