Circadian Shift

I should've known that the preceding puzzle would be too easy for the extremely intelligent and talented readership of this blog.

This one's a little harder, and is different each time you play. (Again, if you're viewing this post through an RSS reader, the game won't work. Come to the site.)

get peeptin @ flooble

To play:

First click the 'Shuffle' button to shuffle the numbers. The goal of the game is to arrange the blocks from 1 to 15 in their numeric order. Click a number next to the empty cell to move it into that cell. The game is won when all the numbers are sorted, and the empty square is in the lower-righthand corner.

Or you can just do what this guy did, and look at the source code to figure it out. Heck, I'll save you the trouble -- the source code is here.

Eva, meanwhile, points to this Petals Around the Rose puzzle (needs the Flash plugin to play).

Have fun, and stay out of trouble.

It's unlikely that I'll be posting again before it's time to run Carnival of the Canucks this Tuesday.

In the meantime, why don't you give this little puzzle a shot:

get toggler @ flooble

Addendum: For those of you viewing this post through an RSS aggregator, the puzzle won't actually do anything. You'll have to visit the site to play.

How to play:

The object is to turn all the [X] buttons into [.] buttons by toggling them. But be careful: when you toggle a button, the four buttons around it are toggled as well. When all the buttons are turned into [.]'s, you win. But the point of the game is to win after the smallest possible number of moves.

There are more mind-benders to be found at perplexus.info.

See you on Tuesday!

There's still time to send in material for next Tuesday's Carnival of the Canucks, which will be held right here. Please with your entries. (If you could reference the Carnival in your subject header, that would be great.)

Meanwhile, check the sidebar or my bookmarks on del.icio.us for new assorted linkage.

Addendum 28 May 2004: Uh, I have no idea what's going on with the sidebar feed, but those aren't my bookmarks. My page on del.icio.us still has the right stuff on it.

Addendum #2, 28 May 2004: Right, so it looks like Spurl (the service that I actually use for on-the-fly bookmarking -- it cross-posts to del.icio.us -- and to run my sidebar feed) just underwent a major upgrade. Some wierdness may ensue while they shake all the bugs out.

i just want to scream and scream until i can scream no longer

Goddamit.

Difficulties, both technical and non-technical have cropped up.

It's pretty safe to say that I won't be posting until after the weekend.

Sorry.

The 19th installment of the Carnival of the Canucks is online, over at Ghost of a Flea. This edition's theme is "Fat, drunk, and Canadian".

In two week's time -- that's June 1st -- Carnival #20 will be hosted here by yours truly. If you see anything in the blogosphere that's written by a Canadian, or about Canada, or just by someone who likes Canada, please and let me know if you'd like it to be included in the Carnival. Yes, you're allowed to submit your own writing, or nominate someone else's work. And, if you could please include "Carnival of the Canucks" in the subject header of your email, it would be helpful to me.

(Speaking of email, I have been very, very bad once again in not responding to a few missives. I have good intentions of catching up this evening, barring brain damage or computer failure.)

To find out more about future Carnivals -- where'll they be, or if you want to host one yourself -- check out the Carnival of the Canucks homepage.

Sometimes, the hustle and bustle of life at the office makes one forget to eat when one is supposed to. Fortunately, there's an easy way to remember:

When you start feeling psychotic, it's time for lunch.

Learn it. Live it. Love it.

Not falling asleep until 3.30 this morning has left me pretty non-functional from late afternoon onward. I fear, though, that if I go to bed now, I'll wake up at 10.30 or 11, and then be up 'til all hours again.

BostonWorks: The Job Blog links to this particularly relevant article:

Morning People vs. Late Risers: The Workplace Battle Continues

Of all the gulfs in understanding at the office, among the most difficult to bridge is that between morning and night people. On the one hand, think bushy-tailed company lawyers who eat lunch at 11 a.m. On the other, consider the bleary-eyed techies for whom the only thing as bad as waking up early is the people who enjoy it so loudly...

But we're not talking about a fair fight here. The 9-to-5 shift overwhelmingly favors larks. When has anyone complained that employees show up too early? Owls, on the other hand, are frequently stigmatized as recalcitrant slugabeds who fritter time and resources on the company's dime.

