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Cool Tools – Debugging Book
by Andrew McCaskey
You may have remembered Kevin Kelly’s site for Cool Tools. “A cool tool can be any book, gadget, software, video, map, hardware, material, or website that is tried and true.”
The gem that popped up on this visit is a book called Debugging- Essential Technological Literacy , by David J. Agans
One story relates to the principle of “One Thing at a Time”. Reportedly on nuclear-powered subs, there’s a brass bar in front of the control panel for the power plant. When status alarms begin to go off, the engineers are trained to grab the brass bar with both hands and hold on until they’ve looked at all the dials and indicators, and understand exactly what’s going on in the system. What this does is help them overcome the temptation to start “fixing” things, throwing switches and opening valves. These quick fixes confuse the automatic recovery systems, bury the original fault beneath an onslaught of new conditions, and may cause a real, major disasters.
It’s more effective to remember to do something (“Grab the bar!”) than to remember not to do something (“Don’t touch that dial!”) .
The Techpodcasts 24/7 streaming server is back in action – about fifteen current shows are available for streaming from the website – a good way to sample some of the other TPN podcasts. A few incidents last week required a restart and reload of the materials, but it’s now back on track. With luck, some of the proceedings from the Gnomedex conference later this week will be uplinked to that streaming server, and there will certainly be a good deal of blogging action from the conference.
I expect to meet up with Todd Cochrane of Geek News Central, Rob Greenlee of WebTalk Radio, and we may have an opportunity to visit with others as well. I’ll have more details later this week.
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Recent Items Mentioned:
Inbox Zero: One of the guideposts along the way will be some articles from the excellent site for personal productivity at 43 Folders , specifically an article entitled “My email diet” in the Inbox Zero – Day 1series.
From the 43Folders Inbox Zero process, I’m learning that these tools are no substitute for ruthless triage of escalating questions:
1. What does this message mean to me and why do I care ?
2. What action, if any, does this message require of me ?
3. What’s the most elegant way to close out this message and the nested action it contains ?
These questions were most valuable getting from 400 to 100 items. After that, the default
Outlook folder “Unread Items” kept the new stuff in one place – just reading headers and sender lines for easy zapping
The free 40 page downloadable e-Book from Rajesh Setty, a fellow Gnomedexer.. “Personal Branding for Technology Professionals”, It’s some heavy reality for anyone in the technology arena – especially the IT field or pure technologists.
Be sure to sign up for our upcoming roundtable. We will be using GoToMeeting. Also, be sure to check out GoToMeeting. Why? Because you can hold meetings right over the Net — from anywhere. Plus, you can hold all the meetings you want for one flat rate. To get your free 30-day trial , visit www.gotomeeting.com/techroundtable.
If you happen to own a Motorola ROKR or RAZR, Nokia 6620, 6630, 6683, or the Sony Ericsson k700, s710 or k750i, check out the Melodeo Mobilcast cell phone podcast player. .
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