Nosce te ipsum

InfoWorld's Chad Dickerson has an article from November 19th entitled The top 20 IT mistakes to avoid that has some interesting points. My personal favorites included:

2. Dismissing open source -- or bowing before it

5. Failing to secure a fluid perimeter

7. Promoting the wrong people

11. Developing Web apps for IE only

16. Clinging to prior solutions

18. Underestimating PHP

20. Being a slave to vendor marketing strategies

Unfortunately, the folks who really need to read this info are sadly the ones who never will. Long live the PHB!

A little guilty pleasure indulgence going on this morning. I was watching that VH1 show the other night which Dee Snider happened to be narrating. Severely dating myself here but as a child of the 80's, Dee was one of the primary tools that teens had to scare the hell out of your parents with. The look, the hair, the music, the attitude - all fantastically 80's. I remembered hearing last year that Dee had a quasi web-radio show that he made in his home studio and then uploaded to the radio station. Sadly, by the time I learned of it, it had just be yanked from the airwaves and thus left my conscious for another year. After seeing the show, I thought I'd check back at his site and was really surprised to see that Twisted Sister had recently gotten back together to re-record their seminal album - Stay Hungry with considerably less polish and much more grit. Regardless, as a very young teenager, this album really whet my appetite for a whole new genre of music and as corny and campy as they could be at times, I always enjoyed their music. The newly recorded album is called Still Hungry and after the first listen, I really like what they did. Very rarely can a band upstage their original versions but I think they did what they set out to do.

If nothing else, it was a nice surprise to learn about this album and even better to hear it turn out so good. Dee's obviously a really interesting personality, in one breath shocking and outrageous (at least in the 80's) and in another, quite tame and conservative in many of his beliefs and values (family, clean living, etc) which was something I always admired about the guy. I heard him on another radio show last year where he professed that he (greatly paraphrasing here) "felt like a supreme master of a dead art" so it's cool to see they gave it another go. He does seem to keep showing up in the oddest of places - including on cable TV with StrangeLand which was one of those rare movies that was creepy & bizarre enough to totally scare the hell out of me when I saw it.