TED on Tuesday: Small Stuff

I found this talk by Rory Sutherland both entertaining, and informative. Actually when he got to his analysis of Tiger Woods, it was all I could do not to laugh out loud!



I've experienced a little of this myself...

When I worked for a division of the LDS Church, I suggested a 5 minute change to make the need for a new million dollar machine obsolete. When the suggestion was ignored, I did it anyway and it worked splendidly. To all those who are still active Mormons and still wear special Mormon underwear... Perhaps I saved you 5c on each item you buy!

Later when I worked for another division, I requested a process be put in place to reboot an Windows Server each week on Saturday night. The process would have taken 10 minutes to implement and would have required minimal oversight, and would have freed up some of my time, especially the couple of hours I was having to stay late each week to restart the server manually. (For some reason the server just ran better after it was restarted - by the computer geeks out there probably understand this.) Rather than approving my request, 3 over-paid idiots came down to meet with me, and tried to convince my boss that we should approve a project which would mirror the database onto a secondary server, and then write an interface which would allow the third party software to access it. For a product (which ran on the server) which was going to be replaced within a year, they wanted to take 2 weeks, and 3 full time (Aforementioned overpaid idiots) DBA's to create this new setup. Instead of simply writing a routine to reboot a server.

Unfortunately I continued to stay late for the next year, to reboot the server once a week.

So I can definitely see value in the small stuff, and right now... I think it's time to focus on small stuff as well.

The Koda household finances are not doing so well. And in addition to being in a job which will not likely see a raise in the next couple of years, I'm also finding myself in a position where my skill-set is deteriorating at an exponential pace and I'm just not keeping up with technology.

So, I'm officially on the job hunt! I applied for 3 or 4 last night, and have another handful of announcements sitting in my inbox for tonight. If anyone knows of a Java, PHP or other Web Development type opening in a progressive company, I'd love to hear about it. Utah would be nice, but Mrs Koda is willing to consider the East Coast (New York area) or possibly Australasia as well (I'm not sure if I have the qualifications to support a company helping me to move out there however.)