Over the falls

If you're a tech savvy, computer aware person, you probably spend a bit of time doing tech support - helping friends and families with general PC problems . You've probably experienced the kind of guru-like awe and reverence that you're viewed with when you quickly solve a problem by breezing through a thousand unrelated options. For us nerds, it's not so hard - just a case of knowing the behavior, and the conventions, allows us to pick our way through even completely foreign application with relative ease. For the rest of the world, Computer use is something of a dark art. User interfaces are complicated. Designing such complexity for an untrained human to use is really hard. Of course, Software Engineers are frequently not great at it, which doesn't help. Jan Miksovsky's post , (via The old new thing ), got me thinking about an old idea I had to try and visualize the complexity of a user interface. I call them 'decision trees' ( I apologize in advance ...

As the creeping Christmas crap encroaches into the shopping malls this time of year, I must admit I always tend to get a bit Scrooge about the whole affair. I was thinking I'd share that surliness with you all. But, then I read on Seth's blog , the sentence that sums up Christmas Shopping for me: "The consumer portion of our economy is now dependent on a four-week long debt-fueled race to buy the useless..." So sad. And so true. But mainly sad...

On the drive home the other day, my friend Rhys and I got to talking about when we first discovered the internet. He mentioned that he started using the internet in high school, when he was about 15. (Rhys is one of those funky young, talented hip marketing guys that software companies love to hire because they make them a bit cooler.) Okay - so that just made me feel old. I can't really remember seeing a web browser until I left college. And it dawned on me in a moment of horrible reality that there are kids arriving in the workplace today who were born in 1987. These guys started high school after the .com boom . The internet is to this generation, what TV was to mine. These are kids who have grown up with the web - and not just the old style, "hey look! It's just like a library but packed into a tiny beige box!" kind of internet - but the communicative chat, publish and discuss kind of internet. According to the Pew Internet project, More than half of the US kids ...

Fluxiom has one of the nicest demo videos I've ever seen. It looks like it might do just about anything. I'm not sure what it is, but I think I might want to use it. Apparently it's developed in rails , which makes it just that little bit cooler still. There is a lot of noise happening around enterprise content management and web 2.0 at the moment - It's going to be interesting to see how these young new whippersnapper guys are going to compete with the established big ECM players.

I decided that with summer coming, it might be time for a new site template. So I borrowed a pagekit from elated.com , and tweaked my way to the summery goodness template you see now. (Nice work guys- those pagekits are an absolute godsend for the discerning web site owner with very little eye for design. )

I've spent the week trying out the (10+2)*5 hack , from 43 Folders. It's a life hacking technique that's designed to help get things done, by forcing you to use the very vices that you are trying to overcome. My task list, nay my life, is a fractured, diverse collection of things - it can contain specifics like: "Refactor the code that cleans up the bug tracker", or fuzzy things like "Learn more about subversion". On a typical day, I have about 6-10 of these tasks on my today list. Now I should admit, I have a tendency towards procrastinating, (unless I have a task that's really exciting). In fact, being faced with a long list of slightly uninteresting tasks is the very thing to set off my distraction alarm, and send me out into the cube farm to find somebody else to harass. Which is where this clever life hack comes in. Basically, you pick a task, and work on it for 10 minutes. Then you force yourself to take a 2 minute break, and switch to anot...

There was an interesting discussion today at work about the blogging. Always with the blogging. Blah Blah Blah. Before you all tune out and go – "oh, Gord’s just blogging about blogging again," hear me out. This is the longest post I’ve ever done, so I must really care about this stuff. Anyways, back to the discussion… Depending on which side of the fence you were on, the conversation was either about the increasing importance and value of the read/write web, or it was about the potential dangers of having bloggers on your staff, and generally questioning the relevance of blogging. Obviously, as a blogger, I took a healthy interest. As an internet consumer (mmmm. packety.) I know that I am innately more trustworthy of a company that is prepared to openly blog about stuff. In fact, it's becoming increasingly evident to me, that in the web 2.0/new media/ future of connected clichés, the only way you will be able to prosper as a business is by adopting this corporate motto: ...

