Month: January 2010
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The rudeness of not following my unstated expectations
Imagine the following situation: You invite an acquaintance out for a cup of coffee. They strike you as someone you might like to know better and figure this could be a good way to get to know them outside of your normal social circles. They graciously accept and you’re looking forward to it. The day…
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Visualizing Our Mental Limitations
When I saw this picture on my friend Daniel’s blog, I immediately thought it was an excellent picture of one of the themes that I write quite a bit about — our inability to both predict the future and recollect with accuracy our past. In both cases, we don’t see things as clearly as we think…
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Voice Recognition is Always a Decade Away
We recently upgraded our phones at work to a centralized PBX. One of the services provided for free as a trial, was transcribed voicemails sent to you as an email. Sure, the technology has been around for a while, but I wasn’t quite sure what to make of my French colleague’s recent voicemail (for the…
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Lord Of The Rings – A Story from Christmas
Over the Christmas holiday, a friend and I were walking to lunch after a fresh snow had fallen. While engrossed in conversation, I walked into a pile of some snow and slipped. Mostly embarrassed, I got up and felt like something was lost. I checked my pocket for the three usual things — wallet, phone,…
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I’m not optimistic or pessimistic – I’m a slave
I was recently reading an article about the economy and it ended with the line – I’m not optimistic or pessimistic – I’m realistic. I’m always surprised when I hear someone say this. Doesn’t every optimist and pessimist consider their views realistic? Moreover, this retort is beside the point. Optimism and Pessimism ultimately are about whether…
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Cycle of Generosity
How do you normally respond when someone is unexpectedly nice to you? Our typical response is to want to pay them back as quickly as we can or to give them something in exchange. This works very well with the Hari Krishnas at the airport giving someone a flower, the person gives them money out…
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Following By Consensus
Early in my career, I took over as the project leader of a small group of engineers in the midst of the merger between Symbios and LSI. LSI had a manager at another location whose group had the same charter as the group I was leading, and we were asked to figure out how to…
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Experimental Costs
“If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward” Thomas Edison Science requires thousands of failures in order to find a success. Following the success, we look back and rationalize why that one success was obviously the solution to the…