Circadian Shift

Death march (software development):

In the software development and software engineering industries, a death march is a dysphemism for a project that is destined to fail. Usually it is a result of unrealistic or overly optimistic expectations in scheduling, feature scope, or both

• What is a Death March Project and Why Do They Happen?
• Hell No! I Won't Go! - Avoiding Death March Projects
• No Means No! -- Letter to the Editor (American Programmer magazine) by Tom DeMarco
• The Death March Project: Are you managing the project from hell?
• Ending the Death March -- notes from a talk given by Alan Cooper to BayCHI

Hmmm, now having vented my spleen quite fully over the spamming antics of Mike Furir (apologies for the excessive profanity -- I've been overdue for a good spleen-vent), I got to thinking about last summer's blogosphere debacle with Quick Boys Moving and Storage.

Sure enough, a Google search on "Quick Boys Movers" still puts Accordion Guy's and Boing Boing's posts ahead of the Quick Boys site itself on the results list.

Interestingly, I started noticing several weeks ago that Quick Boys started advertising on HaloScan, who provide free commenting and trackback services for bloggers. I wonder how that's working out for them.

Some asshole named Mike Furir has been posting comment spam here on le blog for the last few days. Thankfully, the comment filters installed by my lovely and talented blog-host Mr. GAK have ensured that said spam finds its way to the junk bin and does not besmirch your eyes, my dear readers. (All six of you.)

A quick Google confirmed that I'm not the only one getting hit by this shitsmear named Mike Furir. (Hey, that rhymed.) Here are a few other posts on the topic:

• Quixtar Blog: Die Mike Furir
• Jake Ludington: Mike Furir Sucks
• Miss Zoot: I'll join the ranks in wanting Mr. Mike Furir to Die a slow, painful, and hopefully humiliating death.
• It's a Soul Thing: Sock it to me baby!

So, Mike Furir, how's your Google-juice now, ya stupid moron?

It's been a very difficult week.

I think I've been managing the situation fairly well, but it's been, uh, "challenging". (Addendum 15 March 2005: The matter has been resolved to my satisfaction. Hallelujah.)

Here are a couple resources on playing nicely with others and dealing with sticky interpersonal situations:

• Crucial Skills -- the "Free Stuff" section includes a weekly newsletter, various self tests, plus other resources
• Belding Skills Development -- the newly renamed "Winning at Work" newsletter (formerly known as "Hints from Hell") has plenty of tips on dealing with that pain-in-the-ass boss/employee/co-worker/customer in your life

In other workplace-related news, the inventor of the cubicle regrets his creation as a terrible mistake.

Despite the whimsical tagline "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards", the scribblings done by Hugh Macleod over at gapingvoid often capture a truth that is both pithy and precise.

Twenty years ago, this cartoon would have had people scratching their heads.

Today, it is a way of life.

Another week. Another grid.

It was yet another week of dark and cold, and trying to get a good night's sleep.

Even though we've yet to reach the end of November, I went and downloaded some MP3s from eMusic, thanks to having purchased a "booster pack" for an extra 50 tracks, which I can download at any time. I've only made use of 7 downloads thus far, having bought some nice calming tunage to play at bedtime:

• Gas - Koenigsforst -- featuring an array of string samples taken from vinyl LPs, backed with a drum machine; this isn't entirely suitable as bedtime music, but it is good for quieter evening listening thank to its droning atmospheric sound
• Kelly Howell - Sound Sleep -- consisting of a single hour-long track titled "Music with Delta Waves", this is meant to be listened to through headphones so that the delta waves can induce your brain into a sleeping state; unfortunately, sleeping with headphones on is not particularly comfortable, but I still found it to be somewhat useful to be played softly through speakers in the background

I also bought a couple songs from iTunes:

• Laika - "Alphabet Soup" -- yet another dirtyradio discovery, this tune is all spacy and electronic, with vocals that remind me of Kate Bush
• Alice Cooper - "Clones (We're All)" -- one does not ordinarily associate Alice Cooper with New Wave, but he did produce some work in the early 80s that fits reasonably well in the genre; "Clones" combines a Gary Numan aesthetic with Brave New World imagery for just under three minutes of enjoyable listening

Other highlights of the week include all-day Friday and Saturday sessions for this taxonomy and metadata course that I'm taking (nothing says "rip-roaring good times" like parking your ass in a classroom on Saturday morning to learn about faceted classfication and controlled vocabularies), and getting my flu shot for this year. Yes, it's sad that those count as "highlights".

