Messy

The software business is messy. It always has been messy, but lately it's much messier. This might be a good thing for progress, or it might not. It's also murky, right now it's very hard to see which way to go on something, it's almost as if there are too many choices and none of them jump out off the screen at you. Are Microsoft now in a permanently defensive mode? Keeping its nose clean after all that unpleasantness 2-3 years back. It seems like they might be and perhaps this is the root of the problem.

I'll be spending a few days at their HQ in Redmond this week, in one respect it'll be like a geek fantasy, in others it'll be very interesting to find out what exactly they're up to behind those castle walls. And if they actually know themselves. And if they realise just how priviledged they are to have me walking among them for a short while. Ahem.

Planning to hook up with the still-almost-fresh MS inductee, Robert Scoble, for some eats while I'm there. That sounds like it might be fun.

PLUS, whilst I'm over in the states, I'm planning to tell everyone I meet that I know Halley Suitt, just watch her street-cred & stock plummet as a result of that nasty strategy.

Milankovitch Cycles

The act of reading other people's weblogs seems, to me, to be subject to a regular pattern of change in terms of the blogs you read regularly.

I go through phases where I'm drawn to a particular group of blogs more than others. Then those phases pass and I find I'm hovering around another small cluster of blogs, and so the pattern seems to go.

I don't read every blog on my blogroll every day in fact it's probably been weeks or months since I've read some of them. But despite this, I'm sure that I will start reading all of them again, it's only a matter of time. Or orbital trajectory.

My blog's orbit is currently passing through the constellation Winer, en route to the Sessum galaxy where the views of Halley's Comment are fantastic at this time of the year.. In about a month's time, I'll be passing the JOHO nebula, and before long the whole cycle will start over again.

METAPHOR ENDS.

Cool Tip

I found this tip on Chris Sells' blog - it's a very cool idea that should be hard-wired into every e-mail app.

Saving Your Career

Fri, Feb 7, 2003

In response to Never Send An Email In Anger, Lars Bergstrom recommended that I set up a rule that defers sending an email for 1 minute. I set it for 2 minutes under Outlook XP like so:

* Tools->Rules Wizard
* New
* Start From A Blank Rule
* Check messages after sending
* Which condition(s) do you want to check? -> None
* This rule will be applied to every message you send. Is this correct? -> Yes
* What do you want to do with this message? -> defer delivery by a number of minutes
* a number of minutes -> 2
* Finish

And it works like a charm. It's always w/in the first second that I wish I could recall a message, so two minutes should be more than enough. Wahoo!