Paulitex ][

(via mrtoto)

nice find. If their latest blog post is any indication, I think guys don’t realize the massive flood of geeks they’re about to suffer. GL guys, smart simple service.

University students conduct most of their work in libraries, drawn in by the lack of distractions the environment provides. There’s often a feeling of solidarity that develops between participants, making the system work with little outside guidance or control.

Offices should be more like…

Interesting argument. Though there are couple major assumptions that I think work against this idea.

• Students dont have offices: You’re assuming students have selected the optimal work environment out of many options, but students don’t have many options. In particular, they don’t have offices (unless they’re grad students, and in my experience most grad students choose their offices over the libraries). For most undergrads it seems the library is simply the best of the bad.
• Students primarily work as individuals. Companies primarily work as teams: This is the big difference: In school it’s all about *you*: your learning, your grades, you as an individual. Rarely do you actually have to collaborate and when you do people book out the group rooms in the library so that they can make noise. Conversely, a company is all about the team. Everything is collaboration, everything is group work. And having an effective teams is all about communication - all the distractions and interruptions you pointed to are really just forms of communication. In teams, communication trumps individual nose-grinding, and so in companies open, communicative workspaces trump library-like silenced halls of study. 

The only downside of communicative spaces in companies is the multicast/broadcast nature of most real life notifications. The value of communication goes to zero when that communication is irrelevant to you. E.g. If dev A, B, and C are working side-by-side and A talks to B about something unrelated to C, both A and B are benefitting from the communication but C is only losing focus. If instead of only C, there were 8 other people working in the same room, clearly this is a net loss. 

Here’s my solution: Small, open, work rooms of close teams. Only people in the room are people working very closely together. Team-to-Team communication is through IM/other mediated protocols.

It has been a long time coming, but Matygo is finally ready to release some software. It’s small, young, and only does a few basic things but we’re proud of it. Try it out and let us know what you think.

Over the last half year we’ve done a lot more than just work on code. We’ve also made…

Hurray! I wrote this post for the Matygo blog marking the happy announcement of my startup’s first usable software. Give it a read and let me know if you’d like to try it out, we’d love to get some feedback.

thebronzemedal:

mthig:

I don’t enjoy that stuff. I don’t enjoy anything. I don’t even want to be here. The sadness and regret I feel every waking hour of my life is absolutely unbearable. I am a miserable pig and I do not want to exist.

The irony is that, even if I did die, the hell I would surely be sent to could not possibly be any worse than the bottomless pool of excrement I already paddle around in like some demented, shit-covered walrus. In fact, every time I hear my voice coming through the headphones I nearly gag, and I think, “What the fuck am I doing?” Why would I say that Michael J. Fox is faking his Parkinson’s symptoms? Why would I find it funny to play a song called “Barack the Magic Negro”? Why would I tell people not to give aid to Haiti?

What the fuck is wrong with me?

I Don’t Even Want To Be Alive Anymore

BY RUSH LIMBAUGH

JANUARY 25, 2010 | ISSUE 46•04

The Onion isn’t pulling any punches.

This is brilliant. Click through the onion article, truly classic.