Polly
Polly called me today. She's engaged to Ed! Wow, that's a lot of engagements in the past half year. And here I can barely plan my next vacation.
Observations from looking at my website's logs:
Work is very busy right now. Near the end of projects, tension levels tend to rise. People get stressed out, and I can sense different folks on my team walking on the edge. I'm trying to keep my cool, keep everyone focused but even-keeled. I find generally that too much emotion at the workplace can be a negative, though a surplus of enthusiasm is generally a plus. Over time, the pros separate themselves by their ability to stay unemotional while continually pushing towards a solution. Some people are just gamers, true professionals. It's fun working with those types of folks.
Read this brief article in Sunday's NYT about this backlash against workaholics. I have to agree with the writer. This revolt has gone a little too far, to the point where we're idolizing folks who always work a normal 8 to 5 workday. Work/Personal life balance is great, but I haven't run into too many great things in life that weren't attained through some level of obsession and workaholism. I even read this article about how people admired Bush b/c he works much shorter hours than Clinton. That's fine if he does, but calling that a good thing is going too far, in my opinion. He's the president of the largest democracy in the world. If he doesn't have enough to think about every day for the next four years, something's wrong.
I got this letter in the mail the other day. It contained a single piece of paper, with an article written across both sides. It looked like a page from a magazine. On it was stuck a post-it with a hand-written message to me:
"Eugene, try this. It works!"
That's it. Some article about leadership or productivity, or something like that. I can't remember. Another scam to try and get me to read junk mail. I hope it isn't cost effective to hire someone to sit and write all these post-it notes. I really hope people are smart enough not to fall for scams like this. If I could reduce the number of random catalogs I receive but never signed up for and the number of credit card applications I'm sent each day, my mail would be reduced by 50% to 75%, and I'd have about forty fewer pounds of paper to recycle each month.
Observations from looking at my website's logs:
- Google dominates the search engine market right now. It's not even close. Some 75% of searches that end up on my site are from Google. Having Yahoo as a customer certainly helps, but two other things they have going for them. The simplest interface of all, and a smart way of sorting results to surface the most relevant results high up on the page. It will be interesting to see if they can hold their lead or if another search engine will come along and take that next quantum leap in search relevance.
- Lots of people looking for paper ideas on my site. Lots of searches for "paper topics on remains of the day" or "paper ideas for Tobias Wolff" or stuff like that.
- Still lots of perverts out there. Wonder how Scott would feel about all the hits to his Big Sexy page if he knew people were getting there through searches for "Naked frat boys" or something like that. C'mon people.
Work is very busy right now. Near the end of projects, tension levels tend to rise. People get stressed out, and I can sense different folks on my team walking on the edge. I'm trying to keep my cool, keep everyone focused but even-keeled. I find generally that too much emotion at the workplace can be a negative, though a surplus of enthusiasm is generally a plus. Over time, the pros separate themselves by their ability to stay unemotional while continually pushing towards a solution. Some people are just gamers, true professionals. It's fun working with those types of folks.
Read this brief article in Sunday's NYT about this backlash against workaholics. I have to agree with the writer. This revolt has gone a little too far, to the point where we're idolizing folks who always work a normal 8 to 5 workday. Work/Personal life balance is great, but I haven't run into too many great things in life that weren't attained through some level of obsession and workaholism. I even read this article about how people admired Bush b/c he works much shorter hours than Clinton. That's fine if he does, but calling that a good thing is going too far, in my opinion. He's the president of the largest democracy in the world. If he doesn't have enough to think about every day for the next four years, something's wrong.
I got this letter in the mail the other day. It contained a single piece of paper, with an article written across both sides. It looked like a page from a magazine. On it was stuck a post-it with a hand-written message to me:
"Eugene, try this. It works!"
That's it. Some article about leadership or productivity, or something like that. I can't remember. Another scam to try and get me to read junk mail. I hope it isn't cost effective to hire someone to sit and write all these post-it notes. I really hope people are smart enough not to fall for scams like this. If I could reduce the number of random catalogs I receive but never signed up for and the number of credit card applications I'm sent each day, my mail would be reduced by 50% to 75%, and I'd have about forty fewer pounds of paper to recycle each month.