I’ve met several of these meeting creatures, and I bet you have too. Good for introspection as well as a laugh or two.
Tumbly goodness, page
12 
Kottke
says a tumblelog is a quick and dirty stream
of consciousness… with more than just links.
Anarchaia was the first, but there are many copies. And they
have a plan.
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Innovation and experimentation, that is seen as the way to get ahead… For this strategy to work well, companies cannot only be quick to create. They need to be quick to destroy… This is not what happens. Instead, unsuccessful products are left up on the site to rot. Failed experiments become useless distractions, confusing customers who are trying to dig through the options to find what they need and frustrating any customer foolish enough to try them with the obvious lack of support… Old products never die, but they should.
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For Generation X, super careers are out and shared parenting is in. What used to be mistaken for a “slacker” work ethic (by media dominated by workaholic boomers) is actually a generation-defining concern for work-life balance. A report from Catalyst says that professionals in Generation X “place more emphasis on personal goals than on those related to work.” Both parents expect to be closely involved with the children, and full-time childcare is widely rejected as not consistent with the core values of the generation.
— Game plan for peaceful coexistence of kids and career (emphasis mine)
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Most people, to this day, prefer to convey files using email attachments rather than URLs. Over the years I’ve tried, and mostly failed, to explain why and how to use the URL-oriented approach. Programmers do this naturally, because programmers know the difference between transmission of data by value and transmission of data by reference. But almost nobody else does.
— John Udell: Why can’t Johnny download? (emphasis his. via Joe Grossberg)
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I love platypope’s footnotes.
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If Congress got rid of online gambling, how come the biggest online bet is whether voters will get rid of Congress?
— Bruce Reed, via MR
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One of the anagrams for “Edward O’Connor” is “A Cornrowed Don” — I'm thinking this would make a great Halloween costume for me at some point.
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It continues to surprise me how many of the same people who are attracted to the elegant syntax of the Ruby language exhibit a somewhat cavalier attitude towards producing interoperable markup.
— Sam Ruby, on this REXML bug
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Fortress — Sun’s “‘growable language’ with the motto ‘To Do for Fortran What Java Did for C’” — should prove to be quite interesting:
The strategy of the team is to, wherever possible, add a desired feature via a library — and to give library designers substantial control over both the semantics and the syntax of the library. The result is a two-level language design: a set of features to support library designers and a set of features to support application programmers. The former have turned out to be quite obbject-oriented, while the latter is not obbject-oriented at all — something of a surprise to the team.
At this time, the language defines some very cool types in libraries: lists, vectors, sets, maps (with better, more math-like notion), matrices and multidimensional vectors, and units of measurement. The language also offers as a feature mathematical typography, using a wiki-style mark-up to denote Unicode characters beyond what’s available on the ASCII keyboard.
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Wow, this NetHack T-shirt is awesome.
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I love sacha’s idea for a personal board of directors. I think it’s a great idea for, well, just about everybody.
Speaking of Sacha, what would you do with her?
Armed with infectious enthusiasm, charm and smarts, she would be an excellent person to hire once she graduates from UoT… If I was an HR person from Microsoft, IBM, etc. I’d be knocking on Sacha’s door ASAP.
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Bill de hÓra on tag soup parsing (emphasis mine):
The lesson I (re)learned was that using BeautifulSoup, and in the past Universal Feed Parser and Tidy, makes it clear there’s some economic value to be had in giving up on well-formedness in a judicious fashion. …
Engineers have a concept called tolerence. A tolerance specifies the variance in dimensions under which which a part or component can be built and still be acceptable for production use. …
Every major commercial project I have worked on, every one, has had the issue of “data tolerances” being off, where two or more systems did not line up properly. The result invariably is to fix one end, both ends, or insert a compensating layer — what mechanics call a ‘shim’ and what programmers call “middleware”. …
We don’t have the tools or metrics just yet for defining data tolerances as as acceptable practice, but it might happen if enough of these kinds of parse anything libraries come online, that we can come to put a dollar cost on what it is involved in insisting on having perfect markup flying about end to end versus judiciously giving up on syntactic precision. …
If we assume or allow that most data on the web is syntactic junk and will always be syntactic junk,… then there is a good argument that says we’ll need a layer of convertors whose purpose is to parse content no matter what. …
In the semantic web case, I think tag soup parsers are a fundamental layer to that architecture — syntactic convertors that work just like analog-to-digital converters.
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Error-full systems emerge from single-strategy maintenance regimes:
Each maintenance methodology applied singly over time will result in an accumulation of unaddressed errors in some aspect.
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Lawson Tower’s gotten a facelift!
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If we are aggrieved by the rigours of the rat race, the answer is not the clumsy guidance of a paternal state. The answer is simply to stop being a rat.
— Out of position: Against the politics of relative standing, by Will Wilkinson
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Beyond Search is REAP [Retrieve, Extract, Arrange, Present]… Consider the typical information work flow of a professional:
- Retrieve — collect information from a variety of sources
- Extract — extract data, facts, examples
- Arrange — arrange documents and facts for use now or later
- Present — compose information into artifacts of value
Search is just about the retrieve and the -eaping is pretty much left to the person.
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Focusing disproportionately on the wrong risks, screws you because you don’t fix what needs fixing.
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