Over the falls

Wow. It's really really cold here in Newfoundland. And by really cold, I mean really, really cold. The forecast low today was zero, and the forecast high was 1. Now normally, when the weather man is off by a degree or so, nobody really minds. But when it was the only degree we were going to get, I must admit I felt a bit jilted. In the end, the high (and the low!) today turned out to be just zero. There are flurries of snow blowing around, and it gets dark at half past four in the afternoon. My poor bald head is glowing red - I know, bring a hat.. Noted. Meanwhile, my anti-colleague, Simon (I do actually have some friends who aren't called Simon) , just rang me from Miami, where it was 28 degrees Celsius , and he was watching the sun set from his air-conditioned hotel. Nice...

Well, after a bunch of sleeping on the sidewalk in subzero temperatures, we finally managed to secure a Wii . Sleeping outside of a department store has never been on my list of things I wanted to achieve, and I don't think I would recommend it to anyone I liked. But, (and I'm sticking to my story) - I never really planned to sleep outside. Patrick and I drove down to our local Wal *Mart to try and persuade them to sell us one at midnight, to save my other plan of getting up at 6am and trying to find a console. Of course, when we arrived at Fair Lakes Mall, there were people camping out all over the place, at 11:30. The Wal *Mart guy laughed at us, and said - "Maybe if you arrived here at 8 this morning, like the guys out the front!" So, we unwittingly found ourselves in the line outside of Target. "Hang on", I Thought. "This isn't the kind of line that moves. We will be here all night..." But by then, four other people had already sat down ...

It's extremely cold. I feel like I've reached a new level of fanboydom. I'm sitting outside target at 1am, with my son, rugged up in sleeping bags, waiting for the Nintendo Wii, which is released tomorrow morning. At our last count, Pat and I were the 51st people in the line, for the alleged 80 Wii consoles. Blogging via Blackberry hurts my thumbs, so I'll post the outcome later...

Okay, so I'm not exactly immune to picking on Windows vista... But - I just installed the Release Candidate 2, and I have to say - I'm impressed. The installation process was so smooth and so easy - it only asked me two questions - what time zone are you in?, and; what desktop background would you like? These are easy questions. I like them. So far... so good...

Sometimes I wonder which is the more noble pursuit: Providing structured social commentary on the complex artifacts of the human society we live in, This includes things like keeping abreast of new technologies, discussing long-winded and entirely artificial constructs like records management, or: Reporting the simple delights of nature. The things that make me smile, that ring with all of us. The underlying humanist principles that don't need to be hugely detailed, or have whole industries built around them, because they are so built into us all that we appreciate them anyway. I've lost some of the piqueness I had when I set out to write this post, because I have spent the last few hours in a crowded bar in Dallas Airport , watching commercials(in between a game of American Football). Inspired by Wordsworth , and his boundless enthusiasm for the natural world, I idly both wandered and wondered the terminal, which is absolutely massive, and could almost be seen as a monument to...

You know, you have to keep a constant watch on the sneaky blogosphere. Sometimes your friends will just start blogging - without even telling you! Fortunately, there are lots of ways to find them. Technorati knows all (well, some stuff anyway...) Take that, Big Headed Simon! Subscribed :) (You know, six of the top eight hits on google for the phrase " Big Headed Simon " are actually about Big Headed Simon. I think he is the only one in the whole world!)

I'm proud to announce that TOWER Software (my employer) has recently unveiled it's new blog ( the RSS feed is here .) The plan is for TOWER to share some of it's insights and experiences developing TRIM Context, and solving Enterprise Content Management problems from around the world. I know, most of you are probably thinking.."that sounds really, really boring!", but hey - it's my life! You should check out some of the posts before you jump to any premature conclusions - I certainly plan to contribute a post or two, and feel free to drop by and leave a comment. The web is a two way medium, after all :)

I just accidentally pressed Ctrl + Shift + C in my new build of Firefox 2.0 for Windows. Check it out - a separate tab just popped up listing every style used on the page I was viewing, including a direct link to the CSS files themselves. Now, that's extremely cool. Stealing designs from people just got the tiniest bit easier! (Not that I would ever condone such an activity, of course :)

I have to vote in the US Senate Election Tomorrow. Okay, I don't have to vote, but being an Australian American, voting is something we do. Australia has compulsory voting, which I am overwhelmingly supportive of. People often assume that the point of compulsory voting is to somehow educate people about politics - to force them to have an opinion. The reality has nothing to do with voters, and everything to do with ensuring good governance - By forcing politicians to care about every voter, rather than just the ones who can be bothered to go down to the poll both and vote, it means that politicians are consequently forced to address the needs of all the citizens in the country. Under a non compulsory voting system, it's mainly the wealthy and educated who vote. I was a little shocked to find out that part of the aim of the campaign advertisements that have been confusing me for the last month on TV is not to encourage voters to vote for one candidate or another, but to discou...

Despite the traffic and the population, Virginia is really an amazingly beautiful and fertile place. Here's a few fall snapshots taken from my front yard, (except for the last one, which believe it or not was actually taken in my lounge room ...)

My brother Grae just launched his photoblog , at the enviable (well, for some of us), domain of http://taylor.net.au . EDIT: Oh, and speaking of things that are purdy, you should check out: http://www.jonathanyuen.com/main.html for some transcendental web flash magic,..

One startup at a time, I guess... Google just announced the acquisition of one of the coolest little wiki engines ever, JotSpot . I've always been quite a fan of the technology and the approach behind JotSpot . (Any company that has a regular hackathon is okay with me!)It will be great to see what google can do to bring the wiki to the masses. Wikis are definitely my favourite collaboration tools. All those other "big C" collaboration, joint editing instant messagey things (like Groove ) all seem to be a bit intimidating. Wikis are easy to use, and they have instant appeal - people can see the value really quickly. Which is kind of like Google, really...