In response to my previous post, which contained a link to this overview of social bookmarking services, Maria asked:

So I don't understand that "social bookmarks" thing. I've tried to, but I guess I'm a bit daft. Could you explain it to me?

Wherein I will respond by posting this definition of "social bookmarking" from Wikipedia (more on the Wikipedia page itself):

Social bookmarking is an activity performed over a computer network that allows users to save and categorize (see folksonomy) a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others. Users may also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others—a personal knowledge management tool.

Which hopefully answers your question, Maria. However, I feel obligated to supplement that that with a mini link-vomit, which may possibly be of interest to someone:

• Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Review -- from D-Lib Magazine, published in April 2005
• Social Bookmarking Tools (II): A Case Study - Connotea -- also from D-Lib; Connotea is a bookmarking service geared toward the academic community
• Organizing links from references -- from easternblot, Eva's science blog; Eva talks about using CiteULike (another bookmarking service for academics) as well as del.icio.us
• Social Bookmarking Tool Comparison -- has some additional definitions and linkage concerning related technologies
• Social Bookmarking Resources -- a list of links from H20 Playlist, which in itself appears to be a social bookmarking service for people at Harvard Law School
• Social Bookmarking -- brief article which likens the social bookmarking phenomenon to what happens in file-sharing networks like Kazaa

Info-junkie that I am, I rather like the social-bookmarking thing as a quick-and-dirty way to capture interesting things that I find online. My "Drive-by Linking" category here on this blog draws in the links that I post to my del.icio.us account. I actually use Spurl as my front-end to capture the links, which get cross-posted to del.icio.us (there were reasons why I started doing that which no longer apply, but I still do it the same way just because).

I've also tried out Furl, which I never really got into (there has also been a Furl backlash), and occasionally use Simpy and Jots.

The thing with bookmarking with bookmarking a ton of links for later, however, is finding the time to go back and revisit them. But that is the subject of another post...

Here's a handy tip: outdated project plans (printed on 11x17 paper) make excellent placemats if you want to each lunch at your desk.

Then again, maybe it would be better if you went out for lunch.

In absence of any other inspiration, here are some funny lists from McSweeney's that I like:

• Thirteen Leading Synonyms for "Deliverables" in 2005
• Action Verbs to Use Sparingly on Resumes
• Words and Phrases I Use at Work, But Seldom Use at Home
• Frequently Asked Questions at the Office

I love my Firefox browser. Really, I do, whatwith all the cool extensions that provide some totally nifty functionality, and all.

But I am really getting hella goddam sick and tired of it crashing on me all the time -- popups in particular (even user-requested ones) seem to make it choke, sputter, and die.

It's been happening for the last couple versions now. Version 1.0.6 was supposedly a "stability" release, but it hasn't seemed to make one lick of difference.

There's a Beta version 1.5 available for the brave people to try, but I am not one of them.

I'm telling ya, though, if this crashy stuff doesn't get corrected soon, I'm thinking about switching back to Opera.

Over at The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century, Joey relates how he was threatened by Quick Boys Moving & Storage over a negative comment about the business that someone posted on his blog.

Of course, the ensuing blogostorm has ensured that the bad publicity that Quick Boys was so eager to avoid has been multiplied tenfold (just getting covered in BoingBoing alone means that several thousand people have read about it).

Oops. Or, rather, HaHa!

Another weekend is drawing to a close. Do you have that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach? Do you? Do you? Well, you're not alone.

Sunday-Night Depression Afflicts Even Happy Employees
People who suffer from the Sunday-night doldrums don't necessarily dislike work, but they sure don't like the thought of it. For many of the afflicted, the pre-Monday funk is yet another workplace echo of grade school. The only difference between this one and fire drills, cafeteria trays, bullies, teams and report cards (a.k.a. performance reviews) is that it happens every week, and yelling "Force field!" won't protect you.

Maybe you can try screaming along with these people (embedded Quicktime) to vent your dread and frustration.

(If you like the screaming video, there's an extended version of it, plus some other visuals, to be found here.)

Over at Clicks & Notes, I have a bunch of links on managing your email.

I confess that I have been very, very bad at dealing with/responding to email (as some of you may know). This is something that I hope to improve in the future.

(I posted these links on the other blog already, but thought they might be of interest to the viewing audience here.)

• The Password Is Fayleyure

  Today’s password authentication schemes are little more than security placebos. They perversely inspire abuse, misuse, and criminal mischief by deliberately making users the weakest link in the security chain. Greater teleprocessing power has made stealing or cracking password sequences ever faster, better, and cheaper.

