Did today really matter? I thought about this Mavericks at Work Nordic Track excerpt yesterday, but in my head the question was "Did you do anything blog-worthy today?" I think that's an important everyday consideration. I may not do something each day that's instructional or interesting enough to merit a blog post, but I always try to approach the day's work so that at the end of the day there is something I did or learned that I want to blog about. Work is just work otherwise.
Two Obama laugh links. If you haven't seen it, here's Obama doing "Top Ten Surprising Things about Barak Obama" on Letterman. Funny! The second is about a month old with Obama pushing back at Clinton on guns and his supposed elitism. "She's running around talking about how this is an insult to sportsmen, like she's Annie Oakley. Hillary Clinton is out there like she’s out in the duck blind every Sunday. She’s packing a six shooter. Come on. I want to see that picture of her out there in the duck blind. You know, come on.” Duck blind images get me rollin' every time.
Are you in personal branding prison? The title of this copyblogger post is great and I cannot improve upon it. Thought provoking stuff for freelance developers like myself who promote the benefits of being personally involved and responsible for the delivery and success of our clients' projects. That's an important draw, but as the copyblogger post explains, our clients need to know life goes on if we get hit by a bus. Those of us who've been around for awhile on both sides of the invoice know that life goes on whether we're in the picture or not. That said, we SOHOs need to secure the long-term health of our client projects by providing basic documentation and a client-accessible source code repository at a minimum.
IT Conversations still rocks. I enjoyed an unanticipated long walk this evening on a nearby Vermont trail neither Murphy nor I had been before. Pics of green and budding leaves are forthcoming. I tuned in to IT Conversations for a change and enjoyed two programs immensely. The first was Theoretical Physicist Michio Kaku with Moira Gunn talking about the physics behind sci-fi applications like teleportation and time travel, with discussion on string theory and quantum physics that even I understood. The second podcast was Tim O'Reilly speaking on the dynamics of user-generated content and its affect on publishing, with various examples of monetizing content on the web.
Client communications. A client of mine asked me to upgrade his site to Community Server 2008 today in Yoda-speak he did. With hopes of seeing the urgency in his request I would. In telling him his site was up, the email subject line read, "That's no moon" with the body being "It's a space station!" Along with the Admin password, of course. I guess you had to be there.
Deadwood Healthcare. I've been splitting my Nordic Track time this week between the book Slightly Famous--finished today with excerpts coming soon--and Deadwood, with my man Al Swearengen suffering from kidney stones at the start of Season Two. Those bad boys are painful even today, yet in 1870's Montana I couldn't imagine how bad it was. In this scene Trixie asks Doc what he's going to do, to which he responds, "I'm going to pass this instrument through his penis and into his bladder. If he has stones it'll click against the metal instrument. Assuming I can hear the clicks above his screams I will have identified the cause of his obstruction."
