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Thousands separator in Excel as thin space instead of comma
On days when I look at a lot of numeric data in Excel, usually the data arrives with a hodgepodge of formatting, even with differences on a cell-by-cell, not just column or row, basis. Before I really dig into the data, I often find myself reformatting, even re-arranging, into a spreadsheet that helps me see…
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3 Quotes on leadership from Plutarch’s essay “To an uneducated leader”
I’m sharing these notes to encourage you, reader, to read To an Uneducated Leader by Plutarch. My copy is in the book “How to Be a Leader: An Ancient Guide to Wise Leadership,” by Plutarch, selected, translated, and introduced by Jeffrey Beneker. The quotes that follow are from that edition. It took me perhaps 10…
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What harms us, really, according to the Stoics?
Marcus Aurelius, then Caesar of the Roman Empire, wrote the following while stationed in modern-day Austria around AD170 while his troops were at war with the locals: [4.8] Anything that doesn’t make a person worse in himself doesn’t make his life worse either, and does him no harm, external or internal. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations: The…
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A Method for Coaching for Performance at Work
Once upon a time, in a company in a far off land, there was a User Experience team led by Alice. Alice was mentoring Bob, a design researcher who was only a couple of years into the field. Bob had been working hard in preparation for a presentation of the latest round of research, and…
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Sportsmen’s Clubs: On Governance and Structures
Sportsmen’s/Conservation Clubs are typically short 3 key officer roles: Steward, Membership Director, and Events Director. The common-sense reality of such clubs demands that these responsibilities are filled, but because they aren’t defined in bylaws, the existing officers often have to juggle to make sure the work is covered. Particularly for volunteer-run groups, this is far…
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Musk’s madness with Twitter: a rationale
Musk bought a really expensive asset in Twitter that is losing horrible amounts of money (making it a net liability, actually) and he has to renovate it to be cashflow positive—the alternatives of letting it continue on its broken path or actually ending it as a company or far too expensive to be realistic.
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My toolset for digital sketching: Wacom One and Sketchbook Pro
Background Before the COVID-19 pandemic, I worked in an office with 2 wall-sized whiteboards and carried notebooks and pens with me. I diagrammed many times a week, in meetings and in private as a thinking exercise. I’ve been working this way for all of my professional life, and I have a long background in user…
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Budgeting for UX Managers
Budgeting for UX is a conflict of mental models: Ours and Accounting’s. If we start with Accounting’s model, we’re more likely to make mistakes. So, do the version that makes sense first, and then reformulate it for Accounting’s needs.
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Oblique Strategies, a creative tool, in a web version
In Oct 2022 I made a web-based derivative of Eno and Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies cards. I read about a deck of cards made by musician Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt in 1975, which had the purpose of spurring on creative thinking by inserting a random prompt. I imagine Eno composing music in some endless…
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Mosquitos & Eucalyptus
When I was a child, everyone around me would be slapping at mosquitos and black flies, but the bugs would never land on me. I’ve never known why, and these days I’m just as much a host to an opportunistic mosquito as anyone. Today, my wife connected the dots. It was the eucalpytus. I grew…