That stigma is just another sign that shallow emblems of productivity impress American managers more than results.

Damn straight.

Meanwhile, the nub links to a Yahoo! item which reports that One in four nods off at work.

In case you missed it in the sidebar, "N" sent me a link earlier in the day to a BBC piece which provides a formula to calculate the time when you are most tired -- yeah, like I can do the math right now. Fortunately, there's a relatively easy calculator at knackerfactor.co.uk to help you figure out when your energy is likely to ebb during the day.

There is additional information to be found at AWAKE, a "fatigue management consultancy".

Lastly, here's an article about Frank Zappa: Coffee Achiever (spotted on del.icio.us).

Good night!

• Emergic.org summarizes Peter Drucker's thoughts on the future of the company
• Mission Statements: Why You Might Want One
• 10 Principles of Change Management (via Column Two)
• Jeffrey Cufaude, Idea Architects is a very neat blog that provides all sorts of food for thought (via Reforming Project Management)
• The Perils of Obedience -- writeup of a well-known psyhcological experiment from the 70s
• a huge pile of linkage about Software Project Management (via Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Weblog)
• Frank Patrick also has a few posts/linkage about POOGI, which happens to be short for the Process Of On-Going Improvement: I, II, and III
• although the article Toxic Office (PDF, 211kb) focuses primarily on the personality disorders of people in law firms, much can be applied to any hellish workplace situation (via excited utterances)
• bookmarked for later reading: Real Rules of Innovation for the 21st Century (via FC Now)
• FC Now also points to this Thinker's Tookit for examining issues critically
• here's a list of 7 ways to easily network and a guide to making valuable contacts online
• Global Office Gabble provides a list of terminology essential for many a corporate drone (via McGee's Musings)
• Why Jerks Get Ahead in the Workplace (via Badbossology)
• CIO Insight interviews Tom Malone, who discusses his new book The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life
• also on CIO Insight is this profile of maverick CEO Ricardo Semler
• BOSS magazine profiles management guru Charles Handy
• How I learnt from a bad boss

Information & the Quality of Life is a program at the Information School of the University of Washington which addresses how to balance out the increasing demands of information and technology with a normal, healthy life. They sponsored a recent conference in Seattle, titled Information, Silence and Sanctuary. Here are a few reports following the conference:

• How Info-Overload Experts Unwind -- coverage from Wired
• E-serenity now! -- "Reeling from e-mail, cable TV, and cellphones, info-environmentalists try to reclaim mental green space."
• Unplugging the Addiction to Information Overload -- an article from Washington Post (free registration required)

Meanwhile, in no particular order, here's some other stuff that's crossed my radar recently.

• A two-parter from Emergic.org: Constructing the Memex and Constructing the Memex, Part 2
• Defending the In-Box: The Psychology of Coping with Spam (via del.icio.us)
• How the Word Gets Around -- Wired writes about The Memespread Project
• On your marks, get set, search... -- testing Google against more old-fashioned ways of finding information (via Robin Good)
• Robin also links to this list of Great RSS Tools
• Web Search: On to "Sense-Making" -- "WebFountain is attempting to bring a time axis to Internet search. Today, search engines provide a snapshot of how the Web views a certain topic. But it's largely a medium without a memory. That makes it next to impossible to spot trends or easily analyze how things shift over time" (via Emergic.org)
• Directory of Online Resources for Information Literacy (via Furl user Maria Moriarty)
• Organizing Ideas -- some tips from Whitespace
• Monkeymagic writes about Signals, Noise, and Blogs
• Your say: Personal knowledge management (via Mathemagenic)
• Ton's Interdependent Thoughts discusses The Emergence of Blogging and organized complexity

Getting close to the reporting finish line for the month, and it's been relatively painless. Last month, I could've been the Tourette's Syndrome Poster Girl and would have needed my computer monitor and office chair replaced about a dozen times, had I acted on my impulses. Calmer is better.

Meanwhile, here's a visual

that I got from here.

For those of you who don't view the home page regularly (*cough*Dad*cough*), I'm still posting random bits of linkage in the sidebar. (You can also get the sidebar linkage via RSS.)

