Monthly Archives: January 2024

State of the Onion

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Tonight’s the night.  Gore Vidal’s speech will probably be better.  The Democrats’ rebuttal will undoubtedly suck.  We’ll have news about the eastern front in Iran, posturing regarding taking down North Korea, a little fear mongering on the public health issues related to bird flu — but no talk of our germ warfare initiatives releasing HN51 into the Persian poultry flocks of Abadan, or the shot across the bow we sent the Brits on the same issue… kind of reminds me of the good old anthrax days when W. was pumping poison into the halls of congress.

Hey.  A lot of this is inferential.

Anybody care to sepnd time in an IRC space tonight?  Sort of a share the horror time?  Tamar?  You still up for it?

Euan Semple

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Euan has left the BBC.  This news came in the same week that the Financial Times published a nice feature highlighting his good work there.  That article ends with the tag line,

“I’m solving problems most companies don’t even know they have.”

There’s a story behind this separation and I hope Euan can bring himself to share the gory details.  What must it have been like to head up knowledge management for the Beeb, eschewing the seven figure solutions for low cost blog and wiki alternatives?  What must the big guns in IT have thought, the people who measure their success by how much their budget increases annually?  What will happen to the 3,500 or so people who are served by the KM solutions Euan has shepherded during his tenure?

Update:  Euan corrects the material I referenced from the Financial Times.  He says,

… ironically given it was the FT, the figures were
incorrect! There are actually 13,000 staff using our forums, 1800 using
our wikis and 200 or so blogging. The 3,500 refers to a mailing list
and not to the Adobe interest group as the article suggests.

Here at Sandhill, a somewhat smaller operation than the Beeb, we were prepared to be wickedly impressed by a program with an impact on as many as three thousand users.  To draw over 13,000 people directly into internal corporate conversation is monumental.  Congratulations Euan!

Bubble Wrap redux

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That previous post was more of a draft.  Jeneane explains the Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day thing better than I could with all my lame hiphop posturing.  It’s real and while today is almost over, the contest is just beginning.

You know that you love bubble wrap, so…

Think about it.  Foam popcorn, newspaper stuffing, or crisp poppable little percussion shots of air tightly bound in plastic paradiddle goodness?  What pops your bubble?

Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day!

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Bubble Wrap!
Bubba rap…

My name is Frank and I ain so Stank
Gonna win that nano or you can lick my decals
Get me a share of the Big Bubble
yeah

There’s a dubya dubya dubya on a t-shirt jus’ my size
and a book of bloggers rappin’ that I sure can’t criticize
There a gnomie contribution and a free domain infusion
a technical delusion
here on bubble wrap appree-she-ay-shun day

And just so there’s no confusion I am saving my best stuff for the contest entry, lots of rap shuk-shooka-shooka microphone percussion and some fabulous photos that will assure me a place in BubbleShare’s Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day histoire.

But don’t be scared off.  There’s still some fabulous second and third prizes to compete for.

Tom Shugart Rides Again!

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There’s fresh insight at INSITEVIEW.  Tom’s back from the almost dead.  We almost lost him and never knew!  There’s something way not fair about a healthy eater and exerciser like Tom suffering from clogged arteries when a jerk like Winston Churchill could smoke those stogies, suck down quarts of booze, and eat beef all day and walk right through it — albeit in a stuporous somewhat jingoistic haze.

(Disclaimer – I’m glad Winnie beat the Nazis back from the shores of England, and I’m glad that he was such an inspirational leader for those times, but it right pisses me off that he joined with Harry and the corporateers to visit the mindset of the cold war on our generation.  "Duck and cover."  What an asshole.)

Inside Dervala Hanley’s Head

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Every so often, I check this site to see if I’ve written anything.
It’s mostly while working on some presentation where the client
strategy is stuck in my craw and no project manager has stopped at my
desk to perform the Heimlich Manoeuvre. I’ll huff and sigh, get coffee,
check my mail—both Outlook and pigeon hole—tweak a header style, kneel
before the kitchen altar and eat five two-bite brownies. Lapse into
severe inert reverie. Move a sentence, delete it, stare and retype it.
Eventually—all right, in minutes—I’ll alt-tab over to Firefox, and
click the vain little Dervala.net bookmark, just to see if I’ve posted.

For months now, the same entry has greeted and disappointed me. Why
hasn’t she written, this other me who shares my life but lives
upstairs? I deserve some distraction, and she affords me none. Only the
Propecia spammers add to a conversation that trailed off in November, a
Caltrain rant on the way to…where, anyway? She doesn’t even say.

If I subscribed to the feed, and if I paid attention to my subscriptions, I’d miss the delight of returning to an old haunt and discovering the treasure that has been laid in there.

Now this is funny.  I opened up Bloglines to see what cruft had accrued there, to make a point about the hopelessness of following feeds, and there is a post from Betsy scooping me on my re-discovery of content at Dervala’s.  What makes it funnier is that I snarked at Betsy just the other day in my own comments section.  Said something like "Do people really use aggregators?"  I don’t, you see.  I can’t drink from the firehose like Scoble, so it’s hopeless to stack up all these subscriptions that will just build up unviewed messages.  But it was ironic to see that Betsy got to Ms. Hanley’s place today ahead of me, and neither of us has visited there recently enough to see all the wonderful words she’s laid down this month.

Double irony:  I clicked through to Funny Ha ha and found that the post re. Derv is from a few days ago, but Bloglines tells me it was posted today.  And Bloglines doesn’t feed me Betsy’s posts that were posted since then.  In fairness, it does give me a little [!] that means there’s a feed error, but good god, who wants to learn all the ins and outs of that nonsense when Firefox will get you where you want to go?