Ok, I am not usually one to mess with themes or skins for applications. Frankly, most of the time, I have better things to do than spend time tweaking a UI for vanity’s sake. That being said though, I recently applied a theme to my personal GMail account. I’m not sure why I decided to apply it, but I was sucked in, and I must say that I like it and it is because of one simple, eloquent feature that they added.

Essentially a theme in GMail is just a background picture, but they took it a step further and have your background appear differently based upon the current weather in your area. I like it. Here are a couple of pictures of my theme:

For some reason, probably that I don’t post that often, I have managed to just trudge along this whole time using the default Blog Engine.NET editor to generate posts. It’s fine for simple text posts, but once you get to more complex documents or code snippets it can quickly become a nightmare. Sure you have full control over the HTML, but I don’t want to have to ‘code’ my posts.

This is just a test using Windows Live Writer as my agent for adding blog posts. We’ll see how this works. Here’s a code snippet (I think 1 looks better and is more functional):

Plug-in 1:

   1: private void CreateSchedulesDS()

   2: {

   3:     SchedulesDS = new DataSet();

   4:     DataTable table = new DataTable();

   5:     table.TableName = "Schedules";

   6:     table.Columns.Add("Key", typeof(int));

   7:     table.Columns.Add("DueDate", typeof(DateTime));

   8:     table.Columns.Add("ApplyDemographicsFlag", typeof(String));

   9:     table.Columns.Add("IdentifyNonReportersFlag", typeof(String));

  10:     table.Columns.Add("PaymentDueDate", typeof(DateTime));

  11:     table.Columns.Add("Amount", typeof(decimal));

  12:     SchedulesDS.Tables.Add(table);

  13: }

   1:  private void CreateSchedulesDS()

   2:  {

   3:      SchedulesDS = new DataSet();

   4:      DataTable table = new DataTable();

   5:      table.TableName = "Schedules";

   6:      table.Columns.Add("Key", typeof(int));

   7:      table.Columns.Add("DueDate", typeof(DateTime));

   8:      table.Columns.Add("ApplyDemographicsFlag", typeof(String));

   9:      table.Columns.Add("IdentifyNonReportersFlag", typeof(String));

  10:      table.Columns.Add("PaymentDueDate", typeof(DateTime));

  11:      table.Columns.Add("Amount", typeof(decimal));

  12:      SchedulesDS.Tables.Add(table);

  13:  }

I had seen this go up a long time ago and thought it was an interesting concept. I was reading a blog recently that mentioned it again under another context and it reminded me of the service. Amazon's Mechanical Turk is essentially a work-for-hire program for very small units of work, labelled Human Intelligence Tasks or HITS. From the employee side of things it allows for a great deal of flexibility. One can pick up the jobs on the fly that are easy for them do and provide as much variety as one would like to feed their ADD disorder. From an employer side of things, crowd-sourcing mundane tasks that can be split into simple units of work could result in greater throughput. However, my opinion on the matter, having never actually participated in the service, is that the overhead of managing the tasks could outweight any benefit gained via the increased throughput.

 Interesting none-the-less.

I was recently reading a blog called Mini-Microsoft where they were talking about obtaining senior level status at Microsoft. The following is an excerpt that I thought was particularly interesting:

Qualities that a contributor exhibits:

BEGIN ARTICLE QUOTE--------------------------------

·  They can own a room: they aren't warming a seat but rather can take charge of a conversation and represent such a deep level of knowledge that they gain respect for what they say and earn a good reputation. Their focus stays on accountable results and this person can bring resolution and closure together.

·  Expert: They are sought after to be in meetings, for instance, so that good decisions can be made.

·  Results-focused: they are focused on getting great results and don't entwine their ego to particular solutions. They don't get defensive if their ideas are revealed to have flaws but rather delight in being able to move to a better solution.

·  Leadership: pro-active leadership that convinces team members of the future direction and even helps to implement it. This is a big difference between those who can complain about the way things should be and those you can actually bring it about.

·  Solutions, not problems: following up on the above, they aren't complaining about problems on the team but rather implementing and driving solutions.

·  Makes other great: the team benefits and grows from the person's contributions. Answers questions from the team, from support, from customers. Knows what the team delivers backwards and forwards. They are a good mentor.

·  Influence when they can, scare when they must: they have fundamental skills in influencing people, but if they need to flip into junk-yard dog mode, they can. They don't give up and walk away but rather fight when they need to fight, escalating only when needed and with lots of justification.

·  Makes the boss great: if the team and your boss are succeeding because of you, of course you'll be succeeding too.

·  Not doing it for the promotion: if you're out for a promotion, don't do work specifically chose to get the promotion. This is like meeting the Buddha on the road. If you come up with a pretty plan to justify your promotion, you've already lost it. Such plotting is obvious and actually detrimental to your career. If, however, you've determined what it takes to have a successful career in your group at Microsoft and have started what you need to start and stopped what you need to stop, then you're on the right path

END ARTICLE QUOTE-----------------

The qualities above represent what every employer wishes to have in each of its employees. Furthermore, it was every employee should strive for. I am sad to admit that I cannot think of a single person (management or peon), including myself, at my current employer who exemplifies all of these characteristics or at least that exemplifies them well. However, reading this list gives me some perspective and possibly a pivot on which to act to correct myself.

This article also got me thinking about what qualities a true leader should exhibit as it should go hand-in-hand with the above. Entire books have been written on this subject and I’m not going to attempt to replace them here, but here's what I came up with, in no particular order:

1. Focus – A leader needs the ability to stay focused on the important items at hand. Furthermore, they must prioritize and let less pressing items fall back until there is time to address them.

2. Confidence – A leader must have confidence in himself and confidence in his team. If either is lacking then a leader must effect change to build up the necessary confidence.

3. Humility – Despite the need for confidence, the contra-indicator is needed as well. One cannot know everything, and it is important to know when to defer to others who are more knowledgeable or in a better position to answer.

4. Thirst for knowledge – A leader must continually strive to attain knowledge in a variety of areas. This includes duty specific knowledge and social knowledge of team/company/industry.

5. Know when/who/what to delegate  - A leader cannot bear the entire wait by himself. Knowing what your team members are capable of or, more importantly, what they could be capable of if they were given the chance is important.

6. Vision for the future – A leader must know where he is attempting to lead his group to and have a plan for how to get there. Meandering around knocking of tasks as you go, “putting out fires”, is no way to lead. Have a road map, be willing to adjust it, but have it.

7. Ability to clearly and concisely articulate vision – Finally, a leader must be able to transfer his vision to his team, to his customers and back to himself if necessary, effectively with clarity.