My buddy P.J. now has his Ph.D. in Engineering Management!

Some unnoticed time ago, I hopped up over 300 feeds aggregated.

I am afeared.

Om Malik notes that there’s much speculation about about the merging of Sirius and XM Radio … and no firm denials.

That would be interesting. I’m not sure how I like having one monolithic satellite radio company, as I worry about lack of competition driving the prices up. The hardware prices continue to drop for basic equipment as luxury equipment [portable units, HD-based units, component-quality units] hits the market, which make me think that it’ll go the way of cell phone pricing … which could be pricey. XM’s $10/mo price point is just right for me right now—as a car-only listener [damn north-facing apartment!], the service wouldn’t be worth it to me at a much higher rate.

[HT to B2blog.]

Bits and pieces from a conversation with Josh. We were talking about sports journalists, but then got off on broadcast media in general:

[25-January-2005 @ 16:09] G: Being on air is a narcotic, man.
[25-January-2005 @ 16:09] G: I’ve done it myself.
[25-January-2005 @ 16:09] J: No doubt — and you don’t get on air with balanced opinions!
[25-January-2005 @ 16:10] G: And nuance? As Kerry learned, nuance is lost in the soundbite.
[25-January-2005 @ 16:11] J: Exactly
[25-January-2005 @ 16:11] G: You can get your point out, but you have to do it over the right medium. Most of us want to be fed the soundbite because we 1) have shit to do and 2) are lazy.

I think that, these days, you have to craft the message to the medium. Wonder why I segregate my Weblogs? Pretty simple—I see them as different exchange media. [Not that any of them are really good, but they make me happy, so yeah.]

I think that understanding this is important for both content producers and consumers. You’ve got to remember that, when you’re giving or receiving the soundbite, it is what it is—a soundbite! If you forget the context, you can really go off on a tangent.

Not that I’ve ever gone off on a tangent in my life.

Now that I’m done pouting over a loss, I’m working on moving on with life. One thing that I’ve been putting off ever since I moved to Building 5 last year is a good re-organization of my office. [You'll note, if you read the linked entry, that I professed a desire to be more anal-retentive about my stuff. I haven't been. I've been burned again and again. Now, to take steps ...]

One of the steps that I’m taking at the moment is creating a 43-folder “tickler file” setup in my office. Yes, I’m slowly implementing techniques from David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

Man, I think Allen has a conspiracy with the file folder manufacturers of the world. This is one heck of a lot of folders+labels to mess with!

I will take photos and post them when my setup’s complete.

Am I the only one who looks at how some people Weblog and say, “Man, I wish that I could offer up a re-write of their links?” An example of bad linking practices for you from the business2blog (hereinafter called “the B2blog”):

There’s a strong discussion going on over at PVRBlog on what’s wrong with TiVo. Such discussions go on all the time, but this one is better than most because several of the commentators get right down to specifics.

That quote is exact as of the time of this writing, down to the fact that the link encompasses the spaces surrounding “PVRBlog”.

Here’s my two big beefs:

1. The text to give the permalink to the discussion shouldn’t be PVRBlog but “strong discussion”. Why? I look at it this way: I want the link to be self-descriptive. Notice in my first paragraph in this entry that the phrase “example of bad linking practices” is pointed at the permalink of the entry I’m bitching about. That points the bitchiness directly at the entry that sucks, and doesn’t point it at the B2blog itself. Now, mind you, my Christian ethos of “Hate the sin, love the sinner,” may have some overlap here, but I look at it like this: maybe the B2blog will get better at this kind of stuff. I don’t want to point “example of bad linking practices” at B2blog’s home page if, three months from now, they’re using good linking practices.
2. I like to link the title of sites. Again, if you’ll look back to my first paragraph, I use a secondary link in there to point to the B2blog. Why? That link is self-descriptive: it’s a link to the B2blog, pointing at their homepage.

Now, mind you, you can probably find examples of bad linking practices back in my history. I’ve only improved because I’ve had this kind of things shown to me as a problem in the past.

And I rail about this stuff because bitching about it relaxes me. I heart Business 2.0; I was a charter subscriber and held a subscription for the first few years of the publication. Nowadays, I’m not wanting to do entrepreneurship, so I dropped it. But their Weblog still points me to good stuff, so I read it.

