Recruiters are used to briefings where the head of HR hands them a carefully crafted job profile, explains the benfits and pension plans and finishes by pointing out the salary perspective. But sometimes, the briefing gets a different angle when you exchange the head of HR with leaders that know what's really necessary to get the job done. This obviously happens very rarely, judging from df5jt's excited blog entry (article in german). Let's see if my teams will benefit from that very briefing.

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You'd think that an internet company and ISP has "innovation" written all over the business. But boy, do those two clips remind me of some meetings! :-) [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OORnMYoWX9c&hl=en] [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku4Ugw0lQ4Q&hl=en]

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Good grace, I've been really busy those past weeks. I apologize for the silence to all my friends and blog readers wondering what happened to me. I really miss blogging on my diverse websites, so this silence really has to end. I'll try to put away some time for blogging between leading an IT department and caring for my precious. Work's interesting at the moment, to say the least. My department, "IT Core Services", consists of three teams. The one named "Infrastructure Systems" is responsible for providing services like backup for thousands of servers, facilitate central authentication as well as OS and application software deployment. Then, there's the "Databases and Storage" team whose area of expertise is obvious. Finally, there's "Core Applications" where they run business-critical services like our billing and payment services. My staff is great, but they're much too few and recruiting is only going on slowly. What hits me hardest is that two of the teams have been formed from scratch and both still lack a team lead. Having to lead more than ten people directly is nothing you can do well over long time; and I feel how it's slowly exhausting me. Some of the recent applicants made quite a good impression, though, so I keep my hope up. My precious is well, gaining more circumference by the day. Since she's due for the 7th of June, the baby could arrive any day now. The excitement is slowly building up, but we're as prepared as you can be for your first child: First clothes, diapers and musical clock neatly piled up in the closet, parents' magazines piled up not quite as neatly on the side table. To sum it up: All's well, challenges waiting for me at work, at home waiting for another challenge. Boredom? Isn't that a city in Sweden? ;-)

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I don't count myself as even remotely an axe-wielding headbanger, but "ED’s Furry Fucking Guide To Metal" is a hoot: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfdqV_sqal0&hl=en] I wonder what the moshpit part of my family thinks about this. Tom, are you there? (Via Nerdcore)

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I did my baby steps with OpenID some months ago, but never started using it consequently with the growing number of web services supporting this single-signon concept. There are several OpenID providers out there, but I was afraid of having to change all my accounts again if the provider I chose (MyOpenID.com) went out of business. That fear now has vanished. With their new service "MyOpenID for Domains", MyOpenID.com now offers the opportunity to use your own domain name in your OpenID credentials. Using that feature, your OpenID will not be "yourname.myopenid.com", but a name that'll fit to your web presence. You can choose between two formats: http://username.yourdomain.tld if you'd like to provide a separate subdomain for each user name, or http://subdomain.yourdomain.tld/username if you want to configure a subdomain (e.g. "openid.yourdomain.tld") once and just append the different user names in the URL path. In both cases, you'll have to add a DNS entry for the subdomain(s) as an alias pointing to www.openid.com. Maybe you'll need assistance by your web hosting provider's tech support; if you have control over your domain's DNS entries yourself, like I do, you just add the necessary CNAME entry. Now, you'll have to verify that you're actually in control over the named domain by either adding another subdomain entry, or by creating a web page under that domain. In both cases, the name you have to use will be randomly created by MyOpenID.com. After the short verification period (DNS verification can take some hours), you'll have OpenID credentials using your own domain name. If the worst case happens and MyOpenID.com goes down for good, I'll just have to find another OpenID provider offering the same service and point my OpenID domain(s) to them. Time to start optimizing the number of my user accounts!

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We all know: Microsoft isn't useless. They can always serve as a bad example. And I'm not even cynical this time. :-) Some folks at Microsoft made a funny video that demonstrates the Best Bad Tech Speakers Video…Ever: [youtube=[www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZOL878CwfM]) I actually can imagine some of my coworkers do such an unbearable presentation...

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A very nicely done hand-drawn animation about a typically determined cat and its owner has been online for quite some time now: </p> Now, there's the long awaited sequel: </p> I'm sure that there's not one cat owner on this world that doesn't relate to these amusing, not enormously exaggerated ;-) clips!

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If you wonder how that noob that just had your instance group wipe once again could get to 70 at all, it may be because you and others ran them through many prior instances. In their "Officers' Quarters" column, WOW Insider posted the article The road to mediocrity which I agree with very much. I always resisted the temptation of getting a boost from a high-level, even during the time I was supposed to get my character quickly to my group's common level. Not only did I find it boring running through an instance after an level 70 clearing the way, I also knew that I'd later need that experience from all those various encounters. Why should I pay my monthly fee while missing all that gameplay on purpose? So, I wholeheartedly second the suggestion the WoW Insider article gives to guilds: don't take away the opportunities of learning from your low levels by running them through instances.

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cbgreenwood passed the meme on to me by asking me to cite the book I'm reading at the moment, exactly from page 123, three sentences from the fifth one on. Let's see... Well, what a coincidence! I'm on page 123 right now! The book is "Mindset -- The new psychology of success" from Carol S. Dweck. She's a psychologist and writes about the difference between the "fixed mindset" that sees success as god-given and the "growth mindset" for which success comes from continuous effort. Here's the desired part: Iacocca played painful games with his executives to keep them off balance. Jerry Levin of Time Warner was likened by his colleagues to the brutal roman emperor Caligula. Sklling was known for his harsh ridicule of those less intelligent than he. I guess they'll not be in my list of executive role models. :-) Interesting what this meme brings forward! I'll pass it on to my precious, Kai and Tom. What are you reading, folks?

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Or is it?

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