Saturday, May 26, 2012
E-Books
I've been a fan of e-books for quite some time. From epub, to pdf, to Kindle. I was actually an early adopter of the Kindle platform, first owning a 1st gen to the DX model where I happily stay. When it was announced that Ottawa would migrate to e-books I was absolutely thrilled! That is, until I had a class that used them. The company is called CourseLoad and it is more locked down than some IT departments PC's! No copy-paste, printing is throttled, and the resolution is horrible. My thinking is that this is some-kind of anti-theft model; however, the book is auto-charged at registration you don't have a choice.
Given my warm-and-fuzzy personality, I have written the company and suggested they enroll in some reader program as their software sucks.
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Camping
Just got back from camping, with 8 (yes 8) kids. Ages ranged from 18 to 5 and I think we hit our maximum. It was a mixture of ours and nieces and friends of the kids and we had a blast. We visited Jerome and the gold mine near it, something some of them had never done. Had ice cream at the artists park and talked and laughed and built some memories. Sadly I look around and not too many parents do that with their kids today, I know mine didn't do that.
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
The Hammer Approach
I ran across this interesting little tidbit today while waiting on my son:
"Decision makers engage in solution-focused problem identification because it provides comforting closure to the otherwise ambiguous and uncertain nature of problems"
The coarse is a masters level "Organization Behavior" which while interesting to me; is not in my core learning passion block (more later). What stuck me to it is that we see this everywhere, even in IT. People tend to grow comfortable with their daily approach to problem solving and they tend to become rooted in their approach from motivation to implementation. Most people characterize this in the phrase "When all you own is a hammer, everything is a nail".
If you apply this to software development, people tend to pull out the language they know, the toolkit their used to, the design pattern they know. It is comforting to know that the problem is a human nature one, not a skill-rot problem that we see so often.
"Decision makers engage in solution-focused problem identification because it provides comforting closure to the otherwise ambiguous and uncertain nature of problems"
The coarse is a masters level "Organization Behavior" which while interesting to me; is not in my core learning passion block (more later). What stuck me to it is that we see this everywhere, even in IT. People tend to grow comfortable with their daily approach to problem solving and they tend to become rooted in their approach from motivation to implementation. Most people characterize this in the phrase "When all you own is a hammer, everything is a nail".
If you apply this to software development, people tend to pull out the language they know, the toolkit their used to, the design pattern they know. It is comforting to know that the problem is a human nature one, not a skill-rot problem that we see so often.
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