Over the falls

Your days are numbered. Now that computers can automatically generate slogans, and pick up free imagery via tags from Flickr , there's a whole lot more pressure on you guys to actually do something REALLY impressive... Check it out : The Ad Generator, at http://www.cogandsprocket.com/adgen/adgen.html

As previously mentioned , I have something of a tendency to procrastinate. I really hate that I do this. The absolute worst thing about procrastination is that there is no reward. It's kind of like you say "I'll show me! I just won't start anything until it is due..." And then you end up working like crazy at the last minute. Ha. Take that... So, naturally, I'm always out to find a way to trick myself into more productivity. My current tool this week is the Ship's Bell - based on the sailor's system of watches . Once you learn to tell the time by counting the watches, it becomes a lot more apparent how much time you're wasting. And just by associating the sound of the bells with the fact that you should be working, I've found myself focusing on single tasks for the whole 'watch' - often more. If you'd like to try it out, you can download a little system utility for windows that will sound the bells for you from fredsplace.org . Or...

Hey - this is neat - the new version of blogger supports custom domains - so this blog now lives at goodgord.com instead of goodgord.blogspot.com (but old links will still redirect. So don't panic or anything.Phew!) That's really nice of google to offer such a service, which I'm sure took them considerable effort to build, just so I can have eight less letters in my blog address...

Dean made an interesting point on the TOWER Blog today about the future of ECM , and its relationship to Knowledge Management. Having the information at your disposal becomes a lot more valuable when you can use contextual information from other related content to analyse exactly what you have. It's just like Simon was saying about Pandora - real value comes from analysing multiple classification axes - not just one. As always, somewhere there's an academic at work on the problem - the article on Faceted Classification has some good starting points... It reminded me of an article that I wrote for KMWorld , a publication that deals extensively with knowledge management, about robots, and how you need to empower decision makers with information.Funnily enough, when I tried to find my paper, there were a bunch of third party vendors who were charging money for me to read it. So I thought that I'd just post it here for free: What a Robot Really wants…Knowledge at the point of...

Big Headed Simon explains why he thinks that Pandora is better than Last.FM . Oddly enough, This week, I too was thinking about Pandora, and what a good example it is of how taxonomy doesn't have to be boring. In fact, the article that I just wrote over on the TOWER Software Blog, explains it. It's like we're spontaneously having a conversation about the same topic, on different sides of the planet by talking to different people... The Internet is strange sometimes...

If you've ever wondered what the best way to present information for maximum impact, or if you've ever sat and stared at a blank Visio Canvas trying to figure out how to get your concept across, then this is for you. The Periodic Table of Visualization Methods provides an interactive guide to all kinds of great ways to present information - from concepts and metaphors through to timelines and cluster diagrams. How's that for inspiration? Neat...

Just in case you've been living on another planet, Apple announced the iPhone today. I tried not to be impressed and excited, but I just couldn't help it. I want one. It's kind of interesting that the iPhone is still designed to be a two handed experience - one of the great things about RIM 's Blackberry devices are that they can be operated with only one hand - at least for checking and reading mail. The iPhone looks to me like it might be a bit of a hassle to check your email while driving. (not that that's a good idea, or I EVER do it...) And, in a nice piece of bleeding-obvious litigation, Cisco has already decided to sue over a trademark infringement. Still, whatever you call it - it's surely a very lustworthy piece of tech-kit....

I just noticed (after what looks like nearly 170 days) that Stephen's Blog is alive and functional. And to top it off, he's made his applescript application for handling TRIM Context reference files available to all and sundry. If you're using the Mac with ICE, you really need to go and download this thing -it pretty much ensured that Stephen never had to leave his beloved iBook for that hateful windows machine! Anyways, (a very belated) welcome :)

I really liked this post from Chris Fralic, which points us to all the awesome predictions of things that were supposed to happen in the Internet in 1995: " Gopher. The lower-profile poor cousin from outta town, the media has been so absorbed in the publishing potential of Mosaic that it hasn't noticed the continued, and dramatic, growth of this easier-to-use; albeit less visually sexy; alternative. One key difference: I can always find what I want in Gopherspace with only a step or two." Yeah - that Mosaic thing was really a flash in the pan... Still, one other prediction caught my eye: "The first intelligent agent software packages will emerge, allowing Net users to ask for a specific piece of information like "What is the population of Fiji?" or "How far is Saturn from the Sun?" An agent will go out on the Net , find the information, and return it without the user knowing the source." Hey! - I remember all that 'Agent ' talk - (...

Some random shots taken over the holiday :)

Happy New Year! For my family back home in Congo, it's traditional to spend the New Year on the Beach. It usually rains a bit, but if you drink enough, nobody minds. And if you drink enough (like say - Fuzzy has been valiantly doing ), then there's usually a midnight swim in the ocean, often complete with phosphorescent plankton that mirror the stars. 9903 miles away here in Virginia, things were a little different. But, not to be outdone, my excellent family and I headed for the sea anyway - to Ocean City, Maryland. Of course, as Australia lives in the future, The New Year rolled around down under at about 8 AM New Years Eve, our time. I was a little late, but thanks to the awesome guys down at Malibu's Surf Shop , I managed to get all kitted out and ready to get into the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of winter: The swell was small - maybe 2-3 feet. Feeling pretty gosh darn confident with all my fancy protection, I sauntered out into the water. Then I heard this strange n...