Will be out tomorrow night joining some fellow bloggers for beverages and a few hijinks. Main blogging will resume on the weekend.

I just did another extreme weed and kill of saved items in my aggregator. Here's some work-related stuff that survived.

KM:

• Cutting Through offers tips on Starting to blog in the corporate environment
• Cutting Through also writes about How blogs and wikis can help knowledge management
• meanwhile, Common Craft has a good post which describes wikis in plain English
• Column Two also writes about Internal Blogging and More on Internal Knowledge Management

IA:

• Information Architecture of Content Management
• Understanding Organizational Stakeholders for Design Success
• What they didn't teach me in Design & Usability school (Part 2)
• Functional Requirements Tip: "At the very least"

Web design:

• Digital Web covers The Evolution of Corporate Web Sites
• for those of you who like to build your Moveable Type templates from scratch, Anil Dash points to these HTML Editor extensions for Dreamweaver, TopStyle, TextPad and NoteTab (NoteTab, BTW, is a darned fine text editor for Windoze -- in fact, I'm using it to write this post; but I'm content to let others do the heavy lifting when it comes to constructing MT templates)
• Mezzoblue posts A Roadmap to Standards for the web
• meanwhile, over on InformIT, Meryl cautions Design without Standards? Pay the Price
• Matthew Thomas writes about when semantic markup goes bad
• Andy Budd also chimes in on Semantic Coding
• and Bobby van der Sluis writes about Presentational JavaScript (via Digital Web)
• xBlog links to a list of fonts that are common to all versions of Windows, and their Mac equivalents
• BlogPoll is a custom poll-builder which lets you post user polls on your website easily (via Cutting Through)
• Robin Good points an older post from A List Apart that covers how to do Random Image Rotation using PHP

Marketing:

• BusinessWeek comments on the divide between sales and marketing
• Clikz discusses how to Grow Your Own Analytics Team
• also on Clikz is this article about Online Forms That Generate Leads
• on a related note, Fast Company links to a report that notes companies ignore 50 percent of email complaints
• back to Clikz again for this article The One-Two Punch: SEO and PPC
• and, according to a recent Neilsen-Norman report, Web-User Satisfaction on the Upswing

General Business:

• E-biz strikes again! -- " In the first wave of disruption, Amazon, Expedia, and others rewrote the rules for books, music, and air travel. Now the Web is poised to remake at least six more major industries: jewelry, bill payments, telecom, hotels, real estate, and software."
• Bullmarket 2004: Companies That Can Help You Make Things Happen is the latest offering that you can download for free (or for a small donation) from Seth Godin
• Thinking of launching your own business? Here are 10 things to know before you start ("6. Software engineers cannot spell.")
• QuickMBA offers resources on accounting, business law, economics, entrepreneurship, finance, management, marketing, operations, statistics, and strategy (via bBlog)
• Here's a good question: Why Don't More CIOs Measure ROI After a Project Is Up and Running?
• The Power of Design is a BusinessWeek article that takes a look at those darlings of innovation, IDEO

[Addendum: Ugh. Just as I finally get this post online, I spot another thing in the aggregator -- InfoWorld has a special report on Enterprise Information Portals.]

• Movable Type Brain Dump -- "Tips and tricks I wish I had known when I started using Movable Type." (via Rick Klau's Weblog, Cutting Through, and elsewhere)
• Second sight -- "Where are the women in IT? The percentage in this male-dominated industry was already low, but has fallen from 30% eight years ago to less than 20%." (via plasticbag)
• About.com Relaunches with Behavioral Targeting; and it looks like the relaunch is showing some success
• UW Calendar is an open-source calendaring project that will support "personal, public and group events, use existing open standards, and support web-based and other forms of access" (via Information Management Weblog)
• Opera 7.5 will support RSS -- yet another reason to use this very cool browser (via Robin Good)
• No More IT Projects -- "Call it whatever fits best, as long as you avoid that dreaded tech label that continues to wall IT off from the business, making senior executives ask, 'Why does this cost so much?' instead of, 'What value are we getting here?'"
• How Much Does Information Technology Matter? -- "The ability to manage technology effectively is no longer the barrier to entry it once was. Hence, it no longer serves as a source of competitive advantage." (via Pervasive Computing News)
• A Sunny Forecast for Open-Source -- "Weather.com's move to an all-open-source Web site infrastructure has enabled the company to lower costs while meeting increased capacity demands."
• Top 5 signs you're about to be outsourced -- sounds like some kind of David Letterman comedy bit, but it's not; plus, Your job is being outsourced: what to do next
• Microsoft has an Office 2000 HTML Filter that removes Office-specific markup tags embedded in Office 2000 documents saved as HTML (via Tech Republic)
• Microsoft also has a PowerPoint 2003 Viewer available for download (via InformIT)
• Dive Into Mark lists Essentials for cross-platform computing
• CDs and DVDs are subject to decay so keep an eye on your data backups

