Boardmad…still mad for it !

Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you’ll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don’t think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn’t solve some fairly immediate need, it’s almost certainly over-designed. And don’t expect people to jump in and help you. That’s not how these things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and then others will say “hey, that almost works for me”, and they’ll get involved in the project.

[Linus Torvalds]

Contrast this with the monumental effort needed to initiate, elaborate and get momentum behind big programmes…and we continually, year after year are surprised that flagship scaled projects have difficulty delivering. The eternal and utterly human triumph of optimism over experience.

Make the right, informed, smart and pragmatic changes to key functional components within your architecture. Publish the API’s to your solution, be utterly transparent to those that would leverage your product and be generous with your time and FR’s…’Field of Dreams’ stuff folks! If you build it – they will come.

Here endeth the lesson…off to watch footie and drink beer. Apparently someone’s scored and the ITV ad break made everyone in UK miss it.

RoFLMAO

Pay your goddamn license fees, get the Beeb funded properly and stop bitching people.

Cross post from Seth Godin’s blog

All geared up for an overnight flight back to the UK last night and sat waiting to get boarded when the plane outside gets closed up and the lights go out…Uh oh ! Sure enough the flight’s been cancelled due to the inbound leg getting struck by lighting as it came in to land…Nice !

So off we trot to the airport hotel and spend the night while some engineers busily fixed the problem (I hope !) and we’re due off just 10hrs or so late.

That’ll teach me for putting my watch back onto UK before I was in the air…I put a whammy on the trip home ! Hardest part’s been not getting back to the family for another day. We explained to my eldest why daddy wasn’t getting home when we said because we’re stuck in the snow and she promptly informed us she’ll come and rescue me and fix my plane…bless !

Just arrived in Terminal5 on my way to Vancouver for a week’s workshops on a new project I’m taking on and other than the odd bit of hastily erected hoarding to shield one’s eye’s from unfinished partitioning the place seems pretty much done to me !

Firstly and of particular interest to me, is it’s internal scale. In a previous life I once bandied aesthetics and the troubles the human condition suffers in the urban fabric with architects and fellow planners. They (the architects) invariably felt this was of secondary importance to the nature of the architectural statement being made. I argued at length and vociferously in opposition :0) I can’t stand Stansted, it’s amuckle great modernist cowshed of a place with fragments of humanity sloshing about at the bottom of this great container like day old coffee dregs, there’s no sense of scale, you feel (and are in every sense) dwarfed my it’s grandeur and that irks me somewhere deep down inside ! Archtectural statements of this scale remind me of the great state rooms of the modernising Qin dynasty of China designed to awe and demand respect and obedience…maybe there’s something of the rebel in me that illicits these feelings

Back to Terminal 5 then…it’s light and airy with a ‘just new out the showroom’ smell to it still ! Good range of shops but definitely verging on the pricey side…I can’t recall the last time I felt compelled at an airport to by a £250 pair of Bulgari cufflinks but there you go…I am Scots ! Facilities that I’ve sampled are excellent (sat in the BA lounge atm!) and overall I’m much impressed and not surpried to find that the British press hysterical ramblings are largely unfounded. Having said that I’ll blog again once I get to Vancouver and I have my luggage in my hand !

More soon

Arrived safely in YVR and after a mahoosive wait in line to get through immigration there’s my luggage checked right through from Edinburgh. So much for all the hysteria !

Apple has recently polished up it’s Safari for Windows browser codebase into some less reminiscent of an alpha-hackfest (much like it was when i tried their original release on a clean vista machine some months back) and have now slipped it in below the radar on many people’s machines as an automatic download/update on iTunes & Quicktime.

However the disclaimer and EULA you have to sign up for is a beaut…

Now click accept on that in good faith…:0)

I’m most definitely not one of those ‘black helicopters’, Areas51 conspiracy theorist-types however the new that some of the worlds largest printer manufacturers have had a document tracking protocol foisted on them by the US staggers me…

This from elReg details the broad-brush picture of the  problem.

And this great bit of work explains the implications of the tracking protocol implemented on these printers…

Just amazing…minority report and those iris scanners are only just around the corner….see if they’re not !

When you’re unhappy about something why are you said to “disgruntled” ?

Shouldn’t you be “gruntled” instead ? In the same way you talk someone out of an idea, you “disabuse” them of the notion.

Hmmm..needs more thought that one I think !

So do you know why the financial markets are currently in turmoil ? Do you understand what a CDO is or how it’s been used in the traditional mortgage market ?

All people see on TV are the soundbite voxpops from the man in the street….”it’s gunna make it harder to pay off your credit cards (sic!) innit ?”

We hear things like ‘Credit crunch’ or ‘Credit squeeze’ but here’s a perfect depiction of how the traditional mortgage lender/borrower relationship was aggressively co-opted by the financial markets and leveraged for gain while the market was booming…of course now it’s gone flat and the financial markets inelastic ability to handle the contraction in the global liquidity pool is all too apparent.

As if further proof were needed…in the annals of history how many men and women have presented themselves half-cut to ‘get ink’ ? And how many go wrong wrong wrong !!!

This is a shame but one can’t help a degree of schadenfreude ! You really ought not to laugh…much ;0)