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This is the main blog for Mike McBride Online, where you can keep track of everything I'm in to in one place.
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| Saturday, May 25, 2002
Blogback Ah so I see my point about real-time blogging at conferences being a bad idea has reached Robert Scoble's eyes today. He says: So, your boss doesn't want you to take notes next time he pays you to go to a conference? No, actually, I'm sure my boss does want me to take notes, since he's paying for me to be there and learn something. But I don't think he'd be too pleased when I came back and said, "Well I was trying to blog about what the speaker was saying and my laptop was having some problems with the WiFi connection so I missed a big chunk of the presentation, but I got to meet a lot of really cool people." My boss (aka the one paying for the conference in the first place, which means if you don't get his buy in, you have no $$ from attendees) doesn't really give a rat's ass about the cool people I met, all he wants to know is whether I learned anything there that can be put to use back in the company, thereby giving him his money's worth. Taking notes for myself and writing blog entries for other people's consumption are two entirely different things, Robert. If you want to use your laptop to take notes, fine. But understand that turning those notes into something that your reader can understand and process takes energy and focus that you are, therefore, not giving to the presentation. As boring as the presentations may be, that's the reason my boss agreed to pay for the conference and that's what I better be paying attention to. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 11:24 PM | 0 comments | 
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One test down So I got the .Net framework going, and went and grabbed a copy of Aggie. The program has got some potential. It's lightweight, it's quick, and it puts all of your news onto a browser page, so you can see it all in one fell swoop. However, the font size is too small on that browser for full-length feeds. That is, feeds that include the entire post, like Chris Pirillo's feed, show up as unreadbly small, even with IE tweaked to show the largest font sizes. At least it looks poor on my monitor with a 1024 by 768 setting. The other thing that is a deal killer for me, at least in it's current version, is that some feeds that work perfectly well in my Newzcrawler, simply don't work in Aggie. For example, the feed for Scripting News returns a "invalid XML" message. Other feeds, like Geek's Blog feed just aren't accepted by Aggie at all. My own feed did that last night and then worked fine this afternoon. Again, every one of these feeds works just fine, everytime, in Newzcrawler. I really appreciate the consistency. So, Joe, can you get Aggie to work more consistently? If so, it's definitely got potential as a smaller, quicker way to check news when you're on the move. Not to mention the fact that Newzcrawler is going to a paid version, so they're won't be any updates for me unless I decide to buy it. I doubt I will. I did download OpenOffice and get it installed as well. A quick look impressed me but I haven't really put it through it's paces yet. I intend to try and do some work with it tonight or tomorrow. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 4:07 PM | 0 comments |
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Friday, May 24, 2002
Thoughts for the weekend: The concept of realtime blogging at conferences is a bad idea. Not only is it rude to the speakers, because you're obviously not paying as much attention and thinking about what they are saying, it's a waste of your time and money. Case in point, how many bloggers have written something like "Missed some stuff trying to fix my Wi-Fi connection" during a conference? Think about that for a minute, you missed some of a presentation, that you paid to be at, that has some potentially valuable information, and that the speaker worked damn hard at putting together, all because you had to try and be the first to blog about it! I'd rather learn something and share that later than try and give the first report and have it just be drivel. Which leads me to my second point, I don't recall ever, nor do I ever plan to, pull a posting. First off, I think about what I write before I write it, and then I think about it again after I write it and before I post it. So I don't wind up publishing something that I'm going to regret having out there. Oh I edit and add some things to postings all the time, but I never change the heart of what I'm saying, just the wording sometimes because I don't think it's worded well, or I want to add more information to it. If something I post turns out to be wrong, I'll leave it as proof that I'm humble enough to admit I don't know everything, and I'll correct myself appropriately. It's my opinion that people who are constantly pulling postings simply need to think more before they act. (Or they could think less after they act, which would have the same end result. *L*) This morning I took 440 pounds of old, not-working PC equipment to a scrap metal recycling company. Had I known this would involve driving back to the back of the yard and unloading it myself in amongst the dirt, cranes, and other various debris that collects in a junkyard, I would not have worn my normal work clothes. :) Of course, it was more environmentally friendly to do this than just throw them away, I suppose. (Not to mention it's illegal in Ohio for businesses to dump old PC equipment) Now I've got to figure out where to store the stuff that still works, and sort through all of the extra cables and software we've got laying around here to see what we need to keep around and what we can get rid of. This is becoming my summer project, the thing that will keep me occupied while we go into "summer slowdown mode". The summer I got to upgrade the network and all of the PC's was far more interesting than this one's going to be. So you still wanna be a Network Admin. when you grow up? Buy a car that is easy to load/unload PC equipment in, and a pair of work boots. Because at some point you're going to be moving PC's or servers and you'll need them. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 3:27 PM | 0 comments |
