Over the falls

I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold - William Carlos Williams

A friend of mine died today. He wasn't a particularly close friend, or even someone I had spent a long time with. He was a work colleague - we'd worked together at TOWER Software. To Me, Keith was a bit of an enigma - a records manager, ex military, he was organized and careful in his approach to his work. I could always be sure that when I needed a stapler, or sticky tape, that I could find it easily at Keith's desk. When the cancer took hold of him, his desk was often empty. (This made the task of sneaking paperclips much less pleasant. ) Keith's specialty was the JITC (Joint Interoperability Tactical Command) Certification process . If that sounds boring, well, just wait - it gets way more detailed. The US Defense force certifies Record Keeping solutions to ensure that they comply with their strict policy of retention and control. This process is immensely complicated - it requires compliance with literally thousands of different rules and regulations. Because it is ...

This Financial Crisis on Wall Street thing started me thinking. Since we arrived in the US, I've been contemplating how strange it is that America seems more concerned with money than it does with people. And now, with a trillion dollars already handed out to high finance, and discussions about even more massive handouts, well - it's pretty clear who America loves the most. For me to send my children to University here in the US will cost me about half a million dollars, assuming average current College prices. If I get sick, say with an expensive disease like cancer, I could be easily looking at 300,000 dollars a year in treatment costs . When it comes to preserving my personal health, or my ability to contribute to society, the United States wants to contribute absolutely nothing. And yet, the US Government will spend trillions of dollars - that's over a thousand billion dollars resuscitating businesses that have effectively done stupid, bad things . The kind of thing t...

I sit, pensively leaning over my keyboard, stilled for the first time in an hour. The lilting piano music had caught part of my conscience. I stare out the window at the Virginia sunshine, fading in the afternoon. The green, filtered light falls dappled onto the lawn between me and the dogwood tree at the gate. An elderly gentleman pedals along James street, wearing a blue denim hat and a white T-shirt. Somewhere, a fanfare announces the advent of something. Some kind of thought dances elusively as I stare abjectly into the world. And then it hits me. That the time spent is gone. That great intentions and potential are worthless. The future is also worthless. Green light is reflected from the trees in an instant. I think about it now.

I haven't seriously written anything here forever. I was re-reading some old posts, and realising that I really liked reading them. So, in the interests of posterity... Living in America for the last two years has been a wonderful adventure. It's been strange, and entertaining, and frustrating and all the things that life probably should be, if you're trying to make a decent go of it. But, times change, and the lure of Australia is calling us back across the Pacific. So, me and the family are going to pull up stumps and head on home in October. (I still haven't figured out baseball. ) This brings a huge amount of stress, and excitement, and chaotic planning, and other things that life probably should be, if you're trying to make a decent go of it. I feel like I have two different todo lists - one for work and one for home. And when I look at each of them, I think - yeah, I can do that in two and a half months. The trouble is, there's two of them... Cognitive Bi...

You know how it is - You're busy working , trying to get your startup to beta. Then Little Headed Simon pops up and posts you some link he saw on boing boing. And then he says that the link isn't really that interesting, but the way he misread the headline was actually much more interesting. So then you say - "you should make a game out of that..." Yeah, yeah I know- that's like every other day, right? Except that this time, He actually did. LHS - you are seven different coloured lasers of awesome. My highest score is 2.

Here's a first. This post has a soundtrack. The reason this post has a soundtrack, is because this mp3 is a recording of the music I was playing with my band on the weekend, when I came to this realization. And somewhere in the middle of a somewhat self-indulgent but very satisfying twelve-eight blues progression, this weird notion of immediacy hit me. So, I thought I'd attempt to share it. Press play, if you didn't already, and see if you can follow me on this one... The realization comes from this notion that when you're playing music, as soon as you play a note, it's gone. I know that's kind of obvious, but when you're playing with people who are much better than you (which is always a good thing to do) you really have to concentrate. And I found myself concentrating on which note to play, and which change to make, when. But once I had "made it", and played the right note, it was gone. It might as well have never been there. There were other ch...

That NetVibes let's you create your own page title? Cool huh? They really let you type a lot of stuff in there. That's very nice of them.

Hmmm. Simon was picking on me the other day for not being a good blogger any more. (Part of me was all offended - "You are incorrect - I'm teh awesome!", but mostly I was thinking - "That must mean that he thought I was a good blogger once - which is still pretty cool.") Alas, It's been a really long time since I've had much interesting to say, and most importantly the time to actually say it. Running a startup business is hard work, it takes a lot of time from you, and most of my precious blogging time has been spent on getting stuff together over on the infovark blog. It's a good site, and I'm very proud of it, but I admit that it does lack the kind of personal-ness that I like to read in blogs. Reading over my old posts here, I tended to write very honestly, and I didn't need to have a topic - I'd just waffle on about any old crap. Corporate blogging is quite a bit less freestyle, and more structured. So, in an effort to recapture my...

http://producten.hema.nl/ Why can't all online shopping experiences be like this? (no,no - not in Dutch... Go see for yourself :)

Have you ever seen one of those 'viral internet videos' and then said something like: "You know, that's the nerdiest thing I've ever seen." Well, Be prepared to eat your own words: Eat them! Tasty Wordy Goodness. Right?

