Category Archives: Uncategorized

Iqbal Quadir Talks About GrameenPhone

Another stirring example of business as a tool for social progress – commercial mobile phone service in Bangladesh fights poverty. Today, GrameenPhone employs 5,000 people, provides service to 20 million, and is the largest tax payer in Bangladesh on revenues of nearly US$1B.

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Veni, Vomitavi, Partivi

Veni, Vomitavi, Partivi
Literally,I came, I puked, I left. A latin transliteration of Google Analytics “Bounce Rate” metric.

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Scrum and Requirements: CE Game Engine

If you’re local to Los Angeles and interested in learning more about Scrum and Agile, come to a LA Agile & Scrum User Group meetup! Tony Wong and Vladimir Drndarski will be giving a program on communicating product requirements in a Scrum environment. It’s free and there’s only 13 spots left (as of now), so [...]

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Seared Shishito Peppers

I figured I’d try something a bit different tonight…
Sauteed shishito peppers are getting pretty popular in LA as an appetizer at Japanese restaurants. Here’s my shot at it:

Drop some shishito peppers in a skillet. Nonstick = bad, the reason for which is obvious in second.
Drizzle them a bit with olive or sesame seed oil (I used [...]

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Laser-Engraved MacBook Pro

I met Ben Katz of Etchstar.com–home to engraved iPods, engraved MacBooks, and other awesome custom electronics–at a recent LA tech meetup. He handed me an awesome all-metal business card, and we struck up a quick conversation.
Ben offered me a nice deal on an etching for my MacBook Pro. I thought about for a few days and [...]

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Apparently my cats have an opinion about harmonicas

 
I can’t tell if they loath it or love it, but one thing is sure; they’re not indifferent. 

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SQL Haiku

select * from views
where referrer like ‘%phoenix%’
order by time desc
(Interpreting “*” as “all”, ignoring pronunciation of “%”, and pronouncing “desc” as one syllable.)

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SPIM: Yet another scourge to plague us

Oh instant message SPAM…
I’ve kinda got a bit of a crush on you XXXX.. If you wanna know who I am though you’re gonna have to Click Here and play along with my game!
Hey there! – You have been selected for a free vacation to the Bahamas! Click Here to confirm your prize before its too [...]

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A Retrospective on Managing a Client Services Team

About a year ago, I left a job as a Director of Client Services and began interviewing at other firms. I had a great interview with a firm that I’ll call Company Y. After the interview, I wrote up a little essay describing my thoughts on the scalability, people, and operation of a client/customer service [...]

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I hate priorities

More specifically, I hate numbers or letter representations of priorities when it comes to product backlogs.
It’s a common strategy, even in Scrum. (Henrik Kniberg’s wonderful scrum book talks about a product backlog where higher priority items get higher priority numbers, preventing the “if this is critical and priority 0, what is ultra-critical? priority -1″ issue.)

So why the [...]

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