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Share My kids are watching The Blind Side as I write this. I’m sort-of watching and writing, but I saw it some months ago when I took my nine-year-old son to see it in a tiny (75-seat) theater in Friday Harbor in Washington’s San Juan Islands. (The island in the San Juans where we have a place [...] Share A NYTimes article on analyzing video of basketball games contains the delicious quote, ” ‘It’s probably the worst abuse of Microsoft Excel ever,’ said Kevin Pauga….” Pauga is apparently referring to the use of Excel rather than a database to track all the stats associated with every play of every possible opponent in college [...] Share I was floored this morning when I came across this post about project sponsors. Some choice excerpts: The problem with project sponsors is that they have got to where they are by climbing a very dirty greasy pole. They now have a privileged aerial view of the executive landscape…. The slightest hint or whiff [...] Share I found the following subject line on a mail in my inbox yesterday: PMBOK Breaks Project Management The PMBOK is the grandiosely titled Project Management Book of Knowledge from the Project Management Institute (of which I’m a member). Wow, I thought, someone else thinks formulaic, by-the-book-only project management can be as much a problem as a [...] Share There has long been academic debate as to who wrote the work attributed to William Shakespeare. (The word “academic” is important; see below.) Most recent attention has focused on Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. There is a whole cottage industry devoted to these so-called Oxfordians. I won’t go into all their arguments, but here’s a [...] Share One of my business lines is tied to Google Voice. Today I got a voice message that was automatically transcribed by Google. I’m impressed. It wasn’t perfect, but the subject matter was very abstruse. However, it nailed all of the normal-speech parts of the conversation. Based on experience, my guess is that most voice messages are fairly straightforward. [...] Share I’ve been working with the Microsoft Office 2010 beta for a few months. Like many, I’ve been wondering, what do you do to enhance products that are already chock-full of features? PowerPoint struck me as a tough one to add value to; I’m a regular speaker who builds very complex graphics-based slides, and PPT 2007 has [...] Share When Monty Python sang about it, it was funny. (At least it was funny 40 years ago.) When it takes over your inbox, it’s frustrating. And when someone gets sucked in and loses data, money, or both, it’s a disaster — and a crime that the constabulary can’t seem to get a handle on. If you [...] Share Joel on Software — by ex-Microsoft veteran and Fog Creek CEO Joel Spolsky — has been my favorite tech-world blog by far for the past decade. In two weeks, he’s going off the air — for good, he says, in both senses of “for good.” Joel, you’ll be missed. I can think of no one in the tech [...] Share I was going to write this article, but a few days ago Ron Ashkenas at Harvard Business Press in effect wrote it for me. He nails four issues around believing that data = truth: Are we asking the right questions? |
Steven's new book is Legal Project Management: Control Costs, Meet Schedules, Manage Risks, and Maintain Sanity, available now from DayPack Books and Amazon.
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Copyright (C) Steven B. Levy 2009-2010. All rights reserved. |
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