Circadian Shift

Over at Lactose Incompetent, Edward points out that karma works. Right now, it's something that I really need to believe.

Am looking forward to tonight's soiree chez Accordion Guy.

Regular bloggage to resume tomorrow.

Ugh. I've had a wicked headeache since yesterday, and I feel like crap.

Posting will likely resume on the weekend, as tomorrow I'll be busy as all hell catching up from the two days that I've been off work.

Feel free to spend your time browsing the sidebar linkage.

Heavy snowfall means that some people got to flee the office earlier than usual. Yay!

Anyway, here's some linkage:

• Files 'overloaded' Mars probe -- even little mechanical space explorers can get information anxiety
• U.S. Uranium Stock in Peril -- "Security guards at the country's leading nuclear storehouse have been cheating during antiterrorism drills -- perhaps for as long as 20 years.... And now, watchdogs in Congress and beyond are questioning whether the tons of enriched uranium at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, are really safe at all."
• Matt Jones is looking for Brian Eno [Addendum 01 Feb. 2004: Eno was found, and it only took 3 days]
• A Better Night's Sleep, Flat Out at 35,000 Feet -- I've always been stuck flying "egg-crate" class; flying business class sure sounds nice (NYT; reg. req'd) (via v-2 Organisation)
• Eye candy for math geeks -- "These are some applets I wrote to help visualize various concepts in math and physics. You should be able to view them with any Java-capable browser." (via McGee's Musings, who credits BoingBoing, who credits Oblomovka; yeesh)
• Beware the Googlerank feedback loop
• Neanderthals 'not close family' -- "The Neanderthals were not close relatives of modern humans and represent a single species quite distinct from our own, scientists say. " (via Hotlinks)

Miscellany

• Ikeaphobia and its discontents -- a rant
• The Tyranny of Copyright (NYT article; reg'n req'd) (via Tomalak's Realm)
• Philips unit unveils 'rollable' displays -- "ultra-thin displays so skinny and flexible they could be rolled up inside a pen or a mobile phone" (ibid.)
• the guy behind whitespace has started a new site called Lame Ass Job
• Stress--A Capsule Description (via Fresh Inc.)
• yet another article that suggests that cell phones cause brain damage (ibid.)
• Primer is a low-budget sci-fi film that's been turning heads at the Sundance Festival
• Hyperdictionary -- must be hella neat, 'cuz I can't get through to it right now (via kottke)
• Seniors taking to computer games -- " A new generation of mature consumers -- often called 'gray gamers' -- are getting hooked on the small screen, and the industry is responding by developing new games that require thinking as well as shoot-'em-up instincts." (via MIT Technology Review Weblog)

Web/Tech/Design

• of all the user experience books released in 2003, I've read exactly none of them; and you know what? I'm not really that bothered about it (via Column Two)
• Words come before looks in web design (via InfoDesign)
• Web Modeling Language (WebML) "is a visual notation for specifying the composition and navigation features of hypertext applications" (ibid.)
• yet another favicon tutorial (via plasticbag)
• Common Computer Virus Types -- a rudimentary list
• Internet 'Geek' Image Shattered by New Study -- "The typical Internet user -- far from being a geek -- shuns television and actively socializes with friends" (via MIT Technology Review Weblog)
• The Daily Standards is a site that showcases other sites that adhere to web standards (via Digital Web)
• Seattlepi.com has taken to changing its homepage layout at different times in the day (via MarketingWonk)
• Design and Usability (via paranoidfish)
• Canoo WebTest is " a free open source tool for automated testing of web applications" (via Information Management Weblog)
• How the original Mac fonts got their names -- oh, god, Toronto really made the list? (via kottke)
• Answering an RFP? Don't Design on Spec!
• icon theft sucks (via mezzoblue)
• corporate logos are awash in blue (ibid.)
• AdaptivePath has a user experience analysis of U.S. presidential campaign websites that you can download for free if you register for their newsletter (via Anil's Daily Links)

Biz/Marketing/Career

• BusinessPundit weighs in with some thougts on a Fortune article about productivity and the Superbowl; hear, hear
• Screening Employees for Drug Use -- "Do you want to know if your employees are using drugs? Skip the urine tests. Try testing your offices for the presence of drugs.... Swiping your office light switches and employee keyboards for the presence of drugs sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen, but legal experts say workers would have little recourse against this type of testing."
• Could silence be threatening even our strongest organizations? -- "The fact is that silence is strangling many organizations today. Employees and management are encouraged to speak out at only the most opportune time, after the appropriate lobbying has been done and they have their ducks in a row." (via Seb's Open Research)
• Managing Change: Managing People's Fear
• Saying "the system is down" is a lousy excuse
• There are fewer online shoppers in Canada than in the U.S. (NYT; reg'n req'd) (via MarketingWonk)
• Leadership Communication -- " Three elements propel your leadership communications: speaking, listening and learning."
• Getting Your Resume Read
• 10 Books to Steer Your Career in 2004 (via WorkingWounded)
• How to Succeed at Getting Hired (and Lots of Ways Not To) (via Anil's Daily Links)
• What Developing-World Companies Teach Us About Innovation
• Keeping Your Cool in Negotiations
• Creative Recombination: Use What You Have -- "Too much 'creative destruction' burns out companies."

