New Years Hat Designer

Frustrated with the boring hats Party Depot was offering us we bought some paper and spent two days making hats for our New Year's Eve Party. This convinced me that their is some custom design needed, best done by a New Year Hat Designer --

This post means I am back!! We might see a posting every week if I get to it:-)

Monkey Patcher

I like everything with monkeys so when I ran across that I thought it would neatly fit in here:

"Monkey Patching is the ability to hack out a solution over someone else nice code. Interpreted languages like ruby or php always get this, since you get the source, not a binary. Now there are lots of bad things about Monkey Patching, but it's really useful when you need it. Now I understand that if you don't have source, Monkey Patching is not so practical."

Computerized Genius

After the big Apple event yesterday we have some new title: The Computerized Genius analyzes your music library and dynamically creates playlist of songs which go well together. Previously this was some menial human task, maybe working for days to create the perfect mix-tape to impress somebody -- now we get that at the click of a button. Progress? YES!! Mixtape 2.0!!

I know I have gotten lazy and reduced the posts -- but no time is better than the present to check out vintage posts...

Chief Awesome Switch Guard

We know if our company would do X -- that would be AWESOME. However the Cjief Awesome Switch Guard will be at the lookout and usually shoot the idea down with comments "not enough resources", "not enough revenue possible", "other things are more important". If it's one of the better companies it will be recorded in some system and buried under some rocks to be nowhere found.

How do people make those decisions? Since they are guards they base their decision on the same criteria some zoo guard is not allowing you to pet an animal in the petting zoo. Are ideas really researched or even important for the business? Probably not -- otherwise we wouldn't have a gurad for the awesome switch.

Productivity Coach

Because with all the things going on and the GTD movement going strong becoming more efficient is the goal. Besides the moral dilemma that if you get your work done early all that awaits you is more work I am willing to share some of my tricks:

• Get a Macbook Pro. Live is too short to work on bad computers and while you are waiting you are not productive.
• Get at least two monitors -- bigger screens make you more productive
• Use Sandy -- you know you need an assistant and make sure to read the e-mail digest of your day before it starts so you can prepare
• Use twitter, twittd and ubiquity to talk to Sandy -- so she's only a click away
  
• Use GTD to order e-mails into Follow-up, Hold, Archive
• Use Gmail or AppleMail and tag mails with your projects
• Get a smart phone

Berry Economist

Tim Hardford, one of my favorite authors, wrote a new article on incentive schemes (see http://www.slate.com/id/2197735/). I strongly believe that incentives need to be somewhat aligned with the goal of the company so I really liked how they did it and how the right incentives trump nepotism.

But as with all incentive schemes I got some criticism from my co-workers (I might add that none of us is in the position to implement any of them):

"...making sure nobody picked too quickly...
talk about a race to the bottom
wow that is really interesting
it makes the workplace a free market then"

Bouncy Castle Economist

Whereas my company with it's about 300 employees deploys only one bouncy castle at our company picknick another company with about 7,000 people deploys eight bouncy castles at their picknick.

Is there a magic bouncy castle ratio which hints at the success of either one company? I am pretty sure that it has to say something but I am not willing to do the research right now. So if one of my readers needs a PhD in economics he or she might want to look into that:-)