Hamstaa!

I was recently introduced to TED or Technology, Entertainment and Design. If you haven't heard of it, it's well worth checking out. Their by-line is "Inspired talks by the world's greatest thinkers and doers" and the site has videos of presentations from past conferences.

When I first became interested in hackers and computer security many years ago, the first book I read was "The Cuckoos Egg" by Clifford Stoll. Clifford is the astronomer who back in the late 80's while working at Berkeley noticed the intrusion and ultimately helped capture the hacker working for the KGB .

Clifford appeared at the 2006 TED conference and the video "18 minutes with an agile mind" is now available.

Watching it, Clifford exudes a huge amount of energy and passion for his topics and this energy is infectious. So if you have a few minutes, check it out.

When we started having more people blogging, the first thing I did was create a blogging policy. I looked at a number of published policies from big and small companies to come up with the guidelines for Ephox. Basically it's all common sense, but a Blog Policy is a great way to ensure everyone is aware of the potential issues of blogging.

Adrian's recent post on EditLive! Dynamic being outed raised the question of how many points in our Blogging Policy were affected.

Point number 2, "Keep Secrets" seems to be the first one. The super secret project "EditLive! Dynamic" is discussed, albeit in no detail. (Bit hard when there isn't any)

Point number 3, "If in doubt, Ask" I know never happened as I'm still waiting for the "ask" part of the policy.

Finally, point number 7, "Think about the consequences" is the only one I'm sure he did follow as I'm sure Adrian was definitely aware of the consequences of his "tongue in cheek" post. He is "Chief Blogging Officer" after all

At Ephox we've always had a culture of fun and doing things as a team, it's one of the things that make this a great place to work. 

We forage1 and mostly eat as a team, go to the pub Fridays for lunch, have beers at the end of the week and play alot. Along with the usual plethora of desktop toys, we have numerous "squishy toys" that are thrown around to get attention, we've played multi-user games like Unreal Tournament and brought in a Wii from time to time.

With some changes earlier in the year, kicking off development of a new product and lots of support from growing sales, we've been under a bit of stress lately and so some of these things have lapsed.

Last week Rob brought in two remote control helicopters he'd received for Fathers Day. These are about 17cm (7") long battery powered, infra-red controlled and a heap of fun to fly (though hard to control) What surprised me was how they really ignited the team. Everyone had a go and encouraged and laughed with who-ever was trying to fly. This, along with other indicators like returning to the pub has been a great sign that the stress levels are dropping. The work load hasn't diminished I might add, but the fun levels have increased.

 Many people would be concerned at how much playing around a team like us do, however what I've observed (both here an in other places I've worked) is these sorts of teams work really hard. The play is a way to blow off some steam. It's this pressure release that helps alleviate stress as well as gel the team.

1 - Go out and find something for lunch.↩

I couldn't have a blog and not post something about the Hamster especially as its the name of the blog.

Since 1999, when I joined Vignette, I've used the term Hamster. No particular reason. Sometimes used as a greeting, it's said "Hamstaaaaa!!"

I recently found this little gem on a dictionary site

1. (From Fairchild) A particularly slick little piece of code that does one thing well; a small, self-contained hack. The image is of a hamster happily spinning its exercise wheel.

The people I've used this term with over the years have been highly skilled people I have alot of respect for and this somehow seems even more appropriate now.