Week 2

Macs

Wow. So the Air is nice. I’ve gotten used to the gestures on the trackpad for sure (tried using two finger scroll on my netbook, which may actually support the gesture just not as well). 

I have a pet peeve though, and that’s information organization. I’m willing to believe Search should be the main navigation tool for finding information and it shouldn’t matter where it lives, but I do like a certain number of high level folders within my documents. (Or tagging, then having larger folders, but without tagging Search is not enough for business users). And I’ve got a specific use case beyond that: within DropBox, I have certain folders that are shared with certain people, depending on the folder. I’d like to be able to select specific folders to save my documents to, rather than the overall DropBox folder. Maybe it’s just a matter of adding those specific folders to my “favorites”, but in a lot of cases it adds more time to organize things the way I want them organized (and determine who has access to each of them).

On Desk Chairs

It’s very weird to me to sit on the “exec” side of the desk. I don’t really like sitting in the big chair behind the big desk while talking to someone. It doesn’t feel natural to me (in general, or as a management style).

On Consultants becoming clients

I have to imagine that it depends on the person, but I’m always curious if former consultants make better or worse clients. On the one hand, we understand what being on the other side of the contract is like. We also know how to manage scope creep, and how to ask for what we want.

O RLY?

“Phone service and equipment are managed by IT”. The first of many things that will come as a surprise that IT (me!) manages happened this week. There will also be things that surprise me that we don’t manage. It’s funny how things land organizationally in smaller businesses.

Noble Schools

This week I got to visit the applications/data team for Noble Charter schools. It was a really interesting experience – they have a hugely robust data practice that their teachers, principals, and entire culture buy in to. Having clean and up to date data provided by the teachers enables them to make decisions on how to best help their students (they get something concrete out of keeping their data up to date). Principals can make decisions that affect the whole school, and at a system level you can pick out the best teachers and the best schools and try to figure out what they are doing differently to encourage best practices.

Their data platform on the tech side is pretty straight forward and user friendly (leveraging Tableau). The tech is impressive but what really makes it work is the culture that buys in to the data, having impressive results that drive business value and lead to continuous requests for improvement both in the students, teachers, and the tech. Really impressive and well done!

We need IMs in here urgently

I overheard two people talking to each other through their phones. I could hear both of them through my ears. The pauses in speaking (and the content) did not make it seem like there was a third person on the phone.

Day 8

I finally found where the paper towels are in the kitchen. And I realized I have no candy in my desk, and had to resort to a Vitamin C supplement. Or just visit HR for the candy bowl.

A Non Work Rant

Seriously, how hard is it to not print a signature line on the Customer copy of receipts? You’ve already set it to print “Merchant” and “customer” on it, just don’t print a freaking signature line on Customer copy. It’s not that difficult!