Author: Peter

Mu hu hu ha ha ha haaaa!

Who knows what sort of perverted piracy and puerile poopdecking is perpetually perpetrated on the high seas? The Boneyard Man do!

Ladies and gentlemen, once again the Natural Broadcasting Company brings you the Boneyard Man Holiday Spectacular, tonight at 8pm at the London Music Club. I’ve a nagging suspicion the series may be nearing its end, which is disappointing if true; Ol’ No-Eyes and the rest of the regular boneheads have always been a lot of fun, especially when they’ve gone up against… fascists! (organ chord)

Something that reinforces my suspicion is the announcement of The Boneyard Man Anthology (which I’m going to order tonight):

THE BONEYARD MAN ANTHOLOGY is the culmination of eight years of The Natural Broadcasting Company’s forays into the dark and seedy Manhattan underworld of the Thirties and Forties. Rounding off the collection is The Vault, a collection of filler bits, links, one-shots and miscellaneous trivialities. Tracy Clue Girl Detective, The Squirt And Honky Mysteries, Two-Minute Tangles featuring The Black Spot, Semi-Emergency Room, Hudson Falls, Captain Speed and other flashes-in-the-pan have found their way into the set.

It comes with liner notes and an episode guide, plus all eighty episodes broadcast between 1998 and 2005. As Jayson McDonald’s email announcement says, THE BONEYARD MAN ANTHOLOGY makes a perfect gift for people who don’t know what they want.

Go go gadget fingers!

Earlier this evening Jimmy listed a bunch of non-search Google-icious things that he uses. For various reasons (including temperament) I don’t use most of them:

  • Analytics. Tried it, didn’t like it. Because this site is hosted on DreamHost (sign up with that link and get 25% off; I also get a kickback), I get full logs that I can parse with whatever tool I like (currently Analog and Webalizer) so it’s no big loss.
  • Blogger. As it says down at the bottom of the page, Petroglyphs is powered by WordPress. I do have an account, but it’s only so I can comment on blogs that require it.
  • Gmail. All my mail goes through DreamHost, on my own domain, so I can do with it as I wish. As with Blogger, I do have an account; in this case it’s a side effect of using Talk to communicate with my sister and brother. (An interesting fact is that despite having never used Gmail for any mail of any sort—no personal mail, no website signups, no mailing lists—and never allowing it to be advertised or added to things like user directories, it’s full of spam! The account name isn’t something easily brute-forced, so somehow it’s been shared. Sounds vaguely evil to me….)
  • Desktop. Not available for my platform of choice, and I don’t use any other platform to an extent that it would be at all useful. I’ve played a bit with Beagle but found I used it so little that it was hard to justify the resource hit it took to run.
  • Google Alerts, Google Blog Search Atom feeds, and Google News Search Atom feeds. (Jimmy mentioned Gmail Alerts; these are similar features.) These I do use for a few terms of interest, although I’ve generally found (or created) most of the links that appear on it before it notifies me of them. All three have a frustrating habit of alerting me multiple times of pages that have existed for years. All in all I prefer Technorati.
  • Calendar. My calendar is private; when there are public events I’m planning to attend I add them to my upcoming.org account. Everything work-related is in my PDA, and I wouldn’t publish it to a third party server in the first place.
  • Page Creator. Shudder. Nothing but raw XHTML, CSS and ECMAScript for this boy, all written by hand in Vim or WordPress’s markup view.
  • Personalized Home. My 100+ browser tabs and aggregator are the closest things I have to a home page, and they have most everything I’m interested in.
  • Talk. As noted above, I’ve got an account that I use to chat with my siblings. For most internal discussion at work I use our IRC server, and I use an MSN account (ptui!) for my other personal contacts.
  • Google Maps. I do use this one, although I primarily get to it with a smart keyword in Firefox.
  • Google Video/YouTube. I’m a consumer of both—aren’t we all?—but have no need or desire to create or upload anything.
  • Froogle. Nope.
  • Docs and Spreadsheets. Nope. It’s highly unlikely I’ll ever start creating and editing work files on a third-party server, and I use OpenOffice.org for anything personal (which I wouldn’t be posting to a third-party service anyway).
  • AdSense. This site is an ad-free zone, with the exception of a very few personal endorsements like the DreamHost links above. I did have AdSense on What’s That Song for a while, since it was advertising-based, but I think I only ever made a grand total of about fifty cents from it (which I never cashed out) before I killed off updates to the page a few years ago.
  • Google Earth. Used it a couple of times, and it’s sort of cool, but ultimately not of interest.
  • Picasa. I’ve got The GIMP, which does a whole lot more than Picasa, and Gallery, which does everything I need for publishing and sharing my pictures.

You wanna have a catch?

Paul Gorbould posted some additions to TV Land’s The 100 Greatest TV Quotes & Catch Phrases. Some of the entries on the original list are debatable, others are just silly; Paul’s additions are mostly good, although I’d claim that What’s up, doc? isn’t technically a TV catch phrase, since Bugs Bunny and the Looney Tunes were around well before TV appeared.

