It’s the NBA Playoffs, the perfect time to peruse sports columns, blogs, and general comments from fans and haters. I had forgotten how much of the game – specifically, the hype and rumor mill that the media drives to keep the chatter alive – is about statistic overanalysis and unfounded conclusions. Well, that, and the third-grade trash talk.
At some point in modern sporting history, though, someone came up with the ingenious idea of trying to quantify sports with stats. Now, I think it started as a good idea; in basketball, other than the points scored, people first started caring about rebounds, assists, steals, and other metrics that correlate with a team’s success on the court.
It makes for a pointed study in using stats to say whatever the hell you’d want.
Well, it was a fun ride; I’ve moved on from Lolapps, and as of this posting, a week from starting a new gig at the big G (really, that’s Google, not “grad school” as someone had guessed…). The experience has been enormously educational:
- working for a startup since its infancy;
- growing the company in scope and size;
- building apps on top of a rapidly iterating and emerging platform in the Facebook App ecosystem;
I’d easily recommend any aspiring entrepreneurs, engineers, or web-savvy netizens to try their hands on similar opportunities. That said, after having fought the battles and learned the lessons for the better part of two years, I realized it was time for me to bow out of the system and return to more traditional software products.
Here’s why.
Oh boy. I feel another productivity rant coming on. Reader beware.
It’s pretty hard to be productive – trying to maximize the amount of work done in a minimal amount of time requires serious discipline, process, and fairly in-depth knowledge of all the moving parts (including, in a lot of cases, people). Though, there is a sweet solace which comes from the extra time saved and accompanying relaxation.
So why don’t more people try it?
In my ongoing rant against idiots in general, let’s spend a little time to talk about…idiot gamers.
If you haven’t heard, we at LOLapps have started experimenting with gaming, specifically social games on Facebook. I’ve made the lateral move into our gaming division, and of course with that comes plenty of complex front-end graphical and UI responsibilities.
It’s a measuredly harder task than building a blog or simple one-time apps on Facebook. Implementing rich, engaging, user-friendly interfaces is hard work.
My daily trek from home to office and back tend to be fairly educational. Between the likes of Buzz Out Loud, gdgt, and TWiT for tech with American Public Media and The Economist for news, I listen to a whole collection of podcasts, though with a fair amount of coverage overlap.
Occasionally, a host will acknowledge the presence of an echo chamber – that is, a number of media outlets express the same viewpoint without much critical thought, sometimes repeating the PR selling points without rebuttal. More often, though, journalists sound like company fanboys, especially some tech podcasts; they give really positive (sometimes, also negative) testimonials of features or products from the “cool” companies, convince themselves that something useful to them may very well be useless to the listening public, and repeatedly route conversations back to the same hot topics.
We geeks are a loyal and long-winded bunch.
I was going to type up a short post on some rather badly taken pictures of my new computer parts; I upgraded my computer recently, and a few friends asked for specs and pics:
It was a long-overdue upgrade; I have a fairly recent graphics card, but coupled with a CPU four years young, the card’s graphical prowess had been going to waste. With four cores and more RAM, this machine’s has been making Vista 64-bit fly.
As a matter of fact, it was surprisingly easy to put the parts together, and every time I build a box it seems like the manufacturers take the time to put in additional labels or helpful hinges to make the process as simple as possible. If only they’d stop making new standards on connectors every few years to force customers to buy adapters or shiny new gadgets.
You’d think that software – especially free software – would avoid these hardware follies.
It’s the NBA Playoffs, the perfect time to peruse sports columns, blogs, and general comments from fans and haters. I had forgotten how much of the game – specifically, the hype and rumor mill that the media drives to keep the chatter alive – is about statistic overanalysis and unfounded conclusions. Well, that, and the third-grade trash talk.