Monday, September 02, 2002

100 THINGS ABOUT DEWAYNE MIKKELSON 1. I was born in San Diego, California. 2. I am a Capricorn. 3. I would like to visit Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Italy and China. 4. My favorite place is Edinburgh, Scotland. 5. I am addicted to the internet. 6. My favorite TV show is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 7. I am a dog person. 8. During one week on a Caribbean cruise I slept a total of 24 hours. 9. I have gone 72 hours without sleep, on purpose. 10.I have driven a car 26 hours straight. 11.I love road trips. 12.I love History. 13.I never have enough time to read. 14.I hope to live to 135. 15.I am a passionate person. 16.People tell me that I have an honest face. 17.I usually read Science Fiction/Fantasy for entertainment. 18.I prefer brunettes. 19.I have been a bookworm, a pencil neck geek, a jock and a nerd. 20.I am a lifelong learner. 21.I prefer to learn outside of the classroom. 22.I hate to be late to an appointment. 23.I like to eat out for breakfast on the weekend. 24.I like to listen to classical music and read the Sunday paper. 25.I consider myself to be a diletante in my learning preferences. 26.I cannot stand to do the same thing over and over again at a job. 27.I love to be challenged in life and on the job. 28.I own a house and need to sell it NOW!! 29.I have lost count of how many jobs I have had. 30.I have owned two companies. Still run the consulting company off and on. 31.I love New York, Boston, Charleston, SC and Savannah, GA. 32.I am trying to Write in my Weblog. 33.I wish I was going to high school in 2002 because of the curriculum. 34.I am engaged to the love of my life. 35.I discovered emotions when I turned 44. 36.I like to backpack. 37.I like to Snowboard. 38.I prefer amateur sports to professional sports. 39.My favorite books are J.R.R. Tolkiens The Lord of the Rings trilogy. 40.I like to hang out with smart people. 41.I hate idle chitchat.. 42.I consider myself to be an open minded person. 43.Favorite breakfast restaurant The Original Pancake House. 44.I am currently searching for my third career. First Career: Electronics Second Career: IT 45.My favorite season is Spring. 46.I enjoy Indian Food. 47.I consider myself a caregiver. 48.My Chinese Zodiac sign is the Rooster. 49.I consider myself to be spiritual but have not found an organized religion I can deal with. 50.I would like to find out that Magic actually exists. 51.I would like to find out that Time Travel is possible. 52.Once a topic catches my interest I can be very focused for extended periods of time. 53.I am a morning person. 54.I enjoy afternoon naps on the weekends during the summer. 55.I have lived on the West Coast(California) and the East Coast(Carolina's). 56.I would love to work for 6 months and travel/learn for the other 6 months. 57.We have a new Australian Shepherd named Rocky. 58.We are hoping to learn Agility with Rocky. 59.My favorite word is: Love 60.In High School I could not get enough Water Skiing. 61.I graduated from Sunnyvale High School in Sunnyvale, Ca. 62.In fifth grade I was Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. 63.I like to explore new places. 64.I prefer to travel in a circle rather than return on the road/path I used going out. 65.I studied TaeKwonDo in Milpitas, California and progressed to a Purple belt. 66.I love Sweet Tea. 67.Sushi with Sake is one of my favorite food groups. 68.I love to go to Gigantic Libraries and spend all day. 69.I love to go to Huge bookstores and spend all day. 70.I loved the Lovure in Paris but the people I went with did not let me spend enough time there. 71.I love to visit Castles in Europe. 72.I strive toward perfection, hoping that I can get somewhere close someday. 73.I hate to make mistakes that affect other people adversely. 74.I like to shop. 75.The longest I have been unemployed is 3 months and counting. 76.I learned how to save last year and promptly had to give it to my ex-wife in the divorce this year. 77.I had a Chocolate Lab called Lily that I adored but lost her to the ex-wife too. 78.I love antique and fantasy maps. 79.I like Survivor. 80.I like Jeopardy except when it conflicts with Buffy. 81.I like good Champagne. 82.I love to use Beta Software. 83.I am really good at finding/causing bugs in Software. I like QA work. 84.I like good beer. Carolina Blonde is a good local brew. 85.I am 5' 10' tall and 195 lbs. 86.I am balding and I hate it. 87.Home Alone makes me ROTFL every time I see it. 88.I would love to live in a time where Money did not exist like in Star Trek Next Generation. 89.I've never broken a bone. 90.I would love to be a detective if it paid any real money. 91.I love blueprints. 92.I like Faith Hill. 93.I like Garth Brooks. 94.My Favorite Band is Led Zeppelin. 95.I like all kinds of music. 96.I like to go to plays. 97.I like movies at home or at theaters. 98.I like to share what I know about computers with other people. 99.I wanted to be an architect when I was younger. 100. This was a ton of fun but it took me longer than 1 hour. 8:20:33 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

