It had been a difficult morning in Minot, North Dakota. My husband was in intensive care in Bismarck, 130 miles away. After visiting him for hours the night before, we had gotten home late. The children were late getting up. On the gravel road from our house to the highway, the muffler had come loose…
One of the questions I get asked a lot is “How do you get so much done?” I sometimes think that growing up without advantages can be an advantage. For example, when I was a kid, I never had my own room. I always shared it with my sister, or sometimes my sister and my…
After a fine, productive evening of coding PHP and javascript respectively, The Invisible Developer and I were discussing how to find a developer. We’re making good progress on 7 Generation Games and we’re pretty happy coding our own stunts. We did have someone come in to pinch hit last year when we were running behind…
I was wrong. Somewhere along the line, I got the idea that women did CSS and HTML and men did “real” coding like PHP, SQL, Python, Perl, javascript etc. Since life had taught me that predominantly male fields always paid better than female ones (construction workers get paid more than licensed practical nurses, for example),…
I’ve written about the challenges of finding a mentor previously, Why the cool kids won’t hang out with you. Let’s be frank, if you are old and pumping gas, not too many people are interested in you as a mentor, but the last few years have been good here at The Julia Group, and the…
I was looking at one of the problems from the new common core assessment for mathematics at the fourth-grade level. To keep from being sued, I will change the numbers, but it looked like this: 4,0_7 1, 35_ – ——– 2,_99 The student is to fill in the blanks. I *suppose* that the question is…
Since I am at the Western Users of SAS Software this week and on my sixth city this month in the traveling statistician/CEO tour, I drafted a guest blogger for today. Eric Ortiz wrote the following blog post. He is married to my oldest daughter, Maria. He also is the founder of Moblish , a…
We’re out at the USDA Small Business Innovation Research commercialization training workshop and one of the presenters said, “You as a small business owner, have a great advantage over the larger companies. You think they have an advantage but you’re wrong. Customer service in this country is TERRIBLE. You only need to not suck to…
Now that The Spoiled One is in her sophomore year of high school, we are starting to look at colleges and suffering a bit of sticker shock. This is surprising since we went through this three times already with her older sisters. What we were surprised to find is that even though tuition was pretty…
In some ways, this has been an extremely productive week and it’s only Monday, although when you work every day, it’s hard to say when your week starts. Sort of a zen-like question of where the circle begins, isn’t it? I’m not complaining. I love my work so much it is hard for some people…