Musings

Saturday Musings: Daniel Pink, SIMON Baron-Cohen and Secret Agent L

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ February 5, 2011 / 1 Comment

Warning: This post is long and related only tangentially to the main themes of this blog; I mainly wrote it to organize my thoughts on some issues I’ve been pondering the last couple weeks. However, if psychology, social theory, gender differences and self-improvement are interesting to you, you may enjoy...
Saturday Musings: Evaluating Your Purpose

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ January 29, 2011 / 2 Comments

Not everyone has a purpose, an overarching goal of their lives, this post is for those who do. If I’ve learned one thing over the last few years that if you don’t define your purpose and review it regularly it has a tendency to change in ways you didn’t intend...
When it Comes to Our Time: Google Giveth, Google Taketh Away

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ September 13, 2010 / Leave a comment

I noted an interesting little story sprint across Tech Crunch last week. It seems one of Google’s engineers has speculated that Google Instant (the product that loads results as soon as you start typing) will save 350 million hours per year. That statistic is based on hundreds of millions of...
Campaign Regulation Around Social Media

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ August 13, 2010 / Leave a comment

As the campaign for Governor (and others) marches toward an election, I came across an interesting thought. How/should social media be handled for elections? On the one hand, a Twitter account or a Facebook page is a personal representation of the user and that user should be allowed to promote...
Saturday Musings: Don’t Make Gay Marriage Legal, Abolish Heterosexual Marriage

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ August 7, 2010 / 1 Comment

This blog is not typically (at least over the last 8 months or so) a political platform, but since it’s saturday and I frequently go a little off topic on saturdays, I think I’m going to have a quick political discussion. If you’re not a fan, come back tomorrow for...
Lack of Organizational Capability = IT Waste

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ June 18, 2010 / 6 Comments

As I have mentioned before, my day job is in enterprise IT. I work helping some of the largest companies in the world upgrade their IT to match the demands of their business. I have argued before that there is a simply ridiculous amount of waste in corporate IT and...
A Very Expensive Free Game of Pac Man

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ May 22, 2010 / 1 Comment

Yesterday (and today), Google marked the 30th anniversary of Pac Man by placing the game on its homepage. A version of Pac Man can be played through the letters of “GOOGLE” by using the arrow keys. This resulted in glee at my company. The development room may as well have...
Saturday Musings: An Open Note to Pittsburgh’s Youth

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ January 30, 2010 / Leave a comment

Dear Youth of Pittsburgh, I want to tell you about a sport that has more drama than football or hockey. A sport where you can watch every play and see the skill of one man pitted against another. One where you can see both individual excellence and team camaraderie displayed...
Saturday Musings: On What The Co-Founders of Google Are Going to Buy

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ January 23, 2010 / Leave a comment

The co-Founders of Google (Sergey Brin and Larry Page) have decided to take a little cash out of the equity monster that is Google. The two currently own a combined 57,700,000 shares of the company. They are each selling 5,000,000 of their shares. There are business implications to this, the...
Saturday Musings: What if Kitty Genovese Had Been Murdered in the Twitter Era?

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ January 16, 2010 / 1 Comment

I posted yesterday about the book Super Freakenomics, which I just finished reading. In a chapter on “unbelievable stories of apathy and altruism” the authors discuss one of the hallmark cases of apathy, the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964. For those who are unfamiliar with the murder, she was killed and...