Thinking with your stomach

People say a way to a man's heart is through his stomach.  I whole heartedly agree.  Eating has a big affect on our mood and our thoughts.  Today I went out to lunch with a bunch of people from work.  It is a lot of fun getting out of the office, even if it is for just a little while.  The place we went to was nothing special but we ate tons of food.

Getting back to the office we are all moving like slugs.  It is to the point I feel like taking a nap.  My work is not exciting to begin with, but I can say for certain it usually does not put me to sleep this fast.  Doing some team bonding is important, my work place lacks any sense of camaraderie.  Any type of bonding is greatly appreciated in order to making working more bearable.

For future reference eating with co-workers, while being lots of fun, is hazardous ground.  Make sure that what you eat is not going to affect you the rest of the day.  However, if you are looking for a convenient excuse to go home it might just suite your needs.  Things do get interesting when the group of people going includes vegetarians, meat lovers, and vegans.  Let calamity ensue.  Maybe there is a reason why there are so many clashes on my team.

Can I be too BIG?

I had a talk earlier today with a new co-worker of mine.  It consisted of most company politics and how we were positioning ourselves in the market.  I will not go into it for obvious reasons, but there was something interesting that popped up.  Many of the solutions that my company uses work well for large companies.  The company I work for is huge.  Is there a point to when normal rules no longer apply?

I doubt many study lots of physics but everyone remembers the simple stuff from high school.  Force = mass X acceleration.  This equation works well for a lot of things.  In general is it an extremely good estimate.  If the mass is shrunk down to microscopic size this formula no longer works, it breaks down.  There is another equation to use because the problem is so small.  At the same time if mass were increased to something planet size neither formula would work.  A completely new way of dealing with things has to be used.

To make a story short when things get too small or big normal rules no longer apply.  This works for science, but does it hold true to business?  Cloud computing is supposed to be elastic.  It runs on top infrastructure giants like Amazon and Google.  Will cloud solutions for small companies still work for giants like mine?  There have been no large scale migrations to the Cloud yet so I do not think anyone can say for sure.

An interesting fact was given to me.  Due to flu season, people are staying home.  Not only that they are surfing the web, watching lots of streaming video.  If you do not know steaming video is very process intensive and uses large amount of data.  Someone said flu season might crash the internet.  

My reply was bullshit.  It got me thinking though if Cloud computing becomes common place the amount of information across the internet will greatly increase.  I know providers like Google and Amazon will adapt but will the hardware of the internet be able to handle it?  Is anyone thinking about this?  I guess time will tell.

Catch 22

This past weekend I went back to my school for Homecoming and Halloween.  Yes, they were both on the same day, completely bad-ass.  I am extremely fortunate with my job.  This is even more apparent when I go back to school.  Many of my fellow alumni are still looking for a job a year later out of college.  Some do have fluff degrees but, at the same time I do not have an engineering degree either.

As a small experiment I went around a few job sites in my area.  There are jobs out there, but not for anyone close to my experience level.  Most jobs require over 5 years of experience in a senior position.  Many of us have lots of practice doctoring our resumes but even this is a little out of reach.  When things go wrong blame the parents.

By blame the parents, I mean the baby boomers.  The positions that are becoming available are for a different generation.  To even think about applying to almost any job I need to wait several years.  I understand that because of everyone retiring that new people need to fill these jobs.  It seems that companies, rather than looking to promote people within their company are looking else where for personnel.

I, myself, know very little about corporate culture and the norms.  My only experience is my current job.  It seems that there are fewer and fewer senior people to fill positions while at the same time the market place has lots of entry level applicants.  Those high up keep getting more piled on their plate while lower level people keep getting less.

To get a job you need a good amount of experience.  Yet, if companies are only looking for senior positions where are workers going to get that experience?  Why are these companies not trying to promote internally when they have documentation on past performance?  Then hire more entry level people?  As I have said I do not know much about how business works but for what I have seen my recommendation is not a common practice.

Start the Wave

I do not know if anyone has had the opportunity to look a to Google Wave yet.  Last year at a the Google conference this future product was unveiled.  It was said rather than always trying to improve upon an old idea it was time to try something new.  Thus, Wave was born.  It is described as what collaboration and communication would be like if email was designed today rather than trying to emulate snail mail.

Most know me as an avid Google supporter.  I like the fact that Google will try new things and try to break the mold.  Many times I do not think Google is going to do things the best, but I can almost guarantee that they will be the first ones willing to try.

A big thing about this product is that it will be open source.  All us tech nerds will be able to get our hands on the code and customize the hell out of it.  If you watch the video about Wave there is a scene showing Wave run in DOS.  If that does not sell you on how much control you are going to have I do not know what will.  All this control means we can tie Wave into back end systems like SAP or Oracle, plus a company can put their own version of Wave behind their firewall.  

I do not believe that Wave will replace email.  But I think there are certain places where Wave will shine.  Working on large documents collaboratively that have a tight deadline.  With Wave everything is real time.  No version control is needed and editing can happen as soon as someone writes a sentence.  Some think this is mean but if there is a tight deadline no one cares, just get the work done.  That is where I think Wave will work the best.