Still reading 'jack' (auto-biography on Jack Welsh - CEO of GE) - the reading is going slowly (pg 115 out of 463) b/c the content of the book is "lumpy" (as in soft content one time and then some condensed 'lumps' [condensed with thoughtful ideas] in others).
Anyway, one of the ideas from the book that I'm getting out of it is that everytime he had a challenge, he turned to smart folks @ GE's R & D dept. to solve the problems. I don't work for GE and I'm actually the prime component of my company's R & D dept. (scary, huh? - we're a small publishing company with about 12 people and I'm the computer guy, basically) The conclusion that I'm coming to is that I need to work smarter and think harder about what I'm doing. My bandwidth is stretched right now (CGI scripts, sysadmin, etc), but not to the max. So I'm coming up with ideas in my offtime of how to streamline and make our technologies more efficient, secure (and all those other buzzwords when I can get to it - scalable, etc). The main problem is that I'm not knowledgable enough - I need to know more stuff! But that's where I can excel - I love learning new stuff - I'm like a sponge in that regard.
So the first thing I want to tackle is learning OO Perl. On our Web site, we have users coming in & subscribing, renewing, and surfing to/around our publications. It would be cool to have a centralized Subscriber object that was bound to the right db tables and had methods to add, renew, delete and so on. I'm all for centralizing code!
Anyway, I hope I'm not ramblin' here - just wanted to write down my thoughts and share 'em. Reply to this and let me know if you have any advice or thoughts to throw my way.
Jason
PS: I know I'm late to the party here, but I really like Radiohead. I'm glad to hear they won a UK award for the best band. Rock on!
