Thursday December 20, 2007

adjusting to the playing field If you coping strategy involves the use of drugs I can see allowing their use in competitive situations. Adjusting your brain chemistry to be something closer to optimal is something that you can do throughout your life unlike adding more time to every situation. Still, most of these chemicals have had very little real time in the market. Buyer should be careful. ( Dec 20 2007, 09:43:01 AM PST ) Permalink

Wednesday December 19, 2007

Leveling the playing field? I was recently talking with a neighbor who mentioned that his youngest child in college was getting extra time on tests due to his ADD. This was an attempt at "leveling the playing field". My first reaction was to wonder how many of the resumes I'd recently looked at included this bias. You don't get to dumb down the smart guys or slow down the fast guys or even the playing field in any business competition. I think helping students build coping skills in the real world especially before college makes a lot of sense. But college is a time of learning how to be independent and learning how to deal with the real world in a somewhat softer environment. Reducing the amount of competition seems like a poor tradeoff to me. I found a fewlinks which cover this issue. This article gave me a better feel for both sides of the issue. ( Dec 19 2007, 10:49:46 AM PST ) Permalink

Monday December 17, 2007

Security Feelgood? While ordering things for Christmas I had a few large items sent directly to the recipient. One vendor requested that I contact my credit card company to put an alternate address on file. Neither the vendor nor the credit card company seemed to be able to do much in support of this procedure other then to mutter "identify theft". Now, if I was going to steal using a credit card I would think having the items send to a residential address wouldn't be so smart. It leaves a pretty easy to follow trail and to do any real damage would mean a pattern of purchases that would be easy to detect. Does the public at large think this increases their security by the same amount that it costs the credit company and ultimately the consumer? ( Dec 17 2007, 04:13:55 PM PST ) Permalink

Monday December 10, 2007

quick My current project team conducted a two day intensive review. We have team members in Ireland, the east and west US coasts, and Beijing. Generally we use a combination of email, phone, and irc to make this all happen. For this review we used a morning component that including our developer in Ireland. I took notes during this part of the meeting using Sun's externally available wiki. We then spent the afternoon annotating those. While we slept in the pacific timezone we got comments from our engineers in China and our engineer in Ireland did some additional annotation. And then we repeated it all. I'm sure there are better integrated tools to achieve this type of collaboration but these simple ones worked well for us. ( Dec 10 2007, 02:31:38 PM PST ) Permalink

Sunday December 02, 2007

not a cribbage board... I went into the liquor store at the stop of Kingsbury grade this evening and saw a sign stating they had poker chips for rent. The hand written sign didn't state a price so I asked the attendant. He said $4 per night. He followed that up with a comment that they had requests over a period of time so they had brought in several sets for purchase. Those wouldn't stay on the shelves so they decided to rent instead. Not sure I quite follow that as this liquor store mostly services local vacation rentals so I'm pretty sure you could squeeze people for a lot more both on markup and rental fee. I commented that people were probably too lazy to just go down to the casino and buy some chips to use for the evening. He didn't seem to get it stating that sometimes casinos discontinue chips. ( Dec 02 2007, 09:56:26 PM PST ) Permalink