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Here are pics of the senior staff at Google, plus logos, etc. Some pretty good looking people, huh? I know that the photographers and make-up folks for these kind of company photos do good work, but often despite their best efforts, the people are just too ugly to work with. These people aren't ugly.

Perhaps it's their company attitude that keeps them looking so wonderful. Here is some information about their Mountain View campus that almost makes me want to drop out of the ministry path and go back to software. Almost, but not quite. :)

Well I sincerely hope that the trusting person within me is proven right, that these folks will do right by their users and keep innovating to infinity, and keep our private information private. I mean, a blog, obviously is not private, but email and searches should be kept private, until our culture gets to a point of respectful transparency.

So, how did I get to the point of looking at Google people? Well, I followed one of my favorites a while back to Fortune Magazine's "How I Work" section, which I bookmarked a while back when Bill Gates and some others were the focus of the page. I find it fascinating to see how other people get their jobs done, and what makes them successful. Well I saw the picture of Marissa Mayer, and thought "oh, cute, cute," and did a google image search, and came up with that page. Now since there are so many pretty people at that company, I downloaded some of the .tif files so that I can practice my pencil drawing. The face-shapes and the shading have a certain aesthetic appeal. (And if you're really nice to me, maybe someday I'll send you a framed hand-drawn picture of Sergey Brin. Ho ho.)

I remember back when I worked at Annie's Parlour in Dinkytown, Minneapolis, even after I'd been waiting tables for a few years there, I would follow the other waitstaff around and pretend I was a new trainee, just to see if I could pick up tricks on the way they did things. It was stunning to see that many of the habits and procedures I'd developed that I thought were just great were substandard compared to what others around me were doing. In paying attention to them and implementing their best techniques, I got more work done faster, and got better tips, so I could buy more compact discs by The Cure, Cocteau Twins, Pixies, Bauhaus, or Skinny Puppy.

In another, slightly nuttier example, the idea of paying attention to other people's processes was once when some friends of mine and I were up at a cabin in northern Minnesota, a friend and I went out to the two-seater outhouse (a weird experience to be crapping right next to somebody, into the same stanky pit, true), well, after we were done and were cleaning up, I used the process I'd always used, which was different than his, and he thought it to be totally nutty. My process was to stand up just slightly, which as I'm getting older seems to be getting harder on the front of my knees, just below the knee-cap. His process was simply to lean over to the side, keeping one butt-cheek on the seat -- much better on the knees, though you kind of have to put yr hand partway below the rim of the seat. I'm sorry, was all that too much information? Anyway, suffice to say, if we pay attention to how others do things, we can find better ways of living that we hadn't perhaps even considered.

music: She's in Parties - Bauhaus

colors: Black and White

mood: Capital Letters

chant/prayer/mantra: Learn, Evolve.

Here's a site with a musical dancing geek. You can make up dances for him to do.

pax hominibus,
joel