Another fine example of Americana

Not safe for work

"People in the south have started mating with vegtables"

When I was still living in the UK this was one of my favorite shows:

Classic British humor.... Thanks Jason

iPhone 2.0 already....

So if this is true I think I will just hang on to my old fashioned Razor and see what Jobs brings out next - weird marketing he is making me not want to buy his products.....

Apple Hard At Work Making iPhone Obsolete

CUPERTINO, CA—Only a month after the much-heralded announcement of the iPhone, Apple CEO Steve Jobs confirmed that his engineers were...

North Korea

This morning I happened upon this quote about North Korea:
"There are many amusing things about North Korea: The national color is gray. Their Dear Leader is a cross between a Chia Pet and a douche bag. And they used up all of their food money to make nuclear weapons, so they can trade those nuclear weapons for food."

Hmmm almost Monty Python like in their logic....

Salute to Anna Nicole Smith

"There were only two of them, but they made a whole frontage: huge, compelling, pneumatic. They burst out of tight red dresses--preferably red--or teased among feather boas, or flanked a dizzying cleavage that plunged to tantalising depths. These were celebrated, American breasts, engineered by silicon to be as broad and bountiful as the prairie. With them, a girl from nowhere--or from Houston, Texas--could do anything. The body behind them waxed and waned, sometimes stout as a stevedore's and sometimes almost waif-like, matching the little-girl voice; but the Breasts remained." The Economist

Sniff sniff

I am changing deodorants:

Process process process

Today I became responsible for defining the process for defining policy and standards within “our” corporation. Seems damn self referential potentially. If I create a process to create processes shouldn’t I also use that process to create the process to create processes? Oh but wait a minute to process doesn’t exist so how can I use the process to make the process to make processes.
Damn - while I work this all out I think I will decide if I prefer Cline syrah or if I prefer Aussie shiraz.

Random Number

Let freedom reign

"Empower the mavericks, turn them into sensory receptors and change agents for the business, and let them know that the leaders are listening." -Marc Rix

Rogue IT is cool

so too is the sexual harassment panda in South Park

Gawker

If you are into the NYC media scene you might like this Blog I discoved this morning:
Gawker

I dont want to see

I dont want to see underware made of this stuff.

Althought the idea has many uses I am sure:
Color changing fabric
Change clothes in public

I love Dilbert

Every morning sitting in my inbox is the cartoon of the day, today's cracked me up - how many times has this happend to you? At least four times this week to me....

I don't agree

That Web 2.0 = SOA.

This article makes an interesting attempt to conjoin the two.

How to mange RSS feeds in Outlook 2007

Simple answer is don’t, instead use Internet Explorer to manage the feeds – they share the same settings.

If you look for the favorites star, and the select the sub category feeds, right click on a specific feed and select properties, then you find a much richer list of parameters to play with, including update frequency (which was the one I was looking for). I suspect subsequent update to Outlook will plug this gap…

For more detailed instruction follow this link.

Addendum: I was referring to Outlook 2007 and IE 7

Frustrated by ambiguity

How many time throughout the day do you spend time trying to clarify what someone’s email meant?

Yesterday was thoroughly annoying as I had to spend time digging into a series of ambiguous conversations that had been taking place between five different parties. The ambiguity was the fault of no individual, however when all the conversations were taken out of the context that the stream of consciousness of the authors had been a part of, they were very difficult to interpret.

In order to deal with this kind of ambiguity I usually try two things, first see if I can discover enough about the context to remove the ambiguity, or secondly phrase a question that states a context and the ambiguity, and propose only one solution, and then see if I can solicit a yes/no answer.

I was digging for any best practices on this practice and came across a slightly off topic yet none the less interesting article on how to write unambiguous requirements.

http://requirements.seilevel.com/blog/2006/02/art-and-science-of-disambiguation.html

In case you thought CM was making it up

SOA Presentation

I am giving a presentation next week at a regional architect session on my experiences of SOA and business process tools.

I was doing some digging for current references and came up with a series of good articles discussing the current state of the phrase SOA:

What Is SOA Anyway?: Part I, Ambiguity
What Is SOA Anyway? Part II, Hype
What is SOA Anyway? Part III - And Then There Were Two
What Is SOA Anyway: Part IV, SOA Defined
What Is SOA Anyway: Part V, Summary

No comment

Discovered in CM's basement..... aghhhhh

Bosses

Question: How many bosses does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Answer: One. He holds up the light bulb and expects the universe to revolve around him.

