January 17, 2011
Roll Your Own Linkbait Tech Headline
I've noticed two things in the last month. First, there seems to be an overwhelming number of stories in the tech world about how Google search results all look the same. Second, how these stories themselves look all the same.
October 30, 2010
The Case For Nothing
What's the most natural and logical reaction of individuals when organizations do stupid things? --- Nothing.
September 29, 2010
Lighten Up
I got in the habit a few months ago of collecting unusual technology-related pictures. It started out as an effort to collect images for presentations, but somehow it took on a life of its own. Here are some of the best. Enjoy!
December 20, 2007
Bimbo Blowout
Christine Aguilera. Not a bimbo.(This picture was for illustrative purposes only, of course) My master plan for web domination has been foiled. Google has done some major re-organization to their search engine and now my web site traffic has dropped...
October 18, 2007
Who owns my Friendships?
Back in the day, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, we had a Dayrunner. The Dayrunner had an address book, and all was good. If you met somebody you wanted to track, you simply put them in the address book. Nowadays...
October 17, 2007
Who me? Worry?
Coming soon is the big day where Y-Combinator chooses its Winter teams. Over on the news.yc board, there's a lot of angst and tension.I applied too (for the first time), but I have absolutely no worries at all about...
March 6, 2007
Grokking the Geeks
I grok geeks. Since I do, it was fun to be a presenter at the Code Camp in Roanoke last weekend. Big crowd! Lots of neat stuff. Plus, I won the grand prize, an X-Box 360. What more could you...
December 6, 2006
The Twelve Days Of Nerdmas
My true love, darling of my life, asked me yesterday what I wanted for Christmas. When you get to be an old and cranky nerd like me, you've already collected a lot of every kind of whack-job tech-toy out there....
November 20, 2006
Databases and the UML
Lately I have been spending a little more time with UML and databases than I usually do, and I came across an interesting WTF....
November 3, 2006
Tyranny of the Bytes
I spent four hours with Sprint over the past two weeks getting them to do something very simple. Combined with my experience today, I think I see a bit of a trend....
October 15, 2006
Philosophy of Religion
Save 70%! Great Courses by America's Top Professors I just finished a tape series entitled "Philosophy of Religion" by Professor James Hall and the Teaching Company. It's part of my goal to pick up college-level courses I might have missed...
August 31, 2006
Now That's Strange
Am I getting onions now? I just posted an article on DIgg (the Transactional Warfare piece.) Usually I watch an article for an hour after I post it -- people have questions and comments, and I want to be able...
August 1, 2006
If it's Finances, You're an Idiot
Over the last fifteen years or so of watching a lot of television, I've reached a conclusion about advertising: If it's finances, the companies think you're an idiot. I haven't done a good rant post in a while, so hang...
July 25, 2006
CAPTCHA Scmatzpa
I finally got my CAPTCHA working, although it means I will lose a lot of new friends. A CAPTCHA, for those of you who don't know, is a "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart(tm)" It's...
June 25, 2006
The Reading List
I've got a good set of books I'm tackling this week. First up iwth "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife" -- Counterinsurgency lessons from Malaya and Vietnam. The second book is 'The Sling and the Stone" -- on war in the 21st century.
June 16, 2006
Support Group: Not Going So Well
So I decided to start a support group for compulsive list-makers. This is not going so well for a lot of reasons. I would tell you them all, but then i would have to go to extra meetings this week....
June 15, 2006
Lessons in Letting Programmers Build Your House
Everybody says that software construction is like building a house, but what if it was really true? What would really happen if you hired programmers to build your house?
Continue reading "Lessons in Letting Programmers Build Your House"
May 8, 2006
How to Tell Somebody What They Don't Know
I'm a consultant. I'm supposed to know things. I study a lot -- read, watch, write professionally. I believe i'm doing a fairly good job of knowing enough to be valuable. I used to think that "knowing something useful" was the hard part. Now I believe that's the easy part!