Anyway, knowing how Matt loves the PopCultRefs and mental exercises, I thought I’d make a bit of a quiz out of them.

  1. Hey hey hey! What comedian provided the voice for Fat Albert?
  2. Hi, I’m Larry, this is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl. In what state was Newhart set?
  3. Norm! What was Norm Peterson’s wife’s name?
  4. We are two wild and crazy guys! From what country did brothers George and Yortuk Festrunk hail?
  5. Survey says… Hogaaaaaan! What’s the common factor between those two quotes?
  6. I love it when a plan comes together. What inside PopCultRef appeared in the opening credits of The A-Team?
  7. De plane! De plane! In what James Bond movie did Hervé Villechaize play the villain’s henchman?
  8. D’oh! How is Homer’s ubiquitous word written in Simpsons scripts and episode titles?
  9. Aaay! What phrase is used to describe the point where a once-loved television show goes terribly, horribly wrong for good?
  10. Sock it to me! What U.S. presidential candidate phrased Laugh-In‘s running gag line in the form of a question?

That’s it. Enjoy!

Okay, okay, a bonus question since you’ve been good: name the star of the movie that this post’s title comes from.

There’s no team in I

Although I didn’t really know it at the time, I’ve long been a proponent of agile methods at work. Which is why it’s ironic that, now we’ve started actually doing agile development, my role in the company (thank you Dr. Laurence J. Peter) basically prevents me from having anything to do with it.

To fill that gap, I’ve been reading agile blogs, and listening to (and occasionally transcribing or summarizing) agile podcasts. Although agile is very much about working with a team, I’m trying to use its team-based strategies to manage my own work… although without a defined customer, a prioritized task backlog looks an awful lot like a to-do list. I go to standups and medium-level meetings about the challenges people face trying to implement agile in the company. And I’ve taken to reading books like Influence Without Authority, since I have none of either.

I think the correct term is glutton for punishment.

Thank you Firefox!

Just as I was finishing the last sentence of the previous post, my computer shut down. There was no warning, no time to process that it was happening, it just… went off.

I was already mentally composing the short I had written up a cure for cancer but my stupid computer ate it and now I can’t remember it note—because naturally I hadn’t saved an intermediate copy, despite being a geek who knows full well that this sort of thing happens all the time at the worst possible moment—but I remembered that Firefox 2.0 saves the last browser session in case of crashes. Hoping that didn’t just mean opens the last bunch of tabs, I started it up… and, as you can tell from this post’s title, it was all there. Every last character. Huzzah!

Now if I could just figure out why the SATA drive I installed a few months ago has been causing this to happen at least once a week….

Eep! It’s a work post!

One of the most common complaints I hear at work these days is that it’s too hard to find information, particularly on our relatively new wiki. I see this as a combination of several issues:

  • We treat the wiki as a bunch of individual, unrelated documents instead of a web of complementary information. A coworker recently set out to map the structure of our wiki; I haven’t heard back, but I’m fairly certain his graph will look more like a bicycle wheel than a spiderweb.
  • We don’t use the wiki as a wiki. The idea of a WikiWord seems foreign; many people actively override the automatic linking given to CamelCased words because they don’t like to see little question marks on pages that haven’t been created. And I can’t count the number of times I’ve gone to a page and found nothing but a bunch of attached Word documents; worse, they’re often just multiple revisions of the same file; worse still, the documents are invariably nothing more than a paragraph or two of text, which could have been put directly into the wiki in the first place! (This happens with email too, and manifests itself in our source control system.)
  • We use the wiki as a dumping ground, and try to force it to do things it was never designed to do. Got a status report that’s a snapshot of a webpage? Cut-and-paste it onto the wiki, preferably on a new page so it’ll be impossible to link to the newest version. Need to parse an XML file, look up some values in a database and make the results into a PNG file? Write it as a wiki page!
  • We don’t have the WikiNature. If WikiNature is typing in a bunch of book titles, coming back a day later, and finding them turned into birds in the Amazon, WorkNature so far is typing in a bunch of book titles, coming back a day later, finding the same book titles, then never coming back. I’ve tried to create some artificial “hub” pages, and to add context where I think it’s useful or relevant, but it seems to be a losing battle.

I’m sure Matt is reading this and chuckling to himself (or tearing out his hair) thinking about how this sounds like our early experiences with adopting agile development practices, and I don’t deny seeing certain parallels myself. (Some of those are in my reaction to how I see things being done versus how I think they should be; I think it was Mike L. at work who coined the term irrational idealist, and that certainly fits the bill.) Several solutions have been proposed, including adding a search engine (marginally successful due to the lack of interconnectedness noted above), hiring a librarian (perceived as a waste of resources), and—my favourite—education (scuttled due to lack of interest in mundane topics). In the end, it’s going to be up to the company’s employees—my coworkers—to work together as a team to start making the wiki work for us.

I just hope that happens sooner than later, before our several thousand pages become several hundred thousand.