• How to Make Better Decisions
• Human Intuition is a Bad Guide to Handling Risk (via del.icio.us)
• Reciprocality -- "This project began as a bit of practical industrial psychology, and ended up unfolding into an understanding of how most people in most human societies have a consistently distorted view of everything." (ibid.)
• Low-Tech Scheduling for Projects is Similar to Paper Prototypes for Design
• You're Not Fired! (Yet) -- "sometimes a helping hand for your apprentice is better than a termination notice"
• Culture Wars -- "Does the IT subculture contribute to project failure? New research from Syracuse University says yes."; plus Sidebar: Elements of an IT Subculture
• Google, the Verb -- "More and more, when people want to know about you, they will type your name into the world’s leading search engine to see what it reveals about you."
• Managing the Unexpected -- cultivate a state of mindfulness (via Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Weblog)
• Avoiding The Landmines In Entrepreneurial Business
• How to Be the World's Worst Boss (via mktg@msft)
• How to Make Friends by Telephone -- retro, yes, but useful too (via plasticbag)
• What is Social Capital -- several definitions
• How to Be Your Own Career Coach (via the nub)
• The Stanford Prison Experiment -- "We had learned through videotapes that the guards were escalating their abuse of prisoners in the middle of the night when they thought no researchers were watching and the experiment was ‘off.’ Their boredom had driven them to ever more pornographic and degrading abuse of the prisoners."
• Intel researchers study cultures not circuits (Elegant Hack also points to this NYT article on the same topic)
• Managing the mood -- "Where does emotional intelligence come from and how do leaders learn to use it?"

• Ethnography - User Research Analysis (PowerPoint, 2.4MB) (via Conversations with Dina)
• Usability via Information Architecture (via Column Two)
• What they didn't teach me in Design & Usability school (ibid.)
• How much human support does your website need? -- "A 100-percent self-service website may simply not deliver the results you need." (via InfoDesign)
• An Information Architecture Perspective on Personalization -- a chapter from Designing Personalized User Experiences in eCommerce (PDF, 555kb) (ibid.)
• B2B: Help Your Fans Convince Their Bosses -- "B2B websites must support a more complex buying process than B2C sites. Three key goals are to make a buyer's shortlist, offer a downloadable advocacy kit, and build a reputation for great service."
• Visualization Patterns -- "Alexander et. al. (1977) proposed patterns as a method for capturing the knowledge underlying successful solutions to recurring architectural design problems... More recently the HCI community has also adopted the idea of patterns as a method of capturing user interface design knowledge." (spotted at Elegant Hack and xBlog)
• Usability Testing Materials -- PDFs to download (via xBlog)
• New Media Strategies in Web Design -- covers the roles and functions of Information Architecture and Information Design (via Robin Good)
• Are "Back to Top" links useful?
• "The AIfIA Tools project aims to disseminate new IA tools from the community in order to learn from each other. Below you will find document templates, process map posters and other tools to help you in your practice." (via Lou Rosenfeld)
• Designing a Better Presidential Daily Brief -- "Why is it that the president puts up with these horribly written and laid out documents to assess the threat against our nation?" (via anil's daily links)
• Enterprise Information Architecture: Don’t Do ECM Without It (via IA Slash)

• Bunker Holds a Mountain of Movies -- "A Cold War emergency bunker nestled in the side of a mountain will soon house one of the largest movie and music collections in the world."
• geometric paperclip sculptures -- mangle office supplies in new sophisticated ways (via kottke)
• Netflix offers abstract reworkings of some well-known movies (violent stuff, actually) as Flash animations (ibid.)
• The End of the World is a sizable Flash download (3.7 MB), but also worth a look (via plasticbag)
• The Observer runs a review of 50 Years of Pop (yet another link from kottke)
• Wired reports that, despite the success of legal online music download services, the record industry still wants more
• Signal vs. Noise recommends some cool music to check out

(If you don't know what the title means, read the previous post). Of course, there's so damn much of it that it's hard to know where to start. Might as go with some miscellaneous links.

