The Geek Gap

Happy New Year and Chrisatms

2012-01-06T04:42:00.000-05:00

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To PowerPoint or not to PowerPoint?

2011-05-08T20:16:00.003-04:00

Bill and I had enormous fun doing our presentation at the Infotec conference in Omaha a couple of weeks ago, which gave us a chance to reconsider a long-standing debate:As a speaker, are you better off with or without PowerPoint?The Pros:PowerPoint can provide an outline for your talk. Of course, you already have an outline. In our case, we use index cards to prompt ourselves through the main

Podcasting Tips and Links

2011-04-29T23:27:00.003-04:00

For anyone who was at my session on podcasting at the 40th annual American Society of Journalists and Authors conference--or just wants to know more about how to create an effective podcast, here are some links that should help you get there, provided by our speakers Christopher Kenneally who podcasts for the Copyright Clearance Center, and Susan Barnett, host of the radio program "51% The

Rules for in-house social networks

2010-05-17T15:43:00.002-04:00

Google Alerts (I love Google Alerts) just pointed me to my new piece up on the Inc. magazine website about making policy for the use of in-house social networks. Turns out mostin-house networks are fairly trouble-free because most employees assume the boss is reading their posts whereas with Facebook, for instance, they assume the opposite.Turns out an in-house social network is a good way to

362 Commenters??!

2010-04-29T12:14:00.002-04:00

Just got a Google alert from Ubervu Social Conversation that 362 people had commented on or linked to my new Inc.com article about measuring the effect of social media. I guess social media loves nothing more than media coverage of social media...kind of a snake eating its own tail that (like having a videographer at Bill's and my panel on video at the ASJA conference...)Anyway, I had never heard

Brought Home a Dragon Fruit

2010-04-27T13:33:00.002-04:00

(posted by Minda)Bill and I spent the last several days at the ASJA conference in New York City, and part of yesterday in Chinatown. If you like Chinatown, but have confined yourself mostly to Mott Street, I highly recommend going a bit further South and East to East Broadway underneath the ramp to the Manhattan Bridge. There you will find no Western looking people at all, no one who speaks any

Do Geeks Lie About Deadlines?

2008-08-20T00:45:00.003-04:00

How can you tell if a geek is lying? Because his or her lips are moving.That wasn't quite the message from radio personality Rick Gillis when he interviewed Bill and me this past Sunday on his ESPN radio show--but awfully close. In his experience, he claims, whenever a geek answers a question about how long it will take to complete a task, that answer is always a falsehood.I've overheard Bill on

Why Don't Suits Care About Geeks?

2008-06-14T12:47:00.002-04:00

Is it true that suits don't care about their relationship with geeks? That's how it sometimes has seemed to us as we've traveled the country discussing this topic. The greatest interest in the book always seems to come from geeks who want to improve their relations with suits, and rarely the other way around.But maybe we're asking the wrong people or selling the idea in the wrong way?Anyhow, we

Managing Geeks when You Aren't One Yourself

2008-05-30T12:12:00.002-04:00

A little flattery goes a long way.A new friend of ours decided to peruse this blog and just sent us the nicest email about the Net Neutrality post (below) but also my Inc. Technology article on sales training for geeks (two posts down).Which serves as a good reminder. One reason I glommed onto the Geek Gap as a topic in the first place is that I do a lot of business technology writing, and it

Why We Need Net Neutrality

2008-05-15T15:52:00.002-04:00

Funny how one thing leads to another.Bill and I (thanks to Netflix) are belated fans of "A Bit of Fry and Laurie"--Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie's comedy series that ran in Britain in the 1990s. We just finished watching the third season, in which each episode ends with Fry concocting some sort of bizzarro cocktail while Laurie plays the piano. At the end of the piece, Fry hands Laurie the cocktail

Do Geeks Need Sales Training?