Continue reading "How to Tell Somebody What They Don't Know"
May 4, 2006
Tossing QuickBooks into the Sunset
I got a call from a nice woman at one of my software vendors last month. She mentioned that we had a sunset coming up. I love sunsets.
So what's this? Some romantic overture by a vixen at Intuit? I wasn't sure what to tell her -- I am a married man after all -- when she hit me with the big surprise.
April 28, 2006
CSS: Use it or Lose it
I drove several hours today to talk to a client. They were switching CIO consultants, and I was there to possibly fill-in for a couple of months until they found somebody else. It was a small shop, and as usual some of the concerns were about controlling development and consistent look-and-feel. They were using VB.NET and SQL Server 2005.
April 25, 2006
Does the Singularity Cometh?
Over on Winds Of Change, Joe started up a very interesting thread about Ray Kurzweil and the coming singularity. Will machines take over from people? Will we have everlasting life because we will become robots?
March 28, 2006
Psycho Math Day
During a discussion on a internet board, I espoused a pretty weird theory. I like it so much I'm going to try to explain it here. The gist of the theory is that there is no such thing as integers...
February 21, 2006
Announcement
I've been playing around with a new gizmo for the past few weeks and I thought it was time to share it with you. I've always been frustrated at the lack of being able to quickly tell somebody what I...
February 13, 2006
Somebody is trolling for domain names
Last week I read a blog entry by some guy who was starting a new project. He had an odd name for his project, and he searched a few times to make sure the domain name was available. The next...
November 19, 2005
Where did they all go?
This week I'm going to tell you why you don't live next door to the aliens from Zeta Reticuli.
November 7, 2005
First Phaser Created
The US government has unveiled a "non-lethal" laser rifle designed to dazzle enemy personnel without causing them permanent harm.
October 1, 2005
The Ultimate WTF
THE TRULY UNBELIEVABLE: "I don't believe it was 19 ... hijackers who did those attacks." Those are the words of the Saudi-educated Imam slated to be sworn in today as the second Muslim chaplain in the history of.......the NEW YORK CITY FIRE DEPARTMENT
September 25, 2005
New Art Form: Liquid Sculpture
Who know that you could create beautiful pictures by splashing water around and taking high-speed pictures of it? Well, you can.
September 15, 2005
Hurricane Katrina Rant From the Center
Okay. So the following rant was a personal email this morning between friends. One of them said, "Hey, you should put that on the blog." so here goes.
September 13, 2005
Dinosaurs Closer to Being Cloned
Clumps of mineral crystals in fossil bones preserve DNA better than other parts of the bones, a new study shows. The results promise new hope for research on both ancient humans and extinct animals.
September 4, 2005
Sonic Laser May Be Used In Katrina Efforts
It looks like a flat panel or sometimes a stop sign. It can transmit sounds like a laser up to miles away. It's called the Magnetic Acoustic Device, and from the resarch labs at the Department of Defense
Continue reading "Sonic Laser May Be Used In Katrina Efforts"
August 31, 2005
Get Moving!
People need to exercise more, but instead they just sit around and play video games. So why not combine video games and exercise? The high-tech NeXfit exercise bike hooks up to your XBox, Playstation, or the Internet, incorporating game controls...
August 24, 2005
Salad Dressing? In a Spray Bottle?
But once you think about it, perhaps spay-on salad dressing is a neat idea.
August 16, 2005
Robot Roundup
Word today that Japanese researchers are perfecting an artificial skin for robots that can feel pressure and temperature
August 9, 2005
Scientist Use RAINEX to Forecast Hurricanes
Hard to say, but mixing plant and animal DNA is going to make for some crazy green beans. Let hope they don't decide to run away.
Continue reading "Scientist Use RAINEX to Forecast Hurricanes"
July 28, 2005
Maggot Man Dies
Man who was being eaten by maggots died yesterday. This has got me confused, as I was under the impression that maggots only eat dead skin, and are actually theraputic. In fact, this attribute was first noticed during the American...