• Wake up! You need more sleep
• What the world needs is sleep, sweet sleep
• Time centres theory for jet lag -- "Scientists believe they may have found the reason why humans suffer from jet lag." Actually, I rather like William Gibson's take on jet lag (20th paragraph down).
• crater on Mars looks like a giant brain
• Builder survives nailgun accident -- "A construction worker has miraculously survived after six nails were embedded in his skull."
• Return of the Original Invaders -- 25 years ago, a small Japanese company created a video game called Space Invaders
• Grow Your Own Teeth -- get rid of those pesky dentures, and grow new teeth instead
• Major snack attack or clever publicity stunt?
• The Doctor Will Freeze You Now
• the intricacies of designing a national flag (via plasticbag)
• Too much soy makes monkeys aggressive -- insert joke about veggie-burgers here
• Archaeologists Unearth Ancient Maya Masterpieces While Excavating A Sacred Ball Court In Guatemala

And, there is this Venn diagram. Today was one of those days.

(Thanks to my usual source for cartoon imagery.)

The aggregator is screaming for a clearout, while the laundry whimpers pitifully for attention (I wore one grey sock and one beige sock to work today). While feeling too spacey to attend to any of it, I don't actually feel sleepy yet.

Will get into the jammies, lie down with the light off, and see how it goes. Meanwhile, you can look at the sidebar.

[Addendum 05 May 2004: I slept well, but getting out of bed was still an ordeal. Today's sock combo: one light beige, one with khaki and orange stripes.]

...from the "Lying Awake at Night" department -- as BusinessPundit reports:

Cemetery offers coffin with panic button
A cemetery in Santiago, Chile is offering its clients coffins with a sensor that detects any movement inside them after they have been buried.
According to the Camino a Canaan cemetery the sensor attached to the coffin is to avoid anyone being buried alive.

Note to my next-of-kin: get me one of these.

I blame GAK for having this running through my head:

tall und tan und young und lovely,
the girl from ...ipanema! goes walking
and when she passes, each one she passes goes....
AUUUUGHGUHUGHUGGHUGH!!!

Ah, nothing like lying awake at night and having your head cluttered with trivia. Earlier on, I had Patsy Gallant's From New York to L.A. running through my mind. If you've never exposed to this execrable piece of CanCon disco, consider yourself lucky.

Speaking of lying awake at night, it turns out that this week (May 2-8) is Emergency Preparedness Week here in the Great White North. There's also a downloadable 5 Step Guide (PDF, 256kb) for your reading and emergency-preparedness enjoyment.

(Our friends south of the border may wish to refer to Are You Ready? A Guide to Citizen Preparedness, where there are also PDFs aplenty for downloading.)

Of course, I'm going to pay for this not-sleepingness in the morning. Interestingly, I've learned (via the nub) that 25% of workers 'sleep on the job'.

Not that I'll have a chance to try it myself -- we're at the beginning of the month, which means that there are Excel files that have to be shaped/smoothed/coerced/bludgeoned into something that makes sense. Serves me right for taking a job in marketing.

[Addendum: Meryl's Notes links to a book on Excel Hacks. Perhaps this bears adding to the reading pile.]

The Hovel is knee-deep in dirty clothes once again. I know I should run stuff through the wash, but I keep putting it off.

Over at The Occupational Adventure, Curt has a lovely pile of links on overcoming procrastination.

Of course, if I took the time to go through them all now, it would mean putting off the laundry, wouldn't it?

