Over the falls

Helping to contribute to the marketing efforts for my latest project, I came to the somewhat unpleasant realisation that AJAX (man, I cringe each time I use that term) has marketing collateral. I wrote my first xmlhttp script that manipulated the DOM back when I was working in Tax in 99. So, it's certainly not anything new. But as Cam says , a snazzy acronym, and a ringing endorsement from the big end of town, and all of a sudden our marketing story has got a simple, sexy word to describe what we've got over our competition. So, I guess it's bring out the AJAX dancing girls...

I just noticed, when putting my youngest boy to sleep, that Huggies Nappies now have a picture of Disney's Winnie-the-Pooh on them. If only I could have been involved in the marketing of that product.... "Huggies Nappies. Now also with pooh on the outside!" "When too much Pooh is never enough..." "Huggies Nappies. Now featuring Winnie the Shit." Oh, the possibilities...

Democracy started somewhere in a marketplace in Ancient Greece. Everybody important to the society had a vote, and decisions concerning society would be made. It seems somewhat easier than it is to understand in modern day Australia. (Back in Athens,not many people were considered to be important to society - women and slaves were forbidden from voting. These days, in Australia, women and slaves are encouraged to vote! ) But it seems that the key founding principle behind democracy, was to allow people's opinions to be directly solicited on issues that would affect them. Should we do this? Well, let's just ask everyone... Nowadays, proportional representation means that I simply elect my local member, and never have to think about those things again. But is that really democratic? I'm sure that, while Bob McMullan is a nice guy and all, he and I wouldn't agree on everything. I bet most of the people I know who voted for him wouldn't agree with him on everything eit...

So, the more Zen and enlightened among my colleagues joined me for yoga today. Bending yourself in weird and unusual positions, concentrating on your breathing, and relaxing are all good, albeit challenging, but at some point Avanashi asked us to "think of a prayer for yourself - an affirmation all your own." (Avanashi has one of those deep female voices that seem common among drama teachers - one that automatically makes you relax.). So I'm standing there, trying to think of something to pray for. Not being a religious person, I don't have much experience with prayer. In fact, my only real memory of praying was when I was a kid. (At some point I found out that there was supposed to be a big man in the sky who could do anything, and so I prayed every night to God for a motorbike. After two weeks I didn't get one, and my Dad thought the whole thing was hilarious, so I gave up.) Anyway, so yeah, trying to think of something to pray for: Money? nah - don't rea...

Here's the block clock . It's fun to watch. No, really, it is.

Disclaimer:People's dreams are often not very interesting to anyone but them. But this was so weird I had to write it down. I don't know what it means, other than to highlight the fact that I'm a little deranged. All companies and people in this dream are actually me, and almost definitely wouldn't behave in such a fashion in real life. No correspondence will be entered into. Shimmery Dissolve in In my dream, software was alcohol . Everybody was drunk all the time, because of the amount of software in the work place. Big companies like Microsoft and Oracle were in the business of getting people shitfaced at big conventions, where they'd teach you about the alcohol molecule and how they'd added a new hydroxide molecule. Microsoft called this directDrink. IBM had a reputation for taking out the CEOs of large enterprises and getting them all really drunk, thus mandating more IBM liquor (which was blue) be bought and drunk by millions of government employees around ...

I've been following a lot of the hooplah around Seth Godin's new book - All Marketers are liars . (I haven't actually read the book yet, but I've read so much about it that I probably don't need to. Maybe blogging like crazy isn't the best marketing tool when what you're trying to sell is words...) Anyway, for those of you who want to make out that you've read it too, here's the 237 word synopsis courtesy of Brand Autopsy : " All marketers tell stories. And if they do it right, we believe them. Successful marketers don’t talk about features or benefits. Instead, they tell a story. A story we want to believe. Marketing is the story marketers tell to consumers and then maybe, if the marketer has done a good job, the lie consumers tell themselves and their friends. Some marketers focus so hard on the facts of their offering that they forget to tell a story at all and then wonder why they’ve failed. Stories are shortcuts because we’re too overwh...

Warning! This post contains very introspective noodling about me and things I care about. There are no funny jokes or cool links. (There's always spamusement if you're after that sort of thing...) Early morning silence got me thinking about becoming fully engaged. About actively embracing the things that are important to my family - as opposed to being passive and dismissive about them. If you're like me, your wife runs your household. Sure, you like to play with the kids now and again, and you expect that your wife will have time for you when it suits you, but other than that - you're a pretty busy guy. You've got people to meet with and places to go and lots of really important complex work issues to manage. And things like school permission notes, or lunches, or after school play-dates with neighborhood kids, bills and housework are just a nuisance. You have the minimum possible interaction required in order to keep things smoothly running. (i.e. no complaining)...

So I woke up at 3:30 this morning with a stark realisation: Despite valiant efforts, My project team was going to miss it's feature complete milestone. By at least a week. If I had actually been impartial, and not really wanted to make it on time, I would have seen this much earlier, but I find that you get so caught up in the desire to get everything finished and everyone really wants to make it on time, that everyone (I say 'everyone', but really I mean 'me') tends to have those trendy rose-colored glasses on... Schedules are made early on with the best intentions, and no pressure, and retrospectively, to be out by a week over a 6 month project is actually pretty good. But nobody likes to slip. Two things come to mind about schedule slippage, (both courtesy of Jim McCarthy ): never trade a bad date for an equally bad date, and; a slip should be a net positive. When you slip, there's serious pressure on the team to come up with a new date. Often you...

