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Being safe on Facebook.

by Nadya Arnaoot on October 20, 2009

I hear more and more stories these days about folks being burnt by the (bad) privacy default settings on Facebook. As more and more older folks join Facebook, I’m concerned that more and more of the people I care about are going to have embarassing Facebook mishaps– or worse, lose jobs or relationships due [...]

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david hockney’s iphone paintings

by Nadya Arnaoot on October 5, 2009

David Hockney has been using the Brushes app for recent paintings.

Just gorgeous.
“People from the village,” he says, craning back over that shoulder, “come up to me and tease me, ‘We hear you’ve started drawing on your telephone.’ And I tell them, ‘Well, no, actually, it’s just that occasionally I speak on my sketch pad.’”
– David [...]

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hey, what if we added faces to our dashboards…

by Nadya Arnaoot on October 4, 2009

So, for the last couple years I’ve been pretty regularly running into Dashboards.  That is, websites that folks can look at to get an idea of how things are going.  The usual idea is that the first page shows how things are going in a bunch of different areas, and you can click to drill [...]

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social networking art

by Nadya Arnaoot on September 21, 2009

Hypothesis: Any new platform will quickly produce new forms of art.
Supporting Evidence:

Laura Ingalls Wilder on Twitter
Hamlet as a Series of Facebook Updates

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for roger: promoting your company online

by Nadya Arnaoot on December 17, 2008

Curious about how to start to build a professional presence online? Want your company to pop to the top of relevant web searches? Here are some tips.

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I recently got asked for book recs for new project managers, and I had some trouble coming up with any.  It’s a shame, really– most of the books on management I’ve read really haven’t impressed me.  And books on project management often are focused on PMP certification, not real-world wrangling of technical people and projects.
There [...]

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10,000 hours

by Nadya Arnaoot on November 23, 2008

The number that is floating around my universe right now is 10,000– I hear this is the number of hours it takes to become good at something.  I’ve been thinking about that number a lot over the last few weeks.
If you’re doing something as your full-time job, it will take you about 5 years to [...]

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pm tip #487: projecting an attitude of calm

by Nadya Arnaoot on November 17, 2008

So, last night Ted and I were watching Battlestar Galactica on DVD, and I became infuriated by the character of Lee Adama. “He is a crappy leader!” I shouted. “If he were a project manager, his projects would fail!” From there I segued into a more extended rant about real-life political leaders who are promoted above their level of competency based on their family history, and how badly that tends to work out.

This morning, I’m still thinking of Lee Adama’s complete lack of leadership skills. I’ve known project managers like Lee– heck, I’ve been a project manager like Lee. Before I started figuring out what my role is as a project leader, I escalated the level of drama on the projects I was involved with.

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happy Halloween!

by Nadya Arnaoot on November 2, 2008

 
This is what I did for Halloween.
 
 

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neat email trick

by Nadya Arnaoot on October 23, 2008

I was hanging out chatting with a new friend recently, a developer, and he gave me the coolest email trick. When he’s sending email out, he puts the point of the message up top, and then puts in a line saying –Detail: Do Not Read– and then dumps all of the information leading [...]

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