Okay. I promise I'm not going to start constantly ranting about MarioKart. I know where it all ends up - people get so annoyed you have to start another blog . But... I was just lazily reclining in my hammock on my front deck, dappled sun filtering through the jasmine vines, warm light spring breeze blowing from the north-east. As I lazily swung to and fro, I was locked in a fierce battle for kart supremacy with some bad spelling stranger known only to me as 'MasterCheif". We were at 1-all after the first two races, and had settled on the spooky Luigi's Mansion track as the decider. Towards the end of the third and final lap, I jumped into a big long slide that gave me the perfect boost - I was headed for victory, for sure. I could see MasterCheif languishing behind me. Just as I began to laugh maniacally, a green koopa shell, (fired by me two laps before) appeared from nowhere and knocked me into a spin, leaving me about a foot short of the finish line. As I fell out...

I just ran out and bought Mario Kart DS , and spent all of last night getting totally 0wn3d by a bunch of people from around the world who are much better at mariokart than me. I mentioned this to my friend Alan, who said, with a wry smile: "Well, to be fair to you, they are eight years old. They probably have much faster reflexes..." Ha! Well, to counter that, I give you this: Mario Brothers meets Sin City. (from Japundit) Now, I have no idea what's going on, but I think that " 次へ" is the Japanese equivalent of 'Next'. Make sure you click the link to get the whole story! (PS - if you would also like to beat me at MarioKart DS, my Friend Code is: 060189 090100)

When I started with TOWER Software four years ago, I was keen to get on with the job. You know, new project manager guy and all, trying to figure out what was what, and who was who. As part of this breaking-in process, I went around and asked each developer what they were working on, and how long they estimated that their current project would take. I'll admit that I had a secret agenda - it's important to find out who are the overly optimistic guys, and who are the more seasoned realists, because you're supposed to adjust your project schedules accordingly.. Anyway, I collected all this data and feed it into a secret Gantt chart I had somewhere. Most of the team were working on features that were being shipped in the next few months, and I got the broad range of overly positive responses, which is pretty common. I know I'm a terribly optimistic estimator. (Incidentally, if you're like me, my advice is to always multiply your estimate by the value of pi in order to ...

Many have speculated on how it is that a couple of kids from Stanford turned the internet upside down. Some theorized that maybe it was because Sergey and Larry went to Montessori Schools. "Perhaps", some wondered aloud, "there was some fiendish pact with the devil..." Well, now, I know the real secret. This post makes it abundantly clear. The magic of Google comes from Kombucha tea. Because you didn't follow that link, I'll explain. Kombucha is this weird tea made from a " polyculture of at least two yeasts and two bacteria, living synergistically." Basically, what happens is you take this gelatinous blob of yeast and some as yet unidentified bacteria, get some sweet black tea, and 'feed' the blob, removing some beverage each day in the form of an alcoholic(5.0-1.5%) caffeinated, crazy-ass yeast and bacteria excrement liquid. Which Googlers drink for breakfast! (1 and a half gallons of the stuff, every day...) Who knows what weird and ...

There's a whole bunch of construction work happening outside the TOWER headquarters. When Rhys and I arrived at work, there were about four construction guys wearing yellow safety vests and hard hats, hammering stakes into the ground - and the mandatory building site AM radio was blaring out Starship's ' We built this city on rock 'n roll' at maximum volume. The local pamphlet delivery lady, wearing an ice cream container with eyes painted on top, and carrying a big stick, warily sneaking around the neighborhood from letterbox to letterbox. (In the Australian spring, the Black-Backed Magpie is prone to pecking people on the head if they get too close to a nest...) My five year old son Reuben's new battle cry - Brandishing a plastic sword, he charges at you from the backyard and yells 'Shannon Noll!' ( link ) in a deranged way. I'm not sure where he got it from, or what he thinks it means, but I was certainly frightened...

Having spent the week refreshing my .Net skills, thanks to Paul from Readify , I remembered that programming can be a very satisfying activity. So, with me sporting a head full of curly braces and semicolons, Alison and I joined some friends to see Bernie McGann play out at Poacher's Pantry, a restaurant a few Miles out of town. When I was a 'young adult' I couldn't figure out what kind of nerd I was. I wasn't sure if I was your basic engineering/science nerd, or one of those creative artsy fartsy type nerds. At the time, it was a cause of great consternation - but in the end I ended up in software, which is probably the best of both worlds - a pretty creative endeavour that's grounded in engineering. Jazz music reminds me of a lot of things, but listening to the band last night got me thinking about the border between creative and structured. Jazz can really screw with your engineering head - it's based on a definite mathematical structure - scales, modes ...