The Intranet as Living Community. James provides a quick summary of, and pointers to, a well written strategic white paper on intranet design. [Blunt Force Trauma] 2:35:21 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Computer Folkore. Computer Folkore Saturday I attended the Con José panel on "Computer Folklore: Tales from the Geekside," featuring Eric Raymond, Chris Garcia, Tom Galloway, Brett Glass, and Corey Cole. Aside from a brief discussion of the first chain letter (an MIT student did it!) it wasn't what I'd expected, though that's OK. There are some good sources here, and even here. Computer folkore is, by the way, a genuine folkloric academic study, despite much of the humor involved. The panel was well attended, and amusing, but I'd guess about a half hour was spent in geek nostalgia, in the form of "my hardware is older than yours." The other version of this (and the two are often combined) is "my hardware is faster/more powerful/better than yours." This gives me the perfect opportunity to post the ultimate riposte to both debates, gleaned from UseNet, and as far as I know first posted by Christopher Lishka in May 1993 to both rec.humor.funny and comp.sys.mac.???. Thanks Christopher, wherever you are. Come on people: you are all missing the most obvious upgrade path to the most powerful and satisfying computer of all. The upgrade path goes: Pocket calculator Commodore Pet / Apple II / TRS 80 / Commodore 64 / Timex Sinclair (Choose any of the above) IBM PC Apple Macintosh Fastest workstation of the time (HP, DEC, IBM, SGI: your choice) Minicomputer (HP, DEC, IBM, SGI: your choice) Mainframe (IBM, Cray, DEC: your choice) [Instructional Technology] 2:27:51 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Live Journal SIG. Live Journal SIG Friday morning at ConJosé I attended a Special Interest Group set up by a few Live Journal users. I've looked at Live Journal before; of all the various web log systems it seems to be the one most focused on community in the sense of creating communities via links to like minded Live Journal members, or "friends," as Live Journal would have it, and a comment system. Live Journal struck me as a good system to introduce undergraduates in introductory composition classes to writing for the web as a way of getting them to write and to think critically about writing as well as just becoming comfortable with writing as a habit. Most, but not all, of the Live Journal users are creating journal-like pages. Live Journal is a free service, though they encourage users to support Live Journal ($25.00/year) by offering extra services. It's open source as well. There are even a variety of clients, for pretty much any OS you'd want, to use in posting if you don't want to rely on a browser and web-based posting. The FAQs are here. It includes the usual structural devices, like chononological based postings, with the newest at the top, a calendar for access to the automatic archives, and various ways of editing and deleting and controlling access to the journal. Listening to the others at the SIG, I was particularly struck by a few observations. These are my observations, and in no way reflect on those Live Journalists referred to, or linked to. I'm sure I'm getting things entirely wrong in some way. They were both helpful and patient in answering my questions, so I expect some kind soul will straighten me out. In particular, The_ogre, Firecat, Wrapper, Isabeau, Rmjwell, Rowanf. In no particular order then, here are some random observations about Live Journal, based on my admittedly small sampling from the SIG, and some browsing: The role of the communities, and interaction between members of a community, is seen as a positive feature of Live Journal. Users are particularly aware of the public versus private, and Live Journal software supports that distinction, allowing one to post to a public