[On the chance that Damon Darlin, the guy who wrote this entry, reads this ... it's intended as constructive criticism, chief. Much love.]

Wow, I can’t begin to tell you how much I despise superlatives.

The rush to declare stuff “the best!” or “the most $x” or whatever has completely made our language devoid of non-superlative comparisons. If I tell you that you’re a good student, or a good person, society has trained you to ask yourself, “Why did Geof use good and not great? Why am I not great?! My mom thinks I’m great!” Anytime that we limit ourselves to acey-deucey, onesie-twosie comparisons, we make binary choices in what is quite clearly a greater-than-binary decision set.

GAAAAAAAHHHHHH!

[This is what I get for running a Web forum. Every other discussion seems to be, "What's the best $X?" "What's the coolest $y?" AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!]

Man, I’m really beginning to think that I missed out by not taking a course on set theory in college. It’s really the only branch of pure mathematics that I think I’d enjoy. [That's because I analogize it to databases, which means it's really not so pure in my head. Dirty, I know.]

Set theory, probability, and statistics.

I’m a geek. I’m okay with that.

[This is where I pull a Jedi mind trick to get John Wilson to give me some good ideas for texts on set theory.]

No contract after all.

It’s a philosophical thing, I guess. I think that we could stand to change philosophies in some regards.

Oh well. We’ll carry on. That, and I get more sleep this month and next. That’ll be nice … right?

Hey Matt! Go ahead and let loose 1.5. I just finished my 1.2.2 upgrade.

GFM

I just got a phishing attempt for household.com. I have a Household-managed credit card, so I did a quick double-take and checked the URL. The phisher has registered household-verify.com. The address is in Tuscon.

I think that Gilby should take a baseball bat and a couple roommates and go kick ass.

Happiness: not having to delete the 500+ comment spam attempts Spam Karma caught for me this afternoon.

Sadness: seeing rmfo-blogs in one of the blacklist piles in IJSM.org’s moderation queue. [I pulled it out; I don't want to see that domain blacklisted!]

RMFO-Bloggers: If you’re trying to comment here and are getting your comments shipped to the bit bucket, please, please, please get a hold of me.

Of course, this goes generally for commenters. Trying to contact me? Try this domain name as an AIM or Y!M contact; just remove the dot.

As cool as rel=”nofollow” is, I think Steven Garrity is right: this diminishes the benefits that you do get from on-topic URLs in reader comments.

I’ve had my readers give me very good links in the past with their comments. This feels like tossing the baby out with the bathwater.

[And yes, Jeff, we did talk about this at lunch, and I was all enthusiastic then, but this was a concern then, too.]

Now, someone will object, “But hey, if you’re posting an entry where you ask a question and someone provides the answer in a comment, you’re going to update your entry, right? I mean, if it’s in the entry, well, the rel=”nofollow” won’t be applicable then, eh?” Yeah, I am. But that’s more work for me. The way it works now is less work.

Do we really want to let the spammers make us throw out the entire passel of kitty litter, rather than just taking their turds out?

A commentor asked when the second season of Denis Leary’s Rescue Me was going to start. I was curious, too, so I did a little looking. A little Googling turned me to the Boston Herald story from today on this very topic: Rescue Me returns to the air on March 8, 2005.

I can’t wait! I got a big tease a couple weeks ago when NBC’s Law & Order had Daniel Sunjata and Andrea Roth in the same episode. [I was quite, quite disappointed when they didn't have Uncle Teddy (Lenny Clarke) as the rich husband of Roth's character!]

Yesterday, we thought we’d hear back on this Very Important Contract that we’ve been working on bidding over the last month by lunchtime.

Yesterday came and went with no word.

Today has come and gone with no word as well.

I agree with my boss when he says, “We have to still be in the game. If we were so far out in left field that they didn’t take us seriously, they would call us up and laugh at us.” And I’m sure that he’s right, given the nature of the thing. [I'm not sure if there's even another bidder.]

But man … waiting on stuff like this will drive you nuts.

It’s a wonder that I have fingernails left at this point.

The other day, two items flew across my aggregator at the same time, and since they’re on a subject near and dear to my heart, I thought I’d point to them and challenge them a bit: Taming your Email and Shooting E-mail Like Bullets.