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Three day weekend! Yes, we here in the US have the three day Memorial Day weekend coming up, and Angela and I have almost nothing at all planned. That rocks! I know she could use the mental vacation, (I had mine earlier this week in Cincy) and I could use some quality geek time. I downloaded the zip files for OpenOffice and the .Net framework last night so I've got some installing and configuring to do, then some playing with OpenOffice and then a mad search for software that runs on the .Net framework. I'll probably give Aggie a try first and go from there. Anyone know of any good stuff being developed for .Net that I can play with? Or I could wind up just being outside on the front porch drinking beer all weekend. You never really know. :) First thing this morning, the Director of Communications stopped me in the hallway to ask about this digital camera she wants to buy as part of doing some new things with our communications pieces. Since I hadn't had coffee yet, I could only tell her that I'd look. A quick Google search landed me these sites for camera reviews, comparisons, etc. I thought they might help anyone else thinking about getting a digital cam: http://www.dpreview.com/ http://www.imaging-resource.com/DIGCAM01.HTM http://www.dcresource.com/ I've been noticing some weirdness in regards to weblogs.com. BloggerPro is supposed to ping it whenever you publish a new post. I've been reading on the Pro maillist that some folks say that hasn't been happening, etc. So I thought I'd look into it. I posted something last night and then went to weblogs.com to see if the blog would show up in the recently changed list. It didn't after about 5 minutes. So I manually pinged it, and got the "We can only accept a ping every 5 minutes" message. Which means BloggerPro did ping it, it just never showed up. Then about a minute later I manually pinged it again, and this time it told me that it had changed and included it in changes.xml, even though I hadn't changed it from the last time I pinged it. I'm beginning to think this is not a BloggerPro bug, but a weblogs.com bug, or some combination of the two. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 9:09 AM | 0 comments |
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Thursday, May 23, 2002
The real deal Want to know what Hollywood is really up to these days with all of their legislative agendas? Check out Cory Doctorow's piece on the three part Hollywood agenda, and how close they are to putting the pieces into place to achieve it. (Thanks to Doc for the pointer.) Reading today's LangaList. I'm tempted to give OpenOffice a try as an MS Office replacement, except for one thing. The apps I use the most at work is Outlook, which I could find a replacement for I'm sure, but I use Access with my site and at work all the time. OpenOffice doesn't come with a database program like that and I know nothing about MySQL, as far as whether I'd be able to use that as a viable replacement. What do you MySQL users have to say about that? If I like OpenOffice enough would it be possible to lose Office completely and use MySQL or something else for my database needs? Hmm another download for the weekend maybe? :) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 9:41 PM | 0 comments |
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Meanwhile, back at the office today. Yeah I'm back at work today, rather disappointing I must say. I really like being out of the office, forgetting about this place. Doesn't seem like there were any major catastrophes while I was gone, but it's early yet, I'm sure someone will bring me something to make me want to scream and rip their eyes out. :) So, Joe Gregorio left me a comment to the effect that .Net framework is available for 98 and 2000. It's a 20MB download, so even with my cable modem I'm going to have to set aside some time to get that up and running. Perhaps this weekend. Anyone have a direct link to it? Of course I'm not much into the programming so I may have to look and see what the benefits are in terms of using stuff that's been developed as opposed to developing my own. Or maybe I finally learn to do some of my own development? Who knows? Congrats go out to Dane Carlson and wife, who are expecting in Dec. Meryl didn't like the preview release of Netscape 7 just from looking at the screen shot. Oh, in the course of writing this there has already been a couple of things I wanted to scream at someone for, but the biggest one is people I don't know, so I can't scream at them. How cool is it that someone can send a spam out to a mail list, and then allow for all the replies to go out to the same list. Like the spam wasn't enough, now I've got a bunch of "Please remove me" and "Hey how come I'm getting your remove request, quit sending that to me" and "I'm getting them too, it's annoying, stop!" emails to delete. It's enough to make you think that Harvey Danger was right (only stupid people are breeding ) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 8:50 AM | 0 comments |