journal, or to a private one, or to a "communal" one. Most users do in fact use the service to create actualjournals about their daily lives and thoughts. Several spoke about using Live Journal as a way of creating reminders, either short term (groceries to buy) or long terms (events, thoughts and memories to be recorded now for later recall). I think, more than any of the other web log like systems I've seen, Live Journal lends itself to the commonplace book. There are also some obvious ways one could easily and useful use Live Journal as community K-logs or Knowledge logs. A surprising number of those at the SIG compared Live Journal to UseNet. This may have been because the group was self-selected based on an interest in SF, one of the largest UseNet communities. [Instructional Technology] 11:00:23 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Groove strategy disussion. Joel Spolsky's worthreading essay on platforms generated a lot of discussion during the weekend. I'm still reading and digesting all of it. Some interesting threads on Joel's forum discussing the essay. On their weblogs Brian Jepson, Justin Rudd and Krzysztof Kowalczyk agree with Joel and are expressing strong doubts regarding Groove's strategy. Dave Winer points to an essay from 1996 explaining why Groove can't bet exclusively on being a platform and Alexis Smirnov writes : So do I think Joel's article is wrong? No, it simply fails to capture the real issue with Groove - there are two different views of "Groove Platform". One is being offered by Groove Inc. and another is wanted by ISVs. Groove Inc. defines the platform as Runtime plus Transceiver. Want to build on the Groove Platform - write a Groove Tool. Most ISVs define the platform as Runtime. Period. Most of the people thinking of integrating Groove's collaboration capabilities only want the Runtime. This is why Joel's analysis of cost/benefit of integrating Groove with CityDesk is right on the money - it illustrates the Groove/ISV gap. [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog] 10:58:24 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

WinAmp 3. I've seen some people bitching about new WinAmp 3 but I like it. Free-form skins are awesome. Check out Timepiece skin. I'll probably settle for something clean and functional in the end but it's so much fun checking out all those crazy, beautifully designed skins. WinAmp might not look like much but in my opinion it teaches a few important lesson in software developement and marketing. WinAmp is a platform. WinAmp isn't just a music (and now video) player, it's a platform. All the user-contributed skins, visualization components help WinAmp fend off competition, even from those who can include competing player in the OS itself. WinAmp is not only useful, it's also desireable. When designing stuff, including software, the first step is to design something that is useful and functional. But when your competition's stuff is as functional as yours, you have to do better, you have to compete in desirability. Apple is a good example: their iPod doesn't play mp3 better than other players but it does look cool and that allows Apple charge for it more. WinAmp also does a lot of things that don't contribute much to functionality but a lot to desirability: tasteful splash screen with a reference to a recent boxoffice hit, visualizations, skins, animated "about box". WinAmp is masterfully marketed. Take a careful look at WinAmp website. It has it's own, distinctive voice. You won't find there cliched market speak ("our product is leading blah, blah..."). Web site is well designed (it's both tasteful and functional). It has forums so that people can talk about their products. It has plenty of documentation. While this exact style might not be appropriate for every software company, many could learn a lot from guys at WinAmp. Watch and learn. [Krzysztof Kowalczyk's Weblog] 10:57:32 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Why the Tivo / Replay Lawsuits are Futile. Why the Tivo / Replay Lawsuits are Futile This is an article about how to build your own Tivo using Linux.  Think about that for a minute -- build your own digital VCR with off the shelf components.  There simply isn't any way to stop this type of technology from becoming utterly commonplace.  If people want to skip commercials, they will. http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2002/08/29/howardwen.html [The FuzzyBlog!] 10:15:20 AM    trackback []     Articulate []