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Tuesday, June 10, 2008 |
This is a great way of life post from ZenHabits. Seven ways to handle multitasking. Also a great story about teaching (hint: I could have been the kid his mother helped).
9:44:04 PM 
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I have become something of a disciple of Getting Things Done (David Allen). There is another productivity book out, which I have not read because the title sounds hokey, "The Four Hour Work Week." Enter the blog I read with a love/hate relationship, Evolving Excellence. This blog's topic is Lean, but it's usually critical of most everyone. In this case, the writer compares GTD (six sigma) to 4 hr WW (Lean). He says GTD is all about making you more efficient, but doesn't concern itself with what you should be doing (not true, by the way, that's the reason for the weekly review). Same with six sigma. You become more efficient, but maybe on the wrong things. He thinks Lean is all about picking the right project.
Actually, he's wrong about that, too. Lean is all about eliminating waste, whereas Six Sigma is all about reducing variability. You could do a Lean kaizen event and eliminate all kinds of waste in a process and never increase the productivity of your manufacturing line at all. There is nothing inherent in Lean that tells you where to look for the most effective place to optimize.
That's where the Theory of Constraints comes in. I just read a couple of articles that implied that this theory was on the way out. I have no idea where they got that idea. If it's true, then manufacturing is in for a long decline. The Theory of Constraints (popularized in Eliyahu Goldratt's "The Goal") tells you to look for the part of the process (machine or manual station) where downtime directly relates to less total throughput of the production line. That process is the constraint. No matter how fast the rest of the line is, the machines will only build buffer stock if they are faster than the constraining process. Therefore, once identified, then that is where the Lean and Six Sigma tools should be applied.
I really like Lean Thinking, but it needs to be in context, not just applied everywhere for the heck of it. Sorry all you consultants out there.
9:41:31 PM
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Controversy in the Italy v Netherlands soccer match yesterday. Seems during a play, a striker (attacker), a defender and the goalkeeper all went down over the goal line. The striker and keeper jumped back up. The striker, not closer to the goal line than the keeper played the ball back to another striker who put it in the goal. No offside called. The TV announcers went crazy. They were wrong. Offside is when an attacker is nearer the goal line than two defenders or the ball the moment the ball is played. The attacker who scored evidently only had one defender-the keeper. But, and this is a big one, the defender lying on the ground past the goal line counts as one of the two defenders in the offside call. Therefore, no offside. Goal counts. Referees got it right (again).
9:29:16 PM
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"Knowledge was their treasure," Indiana Jones (in "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull").
Fits right in with the knowledge wave that was the theme of the week last week at RSTechEd. OK, so I see patterns even when they probably don't exist. Sort of like the patterns Indiana Jones used to find the Lost City. By the way, if you've never read Erich von Daniken ("Chariots of the Gods" and other books), then you probably didn't really get the end of the movie. Most people know about the Ark of the Covenant and the chalice that is the Holy Grail. The patterns were carved in ancient times and can only be "seen" from the air. Therefore, according to von Daniken who believes we are descended from space aliens, these were landing signs for flying saucers. Oh, for the simpler times of the '50s and '60s <sigh>
I read the reviews for both "The Chronicles of Narnia, Prince Caspian" and "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." Well, one out of two ain't bad. Caspian was OK, but long. I'm probably the only evangelical Christian in the world who never read the Chronicles of Narnia, but I'm told that the long, long battle scene was far shorter in the book. But the pace of the movie was slow. I hate it when a director takes a good idea then doesn't execute.
Not so Indiana Jones. The plot line was similar to the best of the others and mostly kept my attention the whole way. The only negatives were the prairie dogs and the monkeys. There was no real point to the prairie dogs. And the monkey scene was "fantastic" while the rest of the movie was more realistic--just as all the others in the series have been. There was no reason for the extra animation. They didn't even make the audience cheer when the monkeys attacked the villain.
9:17:38 PM
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Trying something new. Video blog. If you care, check it out. This was an experiment to see if the technology worked. Gotta say that the new MacBook Pro with an Intel chip rocks. No USB connection problems. All my headsets work. So does my new BlueBall microphone. And the Intel processor is fast.
2:51:57 PM
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© Copyright 2008 Gary Mintchell.
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