Let me start by saying that I really feel Jeremy on his concerns about the crappiness that abounds in today’s professional email communication. I think that your business communication says a heck of a lot about you as an employee, and that’s why I’m pretty anal-retentive about it. [Yes, I'm a-r in general, but this is a specific application with a specific purpose.] Some folks take the approach of “Be formal when emailing someone outside the company, and informal when in the company,” because formality is supposed to equate to more time spent. I dispute the efficacy of this approach for three reasons:

1. I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve emailed my boss, and he’s taken that email and forwarded it to a customer or, worse, a NASA representative. If I’ve been informal, my boss catches that and has to spend time re-writing what I had to say into his email, making him take more time. My boss doesn’t have lots of time in his day, and for another thing, email [or, for that matter, computers in general] is just not his bailiwick. Anything that I can do to make him take less time is good.
2. In the same vein as the previous note, there’s nothing more embarrassing to have a “Yo, check this out!” email get forwarded to someone with whom you wouldn’t be so informal. Ya see, not everyone is so careful and accomodating as my boss. [Or me. I usually re-write emails if the previous emails I've gotten from folks aren't up to snuff.]
3. Lastly, I want to bitch about the “formality = more time”. If you spend your time being formal in your communication habits, it really doesn’t take any more time than being informal does. This is why I refuse to stoop, generally, to cool online clichés [lack of capitalization, abbreviated or poor grammar, R for are, U for you, etc.]. If you stay formal all the time, it becomes second-hand.

Something Jeremy pointed out speaks to a huge criticism that I have of Michael’s “only process emails a few times a day” approach in his second point:

Expectations about when I’ll read a message. Honestly, if it’s that important, why are you using e-mail? The first letter in “IM” stands for “Instant.” Try that instead. And, like seemingly everyone else in the workplace, I wear a damned cell phone. When it rings, I generally answer it. The only real exceptions are when I’m in the restroom, when the caller has blocked caller ID, or when I’m in the middle of a meeting that is highly likely to be more important than your call. The more often I’m responding to your e-mail, the less work I’m probably getting done.

Now, I don’t work in a workplace where IM is used, because I don’t work in a white collar situation. I also know that Michael’s “process at specific times” approach is a great one where you’re in a normally-tasked environment, but I work in a rapid response environment. [This is by nature inefficient. I'm aware of this, and after many years, I've come to accept it. Hell, it's allowing me to spend time thinking about this entry while I'm downloading and editing engineering drawings in the background.] I can’t afford not to respond to email because of the way my customers, colleagues, and vendors work.

That’s the problem with theory meeting application—the theories have practical boundaries that their staters rarely make. Oh, if I could only respond to emails first thing in the morning, after lunch, and at the end of my day … it would be so glorious!

Got something you want to post to del.icio.us, like class notes, but don’t have an URL for it? Maciej Ceglowski to the rescue!

I’ve set up a text pasting service for users of del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site. If you want to bookmark something that doesn’t have a ready URL attached to it (a text message, some class notes, a recipe, an email), Pasta will create a permanent web page from your pasted content and redirect your browser to the usual del.icio.us submission form.

The service is text only (no HTML or links) to prevent gaming, but it should be useful for assigning a permanent address to snippets of things with minimal hassle.

Sweetness. It’s fun to see independent developers bootstrap stuff on top of each other.

I declare that Steven Garrity is geeky dude of the week for getting his Linux box to play random sounds based off of data from the filesystem.

Remember when I was kvetching about poor utility performance? I got home last night to the power having gone off for well over an hour and to no phones.

No phone, no Internet.

Anger! Frustration!

I think that what’s happened is:

1. Repairs are being done to our line [I saw repairmen on my way home from work yesterday].
2. The truck roll I saw screwed up our service.

That reminds me of moving into my first apartment, almost six years ago now. The BellSouth folks hooked up our phone line to someone else’s apartment, disconnecting their service in the process. That was an unGodly mess to deal with back then, and if it’s happened to me again, I’m gonna be really, really angry.

If the latter’s happened, BellSouth has definitely lost me as a customer.

Gah.

The Blogosphere as a Tuple Space: I think LMO is on to something here.

There’s an argument to be made for mathematically building structures here, rather than organically …

Bli·vet (BLIH-vet): n. Ten pounds of horseshit in a five-pound bag.

Return to Flight schedules are insane. This one I’m working on now? Easily a blivet.

