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Odd Lots

6 Comments

  1. jimf says:

    Colin Furze is crazy about ramjets…if you watch some of his other videos, you may wonder why he is still alive.

  2. TRX says:

    “Eat your heart out, Jeremy Clarkson!”

    How many hold-my-beer-and-watch-this moments do you get to see from someone wearing a necktie, anyway?

    I don’t know if it’s the same guy, but there was at least one guy with videos up on his web site back in the 20th century, before YouTube, about his work with pulsejet motors and various vehicles he’d propelled by them.

    I’ve seen model pulsejets, and they were loud enough to satisfy the inner child of any 95th-percentile psychopath. I think I’d want to double up on ear protection near something that size…

  3. TRX says:

    > echo chambers

    I wish James Lileks would fix his web site so I could link to him for proper credit… he wrote a newspaper article about 20 years ago, saying that he’d thought that the internet would be a place where people could mingle and exchange ideas, but it turned out to be a place where every group could carve out its own safe ideological space without fear of being confronted by uncomfortable facts or contrary opinions. Except he was more eloquent about it.

  4. Erbo says:

    “open offices (that is, sitting at a table in a field of fifty or a hundred tables without any cube walls between them) are a stupid, self-defeating idea”

    Tell that to the company I work for, which just moved all the developers FROM cubes TO open tables last year…

    The manager in charge at the time (who has since left) justified this in an internal blog post that compared engineers objecting to this to three-year-old children being unwilling to try peas or broccoli. To which one of my fellow engineers replied, “I love peas, I don’t like broccoli at all, and I really don’t like having other people’s dietary restrictions imposed upon me just because they don’t know, or don’t want to learn, how to use a fork.”

  5. Erbo says:

    Continued from last comment: One of my comments to that manager’s blog post was, “All I’m gonna say is, Joel Spolsky, CEO of Fog Creek Software, manages to give all his developers (and testers, and program managers) private officesand he manages to do this in New York City, one of the most expensive commercial real estate markets in the world. His rationale for doing this is that it not only increases developer productivity, it makes it possible for him to recruit the very best developers. See: Bionic Office, The New Fog Creek Office

  6. TRX says:

    I think most of the enthusiasm for open plan offices is due to managers being more concerned with keeping tabs on their workers than actually having them produce anything.

    Cubicles are almost as bad, particularly when the only method of communication some cow-orkers have is to turn the volume of their speakerphone up to max and then stand outside their cube shouting at it.

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