It seems like it’s x-ray day on the Make blog. Here are two links from a guy who takes beautiful x-ray photographs and from someone who leaves a hidden treat for airport screeners in his baggage.
September 14th, 2008
How to Add Two Wireless Access Points to Your Home
I have a long, skinny house. It’s so long that one wireless access point doesn’t quite reach from one end to the other. It doesn’t help that all my neighbors have their own in one great storm of EM radiation.
So, I have to have two wireless routers. The problem is that most consumer routers are set up by default to assume they’re the only one on your network and that they are the ones connecting to your ISP. After much struggling, I found some directions on how to add a second wireless access point to your network.
The one thing that I have to add is if you have a switch or hub between your two wireless routers (as I do) then you need to make sure your “Internet side” router is connected to your switch with a cross-over cable to the “uplink” port and your other router is connected to your switch with a normal cable to a normal port.
March 27th, 2008
Sometimes All it Takes is Information
I saw today on the Triple Bottom Line blog an interesting excerpt where a utility simply started showing customers on their utility bills how they compared to their neighbors and that alone lead to a decrease in energy usage. How awesome is that?
At work, our senior management team has been eager to get “metrics” lately. When pressed, it’s sometimes difficult to get from them exactly what kind of metrics, but we have developed a pretty awesome build package based on a bunch of open source products like CheckStyle, Emma, PMD, and others. We also had a case a year or so ago when one particular user in Japan was responsible for 50% or more of the group’s support calls. Once we had the hard data we were able to go to the manager of the group and say, “look, this guys is costing you x dollars more than anyone else. Maybe you should have a conversation with him…”
So, metrics. They’re easy to dismiss as simply a management fad, but they can have a real positive impact if used well. And a real negative impact if used poorly.
February 29th, 2008
The Art of Listening
One of the other guys on my team came up with a great description of “communication”: the process of mapping from one mind to another. I thought that was brilliant, as is his essay on the eight barriers to effective listening.
January 20th, 2008
Coolest Use of LEGOs yet
What do physicists do on vacation? Apparently, they nerd out there too:
http://thenxtstep.blogspot.com/2007/10/nxt-meets-mouse-datalogging-disney.html
July 3rd, 2007
More Rails Test Links
Thought I’d add these two links for reference:
A list of available assertions in Ruby
A list of available assertions in Rails
March 21st, 2007
100 alternative search engines
Found this link recently to an article about 100 alternative search engines. Some of them are pretty neat.
July 16th, 2006
Grades vs. That Something Else
The New York Times is running a fascinating series of articles comparing the performance of men and women in the post-feminist-movement age. The one I read was about women pulling far ahead of men in school. The article itself is an interesting read, but what I was most interested in was one fact the article mentioned but then didn’t really follow up on:
Even though women beat men consistently in both college grades and number of years in college, men still beat women consistently in starting salaries for their first job out of college.
It’s tempting to simply say that must have to do with discrimination. But while I’m sure discrimination could play some role, I think that can’t be the entire story. What also it points to is the (often forgotten) importance of intangible qualities and networking in a successful career.
Because women were blatantly discriminated against for so long in the workplace, to get ahead and prove they deserved equal treatment they had to concentrate on excelling at objective measures like grades, degrees, sales figures, etc. Success in objective areas tends to be irrefutable and speak for itself so over time men had no choice but to accept women in general as equals.
The article went on at great length about how college men spend 4 hours a day playing video games or drinking beer while their female classmates are burning the midnight oil at the library studying for exams. The women in the article marvelled at how lazy the college men seemed to be.
And yet, male graduates start at higher salaries than female. What if those men weren’t just playing video games? What if without realizing it they’re also building business contacts, kicking around new ideas, or feeding on each other’s imaginations? What if they’re polishing negotiating skills? Or feeding their competitive spirit? They probably don’t even realize it themselves, but maybe all that hanging out is setting them up for better careers.
How much better off would anyone (man or woman) be if they could figure out what exactly about hanging out is useful and extract it, minus the Natural Lite and Grand Theft Auto?
April 13th, 2006
The Best Job in America!
According to CNN, I’ve got the best job in America. Yippie!
March 7th, 2006
A Post Mostly for Myself
I want to do my next personal project in Ruby and here is what people say is a good introduction to Ruby (I haven’t read it yet):
http://poignantguide.net/ruby/
I haven’t read it yet, I’m mostly putting the link here as a reminder to myself.