  (via Tomalak's Realm)
• Secure passwords with nursery rhymes

  Take a phrase or saying, or perhaps a line from a song that you can remember readily, then type the first letter of each word as you say it to yourself... You can make it even more secure by throwing in a few number / character substitutions - zeros for the letter 'o', for example.

• Password Production

  The general idea is to pick a two-word combination you can easily remember (and) interleave the words... In cases where your two words have different lengths, you can always tack on numbers.

  (via Cutting Through)

• The Monster Blog examines a number of surveys of American workers and uncovers all sort of factoids, like "nearly one-third of workers skip breakfast, lunch or both nearly every weekday"
• Curt notes that job dissatisifaction can make you sick
• along the same lines, the BBC reports that blood pressure soars on Mondays
• FC Now offers tips on how not to speak like an idiot
• also via FC Now comes this list of the most annoying terms and phrases in the workplace
• Cutting Through remarks on the evil practice of using requests for clarification as a delaying tactic
• lastly, someone has developed a a monitoring system to support companies who want to bill employees for bandwidth used due to personal websurfing

BTW, after checking my site stats, I'm pleased to see that more than half of the visitors coming here are not using Internet Explorer:

As for the other 45% of you: why are you still using IE? Why? Why?

I've been happily using Firefox as my default browser for the last several months now, and it rocks. And don't forget that you can still use Firefox on a Windows PC where you don't have "install" privileges.

Not convinced? Visit Browse Happy to find out why you shouldn't use IE and to learn about some of your web-browsing alternatives.

A few year-end job-related things crossing my radar:

• Over at The Occupational Adventure, Curt mirrors a list of tips for conducting a year-end review of your accomplishments and disappointments, and for setting goals for the upcoming year
• Saleprocessdiva links to a study on Why New Year’s Resolutions Fail which offers pointers to help achieve your goals
• The Monster Blog has a list of four job-related resolutions for you to work on in the new year
• also from Monster is this list of Top-10 lists of things work-related
• Worthwhile offers some resolutions for health and wellness that will go far in helping you maintain your sanity when things get rough

palmOne Tungsten T5 Handheld:

• 320 x 480 colour display
• 256MB storage
• Intel 416MHz XScale Processor

Drool!

Right.

If I haven't updated this monster in the next week, will someone please freaking well slap me....

Meanwhile, feel free to peruse the sidebar. And -- if you've got the drive space and bandwidth -- visit the MP3 Blogs Aggregator often. Very often.

See you in a week.

I've been happily using Opera as my default browser at home for the last couple of years, but I find it's been really crashy on me lately.

So when I started up Firefox this evening, I checked the little box to make it my default browser instead.

However, I'm now finding that it's not integrating with Star Downloader properly (I'm using the Free Version), which is very annoying, given my MP3 harvesting binges of the last while.

*sigh*

Addendum (07 October 2004): Fixed the integration problem with Star Downloader -- turned out that some of my QuickTime settings had gotten changed somehow. Back to downloading mayhem.

Right.

Over at Ripples, David St. Lawrence offers some sobering words, as well as encouragement, on escaping a dead end job.

On with the day.

In case you've somehow managed to missed it, Troutgirl has been fired by her employer, Friendster, over her blog.

Yep, that Friendster -- the company whose product facilitates networking and socializing online. Kind of like the way blogs do.

That's a real head-scratcher.

The prime source of linkage tracking the blogosphere's reaction seems to be over on Jeremy Zawodny's Blog, so I'll not bother to duplicate it here, having spewed out my own list of links about blogging and employment not too long ago. (Further irony: one of the articles in that list was written by Joyce Park -- Troutgirl herself.)

(Yes, I'm writing this while at work. The less said about that, the better.)

It would seem that Drew from toothpastefordinner knows all about the rules of workplace snacking -- and their effects:

In the month or so after writing his "How to Be Creative" post, Hugh at Gaping Void has been making follow-up posts, expanding on his thoughts, and adding to the original list.

Now, he's gone and put it all together -- check out "How to Be Creative (Long Version)". This one's a keeper.

It's been at least a few months since I've done any real linking to business and technology news. I keep meaning to do something about that.

