I’ve discovered a great blog by Leisa Reichelt, an information architect living in Sydney. It’s called disambiguity and has the clever tagline “pretty design pending.” I would like to declare that about myself, except with a slight change: “pretty hair pending.” The great thing about living in Maui has been that there’s never a bad hair day. The bad? Now I’m moving back to the mainland and I’m not sure if I remember how to do anything with my hair beyond whipping it into a ponytail. I did, however, color it Amber Shimmer. You’ll have to wait for the photo–I’m going to get a pic with the Rocky Mountains in the background.
Browsing Leisa’s blog, I immediately found several posts of interest:
- She reviews Pixoh, an online photo editing service. My impending switch to Macs will leave me temporarily PhotoShop-less, so I’m glad to know of this. I’m thinking, however, that the iLife suite may include photo editing. See what a Mac barney I am?
- Leisa wonders if Mum’s Principle (”if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”) applies to the beta sites she gets emails about. I’ve been wondering that too, although only theoretically, because I don’t have much extra time right now to play with new possibilities. I have been working with Personal Bee and am hoping it might become my answer to providing a work-family balance news page a la Memeorandum.
- She writes about the supposed attention scarcity problem: “Even when you have 300 blogs in your RSS aggregator, there are some that you will always have time to read.”
Ah, at last we get to the theme of my post: blogs that I always have time to read. I’ve put disambiguity into my Current Favorites folder in Bloglines. The feeds in that folder are the ones I always read and they are the ones that appear in my Anne 2.0 blogroll.
I discovered another new favorite, Scott Mark, via email, when I declared my intent to blog more about enterprise software. That’s one benefit of declarative living: what you need can find you better. It’s similar to the intention economy that Doc Searls has been talking about recently. When your intention is known to other people, they can respond. I don’t want to turn this into some sort of market transaction (although it is, in the broadest sense) because I don’t want to take out the human connection element of it. Not only can Scott and I bond on the heaven and hell of enterprise software development and integration, we can also talk Tang Soo Do, which Scott and my son practice, and work-family balance, because Scott is a former stay-at-home dad, part of a new wave of reverse-traditional families. I have hopes that my family will try that sometime in the near future.
I have a third new addition to my Current Favorites: Michael Cote at People Over Process and lately of the Red Monk analyst group. Sorry, Michael, I don’t know what character reference to use to get that jaunty accent over the “e” in your last name, but it’s a nice design touch. I’ve had Michael in one of my skimming folders since he joined Red Monk but didn’t add him immediately to my favorite reads because he needed to prove his worth to me. And he did prove himself by including one of my rambling treatises on entrepreneurial economics in his delicious links. He also writes about subjects that are not usually covered by the other feeds in my must-read folder, so he gains entry by virtue of orthogonality. Orthogonality is a favorite quality of software engineers and statisticians everywhere, so I love it double.
And finally, I have added mobile jones a.k.a. Debi Jones to my blogroll. She and I both work as contributing editors at BlogHer and have similar ideas about what enhancements we’d like to make to the BlogHer directory capabilities and the website design. She also has a broad, global vision for the future of technology. I loved her post The Site that Ate the Blogosphere about MySpace. We ignore MySpace and its ilk at our peril. She calls 2006 the “year of mobile social media” and I think she’s right. Debi’s going to drag me out of 2005 by giving me a reason to buy a headset and sign up for Skype at long last. I’m a latecomer to VoIP. We’ve got a conference call planned for next week to talk about how to make the the BlogHer beta site even more cool. Thanks, Debi.
Wishing you all many orthogonal and savory blogs.
8 Comments
Thanks for the plug, Anne, I have been enjoying your blog for awhile now so hopefully I will pay you back! I’m feeling like less of an architect now because of my low usage of “orthogonality” - I will rectify that immediately.
Re: photo editing on the Mac
I’ve found that iPhoto (which comes bundled as part of iLife) takes care of most of the editing and touch-ups I do on my pictures pretty well. I’d like a copy of Photoshop eventually, but it’s a little expensive for just adjusting the light/color balance and cropping. And then I use the Gimp if I need something more detailed, but I know it can be awkward to switch to when you’re used to Photoshop.
Scott: I probably ought to drop “orthogonal” from my vocabulary. I find myself wanting to use it WAY too much and often in situations where people wouldn’t have any idea what I meant.
Audrey: thanks, I was hoping iLife had that. PhotoShop is really expensive and, at least on my PC, it takes forever to load.
bey Anne, I’m beyond flattered. Thank you!
I’ve really enjoyed reading your blog over the last few months. Looking forward to taking a look at some of the others you’ve mentioned here too, and your Favourite Reads (some of which I already regularly read).
I’m also looking forward to your new pic with ‘mainland’ hair
Re: Enterprise Software, I’ve worked in enterprise software for almost 5 years now, and I can tell you it’s filled with crap. I think it’s widely viewed as a process problem - we don’t have the right processes or models to bring up a large complex system, but I think its a technological problem with a technological solution. Simply put, current state of the art software is too primitive and verbose to develop and be agile. Eg: Java, C++, C#.
Personally I’m doing my current project in Erlang. I have sign off for the prototype.
I see I’m a little late to the “thanks for the kind words” comment pile. Nonetheless, thanks for the kind words. I’ve recommended your blog to several people lately.
If you really want to do the e acute, you can use the HTML entity &eacaute; which will show up as the e with the accent over it. But, really, that’s a lot of trouble
ryan: yeah, I’m familiar with some of that enterprise crap, having had to fix bugs in it (Oracle Financials) and then consolidate data models in it (customer model for the Oracle ERP and CRM apps). I don’t have an opinion at this point whether the problems are more technological or process-oriented, but I bet you’re right that higher-level abstractions could help. I’ve heard good things about Erlang.
Cot
By the time you get to something like OFA, or the like, your process is so tied up in the technology, that everything just is sucky. More specifically, it’s not natural, doesnt make sense all the time, and you can’t make effective change.
I think one reason why job burnout happens is because people stop believing they can make a difference. That is, people have learned helplessness!
As Sr developers, the job is to enable your team, by fixing learned helplessness, and making effective teams. Your manager can only do so much, you have to do the tech side.