What sort of crazy people jump in the car to go North to Canada in Winter? Well, that would be me and my family. We're currently in Quebec, Quebec - the most French place in Canada. My French is limited. No, check that, it's actually somewhere between non-existent and hopeless. Thanks to Madame Brown in Year 9, I can sort of say some stuff. (Most of it wrong) Anyway, we've been enjoying the snow - so far there's been just under a metre. We've been swimming outside in -17 degrees, Cross country skiing in Montreal, been to the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa (including the coolest children's museum) driven through the driving snow (It was driven mainly by the wind) and somehow, haven't managed to drive each other crazy - despite having eight people in our dodge minivan. (we managed to rope Ali's sister Jen and my Sister Kirilee into the adventure.) Anyways - there's free internet here at the best western in Quebec, so I'll try to get some...

Oh dear... my sides ache. And it's all thanks to the Flight of the Conchords .. (via Big Headed Simon )

Just cleaning the kitchen after a busy days worth of work on the infovark project. Sometimes you have those days where you feel you're working your very hardest, and yet, things seem to go backwards just to spite you. After a solid 6 hours worth of code, less then 2% of the 300+ unit tests that we've written were passing. Oh well. I guess you get that on the big jobs. I was just pondering, as I was scrubbing those pesky pans (does it ever seem to you that all pans seem perpetually dirty? It's just like you're cleaning them, but you can't really scrub off anything more than one layer of dirt. Pan dirt is special. I think it contributes to much tastier food.) Anyway - oh yeah - pondering. I was thinking how sad it is that no matter how well humans adhere to whatever their particular religious code may be, that there will always be someone somewhere else who would view them as condemned to some kind of hell. If you're the world's most pious Christian, then the...

(This is cross-posted with my new company blog, inforvark.com I'm pretty excited about the new job, new challenges, and so you can expect to see more project management, Enterprise 2.0 technology and software posts happening over at the infovark site. I'll try and keep Over The Falls up to date with personal stuff, but no promises! ) For most people, the use of the nominative plural pronoun (’we’) tends to refer to themselves and to the other significant people who happen to be sharing their lives. If you work for a company, or any kind of collaborative venture where there are multiple people working towards a similar goal, you’ll find that you use the word ‘we’ an awful lot. For example ‘ We need to refactor that code, and we should probably add some comments’ or ‘ We need to get our TPS reports done by Monday’. I think that the use of the word ‘We’ is one of the nicest things about being at work. That one little word indicates collaboration is occurring. It shows that you ...

“If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less." - General Eric Shinseki. Found on R.Todd Stephens new collaborage blog, via Jesse.

Apparently Einstein once said: 'The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we used to create them.' That's way cool, if it's true. And even if not, it's still way cool :) *

Hello! I haven't updated my blog in forever - and personally I blame Web 2.0. Between Twitter , and now Facebook , and my crazy work commitments, I seem way too busy to even think of anything interesting to say...

Simon's new blog, The Cluttered Desk, talks about how people in your head when you read are composites of people you know. It's true - it reminds me of how I read somewhere that one theory of dreaming is that all of the people you meet when wandering around in your dreams are really you. Ocassionally in a vaguely lucid dream, you can become aware of this, which makes weird dreams even weirder... But on some level, this makes sense - for instance, while you think you are talking to your Wife, you're really talking to the way you imagine your Wife to be - it's not like she's actually in your head... Reading is similar to dreaming in that respect. The late Kurt Vonnegut , in his last interview, said of reading that he thought reading was a difficult task. If you could do it right, you could be transported to the murky waters of the Atlantic with Herman Melville, or a deserted tropical island with Defoe. But if you couldn't do it, I guess there's always TV, ...

"I'm annoyed!" I announced to nobody in particular. I pushed the desk away from me and rolled back into the middle of the cubicle. "What by?" Dean asked, turning away from his machine. I thought for a bit. "Well... I'm annoyed that things don't just come into existence because I think of them." "Uh -right... You're actually annoyed by that?" And you know, I was. I mean, I still am. In software development, solving conceptual problems isn't always easy, (or even possible) but it is usually rewarding. Unfortunately, just solving the problem isn't enough. Once all the hard thinking is done, you then have to sit there, and wiggle your fingers in a very exact and particular sequence, until your design is completely implemented. Then remove all the mistypes and little deviances from your perfect unimplementable design.Then re-test it, over and over. And that's the thing that's annoying. And the more I think about it, t...