2008-05-09T17:42:00.003-04:00

Yes, according to Martyn Lewis, founder of Market-Partners, and once a lowly geek himself who screwed up his fair share of sales by not understanding the process.There's a great story in The Geek Gap, courtesy of Paul Glen, author of Leading Geeks, about an engineer on a visit to a customer, who, when asked for his opinion of the company's technology replies "You have NT installed on some of your

New Geek Gap content at SAP's BPX Community

2008-05-07T12:20:00.002-04:00

We're getting more involved in SAP's BPX community!BPX stands for "business process expert"--what we call go-betweens, the increasingly important liaisons between the business world and the tech world.We've begun contributing regular content to the site, as articles, blogs and wikis, and it's some of the most fun writing we've done for a while.Here's our first entry, about how the 2010 Census

Geek Gap TV at SAP

2008-04-16T16:45:00.002-04:00

If you've been following our Geek Gap doings, you may know that we traveled to California week before last to give a Geek Gap presentation to a live audience at SAP Corp., as well as countless watchers over the Web via Webex and Quicktime.If you missed that event online, here's a chance to see it again. (You will need to use Internet Explorer to view the video.) It will be up on the SAP site for

Amazon Screws Print-on-Demand (POD) Publishers

2008-04-07T18:18:00.002-04:00

You don't need road manners if you're a two-ton truck.Amazon proved the truth of this adage this month when it issued new contracts forcing print-on-demand publishers to use its service BookSurge to print books.For anyone who doesn't know, print-on-demand (POD) is a long-tail technology that allows publishers to print and sell books one at a time, in response to purchaser orders. You still wind

Geek Gap Presentation Went Great!

2008-03-27T18:29:00.002-04:00

Bill and I hade a great time doing a presentation on The Geek Gap for the SAP BPX (Business Process Expert) community. We had role-play of a real-life geek/suit conflict with Bob Mcglynn and Mark Finnern (thanks, guys!), and a couple of people afterward talked to us about doing a Geek Gap presentation at their events own events. We may be back again on the West Coast in the next few months.For

We're off to Silicon Valley!

2008-03-18T21:00:00.004-04:00

California, Here We Come.On Wed. March 26, 2008, 10am to 11:30amPDT (that's 1pm to 2:30pm EDT for the timezone-challenged), we'll be in Palo Alto, CA as guest speakers for the SAP Salon series. You can join us there for the event at SAP, or join the live stream. Click here to see the invite for the event, get the address, and for the link to log onto the live stream.Also check out the blog entry

Love My Sony Reader!

2008-02-07T11:46:00.000-05:00

Bill's granddaughter Julia had her first birthday in early December, and after the party, Bill and I were hanging out with her parents, Bill's daughter Alyssa and son-in-law, John.Alyssa is as much of a tech-head as Bill is and talk swiftly meandered to the latest and greatest tech devices. I mentioned my interest in Amazon's newly-released Kindle. I have stacks of books all around my office and

Product recall does not illustrate Geek Gap??

2008-01-06T08:53:00.000-05:00

Every semester, Bill and I do a presentation on the Geek Gap to a management class at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, N.Y.These are the technology leaders of tomorrow (in case you're not familiar with it, RPI is a top school for geeks. Uber-geek Ethan Zuckerman, who wrote an introduction for The Geek Gap is just one of its many prominent alumni.)Perhaps because they are young,

Sold Out at Amazon!!

2007-10-16T13:24:00.000-04:00

So we got on a plane--actually a few planes--and went to Las Vegas for SAP's humongoid TechEd conference. What a time that was!You can catch just a glimpse of Bill in the video highlights, but there is also some video of us talking Geek Gap in a roundtable discussion that we will post at least part of when we get it.It was awesome to be in a crowd of people who get it about the geek/suit

How They Make News

2007-09-04T23:28:00.000-04:00

I've read it in half a dozen places now: A poll shows half of all employers won't let employees use Facebook on company time. The poll, conducted by the security company Sophos, bounced around from tech news outlet to tech news outlet, appearing and reappearing over at least a week.This raises three questions: 1. Why Facebook? MySpace is out there, as are Orkut and Friendster. And then, of course

A Rare Misstep from Google?

2007-08-19T14:08:00.000-04:00

We've always been big Google lovers. We think the way they structured their business is brilliant: create a graduate-school like atmosphere. Serve gourmet meals. Embrace open source. Make everything simple and fun.Paul Graham, a geek much smarter than either of us, pointed out how Google's clean, simple and mostly white space look was not so much an aesthetic choice as a recognition, years ahead

Don't Blame Tech!

