Chinese New Year - 2002 is Year of the Horse01/22/2004 10:20 AM ¨§‡ … ˆ ˆ… †Š†Œ€Œ‡§ ¨§Œ §„ †ˆ .. Chinese New Year - 2002 is the Year
of the Horse .. Welcome to 4700 .. Monkey ..
4700
"From the shore, they look like tiny dots slowly making
their way out past the breakers. They're the software vendors
positioning themselves to catch the Enterprise RSS wave. My, that's a
lot of tiny dots...." [MoonWatcher]
RSS was big in 2004, but next year is going
to be something else. It's killing me that I can't say more, but I
know of two major library vendors that will make big announcements
about RSS in 2005. It's going to be a fun year!
Wow. What a long time it has been since I last posted to
plasticbag.org. And what have I done in the meantime? I've been back
to Norfolk to see my family, experienced the wonders of Christmas,
seen Return of the King,
watched ten hours of videos with my little brother, watched the snow
come down and get washed away, struggled through lots of music
television, had my first frank conversation with my little brother
about being gay, opened and given lots of gifts, battled back to
London via bus and train, gone back to work for a few days before
late-night driving off to Cornwall for New Year with a selection of
friends and friends of friends wherein was had much late-night
drinking, (indoor) swimming, fondue-ing, walks in the wet and the
dark, eating of beef and roaming around. Since I last posted I've
travelled about eight hundred miles in total, including trips to
Penzance for shopping, Newquay for boots and Bath for Sally Lunn's. I've driven
through Indian Queens, passed by Splatt and circumnavigated Pityme. I've also read a lot of The Social Life of Information (more
on how much I want to burn that particular waste of headspace later),
thought a lot about Tivo and Social
Software, played a lot of Knights of the Old Republic and both
been bought and bought for others some of the most wonderfully
entertaining porcelain cups I've ever seen. All in
all, an eventful and entertaining couple of weeks.
Next up is trying to get my head together to start a new project at
work (interesting one this - should have really positive, interesting
and coincidentally weblog-friendly effects on BBC Radio sites), trying to
assemble my thoughts for a conference at Olympia in a couple of
month's time, trying to work out whether to propose a participant session for this year's ETCon (which I'm
still hoping I'm going to attend), while apparently also trying to
score maximum points on self-created, self-destructive and highly
non-fun-for-all-the-family games like, "How quickly and effectively
can I alienate everyone I work with?", "Be an arse!" and "How fat,
weird and bearded can one man become?". What did you guys get up
to?
LynuxWorks Announces Consecutive Year Over Year Growth and Profitability; Company’s Fourth Quarter Success Fuelled by Growth in the Military/Aerospace Market
Research And Markets - The Western European PC Market Has Continued To Go From Strength To Strength In The First Half Of 2004, Capitalizing On The Recovery Of 2003 To Record An 18.3% Shipment Growth Year On Year
The Chinese mobile phone industry's shipment volume rose 64.2% year on year to reach approximately 65.2 million units as the PAS mobile phone shipment broke a record high
Constructech Magazine Names ELAN™ as One of Technology’s Hottest Companies Leading Construction Automation Technology Magazine Recognizes ELAN as One of the Year’s Most Innovative and Exciting Companies in the Home Building Market for Second Consecutive Year
While the Taiwanese router industry declined in the first quarter of 2004, Taiwanese router shipments are anticipated to grow by 30.9% year-on-year in the second quarter of 2004
W
ith a few caveats and a bit of apprehension, I present to you my
latest pet project: The CSS Zen
Garden.
Since I just about missed it (I could have sworn it was May 8th,
2003, but my archives don't lie) I don't have anything much planned to
mark the occasion. So lacking that, I'll take you through some of my
design process when I was building 'Tranquille', the default
template.
5,000,000,000 per Year09/22/2004 07:15 PM I had a talk today with Make Technologies, I’ve
known them a long time and I have some shares. They’re doing a lot
of work on legacy conversion, both methodology and technology; helping
people who have mission-critical applications that they want to move
to modern infrastructure, specifically J2EE. I knew that this was an
interesting space (even post-Y2K) but I was flabbergasted when Mike
Hagerman (Make’s CEO) told me two numbers: There are five billion
new lines of COBOL getting created every year, and there (wait for it)
220 billion lines of COBOL in production. (Holy cow, now that I think
about it, I bet I wrote ten or twenty thousand of them). Mike got the
numbers from Gartner. That’s... scary.
Yesterday, we celebrated the anniversary of our arriving here one
year ago and today I remembered why I don't get drunk very often...the
day after. :)
When we left Boston last year, both Iceland and Helsinki were warmer
at the time even though friends and family were joking about how cold
it would be in Finland. I was filled with both relief of getting
everything done in time and anxiety for relocating to the great mostly
unknown. It has been an interesting year with something new nearly
every day. Relocating from Denver to Milwaukee isn't like expatriating
to a place where everything including the language is utterly
different than anything you're used to. It's a radical change even
when you know what to expect. I had prepared myself for most of the
issues that face expats though it was still a year of difficult times
and difficult language classes. I remain optimistic about learning the
language, but I think it will take a bit longer than I had originally
anticipated.