The cover story from last week's issue of BusinessWeek was:

More than 82 million Americans -- nearly 40% of the teen and adult population -- suffer from some form of insomnia, meaning they routinely have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep. Even for those who grapple with transient insomnia a few times a year, the bouts of sleepless nights are an ordeal, like a bad, recurring flu. On the other side of the empty bed are countless people who cheat on sleep so they can squeeze more hours out of the day. Only 32% get the recommended eight hours of shut-eye on weeknights, according to a 2002 poll by the National Sleep Foundation.

In addition to the feature article, there are some informative graphics, as well as a few supplementary articles.

• Mental Muscles of Steel -- "Looking to boost your science smarts? First test your IQ organ, then follow our 6-point brain regimen. Soon you'll be crunching bogus claims and citing stats with the best." (via MemeMachineGo!)
• Sleep State Visualization -- "Have you ever gone to sleep with a problem and awakened with the solution? What if you could make it happen consciously? What if you could literally solve your problems in your sleep?" (via The Occupational Adventure)
• Transforming Thoughts Into Deeds -- " Lots of people wish they could jack their brain directly to their computer and toss out those annoying keyboards and joysticks -- especially people who can't use keyboards or joysticks." (via Abyssal Mind)
• Learning to Juggle Causes Changes in Brain -- "Mastering the skill increases the amount of gray matter in areas of the brain that process and store visual information" (ibid.)

• Linux Takes on the Windows Look
• Next-generation e-forms
• Mother Of All CSS Hacks -- The Table (via paranoidfish)
• The problem with web typography
• a list of power tools for web builders (via Information Management Weblog)
• 10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change Your World (via Tomalak's Realm)
• CSS: Group Common Styles into Shared Classes -- doing this helps make your site load faster (via InformIT)
• Desperately Seeking Sundance Cool -- tech companies close in on the film festival
• Sweet Dreams Made by Machine -- a new gadget from Japan allows users to design their dreams through multisensory stimuli of scents, sounds and more
• Biometrics Enters Third Dimension -- "DuPont Authentication Systems and A4Vision, a company that sells facial-imaging products, have developed a biometric security device that generates in-depth, three-dimensional facial portraits similar to holograms and secure enough to be embedded in documents."
• Four Stories the Media Mostly Missed
• Arch Enemy -- eating at McDonald's three times a day, for thirty days, is almost deadly (via kottke)
• How to Write Good (via paranoidfish)
• Making networking a daily task leads to career success

This is too late for the holiday season, but is gosh-darn cute nonetheless:

Real content will be forthcoming later today.

Info-wrangling

• Bruce Sterling on the Information Economy
• the importance of managing one's bits
• Enterprise Information Architecture reading list (via Information Management Weblog)
• converting Word documents to XML can apparently get pretty nasty (ibid.)
• Generating user confidence with trigger-words in links
• 10 Big Myths about copyright explained (via Mezzoblue)
• What are the differences between a vocabulary, a taxonomy, a thesaurus, an ontology, and a meta-model? (via InfoDesign)
• Email Management Emerging as Critical Corporate Need
• Choosing the Right CMS: A Few Pointers
• MySQL develops new graphical admin tool
• Eurekster, We Have Found It -- "Friendster meets Yahoo! in a newly launched search engine"(via MarketingWonk)
• Monetizing Information (via Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Weblog)
• Attention, please -- "Thanks to technology, it's easier than ever to get distracted." (via BlackBeltJones)
• Now Where Was I? New Ways to Revisit Web Sites -- "bookmark lists have become "information closets" that hold a jumble of sites people never return to. Only hyperorganized users sort sites into folders, clean out dead links or click on inscrutable addresses to figure out why they were bookmarked in the first place" (NYT article, free registration required) (via Tomalak's Realm)
• Movable Type For Policies & Procedures (via Column Two)
• Getting Your House in Order -- "Starting on the journey to content competency"(ibid.)

Web authoring

• HTML Forms Tutorial - Textarea & Select
• HTML Forms Tutorial - Method, Mailto & More
• XForms: XML Powered Web Forms - Chapter 1
• Proposed XHTML Module: Web Forms 2.0 (via BitWorking)
• Simple Tricks for More Usable Forms
• a list of web design resources
• CSS3 Media Queries: Background Stretch (via paranoidfish)
• HTML Sanitizer (ibi.)
• Pure CSS tooltips (via Mezzoblue)
• XHTML-Print: W3C Candidate Recommendation (ibid.)
• The Business Case for Web Accessibility (ibid.)

