Categories ArchivesDiversions

For those of us in the States, not much is going to get done today as most of us look forward to a four day weekend. In that light, no big post here. I’ve got a few post ideas I’m working on for the month of July—one being a series on surviving corporate America. There is a set of skills I learned over the years that are never taught in business school, your company’s orientation, or on your company’s intranet (probably). I’m going to put together a list of survivability tools to help develop those non-IT/IS skills! In the meantime, enjoy a safe weekend wherever you are, and Happy 4th!

It’s hard to be in the IT world today without hearing something about the Theory of Constraints. It could be from The Phoenix Project or the latest DevOps presentation you saw. Most questions I hear sound like, “How does some analysis of a factory help me make IT more efficient?” Go read The Phoenix Project to learn more about that. Gene Kim links to a fantastic set of resources in his blog on Kanban resources, but one key resource is a case study on how a failing Microsoft development team used the Drum-Buffer-Rope technique of Theory of Constraints to completely revamp their operations. Do yourself a favor and invest the time to read the Microsoft case study. Check the other ...

Have you ever had a moment in your life where you made what you thought was an innocent comment or asked a simple question, but was met with a verbally violent response? This happened multiple times in my career, going back to the PCI DSS assessment days, to living in management, to even personal interactions with individuals. Admittedly, my brain to mouth filter has been maturing over the years—so in some respects that may have been to blame. But recently, I started analyzing these responses and situations when they happened. Kind of a, “how did I get here and what should I do now” analysis. Let’s explore what I have learned. Let’s discuss the concept of Lizard Brain. This is ...

There has been a ton of noise around Bitcoin recently for two big reasons. The first is that the Bitcoin-USD forex climbed above $1,000 (currently just under $900, and the second is a heist that moved around $100 million worth of the currency, all able to be watched online through the public clearing houses. So if you are a business, what should you do with this and other currencies? One of the main attractions to Bitcoin is that it is not regulated by a sovereign government. Some might say that it works in the purest form of capitalism, completely separating the buyer from the seller through an anonymous exchange. Well, somewhat anonymous. The contents and value of the wallet is ...

Yep, a little bit off topic, but that’s why I have a Diversions file! Some of you may remember a post I did for all of your frequent fliers a couple of years ago about some travel trouble I was having with airline tickets purchased as codeshares. In all fairness, this isn’t just an issue with one particular airline (although I did discuss my experience with AA/BA). Here’s what happened today. I was finishing up my tour of Ireland a bit early and wanted to stand by on an earlier flight. With BA, you can do this if you have any status at all including honoring OneWorld levels. BUT! Only if you have a BA marketed & operated ticket. So ...

Yep, we just pushed some fun new features to SlideZip, so I figured that we could create an offer to celebrate! Right now, the first 20 people to upgrade to an Unlimited account can get a free month with this coupon code: FreeMonthOct2013. Free is great! Also, we now have support for conferences (with multiple logins which could be for separate tracks or satellite locations)!

Hello Internet! I had an idea for a product last summer to help with my presentations. I wanted to find a way to allow people to easily and quickly get access to the presentation materials (and other stuff) while keeping the conversation going after I left the stage. Gene Kim and I discussed a number of options, and within a few hours I had something crude cobbled together. Folks at my talks could get the slides by sending a quick text message to an address, and BAM! Slides in their inbox! It worked great for me, but required too much customization to be actually useful. In February after I left RSA, I decided that it was time to re-learn Ruby ...