Email text messages

Here are the email addresses for the 6 most popular cellular phone carriers:

T-Mobile: phonenumber@tmomail.net
Virgin Mobile: phonenumber@vmobl.com
Cingular: phonenumber@cingularme.com
Sprint: phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Verizon: phonenumber@vtext.com
Nextel: phonenumber@messaging.nextel.com

where phonenumber = your 10 digit phone number

Thanks to Aaron for the link

Pigs and Chickens

A chicken and a pig are together when the chicken says,
"Let's start a restaurant!".
The pig thinks it over and says,
"What would we call this restaurant?".
The chicken says,
"Ham n' Eggs!".
The pig says,
"No thanks, I'd be committed, but you'd only be involved!".

Feedback .... my style

Hi Christopher. Thanks for the heads up. The batteries have been replaced. I appreciate the feedback.
Thanks again.
Kevin

________________________________

From: contactus@lifetimefitness.com
Sent: Sun 2/11/2007 10:21 AM
To: MNSV Admin Asst
Cc: MNSV General Manager
Subject: Rowing Machine



CONTACT US CUSTOMER EMAIL
--------------------------------------
FROM: Christopher Crowhurst
DEPARTMENT: Customer Service
CLUB NAME: Savage
MEMBERSHIP NUMBER: xxxxxxxxxxx
EMAIL: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
PHONE: xxxxxxxxxxxx

MESSAGE FOLLOWS:

Good Morning,
The last four days when I have gone to the Gym the left hand rowing machine has needed it's batteries to be replaced. Each day I have informed the front desk and they have promised that "hospitality" will come down and take care of it. Today it was still not taken care of, again I went to the front desk - I even found the batteries in the shop... but still, no they could not put them in. I left again today after working out and the batteries were still not replaced.... Please either empower the front desk to allow me to take a pair of AA batteries from the shop, or please place a boot up the backside of hospitality (who ever that is) and get them to fix the batteries in the rowing machine :) Happy days, Christopher Crowhurst

You Tube Censorship

Google's YouTube has removed the account of a British guy simply for highlighting the fact that the Koran has several references to violence. I wonder if they would do the same for the Old Testament?
Check out the guy on this video commentary.... This seems wrong to me.

Buy this

Buy this music and make Chuck a rich man.
On second thought don't do that, he might stop working.

If you like RSS...

You will love this AJAXy mashup: Original Signal

A valentines gift?

Buy them here for your lady if you want to...

Artful

Found these cool pictures of old video games taken with long exposures....

Just when you thought..

you had seen all the search engines out there, along comes another list of cool ones....
Whonu seems very cool all though I am struggling to see the semantic side of its search capabilities.
I just discoverd an interesting site AddThis.com it alows you to have one simple link on your page and through a little indirection it allows your readers to add your page to their favorite tagging/bookmarking site, very cool.

Yet another new low

-19F reported this morning on my drive to the office. Blows away the previous low from Monday. As a colleague of mine asked this morning "Why in the world do I live in the tundra?"

How to see an entire blog

This morning I discovered that there is a simple method using Blogger to see every post for an individual blog, see this url as an example: http://www.christophercrowhurst.com/search?max-results=1000

Web 2.0 traffic

Found this great site that uses Alexa traffic data to rank the crop of Web 2.0/community sites.

Demo videos

If you like me were unable to go to the Demo conference this year you might enjoy browsing these videos.

Share your bandwidth

Free the web:

Highly instructional Web 2.0

Every CS or PD for that matter should see this:

Google Relevancy Algorithm

This morning a colleague forwarded me an article which briefly mentioned 80 levers Google uses for relevancy, this set me off hunting and I found an excellent posting about how Google filters results (effectively pointing out the relevancy) now clearly this is a constantly evolving area but it does provide an insight into what makes the engine so good.
But enough about work, did any of you read the Washington Post today, fascinating article here on what our dutch friends are getting up to.

No sex please we're British

As reported by one of my favorite reads (Shake Well Before Use): A recent study in the UK found that 30% of men and 42.5% of women would consider answering the phone during sex. Even more shocking, 24% of women answered that they would give up sex before their mobile phone.

Crank it up

If you have not seen it yet I recommend you watch Crank, an awesome movie with a great cast.