2007-08-10T17:41:00.000-04:00

If you're a geek and you lived through the boom and bust of the dot-coms in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it must be nice to know...this time no one is blaming you.The culprit this time is the most bricks-and-mortar of industries, real estate. Real estate spent most of the last decade in a delusional state that was quite reminiscent of the dot-com boom: things were going to keep going up and up

The Ad Campaign and the Grinch

2007-08-08T12:38:00.000-04:00

Is it me?Nokia's new viral ad campaign for its N95 centers around Internet warnings of jealous laptops viciously attacking their owners when the computer spotted the Nokia phone and responded with unbridled rage.The site comes with warnings as to what to do in the event of a computer attack, offers of camouflaged ringtones (so the eavesdropping computer won't know it's a Nokia) and even the

Lenovo Thinkpad - Now With Linux

2007-08-07T11:19:00.000-04:00

Lenovo, makers of the formerly IBM Thinkpad, have just announced at the 2007 LinuxWorld Conference and Expo that they'll now be offering Linux operating systems on new Thinkpad T60p laptops, one of their leading core business models. According to this Reuters article, the 3rd largest PC maker will be shipping Thinkpads pre-installed with Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (SLED 10), one of

The Inscrutable Future

2007-08-07T10:36:00.000-04:00

The new novel, Spook Country, is set in the recent past.There would be nothing unusual about that, except that its author is William Gibson, who, for more than 20 years, has made his living and his reptuation writing books about the near future. Gibson is most famous for inventing the cyberpunk movement and the term "cyberspace."Why the switch? In part, Gibson told Silicon.com, because the future

The Mad Serb's Dream Comes True at Last

2007-08-06T16:36:00.000-04:00

One of the most heartbreaking stories in The Geek Gap is that of Nikola Tesla, a man for whom the term "mad genius" could have been invented.Tesla, a Serb born in Austria-Hungary, arrived in New York in 1884 with little money and few possessions, beyond a letter of introduction to Thomas Edison, whose new-fangled DC electricity was all the rage at that time. Tesla invented not only alternating

Too Many Patents?

2007-08-04T11:14:00.000-04:00

It's unusual for Apple, Microsoft, IBM and Google to all agree, but in the past few years, they've been unanimous in their opinion of the U.S. patent system: It's broken, they say. We spend too many billions defending nonsensical infringement claims. Time for reform!Well, reform is coming in the form of the Patent Reform Act of 2007 which would dramatically (or not dramatically enough, depending

Better than Cloning?

2007-08-03T16:44:00.000-04:00

From the You-Can't-Make-This-Stuff-Up files:In 2004, South Korean Hwang Woo-Suk announced that he was the first in the world to extract live stem cells from a cloned human embryo. Stem cells, of course, are the darlings of medical researchers everywhere, as they can pretty much turn into whatever you want them to. They make the prospect of growing someone a new kidney, or repairing brain cells

FCC Does the Right Thing...Sorta

2007-08-02T19:19:00.000-04:00

Infrastructure.There's a word most of us suits hate. We hate thinking about the little packets of information flying around that bring us our e-mail, and whether those packets are traveling along cables under the ocean or bouncing off satellites above the atmosphere. We just want to know for sure that the message will get there.But every now and then we have to at least try and apply our brains

Dreams of Free WiFi Evaporate?

2007-07-31T10:54:00.001-04:00

Years ago, after we spent a lovely afternoon catching up on our e-mail in Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan, Bill proposed something called Wireless Woodstock, to broadcast WiFi throughout the village of Woodstock (which amounts to about four city blocks) and perhaps beyond.Who would pay for it? Bill and others proposed various options, including support by advertising on the welcome page, or

Geek vs. Geek - Who's the suit here?

2007-07-31T00:52:00.000-04:00

I love using Google search. It's my encyclopedia, my dictionary, phonebook, roadmap, medical info center, my source of any and everything I need to look up. Almost everyone I know, certainly all the geeks, use Google the same way. Google has always been very connected with the open source community, something I look for in any tech company.So why is Jimmy Wales so worried about Google?Wales,

The Battery That Wouldn't Budge

2007-07-31T00:22:00.000-04:00

Last month, Apple's iPhone launched to a more-than-usual amount of ballyhoo.This month, Apple faces a class-action suit over what is undoubtedly the iPhone's most controversial feature, or non-feature: the fact that its battery is sealed in place.The sealed battery compartment makes the iPhone no different from the iPod, a product that has achieved enviable dominance over its category. But it

SunRocket Backstabs Customers

2007-07-30T01:28:00.000-04:00

Why is it many geeks tend to mistrust the suits? The recent cut-and-run action of VoIP company Sunrocket could be a perfect illustration of why.In case you missed the news, Sunrocket, Inc., the second largest VoIP provider, closed its doors, even shutting down customer service lines without even notifying customer service employees, and left over 200,000 customers hanging without a dial tone.

