geek to live: underwear rotation and google’s rules

We’ve borrowed one of our favorite blog’s slogan (lifehacker) for today’s entry.

Firstly, underwear rotation. Here’s a topic near and dear to our hearts. When Mrs. Taco found us rotating our t-shirts (of which we have many), she laughed. Lo, how lonely we felt! As if we were the lone taquito left in a 3-rolled-with-guac combo from ‘Bertos. Because we not only rotate our shirts, but the underwear, and, in their own way, the socks as well. We’re not fanatics about it, but it helps keep everything worn at least somewhat evenly. So it was with great joy in our hearts that we read about ChangeLog’s wife rotating his underwear. We’re not alone!

Newsweek recently published Google’s 10 ten rules for employing IT workers. We can find no fault in these.

1. Hire by committee
2. Cater to every need
3. Pack them in. Almost every project at Google is a team project, and teams have to communicate. The best way to make communication easy is to put team members within a few feet of each other
4. Make coordination easy
5. Eat your own dog food
6. Encourage creativity
7. Strive to reach consensus
8. Don’t be evil
9. Data drive decisions
10. Communicate effectively.

Almost every good working environment I have had–where people are genuinely happy and look forward to coming to work–has focussed on most of these in some way or another. But some days, we would be happy enough with just some good communication.

On the cheap: software

We love open-source software. It’s usually small, fast, and does one or two things wickedly well.

As we mentioned yesterday, Firefox 1.5 launched yesterday. Aside from a few extensions not working properly (grrr), it seems to work pretty well. Our current biggest upset is that the Calendar extension no longer works. We use Calendar to keep track of some serious stuff, so that’s a bad thing there. Lifehacker (whom we love) has a workaround for some externsion blargaring.

We were particularly excited about installing the update, as we had installed a Beta version on our machine, which created a huge Status Area at the bottom of the browser. Uninstalling the Beta did nothing to erase it. But thankfully, as we suspected it would, the release version wiped it up.

But more than browsers, we love to actually do stuff. And for that, we look to the Open CD, which has recently launched version 3.1. We have also recently found that Wikipedia has a nice directory of open-source software. The one software that we are most looking forward to is Jahshaka, a video and movie-making software.

On a parallel topic, we love things that make us more productive. This is why we began this who blogging thing. Okay, one of the reasons. The blog groupies are amazing. We recently heard Paul Ford — author of Gary Benchley, Rockstar, and frequent contributor to our favorite morning news site, The Morning News — on NPR talking about disctractions and computing. He had some compelling suggestions, but we don’t think we will be installing WordPerfect for DOS any time soon (sorry).

But he mentioned a keyboard that “stores your text”, but doesn’t do anything else. We were intrigued. Imagine, no (computer) distractions as you type! Lo and behold, here is the AlphaSmart Neo. It seems like it’s all the use of a portable word processing program–check out that fancy but low-fi software!–, but with none of the laptop overhead to go with it. (It dumps into a computer via USB come time to print.)

We are thinking of buying the rechargeable version, which has an AC cord. 269 bucks is a lot, but we are also thinking that future generations of Free Tacos (Free Taquitos?) will get much use out of it. Especially when daddy won’t let them chat or surf after hours.