John’s Technology Blog

Several years ago when I worked as a manager in a retail establishment, I learned a true lesson from a friend and mentor. We were hiring employees that would be facing the customers. All of our interview questions centered around their knowledge of the retail industry.

After one particular interview, my friend and I discussed the importance of personality and passion for what one does over the knowledge that is required for the job. In many instances we concluded that you can always teach an employee how to do the job — as long as they come with a certain set of core skills.

In my opinion, it is much harder to teach an employee to have passion for what they do. That passion and personality comes from years of development and from their character. We decided that we would hire more on the passion over the knowledge. Over the years that has been a key ingredient to successful hiring situations in my career.

When I saw this video I felt reaffirmed in my decision 10 years ago to place such a high emphasis on hiring the right kind of person over the person that knows the right stuff.

I love looking at people that can throw away their traditional preconceptions and processes for doing even the most ordinary and standard of tasks and take a new look.  These new perspectives often don’t yield life-altering changes in time and space, but they do evolve ideas into catalysts that do change how we act and interact with others.

One such interesting idea came across my desk today – it is DoodleBuzz – a new way to look at the news.  Rather than read the headlines straight through from top to bottom, DoodleBuzz lets you be artistic in how you arrange the news.

Check it out at:  http://www.doodlebuzz.com/

I was looking around and ran across the python builtin function property(). In other programming languages we are used to making things public/private and using getters/setters. In python this is not the usual way of doing things, you just set an attribute directly. We also try to use underscores to denote that an attribute should not be changed outside the class. Since people are not used to calling getters/setters in python they came up with the property function.

Say I have a class X with a single attribute y. I don’t want anyone to modify the y attribute without calling a setter function, well what I can do is something like the following

class X:

def __init__(self):

self._y = 1

def get_y(self):

return self._y

def set_y(self, value):

self._y = value

y = property(get_y, set_y)

Now when anyone does something like
temp = X()
temp.y = 5
it does not set y directly but invisibly calls the setter, likewise
print temp.y
will call the getter invisibly.

You can have a look at more documentation here: http://docs.python.org/lib/built-in-funcs.html There is also a good blog post here http://codefork.com/blog/index.php/2007/12/05/pimping-pythons-property/

Another cool thing is that you can create a read-only property out of a function, this would be like a constant, which is kind of cool.

I recently purchased a Garmin Nuvi 650 and have since used it to help me with my Garage Sale needs.

Now, when I want to go garage sale’ing I’ll look up all of the addresses in the paper and copy and paste them into a text file list this:

2868 West 230 North, Provo
401 North 2330 West, Provo
1020 W. 1020 S. Provo
1453 S 760 W Provo

Then I go to the following GPS Translation website:  http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/geocoder/

I enter the list of addresses there and click “Start Geocoding”.

The result is a comma delimited list of coordinates with the address.

I then click “Create a GPX File”.  I then save that GPX file onto my Nuvi in the Garmin/GPX folder.  This puts them into my favorites.

Finally, for added measure, I print out a map of the coordinates – using that same webpage and order the addresses according to the route I want to take.  I print out that list of addresses and use that to select the next item in my favorites on the GPS.

This has really made garage sale’ing easy and fun!