Okay so we know there are some sucky parts of agile processes, is there anything good in there? Most of the great parts look surprisingly similar to the bad parts. For starters:

“YOU HAVE TO USE YOUR BRAIN!”

If you work in software, and you’re not a robot, then you want to use your brain. Sure, 8am the day after your 30th birthday you may want to coast but in general most people want work that requires them to be present, contribute and think. How many people do you know who ‘phone it in’ during their day jobs only to spend all their off hours on a project they’re utterly passionate about?

If you’re a business owner, do you want a process that attempts to get every team member thinking about your business goals in every decision they make and every action they take? Or do you want a process that requires a small subset of people to think and then hand off their attempt at documenting those thoughts to a team of glorified line workers?

Am I biased? Of course I’m biased, because I’m not a robot. I’m biased to providing real value to business owners while providing a model to work in that places value on that wrinkled piece of sponge held in people’s brainboxes.

Traditional processes creep in when intelligent, collaborative models are forced to scale too aggressively. It’s difficult to control this model and that scares people. You can have the control back but only by introducing more traditional models that have a proven record of stifling innovation. They come at the sacrifice of that individual intelligence. You really can’t have it both ways.

Being cheap and independent, I’ve tried a lot of free conference call services. While I haven’t had to chance to run enough calls on this service to comment on the call quality, in terms of features this is the slickest service I’ve seen.

Sign up and you get a dedicated reservationless bridge for yourself that includes more base features than any service I’ve seen, including free call recording:

“LiveOffice’s FreeConferencing lets you record your conference calls at no cost. Not only is recording your conference call free, but it’s as simple as dialing the phone plus the audio file from your recorded conference is saved in MP3 format for superior audio quality and flexible playback. Your recording will be made available online within sixty minutes of your conference call concluding and will remain available for a minimum of the next thirty days.”

That’s not even the slickest feature, that title falls to their web control panel. With the control panel you can not only control your call, you can see who’s on the call and what number they called in from. No more calls filled “who just joined the call?” and “who just dropped off the call?”.

That’s not all (this is turning quickly into an infomercial), with the web control panel you can dial out to participants although there are some restrictions around the use of this feature. I believe you need five inbound calls for every one outbound call.

Cause Paul Graham says…

“Where the method of selecting the elite is thoroughly corrupt, most of the good people will be outsiders.”

“If it’s corrupt enough, a test becomes an anti-test, filtering out the people it should select by making them do things only the wrong people would do. Popularity in high school seems to be such a test. There are plenty of similar ones in the grownup world. For example, rising up through the hierarchy of the average big company demands an attention to politics few thoughtful people could spare. Someone like Bill Gates can grow a company under him, but it’s hard to imagine him having the patience to climb the corporate ladder at General Electric – or Microsoft, actually.”

“I think that’s one reason big companies are so often blindsided by startups. People at big companies don’t realize the extent to which they live in an environment that is one large, ongoing test for the wrong qualities.”

Taken from “The Power of the Marginal” article. It sounds interesting to me but I’m sure on the day I head back into a traditional office I’ll magically come up some great justifications for the opposite.

Another sweet looking coworking space, this one in gastown in Vancouver.

Via Todd.

I would like to formally apologize for the previous ‘Blackberry PINing’ post. I posted without really taking a good look at that site. Upon further review, one of the following is my opinion of the service:

• don’t get it
• get it and am aggravated by it
• get it and hate it

Being labour day today, it seems timely to post about this whole holiday thing in general. Holidays, and vacations, are yet another concept that has been redefined working in this model.

I generally find out about holidays the week before when someone says to me “you up to anything special this weekend?”

“This weekend?”

“It’s a long weekend.”

The long weekend concept’s lost on me now. I don’t really observe them and typically work on them, a half day today. The same applies to weekends, not that I work them but that I’m far from opposed to working on them. Back in my office days I was vigilant about not working during the defined off hours including weekends, evenings, and holidays.

It’s just all a lot more gray now and to be honest it feels more normal. It’s taken me time to adjust to this but now that I’ve acclimatized to it I prefer it. There’s a thinner, grayer line between work and life, again reminiscent of an older model not a newer one.

I’m trying out ma.gnolia and I thought you should know.

Generate your very own seal if you’re really bored or need yet another useless means of procrastination brought to you by our modern key to productivity, the interweb.

I’m lazy as I haven’t had a chance to explore what exactly this is yet but if you have a blackberry then check it out for yourself. For now, I’ll file it under “I’m not sure I get the point”.

As usual, I have no friends.

Via Chris

By the time I’m done this post I may need a new category. Maybe “Who Really Cares?” or “Confessions of a Dork”?

I carry a fisher bullet pen with me all the time. I’ve tried loads of different small pens over the years and the space pen is the first that’s lasted and actually usable.

For paper, I carry a few recipe cards in my back pocket as well as some of my cards. The combination means I always have paper and pen while taking up little space in my pockets because I’m not a fanny pack guy although I didn’t mind fubar.

Some call this a variation of a hipster pda. I’m not much for calling anything I do ‘hipster’.