This morning I finished Planet Money’s Episode 963: 13,000 Economists. 1 Question.. These fine folks make one of my favorite podcasts - each week is a different look at something weird from a weird perspective. It sounds like it’s very market/economy focused, but it’s really focused on everything economics. In the past decades economics has branched out to look at nearly every field of human endeavor with a mathematical eye. It’s not always very successful, but the economist perspective does make me look at things differently.
A friend and coworker told me about intermittent fasting a few years ago. She was doing it as part of a weight loss competition at work… She was one of those folks that says they want to lose weight, but - I’m not really sure why they actually need to? My wife does that too - doesn’t need to lose weight but makes plans to do-so anyway.
Anyway - this woman was doing intermittent fasting by not eating for most of the day. At the time I thought I’d never do that… I’d just get “hangry” and be mean to folks around me. I didn’t want to do that…
I recently converted this blog over from a WordPress installation to use static pages generated by Hugo. I’ve used Hugo for my other recent web creations and I’ve been very impressed. The templating system is very nice, the page generation is lightning fast, and I’m always able to find something near what I need in the themes.
One WordPress feature I liked was the listing of articles by year and month… My blog had a little timeline on the side with each year and month listed, annotated with the number of postings I made during each. This let me look back through my ramblings chronologically, which is how a lot of them are organized in my head.
File "asdf.py", line 2
print("Result is: {}".format(result))
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
result = ((5*10) +15print("Result is: {}".format(result))
Two lines of code… Syntax error on the print line, evidently. But where? That line looks so simple and correct! And pointing directly at the t?
Well - it’s not really on the print line. Folks who have done any amount of programming will look at the preceeding line fairly quickly and notice the missing parenthesis.
I was thinking this morning about how I might manage an Air Force unit that provides networked server management services. For some reason. I realized that, while I know a bit about some of the technology used to provide cloud services, and manage a server farm - or at least what’s used by some cloud providers - I don’t know much about how they organize their business. I started to wonder if someone from Rackspace, or AWS, or DigitalOcean had written a book about their management practices, or company organization.
CybatiWorks is an educational and research tool for learning about Industrial Control System cyber components. I haven’t used it much, but it looks like it’ll simulate a PLC controlling a process, and it’ll do it on a Raspberry PI, GPIO-connected hardware, and a controlling HMI (Human-Machine Interface) desktop. You can buy the hardware pre-setup, then use it in a course.
The person who runs the company is Matthew Luallen, and he’s quite responsive over email. I’ve been trying to look into the system a bit, and CybatiWorks offers the RasPI image for free through their “Community” program. Unfortunately that’s run by Google+, and is now a broken link. Emailing the responsive founder, however, will get you a link to the necessary image.
I’ve done some small research about blockchain recently, and just want to put my thoughts down on paperblog so I can stop thinking them. Most of this is rehashing information I’ve read, but the “signed code verification” piece towards the end is an idea of mine that I’ve not read about elsewhere.
Blockchain is a hot term these days. It’s a popular management buzzword, and as such it can get thrown about as a cure for just about all that ails you. All businesses need to store data, and blockchain is known as a data-store, so everyone wants to make sure you’ve considered their (probably expensive) blockchain solution for data storage…
Everybody spends time advocating for something. “Pitching” something. You want your boss to consider a smarter way of working, one that you’ve come up with? You pitch it to her. You want someone to use an open-source project you’ve created? You pitch it to them.
A recent episode of the Freakonomics podcast covered meetings. Two or more people gathering to accomplish the business of business, as they defined it. It gave me some things I hope I remember the next time I’m organizing a recurring staff meeting…
Organize an agenda around questions-to-answer
Hold smaller meetings
Keep track and time
Meetings need agendas, just about every book I’ve read which touches on meetings agrees on this point. The agenda needs to be communicated to participants in advance, so folks can come ready to accomplish it. Folks need to know what to expect. Without an agenda meetings usually devolve into chaos, although sometimes it takes a couple aimless meetings in a row to hit this point. Staff meetings often don’t have a pre-published agenda, but they generally do have a set of topics they proceed through in a set order, and that becomes the known-agenda for the group.