I’m not much for posting video links but wow, this is classic.

Not that I ever drank bottled water but living in Guelph means I swore off it almost entirely ages ago. You’re taking serious risks walking around this town with a bottle of water in your hand. It’s less about the particular issue for me than just not being a target for the hippies.

Having said all that, Chris Jordan’s simple pictures resonated with me more than any article I couldn’t bring myself to read. The title “Intolerable Beauty” sums it up.

FC Article about bottled water.

Original link from Mark Hurst.

Dang! I was in the process of checking out on a purchase for a decTOP when I see that the cheapest shipping option is $55. Ummm…that’s 50% of the product cost for shipping? Oh well.

I wonder if it even registers at MS when someone as high profile in the MS community as Mike Gunderloy declares that he’s jumping ship. He doesn’t even know where he’s going or what he’s going to do, his only goal is that it doesn’t involve MS.

While I still spend the majority of my workday building .NET applications I have at least divorced myself from MS for everything else. I run linux as my primary OS and use a vmware windows instance for development only.

Mark Shuttleworth, if you’re reading this please contact me asap! Ok fine, it was worth a shot.

As we delve deeper into creating open source projects, I suppose I’ll just have to do the research myself. I like what I’m reading about Mark, Ubuntu, Canonical, etc. Canonical seems to be thriving with a cool mix of open source and proprietary projects.

It appears we share some heritage as Canonical “originally started as a wholly virtual organisation, all of the employees working from home. With no traditional office space at all”.

I cringe and do my best to bite my tongue whenever someone claims an application has a “random error”. In all my years working in computers I have yet to encounter a random error.

Computers are a lot of things but random they are not. Okay sure, if you write a random number generator that introduces a bug some of the time then technically it’s random but it ain’t really “random”. Wow…

Errors are only random until you discover the pattern, and then eventually the cause. That’s the challenge and frustration in debugging applications. It’s detective work.

Quick primer. At boc we have no formal process for hiring. Some may wrongly assume that’s because we’re small, immature, and haven’t locked things down yet. While all those things are true, don’t mistake our lack of formal process as being unintentional.

Okay, we don’t have any rules but we do have a history:

• We’ve never hired someone from a resume.
• We’ve only ever hired people who’ve been referred to us by someone on our team.
• Since I’ve been involved, I have yet to seriously read someone’s resume. Man I love that! I wasted too much of a previous life reading resumes.
• We don’t consider someone to be a full-on boc’er until they’ve attended one of our retreats. At a retreat they’ll have no choice but to meet most of us, cook and eat food with us, talk about work and non work, roll an ankle or blow a knee etc.

Anytime I attempt to explain how we hire to someone with more traditional ideals I always feel like a hippy flake. Look, the bottom line is that we literally hire like cavemen, err cave people? New people must gain acceptance by our established group and it’s more about admitting members to our tribe than hiring new recruits. Is that crazy?

Ummm…no. These tribal leanings have a much deeper history than any new HR policy created last week. We hire in a time tested, tribal fashion. What’s crazy to me is companies that leave hiring decisions to a small group in HR, provide limited exposure to the people who must accept and help make these newbies succeed. The most I’ve ever had in my experience of hiring, or being hired, is a quick lunch with a select member or two of the team. I’ll stick with our caveman ways thanks….

Years ago, during the first dot com boom, I worked at a little web company in Toronto. That company made the decision to bring in some old school boys to run things. Some guys who know how to efficiently operate a growing organization. Is there a ‘tongue in cheek’ emoticon? That particular experience didn’t exactly inspire my confidence in the old guard. I butted heads more than the opposite.

One case that came to mind was office layout. With a few new hires coming in the door, we’d outgrown the layout of one of our floors. There was some heated discussions with some people having strong opinions about how things should be laid out, where their “office” should be, who should sit near who, etc, etc, blah, bored, blah…

So the part that really blew my socks off? Our man in charge at the time took it upon himself to stay late that evening and draw up the new office layout with no real consultation with the people involved. The next day he handed the new office layout over to the office manager for implementation.

Occurrences like this drove me bonkers and I generally got nothing but cow-eyes when I’d raise my concerns with the ‘powers that be’. Stereotypical managers actually view this kind of useless crap to be their job. At this time, this guy would have been one our highest paid people and he’s being paid to write seating plans for grown ups?

In this case my only question for ‘the man’ was “how old are your children? Does their teacher issue them a seating plan at school or does she trust those 6 year olds to figure it out themselves?”

I recently read something from Ricardo Semler, speaking about exactly this issue. Obviously he has pretty much the polar opposite take on it…

“Sure, I’m the main shareholder, so I always have a loaded gun in a drawer and the right to fire it, but understanding the benefits of our system is my self-restraint. I know that there’s only one bullet in the gun, and if I fire it off in a fit of pique, I’ll only get one shot at overriding a popular decision, after which I’ll be disarmed. At that point, I’d lose everything I’ve worked for..”.

If you’ve only got ONE bullet, do you really want to use it on a seating plan issue??

Sure they’re wee lads but I can’t stop listening to the ruffians since I saw them at Hillside. I think they’re my ’surprise find’ for Hillside this year.