Linux, finance, rants, politics

This year we got a lot of great Christmas cards, so when the season passed, we didn’t quite know what to do with them. Keep them? Throw them away? Neither quite works, so we instead cut out parts of each card and made an ornament for next year.

I had seen these ornaments online and in person a few times, so I found a site that detailed how to do them. The instructions are here, so I won’t go through them step by step. I do, however, have a few suggestions:

1. I used a shot glass to trace the circles. It was a perfect size.
2. It’s important to get as perfect of a triangle as possible, so that your ornament fits together correctly. The best way to make a perfect triangle is to cut out a circle, fold it in half, then in half again (so that you have a quarter circle). Unfold, and mark a strip of paper the length of the radius of the circle (see picture). Then use this to make 6 marks around the perimeter of the circle. Connect 3 of them and you’ve made a perfect triangle. Cut out this template triangle to use when tracing onto the other circles.
3. Make sure that pictures and circles you glue in are facing right-side-up
4. Glue a piece of ribbon through the hole in the top piece before you glue everything together

Our ornament turned out really well, and we’ll definitely do it again!

The most successful companies are the ones that work every day toward building what I call a “culture of ideas”. Google is the prime example of this — if you work at Google, you’re encouraged to spend 20% of your work time on ideas that interest you. Think about this — Google “loses” one day a week of productivity from their workers while they pursue projects that they find interesting!

Dig a little deeper, however, and you’ll find that it is anything but losing for Google. In fact,

As legend has it, the humanities program at MIT was started by an MIT president who quipped “too many MIT graduates end up working for Harvard and Yale graduates”. The thinking then, which remains to this day, is
that engineering classes make a person narrowly focused whereas humanities classes help a student to see the full picture. Although I can see some truth in this, I would argue that a person is far better equipped to be a great manager having taken engineering than its “softer” alternatives.

The New York Times today has an article about how YouTube is transforming the nightly news. As more high-quality, user-generated content is uploaded to YouTube by professional news networks, semi-professional hobbyists and amateur aspiring Ron Burgundys, the potential for customized, localized news delivered directly to your computer whenever you want it becomes a reality. Google, which owns YouTube, has already built out Google News to deliver fresh and personalized news that they’ve harvested from news sites around the web, and YouTube video news is a logical next step.

No doubt, this is great. However, with smaller city newspapers failing across the country and even the venerable Times in trouble, the long-term sustainability of content providers is a serious question. Right now, Google News and YouTube news videos are fueled largely by professional journalism companies that make their money selling advertisements in print and video media. However, as Google steps in and uses the content without providing an adequate revenue stream back to the content creators, the prospects for professional journalism look dim.

I’ve noticed more and more lately that there seems to be an air-conditioning problem nearly everywhere I go. Businesses for some reason think that their customers want to be kept at a frosty 68 degrees while they shop. Office buildings think that the computers and inhabitants will melt if the temperature leaps beyond the 70 mark. At the offices I’ve worked at, it’s typically so cold that people bring sweaters or fleeces to wear during the day!

The Department of Energy says that HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) account for 40-60% of the energy use in buildings. Given that it’s expensive, inefficient, environmentally harmful and just plain uncomfortable, why not just turn the thermostat up a few degrees!

I have a ton of photos that I’ve taken over the years, and managing them is a constant challenge. Part of the problem is simply the fact that there are so many great things you can do with digital photos — view them online, make cool photobooks, create collages, order prints, send them to friends and family, etc. There are many different applications that are useful for photos, and while some of them come close to doing it all, there still isn’t one solution that works for everything.