Tech

• 10 reasons why RSS is not ready for prime time (via MarketingWonk)
• New air software after near miss -- "Computer systems which direct Britain's air traffic are to be changed after a near-miss between two passenger planes"
• Viruses turn to peer-to-peer nets
• IT spending on security, CRM to rise in 2004
• non-consensual http user tracking using caches (via Mezzoblue)
• FTC says identity theft, online fraud on the rise

Biz/Marketing

• Two-faced capitalism -- "Corporate social responsibility is all the rage. Does it, and should it, make any difference to the way firms behave?" (via BusinessPundit)
• The Role of Business Analyst - a Need but no Room for HCI? (via InfoDesign)
• Bridging the Chasm Between IT and Marketing -- Written from the marketeer's POV
• Know Where Your Leads Come From? Think Again -- "Can you not measure the value of your Web visitors?"
• 10 tips and tactics for better selling
• Gary Price's List of Lists -- "LOL aggregates a large number of lists on companies, people, and resources that are freely available on the Internet. The lists range in content from the Top 100 Health Clubs to the Top Ceramic Companies by Segment." (via HBS Working Knowledge)
• The trouble with today's CRM

Squishy

• What Do You Expect? -- "It is a make-or-break question in terms of project success, relationship health, investment return and product or service satisfaction."
• Six Newer P’s to a Better Job Search -- "Job hunting has striking similarities to a marketing project."
• Overload and Overwhelm -- "Get into the habit of managing your promises."
• Executive on the Couch -- "What makes leaders tick or tock?" A psychoanalyst explains
• How Leaders Use Questions
• On Prudent Communication -- a fun bit of poetry by Ogden Nash
• The Influence of Corporate Culture on Intranets
• Four's a crowd -- "How do the members of a string quartet play together and tour together year in, year out, without killing each other?" (via kottke)
• Manager as Permission Giver (via Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Weblog)
• Why Sleeping On It Just Might Work -- "Many artistic and scientific milestones seem to have sprung into being when their creators fell asleep" (via Mezzoblue)

Other

• Here's the Price of Fame: $218.32 -- "Using his boyfriend's iMac and the editing program iMovie, (Jonathon) Caouette distilled his VHS home movies, his Super-8 experimental films, and a suitcase full of photos and audio tapes into Tarnation, a hybrid documentary that premieres this week at the Sundance Film Festival."
• Documentaries Draw on Animation
• a list of themed timelines from Wikipedia (via McGee's Musings)
• NASA's New Antiterrorism Mission -- "NASA researchers are using data gleaned from flight-safety records, including reports of sick passengers, bad weather and sleepy pilots, to build an antiterror database."
• Mystery Deaths on London Flights
• This Cow Is Certified Sane -- "Scientists looking for a surefire way to stop mad cow disease are trying to clone cattle that are genetically engineered to resist the deadly brain-wasting illness"

Oh, my poor, poor, neglected blog.

sigh

I had good intentions of catching up on my blogging this evening, but then I wound up talking on the phone for two hours. More extensive bloggage will have to wait until tomorrow.

Tomorrow also happens to be the first day of the Chinese New Year. Happy Year of the Monkey, y'all. (And, thanks to Richard for the link.)

Meanwhile, Graig has some nifty stuff on his blog, including Northern Lights photos from Mr. GAK's recent trip to Finland.

Curt has his usual fine selection of squishy people-skills/job-related type stuff.

And Hotlinks features plenty of fun/interesting stuff, likely to appeal to short-attention-span/visually-oriented/geeky tech types.

Of course, there's plenty more going on in the blogosphere -- just check out anything in the trusty sidebar.

'Til tomorrow, then....

Linkage:

• Do You Love Your Job?
• Social Hypochondria (via this week's "Carnival of the Capitalists", via BusinessPundit)
• A Few Thoughts on Cognitive Overload (via InfoDesign)
• The difference between threat and risk
• PCs at home make 'better workers' -- "Having a computer at home means people are much more efficient when they are at work, according to a survey. "
• Change Strategies are Key to KM (PDF, 760 KB) (via Excited Utterances)

Also from Excited Utterances comes this description of two kinds of employees:

Cosmopolitans

• Identify themselves more strongly with professional and functional capacity
• More likely to be mobile
• More concerned about their specialized skill or functional area
• Little concern with internal details or politics unless they are inhibiting
• Seek recognition beyond the company boundaries, i.e., from peers in other organizations
• Less tolerant and more vocal about job climate problems
• Tend to have few, and relatively loose, ties with people in the organization
• Have less influence because of less involvement

Locals

• Identify themselves strongly with the employing organization
• Career oriented with one firm
• Committed and dedicated to the organization as an entity
• More involved in and concerned about internal details and politics
• Rely on getting recognition within the oranization
• More tolerant of and less vocal about job climate problems
• Develop closer and more extensive relationships with people in the organization
• Tend to have more influence

These Ingredients for Serious Thought are from My Computational Complexity Web Log (via paranoidfish):

