After the weekend away...

By -
Mondays, bleagh.  Coffee helps.  Giant bug now as long as a penny helps even more!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why people don't like Product Managers

By -
I recently attended p-camp , a fantastic get-together for product managers from all over the US. Hidden among sessions in the vein of "Agile Now!" and "Can you be more Agile?" and "Agile and Scrum: How to be more Agileriffic" there was a gem of "The Future of Product Management" where we explored where the career of Product Manager was and where it was heading. And what I quickly realized was that people don't like us much. Come again? Ok, people like PMs as individuals just fine. (Well, people seem to generally like me, and seem to like the PMs I've worked with) But in general, there is a greater than average distrust of the PM as a role in an organization. As it turns out, there are some perfectly valid reasons. Engineers: don't like being told what to do (who does, really), and they don't like having to guess how hard something is before digging into it. And they really hate having to stop work on one thing and swit...
Read more

Inability to visualize the scale of our national debt

By -
With some needed brain-break time between recruiter calls, I wanted to visualize the national debt.  Inspired by the NYT tree-map visualization of our next proposed budget , and unsatisfied with the "if the national debt was dollars it would encircle the earth X times " type of answer.  I get it, it's big.  Very big. But, how big? So I started out with a nice slider (now easy in HTML5) and a picture of a crisp new $100.  (It's all about the benjamins!)  Apply some exponential math to the slider, and whammo... I crashed my browser. No problem, rookie mistake and I'm just exploring, let's have some stacks of $10,000, the amount of a federal bundle of $100 bills.  When the amount of images on the screen is too big, switch to the bundles.  Problem solved, right?  Wrong, browser crashed again. Er, ok. How about stacks of million dollars?  Easy, some casino had a stack in a glass case and everyone took pictures.  Stacks o...
Read more