Today is February 29. It’s a bonus day that comes but once every four years. Each of us remembers by name that one kid from elementary school whose birthday is February 29. It’s a special day on the calendar, unlike any other. It’s like when the record skips for a few seconds and then re-engages, [...]

The wickedly smart UW Phd student, Aaron Kimball, will be hosting a talk on cloud computing at the end of April at Google’s Fremont (Seattle area, not California) campus. The talk will include some good discussion on Hadoop, the open source project that aims to democratize Internet scale computing. Hadoop is the open source equivalent of Google’s [...]

At blist and throughout my career I’ve received thousands of resumes, most of which have come by email in the last decade. Most cover letters are either omitted or too long. They almost always simply restate what’s in the resume. Today I received an unsolicited resume with a brief cover note that really caught my [...]

I’ve long observed that really successful people developed an impressive work ethic before they could even drive a car. I read a study once that said that the percentage of Fortune 500 CEO’s who had paper routes as adolescents was greater than half. Most of the really successful adults I know were hard workers as [...]