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In thinking further about the Po Bronson piece that I liked to yesterday (this item), I realized that I had more to say about it. When I interview candidates for various positions, pretty much the sole factor I look for is passion about the job. I find that by hiring people who (aside from competence) seem to love their jobs, I rarely go wrong. I want the sysadmin who’s installed every Linux distribution on their PC at home one time or another, the Web developer who has the personal Web site, or the programmer who is always finding new projects to tinker with. Obviously hiring such people is not risk free, but I find that the odds of their doing a good job is much better than the odds if you hire the person who checked out a salary survey while in college and discovered that working in IT pays pretty well. Not only that, but I’ll probably find the people who are into this whole computer thing to be more enjoyable to work with on a day to day basis than people one might derisively refer to as clock punchers. The passion vs obligation equation is completely separate from willingness to work hard (or long hours) as well. I love what I do, but I don’t have much interest in regularly working 50 or 60 hours a week, and I know people who don’t really touch a computer when they go home who work insane hours. Give me the passionate person any day of the week. They’ll be the one who remembers something cool they picked up on their own that saves a week of work on the project, or who find that great open source package that saves you from having to write your own logging system or connection pool. ...

In my grand tradition of stealing good ideas from other people, I’ve developed a fascination with Wiki-like text formatters for posting to weblogs. Dean Allen’s Textile is quite spiffy, and Movable Type is getting pluggable text formatters. So why not me? A few months ago I dumped all of my code into CVS, so I’m also getting closer into having a releasable version of this software. It still needs a ton of work, but maybe I’ll get around to it at some point. ...

I’ve seen a few pointers today to Po Bronson’s article What Should I Do With My Life? The whole article is worth reading, and indeed it inspired some thinking on my part, which is exactly what it was designed to do. I feel fortunate that I’m a software developer, because I really can’t see myself doing anything else, at least right now. So I don’t fight with myself constantly about what I should be doing. However, Bronson’s article echoes some thoughts I’ve had in the past about “glamorous” jobs. I used to be obsessed with working on something that could be defined as “hot.” Working on any old software package or Web site was boring – I wanted to work on something cutting edge, or widely used, or whatever. Since then I’ve learned that the actual function of the software you work on has almost nothing to do with how entertaining your job is on a day to day basis. Working on a payroll system with a bunch of creative people in a friendly environment that doesn’t require you to work like a slave under unreasonable schedules beats the crap out of working on the next big thing for a company that’s on the brink of failure and grinds you down to a nub through a combination of incompetence and malice. That’s an important realization to make, I think. ...

Joe Foss died today at age 87. I probably didn’t agree with Foss on much of anything when it comes to politics, but I always admired the sort of life he lived. Foss was an ace pilot, governor of South Dakota, commissioner of the American Football League, and head of the NRA.

Al Jazeera is launching an English-language Web site in February. Someone who reads both English and Arabic should compare how inflammatory the reports on the Arabic site are as compared to the English site.

Status symbol for the 1990s: make of automobile Status symbol for the 2000s: FICO score

While I was away, I started reading Charles Petzold’s book Code. This is the perfect book to read if you’re a programmer who doesn’t have a traditional computer science/electrical engineering background. If you spend your time proramming, but are irritated every time you have to deal with bitmasks, bitwise operators, or hex in any way shape or form, pick up this book immediately. It’s an incredibly clear explanation of how computers work at the level of circuitry, and provides a great refresher course in all that fundamental stuff that is hidden below about 100 layers of abstraction when you’re writing a SQL query or writing code using an IDE. The book is also really interesting, so reading it doesn’t feel like work. Or, I should say that if reading it feels like work, maybe you shouldn’t be a programmer. I’d guess that even real computer scientists might find it interesting, but since I’m not one, I can’t say for sure. By the way, this book would also make the perfect gift for that teenager who has an interest in computers. Their level of interest in the book will be a great gauge as to whether they ought to consider making computers their career. ...

I have returned. Even though I didn’t get groped or fondled by anyone working for the Transportation Security Administration, I can say that travelling by air sucks really, really badly these days. So much so that I think it provides a strong incentive to avoid air travel altogether.

I’ll be back on December 31.

Fortune’s Peter Lewis gives his worst technology of the year award to TIA: But in terms of potential impact on our lives, the Worst of 2002 award goes to TIA, the Total Information Awareness program, spawned by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Awareness Office. TIA is exploring the feasibility of developing a national surveillance system intended to identify potential terrorists and criminals through "data mining" of the public and private electronic records of every citizen.