From the random links department, two things that took my fancy, from opposite ends of the ethical spectrum: The Punk-O- Matic lets you compose a variety of authentic sounding cool punk tunes using Guitar Bass and Drums. Rock on!. mmmzr is an unpronounceable, yet maybe a little bit brilliant site which uses a pyramid style scheme to extract money from advertisers. Right up there with the million dollar homepage and 'wash-your-own-car' for ideas you wish you had thought of.

Parenting is one of those things I never really understood, I just do. I know there are heaps of books you can buy on the subject, and that lots of people must freak out because they're not doing it right, and then go buy those books. Or maybe parents in law buy them as a discreet way of telling their children's spouses that they're not doing it right, or maybe nobody buys them at all... Either way, my approach to parenting is really simple; children are people. They're often really short bizzare crazy people, but they're people none the less. I worry a bit about the supernanny and the baby whisperer training children to regimes and schedules. You can train children to behave according to your rules, the same way you could train a monkey or a goat, sure. But you don't treat people like that. All kinds of organisations from the Third Reich to Heaven's Gate have managed to successfully train people to behave in a particular way. They didn't get their...

I had the pleasure of getting an e-mail out of the blue from an old friend last week - thanks to the inter-connected world of the blogosphere. He'd ran across my blog (from Cam's blog ) and had read up to find out what it was I'd been doing since we parted ways in college. It was kind of weird to talk to someone after such a long time and have nothing much to say that he didn't already know! Dan's been adventuring in Indonesia for the last seven years, and he's finally 'sold out' and started publishing his writings. You should prime your rss readers (I found one that I love - this one !) and head on over to his new blog to get the latest updates on his progress -they'll be required reading around these parts. Welcome aboard, Dan-o!

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was trying to come to terms with exactly how to use the Novation Remote Midi Controller in conjunction with Reason... Well, I'm still trying to figure it out - I've thrown away nearly everything that I've created, but today I managed to create a song that was worthy of persistence. If you'd like to hear it, you can download it here . I figure I'm using about 2-3% of the software's features. Not even having the faintest idea how a synthesiser works, I'm viewing the exercise as something of a random knob-tweaking frenzy... So many buttons to push, so little time...

In Software Development Land, there is one kind of project that nobody wants to end up on. Identifying features of these projects often contain wildly unrealistic goals, crazed unrealistic timelines, a lack of adequate requirements or supporting technical infrastructure, and often, a combination of all of those things. These projects are affectionately termed 'Death March' projects. I know the name sounds a little extreme, but that's really what they are called. (Here's the wikipedia link to prove it.) I've just survived a project that has had me working crazy hours, weekends, public holidays, and basically any time that I wasn't asleep in an effort to pull one of these off. It all wrapped up today, and in the end, it wasn't that bad. Well, it was actually pretty bad in some ways. For example, my kids haven't seen me in 36 hours, and my wife hasn't actually kicked me in the balls , (but to be honest I wouldn't blame her if she did), so for the...

This was driving me crazy - here's an easy cut and paste solution to not being able to use the DOM to rename a node for lazy developers like me: public static XmlNode RenameNode (XmlNode node, string namespaceURI,string qualifiedName) { if (node.NodeType == XmlNodeType.Element) { XmlElement oldElement = (XmlElement) node; XmlElement newElement = node.OwnerDocument.CreateElement(qualifiedName, namespaceURI); while (oldElement.HasAttributes) { newElement.SetAttributeNode(oldElement.RemoveAttributeNode(oldElement.Attributes[0])); } while (oldElement.HasChildNodes) { newElement.AppendChild(oldElement.FirstChild); } if (oldElement.ParentNode != null) { oldElement.ParentNode.ReplaceChild(newElement, oldElement); } return newElement; } else { return null; } ...

On Friday the current amorphous collection of cells (and more importantly their digital replication instructions) that make up me passed a milestone: the completion of their 32nd lap around the giant mass of incandescent gas that brings life to the planet Earth. Or, to put it somewhat more concisely, it was my birthday. My Dad and my Congo-family had sent me some money in celebration of this momentous event, and despite my inclination to pay some bills, my Wife insisted that I spend it on something for myself. It's pretty rare for me to have some money that I have to spend on fun stuff. You know what? I discovered that if you check out the shops, there are a LOT of things you can buy. I mean a lot. And they all look really cool. So, after much prowling and perusal, I had narrowed my purchasing field down to the following. a) some kind of digital camera, or b) some kind of musical instrument. In the end, I decided I couldn't afford to buy the kind of camera I wanted, and yet I ...

I have a really sore neck this morning, from the Virgin Music Festival in Baltimore. My wonderful wife bought me two tickets for my birthday, so we found a kind hearted soul who wanted to play with my four kids for the day, and drove up the Beltway into Maryland. After parking the car about three kilometers away, we walked in the direction of the pulsing drums up to the pimlico race track , where the event was held. I felt a little old, hanging out with these kids, but we managed to sort of fit in.. (maybe?) Twenty Dollars for two beers was a bit steep...Old guy whinging at the bar. When I was a kid, me and my brothers would be driven around town in our big red family van, and Dad would blast The Who on the crappy cassette player. We grew up singing along to tunes like ' Boris the Spider' , ' Magic Bus ', and ' Can't Explain '. When I heard that The Who were re-forming and coming to town, I just had to go. To be honest, I thought they would probably suck. ...