1. Lots of light.
2. Adequate sleep the night before (duh).
3. Freedom from buzzing insects, screaming babies, ringing phones, slamming doors, and car alarms. I'll never know what I could have proved if not for these things.
4. A well-ventilated room with fresh, non-oxygen-depleted air at about room temperature. (Bug screens allow the last two ingredients simultaneously.)
5. Caffeine or other stimulants.
6. A comfortable swivel chair, or else a couch or bed to sprawl across.
7. Long deserted halls or outdoor walkways. (Pacing around in tight circles is no good.)
8. Hours and hours of concentration with no end in sight. I've never been able to set aside (say) two hours for serious work, in between other commitments. That's why I work at night.
9. Lack of awareness of how much time has elapsed with no new ideas. Before starting to work I take off my watch and hide the Windows taskbar so I can't see the little clock in the corner.
10. Comfortable clothes. I've never proved a publishable result wearing a shirt with a too-tight collar.
11. Black erasable pens, unruled paper (the backs of printouts serve nicely), Scientific Workplace for TeX, and (don't laugh) MS-DOS QBasic for quick calculations. Substitute your own favorite tools.
12. No tempting distractions. Train rides are good: plenty of room to spread out papers and a laptop, but no Internet access (something I hope doesn't change soon).
14. No people around toward whom I have strong unresolved feelings (attraction being only one example).
15. Freedom from bodily annoyances and pains. Advil, cold medicine, lip balm, a nail clipper, and a glasses cleaning cloth are important weapons in my theory arsenal. Also, I can't do serious work until about half an hour after a meal.
16. A positive attitude, which is fostered by a calm, uneventful week in my life.
17. Colleagues to talk to. People able to shoot down wrong proofs are ideal, but even "write-only black boxes" are invaluable as sounding boards. Of course I try to reciprocate both services.
18. A problem that I consider "mine" -- either because I posed the problem, I've had recent successes on subproblems or related problems, the problem is important for one of my research goals (or even better, two goals), or I'm (rightly or wrongly) seen as the world expert on the problem.
19. A problem that others are eager to see solved. It's easier to let myself down than to let others down.
20. Conference deadlines. They motivate me to work, but then if I miss them (as I do), my "research GPA" doesn't suffer: there's always the next conference.

IA/ID/UX/KM/CM

• Grokker, or Visual Navigation
• How Big is the Difference Between Websites? -- "Competitive Testing of Website Usability"
• Metacognition, Distributed Cognition and Visual Design (PDF, 3.7 MB) (via InfoDesign)
• Type: the Extra Mile
• PLL Perspectives is a publication geared toward law librarians; their Winter 2002 issue has a number of good resources pertaining to knowledge management in general (via Excited Utterances)
• Wanted: CMS

Web/Tech

• XForm Institute -- "Interactive XForms School" (via InfoDesign)
• CSS Vault has been revamped
• A Brief History of the World Wide Web
• Spam Filters Grab Good With Bad (via MarketingWonk)
• Template Files for Web Projects -- there's a free version (MS Word, 260 KB) and a not-free version (ZIP, 1.4 MB)(via Column Two)
• Test CSS in Aural, Braille, and Speech
• Persistent Login Cookie Best Practice (via paranoidfish)
• CSS-only Filters Summary (ibid.)
• Common XHTML Validation Errors (via Mezzoblue)
• XML Error Handling in Web Browsers (ibid.)
• Cross-Browser CSS Tabs with Rollover (ibid.)

Biz/Marketing

• Use analytics for strategic Business Information implementation
• Shopping cart abandonment is high, but e-retailers have more control than they know (via MarketingWonk)

Other

• Active versus Passive Music "Consumption" (via this week's "Carnival of the Capitalist", via BusinessPundit)
• Why digital cameras = better photographers

1. Delegate, Don't Abdicate
2. IT Manager Resume Makeover -- PDF: free registration required to download
3. Power to the Edge -- (9 MB PDF) "This book is truly a must-read for anyone interested in decentralization and the social and organizational relevance of shifting power to the edge" (via Ray Ozzie's Weblog , via McGee's Musings)
4. What you can't say -- "This essay is about heresy: how to think forbidden thoughts, and what to do with them." (ibid.)
5. Tame the Desktop Monster
6. All of Us Are Stuck on Suck-Ups -- "We all hate suck-ups. So why do we surround ourselves with them?" (via Working Wounded)
7. The End of Work -- Free yourself from being a wage-slave
8. Miss Manners vs. Business Casual
9. Inspiring the Jaded Employee
10. Negotiation and All That Jazz
11. Balancing Priorities on Schedule
12. Avoid The Email Avalanche
13. Success and General Cognitive Ability
14. Taking Advantage of Resistance to Change to Improve Improvements
15. When is it okay to micromanage a project?
16. Organizational culture and structure influence project management more than you realize
17. Employee survery results are useless if you don't actually do anything with the results
18. Employer-Centric Era?
19. Two Laws of Explanation
20. Working around people who demotivate you
21. Weeding Out Corporate Psychopaths (spotted on BusinessPundit and FC Now)
22. The Trouble with Projects (via Reforming Project Management)
23. Jerks At Work
24. Leading Edge: Dare to Doubt -- "In a world in which the only constant is relentless change, decisiveness is overrated. "
25. Dealing with Distractions, part 1 and part 2
26. Dealing with a Yelling Boss
27. Handling Changes Under a New Boss
28. Concerns about the commitment and honesty of one's employer

