Turns out justice can be served by this administration on occasion.

Howe said she couldn't comment on the reasoning behind Pitt losing her $89,920 job, but said the information MnDOT sent "corroborated our investigation.''
- StarTribune

I'd still think you would want to check on reports that your job candidate was fired for failing to do her job and misappropriation of state funds before hiring her. But maybe that's just me.

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I know the current administration is bad about responding to crises, but they didn't have to show that their hiring was specifically tailored to create crisis response problems.

We know President Bush kept reading his picture book when the Trade Towers were hit. We know it took a week to get water to New Orleans. What will the TSA miss in the near future?

Pitt, 44, of Red Wing, was fired last November from her high-level job at MnDOT after she failed to return from an unauthorized, state-paid trip to Washington, D.C., during the I-35W bridge collapse crisis. The bridge collapsed Aug. 1 and Pitt didn't return to Minnesota until Aug. 11. Various state investigators later determined there was no work-related reason for her to be in Washington and that her trip there was unauthorized and at taxpayer expense.
-- StarTribune

 At least there's an investigation. That means someone thinks there's a problem.

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In the past couple of years, I've had the opportunity to observe several managers within a single organization of around 550 people. This is the first time I've worked in a situation with multiple managers whose behavior and success I could compare. I'd like to share what I've learned about management through that observation.

The most important component of any organization is communication. A good manager is an expert at communication. Larger organizations are more likely to  have problems with communication either within the ranks or between the ranks. There will be groups and managers that don't want to talk to each other and there will be management that doesn't want to communicate up or down the chain of command. A good manager will work to bridge those gaps by bringing in people from outside of their group and will ask questions within their chain of command to facilitate missing communication.

I used to have a saying when I made service calls for a living: "If I ask a yes/no question and the person I'm asking doesn't understand what I mean, their answer will be yes." I tried this out on many occasions by asking questions I knew I'd have to clarify later. Every time, the answer was "yes". A good manager can recognize this type of situation and make sure that the answer given by them or to them is an informed, correct answer.

A good manager delegates work that can be delegated and keeps track of what their employees are working on at any given time. Occasional group/team meetings to keep everyone up to date are good, and it never hurts to go for a short walk and talk to people and see what they're doing and how they feel.

When work that has been delegated is not completed satisfactorily, a good manager will take a step back from the situation and ask a few important questions. "Why didn't this work get done?", "Did I clearly state the requirements and, if not, was the work completed as I requested?", "What can be done to avoid this situation in the future?". If the requirements were complete and the work was not, a good manager will help understand where the shortcomings were.

I want to keep this a positive message of what a good manager does rather than what they don't do, but this one is important. A good manager refers to their employees as people, not resources. Resources are mined and drilled and pumped; people are nurtured, trained and worked. Even the best possible use of the term, "renewable resource", suggests that, once the resource in question has been burned out, you can wait a season and another one will grow back.

So, when hiring a manager, or when managing, keep these things in mind and you'll find that things go well for you and your organization.

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The world's first tidal-electric turbine has been connected to the Irish power grid. Powering 150 homes during the break-in period and 1500 once it's up to full capacity, this is a small step toward true renewable energy production. As an added bonus, the turbines rotate at 10-15 rpm so they're unlikely to cause "problems" with sea life.

The idea of a space elevator has fascinated scientists and the space-aware for many years, even though the possibility of a cable strong enough is incredibly unlikely. Turns out there's an annual space elevator conference and they have a blog so you can keep up on the progress.

I've always been annoyed at the artificial shutter sound made by my digital camera. The first thing I did with my new SLR when I took it out of the box was disable the focus beep. This article told me why those are there and why they can't be disabled in Japan.

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I started taking an art class this summer. It's Drawing 1101 at the University of Minnesota and it's a prerequisite for many art degrees. Since I've been thinking about getting a BFA in photography, I thought I should start somewhere, especially since most of the classes I took when I was in college were in engineering. I still have an interest in engineering, but I'm already a pretty good photograper, so that was the direction I decided to go.

