The RubeTube

Success Built to Last (official website here) was at the top of my wishlist for our exchange gift within Simon's team (the others on my wishlist were a poker book or a go book). I had finished reading Jerry Porras' previous book Built to Last a month ago and Success Built to Last had good reviews so I decided it was a great book to put on my reading list.

I had the good fortune of drawing Simon as my "parent" for our exchange gift, but I didn't expect him to actually buy the book for me. The title was just a few months old (August 2006) and didn't have a paperback edition yet; it would cost much more than our 500-peso minimum. I also tried asking at Powerbooks in Megamall but they didn't have it there. So I was pleasantly surprised when I opened Simon's gift and it indeed was a hardcover copy of Success Built to Last. He found it at National Bookstore, of all places.

Thanks for the awesome gift, Simon! I'll make sure to apply what I've learned from the book and share its lessons with the whole team.

Labels: :), exchange gift, gifts

Last Thursday night, Simon's team had a Christmas party (#3 in my marathon) at Simon's house. We had agreed at the previous week's team meeting that we'd do an exchange gift at the party.

Being the total geek that I am, I volunteered to write a program to generate the exchange gift assignments. I fired up Visual Studio 2005 and coughed up a C# exchange gift program in less than 15 minutes, whose source code you can download free of charge. Granted, automating the process is not as fun as drawing names from a jar, but it does have its advantages:

1. It doesn't require everyone to be physically present at the assignment drawing.
2. It's faster than the manual process.
   
3. By allowing the user input of a seed for the random, the assignments can be recreated in the future.
   
4. I had much more fun than if we had drawn names from a jar.
   

I had Ian give me a seed which I inputted into my program to generate the assignments, which I then emailed to the whole team. There were some who complained of "luto" when they saw that Simon (our ever-thoughtful manager) was my exchange gift "parent", but hey, it's (literally) just the luck of the draw.

Labels: .NET, C#, Christmas, exchange gift, geek, gifts, programming