Andy's Mind

I’m starting at my new job tomorrow. I’m quite excited about it, because on the surface it looks well matched to my personality, skills and current needs. But of course, I’m about to see how it looks on the inside. I’m prepared for some reality check, but I hope to maintain a positive attitude. Next two weeks would be spent mostly learning about the organization, business objectives and model, current situation, needs and of course seeing how I fit in there.

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I passed the exam for the PMI’s Project Management Professional certificate today. I studied for the past three weeks, at least an hour every day (though on many days much more) and it paid off. Nevertheless, the test wasn’t exactly easy and despite being quite confident that I’m well prepared I had some moments during the exam when I thought I won’t make it. Those seconds after clicking “Exam End”, when the Prometric’s software displayed some progress bars and churned hard-disk ferociously were quite stressing.

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I took part in the last days in two discussions on Slashdot. One spurred by Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer behavior when he reacted to the news that an employee is leaving to Google by screaming profanities and throwing a chair across his office. The other by Microsoft’s official, but still nervous reaction to Massachusetts state government plan to get rid of MS’s Office and its proprietary, locked formats and move to OpenDocument.

It so happens that just recently I finally saw the notorious documentary, “The Triumph of the Nerds”, in which Steve Jobs summarized Microsoft by saying that they just don’t have taste. Interestingly, I remembered the quote a bit differently – they have no class – and so I used it in the debate. Slight difference, but yet lacking class is, in my opinion, something deeper than just lacking taste. This led to various debates about Steve Jobs’ outbursts at Apple workers, which everybody knows about – it’s a part of industry’s legend.

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While watching the media coverage of the New Orleans disaster and rescue (mostly on CNN, I have to add, because that’s the only US news channel I have available here) I couldn’t help but notice a strange regularity. Most refugees – and looters – were black, while almost all rescuers (firemen, policemen, troopers) were white. Image after image I saw this and I started to wonder why it is so.

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