Work Habits

I've described my job as akin to that of a train conductor, but with some unusual wrinkles.  I start at the top if a new person sits towards the front.

Although I always work towards the back, I have a more immediate response to newcomers (better than same day service).  So it's not a queue, and not a stack.  Not exactly.

Restaurant waiting has similar queuing theories.  You can wait for a bill, talk, enjoy family (the owner knows you'll not regret it), whereas if you're a party of three, waiting for a table, there's a lot of priority, perhaps even a radio frequency controlled device, such as Spaghetti Factory has, along the Willamette River (lots of new construction).

I enjoyed this analysis of Starbucks which I found at the Strata site, this being a major data conference, lots of overlap with OSCON in terms of theme, speakers and management.

One perk of the job is we have musicians and artists in the building (and cooks!) -- like an art colony.  I also have enough bandwidth to get SomaFM, for example.  Mission Control is a way of enjoying Apollo Project successes, listening to audio from missions against the backdrop of spacey music.

Tonight I'm keeping company with the chairman as he preps for a class in Minnesota (he's the trainer). I was invited but have my train conducting.

This is a good time to be looking at OSCON talks (I'm on the selection committee, my second year).  As I was mentioning, there's overlap with Strata, which latter, like the upcoming Pycon, is in Santa Clara (California), near San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Speaking of Silicon Valley, my Mac Air shipped with Cupertino the default time zone.  I thought that was cute.  We also talk about Redmond as a HQS, in geekdom.  You'll notice how cities play against one another as capitals, cities that don't get to play on the Elephant & Donkey board (pay yes, but play not so much).

I've been watching David's screencasts on Youtube, in between keeping up with the other syllabi.  DVDs have the same status as books sometimes, in the sense of "required".  Keeping up with coursework is another aspect of my job.  Lots of acronyms to memorize, always.  Namespaces abound.

I used some of the time to seed edu-sig with a spate of postings, bam bam bam.  Cherlin batting the shuttlecock right back to me, extolling the virtues of LISP and APL, ever the geek preacher (amen, brother).