1. Conversion Rate: Measure of Success
2. The Survey Says... -- "Navigating online survey pitfalls."
3. Create and Test Your Business Name
4. Broadband Internet access stretches toward the 50% mark (via MarketingWonk)
5. In email marketing, the sender line is more important than the subject line (ibid.)
6. Bridge the Gap Between Strategy and Tactics: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3
7. Best Practices and Case Studies: Be Very Afraid
8. Pondering the 4 P's of Marketing
9. YAROBFB="yet another report on blogging for business"
10. Blogging for Business -- "Case study: Western States Information Network"
11. Decision Support: Use analytics for strategic Business Information implementation
12. The Future Of Business
13. Wordlab -- "Free Naming and Branding Consultants and Resources" (via Seth Godin)
14. Common Mistakes in Selecting and Implementing Analytics Systems

1. Excel keyboard shortcuts -- PDF: free registration required to download
2. Sites to See -- "(A) compendium of recommended Web sites aimed at increasing knowledge of business processes and technology. We've organized these sites into multiple categories: Benchmarking, Business Continuity, Customer Service, Data Management, e-Commerce, Emerging Technologies and Outsourcing."
3. Validator Tools for web authors
4. A Standard for Site Organization (via Brainstorms & Raves)
5. CMS Wiki -- "a knowledge base for Content Management Systems" (via Column Two)
6. edNA Knowledge Management Portal (ibid.)
7. Choosing an intranet project sponsor (ibid.)
8. Sources of CMS uncertainty (ibid.)
9. Colored boxes - one method of building full CSS layouts (ibid.)
10. Creating Access Forms To Work with Excel Data
11. Seven Resolutions for 2004 -- for UE folks (via Tomalak's Realm)
12. From Brick to Click - Bridging the Divide -- a series of articles about ecommerce (via Digital Web)
13. Web content management predictions for 2004 (via InfoDesign)
14. Five ways to identify intranet usability issues (ibid.)
15. Infographics, Exploring Visual Information Design (ibid.)
16. Using XML with Legacy Business Applications: Chapter 1
17. hAcKiNg sPaM -- "A global, collaborative and explorative effort to preserve electronic mail for future generations" (via MarketingWonk)
18. within 10 to 15 years, India and China will together account for more than half of all Internet usage in the world (ibid.)
19. Why You Should Weblog (via paranoidfish)
20. Minimizing Flickering CSS Background Images in IE6
21. Windows 98 wins support lifeline
22. Disk drives take on the living room
23. Biometric passports in Britain
24. Random Acts of Spamness
25. Personalization is not Technology: Using Web Personalization to Promote your Business Goal
26. Designing for Limited Resources
27. How to Gain Control of Your PowerPoint
28. Accessible contents menu?
29. Images: height and width attributes
30. Creative suggestions for coping with project development stress
31. Planning a Dynamic Site
32. Introduction to SOAP 1.1
33. There's a Gaggle Chasing Google
34. Causes of Shopping Cart Abandonment (via MarketingWonk)
35. Topix.net is a new automated news aggregation service (ibid.)
36. Choosing the Right CMS: A Few Pointers
37. CMS to Mature in 2004
38. Email Management Emerging as Critical Corporate Need
39. Storage Basics: Information Lifecycle Management
40. Show/Hide Text Recipe (via LockerGnome)
41. Testing the Three-Click Rule (ibid.)
42. Two documents (MS Word format) about email policy: E-mail Usage: User Good Practice Guide (165 KB) and E-mail Acceptable Usage Policy (167 KB) (via Excited Utterances)
43. Increasing use of infographics in weblogs (via Seb's Open Research)
44. Wikis: Hypertext on Steroids (ibid.)
45. Document retention: The IT manager's changing role
46. IM policies offer users guidance for intelligent messaging
47. What Goes On Behind Your Back -- "Your company may outsource IT, but your business units will build their own IT systems anyway."
48. Who ARE these virus writers?
49. Are you designing for usability or sales? -- is written from a marketer's point-of-view; good for a look to see what "the other side" is thinking
50. Google adds new travel, number-search tools
51. Design Talent: Natural or Learned?
52. Integrating weblog aggregation data with enterprise data (via Column Two)
53. Creating the Perfect 404
54. HTML Forms Tutorial
55. How to use the INPUT tag
56. The Importance of Process in Web Design (via Digital Web)
57. Web design: never let an ad agency near your website (via InfoDesign)
58. Major Relational Database Vendors and How They Support XML
59. Creating Frameworks for Organizing Information -- an article on portal design

1. Merriam-Webster's Words Of The Year 2003 (via meryl's notes)
2. Investigating Freak Winds
3. A Taste of Our Own Poison (via Tomalak's Realm)
4. Recording Studio in a Box -- NYT article; free registration required (ibid.)
5. A summary of the movie critics' 2003 top ten lists (via kottke)
6. A Sense of Scale -- "A Visual Comparison of Various Distances" (ibid.)
7. Evidence that NASA is altering the true colors of the pictures of Mars (ibid.)
8. CD singles will be phased out in the US within three years
9. Moon Base: NASA's Recurring Dream
10. Online Festivals Nurture Film

Shot with the keychain-cam, from the comfort of indoors, of course.

Go tell that lonesome liar
Go tell that midnight rider
Tell the gamblin', ramblin' backslider
Tell them God Almighty gonna cut 'em down

You might run on for a long time
Run on, ducking and dodging
Run on, children, for a long time
Let me tell you God Almighty gonna cut you down

You might throw your rock, hide your head
Work in the dark with your fellow men
Sure as God made you rich and poor
You're gonna reap just what you sow

Posting will resume on the weekend.

