Igor's Computer Blog

If you haven't read  Getting to Yes ,  I highly recommend it, it had a drastic positive effect on my negotiation skills. For me, the key point of Getting To Yes is to focus on outcomes not positions.  Outcomes are what we want to accomplish, for example  "getting something to eat".   Positions are a single concrete instantiation of that outcome, for example "getting a cheeseburger at Burger King".   A problem with humans is we often get very attached to achieving our position, even though there are several positions that can achieve our outcome, many of which will make other people happy.    When we get in a fight with someone it's usually because we have incompatible positions, not incompatible outcomes.  If we can  refocus our interaction onto achieving outcomes,  we can usually find a position that can make everyone happy.  A few days after reading Getting To Yes, I was at the cafeteria and had an excellent oppor...

Keyboards are a personal thing, but people often ask me the keyboards I use.  I'm a heavy computer user, I've tried lots of keyboards and these are the ones I've settled on: Desktop Keyboard:  Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Desktop (L5V-00001)  - My *new* desktop keyboard, the keyboard I use for 8 hours of typing.  Uses a custom wireless dongle, and has a removable number pad.  Very sleek, I wish there was a little more key travel, but I think after a bit of use I'll prefer it over the Ergo Desktop 7000. Portable  Keyboard:   -   Goldtouch Go2Mobile - A fully adjustable (like crazy adjustable), really comfortable, and relatively portable keyboard.  I say "relatively portable" because the keyboard can fold up so it fits in your bag,  but it's still bulky and weighs a pound.  I only bring the keyboard with me if I plan on typing more then 30 minutes.  A non-obvious advantage of bringing a portable keyboard is you can put yo...

This is part of the  SaaS  series. Any connection to reality will be strictly denied. Internships are best approached as a long-term field trip. You should plan to be exposed to new things, spend some time out of your comfort zone, and, by all means – use the buddy system. My buddy’s name is Biff. As our eye-opening experience learning to savor soup while sipping scotch revealed, not only did we  learn a lot of technical skills during our Microsoft internship, but we also learned key life skills. On the topic of life, Biff loved life.  Biff also loved drinking, and loved driving – and – while sober, he had no trouble understanding that flirting with drinking and driving would ruin his relationship with life.  But, as I learned that chilly Seattle fall,  Biff’s sound judgment disappeared at quickly as the scotches – and was replaced by a foolish desire to drive drunk. As an engineer, or perhaps as a foreshadowing of my future role as development le...

Instead of making a post every time I stumble upon a cool powershell one liner, I'll combine them all in this post. If you have a better one liner for my tasks, please comment. Kill a process by name (In this case Jenkins).  Get-Process | ? {$_.Name -like 'JenKins' }  | Stop-Process Delete all Duplication Downloads (I usually run it first without the del paramaters)  dir  -r  | ? {$_.Name -like '(1)' }  | del Powershell 3, Where/ForEach hack  - allowing you to specify properties sans an anonymous expression.  dir  -r  | ?  Name -like '(1)'  Restart Explorer (often auto-hide of taskbar gets stuck, restarting explorer fixes it.) Get-Process | where name -eq explorer  |kill ; explorer Find Who's hogging memory  Get-Process | sort "VM" -Des | Select-Object -first 10 Set current time  forward 4 hours  set-date ((get-date) + [TimeSpan]::FromHours(4.0)) Get my son's age in weeks  ((g...