KPIs considered harmful

If you've had any exposure at all to large bureaucracies, you will probably know that KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator, which is...

What makes Google such a great place to work? (Part 2)

This is the second of a two part series about what makes Google a great place to work, so I shall skip the preamble and dive right into so...

What makes Google such a great place to work?

[A lot of people seem to be entering my blog for the first time through this post. Welcome! If you'd like to be kept updated about futur...

Dealing with technical debt

Once in a while something goes crazy in my Google Reader (I know, time to find something new :-/ ) and it will spam my feed with dozens of o...

This makes me mad

There are a bunch of refugees on hunger strike at a detention centre in Melbourne at the moment, and here's why: they were assessed as ...

Succeeding for lazy people

This is a follow up to my previous post about being lazy . In the last post, I tried to define laziness in a positive (or at least, less neg...

Universities are the new newspapers

Mark Cuban posted a little article a while back about the parallels he sees between the newspaper industry and what is now happening in th...

Being impolite is good science

I have the habit, whenever I review a scientific paper or attend a scientific talk, of trying to find a hole in the case being made. Are the...

Urinal cakes

I was thinking about urinal cakes today, mostly because I've noticed that they seem to have all but disappeared. Instead, urinals seem ...

The politics of traffic offences

My usual disclaimer: nothing about what I write below should suggest that I trivialise driving under the influence or that I think it should...

How on Earth are Harley Davidsons legal?

Most developed countries have fairly strict legislation around noise pollution from motor vehicles. For the most part it works pretty well, ...

Things I like about blogging

So I haven't been in this blogging game for very long, but I'm already discovering a few things that I like about it: It's self-...

On being lazy

I've done the Myers-Briggs personality type test a couple of times now (I'm an INTJ, FWIW). While I found much of it less than usef...

How to give a good presentation

(This is a lightly-reworked version of a posting I originally made on my internal blog at IBM) The art of giving presentations is a difficul...