“Our drop dead date on this is 28 February.”

(pause)

[Incredulous.] “You’re shittin’ me.”

“No, I’m not.”

(pause)

“Wow, okay.”

“What does your February look like?”

“Oh, trust me, boss … I’ve kept it clear, knowing that this was going to likely hit.”

This is one hell of a hole card.

Well, it seems as if Leonard will move out at the end of the month, leaving the place to Randy and me when he’s gone.

I take it that this means that Randy will quickly exit the “bitch room”.

Maybe that means I get an office back, seeing as Randy has a desk and such to use in his bedroom. Of course, we’ll have to swap the desks, seeing as Leonard has my desk in his bedroom right now. Swapping desks would return all my old bedroom furniture to one bedroom, which would be nice in a decorating manner. It would actually give me an honest-to-goodness guest bedroom as well. Mind you, I really would use it as an office, but still.

With Leonard moving, I’m very strongly considering cutting off my home phone and switching from DSL to cable. I’d hoped that the AT&T Wireless-Cingular merger was going to pay dividends in bundling and lower my cell phone bill, but it won’t—at least not what the costs of dropping my home line and DSL and gaining cable modem access would be.

The only thing that would suck is that I’m not 100% sure that home-to-mobile line portability works for folks like me, who already have established cellular service and are dropping their home lines. I get the feeling that BellSouth’s customer service representatives would send me down a gauntlet of “we don’t want to lose you!” sales pitches that would take a good hour to move through. I think my answer’s going to be, “Unless you can make my DSL service stop sucking, suck it!” Connectivity right now is still as crap as it’s been since the beginning of December, long technical support call notwithstanding.

Welcome to another season of life, one where a good friend who’s been a good friend for some time moves on, and the ripples echo all throughout life…

Most of our Boeing work is now complete. We still get tasked with things from time to time, but for most of it, the effort that remains is for paperwork closeout.

This has been a good contract to work on; the follow-on isn’t half-bad, either.

With not much else better to do this weekend—okay, that’s a lie, but I felt like being a bum—I plowed through a ton of Gilmore Girls re-runs. In fact, I’m all the way through Season Three.

I’m still ticked about an ep from the middle of the season, though: “Face-Off”. Yes, leave it to me to be upset at the one episode in the show’s history that has hockey in it.

Questions that Pamie-the-reviewer didn’t ask that I would have:

1. Why are we just now seeing Dean play hockey? Hockey is a sport that requires years of practice to be any good at, and it’s a sport that requires a lot of practice time. Skating on ice is just not something that the human body does that much, and the muscles involved are like no other activity. I remember asking my friend James Kodrowski, who played for UAH’s hockey team, if in-line skating was any good in keeping him in shape during the summer. He laughed and rolled his eyes, which told me all that I needed to know. So, in the three years Dean’s been on the show, we’ve never seen [or heard of] him going to practice or playing a game, but now he’s Stars Hollow High’s starting center? Please. [At least Jared Padalecki could skate credibly.]
2. I know that Kirk has jobs everywhere in town, but he suddenly is the PA guy here at the end of the season? Unlikely. I know, it takes away from Kirk’s mad-cap demeanor, but it would be so much funnier to me if Kirk was this insane, Don Cherry-like, hockey-mad PA guy, trying to fire up the SHS faithful while the extras yawn their way into oblivion. One wonders why Taylor Doose hasn’t made an ordinance about this.
3. Why, after the game when Dean and Rory are talking, is Jared not covered in sweat? Hockey is a sweaty game. Jared has perfect hockey hair. He should be all sweaty and nasty and stringy. The hockey girls like that—they really do. That’s probably the thing that bothered me most about the ep—Padalecki would have been sweaty from the minor amount of skating we saw him do, given that there were probably four or five takes—-so much so that it was almost impossible for me to watch the scene.

I’m joining a support group in the morning, if you’re curious.

Man, these 4:00 p.m. hockey games are just like old times, back when I was doing radio for hockey and would be at the arena by mid-afternoon on Saturday just to have something to do.

I miss radio something fierce, mainly because of the community of people associated with the game—coaches, players, fellow media, SID staff, etc. My job is more rewarding, though.

What won’t be like old times is that I’ll have my Saturday night totally free. The game will let out by 6:30 or so, and the night will still be quite young.