Not my practice blog, by Scott Knaster

It's a big world

Today at work I sat in a meeting across from a woman wearing a colorful shirt covered with Devanagari writing, plus wheel symbols and lots of swastikas. I've heard that swastikas are used by many religions and cultures, so I wasn't shocked, despite the swastika's most notorious usage. A quick trip to Wikipedia revealed that indeed, swastikas are widely used in Hinduism (which explained the shirt), plus many other religions: apparently there is even a swastika in a synagogue near the Dead Sea!

By the way, I learned that swastikas are not just for Nazis from an old episode of the Night Stalker. So that's educational TV.

Hockey question of the moment

Are NHLers being clever when they refer to the Stanley Cup as "hockey's Holy Grail" (as Colorado's Alex Tanguay just did on CHED-AM radio)?

Deadwood is back

Deadwood is back for a great, obscene, profane, violent new season on HBO. The show is sometimes called Shakespeare in the Mud, and it produces some of the most incredible dialog ever heard on TV (read transcripts here, but be unoffended by really foul language if you do). My new favorite line from the first episode, spoken by "Calamity" Jane and already plastered around the web: "Every day takes figurin' out all over again how to fuckin' live." Yeah.

Overheard at the ballpark

"This Coke is no good. The carbon that makes it fuzzy is out."

The Omen

According to the movie studio, The Omen took in precisely $12,633,666 at the box office on its opening day.

Boo!

Alex Toth has died

Another of the great comic book artists, Alex Toth, is dead at age 77. I'll leave it to his many fans to celebrate his work. I just want to observe, with a small smile, that when a great comic book creator dies nowadays, his work is treated with respect and we get to read an obituary containing scholarly analyses and expert comments. And no "BAM! POW! ZAP!" headline.

Café as corporate metaphor

Yesterday Jason and I were chatting on the way to lunch about, well, lunch. I noted that Google seems to be creating many new cafés in its buildings around the Shoreline area of Mountain View. Jason said that Google's café technique seems to match the way it does servers: have lots and lots of them.

I mentioned the café-coverage strategy of my Redmond-based former employer, which tends to build one big café per three new buildings. That's when we hit on the café as a metaphor for the companies we've worked for, then proceeded to have fun and stretch the metaphor completely out of proportion:

Google: many cafés, most of them small (like a cheap server) but with awesome food (great software). Lots of different kinds of cuisine (a healthy heterogeneous environment). Failover capabilities (e.g., "Charlie's is closed for a big meeting, so please have lunch at No Name today"). Meals are free (like most Google products). (And by the way, Google is hiring.)

Microsoft: fewer, larger cafés. Various kinds of food, but less variety. Meals are not free.

Apple: one café. Eat there.

IBM: the food isn't great, because it's outsourced.