Crazy watches and passing time

This is without doubt one of the most interesting articles I've read in a long time. It's about a japanese watch maker called Haruo Suekichi (Japanese homepage only), who designs odd and unique contraptions that show time. Some of them look barely wearable, but they're all still really cool.

The interviewer also asks how he looks at the passing of time and I think he had a great definition of it:

The progress of time and memories are like a path you go along, and certain memories stand out as markers...that's kind of how I think of time, I guess, how I look at time...

I'm so used to looking at time from a scientific point of view (I blame Brian Greene for that) so this article felt really refreshing to read. Sometimes it would be nice to be able to express thing in a more poetic way.

How to keep a geek employee happy

Was a fun and quite accurate post on nomadishere.com about what a geek/nerd needs to be happy with work. I'd say number 1, 4 and 8 is the most important points.

The k programming language

Found an old but interesting and well written article about the k programming language over at kuro5hin. It's a descendant from APL that I have the unpleasant experience to work with. k looks a lot more sane though, using normal ascii-characters and having some more advanced features than APL.

Still, no one can say that k is an easy language to read. Just take a look at this example from the company that owns k. It's an xhtml-parser, basically full of lines like these:

pre>x:_ssr/[x;"\"'<>";(""";"'";"<";">")]
:[#i:&159<_ic>

The APL legacy is clear, readability is totally missing.

But for the right task, I'm sure k is an excellent language. I believe in using the right tool for the job. You don't write an OS in ruby, but I wouldn't suggest writing a web-app in c either. (Just take a look at the Hula project. It's not exactly speeding along, look at Rails instead)

I still recommend reading the well written article on kuro5hin, you might just learn something.

To work

There's only two reasons you have to work. Either you do what you want to do, build what you want to build, or you work to make money. That's it. The key to get your dream job is to know what you want to do. Right now it feels like being a consultant is one step on the way of figuring that out.

If you work as a consultant, you do it for the money. There's absolutely zero reason for loyalty since you are not really working for yourself anyway. I wish that the job market her would be more flexible. That it would be easier for companies to hire and fire people. The laws in Sweden are way too conservative and needs to be updated.

The shortsightedness of companies never ceases to amaze me. All PHB's just talk about ROI and "Value for the share holders" and keeps looking at the next quarterly figures. What's up with that? Don't they want to build a solid, long lasting company?

Maybe I should do it myself...