Monitoring Dalager

Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Wonderchicken

I really hate dropping links here without comments, but at the moment I find myself a bit busy. So I think I’ll just let it stand alone for now. I usually try to return to the good stuff with updates and analogy-linking to tie together the smaller chunks into larger chunks.
Adieu.

[via Classy, provider of golden links]

It looks as if beeing an author isn’t that hard at all.
Now I just need the book title from hell, a few weeks vacation and a publisher.

Check my source of inspiration [from jonas]

Note: this list was obviously compiled by a woman and not me. Not me. So stop giving me a hard time. And not Jonas (I hope).

Update: Women are from Venus and men are from hell? Pfft!!

Findory.com is a news site with collaborative filtering (see an explanation of the term in here), serving aggregated news based on your interests.
When you return to the site after reading a news story somewhere, the listings have changed, and the headings that have been generated by the filtering algorithm are marked with a ‘personalized’ tag. It’s a cookie-based no-registration service which is new in this genre. Very nice.

Weinberger does some guessing about how the filtering algorithm works.

The thesis guys and me have received funding for a one day Java conference tomorrow[in danish], put together by JavaGruppen (The Java Group).

It’s about
* aspect oriented programming
* reflective server architectures for J2EE
* XDoclet2
* Ease of development through standards

We’re looking forward to a minor break from writing, meeting people and the chance to get new input and some good discussions.

Of course we are primarily into it for the money aspect oriented programming, although the other subjects are within our field of interest as well.

Oh, and there’s also the chance of running into future employers. After all I’m between education and job as of April 1st.

I hope we get a fancy badge.

One of my friends has a hunting cabin in Blekinge, Sweden. Every year we go there to relax and do some hunting.
It’s really just an excuse to be with friends, and though it may sound harsh, the killing of innocent animals just happens to be a part of that excuse. It is comforting though, to know that they die for a reason. Something bigger.

Driving from Copenhagen friday evening the weather was cold and wet but 8 kms from Olofström everything turned white and wintery.

After two days of hunting and relaxation we lined up our prey in the snow.

We hoped for six, but we only got two. Next year we will show up with high tech weapons and improved bait.

Oh, and Emili, I almost got injured. But not because I was mistaken for an Elk. Note to self: traps do backfire.

I haven’t deleted any spam this year. Decided to see how much I really got.
So far my junk-folders contains 1494 emails.
It’s the 19th of January today. Anticipating no growth (who am I kidding?) and an even distribution over the year, my junk repository will contain 28.701 unwanted messages on the first day of 2005. Most of the junk is dealt with by Thunderbird’s Junk Control but it’s still Aaaarrrrrgghh…

I just felt like sharing.

Yeah, I know this is boriing, but this way you will enjoy the next post about going hunting in Sweden. I will bring you life, death and blood in the snow. To see with your own eyes.
Incoming: Blekinge by Proxy.

The last couple of years this song has been one of my favourites and it’s suitable for this time of year.
I hear it all the time these days, and although I don’t share the same amount of winter depression and weltschmerz with a twist of spleen, It has become dear to me.

Bright Eyes (@allmusic): “If Winter Ends”, from the album Letting off the Happiness.

I dreamt of a fever,
one that would cure me of this cold, winter-set heart
With heat to melt these frozen tears burned with reasons as to carry on

Into these twisted months I plunge without a light to follow
But I swear that I would follow anything
just get me out of here

But you get six months to adapt
and you get two more to leave town
And in the event that you do adapt
we still might not want you around

But I fell for the promise of a life with a purpose
but I know that that’s impossible now
And so I drink to stay warm and to kill selected memories
cause I just can’t think anymore about that
or about her tonight

And I give myself three days to feel better or else I
swear I’ll drive right off a fucking cliff
because if I can’t learn to make myself feel better
how can I expect anyone else to give a shit?

and I scream for the sunlight
or a car to take me anywhere.
just get me past this dead and eternal snow

cause I swear that I’m dying
Slowly, but it’s happening
and if the perfect spring is waiting somewhere
just take me there
just take me there
just take me there
and say and lie to me and say and lie to me and say
it’s gonna be alright ..

This melancholic tour de force somehow makes me feel better and worse at the same time. Powerful stuff.

Bruce Eckel: Rethinking weblogging (and everything else)

Stumbled upon this one. I’ve read one and a half Eckel book and I think he’s pretty clever. This article/paper/blogpost/whateveritis is worth reading.

I don’t think the title of the thing should be taken that literally. If he really means it, I’m afraid he might go for world dominance as Napoleon next ;-)

So I picked a quote — you can check out the context yourself.

I now believe there are three modes of written communication: books, articles, and ideas. The first two I have long experience with, but I lack a medium for ideas. My friend Bill Venners, who created Artima.com, notes that his weblogging structure at Artima also seems to motivate people to produce articles rather than ideas. Daniel Will-Harris observes that the weblogs he finds most interesting are the ones that have small idea-sized entries appended together on a single page.

That’s what I’m missing, I think. I will certainly continue to have article- sized entries that come up from time to time (Bill dubbed these “blarticles”), but I’d like a medium of expression for ideas that is so simple that I won’t hesitate to put something up. This will be more about brainstorming than producing fully-developed concepts. So I think I’d like it to be email-based, so I can just email entries to my weblog. I think the mailblog could enable weblogging for a lot of other people, as well.

I’d like the ability to mail-blog myself. And it should be possible to implement. Post-thesis, that is. Like everything else tends to be post-thesis these days.

update: Eckel has written programming literature for several years and is famous for being one of the first to make the books freely available online. It resulted in boosted sales of Thinking in Java in hardcopy and increased traffic to his tech-seminars. In the article he gives the motivation for his business model.

update II: And Eckel tries to turn his teaching towards Open Space, which sounds cool!

Eske: I’d really like to see you in a G-string. Could you do that?
Me: Mmmmmm… No.

Fortunately not everything is code around here.

“Blogging the Market - How Weblogs are turning corporate machines into real conversations”

Weinberger provided this link to a lenghty paper by George Dafermos on the importance of real voices in corporate communication. And weblogs as a way to facilitate the inevitable. Cluetrain taken further.

update:

It’s obvious that most companies are bewildered by the ever perplexing web of conversations that the network of networks is actually made of. On the one hand, they are not willing to abandon their mass-driven, one-way approach to the market and engage into real conversations.

There is no need to do so: bombarding customers with marketing messages works fine (that’s what they think anyway) and lobotomising employees with the hierarchy axe so that they are unable to have their own mind also works. On the other hand, there is the Net which envisages an ideal infrastructure for circulating ideas and indulging into conversations.

This is the great tension that management currently strives for reconciling: how to make use of the Net without deviating from established best practices, how to network without becoming really networked, how to connect without being connected.

Not bad. More will come. Stay tuned.