Can’t help but comment on the fact that a fellow Victorian won the NBA MVP. Always good to see the underdog pull through.
Congratuations Steve and go Suns!
On the flip side, I also admire Mark Cuban for what he’s done as a technologist and the type of person he is (his ownership antics are only part of this).
He’s one of the best owners in the league and I’m looking forward to the series, it should be a good one.
I’ve added a Wikipedia entry about Metawork.
I agree with Rory Blyth that Metawork should be defined as “the work that y
ou have to do in order to get your real work done.”
I’ve been bombarded with metawork the past two months, you know its bad when your boss has also coined the term ‘metawork’. My metawork has ranged from H
R to IT to Purchasing to Travelling, etc. Its not that I don’t like variety in the work place, don’t get me wrong, its a major part of the reason I’m stil
l around. I just think its funny that I’m not the only one talking about ‘metawork’.
example) I’ve spent 3 or 4 weeks of the past 2 months on the east coast at various tradeshows and customer sites. Heading back to Philly and Boston next
week for 11 or 12 days.
All this and I’m really just a programmer/team lead/technology lead. The life of a startup employee is enviable 
Luckily I had a two week (non-work related) stay in Mexico which helped get me grounded and motivated again.
Of course, metawork wouldn’t be so bad if one didn’t have deadlines on features you’re supposed to be overseeing and weren’t forced into working weekends a
nd nights just to stay on top of things.
I recently got asked a question about how to potentially combine the following three fields into a meaningful occupation or career:
— My Response —
I’m not really an expert in any particular field but I do have experience developing enterprise data management systems that current touch on and will in t
he future play in the data mining/analysis arenas.
I’m more interested in data mining but I’m not really an expert. I understand some of the needs of people but don’t have a ton of experience in core data
mining.
As you know, everyone is drowning in data. The amount of data we manage or interact with on a daily basis is growing exponentially. So-called social netw
orks are being created and leverged to help connect people and facilitate even more data sharing. This will not stop.
I would start off by choosing an industry that interests you. Then you can decide whether you want to write software to help end-users (think customers) m
anage their data. On the flip-side, you could go the tool route and develop libraries that allow others to utilize and leverge to provide solutions.
To combine programming tools, data mining, and personal software one could perhaps focus on developing tools that could mine source code repositories (thin
k cvs or other data repositories like blogs, etc.). This is not exactly an enterprise system so would satisfy your interest in personal software, and the
information gleaned could be used analyzed to detect patterns, design artifacts, etc in an attempt to improve the software development process. It’s just
an idea off the top of my head, not an area I have an intense interest in so I’m sure many of you could come up with something a lot cooler.
There’s lots of open source (and commercial) software in the whole scientific / data mining arena so take a look. It’s amazing the different directions pe
ople are going.