February 11, 2003
Geek Valentine Candy
Heh. I love it.
Thanks to the ACME Heartmaker you can put any (short) message you want on a candy heart. And if you're really bored, you can string a whole bunch of them together to make a long message like this.
Thanks to Geodog for the pointer.
I'm sure that some of you will come up with much more amusing stuff than I.
A boyfriend recommendation site?
Geodog points to an on-line service where women can rate and recommend guys they know. It's called greatboyfriends.com.
Heh. There's even an "I'm a Guy" button for people like me to click. It leads to a form that asks for the e-mail addresses of my female friends so I can e-mail them to solicit a recommendation.
I think I'll pass. But I'm still rather amused.
DBD::google
This is too cool. A DBD::google module on CPAN:
DBD::google allows you to use Google as a datasource; google can be queried using SQL SELECT statements, and iterated over using standard DBI conventions.
I've been wanting an SQL interface to Google for so long. :-)
Innovation Contest
One of my co-workers, JR, remarks on an innovation contest at work. I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who wasn't sure what to make of the announcement.
The initial announcement sounded a bit fishy for several reasons. I wish I could post it here to see how others interpret it. Anyway, it contained just about all the information you'd expect: the goal, rules, timeline, and so on. But it left out one key piece of information. If I come up with Yahoo's next great idea, I'll win the prize (a strero). But will I get what really matters: the time and authority to work on taking that idea and turning it into reality?
The contest announcement never said. It didn't mention the fate of the winning idea.
So I e-mailed the vice president who announced the contest and asked: "Does the winner get any assurance that they'll be given the necessary time and resources to help build and deliver on their innovative idea?"
I got a response. He started off, predictibly, with "that's a great question" and then went on to not answer it. Yes, he said stuff, but he didn't say "yes" or "no." It was a yes or no question.
Sigh.
What's worse is that this contest does little to address the real problems that I wrote about earlier.
I worry that the self-appointed judges of this contest wouldn't know innovation if it bit them on the ass. They're doing nothing to address the real barriers to innovation in our workplace.