Anywhere, here are some things of interest that I fished out of my aggreagator:

• IA vs. Information Management, plus a response
• Information Architecture Heuristics
• How to Apply for IA Jobs
• Representing Content and Data in Wireframes
• Enterprise IA Summary
• Eight Quick Ways to Fix Your Search Engine
• It’s Not Just About Searching -- It’s About Findability
• The Cognitive Cost of Classification
• A Primer of Visual Cliche
• Six great ways to ruin a brainstorming session
• What Are the Differences Between Message Boards and Weblogs?
• Fitts' Law
• Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom
• A blank canvas is too confusing
• Knowing vs. Doing: Time for More Action?
• Dismantling a Culture of Knowledge-Hoarding

Everybody and their grandmother are linking to this (and hence, you may have some trouble getting through on the first try):

Internet Explorer can make your computer unsafe. Why not switch to a browser that's more secure?

Remember, kids -- you can still use Firefox on a Windows PC where you don't have "install" privileges.

Get happy. Switch today.

Jim from Blogs Canada (Hi, Jim!) dropped a quick note on the weekend to bring my attention to this news article:

Nunavut Tourism fires web-logging staffer

A Nunavut Tourism marketing officer was fired last month after a local resident complained about a web site she ran in her spare time.

Penny Cholmondeley, known on the Internet as "Polar Penny," was surprised to learn on July 18 that she was being fired because of the online journal, or web log, she had kept since her arrival in Iqaluit in January.

The web log, or "blog," was easily found by typing the words "Polar Penny" into a search engine, and often topped search engine lists generated by people looking up a local business in Iqaluit, or for photos of Frobisher Bay.

During the six months she lived in Iqaluit, Cholmondeley regularly updated the site with details about life in the North, including photographs, anecdotes, and what she thought were personal opinions, including food and restaurant reviews.

Cholmondeley was baffled when executive director Maureen Bundgaard said that she had received an anonymous complaint from someone in town, and that she had to let Cholmondeley go, just before the end of her six month probation period.

As Jim notes:

There are some bizarre aspects to this tale and some unanswered questions. The complaint over which Penny was dismissed was apparently made anonymously. One anonymous complaint can get you canned? The nature of the complaint has not been made public either by Nunavut Tourism or Ms. Cholmondeley.

MetaFilter also ran the story, generating much discussion and speculation; some believe that Penny's former employers are idiots, whereas others just shrug.

What can I say? We've seen this happen before, and no matter how innocent you think your post may be, you can still get slapped upside the head for it.

I, too have pondered this before, although it's been from the (somewhat) comfortable perspective of not having had a job to lose. As I once said:

OK, a few simple rules are perfectly reasonable. For instance:

• Don't blog during work hours.
• Don't say anything slanderous about your colleagues or your customers.
• Don't disclose confidential information on your blog.

But what if you simply express an opinion on your blog which the powers that be at your workplace don't agree with? Where does the line of appropriate vs. inappropriate get drawn?

(Well, rules are perhaps easier made then followed -- I've gone and broken rule #1 several times already; and while I haven't said anything slanderous or disclosed anything confidential, I have expressed sentiments in recent months that may be a little too candid for some.)

I guess I'm in the 'shrug' camp, because -- let's face it -- there were employers who picked on, harassed, and even fired their employees for trumped up reasons long before the internet was around. Of course it sucks. But it happens.

Anyway, I'm sort of having trouble winding this screed up, so I'll just cop out and post a fistful of links like I usually do...

More thoughts on the perils of blogging and employment:

• here's a BostonWorks.com article which notes that "Job blogs hold perils, opportunities"
• Don't Blog provides "Headlines from the Future of the Weblog Backlash"
• "Towards Semi-Permeable Blogging" touches on issues of online privacy and blogging about work
• Groove.net is one forward-looking company which has a weblog policy for its employees
• blawger Paul Gutman wrote a paper titled "Did You Just Say That?: Blogging and Employment Law in Conflict" which was available in draft form on his website; you now have to look for it in the archives of the Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts
• last year, Harvard Business Review published a case study and commentary titled "A Blogger in their Midst"; author Halley Suitt recently made a follow-up post about it in her own blog
• Big Blog Company consults for -- and writes about -- companies that want to start blogging

On the other hand, some people like living dangerously. Fuck This Job is an online community where they believe that "job blogging helps you better deal with those ass customers, stupid boss decisions and other daily crap you get at work everyday."

I have to admit, it sure feels good to let off some steam here in cyberspace.

Addendum 14 August 2004: Hotlinks points to this Washington Post article about the fallout from when a Capitol Hill mail clerk's blog gains widespread notoriety.

Addendum 16 August 2004: Yet another article on the subject; here's Blog slog can get you in trouble in the workplace.

