Category: Personal

What's your Google Number?

What's your Google Number?. (SOURCE:Don Park's Daily Habit)- My google number is 45, 800.  What's yours?

QUOTE

Latest Google fad seems to be calculating Google Number (via Elliotte Rusty Harold). A person's Google Number is the number of results return by Google when queried with the person's name in double quotes like “Don Park”. Bill Gates and Michael Jackson are both around 2,900,000. Dave Winer is 194,000 and Don Box is 127,000. My google number is 83,700 which seems too high.

UNQUOTE

[Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

18,900 for me.

UPDATE: I found some more background on this in an interview with Valdis Krebs in the Star Tribune. Using the common variations on my name that I use pushes the number up over 25,000 although that's a bit high because there are a number of other Jim/James McGee's out there on the web. Still not a bad return on two years of blogging.

Some lessons learned

2nd Email. I get a lot of email. I post it very infrequently. This is a keeper.

As I’ve Matured…

I’ve learned that you cannot make someone love you. All you can do is stalk them and hope they panic and give in.

I’ve learned that one good turn gets most of the blankets.

I’ve learned that no matter how much I care, some people are just jack
asses.

I’ve learned that whatever hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.

I’ve learned that you shouldn’t compare yourself to others – they are more
screwed up than you think.

I’ve learned that depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.

I’ve learned that it is not what you wear, it is how you take it off.

I’ve learned that you can keep vomiting long after you think you’re
finished.

I’ve learned to not sweat the petty things, and not pet the sweaty things.

I’ve learned that ex’s are like fungus, and keep coming back.

I’ve learned age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

I’ve learned that I don’t suffer from insanity, I enjoy it.

I’ve learned that we are responsible for what we do, unless we are
celebrities.

I’ve learned that artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.

I’ve learned that 99% of the time when something isn’t working in your
house, one of your kids did it.

I’ve learned that there is a fine line between genius and insanity.

I’ve learned that the people you care most about in life are taken from you
too soon and all the less important ones just never go away. And the real pains in the ass are permanent.

Pass this along to 5 friends…trust me, they’ll appreciate it. Who knows,
maybe something good will happen.

If not…tough.

As Always … Keep grinning …. it makes people wonder what you are up to

[raving lunacy]

Since I talk about learning from time to time this seemed worth keeping and passing along.

ER-6 headphones

Buzz is nothing if not a persuasive salesman. He's been on my case for months to try Etymotics's ER-6 earphones. He finally succeeded a few weeks back and I've now been using them for a while.

I should have given in to Buzz earlier. Understand, I was already using an upgraded pair of UM In-Ear Monitors as recommended by Kevin Kelly at Recomendo. And I used Bose's noise-cancelling headsets when I travelled. The ER-6's replace both of those and give me noticeably better sound over both of those choices.

Tools and problems

Emergence, reverence, and irrelevance.


Via Jerry Michalski, here’s a great text by Russell Ackoff, a pioneer of Operations Research (pdf file), that sketches what I feel is the usual arc trajectory of successful fields of knowledge.

The life of OR has been a short one. It was born here late in the 1930’s. By the mid 60’s it had gained widespread acceptance in academic, scientific, and managerial circles. In my opinion this gain was accompanied by a loss of its pioneering spirit, its sense of mission and its innovativeness. Survival, stability and respectability took precedence over development, and its decline began.

I hold academic OR and the relevant professional societies primarily responsible for this decline-and since I had a hand in initiating both, I share this responsibility. By the mid 1960’s most OR courses in American universities were given by academics who had never practised it. They and their students were text-book products engaging in impure research couched in the language, but not the reality, of the real world. The meetings and journals of the relevant professional societies, like classrooms, were filled with abstractions from an imagined reality. As a result OR came to be identified with the use of mathematical models and algorithms rather than the ability to formulate management problems, solve them, and implement and maintain their solutions in turbulent environments.

Eventually the tails begins wagging the dog. “When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.

[…] In the first two decades of OR, its nature was dictated by the nature of the problematic situations it
faced. Now the nature of the situations it faces is dictated by the techniques it has at its command.

There’s an interesting passage on interdisciplinarity as a sign of the aliveness of a field:

Subjects, disciplines, and professions are categories that are useful in filing scientific knowledge and in dividing the labour involved in its pursuit, but they are nothing more than this. Nature and the world are not organized as science and universities are. There are no physical, chemical, biological, psychological, sociological or even Operational Research problems. These are names of different points-of-view, different aspects of the same reality, not different kinds of reality. Any problematic situation can be looked at from the point-of-view of any discipline, but not necessarily with equal fruitfulness.

[…] The fact that the world is in such a mess as it is is largely due to our decomposing messes into unidisciplinary problems that are treated independently of each other.

Don’t miss the ironic postscript, too.

A related earlier post of mine is Information systems research: towards irrelevance?

[Seb’s Open Research]

Written almost 25 years ago, this gem from Ackoff captures why I’m back in the real world and was never a particularly good academic. I’ve always been more interested in making some progress against interesting problems than in solving toy problems.

I helped pay for my college education as a stage carpenter and electrician. I learned a lot of valuable lessons about tools. Probably the most important was that the tool you could get you hands on now was a lot more useful than the perfect tool back in the shop. The second was that if you had a reasonable collection of tools, you could usually adapt one to the problem. But you could rarely fit the problem to the tool.

Censorware Blocks This Site

Censorware Blocks This Site. Simon Phipps alerts me that one of the big censorware outfits, SurfControl, is blocking this and other blogs as a… [Dan Gillmor’s eJournal]

Hey, I’m hanging in a better neighborhood than I thought. Just checked McGee’s Musings at SurfControl to discover I’m blocked as well. Good to know that SurfControl’s rigorous methodology has carefully classified my blog as Usenet News. Won’t you sleep better tonight knowing your children are safe from my thoughts?

Ruth McGee 1925-2003

Mom passed away last week. I've gone back and forth over whether to post something here or not. What finally tipped it was this write up from yesterday's memorial service that my Dad put together.

Thank you all for coming today and thank you all for your loving care and support. Ruth is delighted.

She firmly believed that we are all created in the image and likeness of Christ so she was convinced that He too was a collector (pack-rat?) of memorabilia (Crayola art, cards, pictures, “Good” report cards, awards, diplomas, knick-knacks, various “can't live without” items from her many travels, etc.). As a result she believed her first assignment would be to clean out all His closets and storage spaces before she could set up bridge games and our rooms. So if you see muddy rain and hear noisy thunder don't be surprised. It's Ruth organizing the clean-up crews. Wear a hard hat. The hail may be rather heavy and odd-shaped.

Thank you again for everything and listen for her infectious laugh.

So now you have a sense for where my occasionally off-center perspective comes from. We're all doing ok. And my hard hat is close at hand.