All this talk about nudie rudie conversations and membranes is all well and good, but I really took heart from this post about conversations being a two way street. And the conversations coming in seem to be sadly lacking in proportion to the the number of marketing gurus who are busy trying to "practice the art of sincerity" in order to get their " corporate message " across. So, with that in mind, here's my lil contribution as a consumer - talking to somebody who really should be listening. World, I hate your RSS Aggregators. All of them. Over the past eighteen months worth of RSS interaction, I've gone through over 10 aggregators. And they are all, for various reasons, condemned to my windows recycle bin. So, given that I spend a bunch of coffee time each morning trying to find out what people think of our product , I thought I'd help all the manufacturers of said aggregators out, by telling them why they ended up in my bit-bucket. Awasu I installed...

Friday night at the end of a pressure week that was somehow unsatisfying, drunk and inspired (do those two things really go together? ever? Think about it... ) to re-tell a moment from my day, which struck me with a poignant profundity. After returning from lunch for a departing colleague (the worst steak ever ) Stilly and I stopped to watch the big-assed construction machines next to our building, that were digging big holes in order to build more apartments, (Australia needs lots of apartments, nobody gets any space over here ). There were three digging machines, making tremendous noise and smashing rocks and stuff. Mainly because it was so noisy, Stilly and I just stood there for 10 minutes watching them. And that's where the profoundness came from. Watching these enormous machines operating with enormous power, in the process of creating something that I wouldn't have the faintest idea how to do, I felt like a little kid. And I felt like me and Stilly were both kids -back w...

Our new Graphic Designer and Flash Guru, Rhys , pointed me to this flash movie that shows the relationships between Fortune 500 companies. Pretty amazing, and a little scary. My vote for spamusement cartoon of the week: stop that bending ! I dug Paul Graham's article on why hiring is obsolete: "... The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Average age of their founders: 24." I made a winsock version of pong when I was 24. Does that count? That is all.

Due to probably the weirdest impulse purchase of my life, you can now get to my blog at www.goodgord.com. It was a case of - hey - the domain's not taken! Therefore - I should buy it!. So I did. Now, if only I could figure out why all my computers seem to think they are in Singapore, I might be able to see if it works. (For some reason, I can't access the domain, or the hosting company (godaddy) from my home PC. I rang my ISP but the helpdesk guy talked to me like I was a crazy person. "That thing between your start button and your clock is called a task-bar..." Sigh.

I really enjoyed reading the results of the JotSpot hackathon. I've been keen on the idea of a hackathon for a while now - (although not with such a l33t name...) Back in December, when we were planning our R&D Convention for this year, I was keen to take the R&D guys through what I had called (in a very boring, non-l33t way) : "Something Great". The aim of Something Great was to give everybody everything they could want for in terms of tools and food, allocate some time, and get them all to come up with, well, something great, that wasn't related to their daily work, but could still potentially benefit the company. The reason I was keen on this idea is because when you are working on maintaining and building the same product that you've been doing for (in some cases) 20 years, you kind of forget the fun thing about being a computer programmer - the fact that you can make really new innovative things that impress, delight and amaze people. And maybe it...

Some folks over at MIT are holding a time travel convention . The idea goes that there would only ever need to be one, because people could just turn up from whatever time they were in. It's on at the east campus courtyard MIT, May 8, 2005 02:00:00 UTC. I have no plans to go right now, but I will definitely consider going sometime in the future if it transpires that I can. So, I might see you there! Come to think of it, I might see me there as well...

Robert Scoble and Shel Israel have posted chapter four online of their book on business blogging. There are some valuable lessons in there: "Blogs...have already proven to be the most powerful tool to directly access company constituencies, short of buying your own printing press. Come to think of it, blogs are a whole lot less expensive than a printing press as well." (Doesn't 'Robert Scoble' look weird without the underline?)

I used to know a very friendly, very creative guy called String. String was one of those guys that art just came out of. In the same way that Jimi Hendrix played guitar, or Henry Moore sculpted, String would draw and sketch and paint. My creative endeavours are extremely contrived by comparison. Anyway, as a young student, I remember listening to him complain bitterly about his art class, which he was failing. I found this somewhat hard to believe. "How could you fail art? You're the most artistic person I've ever met!" He laughed and told me that people were looking at his work and saying that it was " worth about an E - maybe a D". He couldn't believe that anybody could apply a stringent set of evaluation criteria to something that obviously came from an intensely personal endeavors, and try and rank it against other people's personal endeavours. The whole concept seemed entirely preposterous to him. Fair enough. String went on to fail art, and to ...

If you're feeling unmotivated, and you want to clean up your house, here's a tip: Invite the bank over to value your house. It wastes a bit of the bank's money and time, and it makes you clean up all those things that you've been putting off because, uh, well, um *scratches head* uh-because they're as boring as batshit. I read somewhere that the Queen thinks that the whole world smells like paint, because wherever she goes, there's some red-faced bloke forty feet in front of her with a paintbrush. Well, this guy must see 5 spotless houses a day, and then go back home to dwell on how lazy and pathetic he must be because he just can't be bothered to do the dishes... Anyway, the valuer (who was very nice, and not in the least lazy or pathetic) came over an hour early, while we were all red-faced after deciding to take the teenager approach and hide the mess under furniture and stuff. He was a very tall man, with a bit of a beer gut ("A roof over the tool s...