Years ago, I read a science fiction story about a future where all plays were performed by robots that had been programmed with the combined characteristics of the world’s best actors. An aspiring actor sadly asked the technician working on the computers to run these robots: “What would you do if they invented a little…
Read a great line in Seth Godin’s book, Linchpin, “It’s not an effort contest, it’s an art contest.” The point being that no one cares how hard you worked, they care how great your product is. Of course, great products tend to result from hard work along the “necessary-but-not-sufficient-condition” lines, but that’s a whole different…
The next time your boss asks what you do all day or why it takes you so long to answer a question, show him or her this … Now, unlike this blog. where I basically drink Chardonnay and say whatever the hell I feel like, when people are paying me for answers, I take my…
I owe Victoria Brookhart an apology. One day, we were in the graduate student lounge discussing research methods and she burst out, “Isn’t this great? Here we are warming ourselves at the fires of knowledge. These are the times we’ll remember our whole lives as the good old days.” The rest of us threw spitballs…
Vista on VMware was running slow. I mean painfully slow. Like, bamboo shoots under your fingernails painful. As in banana slug slow. SAS Enterprise Guide was running SO slow on VMware I had gotten to the point where I would read a book while waiting for it to open, or to view results in a…
This is a blog about blogging. On the fun scale, meta-blogging probably falls midway between metadata and meta-analysis but I am going to do it anyway. In stages, because, just like if it has bullet points it must be serious business, if it has stages, numbers and units you’ve never heard of, like petapixels, it…
Hmm … so, Liz, our finance person is incomparably efficient and unfailingly nice, where I am usually efficient and have a reputation for being correct 97.6% of the time (as someone commented on twitter, if it has decimals in it, it must be true). Between the two of us we just accomplished the impossible task…
Some times documentation can be a little hard to find… You may be aware of the fact that, if you are running SAS 9.2 on a 64-bit Vista or Windows 7 machine the Import Data option from the file menu does not work for Excel files. Per SAS Usage Note 33228: (Courtesy of Peter Ruzsa…
I am writing a paper on moving from novice to intermediate programmer and got to thinking about the sort of things that people say that identify someone as a novice programmer. NOTE: No one is allowed to feel bad for having made these mistakes. Everyone you meet will admit to having made the exact same…
There are two kinds of people in organizations; those who can count and those who claim to have “people skills”. When David Wechsler created the most commonly used intelligence test in America, the results gave two IQ scores, Verbal and Performance Intelligence. Dr. Wechsler said he had noticed that there are some people who were…