Jay Levitt

Jay Levitt

14p

17 comments posted · 0 followers · following 0

14 years ago @ Feld Thoughts - The Public Restroom as... · 0 replies · +1 points

Tip of the hat for talking about your OCD - real OCD, not "I'm detail-oriented" OCD.

14 years ago @ Mendelson's Musings - Quick Ways To Get Fire... · 0 replies · +1 points

Re #3, leadership: I think the value of an "expertise" professional - attorney, accountant, realtor - is inversely proportional to the number of good ideas *I* have to come up with. If they make me do all the thinking, they're not advisers - they're gatekeepers.

Oddly, I have yet to find someone who'll make that their basis for compensation.

14 years ago @ Feld Thoughts - My Airplane Super Power · 0 replies · +1 points

I have the uncanny and impressive ability to, given any conversational topic, remember and sing a thematically-appropriate pop-music lyric, usually from the 1980s.

Also: Discover new bugs that really ARE in the compiler, not my code.

14 years ago @ Mendelson's Musings - Drummer Jokes 101 · 1 reply · +1 points

Drummer parties a little too hard one night. The next morning, his roommate sees him walking around with his wallet duct-taped to his cheek.

Seems he was trying to stop his head from ringing.

14 years ago @ Mendelson's Musings - Drummer Jokes 101 · 1 reply · +1 points

Oh-HOO, look who's getting picky! OK, I'll make some up. Fresh off the grill:

Investor: This recession's awful. I can't stand to listen to the market reports anymore.
Drummer: Really? I couldn't listen to them before, but now everything's great.
Investor: Great? Have you heard the Dow today?
Drummer: Yeah, and boy, did I miss that! I can't hear anything above 8K.

14 years ago @ Mendelson's Musings - Drummer Jokes 101 · 1 reply · +1 points

How can you tell when a drummer's knocking at the door?

He speeds up.

14 years ago @ Feld Thoughts - When I Grow Up I Want ... · 0 replies · +1 points

She looks to be about 11. I'm sure other parts of the country are tamer, but as a native Long Islander, the only term I'd have trouble conceptualizing at age 11 would be "bloated"...

15 years ago @ Feld Thoughts - The Unbearable Frustra... · 0 replies · +1 points

What's really surprising is that Microsoft tends to have bafflingly good tech support. And I say that as someone that really wanted to hate it! I usually can debug my own problems, so when I needed XP support, it was usually a deep-seated bug of some sort. My tickets would always get detailed responses, with techs asking for log files, suggesting workarounds, duplicating it themselves with my failcase data, etc.

We almost inevitably found the problem. If not, I left satisfied that it really *was* intractable, and I never got that "if I could just talk to the guy who wrote it, he could solve it" feeling.

Shame that their phone-based Xbox support doesn't live up to their web-based XP support.

15 years ago @ Feld Thoughts - Understanding Ignoranc... · 0 replies · +1 points

Hear, hear!

I get annoyed by certain very bright entrepreneurs, because all they talk about is what worked for them. Who cares? "This worked for me" doesn't mean "the true path to success"; it doesn't even mean "important". (In "Founders at Work", half the founders swore that Aeron chairs were critical; half swore that plywood desks were critical. Talk about a distinction without a difference...

Success is nice, but I'd much rather hear about what didn't work, and why. Only then can you start comparing successes to failures, and find out what's important.

Richard Satava gave a great talk at BIF-4. He said that DARPA had a rule: If more than 10% of their projects succeeded, they considered it a problem; clearly, they weren't taking enough risks.

15 years ago @ Feld Thoughts - Mailing List Spam · 0 replies · +1 points

Agreed about the "wide range of philosophies". But, as far as I know, there's simply nobody - from major ISPs down to their own customers - who's been able to get them to engage at ALL in dealing with either their outbound spam or their inbound blackholing. I know the anti-spam world; I testified in some of the first lawsuits, wrote some of the code, spoke to the DMA on line 1 and Sanford Wallace on line 2. Postini doesn't engage at different levels; they lock themselves in the bunker.

My personal (non-commercial, non-bulk, DKIM-signed) server was being silently blackholed by Postini a while back; my mail didn't even appear in the Postini junk folder. After multiple brush-offs and back-channel escalations, I found out that Postini feeds their spam scores back into their spam scores! If I send five e-mails to Postini clients a day, and one gets mis-tagged as spam, I'm 20% spam. Which is awfully high, so I must be a spammer, so the next day, I'm bumped to 40% spam. And clearly, my spam volume is increasing - just look at the numbers! By the end, I had a 98% spam score - and no way to get off their list.

See also "vicious cycle", "begging the question", "Kafka".