Last year we installed a water filter due to some perfluorochemicals that were leaching into the groundwater by a nearby manufacturer. It’s a nice reverse-osmosis, 4-stage filtering system that fits under our sink and is suppose to remove all sorts of volatile organic compounds.
I thought I’d share what the 1st filter pulled out of the water in the last 6 months.
The filter on the left is after 6 months of use. The filter on the right is what it looked like new.
Beliefs: The framework of things you hold to be true, and of which form the basis for all of your decisions.
Here are some of mine. Which do you disagree with? Why?
Workarounds are never a good thing. Short term workarounds are never short-term. They should be avoided. Do it right the first time, and if you can’t due to time or budget, delay the project. I hate technical debt.
Plan as you go is more appropriate to life and to projects, and returns better results, than planning everything up front (ie agile vs. waterfall). What we are talking about is predicting the future. Sure, you can be somewhat accurate, some of the time. But it’s just a guess. You’ll be more accurate if you don’t predict too far out. If you’re more accurate, you’ll be happier.
The problems of new are less than the problems of the old. On occasion you will run into a bug by upgrading software to the latest version. But I’ve found that on balance, I have far fewer compatibility & stability problems if I keep up to date. And as a bonus, new features!
Buy the well-built item once instead of the cheap thing multiple times. It’s eco-friendly, and you get to have the quality item to use every day. My wife and I had been wearing out a $10 garlic press once every 12 months or so with basic wear and tear — till we bought the Rösle Garlic Press for (at the time) $30. Five years later, it still looks good as new and works brilliantly.
Price is not correlated to the value. Just because it’s expensive doesn’t mean it’s worth a lot. Conversely, just because it’s cheap doesn’t mean it has no value. Open-Source Software, Wikipedia, a walk with your kids – these all have a lot of value, and they don’t cost you a dime.
Deals are rarely worth it. Everything is “on sale”. Everything is discounted. Of course, there are good deals to be had. It’s just that the effort to find and take advantage of the deal is more costly than any savings I might obtain. There is a reason why rebate forms are difficult to complete: it is in the company’s best interest that you never fill them out.
I believe in Scaling Software over Scaling People. See my blip on Techies and The Business, or the whole article here.
The most important attribute to any employee is their willingness and ability to learn. I’ve written about this one a lot. I think learning is the key to innovation, that through mistakes you get better, that Adapting is the Most Crucial Skill You’ll Ever Learn, and that progress (and who doesn’t want progress?) is an act of discovery.
So! What are some of your beliefs?
I’ve been reading The Playful World: How Technology is Transforming our Imagination (you’ll have to read it slowly — it’s kinda dense):
“A tendency to overvalue the ends of technology has become one of the most persistent features of these heady times, but so much technology has been piling up for so long that we are now beginning to see how it transforms the way we thing. We are different for using it. This qualitative change can be seen most clearly in the World Wide Web, which grew from a simple, if subtle, idea into a global unification of all human knowledge, and, perhaps, a catalogue of human experience. Confronted with a space of ideas that has grown well beyond the ability of any person to “know” it, we find ourselves navigators in a familiar but impossibly vast sea of facts, figures, and fiction. Every individual who has become a web surfer has changed the way he thinks and the way he uses knowledge. Every business, as it encounters the Web, changes completely.“
[emphasis added]
Wired writes An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All:
“The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.” [...] Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense.”
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