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A few weeks ago I took Jerry Weinberg 's Problem Solving Leadership (PSL) workshop. Everyone I have heard speak about PSL calls it a life changing experience. I understood Jerry's book Becoming A Technical Leader to be a sort of offline version of PSL.
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A year ago I joined a team building a top secret project. Today we threw off our invisibility cloak and revealed ourselves as as Live Mesh . Come on over and browse around. Subscribe to our team blog , where I'll be posting from time to time. Then come
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A colleague: "I don't understand it. I lived with my wife for eight years before we were married and she never cared what time I got home from work. Ever since I put on this wedding ring, though, she expects me there at six o'clock on the dot!" Me: "Didn't
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The conference hotel was one of those every-room-is-a-suite places. I found having an extra room helpful even though I wasn't in my room much. The hotel food was standard hotel food which I didn't bother eating. (A healthier menu with organic ingredients
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Friday I recuperated from the week of brain stuffing, intellectual and emotional stimulation, and long days by motoring up to Sedona, where I processed my week (and wrote this) with the assistance of an energy vortex or four.
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Thursday was SHAPE Day, a gathering of those conference attendees who are also members of Jerry Weinberg's SHAPE Forum . We started out about twenty, which number dwindled throughout the day as people left for the airport. This was effectively a live,
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Wednesday morning I took part in a writing workshop by Johanna Rothman and Naomi Karten , each authors of multiple books and copious articles. I picked up numerous tips, such as to ask reviewers for specific types of feedback rather than simply requested
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Tuesday morning I took Naomi Karten 's Building Connections That Amplify Your Effectiveness. I thought it would be about networking. Nope. (I don't know why I thought that since the class description didn't mention that topic.) It turned out to be informative
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Monday morning I attended Steve Smith 's workshop on Virgina Satir's Change Model. The short form of this model (see his popular article for the full skinny) is: Status Quo. Everything is stable and going well. A Foreign Element pops up. The person/group
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Sunday was a warm-up tutorial by Don Gray and Steve Smith . This was an all-day session meant to introduce newbies like me (and returnees looking for a refresher) to the lingo, vocabulary, and concepts used at the conference. First up was the Myers-Briggs
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I spent the previous two weeks in sunny Arizona. Last week I hiked around Sedona. The week before that I was in Phoenix attending the Amplify Your Effectiveness (AYE) conference. AYE is not your typical sit-in-dark-hotel-rooms-listening-to-droning-speakers-read-their-slides.
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Once upon a time, I thought testing was about finding bugs. Once upon a time, I thought I should be able to find every bug in my product. Once upon a time, I thought testing was about ensuring no bugs escaped to customers. Once upon a time, I thought
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When a Microsoftie moves to a different group we typically take one of our machines with us. I opted to take my four-year-old desktop as that meant I also took my flat panel monitors, to which I have grown rather attached. As I frequently work outside
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A few weeks ago I read a suggestion by somebody somewhere to stop saying the word "but". Much of the time, they said, "and" works instead. This seemed interesting, so I decided to give it a Thirty Day Trial . Now I have mostly removed "but" from my vocabulary,
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I am excited to announce that today is my first day on...yet another top secret V1 project. As a test architect no less! I've had lots of fun on Expression these last almost-four years, and now I'm ready for something completely different. More news when
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