I've learned a few things at this class that I didn't expect to. One is that I can actually draw. I knew I was okay at drafting and representing mechanical and angular shapes, but I didn't expect to discover that I could draw organic shapes as well. Faces are still tough though. The second thing that I learned came completely out of the blue, during an assignment on perspective. It turns out that many "photoshopped" composite photos don't have a consistent vanising point. One more thing to use for spotting the hacks.

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I was listening to someone talking about why mathematicians are so obsessed with pi the other day. They broke it down to what I thought was a fairly simple explanation. Pi is an infinitely complex, seemingly random, never-ending number, and it describes the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter. Since a circle is one of the simplest shapes and pi is one of the most complex numbers, they feel that the complexity of pi must contain the hidden secrets to the simplicity of the universe.

I say that the square root of two is getting a bum rap here. If you measure diagonally, point-to-point across a square, and divide that "diameter" by the length of one side of the square, you get the square root of two. This is an infinitely complex, seemingly random, never-ending number that describes one of the simplest shapes known, and I've never heard of someone calculating the sqare root of two to billions of decimal places.

Don't even get me started on e...

Update:  The square root of 2 was recently calculated to 1,000,082 digits. Still not billions, but quite impressive.

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I wouldn't feel like a geek if this didn't make me happy. The way that memory manufacturers have been able to make CF and SD cards have such high capacity is by stacking silicon layers on top of each other. The increase in thickness is minute, there's no increase in board real estate and every time you do it, you double capacity. The problem with moving this technology to other areas, like CPUs is heat. IBM has just solved that problem. IBM via Gizmodo.

Everybody knows that email is a huge time-sink in the workplace. It interrupts work and forces a response or a change of priority. In my experience, people walking into my office to ask a question can be just as bad because I have to respond now, rather than on my own time. The obvious corollary is that instant messaging would be worse than email, but not as bad as a personal visit. A recent study shows that may not be the case. - Science Daily via Lifehacker.

More and more this seems to be the case.

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So, I get extra cash each year to do something healtcare related. In the current case, it involves looking at information provided by my insurance company about prescription drugs that I'm taking.

Since I have alergies fexofenadine, an antihistamine, is one of my prescriptions. Here's an excerpt from the provided information on that medication:

What drug(s) may interact with fexofenadine?

• antacids
• erythromycin
• grapefruit, apple, or orange juice
• ketoconazole
• rifampin
• St. John's Wort

In addition, the following medicines can make you feel drowsy:

• alcohol
• barbiturate medicines for inducing sleep or treating seizures (convulsions)
• medicines for anxiety or sleeping problems, such as alprazolam, diazepam or temazepam
• medicines for hay fever and other allergies such as antihistamines
• medicines for mental depression (antidepressants)
• medicines for mental problems, anxieties and psychotic disturbances
• medicines for pain such as opiate analgesics (e.g. codeine)

 Now, I can understand barbituates making me drowsy, but I've never been prescribed this "alcolol" stuff...

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Improv everywhere is definitely a hit or miss organization. Sometimes they come up with the funniest thing ever and sometimes they come up with something that feels like a high-school prank call. This one appealed to me since it actually brings joy to someone. What really impressed me is the number of non-improvers they got to participate. Do you think they got the blimp for free?

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Honestly, I wasn't sure what category to use for this one. Maybe this should have gone in a new "opinion" section but really, this whole blog is full of my opinions...

I saw a bumper sticker on the way to work today that said "Actions Will Be Judged According To Intentions". My first thought was that it made a lot of sense. My second thought was that it made no sense and the owner of the car probably didn't get it.

Here's one of my famous hypothetical situations:

"My intention was to get my buddy to the hospital as quickly as possible so that they could tend his wounds from being hit by a car while crossing the street. Therefore, all the red lights I ran and people I hit with my car are of no consequence."

Here's another, this time ripped from actual headlines:

"My intention was to make a small hole in the wood beam to run a cable through, so it is irrelevant that I shot and killed my wife in the process."

The moral of the story? Think before you stick something on your car.

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