How Does Oscar Know?

2007-07-29T01:13:00.000-04:00

I should apologize right up front, because this post is not about technology. Or business. It's about a cat, I'm sorry to say. But it's also about trying to figure out how things work, which is the essence of what geeks do.Today, I read about Oscar, a two-year-old cat who has lived most of his life on the third floor of Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island.

What's in that Sunscreen?

2007-07-27T23:40:00.000-04:00

Wear sunscreen. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience.The above text has been falsely attributed to Kurt Vonnegut (at a mythical MIT graduation address) and--I just found out through the good graces of

Doing the Obvious

2007-07-26T17:19:00.000-04:00

If you're a registered sex offender the social networking site MySpace has a message for you: "Don't come around here no more!"Tthat's right, in a bold and surprisingly unprecedented move, MySpace announced two days ago it had decided to eliminate 29,000 users from the system because they were registered sex offenders. It had apparently dawned on MySpace that it might be a bad idea to have

Technology We REALLY Don't Need - Take 1

2007-07-26T02:29:00.000-04:00

I'm a guitar player, so please take my opinion with a grain of salt. I think "air guitar" aficionados are sad, untalented losers who, instead of getting off their pimply butts and learning something about playing music, would rather pretend they're playing music. The fact that there's an "air guitar" championship just gives me cramps.And now, we have this wonderful product - the Air Guitar Pro.

Congress Promotes Resistance to Technology - Again.

2007-07-26T01:20:00.000-04:00

Reading this "Listening Post" item (a Wired Mag blog) made me want to bang my head on the keyboard. In a typically technophobic reaction combined with their continued kowtowing to the demands of the insane R.I.A.A. and their slimey pocket-picking lawyers, Congress is encouraging institutions of higher learning to attempt to block the use of P2P services, obviously without giving thought to:1 -

The Filter Ate My Homework?

2007-07-25T01:23:00.000-04:00

It had to happen eventually.The law firm Franklin D. Azar & Associates was ordered to pay attorney's fees for opposing counsel when its lawyers failed to show up for a court appearance May 30. Why'd they miss their day in court?Pornography was the initial problem. Or rather, the real or spurious offers of pornography that pour in every day to all active e-mail accounts. Enough of it was getting

Debates: The Medium Is the Message

2007-07-23T22:09:00.000-04:00

Well, tonight was a first: the first presidential debate with questions submitted by YouTube.Democrats, of course, ever the most tech-friendly, were the ones to try this out. In a memorable moment, Mary and Jen in Brooklyn asked the candidates if elected, would they allow them to be married...to each other? (Yes, said Dennis Kucinich, the others waffled about civil union.)The reaction to the

Medieval Greenland Vikings - Victims of the Geek Gap?

2007-07-23T17:10:00.000-04:00

As Minda and I discussed in The Geek Gap, the concept of a destructive communication gap between the creators of a technology and the users of the tech is not restricted to modern times. One such possible group who suffered from this phenomenon is the Norse Vikings who colonized Greenland in the 11th to the 15th centuries. They called it Greenland because it was a lush, wonderfully

Gridlock v. Gridlock

2007-07-17T10:32:00.000-04:00

One summer when I was in college, my boyfriend and I were walking home with my father from his 57th Street office. Along the way, we stopped into a drugstore for a few household items.When we went into the drugstore, Midtown traffic was inching along, like on any other Friday afternoon in summer. When we emerged from the drugstore, less than ten minutes later, everything had come to a complete

Sprinter in the Shell?

