blocks signals
within 20 meters

You know the types: The one who talks wayyyy too loudly on private calls, completely disrupting everyone around him. Or the self-important person whose incoming text messages are always far more important than actually giving you his undivided attention for five minutes. Yeah, those types.

If you work w/ one of those, maybe it’s time for the ultimate work-around: A cell phone jammer. Churches, temples, theaters, concert halls and museums use them to ensure that their cultural norms are preserved and so self-possessed people need to exit the locale to talk loudly or check the scores from their favorite team.

Extreme? Maybe. But sometimes that’s what’s called for.

collider.com

Hacking Lesson: Bottom-up power is real. In recent years, every movie that wowed Comic-Con-ers won instant word-of-mouth raves eventually went on to become blockbusters at the box office. Most every movie that failed to wow them, well, let’s say sales could be heard in cartoon-balooned “Ssssplattt!”s and “Thudddd!”s. The power of the masses to give support or take it away is very real.

image: icons.mysitemyway

It is not so much a wonder that people hate IT,
it is a wonder organizations
still find people to take the abuse.”
— Kevin Wood

photo: howstuffworks.com

One of the key practices that single-handedly can build or destroy an organization and its people: Access to the best and right tools to do the job, to understand the job, the goals, the strategy and others and to communicate to others. Are user-centered tools (the user being the worker) a most basic and fundamental right of every corporate citizen?

With the right tools anybody can do anything and everything. Without the right tools, we are all hampered, diminished, and our ability to succeed is greatly reduced. Without the right tools, all work is harder and little of it is smarter. With the right tools, anything is possible. What do you think? Are the right tools to do one’s best a right?

Now, kids, hacking work is kinda like marijuana’s role in the drug world. We all know that hacking one’s work is a gateway experience — a stepping stone for bigger, harder hacks. Like that 600 million workers might begin standing up for their rights.

photo: newint.org

photo: aheadinbiz.com

In the text of this 1990 speech, given to the German Informatics Society, he warns us all: [That] “which once was our friend, turned against us, as well. I refer to information….The tie between information and action has been severed….It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don’t know what to do with it.”

Prescient reading.

photo: organizingla.com

Chats/IMs/Tweets/etc. are killing meetings in some companies. And this post calls that a bad thing? Hullo? In what universe is that?

Yes, some f2f meetings are super-critical. But the amount of good meetings like that and f**king-horrible-waste-of-time meetings is outrageous. Meetings are dead, long live meetings! (Only the good and useful kind)