Dot Product

Yep, you guessed it: too many processes demanding time on my wetware, and writing this blog has always been a nice’d process, so hence no reports for the last couple of weeks. What’s been keeping me busy?

Well, beyond the usual suspects, the International Business course I’m taking at Union is wrapping up, and last week was the final, and this week is the project presentation. *Grind* *Grind* *Grind*. BTW, one of the cool things about the course has been reading The World Is Flat, by Thomas Friedman. You may have caught him on the Daily Show a few months ago (that’s where I heard of him first). The premise of the book is that the world’s competitive environment is becoming flat, both for businesses and for people. Anybody in programming knows their competition isn’t necessarily the guy down the street, but some clever fellow in Bangalore, India. But it spans FAR beyond software engineering, and this book is for people who need to understand just how far it goes and what it might mean for us going forward.

The book has been a focal point of several fights between Maggie and I. She doesn’t like the book, thinks the author is wrong on several fronts, and is concerned that the perception that a flattening world is good will be at the cost of cultural diversity and heritage. The latter is my concern as well, though many of the factors that Friedman talks about in his book have made other cultures more accessable to the likes of me… and that has to be good, right?

Anyway, the book is worth picking up, even if Friedman has a tendency to make his point over and over again.