I've managed to cut down the monster pile of linkage to less than 100 items. I'd sort them out further by lumping them into categories, but I've been staring at the computer for too long already.

The coming week will probably be super-insane [Addendum 12 January 2004: it is super-insane], so posting here will likely be scarce for the next several days. Hopefully, you can glean enough items of interest from the following to tide you over in the meantime.

1. The key to learning: Fail Early and Fail Often
2. 12 Tips for Search Engine Marketing
3. Troubled Borders -- dealing with the way that different browsers handle where background color actually lies
4. Create Columns Using Text Boxes In Word
5. How to Choose a Web Analytics Solution
6. Stylesheets: Single or Multiple?
7. Richard Saul Wurman: The InfoDesign interview
8. Relative URIs in HTML
9. Brainstorms & Raves has a bunch of linkage pertaining to Abbreviations, Acronyms, and Shortened Words
10. Business Process Change, Part 1 and Part 2
11. Ten Steps for Cleaning Up Information Pollution
12. IT management demands ongoing learning/training efforts -- "Here are some simple techniques that I have found that can help you define your study requirements and help you balance the continual learning effort with the demands of the workday."
13. Metrics: Measurements that Matter (excerpt)
14. Form Validation -- an introductory article
15. Why Ad Agencies Fail at Search Marketing
16. Non-Browser Apps More Popular -- "Three out of four home and work Web users go online through non-browser-based Internet applications, such as media players, instant messengers and file-sharing tools"
17. Why Can't We Get Anything Done?
18. The art and science of top ten lists
19. What You Can't Say -- "This essay is about heresy: how to think forbidden thoughts, and what to do with them."
20. Fontifier turns a scanned sample of your handwriting into a computer font that you can use
21. 2003 in Review: Technology trends turn painfully realistic -- "If one word could serve as a prevailing theme for 2003, it would be 'survival'."
22. How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web
23. Fun with Words: A Glossary of Linguistics and Rhetoric
24. Rich Gold on PowerPoint
25. Global broadband keeps climbing
26. Combating "Not Invented Here"
27. Using the :hover selector
28. Motivation tactics for those who lead techies -- " In this chapter from his book, Leading Geeks, Paul Glen warns that traditional methods of motivating staff won't work with knowledge workers. These are his suggestions for what will work." (free registration required to download)
29. What Turns on a Team? -- "Traditional views of leadership and motivation reflected a 'passive' view of motivation. In effect, people required strong leaders to motivate them towards certain goals." (free registration required to view)
30. Management do's and don'ts, according to your staff
31. Enhance your listening skills and your management success
32. Presenting multiple options to smooth the client's path -- "The technique of presenting choices rather than a single solution addresses a number of important factors in corporate decision making"
33. Be more than a manager: Coach your staff
34. Empowered and Engaged Employees: A Critical Requirement for Customer Loyalty -- A Patricia Seybold Report (free registration required to download)
35. Ramp up your staff with versatilists -- how versatilists differ from generalists and specialists
36. Design Process, Clients, and Web Standards: An Interview with Jeffrey Zeldman
37. Why people blog
38. Everything You Know Is Wrong -- "As we get accustomed to the tools and the terminology, the prospect of tracking things online is no longer as frightening as it used to be. At least that was the case until November 20, 2003."
39. Communicate the problem, then the solution -- "It’s important that you communicate what you do in ways that help your prospective client understand that you are a solution to his problem."
40. Statistical Ego -- discussion and linkage about log analyzing software
41. XML button created via CSS
42. What graphs are, what they are for and some rules to draw them properly
43. Database Journal has a bunch of articles on using MS Access in a business environment
44. BusinessWeek reports on Tech's Top Trends for 2004
45. Spam Costs $20 Billion Each Year in Lost Productivity
46. Research: Are Successful Leaders Born or Made?
47. Sarbanes-Oxley: Comply With Me -- "In the 12 months since the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in July 2002, corporations both public and private have been put through a wrenching exercise in self-examination about information security and integrity. And it's not over yet."
48. Cross-Selling: New Customers from Old
49. Will XForms Matter?
50. What Happened To My Site On Google? -- "a significant change to Google's ranking algorithm has caused some web sites to lose top positions for some search terms"
51. What Happened To My Searches On Google? --
52. Bungled Search Engine Optimization - Cleaning Up the Mess
53. Search Gains Importance at Online Retailers -- "Searching is rapidly overtaking browsing as a primary way people find and buy products online"
54. Meta Search Engines are Back
55. Toolbars: Trash or Treasures? -- " The success and popularity of Google's toolbar has spawned broad interest from other search engines and sites in creating their own branded search toolbars."
56. Beyond Google: Narrow the Search A look at tools that automatically categorize and sometimes even visually present search results.
57. Is Google good for you? Part 1 and Part 2
58. Search Guru Danny Sullivan Talks Google -- "With so many people joking that they were addicted to Google and needing a 12-step recovery program, I took the actual 12 steps from Alcoholics Anonymous to see how they could be applied to those with a Google addiction"
59. Spam Filtering: The False Positive -- "Spam-blocking applications can screen out legitimate e-mail messages. A look at what can trip up your company."
60. Business 2.0 looks at How To Succeed in 2004
61. XBRL - The New Latin? -- "XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) has been described as the universal business language, but so far, it's about as oft-spoken as Latin."
62. Legal action over anti-copy CDs
63. NASA Looks for an Emergency Exit -- "Not since the Apollo moon shots have astronauts had an escape pod in case of an emergency during launch, but that safety measure will be central to NASA's next generation of spacecraft."
64. The New Cubicle Commandos -- "Gangs of action figures stand guard at people's workstations: Wolverine looms over the printer while Yoda secures the inbox and Homer Simpson scratches his head beside the phone... But now a new kind of plastic pet is on the scene - one not born of a corporate media franchise."
65. Why people blog (2)
66. Frank Patrick cleans out his blog backlog of project management and productivity linkage
67. What Business Leaders Think of You
68. How to be a successful consultant
69. Myths and Realities About Headhunters -- "Most IT pros know that a 'headhunter' helps client companies find candidates for job openings. Beyond that basic knowledge, however, lie many myths and misconceptions."
70. Five Ideas for 2004
71. Non-scientific poll: Music while working
72. Your blog's soul is its writing form; that soul's expression is its home page.
73. another blurb about implementing Favicons
74. Abstracting CSS
75. Interference questions dog broadband over power lines
76. Page Size (KB) -- "how big is too big when it comes to total page weight"
77. positioning text Dead Centre on a web page
78. A Manager's Annual Plan
    • Part 1 - What Are We Doing?
    • Part 2 - Reaching Your Goals
    • Part 3 - Do I Have The Right Team?
    • Part 4 - The Manager As Leader

