These things rock. I’m getting two — one for me, and one for her.

http://www.theslanket.com/product.php

http://flickr.com/photos/visualseed/86410009/in/pool-tuawrigs/

This is an excellent collection of 10 beliefs that managers “should” have — or, good ones anyway. I find the list to be quite accurate, and I liked this one in particular:

“Managers believe that people are innately good. Without this core belief and faith in people, great management is not possible.”

It’s funny because this is exactly how I feel — not just that managers should think this, but that everyone should. Actually, many of the ideas in the list are beliefs I’ve held for as long as I can remember. Over time they’ve (mistakenly) been associated with my being naiive. I disagree. An example would be how I treat weakness in a person. I don’t focus on it or worry about it too much (unless I’m trying to help them fix it). What I see above and beyond everything else is the person’s strengths. This is why I have so many friends; the stuff that other people can’t stand in people I can, for the most part, completely ignore. When I look at people I see what they can offer the world — what makes them great.

The trick about the management thing is that it requires that you believe in your team to begin with. If you don’t, there’s not much reason to begin in the first place. But once you do — once you say, “I can work with this.” — all negativity is put aside and the team should be looked at as if it’s nothing but a collection of strengths.

If a manager comes at it from the standpoint of, “These are a bunch of retards that I have to babysit.”, there is little good that will come of the entire excercise. The manager’s contempt will be palpable, and the team will be perpetually at odds with itself.

So I guess the goal of a manager should be to first start with good people. “Good” meaning having many strengths and talents, and a good heart. From there it doesn’t really matter what problems they have. Given a good environment they’ll kill those issues off in time. And while this transformation takes place the team will get stronger and stronger.

This little tool is quite interesting; it watches what you do on your system, takes note of what you do that is repetitive, and then offers to script out a solution for you so that you don’t have to keep doing the same thing over and over.

Not something I’ll be using, personally, but a very cool concept indeed.

Tool: Eager

According to this article, those in information security with a bachelors degree get paid little (if any) more than those with just a high school diploma.

This doesn’t suprise me.

Many are saying that this means that college doesn’t matter — that it’s worthless, etc., but they’re way off. The problem is the quality of education. Overall, the standards for someone with a 4-year degree are way down from where they were 10 or 20 years ago. The difference between a high-school graduate and a college-educated person back then were quite significant.

Today, however, we have people graduating with Bachelors degress that can’t do basic multiplication and division in their heads, don’t have basic problem solving skills, and have a horrible grasp of English.

Because of this, there are a TON of people who only have high school under their belts that compare to or surpass those with these degrees.

But make no mistake — someone with a degree from Cal Tech, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, etc. is going to blow away all but the most talented high-school graduates.

Bottom line — don’t confuse most college education with a good college education. The first is essentially what high school should have been. The second is truly an exercise in how to expand one’s abilities.

As for information security, the reason there is so attention paid to whether or not you have a degree is because being successful in the field requires talent and intelligence. If you have these things you’ll go far. If you don’t, you won’t. Ultimately, certifications and degrees are peripheral to this fundamental rule.

Video: A Not-So-Bright Dog Defends His Property

Just watched the Tim Silvia fight on Spike and saw that there are some cool matches coming up here soon. The two that are getting all the attention are Coture vs. Liddell 3 and Matt Hughes vs. Royce Gracie.

The Hughes/Gracie fight, in my opinion, is going to be a non-event. Gracie is a God, don’t get me wrong, but so is Sugar Ray Leonard — that doesn’t mean I want to see him fighting the current champion.

The fact is, the game was much different when Royce was on top, i.e. there was no one on his level. Now, everyone is where he used to be (or close, anyway) — it’s nothing against him; it’s just the evolution of the sport.

I’m not a big follower of Coture/Liddell either. I think Liddell is going to win — probably in convincing fashion — but that’s neither going to suprise or impress me.

My favorite fighters to watch right now are people like Matt Hughes, Nick Diaz, Forrest Griffin, David Loiseau, and Rich Franklin. Those last two are actually fighting in UFC 58, and that’s something I’m going to be all over.

Of course my favorite fighter is still Jeremy Horn; he’s the man.

NuFW is a very interesting new Linux firewall product that does something no other Linux firewall does — it authorizes packets based on user identity.

If you’re a security geek, like many of my friends are, this is very exciting. Check it out:

http://www.nufw.org/ 

It’s absolutely amazing to be able to gather this kind of data. It gives the powerless a feeling of power.

“My little blog…so many people…from so many places.”

It’s the same reason guys like laser pointers — they like being able to “touch” things that are far away.

I’ve been using TextWrangler for a while now — a free uber-text editor that’s used heavily by web developers. It’s actually the free, mini-version of BBEdit — which is supposedly everything TextWrangler is and more.

I’ve been thinking that I might want to “step up” to BBedit and buy it to get the features I’m lacking with TextEdit, but then I looked at the stuff and it doesn’t seem all that compelling. It then came to me that if even one or two of the features are useful — ever — then it might be worth it. Why?

Because I love TextWrangler so much. That doesn’t seem to make sense, but I almost feel like it’s good karma to buy BBEdit because I like their free offering so much — especially since it does offer some extra features that could come in handy. I’m going to download the demo and play with it for a bit — just to make sure I’m not being too nutty.

What do you guys think; is it just abject stupidity to “reward” a company in this way?

Edit: Thanks for the input; I bought it. For anyone thinking of doing the same, there’s a $100 discount for anyone using TextWrangler. The details are a bit weird, but it’s a real discount. I got the product for $99 instead of $199. W00t.