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Extreme Blue Reflections

Patents and Prior Art

As part of Extreme Blue, my team and I put in two patent applications. One of them was put on ice, and the other has been deemed publish. This is pretty cool! So I’ve been working on it since last week. The end is in sight – I hope. This has meant reading a disgusting […]

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Extreme Blue Presentation Reflections

10 Things I Learned About Presenting in Extreme Blue

You can distill a 15 week project to a 4 minute pitch. In fact, you can probably distill anything to 4 minutes if you truly understand it – the trick is learning what to leave out. Images are trickier than you think. For instance, our project involved a university and we wanted to have a […]

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Education Extreme Blue inspiration Reflections

I am an IBMer

Tomorrow is the last day of Extreme Blue. At the US Expo in New York last week, I stood 6ft from Sam Palmisano, and listened to him talk about IBM’s vision for a smarter planet. He spoke about why we need to build a smarter planet and how IBM is trying to engineer this vision. […]

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Extreme Blue job hunting Networking Organization

Failure Is Not An Option

Having admitted that I seek out a high level of stress, it’s timely that I have, once again, gone way past the level of stress that I like to operate and hit the “woah this is damaging to my productivity” bit. I wrote before about How to be Crazy Busy Without Losing Your Mind and […]

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Extreme Blue Presentation Programming Reflections

My Secret Life as an Introvert

My friend Maggie tells me I’m an introvert. Not because I’m shy, or because large groups make me nervous, but because I don’t get my energy from being around people. I was surprised by this, because I guess I’ve always considered myself to be extroverted and so I asked another close friend and he said […]

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Extreme Blue Organization Presentation Reflections

Extreme Blue

One of my closest friends works at another large tech company, and all summer we’ve been having conversations that go like this: ME: I’ve had such an awesome day! I found out about this awesome thing and made some progress on my awesome project. I love my job! How was yours? HIM: Good! I finally […]

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Education Extreme Blue

Teachable Moments in the Wilderness

I was not excited about the mandatory work trip to the wilderness for a number of reasons: It is completely incomprehensible to me to drive that far just for two days. I have no desire to sleep in a tent. There is a reason why inside and beds were invented. We have a lot to […]

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Extreme Blue job hunting

Career Planning

The other week I had a phone interview for what I thought was my dream job. In the days before, I realized that was the kind of thing I’d been doing. And then, I waited. Meanwhile, work was going so-so. My computer broke – again – so I lost a day and a half on […]