Monthly Archive for: ‘January, 2008’
You Could Have Warned Me Sooner…
Oh, how I wish I’d known about this limit before I spent ages selecting 149 contacts to delete from GMail:
Web-Deprived No More
Mmm, three hours surfing, on a weekday night. I feel slightly guilty, but good – I’ve been web-deprived for too long.
Who Participates Online
Here’s some neat infoporn – a chart in Business Week showing which ages groups participate online, and what they’re doing. Click for original article.
(Via Jez)
Going For It
I’ve never been a fan of those motivational posters that you see on office walls (usually in sales or marketing departments) that attempt to depict a word like "Opportunity" or "Teamwork" with a single image, usual of some nature scene or a lone individual rising above the odds to achieve a difficult goal. To my mind they always look a bit facile, glib and superficial. "Destiny" equates to a holiday villa on the Maldives? "Integrity" is a Lion? "Success" appears to involve hang-gliding off towards the ocean in an action which brings to mind Reginald Perrin?! I demand more thought and more words from my motivational office decorations!
For many many years, blu-tacked to my monitor at home has been an inspirational "wallet stuffer" by Bruce B. Wilmer which was given to me by my mum. It’s a short poem entitled "Go For It!" which begins:
"Shake off your doubts and then go for it.
Check out your options and act.
Find an approach to the future,
And turn today’s dreams into fact."
I’ve seen those words on a daily basis for far too long. Today is the day that I stop simply reading them, and start acting upon them.
After much deliberation, I’ve handed in my notice at Marshalls and begun setting myself up as a contractor. I have been mulling over the idea of going freelance for a long time, but have always had other distractions to worry about. Now that I’m married, settled in a new house, have obtained UK residency for Jocelyn, and baby Ben is settling down nicely, I figure that my life is finally getting to be stable and prosaic, and I should take this opportunity to stir things up a bit by handing in my notice with no certainty of regular (or indeed any) future income!
I am filled with a heady mixture of trepidation and excitement. More details will, undoubtedly, appear on this blog in due course. Wish me luck!
A Few Times Around The Block
Whilst driving home from work today, my car reached a significant milestone in it’s life on the road – 100,000 miles on the clock!
Thanks to John for lending me an Ixus to capture this historic event in my commuting life!
Bill’s Last Day
Bill Gates opened this week’s CES show in Las Vegas by showing a hilarious spoof video featuring one or two people you just might recognise
Fun Feeds
It probably won’t surprise you to hear that the majority of the 167 RSS feeds to which I currently subscribe are technical blogs. But, for some light relief from all the geekery, I do have a folder in Google Reader entitled "Fun Stuff", which contains the following feeds (some of which, alas, no longer appear to be regularly updated):
What it says on the tin. The Soviets wrote the book on propaganda, and here you can see their work exemplified in daily chunks. The graphical techniques are frequently excellent, and the posters have many layers of meaning, which are decoded by accompanying text each day.
Clientcopia is a user-submitted collection of dumb things that have been uttered by customers, frequently of web designers and graphic artists. The quality varies, but really poor entries are usually removed fairly quickly, and there’s a voting mechanism to rank the submissions.
A recent example:
Client was asked to send a photo by email of the problem. "Okay, I can email it to you, but can you send it back when you’re done? I need to keep the photo here just in case we need it later."
Screenshots of web pages that are "broken, but in a funny way". Sadly not updated very frequently, but worth subscribing to for the occasional post.
The site describes itself rather well:
"Bug Bash is a comic strip written and illustrated by Hans Bjordahl. Bug Bash is a comic strip about technology: managing technology, the business of technology. It’s about project management and managing projects through the dull world of Rational Rose, use cases, and requirements. Functional requirements, user requirement, functional specifications, design specifications, call it what you want but it’s still the bane of project managers. And when you’re done with that, you can think about all the fun that comes with timelines, scheduling, estimates (PERT estimation anyone?) and resourcing until Gantt charts are coming out of your ears. Let’s not forget the risk management in the software engineering life cycle. Maintaining the project is just as much fun, managing what was initially set out in requirements and trying to keep feature creep / scope creep in check with change management. If any of these words send nightmares to you, the project manager, then this site probably rings true with you."
I’ll just add that it’s very funny 
Surely I don’t need to tell you about Dilbert? What you might not know, however, is that an unofficial but highly reliable feed is available at http://www.tapestrycomics.com/dilbert.xml.
"Bizarre, tragic, true and sometimes hilarious things a college girl overhears during the course of her day."
Appears to be down at present.
Pictures of cats! With funny captions! Who can possibly resist?
Pictures of US Presidents! With funny captions!
Now back to its original name (hooray!), The Daily WTF provides daily real-world examples of crappy code, dodgy database designs, and ugly UI. The disturbing thing is, they’re all real, even all-time class The Brillant Paula Bean.
Of all these sites, XKCD is my favourite, as it covers four subjects that are close to my heart:
"A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language."
New comics are currently being posted regularly, three times a week. You can read much more information about the comic on its Wikipedia entry.
A cross between I Can Haz Cheezburger and Postsecret, this site lifts the lids on the dark secrets kept by the planet’s pets.
I’d never buy a red-top tabloid, let along a gossip magazine, but I still enjoy getting my daily dose of celebrity news and photos, and to that end The Superficial is my guilty pleasure. It’s a bit US-centric so I’ve never even heard of many of the post subjects, but it’s worth wading through the dross to get the latest goss on Britney, Paris, Jessica and Lindsay, complete with paparazzi photographs.
So, what other funny feeds should I subscribe to, to further brighten my days?
Copying CDs could be made legal
“Copying music from a CD to a home computer could be made legal under new proposals from the UK government.”
I’d actually long-since forgotten that this is technically illegal! Surely it’s one of those silly archaic laws that nobody really expects to be enforced, much like the way it’s still technically legal to shoot a Scotsman with a bow and arrow within the City of York walls after dark?
This is 2008 – does anybody really believe that people still carry dozens of CDs around with them instead of ripping them to an MP3 player? iPod sales would suggest not.
Melancholia
This morning I’ve been enjoying listening to an iTunes playlist of ten of my favourite melancholy songs:
- Jeff Buckley – Hallelujah
- Rufus Wainwright – Vibrate
- Embrace – Looking As You Are
- Cary Brothers – Blue Eyes
- Sheila Nicholls – Fallen For You
- R.E.M. – Fretless
- Cat Stevens – Wild World
- The Verve – History
- Colin Hay – I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You
- Elvis Costello – Shipbuilding
iPhone (again)
Bugger. Despite what I said a year ago, I saw John’s iTouch last week and now I’m coming round to the opinion that the £899 price tag of owning an iPhone for 18 months is perfectly reasonable for such a revolutionary and downright gorgeous gadget. Damn, damn, damn! Curse you, latent technolust!
Currently Reading