July 27, 2005
Fish Art
Here is something neat. You take a pond, tag all the fish, and the monitor their position, rotation, depth, etc in realtime. Hook all of this up to a java server and some programming, and you've got a really cool...
July 26, 2005
Atlantis Found Again
Just do a Google search on "finding Atlantis" and you'll find a kazillion articles. Here's the latest on the controversy, another inconclusive but interesting take on the legend. WTF? I think we should have a TV mini-series with Atlantis stories. We could start with a reading of Plato, then go through those old "In Search Of" TV Shows with Leonard Nimoy, and then on to the latest rabble. Heck, you could probably fill a whole week's prime time programming slots with it, without any conclusion. It would be like the X-Files without the smoking guy.
July 25, 2005
Get On the Bus: Jargon Versus Reality
I like jargon just as well as the next guy. Grep, awk, vi, emacs -- hey, these were great Unix buzzwords, and consultants once made good money using them. Somehow over the last 30 years or so, everybody got into the act. Now it's not so fun anymore.
July 23, 2005
Weekly Poll Results
This week we had way fewer voters, probably because the answer was not that easy to guess. Wondering which Kirk speech had the most cliches strung together?
July 22, 2005
Tougher Rules Needed For Airspace Incursions?
Here's word that a Congressman wants to drastically increase the penalty for airspace incursions. He wants a one-hundred-thousand dollar fine and 5 years license suspension. As a pilot who doesn't fly any more, I think this Congressman, Rep. John Mica, is full of horse hockey. My opinion, for what it's worth.
Continue reading "Tougher Rules Needed For Airspace Incursions?"
July 20, 2005
Scotty Dead
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- James Doohan, the burly chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise in the original "Star Trek" TV series and motion pictures who responded to the apocryphal command "Beam me up, Scotty," died early Wednesday. He was 85.Read the rest of the article on CNN.
WTF? How About ISP Idiots?
So this morning my frame relay went out at the office. I waited an hour, and then called to submit a trouble ticket. While I'm calling, they decided to call me to tell me it was down! And it gets worse.
July 19, 2005
Solution for NASA: Write Mileage Down
Word today from NASA that they still don't know what is wrong with the fuel gauge on the shuttle. I happen to know exactly what the problem is: durn thing is busted. Since none of our cars has a working fuel gauge, this is a problem we've lived with for some time.
July 18, 2005
TiVo Upgrade: Ads More Intrusive
Reuters is running a story today that TiVo is going to make ads more annoying. ads embedded with special "tags" will pop up as small pictures, sporting branded logos, even when users are fast-forwarding thought those commercials. However, TiVo says...
July 17, 2005
Jesus Gets A TV Show
Read this one for yourself....
The NBC network, eager for new hits to reverse a ratings slump, said on Friday it has given a mid-season 2005-06 commitment to a new drama titled "The Book of Daniel," depicting Christ as a contemporary confidant to a pill-popping priest.
Hairy Plotter: Christmas tree machines
Now that I've started reading the latest Harry Potter book (I was #2 in the pecking order at the house) it occurred to me that most people aren't aware that there are real magic machines in the world. They're called Christmas Tree machines, and they're better than having your own wizard around.
July 14, 2005
"More" pages not working
Yes. I know. I just heard that the new template for the "more" pages looks awful unless you are in IE. I'm working to fix it. Sorry for the mistake. Thanks for Jeff for pointing it out....
What's Wrong With This Picture?
Somebody creates a web site that allows you to enter checking account information and withdraw money from that checking account. The web site does not attempt to determine the identity of the users. Let's repeat, for the slow: If you've got a blank check from anybody's checking account, you can withdraw money from their account. Sounds like a great business model!
July 12, 2005
WTF -- How about the site?
Apologies for the site looking poorly for the next few hours. I started modifying the master style sheet and templates and got an urgent call in the middle of it. Things should be back to normal (or better!) by this...
Spice Up (and Perhaps Cure Cancer?)
All this time we were looking in the rain forests for new drugs. Wouldn't it be ironic if the next big breakthough came out of the kitchen cupboard?