I've mentioned them before, but it bears repeating: TinyApps.Org is an excellent source of software -- most of it free -- that can fit on a floppy disk. A number of the programs are also recipients of the "Green Award", meaning that the software

• does not require installation
• does not write to the registry
• does not create or modify files outside of its own directory

I'm less familiar with Under1mb.com, but it too boasts "Freeware that Fits on a Floppy".

I've found it useful to have a number of these minimalist utilities copied onto floppy disks, or burned to mini-CD -- you have a little Windows toolkit that you can take with you wherever you need it.

Over at Blamblog, Brett has been exhorting (to put it mildly) his readers to stop using Microsoft Internet Explorer. The ensuing comment thread noted that, when one websurfs at work -- almost invariably on a PC running Windoze -- one doesn't always have the option of using an alternate browser.

Or do they? I responded:

If your user settings don't allow you to 'install' software on your workplace PC, you can still use the ZIPped version of Firefox, available here:

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/0.9.1/

Addendum 30 July 2004: You can now find version 0.9.2 at
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/0.9.2/

Addendum 12 August 2004: Whatever the latest release of Firefox is, find it here:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/

Just unzip the contents into a directory on your hard drive, and you can run it from there.

Should you require a ZIP program, may I suggest 100K_Zipper. It doesn't handle any kind of compressed file other than ZIP, but it does benefit from not requiring installation. Find it here:

http://www.quickzip.org/quickzip/information.php

Heck, even my Mom and Dad have made the switch to Mozilla (albeit, at the insistence of my brother and I, who serve as de facto tech support to the parental household). After all, there are many things that Mozilla can do which IE cannot.

On my main desktop PC here, chez Hovel, I use Opera, which works just fine for me on Win98SE. However, I've had less luck with Opera on my notebook PC, which runs WinME. (The "ME", I believe, stands for "Multiple Expletives", which is what it usually drives me to using, thanks its overall crappiness.) So on my notebook, I use Firefox.

Adding a toolbar or two to your web browser can be useful, but is it possible to take things too far?

(via Information Nation)

Some blog posts that are particularly relevant right now:

• Curt Rosengren writes about Comfort, inertia, and the positive side of pain
• David St. Lawrence puts forward A question to ask yourself when things aren't going well

A while back, Curt also pointed to this article on Monster.com:

• Set an Expiration Date for Your Job

Good advice, all around. The tough part is applying it.

Sadly, there are times when this seems true:

Thank you, toothpastefordinner.

[I meant to post this on Monday, but my fancy-ass new home internet connection has been muy uncooperative for the last two days. I am not happy.]

Kudos to Richard for providing these links about website piracy:

• Copyscape is a Google-powered search-thingy that hunts down online copies of any URL you provide
• a few months back, there was a Slashdot discussion about website theft
• Pirated-Sites.com

Awright, just one more post on the Shaolin Monks....

Did some Googling, and found a number of references to a Windows Help file that goes into greater detail about the 100 action principles. The text is based on a book written by one Bill Fitzpatrick.

The original page by whoever made the help file is gone, but I did find a copy of the file hosted elsewhere.

I've also gone and mirrored the file here:

• 100 Action Principles of the Shaolin Monks (ZIPped Windows Help File, 73.3 kb)

Further to the previous post, Matthew M. Boedicker has put a Shaolin Action Principle Randomizer on his site. To draw a different principle from the deck, just refresh the page in your browser.

Thanks, Matthew!

Also found squirreled away on a ZIP disk was this list of 100 Action Principles of the Shaolin Monks (plain text file, 2.59 kb). I have no idea where I got it from.

Taken out of context, some of the points don't mean much, but others are simply good common sense:

While doing some ZIP disk archaeology last night (I have a ton of ZIP disks dating back to the late 90s), I came across a copy of David Allen's workflow diagram that I have in my Daytimer:

A quick Googling about yielded the following additional goodies:

• Some downloadable tools that someone put together, based on David Allen's work
• an advanced workflow diagram (PDF, 321 kb)

I actually do own a copy of the book Getting Things Done -- The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, and it's... somewhere... here in The Hovel... um... partially read...

Really should get that done.

