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When work stuff becomes useful in your personal life

Greg — Fri, 14 May 2010 19:28:08 +0000

A couple weeks ago I changed the title of my wedding blog from “Greg and Rachel are Getting Married” to “Greg Baugues and Rachel Lazelle Are Getting Married”.

Small, unnecessarily formal change… right?

If you Googled me prior to the change, the top result would have been a cheesy interview I gave to an entrepreneurial website seven years ago. Our blog was buried half-way down the page.

Why? Because on a site full of information about Rachel and I, only a single page had the phrase 100% of people use when looking for me online — my full name.

By simply changing the name of our wedding blog I created forty pages of content with “Greg Baugues” and “Rachel Lazelle” in the title, establishing our blog as the definitive source for information about us and boosting it to top of search results for our names.

What shows up when people Google you?

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Lucas is Leaving

Greg — Thu, 13 May 2010 21:22:02 +0000

Tomorrow will be Lucas’ last day.

Lucas was the first full-time Table XI employee. For the last couple of years he has been working remotely from Victoria, BC where he and his wife completed their post-graduate education. He will be relocating to Vancouver to take a job with TaskTop, a software process management company founded by the researcher with whom he almost did his PhD.

For all intents and purposes, this is Lucas’ dream job, and while we are incredibly sad to see him go, we can’t help but wish him all the best.

Obviously time for him to go.

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Table XI Bikes

Greg — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 20:02:56 +0000

Here’s a shot of the bike racks right outside our office. From front to back that’s Erik’s bike, Samantha’s bike and my bike.

Erik and Samantha are hardcore and ride to work all winter long. I’m kind of a little girl when it comes to the cold, so I just started riding again a couple weeks ago when the temp rised above 50.

Riding my bike in Chicago is one of my favorite activities. There is no better way to get around and experience this incredible city.

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Matt went and got himself an iPad

Greg — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 22:14:41 +0000

He’s only had it for a couple hours, but his initial review is that it’s “pretty sweet.”

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We are hiring

Greg — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 19:04:57 +0000

We’re blowing up over here. Business has been good and we are about to start a couple of really large projects that will be keeping us busy for a long time.

And since work/life balance is very important at Table XI, we are looking to hire a developer so that John, Erik and Rich can continue spending time with their significant others.

Perks of taking a job here:

You get to work at Table XI
Umm, just skim some of the past posts on this blog and you’ll get the idea

Check out the job description and drop us an email if you or anyone else you know might be interested.

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Table XI does well by eating well

Greg — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 20:15:17 +0000

Medill Reports wrote an article about us called Tech consulting firm does well by eating well. The article gives a background of who we are and what we do, but the highlight is the video of Ellen putting on a cooking demonstration.

Speaking of cooking, yesterday Ellen made for us Tortilla Espagnola with Spanish potato, caramelized onion, and piquillo pepper omelet. The salad had sherry-mustard vinaigrette, and the dates were stuffed with manchego and wrapped with serrano ham.

Ridiculous, no?

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Some videos for you to watch

Greg — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 23:41:35 +0000

We’re still working on collecting pictures from everyone and putting them online. In the meantime, here are some videos.

Playa Grande
Playa Grande means “Big Beach”.

Hotel Bula Bula
Seven of us stayed at this ten-room hotel & restaurant/bar. The most succinct way for me to describe the vibe of Hotel Bula Bula is to say “you check in at the bar”.

Water Taxi
Playa Grande is a short water taxi away from Taramido. Costs about the same as a ride on the CTA.

Matt Lineen to the Rescue
This actually isn’t from Costa Rica, but rather Matt responding to an urgent client issue earlier this week.

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Samantha’s superior diadochokinetic rate

Greg — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 23:26:28 +0000

Katie Gore, John’s wife, swung by the Table XI office today. She is getting a masters in speech pathology at Northwestern and as part of her studies needs guinea pigs on which to perform “Oral Mechanism Exams”.

Part of the exam includes measuring diadochokinetic rates. This is a measurement of how fast one can articulate distinct sounds like “puh”, “tuh”, “kuh” and the combination of the three.

Being the overachieving, competitive bunch that we are, we wanted to know how we stacked up. Here’s Katie’s reply:

Here are the “results”:

I have tallied them into a total raw score to make it obvious who did “the best” for your competitive ranking purposes. Clinically you would never combine the scores, as it would be meaningless– it’s meant to give you a picture of an individual’s abilities with a specific articulatory parameter, which may be completely independent from their ability with a different parameter (e.g. in a young child, they may have excellent production of “tuh” but be completely incapable of pronouncing “kuh” sounds). I just added them up (your per-second rate for “puh” + “tuh” + “kuh” + “puh-tuh-kuh”) for a “for fun” overall picture.

The unit being measured is “articulatory movements” per second (??? like I said, I made this up, you would never average it…but I guess that’s as good a term as any)

1. Samantha: 7.4/sec
2. Erik: 6.1/sec
3. John: 6.0/sec
4. Jordan: 5.6/sec
5. Matt: 4.8/sec
6. Greg: 4.6/sec

The only thing I might clinically derive from this is that if Table XI was having some sort of speed-tongue-twister competition, my money would be on Samantha.

Also it might be worth mentioning that in many areas of speech, girls perform better than boys. So really she just had an unfair advantage.

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Diet Coke Explosion

Greg — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:55:47 +0000

Okay, so not all of Ellen’s kitchen exploits turn out so well.

Alinea serves a dish called “Black Truffle Explosion“. This is Ellen’s variation on that theme:

Broadly speaking, Table XI makes its living solving organizational problems. Here is “the management” applying those talents to our own internal challenges:

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If your product is great, it doesn’t have to be good

Greg — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:03:08 +0000

The opinions expressed in this post are the sole opinions of its author and are not representative of Table XI as a whole.

That’s because I seem to be the only one around here excited by the iPad. Most of the time (well, all of the time) when I’m in disagreement with everyone at Table XI over a technology issue, I’m wrong. But it was an article from Paul Buchheit, creator and lead developer of Gmail, that finally gave me the courage to go public with my beliefs.

His post, entitled When your product is great, it doesn’t have to be good, argues that the iPad’s success will be because of it’s limited functionality, not in spite of it:

I believe this “more features = better” mindset is at the root of the misjudgment, and is also the reason why so many otherwise smart people are bad at product design… What’s the right approach to new products? Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else. Those three attributes define the fundamental essence and value of the product — the rest is noise.

37 Signals has become rich and famous while being brazenly unapologetic about all the things their software doesn’t do. Give me the choice and I’ll use Google Documents over MS Word everytime for a single reason: simplicity.

My parents do 90% of their personal computing sitting in a recliner with a laptop. They need a device that can do three things: browse the web, listen to songs, and play Bejeweled. And yet, every single time I make the trip back to Indianapolis I spend hours troubleshooting an operating system built to support a bunch of applications they will never use.

Like Paul, I too have found myself using my iPhone for recreational web browsing more than I use a “real” computer. Even if the iPad is nothing more than a blown-up iPod Touch, I want one. That said, I will likely wait for kinks to be worked out and the price-point to drop before getting one. I didn’t pick up a first generation iPhone either, but when I finally got around to it, it changed my life.

Five years from now we’re going to look back and laugh at the archaic times when sitting upright at a desk was the standard way of browsing the web.

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txilife.com » Uncategorized

When work stuff becomes useful in your personal life

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