Arnold Kling, quoting John Holt on schooling: Bryan’s view is benign compared with John Holt. society demands of schools… that they be a place where… children or young people can be shut up and so got out of everyone else’s way…. They are a kind of day jail for kids. [elided much of this paragraph – […]
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Arnold Kling is discovering John Holt
06-Mar-13.. is an ex-sysadmin
06-Mar-13I am now an ex-sysadmin. That hit me pretty hard. I was surprised. Yesterday I had a final meeting onsite with Client#1’s sysadmin; we talked over all the areas of responsibility, recapped all the services, talked about all the physical and virtual servers, discussed everything from low infrastructure (power, network wiring) to high hopes (finally […]
Less Painful Office Ribbons
15-Feb-13Microsoft helpfully “upgraded” office in 2007 and destroyed all the personal intellectual capital that people had created by learning the menu system. I took slight notice of this at the time because, hey, infant twins. Recently I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming off of Office 2003 and started using Office 2007, so I’ve had to […]
Remembrance of Futurists Past
14-Feb-13I just got around to reading As We May Think, Vannevar Bush’s famous 1945 article where he lays out a vision for the Internet, high level programming languages, Wikipedia, CCD-based cameras, and more. What a contrast to the popular futurist vision of flying cars and humanoid robots… So: how can you tell which of today’s […]
French Press Tip
09-Jan-13I’ve been making French press coffee for at least 20 years. About every third time, while pressing the coffee, a little bit spills onto the counter. The other day I tried it differently: I put the French press into the sink and pressed it there. 20 years of pointless, needless counter-wiping could have been averted […]
Reimbursement Form
08-Jan-13Here’s some more tiny-business advice: you should have a reimbursement form. It’s not that I’m nostalgic for the “Good Old Days” when I was at UC Berkeley: I’m not suggesting you make yourself sign a loyalty oath. It turns out that keeping track of expenses is hard; reimbursable expenses especially so; and a form is […]
Do Your Own Books – Wrap Up
02-Jan-13Well maybe just a wrap-up for NOW. Maybe I’ll bang on this drum more, later. I don’t know enough about John’s business to argue with him further. 400 journal entries a year sounds like <10 a week to me, which is less than an hour a week. But if an hour a week is more […]
I’m working on a couple of tech interview questions and I’m looking to test them on people — ideally, people who do tech hiring and project management work. So if you want to read my tech interview questions and give me feedback on whether they’ll help me find the people I’m looking for, please comment […]
How to do tiny-business payroll quickly; calculate once a year and then spend five minutes a month writing checks. Also: Newton’s method applied to payroll deductions!
In response to my earlier post, John writes: That works for single owner /employee businesses, but I’ve found it gets harder as you scale up. (either more owners or more employees). Aren’t payroll checks their own nightmare? It does get harder as you scale up. This is “Sam’s business advice – tiny business edition”: when […]