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Wednesday, May 22, 2002
Interesting Reading Medley I noticed an interesting quote from LWN. So what do you think? In light of the fact that you can use a Sharpie to circumvent copy-protection, when should we expect the RIAA to sue marker companies under the DMCA. It will be interesting to see if this develops any further or if they can admit that the DMCA is bad law! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 10:56 PM | 0 comments |
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What I missed while I was gone: Well first of all, you missed a great show last night, unless you were there. :) Midnight Oil still rocks with the best of them, I have never seen a band (and I've seen a lot of bands!) play with that much passion and intensity. They still play that way, 25 years after their first album came out. Amazing. Thanks to Geek, and others, I found out the CARP recommendations were rejected by the Library of Congress. Excellent! nf0 points us to yet another news aggregator, Aggie. I can't add this one to the comparison article because it requires .Net framework, which I do not have. (I still use 98 at home and 2000 on my laptop..) Anyone want to volunteer to test it and report back? Well, after the late night last night, I scheduled today for an off day, so I'm at home, doing some writing for my other site. It's a nice break, and it's very nice to find some time to do some real soul-searching in my writing. I don't spend enough time with that. You can read my review of not only the show last night, but my personal feelings about being back in Bogart's 13 years after the first trip there to see Midnight Oil and the rambling personal thoughts that late-night road trips can bring up here. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 1:17 PM | 0 comments |
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Tuesday, May 21, 2002
Today's news MSN Launches AOL Defection Tool -the funny thing here is that it takes something like this to get you out of all the proprietary AOL stuff when you're an AOLer. Of course you're trading it for the proprietary MSN stuff, so which is worse? Give me ISP's without any proprietary software! You can switch those at will without all of these problems! (via Evan) "Copy-proof" CDs cracked with 99-cent marker pen -if true, this is hysterical! Of course it goes right along with the news over the last few weeks about smart cards being hacked, and biometric devices being fooled using gummy bears, and facial recognition falling flat in Orlando because of the lighting in the airport. There is no technology out there that is going to be foolproof. So how about trying some original ideas instead of treating everyone like a criminal? Doc was sort of all over the map yesterday. Lots of good stuff, but since I'm only working half a day today, and have some things to get done, I don't have time to delve into all of it. This will serve as my reminder to look more closely at it tomorrow. :) I'm off to Cincinnati this afternoon for the Midnight Oil show at Bogart's tonight. You all be good while I'm gone! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 8:56 AM | 0 comments |
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Monday, May 20, 2002
Migraine inducing Things like this are why I think IT people consume more aspirin and migraine medicine than the average person. It's probably why we cuss more too! I wonder though, now that my educational efforts are apparently doing more harm than good, should I just stop? No more virus warnings no hoax warnings, just leave them all to their own devices? Oh there's a scary thought! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 3:57 PM | 0 comments |
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How bad is it? I had another post written up here about work today, but then I realized that some of the information in it hadn't been made public knowledge yet. While no one I work with reads this blog, outside of my wife, and I don't give out the name of the place I work, there is still a risk that I'd get in trouble for saying critical things about the management team. So rather than specific criticism let me just say that if you have an internet connection sitting on your desk everyday, there's no excuse for not researching claims made by potential vendors. It took me all of about 5 minutes to refute a claim being made, with one simple Google search. Now whether or not anyone in management bothers to do the same, well, it'll be interesting to see that. They didn't the last time this happened and have been saddled with a vendor contract that isn't bringing in anything near what we were "promised". Do you think they've learned their lesson? One other note, I hate editing myself. I hate that I work for a place where I have to play politics and worry about what I say and who reads it. I hate that I work for a place that won't let it's workers communicate directly with it's customers without going through the proper "channels", and I hate that our customers or potential customers don't even know what we do because they can't cut through the public relations BS, which is the only thing they hear from us. (Yeah, I have been reading Gonzo Marketing *L*) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 10:41 AM | 0 comments |
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