Blahgorrhea

Too bad I don’t have neighbors like this

It is quite possible these days for a company to fire its IT staff and move all internal applications to web apps offered by other companies. It is especially easy to do this at start-ups that don’t even have IT staffs to fire. My boss at my new job decided to go this route as well, claiming we’d be “eating our own dog food” as well as saving on IT costs. Our list of web apps includes Gmail, Kiko, JotSpot and Backpack. I was more than willing to give this approach a shot, but then I realized its drawbacks. [Continue reading…]

I cleaned up my bookcase and decided to get rid of some books. I left them sitting in a box for a week, planning to just take them to Goodwill, but then it hit me that I could sell them, and since I had recently inadvertently signed up for a seller’s account on Amazon.com, I figured “what the hell.” So I posted about 20 books for sale. Within 5 hours, two of them had sold. I was very excited. I packaged them up and sent them off, having pocketed about $8.00 those sales. Then when I got back from the post office, another book had sold. The next day, two more sold. I was in seven heaven, making money with practically no effort, ridding myself of books taking of space in my apartment, and sending books to people who wanted them. I was so happy with Amazon. But then… nothing. After that first 24 hour period of spectacular sales, not one book has been purchased in the subsequent weeks. Do you want some? Here’s what I am selling.

In “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” Robert Pirsig talks about the effect of grades on student behavior, attitude and performance. He tells a story of a college rhetoric professor who experimented with withholding grades for a semester. The experiment ended with great results, with all students eventually “scoring” where they normally would have but actually learning in the process. He gives a hypothetical example of a student in a normal system who works only for grades and becomes distracted by the “carrot” so that he does not learn at all, and a student in a gradeless system who drops out with a lack of motivation but then ends up returning to school later in life with an intense desire to learn, eventually “performing” better than he would have in the graded system. [Continue reading…]