July 11, 2005
Groupware Battle Shaping Up
Now that Microsoft has again launched a major push to kill Lotus Notes, it's time to take stock of where the players are. My money is on Microsoft, because I think they have a secret weapon.
July 10, 2005
The Three Basic Kinds Of Commercials
Is it just me, or do commercials make no sense anymore? They're either stupid, gross, or a waste of time. What gives?
July 9, 2005
Hundred Years' War -- Poll Question Too Easy
Thanks for the almost 500 people who answered our poll this week. It was way too easy. Many of you, I believe, used Google to get your answer. Well, next week isn't going to be so easy!
Continue reading "Hundred Years' War -- Poll Question Too Easy"
Death of a Hamster
I wish I could return to a world without 9-11, or 7-7, without crazy people hiding in caves plotting to kill us, without cancer, crime, or disease. Back when the only touch you had with reality was when a pet died. I feel for my kids. But in a way, I kind of envy them too.
July 8, 2005
From the "Wild Speculation" Department
MSNBC is running a story about teleportation. Seems like there is conntuing research into "Spooky Action at a Distance" Will one day we really be able to say, "Beam me up, Scotty!"...
July 7, 2005
WTF? How About Tornadoes?
No posting for a while, as tornadic storms are coming through the area. Our frame-relay goes up and down during thunderstorms, so I'm passing on posting until later.
July 6, 2005
WTF: Bring Back Extinct Species
I'd like to see what a Wooly Mammoth looked like, for real. Or a Sabre-Toothed Tiger. Or a T-Rex. What if the T-Rex had tiny feathers? Wouldn't it be a lot sillier-looking that the fearsome beast in Jurassic Park?
RUP UP! What Part Of Software Development is Outsourcable?
It certainly may be the way it is thought about in the board room, but the difference between the way it looks at fifty-thousand feet and the way it looks in the trenches is going to mean life or death for some of these outsourcing efforts.
Continue reading "RUP UP! What Part Of Software Development is Outsourcable?"
July 5, 2005
NASA Blows Up Comet, Gets Sued For $300 Million
From the "It's a Good Time to be a Lawyer Department":
Continue reading "NASA Blows Up Comet, Gets Sued For $300 Million"
The Complaint Department
I did my best to understand your complaints and act on them. If you're still not happy, drop me a line and we'll work on them some more!
July 4, 2005
Fix It with BioTech
Whatever the results of all this action, it's clear that biotech is going to be a big player over the next 20 years in WTF.
July 2, 2005
Stooges Three I Count Thee
Nobody really knows how many stooges there were.
July 1, 2005
Is Anybody Abusing RSS? Should We Care?
I don't think it is unreasonable to be able to play songs on my computer without having it crash, don't you?
June 30, 2005
Stone Age Factory Found
I just hope those guys weren't eating too much lettuce while they were making tools, because as we know now lettuce is actually an aphrodisiac.
June 28, 2005
Kentucky Fried Dinosaurs
Then it hit me: we should be raising dinosaurs to eat.
Zombie Dogs From Another Dimension
Unless you have some unatural fear of souless canines stalking you in the night, this is probably a good thing.
June 25, 2005
Can Chickens Swim?
After all, one day a flood may come, and then it's too late to dress up like a chicken.
June 24, 2005
Killer Bot Support Line
It's one thing to let your users take IE7 beta out for a test spin, but quite another to hand out free copies of "Assault Commander Mark VII" to whoever signs up.
June 22, 2005
Speaking Engagement Update
Here's a link to the Rational User's Group that I will be speaking at next month. There's directions and instructions there too for those of you who will be attending....
June 21, 2005
Speaking Engagements
I've got a couple of speaking engagements coming up: RTP RUG. The Research Triangle Park Rational User's Group. NoVA RUG. The Northern Virginia Rational User's Group. Details to follow soon. Whassup with all the rugs? The Rational Unified Process is...
We made it!
we're all just dumb schmucks in this world doing the best we can