Last week, my access to Google went away. Must've been some local cluster outage, but in Canberra, I couldn't get to any Google sites. That was weird, because I couldn't check my mail. Couldn't get my document from my Gmail inbox to work on. Couldn't complain to the world about it because I couldn't get to Blogger. And so I sat around and twiddled my thumbs and waited. And it dawned on me how reliant I am on this company for access to my own information . I'm not usually in the habit of defending Microsoft - but David Kirkpatrick's article Microsoft Plays Catch Up seems to me to be a little unfair. Sure, Microsoft are really behind. They don't have a strategy for the new web, just like they didn't have a strategy for the old one. But the first time I ever heard the phrase ' Software as a Service', it was from a Microsoft Employee. Remember Hailstorm? (My Services) Microsoft were totally ready to pounce on this stuff, about four years ag...

It's been a fun week in the blogosphere - my post on innovation was picked up by a few blogs around the planet, most notably Fortune Magazine's business innovation 2005 - (which it turns out is quite a cool blog - subscribed). Lindsay even asked me for my autograph , so I figure that I must have made the grade from Z-list to Y-List. So what's a Y-lister to do? Cash In! I added some Google ads to the side of my blog. I know, sell out and all. But if you find them interesting and click them, then they pay me money! (I'm trying to recoup enough cash to pay for the fact that they stole Stilly away....)

As I was saying , our development team at TOWER Software is in the process of making the transition from Source Safe to Subversion. This meant that we had to spend a whole bunch of time trying to figure out the best way to manage branches, and releases, and a whole bunch of other really important SCM stuff. Now I know I probably also said this before, but despite the importance of this discipline, I find it really hard to care about as much as I should, because it's so very, very boring. So, I came up with a way to make it more interesting: Here's a part of our SCM Model, displayed as your neighborhood. (If you live in a sparse, snow covered land full of highways and pine trees, that is...) Points of Interest: You can see our smart, free-range (well, somewhat less responsible) developers in the train at the top, working on some cool new innovative stuff for later on. You can see our smart, semi-responsible developers in the train at the bottom, carving out our next immediate r...

When I was 12, my brothers and I went on an intense money gathering campaign. We pooled our collective resources, and began nagging our parents, washing cars, and weeding gardens. In desperation, we even collected aluminum cans... (I seem to remember my brother actually telling the Alco guy to 'piss off!' when he handed over seventy-five cents in return for two garbage bags of crushed cans. To us, that represented an entire weekend spent in garbage cans. He was a pretty brave nine year old.) The purpose of all this entrepreneurial activity was this machine : the Nintendo Entertainment System. At the time, I didn't want anything else in the world. Back then, I didn't know anything about marketing, or statistics. If you had told 12 year old me that 31 percent of homes had a video game console, I wouldn't have cared. I would've smiled politely and asked you for money. Now that I know enough to be interested, do you know what that figure is? 31-32 percent. That...

Just after my post on how a lot of web tech stuff is boring and derivative, comes the introduction of Yahoo! Maps . It looks great. No doubt a lot of people will find it very useful. But the sad thing is that, in the scheme of things, it's boring as hell. I really feel for the development team behind that effort. They all must've known that when they finally shipped (and shipping software is a really, really, amazingly hard thing to do), that the blogosphere would be full of big gaping yawns and nasty posts about what copycats they are. And no matter how good they made their service (it's really cool), nothing would change that. Speaking of copycats, I reconnected with Robert Scoble today - His feed had been super quiet, and I thought he might be dead, until mikal pointed out that he'd actually moved house, over to wordpress.com . (Maybe there should be a forwarding service for RSS feeds. That might be an original idea...) One of the things that makes Robert mad (in fa...

Innovation is a weird thing. Everytime I go into a movie theatre, I end up asking the same question aloud: "Aren't there any original ideas anymore?" It seems every movie is a remake of an old movie or a fairy tale or a kids book or a TV series, or a sequel to some other movie. In a flash of simplistic reductionism. I decide conclusively that there aren't any new ideas at all. That all 'new' ideas are just a baked together collection of old ideas. Lets use the internet technology world as an obvious example of what I'm talking about, because that's something that moves pretty fast, and something I (sort of) understand. Once upon a time, a California company made a better search engine. And coupled with that, they made a better revenue model, that made money from 'the long tail '. They made a gazillion dollars, in a way that didn't even seem intentional. Now, they have this wonderful reputation, as nice guys, but also as innovators. (Althoug...