Like Simon , I've always kept an eye on Shaun Inman's blog -or if not so much his content, on his designs. His concept of having old posts slowly disappear into nothingness is a really odd, and quite interesting idea. So yeah, another endorsement from me - but the fact that he's currently having a bunch of fun with his new Wii is also close to my heart - in fact, most of his posts kind of mirror what I've been doing since I started my holiday...Yay for Holidays! No Wii for me today though. I need to go and camp out at the DMV , to obtain my Virginia drivers license - besides the fact that American cops tend to freak out when you show them an ACT drivers license, they charge you through the nose for insurance. (Not the cops, the insurance companies.) I'm resolved to just live there for the whole day. If you'd like to share, you can take some sample tests here. Then you could just stand in a queue for an hour or so. Then sit down and do nothing for an hour. Then...

Dear Lazyweb, Is the word 'Bollocks' considered offensive? I ask because I used it in a new upcoming post for the TOWER Software Blog, and I was wondering if maybe it might be deemed 'inappropriate'... I used it because I think it's funny, but the extensive wikipedia entry on the word is just outright hilarious... "In a technological context, the question could be 'Why has the web developer included a three-minute animated intro to this page?', prompting the answer: 'Dog's Bollock Syndrome, Mate. Because he can.'"

Here's an interesting tie-in to the simplicity debate - Four years after the hype, Google has quietly axed the SOAP Web service API to it's search interface. ( full story here ) And nobody cares. Why? The SOAP concept grew out of a great simple idea. The Idea was this: "wouldn't it be nice to do RPC stuff via XML? The first iteration of what would become SOAP was pretty straightforward - XMLRPC . Version 1.0 of SOAP built upon that, and was still human readable, and okay. Som etime after that, the big boys like Microsoft, IBM and Sun jumped on board, and proceeded to complexify , 'standardize' and completely bugger the specification about until the final modern iteration of SOAP was so confusing, that only the most zeal-ridden platform zealots were singing it's praises - and even they didn't actually know how the thing worked anymore. Marketing execs all over the world were so desperate for 'Web Services' that they confused them with 'We...

If you've ever run across an OGG file, chances are you've probably gone - "What on earth is that?" And then you'd find out that it was an open source, slightly superior music compression format that tends to be used by the more 1337 amongst us. Then, you might have wondered how you could listen to something that had been encoded with it. Well, if you wanted to use iTunes , you were previously out of luck - or so I thought, until I found the Xiph .org quicktime plugin . This has been around for a while, but now it seems to work great.

I can remember 'certain' students used to find a modicum of ribald hilarity in scrawling the traditional 'dick and balls' on a plastic high school chair, but these kids have completely taken it to a new level . Tsk, Tsk - Busted by Google Earth - the shame... (The Google Maps link .)

Nearly 100 percent of the time, Cable TV in America dishes up the most inane garbage, very rarely worthy of any comment. And yet, sometimes... well, suffice to say that thanks to Encore, I now have a new favourite movie - North Shore , from 1987. How can this be so? Well, because of the following: Awesome Surf Footage, A ridiculous cheesy plot line about a surfer from Arizona (yes, Arizona) who wins a surfing contest in a wave pool, and then decides to go to O'ahu to surf the Pipeline Classic. Cheesy eighties music soundtrack, that includes Journey and Pseudo Echo, Awesome Surf Footage, A truly terrible love story straight out of a Sweet Valley High book. Lots of gratuitous shots of chicks lying on the beach in ugly eighties bikinis, A bunch of ' Bad Ass ' Hawaiian locals, Actual cameos from amazing real life surfers like Mark Occhilupo , Laird Hamilton and Gerry Lopez ; and Awesome Surf Footage. I mean, really, could there possibly be anything more you could need i...

This is just a reminder to make sure you keep up to date with Harsher Light - Little Headed Simon's tale of a skilled Gothic hero just keeps getting more and more intriguing. Who is this guy? What are these terrifying sexy angels that are trying to kill people? Can you really use crushed aspirin and smoke to detect evil spirits? Some of these questions may be answered, but you'll have to keep your browser (or your RSS Reader) tuned to http://harsherlight.blogspot.com/ .

I was, I admit, a little ambivalent about making the trip up from DC to New York City. My wife, Ali, was extremely envious of the idea. But, (as a good husband so often finds) , It turns out she was right. New York is an extremely inspiring place. It's like a thousand ideas colliding all at once. Everywhere I walked, I was mindful of New York stuff,( even though I grew up about as far away as you can get -in Australia ) - things like the 59 th Street Bridge , Madison Square Gardens, 42 nd Street, Times Square - Lyrics from the Beastie Boys, those dumpsters from Law and Order episodes, Ben Lee and Grandmaster Flash, and the art-deco style uber buildings that define the megalopolis. Times Square was particularly amazing at night - If you don't pay attention to where you're going, You'll almost certainly be run over by a cab - but if you don't, you'll probably accidentally buy something - the neon assault of advertisements is a wonder to behold. I didn't...

I've spent a few days now with Windows Vista (Ultimate). It is the ultimate many things, but I sure hope that it's not the ultimate operating system. In a way it seems to me that Vista is sort of like a really shallow, hot girlfriend - You have to pay her lots of attention, work hard constantly to keep her happy and in return, she looks gorgeous and drives you absolutely insane with her stupidity and nagging... I'm talking particularly about User Account Control . This one single 'feature' has the potential to make people throw their machines across the room in all their shiny transparent aero glory. Essentially, the way it works is this: anytime you do anything that could possibly affect the configuration of your computer, Windows prompts you to enter your username and password again, to confirm that you really meant for the action to occur. This may seem like a cool idea. I understand the point. The theory goes that no nasty virus or spyware will ever be able...