Mookie points to the following goodies that you can add to Mozilla Firefox:

• Download Manager Tweak
• Googlebar
• Yahoo Companion

• What is a Polymath? -- "A person of great or varied learning; one acquainted with various subjects of study."; Ming the Mechanic explains and provides more linkage
• Protect your intellectual property -- quick overview of the differences between trademark, copyright, patents, and trade secrets
• Stocking the Virtual Ready Reference Collection -- linkage to existing reference sources and to help for creating your own
• 125 Public Information Symbols -- signage from Japan
• Information Literacy - Sources of Information -- a webliography from the University of Sköde
• threetwoone.org -- "devoted to the display of information with diagrams"
• Tips to Avoid Information Overload -- geared to those in direct marketing
• No Rest for the Weary -- "It seems companies expect mobile technology to increase productivity outside the office in addition to what goes on inside, not instead of it"
• Social Effects of Mobile Technology -- "I know that I, personally, am often overwhelmed by the speed at which information moves and changes (being in the information business). There is too much to know and sometimes my brain simply shuts down!"
• Interruptive Technology and the Death of Deep Thought -- "the interruptive nature of our current technology makes it much harder to sustain concentration"

Firefox has released an incremental update -- version 0.9.1 is available for download.

Tesugen has put together a "mood board" to help him focus his ideas while designing a website:

I'm a total sucker for having visual stimuli around when I'm working on stuff -- something which has caused some small measure of consternation and bafflement at my current place of employ. Now that I know that this is a recognized tool for conducting qualitative marketing research, I figure I can push the envelope a little more with my cube decoration.

(Thanks to Plasticbag for the link.)

[Addendum 29 June 2004: IAwiki has a nice page dedicated to Cubicle Decoration -- links to all sorts of diagrams and posters of things related to Information Architecture (spotted on del.icio.us)]

• Can You Hear Me Now? All Too Clearly, I'm Afraid

  Because cellphones are tiny, some people assume there's a need to shriek into them. "On a small phone, you can't hear yourself; therefore, you don't think anybody else can hear you," she said.

  (via Nathan's Notebook)
• I Want to Be Alone. Please Call Me.

  Consider the case of Lilia Belkova, a passenger earlier this month on a US Airways flight from Miami to Philadelphia. She refused repeated requests by flight attendants to turn off her cellphone so the plane could take off. Hanging up on her caller, she said, would be rude. Things got so out of hand that the plane had to return to the terminal, but not before Ms. Belkova, 38, had slapped a federal air marshal.

  (via Follow Me Here)

• ResearchBuzz! points to a Google search scraper bookmarklet that lets you save Google search results as a comma-delimited file
• NewsLookup lets you search for news articles by media type, source region, and other criteria (also via ResearchBuzz!)
• Information Literacy & You is an interactive guide to research techniques and strategies from Penn State University Libraries
• Dave Pollard has been working on a list of Essential Links and Free Downloads; meanwhile, Jason Lefkowitz has compiled The Big List O' Quality Software (via Robin Good)
• it also wouldn't hurt to check out The Spyware Infested Software List (via Meryl's Notes)
• Time has a list of The 50 Coolest Websites that have popped up on the radar over the past year (the impatient/time-pressed may just wish to skip through to the complete list)
• researchers and info-junkies can check out this list of Mozilla keyboardlets, which provide shortcuts for sending queries to various online resources (via del.icio.us)
• then there's this Overview of Windows Graphical Brainstorming Tools to help you deal with the new thoughts and insights gushing out of your brain (also via del.icio.us, courtesy of Seb); a separate page gives an Overview of Windows Outlining Programs to put everything in some semblance of order

Over at Gaping Void, Hugh's got yet another brilliant cartoon online:

He's also got some great thoughts about it here.

I've been having trouble remembering what day of the week it is.

(photo courtesy pixelperfectdigital.com)

Villagers with Pitchforks has this handy guide to calibrating non-weekday enjoyment:

My definition of a good weekend: it's a good weekend if all you can remember about your DayJob is where you work.

Which reminds me of a quote from an old Dilbert strip:

Morning Amnesia: Nature's way of keeping you from waking up screaming.

I stumbled across a comic strip yesterday that I had seen on a co-worker's bulletin board a few years ago -- The Adventures of Action Item will ring true with anyone who's been exposed to too much office jargon.

The Nub points to two excerpts from a book called Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruining Our Lives -- part 1 is here and part 2 is here.

Lastly, someone on del.icio.us posted this link to a tale about Downsizing the Human Deadwood.

The latest version of Mozilla's leaner, speedier cousin is available for download.

And, while not prominently listed, there is a ZIP file version for Windows (5.99 MB) available -- perfect if one finds oneself using a PC that doesn't allow you to install new software.

(I'm just saying, you know...)

• 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

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)

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