The monster pile of 200+ links remains unaddressed. Meanwhile, here is some newer stuff.

Squishy stuff:

• What's Wrong With A Messy Desk? -- "Clean or messy doesn't matter. Effective does."
• Malcolm Gladwell On SUV's And The Danger Of Learned Helplessness -- "the risks posed to life and limb by forces outside our control are dwarfed by the factors we can control"
• Smile -- "facial expressions affect blood-flow to the brain and are not just results of emotions"
• Q up for Success -- First there was IQ, then EQ; now there's RQ. (via BusinessPundit)
• Top Ten Most Stressful Jobs (via FC Now)

Somewhat less squishy:

• The semiotic efficency of systems -- "Like the laws of thermodynamics in energy systems, semiotics proposes a hard limit to the efficiency of any situation involving externalized representations of human thought."
• Don Norman on PowerPoint Usability -- "PowerPoint is NOT the problem." (via IDblog)
• What is beautiful is usable -- "An experiment was conducted to test the relationships between users' perceptions of a computerized system's beauty and usability... Perceptions were elicited before and after the participants used the system. Pre-experimental measures indicate strong correlations between system's perceived aesthetics and perceived usability. Post-experimental measures indicated that the strong correlation remained intact." (via v-2 Organisation)

Web/UI/Work-related Technology:

• Messaging programs bring instant risk -- "Instant messaging is gaining popularity with workers trying to get around the restrictions placed on what they can do with e-mail."
• Put IM archiving on your compliance to-do list
• The seven habits of wildly unsuccessful CIOs
• Elastic Design -- moving from a static, pixel-based design approach to an elastic, relative method (via Digital Web Magazine)
• Faux Columns (ibid.)
• Don't Use Buttons -- "Little UI design tip: don't be a goddamn idiot and include anything like a 'clear' button on web forms." (via paranoidfish)
• Key Research Findings Related to User-Centered Design (2002–2003) (via Column Two)

Other Technology:

• Computer predicts facial future -- "Patients about to undergo complex facial surgery could be shown an computer-generated image of how their face will look afterwards."
• The 20 Macs That Mattered Most -- From the Mac 128K to the Power Mac G5, twenty years of computing with the Macintosh.
• The Click Heard Round The World -- Point and click computing, 15 years before the Mac.

Following my quick editorial interjection in the last post, I did a quick Googling about for additional info about legibility of serif and sans-serif fonts, and came up with the following:

• Readability studies on fonts--serif and sans serif
• It’s About Legibility
• Do Fonts Matter?
• Reading and Typography

And, while more general, still kind of neat:

• Little Typeface Primer

Still have a pile of aggregator links to wade through. Yikes.

Meanwhile, this appeared in one of my newsletters from TechRepublic:

SEVEN WAYS TO REVAMP YOUR RESUME

When was the last time you took a good, hard look at your resume? It's probably been a while. And, anyway, why should you? You've got a job that pays...well, it pays. And your job description hasn't really changed all that much. Sure, there are the extra responsibilities you took on when half your staff got canned last December, but those are little tasks. And no one's getting a raise this year, anyway, right?

----------------------------------------

>> Nodding your head complacently? Then this is precisely the time to reevaluate your resume. You need to know just how much you've accomplished so that you can be the one person in the company who does get the raise you deserved two quarters ago. A resume revamp doesn't have to be intimidating. In fact, in seven simple steps, your resume can reflect the better, brighter, more accomplished IT pro you've become.

