Terry White and others Today
I am pleased that I can add Terry White’s Tech Blog to my Firefox Sage feeds. The last time I mentioned Terry White in my journal was July of 2007. I have been waiting at least this long for Terry White to get a news feed going. I blame Adobe Products before I blame Terry White for finally getting up and running. My guess is that Terry is “dog-fooding” in Adobe purity in order to keep himself close to Adobe customers… Watch Terry White on the Adobe Creative Suite Video Podcast.
“Cubicle Culture: The 10 worst workspaces in tech”
Vallywag.com: “We’ve toured the top 10 workspaces in tech. Now, we’ve gone back to Office Snapshots to find the 10 worst. What makes them so bad?”
“IT Wars: When we fight over IT, nobody wins.”
Robert X. Cringely: “Most of the problems of IT start and end with bad management. I speak fairly often to technical audiences and one question I like to ask is simple: If you were hit by a bus tomorrow, could your boss do your job? ...The answer is almost always ‘no.’ By ‘almost always’ I mean 97–99 percent of the time.” When I read this stuff, of course I thought of my oldie, “Bryan Wilhite: An IT Fundamentalist Speaks.” The best kind of manager a developer can have is one that does not consider herself your manager—she is in charge of the project… not people. And of course what is great is to become a better programmer by working for a team leader that can do everything you can do—you are just an extra pair of hands working for a person with clear understanding about what the hell you are doing.
“Why Judy can’t add: gender inequality and the math gap”
John Timmer: “The general pattern of these differences suggested to the authors that the performance differences correlated with the status of women. The authors of the study built a composite score that reflected the gender equality of the countries based on the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index, data extracted from the World Values Surveys, measures of female political participation, and measures of the economic significance of females.”
These studies are important to me for two leading reasons: these studies reveal the power of thought. Materialistic westerners seem to vastly underestimate the super-natural effect of being surrounded by people who think you are a worthless piece of shit. Most “white dudes” I have met (I am sure there are others) could not last a half hour living under such psychological pressure. We should be amazed when we meet a Black woman who has successfully and gracefully survived the gauntlet to become say, Tammara Combs Turner.