August 18, 2003
@ 12:58 AM
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Penis Puppettry, Hemp Festivals and Piracy on the Caribbean
This diary done in the style of the great Bob Abooey who hasn't posted a K5 diary in almost a month
  • It seems an airport in Amsterdam has a neat trick to keep its male customer from peeing on the floor when using the urinal. In each of the urinals, there is a little printed blue fly which are there as a subtle way to encourage good aim by users of the urinals. It sounds like the psychological trick is quite successful. Nice one.

  • I haven't been exchanging mail as regularly as I'd like with Miguel and it seems he's grown tired of waiting for me to ship a newer version of BlogX and he plans to write his own. Hopefully Miguel and others like him who are interested in the BlogX will comment on the discussion thread about what direction the software should take in the future. Besides whether the project should soldier on or merge with .Text or dasBlog there's also the issue that Miguel raised as to whether something like SourceForge wouldn't be a more conducive environment for development.

    Miguel's mentioned that he may be at PDC which should be cool since we haven't hung out in months.

  • I just found a Google job listing via Jason Kottke's blog which mentions the concept of Googlettes.
    What is a Googlette? It's a new business inside of Google that is just getting started - the start-up within the start-up. We're looking for an experienced, entrepreneurial manager capable of offering direction to a team of PMs working on a wide array of Googlettes. You will define Google's innovation engine and grow the leaders of our next generation of businesses.
    Googlettes aren't that new, they are at least a year old. About this time last year I was pinged by someone from Google out of the blue who asked if wanted me to apply for a job as a PM for a Googlette. He said he stumbled on my resume online [I should have asked if he found it while "googling"] and wanted me to see if I'd interview to be a Product Manager for a Googlette.

    The way he described it, a Googlette is basically a PM, two devs and a tester who work on additions to the Google website. Things like Froogle and Google Answers are the kind of things that spring out of Googlettes.

    I was curious about how things work at Google so I agreed to a phone interview which is where I learned about Googlettes and the like. Since this was back when I was still a tester on XQuery I didn't really have the background in doing PM stuff so it I wasn't surprised when my phone interviewer declined to have me fly up to Mountain View, CA for on site interviews.

    A year later I now have a few months of PM experience under my belt from designing the next generation XML APIs for the .NET Framework, working on various issues with W3C XML Schema & XQuery, coordinating the content of the XML page on MSDN as well as being the main developer community contact for my team. Would working at Google on a Googlette rock as my job does now? I doubt it.

    I love my fucking job. :)

  • Pirates of the Caribbean: **** out of ***** (Great movie, a lot better than you expect)

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