1. LOOK AT THE BIG PICTURE. This pertains to printed resumes rather than text-based ones sent via the Web. What does your resume actually look like? Ignore the words for a moment. Is the layout clear and concise? Is the font easily readable? Remember that a sans serif font is harder to read that a serif font [actually, some legibility studies contradict this -- jv]--though a sans serif font can look more modern. Choose your font size wisely; don't go smaller than 11 pt type if you want anyone to read about all your accomplishments. Use bullet points, bold type, and spacing to help break up the information on the page.

2. USE STRONG ACTION VERBS TO DESCRIBE YOUR JOB DUTIES AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS. You don't want to present a laundry list of your day-to-day duties. Focus instead on the parts of your job that earn you recognition and stress your leadership skills. For example, instead of writing that you are "very involved in running a team of programmers and keeping projects on schedule," try saying that you "manage a team that consistently meets deadlines."

3. BE CAREFUL WITH YOUR CONTENT. Is the important information readily accessible? If you're job-hunting, remember that the people who initially screen resumes often have only extremely basic technical knowledge; they might not know an MCSD from a CCNA. Don't hide your strong points in language that no one outside your field can understand. And, even if you're happy where you are, you want your resume to showcase your "hireability" so that your employer will compensate you accordingly.

4. EASE UP ON THE TECHNICAL DETAILS. Remember, you're in management now, and even though your tech skills got you where you are, it's a different skill set that will propel you forward. Yes, you can -- and should -- still list your technical skills, but make sure the focus is on how those skills help you manage people and technology more effectively.

5. STRESS BENEFITS, NOT FEATURES. Think back to your days as a hardware engineer. Did you stress that the chip you designed replaced up to 10 discrete components, or did you stress the greater product functionality and smaller device sizes that your customers could enjoy when they used your chip in their devices? Now, apply that logic to your resume. Don't just say that you devised a new off-site backup strategy for the company. Point out that your off-site backup strategy reduced hardware and manpower expenses by over 50 percent, reduced downtime substantially, and increased client satisfaction 100 percent. See the difference?

6. PUT THE BOTTOM LINE ON TOP. Translate each of your accomplishments into hours saved, money earned, and other tangible results for the company. If you can't figure out how what you do every day fits into the big picture, then you're doing something wrong. If you know what the moneymaking tasks are and you're not finding time for them, you also need to reprioritize. Your resume should reflect the net worth you add to your organization.

7. ASK YOUR MOM TO READ YOUR RESUME. No offense to Mom, but unless she is an IT pro, she's probably not too technically savvy. So if she can read your resume and get a sense of what you do and why someone might hire you, your resume is definitely on the right track. If Mom can also proofread, then you're absolutely ready for prime time.

Got other stuff on the go, not to mention over 200 links from the aggregator to sort through. Meanwhile, feel free to peruse the fine linkage from the sidebar.

New 'toons up at Gaping Void.

Meanwhile, the aggregator is backing up again. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

A relatively new addition to my blogroll is largehearted boy, who's been pointing out all sorts of MP3 goodies to download, like Nirvana's first live gig and a bunch of b-sides, demos, etc., from Radiohead.

Meanwhile, tbit links to some handy MP3 tools: ID3 TagIt, for editing ID3 tags, and MP3Gain for volume normalization.

Tech gadgets

• the BBC's Gadget Outlook for 2004
• Brent Ashley recommends the Zonet 4-Port KVM Switch
• BoingBoing recommends recharging devices via USB or Firewire cables (via McGee's Musings)

Instant Messaging

• Treating Messaging as Critical
• 2003's Top Trends in IM
• IM, Not IP (Information Pollution) (via Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Weblog)

Content Management

• When is Web Content Management Right for an Intranet?
• Building a Paperless Office using Low Cost Technology

Choice Overload: The Psychological Paradoxes of Ecommerce

On English: "Speaking about the English language, the pitfalls, the pleasures, the rules (or lack of them thereof), the art (poems, short prose, puns, 'proetry'), and so on."

(via blogsnob)

I have to remind myself that it's only Friday. Of course, some poor souls (hahahahahahaha) had to go to the office today.

• Busfilm is a blog that covers the portrayal of business in the movies; I particularly liked this list of films showing employees' struggle to preserve their souls (via Darren Barefoot)
• Edward Gorey fans may want to check out this online presentation of The Gashlycrumb Tinies (via Manifesto Multilinko)
• Generation Terrorists is a rich source of quotations from popular culture, like The Matrix films, The X Files, or Bart Simpson's Chalkboard Quotations
• Blogosphere junkies will want to check out this Big List of Blog Search Engines (via Hotlinks)
• So you didn't think electronic music existed before Kraftwerk? This look at Electronic Musical Instruments from 1870 to 1990 will change your mind (via purse lip square jaw)
• Earth as Art shows images taken by the Landsat-7 satellite

• job hunting
• sleep
• way too much time at the computer
• GTAB hijinks
• employment

Happy New Year, y'all!

(Thanks to Elaine for the Mayfly link.)