The 80/20 Principle

If you haven't heard of this, read this book. If you have, read it anyway. Pareto's principle changed my career and my outlook on much of my life. Simply put, redirect your attention and energy towards the 20% of effort that yields 80% of the results. Doubling this effort yields a 160% output on only 40% of the effort. Sally forth and kick ass, my friends.

Hacking work

Decent enough book. Contradicted itself in several places and didn't appeal as much as simpler work. By the core ideas were strong:
1. Corporate work is profoundly stupid because it's an aggregate of rules put in place to keep the lowest common denominator safe.
2. Most execs don't follow the stupid rules.
3. You have a 2% chance of getting fired for not following th unimportant rules (mostly IT).
4. Give yourself the freedom to break the rules to get the job done.

Couldnt agree with this more. My job didn't exist until my boss and I broke the rules and made it up as we went along. Now I have the best job I could have; because I made it up for myself.

Vegas for my 40th Birthday

Hiyat and I had a great time in Vegas for my 40th. Went out with Leanne and Joe. We had fun going to clubs, eating great food, and I got to shoot some WWII vintage machine guns. Great fun!

Maya's lost her first tooth

Maya lost her first tooth today. It's been wiggling for weeks and she's been afraid to have us pull it out. Then out of the blue she pulled it out herself when her cousins came buy today! Always a surprise that princess of mine.

Got A Mac

After 5-ish years of running a Linux PC at home for the kids I finally threw in the towel and got an iMac.
Reasons:
- tired of twiddling with the linux box.
- iPod support comes and goes
- eternal sound system problems (it's 2011 for crying out loud and we haven't figured out sound?)
- having to choose between the glossy and futuristic KDE desktop and the 1999 looking Gnome
- On and on of fiddling with the command line to white list kid's web sites
- Really stupid errors like having distribution list support disappear in kmail
- Openoffice still looks like shit
- Flash is really, really, slow

The iMac is great. So easy that Gabe set it up himself, just needed the wi-fi password. iWork is good, iPhoto and iMovie are just amazing. Edited a movie and started an upload to youtube in about 2 min.

With three kids, a wife, aikido, etc. I've just had enough of wasting my time farting around in what is in essence a hobbyist system.

Another long week

Man let me tell you it's been a killer long week at work. But I think I've finally hammered things down to consolidate and execute what needs to be done. The further I go in my career the more I'm stunned by seeing smart people do foolish things, spend a lot of money and make a huge mess in the process.