Everybody (well, almost everybody) around is talking about Seth Godin’s new book The Dip. It amusing to see that different people from different industries share very similar comments about this book:

• Guy Kawasaki (venture capitalist): The Big Dip: Ten Questions with Seth Godin
• Chris Busse (IT specialist): REVIEW: The Dip by Seth Godin
• Hal Macomber @ Reforming Project Management (project manager): Seth Spreads the Idea of Mastery
• Bob Walsh (micro-ISV developer): Time for a hiatus

Have you ordered a copy of the book at Amazon? I did.

Breaking news from mathematical congress! One of the scientists provided indisputable proof that 101 is the most important number in the Universe. Look yourself: 57+44=101, 188–87=101, 1212/12=101!

Old joke

Today is certainly a day of 101. I happened to spot 2 post related to blogging and the most important number in the Universe:

• 101 Steps to Becoming a Better Blogger
• 101 Great Posting Ideas That Will Make Your Blog Sizzle

What your the most important number in the Universe today? Can you prove it?

Browsing Reforming Project Management feed I came across the post about the importance of saying “No” when feel you can not say “Yes”. Truth be told I fully agree with the idea that No is equally as good response to a request as Yes. But it requires some courage to say No when are asked to do something because, I believe, somehow we always think that the person who asks wants to hear yes. Especially, if you are kind of subordinated to her. Be it your boss or your customer.

One of the things I try to teach new PMs is to have courage to say “No” when they really want to do so and not to try to finding a way to say “Yes”. In communication with them I try to make them feel comfortable with saying “No”. When I ask something I try to show that what I really need is a decision and not necessarily positive.

So make sure you say “Yes” when you really mean it. And say “No” when you don’t.

Researching topic of working efficiently with your mail I came across two more articles definitely forth attention:

• Inbox Master: Get all your inboxes to zero, and have fewer inboxes
• Email Zen: Clear Out Your Inbox

I’m now trying to come up with schema that will work best for me as my e-mail processing workflow quite often differs from traditional read-do-reply/delete cycle.

With growing number of staff in my department I found my self being interrupted more often than I would like to efficiently do what I have to. As e-mail is the main source of information that requires attention for time enough to completely get you away from what you were currently doing I decided to deal with that first. The first thing (probably, not the most obvious one) I did I visited ToDoOrElse blog by Bob Walsh. I came to know about this blog through his another blog and book ClearBlogging. I found his recommendations for bloggers very valuable so it was natural to assay his ideas on Getting Things Done. And I was rewarded for that by link to “Clearing Your Inbox with Minimal Pain” at Web Worker Daily. Going to try this approach in practice.

New York Post reiterated a year-old rumors that Microsoft wants to acquire Yahoo!. In the light of the “Microsoft is dead” essay by Paul Graham. In the web space Microsoft to my mind was always challenger trying to overtake leadership of innovations by others. It will be interesting to see how this story will end.

By the way, Russian translation of Paul Graham’s essay is available here.

If you are seeking for improvement of your modeling practices in software development check out P-Modeling Framework by INTSPEI. I participated in several experiments that lead to creation of the framework. Personally I’m looking forward to see first case studies of application of the framework in “real life”.

If you happen to not know who is Jim McCarthy watch all the video episodes of his “23.5 Rules of Thumb” presentation and read his article “21 Rules of Thumb for Shipping Great Software on Time” based on earlier version of the presentation. Jim left Microsoft to continue his research in the field of team dynamics. The result of this research is The Core: set of commitments and protocols to enhance productivity of teams.

If you think downloading The Core PDF is a waste of time and traffic – just read the thoughts of a bootcamper. Or watch an episode of Jim’s presentation right now.

If you are reading Joel’s blog you probably have read his post about New elevator technology. While this is an interesting idea from pure technology viewpoint, another idea came to my mind…

I believe that USA (together with Singapore, Hong Kong) is the place where such technology was likely to emerge more than in any other country. And almost certainly (alas) such technology could not be invented in Ukraine. Why? Because there is no demand such kind of elevators usage optimization, simply there is no places in Ukraine where it can be applied. Even if a man has a bright ideas he has to be in the right place at the right time for his ideas to blossom. Unfortunately, the factor of place still can limit the greatness of accomplishments one can do.

Mankind has to go a long road as yet to overcome limits imposed by all sorts of divide on the achievements of human race. I hope that in future we will more often learn about technology breakthroughs made in places we now know as “developing countries”.

Well, I did not completely wasted last month blogging-wise. I was looking for hosted blogging solution to move to from dasBlog. It is not that dasBlog is bad, but it turned out that supporting dasBlog (well, my instance of it) consumes more time than I originally expected. I decided that I’d better spend time writing new post rather than tweaking blog engine.

At first I decided to use TypePad. During test drive for the first month everything was going more or less well. The only issue I encountered was somewhat limited capabilities to customize design of the blog with the Plus subscription level. The real problem emerged when they could not charge subscription fee from my credit card. Although their staff was responsive and did their best to resolve the problem we did not find acceptable way of making the payment. So I ended up looking for another alternative.

After comparing all the options I decided to go with Blogger blog hosted on external server.

My new blog is now accessible at blog.dmalenko.org. For some time my both old and new blogs will be running in parallel. As for feeds: those of you who get my feed via FeedBurner do not have to worry about anything, those who are not – please, subscribe to this feed.