Over the falls

Simon dropped something of a megaton bomb on the Tower Software blog the other day. For those of you who can't be bothered with the link, the (heavily paraphrased) summary goes like this: "If I mis-file something, it takes me all day to find it. It also takes me all day to organize my filing cabinet. So, in a world where Google can give me stuff no matter where I file it, Why should I bother filing anything at all?" ECM Systems, like TRIM Context, are often heavily based on information science, and encourage a kind of "virtual filing". It reminds me a bit of my own post in 2005 , where I was musing on exactly the same thing, perhaps unsurprisingly, after having to search through my personal piles of mess, just like Simon... A few years have passed, and I've cultivated some partial answers... Retrieval - Filing things properly and retrieving them is still the single most efficient way to manage data. Finding a document that's been filed properly will al...

Has anyone else noticed that the logo for Newfoundland Power and the logo for Nintendo Power are almost identical? Probably just me...

... The worlds engineers are having an "Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day!" as part of Engineering Week It's tomorrow - February 22, 2007. More here . Some of the best software engineers I've ever worked with have been girls - it's just that comparatively there have been hardly any of them... Me, I'm going to sit down and watch cyberchase with my daughter...

I've been blogging a lot over at the TOWER Blog lately, and that's made me resuscitate my feed reader (something about having to have some interesting content...) So I fired up blogbridge , but then, as always, I went looking for something better... Why can't I pick a feed reader and stay with it? I don't know, I just can't. Form is freed from content! I want my content to look and behave ... better! Anyway, I ended up coming back to the Google reader . They've obviously listened to the worlds complaints, and they have made it significantly better. In fact, I might even go so far to say that I'm delighted with it. I've always felt that RSS feeders should be web based, but both bloglines and newsgator gave me the shits for various reasons. For a while, I was using the Google homepage , but that's too much hassle, and doesn't really track what you've read or where you've been. If you were one of those guys (like me) who checked out Googl...

Look how much fun you can have with three inches of icy snow, an abandoned brightly lit parking lot, a two dollar toboggan, and a few beers... Awesome.

I just returned from Tampa, Florida, where this years North American TOWER Software TRIM User Forum (TUF) was held. Yes, it's all about ECM, and TRIM, but as nearly anyone who's attended a TUF can tell you, it's also about having lots of fun, and something called 'Customer Advocacy', which often seems to entail a lot of drinking... My mate Greenie, another Aussie over here with TOWER came up to me the morning after the night before, looking positively green and smelling faintly of vomit: "Y'know mate..." He said to me, "I reckon you must have to be really sick to die." Oh man.. I laughed so much that I had to sit down. Well, mainly because my head was also killing me. You can read about the much more sensible, work related efforts of the conference over on the TOWER Software Blog

With the latest firmware upgrade, my Nintendo Wii seems to have acquired a new feature - this mysterious black cat slinks onto the screen every now and again when the Wii is idle. If you try to grab it, it runs away - unless you sneak up on it with the wiimote very carefully. If you actually manage to pet it, the cat will give you a reward - a useful tip about how to use the Wii Dashboard, or whatever feature you're in. What a crazy idea - making people work hard for a measly tip! (hang on - that's the whole principle behind the service industry in America...) And yet, no matter - it's fun! I always try to catch the cat (if I'm lucky enough to have it appear). It dawned on me that if those same tips were presented every time I turned on the Wii, in a boring grey window, that I almost certainly wouldn't read them at all... Dean and I were discussing yesterday how strange it was that people pay real money to do boring busywork in game worlds, that they wouldn't...

One silly Christmas Party in 2005, My colleagues and I decided that what the world needed was a wiki novel. That anyone could edit. So, after a few beers, we started one , with the sentence: "It's a compelling story of Vernon " FireFox " Wilson, a crack addicted journalist who decides to leave his humdrum job and become a ninja.... Alternatively, it could be about something good." I kind of forgot about it, but Big Headed Simon pointed out that the Reluctant CyberProf had mentioned it in one of his essays... Then I kind of forgot about it some more, until Little Headed Simon told me that Penguin are actually doing the same thing, with their new wiki-novel, A Million Penguins. They're proclaiming that: " Anyone's allowed to write and edit the world-first novel, A Million Penguins , which is constructed in a similar way to the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia " World First? I don't think so! We know better, right folks? Anyways, I went ba...

I must be thinking in American these days. I just accidentally stumbled on this great site: Purely on spec - just by typing in the url directly. Once I'd found my colour with no hassle (great site - couldn't possibly be easier) , I realised that the only reason I found it was because I didn't spell colour right....

Check out the wonderful Whitney Music Box , by KrazyDad . If you liked Electroplankton , you may well find you stare and play with this for a while. The idea is to turn a harmonic visualizaion (basically dots moving at standard related speeds around a fixed point) into the corresponding harmonic music. The result is hypntoic and beautiful - and very natural sounding. You can read more about it the theory here .

Well, Saturday started okay. Ali and I slept in, while the kids ate cereal and watched cartoons. We woke up and made breakfast. I sat down to do some work, and play with Ruby on Rails some more. I went to the store and bought some coffee and bananas. All in all, everything was shaping up much like a Saturday should. I was happy. And then, came a strange cry from my 4 year old son. "Dad! I can't have a wee!" I'm often a little hard to distract when I'm concentrating, so I guess some part of my brain might have registered the strangeness behind that statement, while I was still mostly trying to divine the magic of ActiveRecord ... " Aggh ! There's water all over my feet!" Okay, that made me stand up, and step down the hall to the bathroom. Yep, there was indeed about two inches of clean water all over the floor - repeated attempts by Link to flush the blocked up toilet had generated a nice cascading fountain spilling out all over the tiles in the bathr...