• Spiders Make Best Ever Post-it Notes -- "Scientists have found that the way spiders stick to ceilings could be the key to making Post-it® notes that don't fall off – even when they are wet."
• Warm Toes Are Happy Toes -- "keep your toes toasty warm (with) special wool socks and a 7-volt battery"
• Cholesterol 'highest in winter' -- "many people who had healthy cholesterol levels in summer went on to have high cholesterol in winter. Overall, 22% more people had high cholesterol in winter than in summer"
• it would appear that vitamins increase cholesterol too -- especially the "bad" kind
• Office Attachments documents all sorts of funny jokes and things that appear online -- just like what bogs down many corporate email servers
• How to Fold a T-shirt in 2 Seconds (via Mathemagenic)
• Dave Pollard links to a New York Times piece on punctuation and offers his own commentary on same
• Meryl has her own linkage on tech's impact on grammar
• whatwith the way that the weather has been fluctuating lately, seems like a lot of people are getting sick (my sinuses have been giving me hell); here's a guide to Understanding the Common Cold (via plasticbag)
• Follow Me Here links to this Map of Conflict in the 20th Century
• lastly, how about an interactive Java tutorial on the Powers of Ten (also via Follow Me Here)

• How It Sounds Is All in Your Head -- a review of in-ear canal phones
• A survey of playlist formats -- I have a feeling of déja blog with this one; my apologies if it's a repeat (via anil's daily links)
• CNET now offers free music downloads
• Easy DRM Stripping for Windows iTunes -- "Another approach to protecting your investment in your music library" (via McGee's Musings)
• Audioscrobbler tracks the music that you play on your computer and generates a list of other artists/songs that you might like (via Robin Good)
• there's also a Music Recommendation System for iTunes (via plasticbag)
• Dave Pollard lists his Favourite Online Radio Stations
• two noise-y links via del.icio.us: The Aesthetics of Noise, and Luigi Russolo's treatise 'The Art of Noises' (sic)
• BoingBoing links to a BBC Radio 2 documentary on the history of chillout and ambient music (also via del.icio.us)
• lastly, would you believe that Making Music Could Be Bad For Your Skin?

I deliberately avoided linking to The Memespread Project before because I was turned off by the tagline and read no further -- linking to something just because it says "Spread this Meme: Link to this site. Send it to your friends. Get the word out." seemed kind of lame.

Fortunately, the project had plenty of help without the likes of yours truly, and (as I would have discovered before, had I bothered to read the tiny type on the page) the ensuing link-frenzy was analysed and an report on the results (PDF, 126 kb) published.

I did, however, happily/unwittingly participate in the 23/5 meme -- a much more organic experiment, methinks, in popular link propagation because it wasn't obviously labelled as such. LaughingMeme has his(?) own write-up, page 23, sentence 5: an autopsy

And, while that was going on, I was collecting these links on information flow:

• FaganFinder has a very readable Explanation of RSS, How You Can Use it, and Finding RSS Feeds (spotted via McGee's Musings, and elsewhere)
• Meanwhile, Library Stuff gives props to Michael Fagan's del.icio.us page as being a good source of linkage
• Robin Good links to a list of news sources ranked by Moreover
• Robin also points to Ujiko, a visual search engine that learns from your preferences
• kottke links to PUSH! Kiss your browser goodbye: The radical future of media beyond the Web (from Wired's March 1997 issue) and The Return of Push! (from their May 2004 issue)
• Wired also wonders Will RSS Readers Clog the Web?
• In his article That's Not What I Meant, Dave Pollard looks at information loss during presentations
• Data Cubes are "a type of multidimensional matrix that lets users explore and analyze a collection of data from many different perspectives, usually considering three factors (dimensions) at a time"
• Transform magazine covers using taxonomies for overcoming information overload (via ResourceShelf)
• Overwhelmed yet? How about this Slate article on choice overload? (via del.icio.us)

And, just in case you missed them when they were all the rage a month ago (the links having fallen victim to my Bloglines purge the first time 'round), here are some additional links:

• Can RSS Relieve Information Overload? -- My immediate response as soon as I read this headline: "No."
• Information Overload and Its Discontents
• Newsmap presents the contents of the Google News aggregator in a visual form
• Information overload doesn't really exist because Every Signal Starts Out As Noise