2007-05-15T11:57:00.000-04:00

Bill and I are both fans of the Japanese animation movie and series Ghost in the Shell, whose central character, Major Motoko Kusanagi is "full cyborg"--a human being who, due to an illness or injury in childhood, has had her natural body replaced by a robotic body.It's not a bad deal. She can leap tall buildings in just a few bounds, then dive off the roof and land without harm; lift objects

Ready or Not, You've Got Open Source

2007-04-27T19:23:00.000-04:00

Bill and I spent Monday this week at the Linux on Wall Street conference in New York City (right after the ASJA conference, where we presented on technology writing).What was fascinating was that all the sessions were about one thing: the legality of using open source software, such as Linux--but there are also many others, in widespread use. They talked about things like the "beer license" (in

Soon to come: Robotic Rights Legislation

2007-03-31T12:45:00.000-04:00

Do your robotic devices feel? Do they have rights? When you use them, do you need their permission? This may sound like science fiction, and it's indeed been a question asked in science fiction already for decades. For instance, anyone who reads science fiction can tell you about the Three Laws of Robotics as put forward by author Isaac Asimov in his short story Runaround in 1942. However, many

Geek Gap on CN8 TV

2007-02-28T13:44:00.000-05:00

Hey, here's our appearance on CN8 Philadelphia TV program "Money Matters Today" with Mary Caraccioli, Monday, Feb. 26, 2007. Mary is a terrific interviewer, and we really enjoyed being on the show. They wanted to discuss the RIAA lawsuits and DRM technology debates from the geeks vs. suits aspect, and we were glad to oblige. Click the YouTube link here and view it.

Remember your spine!

2007-02-06T21:25:00.000-05:00

Were you on the Internet today? I was. Something significant happened: nothing.Why was that significant? Because apparently while I was composing a lengthy e-mail about problems with my latest project, and pausing on occasion to play Braingle or read a news story, and while Bill was using his Vonage phone for a spirited discussion of Woodstock's proposed cell tower, the Internet itself was under

Geek Gap on NPR

2007-01-25T11:37:00.000-05:00

I guess we let the holidays and the whole new year get away from us - time to get back to blogging!We were invited to Washington, D.C. to be on the Kojo Nnamdi Show for January 16th, heard on WAMU (American University Radio) and we jumped at the chance. It's a syndicated NPR show, which airs on more than 30 affiliate markets across the country, and we were offered the chance to be his guests

How Not to Improve Your Image

2007-01-25T00:59:00.000-05:00

What's a poor monopoly to do?Today, Microsoft Corporation, has been lambasted all over the Web for offering to pay--some say "bribe"--an Australia-based geek named Rick Jelliffe to edit Wikipedia entries involving Microsoft products.Wikipedia, for anyone who doesn't know, is a multilingual online encyclopedia that works as a wiki, which is to say its entries can be edited by anyone at any time.

Oops! I grokked when I shoulda grepped!

2006-12-23T01:03:00.000-05:00

Caught being stupid! Aargh! Don'tcha just hate that when it happens?In the middle of a live phone interview, the business talk show host asked me about the term "grep" and - right about then - my brain went out for a beer, while my mouth answered like he'd said "grok." I know better, I really do, but for some reason I heard "grok" and that's what I was answering. Hell, I absorbed everything

Allison Resigns Novell in Micro$oft Protest

2006-12-23T00:54:00.000-05:00

DO go and read the whole story...this is important, not just from the viewpoint of the Geek Gap, but particularly to the future relationships between corporations and the Open Source community, which is many ways is the front lines between Geeks and Suits."Jeremy Allison -- best known as one-half of Samba's leadership team with Andrew Tridgell -- has resigned from Novell in protest over the

Buzzword or Turkey?

2006-12-21T10:33:00.000-05:00

We love getting corrections.Not long ago we got an e-mail from a geek who loved our book (many things hold true from her own career, she said) but wanted to let us know the game we describe as "Buzzword Bingo" had been around a lot longer than we said. (In Buzzword Bingo, players arrive at lectures or classes armed with cards that say things like "paradigm" or "out of the box" and check the words

Will Geeks Save Civilization?

2006-12-05T09:47:00.000-05:00

One of the things I love about living in Woodstock is the Woodstock Film Festival, which began seven years ago and has grown in size, polish and prominence ever since. Even if I made it my full time occupation during festival week to see as many movies as I want to see (I wish!), I'd only be able to get to half of them. There are so many! Bill and I tend to focus on full-length documentaries,

Are Techies Arrogant?

2006-11-29T02:12:00.000-05:00

Funny thing about that New York Times article. It took the position that technical support people are arrogant, and that arrogance is their default setting. So much so that, when business people find the rare non-arrogant specimen, they hang onto him or her for dear life.I'm not really qualified to represent the suit point of view on this particular topic because, well, I married my tech support

Geek Gap quoted in the NY Times

2006-11-18T20:59:00.000-05:00

Excellent article in the NY Times by Coeli Carr, titled Computer Support Technicians Who Play Well With Others. She quotes us in it, go check it out.