Super Bowl Ads

In case you need to see them again:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsQn2gdOpos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWvcdO1Sdlk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoApXpIymdE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjuXbYW6KmE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfV07aMeivc

update: Just found this official super bowl ads page

New Personal Low

Damn it was cold this morning, -17F or -22C, never been colder in fact.
Anyway my hair froze again this morning, and there is not much left of it after the hair dresser took me literally when I said I wanted my hair shorter.
A colleague put me onto UJIKO a search engine with rather a cool user experience.
While watching the Super Bowl last night I found the Snickers commercial wonderfully funny and another colleague sent me the link to their site with four varieties of the same commercial, you get to vote for the one you want to appear at the Daytona 500.

Company Name Game

Recently too many cycles have been burned on coming up with a new business unit name and product brand. Instead we should have used this site ;)
http://www.whatbrandareyou.com/
I tried it and it came up with: bivium

It must be Friday

I thought it would be interesting to see if I could see any trends in email volume since I started my new job. apprently the singal to noise ratio is too high at this point to see.

Crazy Ranting Floridian

Whilst working today I discovered a .us sub domain that did not fit the mould of the other quasi governmental ones, http://takebackflorida.us/id26.html
I could not help myself reading this, this is what makes the US great, people like this truly exist and believe in themselves.

Irreverent Apple Ads

Continuing the theme from yesterday of Apple Ads here are a bunch of irreverent images poking fun at the Apple "i" craze.

Lawyering up the belly pork

I found this ridiculous attack on a very well meaning lady today.

While reading it I found this great series of icons to use for building links to social feedback sites.

I haven't set them up to be useful yet but I will get to that eventually.

National Gorilla Suit Day

I don't know if you noticed (I certainly didn't) that yesterday was national gorilla suit day, apparently this tradition was started by a now deceased Mad comic cartoonist.

Interesting competition

Google has made two recent announcements about real time market data becoming available through their platforms, one with NASDAQ and another with the NYSE.
Given this "opening" up of real time market data presumably it will only be a matter of time before their are trading Mash-ups created, it will be interesting to see how this affects the competitive landscape of the financial analytics industry.

Ice in Maryland

This morning there were icy road conditions in Baltimore County where Emma my daughter lives, they delayed school by two hours which then means her Kindergarten does not operate at all. Here in Minnesota it was -6F when I went to the gym the roads were slightly icy mainly from the remnants of snow flurries last night, when I parked at the office my car slid five feet sideways when I tried to turn too fast on the painted floor, fortunately I was early and the lot was empty so no damage was done.
Note to self; slow down next week.
I can't imagine what it takes to close schools here, it hasnt happened yet since I have been a resident.

Thunder storms and tornado's in FL

Severe thunder storms and tornado's hit central FL over night, so far two deaths have been reported. My folks are staying at Fort De Soto park at the moment, fortunately the storm was north of them and apart from some heavy n they are fine.

Early Spring this year

At least Phil thinks so.....Boston.com news

Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Now I have to start by saying I know nothing... but... doesn't it seem that Boston is over reacting just a little to the ATHF advertising campaign?

Peter Berdovsky, 27, a freelance video artist from Arlington, Massachusetts, and Sean Stevens, 28, of Charlestown, Massachusetts, are facing charges of placing a "hoax device" in a way that results in panic. How about the people that called 911 being placed under arrest for wasting police time?

How does this look like a bomb?

I watched this press conference with the two "suspects" this morning with much amusement - I hope these guys are being paid well for their hard work, they certainly are generating lots of publicity for the campaign.




Wikipedia reference for those that care enough

Apple ads

whilst I don't subscribe to the religion these really are very funny:

Awsome product

For us ouotdoor types there is nothing worse than going kayaking and then coming home stinking of wet suit. This new product Hot Jugz is apparntly going to change all that - I think I will go buy one now and see how well it works.....

Australia from above

I found this link to the Microsoft photo competition in Sydney, I cant help wondering how many people decided to do something on the weird side..... I wonder if we will find the images one day on maps.live.com

Pinch Punch

In keeping with my home land, I say "White Rabbit" to you.
In case you think I have lost my mind check these out:
Rabbit Rabbit
White Rabbit
An an aside I subscribe to the white rabbit school not the rabbit rabbit one, for what its worth....

Microsoft 1 Google 0

Came across a rather amusing story blogged by Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land.
Apparently Microsoft got permission to photograph Sydney on "Australian Day" and Google was turned down, it was not really that surprising when you read that Google wanted to do it at 600M altitude......