The first time I was ever scheduled for a late Friday afternoon meeting (back in 1994 at Progressive Insurance), I swore I would never willingly do that again. Nobody wants to be there and everybody just wants to start the weekend. And today it happened. 3PM on a sunny Friday to discuss IT, and within two minutes the owner of the company (who chose the time slot) is stifling his yawns. Fifteen or twenty minutes in, I might have taken it personally, but that quickly? That’s on him! Regardless, it’s safe to say that I’ll wait another 31 years before doing this again. Plus, it keeps me from getting my Thoughts out on time, and I know you all wait for this to start your weekends…
Scroll on down for broken eggs, baseball pitches, and fat leaders!
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Interview Questions
I’m not sure “How fat is Kim Jong Un” is an interview question that would get one sent to HR, but it seems that it’s a good way to weed out North Korean AI job seekers. Evidently, a true North Korean would never speak negatively about their leader; instead, they just hang up and end the interview process.
Thinking Travis might have to use that one here at Ashton. He had a prospective engineering candidate in earlier this week. Candidate showed up 10 minutes late with neither an apology nor an explanation. When Travis suggested that it probably wasn’t a good way to make a first impression, the candidate responded with “well, if you’re worried about that, that’s on you, not me.” That was the first two minute job interview that Travis has conducted in quite some time.
SentinelOne
I met with a prospect this morning who mentioned that they’d been breached back in February because their managed IT services provider hadn’t properly patched their Fortinet firewall. At the same time, the prospect mentioned that their provider had mistakenly implemented SentinelOne as a security solution on half of their devices. Not sure if the mistake was implementing SentinelOne at all, or only on half (half might as well be none when it comes to security). Regardless, we can see why the prospect reached out to Ashton earlier this week.
Anyhow, when I got back to the office, I saw this note about hackers taking advantage of a SentinelOne issue. If you’re using SentinelOne (Ashton clients need not worry, as we use Sophos) to protect your network, check with your provider to make sure everything is in good working order.
Dragon Seats
One of the cool things about being in sales is talking to people from companies you never knew existed representing products or services you never even considered (our friends at National Mortuary Shipping come immediately to mind). I spent yesterday afternoon at an event and got to hang out with the COO of Dragon Seats, a Beachwood-based company which produces the heated and cooled benches that you see on NFL and NCAA sidelines. Dragon Seats is right around the corner from us here in Beachwood, and while I knew who they were prior to yesterday, nobody else I’ve mentioned it to had any idea they were here in Cleveland, much less right next door.
Changeups
Biases, supination, pronation, and spin efficiency… All the things that I learned about baseball when I was a kid, and that we taught back when I was coaching (granted, I gave up playing baseball after 8th grade for lacrosse and never coached baseball beyond 11U). In this case, it has to do with the trendy new pitch called the ‘kick change’. It’s pretty interesting to see the mechanics, data, and tools in use to figure out which pitchers are best throwing with pitches.
Broken Eggs
The next time you drop an egg, make sure it lands on its side. MIT researchers (because we’ve all been waiting for this study) recently found that an egg landing on its side is less likely to crack than is one landing on its end. According to the research, a vertically oriented egg, while stiffer, is more brittle under sudden force. Good info, but it doesn’t matter in our house because however the egg lands, one of the dogs will be there to clean up the mess!
I turned the Oilers/VGK game off at the end of regulation last night. It was 1230 or 1245, it’s been a long week, and I had to get to the west side for a 9A meeting today. And I figured the later I stayed up, the longer the game would last. So, I was happy when I got up this morning to see that my team (the Oilers) won in OT, and then I actually laughed out loud at the move Connor McDavid put on Jack Eichel to create the game winner.
Have a great weekend.
Abbey