Voting Machines are a Geek Gap Issue

2006-11-04T23:35:00.000-05:00

Voting machines, especially the touch-screen variety, have been in the headlines for several years now, and no one seems to be able to (or, possibly more likely, wants to) resolve the problems. Voting machine maker Diebold, which donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican campaigns (and whose CEO Wally O'Dell was famously quoted saying he would "...deliver Ohio electoral votes for

What Interns Are Up To

2006-10-30T22:41:00.000-05:00

So last week I told you how we'd discovered The Geek Gap being discussed in a discussion group of the blog Joel on Software. The "Joel" was Joel Spolsky and the funny thing was we'd just watched him on the Documentary Channel. Fantastic channel, by the way!The documentary was called Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks and takes place at Fog Creek Software, Joel's company.It's the story of four geek

People are Blogging...

2006-10-24T11:06:00.000-04:00

I love Google Alerts! It's like your own, completely free and completely benign version of a government wiretapping program, where you get to hear what people are saying about you on the Web.So this is how, a few days ago, Bill and I found out some software developers in a blog called Joel on Software were having a whole discussion about our book. The "Joel," it turns out, is Joel Spolsky, a

Music Laswuits: The Great Ownership Debate

2006-10-17T14:49:00.000-04:00

The title of this post is what I know is about to happen: this is a subject on which the geek and the suit that Bill and I are do not entirely agree. When he reads this post, I can safely predict, he will have a response or two.We usually have these discussions standing around in our kitchen. Today, I thought I'd do it here instead. :-)The news is that the music industry is suing 8,000 more

World's first "stealth" fire department? Huh?

2006-10-17T00:08:00.000-04:00

The way geeks see things is this: Many often create free websites in their spare time that offer a service. They mostly do it for fun, but also to try to help people with their coding abilities and imagination. All too often, the technophobes standard response is like they're confronting vampires and need to start wearing garlic to ward off the "evil IT." Good friend, writer and über-techie

Girls, get your own geek!

2006-10-13T01:25:00.000-04:00

I'm blogging this as a public service for women trolling the singles bars and dating services. Funny, and so true!Girl's Guide to Geek Guys

Why I'm the Co-Author

2006-10-12T14:42:00.000-04:00

There I was, minding my own geeky business - fixing computers, writing my little tech column in the Woodstock Times, and the occasional magazine article, when my business writer spouse shows me a short description of a book idea. Geeks and Suits not communicating in the workplace? How could I resist? I was hooked.I'd been dealing with this issue almost my entire life, as pretty much everyone has

Paper or Silicon?

2006-10-11T01:44:00.000-04:00

I'm currently working on a writing project with a personal finance expert. Very smart guy. Has an elaborate web site with a webmaster, uses Internet programs and sophisticated software to make investments.We were at a business meeting recently when a colleague asked him if he was available on a date in a couple of weeks to attend an important conference. He pulled out a datebook the size of a

Why We Wrote the Book-Part 2

2006-10-08T18:43:00.000-04:00

And then I procrastinated. I wandered around, thinking about what I tentatively called "Geeks vs. Bean-Counters." I told friends about it when they asked about future book ideas. But when it came to actually writing a book proposal...well, I didn't.Eventually, I begged my agent to have lunch with me so I could talk over some book ideas with her and maybe get myself going on something. She kindly

Why We Wrote the Book-Part 1

2006-10-07T23:17:00.000-04:00

I spent five years writing articles for business/technology publications like Computerworld and Smart Business and EContent, articles about things like how to recover from a failed project or what to do if your project's business sponsor leaves in mid-project, and on and on and...pretty soon I started feeling like the underlying subject--in many different disguises--was always the ongoing culture

Geek Gap Disaster

2006-09-24T01:09:00.000-04:00

"Take Off Your Engineer Hat." The Shuttle Challenger launched on January 28, 1986, after a night when temperatures dipped into the twenties, a most unusual occurrence in Florida. The shuttle's solid rocket boosters, built by Morton Thiokol, were made in segments and sealed together by rubber O-rings. The rings turned brittle in the cold, and the shuttle exploded