Tag Archives: Tech

What’s the secret of building great teams? Google researchers decided to find out. They presumed that the ideal team would have a mix of varied skills and personalities. As they put it, “We were pretty confident that we’d find the … Continue reading →

Via Karl Voit: Related: Visiting a potential employer? Check the toilets. Singly-ply sandpaper says a lot about their actual values. — Bernd Haug (@xaibeha) November 23, 2015 It seems a little silly at first but, really, it serves as a … Continue reading →

We’ve all seen them, either in person or in courtroom dramas. Those odd looking little machines that appear more like old fashioned adding machines rather than typewriters. I’m talking, of course, about steno machines. They’re used to provide verbatim transcripts … Continue reading →

If you spend a lot of time using your terminal to log into remote machines, you are probably aware of GNU Screen and tmux. If you aren’t using one of these, you should definitely check them out. They work nicely … Continue reading →

Many, or perhaps most, of us have suffered through a round of layoffs and have found ourselves suddenly unemployed. Often these layoffs are handled in a clumsy and uncaring way. One common tactic is to call the victim into the … Continue reading →

Here at Irreal, we’ve been grumpy for some time about the seemingly never-ending onslaught of articles and television pieces about the evils of smartphones. There are the academics, desperate for a publication cred., claiming that using cellphones causes young brains … Continue reading →

If you enjoyed yesterday’s story about the vacation memo, you may also like another video by Professor Brailsford on a short history of typesetting. The Mergenthaler Linotron 202 that was the subject of my last post could be said to … Continue reading →

Over at Coding Horror there’s an interesting but disturbing report on research by Will Felps on how a bad apple can affect team dynamics. Most of us have worked on a team where a single individual disrupts the smooth functioning … Continue reading →