I rode with Jarkko's father, HB and the bags from the airport in a
borrowed van while Jarkko and his mother took a cab. I hadn't seen the
apartment prior to our arrival and when Erkki turns to me as we were
climbing the stairs and says, "It was a bit of a compromise." I braced
myself for the worst-case scenario and the apartment was a lot better
than I had feared after he said that. The wind howled and whistled
through the bedroom window that night and I started to wonder why I
couldn't have married someone from the British Virgin Islands or Fiji.
:) We spent the next six months renovating the apartment and taking
Finnish language classes so I didn't really have a lot of time to
ponder the depths of the insanity of moving to Finland until midsummer
and by then I found that I had grown quite fond of this small corner
of the Nordic lands.
I don't really have any words of wisdom or insight on being an expat
because I have seen that nearly everyone has a different experience.
Adjusting to Finland has been difficult at times and easy at other
times, but it hasn't been dull. You can prepare yourself for the
larger obstacles, such as the language barrier, but the little things
like not finding peanut butter where you expect to find it in the
grocery are what will send you into bouts of petty despair. The dark,
foggy days of November sneak up on you when you aren't looking, too.
It has been a year of challenge and adjustment but I am be curious to
see how long it will be before Finland becomes as familiar and
comfortable as home. I hope it isn't terribly soon as I'm still
enjoying the newness of everything which people don't get the
opportunity to enjoy very often in life, especially now that world is
becoming a smaller, more familiar landscape all the time.
What A Year It's Been
What A Year It's Been12/19/2004 03:15 PM An all-new Probe Droid has just been launched; this week we're
searching for the letter grade collectors would give 2004. With only
two weeks left it's that time of the year again. While we've seen some
interesting items come down the pike, overall how would you
rate the year in collecting? Look for the new Probe Droid ballot now
and cast your vote today!
$14 into $1,000 in one year04/29/2004 04:16 PM
I'm not a fan of followup posts, but this is cool enough to
mention. Remember the
challenging question of how to turn $14 into $1,000? BirdD0g has taken
that noodle-scratcher of a problem and turned it into his personal
challenge, and he's taking everyone along for the ride at 14bucks.com. He's got until April
15, 2005 to turn it over into a grand, which sounds like plenty of
time, but that's a lot of profit to turn over (7000% return on
investment). Who wants to take my $14 bet it doesn't happen?
Best Mac Year Ever?
Best Mac Year Ever?12/20/2003 12:10 PM You, and hundreds of others who work for Apple, have provided us with
one of the most exciting rides in recent computing history. Thank you.
By Derrick Story (O'Reilly Network via MyAppleMenu)
One Sun Year
One Sun Year03/17/2005 03:17 AM Today, March 15th, is my first anniversary at Sun; an opportunity for
discourse on how I think we’re doing. There’s a unifying theme
which may come as a surprise: The important stuff, well, it’s
boring. Which is both good and bad...
About six weeks later, when I happened to be off on another
escapade, my mother was visited by a man who identified himself as an
investigator from the F.B.I. [...] He reportedly was quite
disappointed when he learned that I was only 12 years old.
[he] said "Lady, this case has cost the government thousands of
dollars. It has been the top priority in our office for the last six
weeks. We traced the glasses to your son from the prescription by
examining the files of nearly every optometrist in San Diego."
Totally sounds like something I would have done when I was a
kid.
New Year, New Gig01/01/2005 02:57 PM Happy New Year to all. May this one be an improvement on the one we've
just ended.
As many of you know, I've left the Mercury News to work on a project
to help citizen journalism. I've started a new blog where we can
discuss that topic in some depth. I'll post here as well periodically,
though the future of this blog is not entirely clear right now.
I'm incredibly grateful to you for your support, or at least your
readership and involvement in a normally valuable conversation here.
We haven't always agreed, but we've been able -- with a few exceptions
-- to disagree without being disagreeable.
Again, happy new year, and let's keep talking.
New Year to all of you. I hope this year will be better than the
last. With the tsunami and all of the uh-oh's of last year, I don't
think I can really say "happy" anything right now. :-|
If you check the left sidebar under the recently commented entries,
you'll see a new section called "One Year Ago." These are the entires
that were gracing the site one year ago today...sort of. I think it's
a little off due to the time zones, so it may be a day early or late.
Via Brad Choate's OnThisDay plugin.
Oh Well, Maybe Next Year06/30/2004 07:45 PM I don't know what really went on between Apple and the makers
of Konfabulator, but neither do you... Is anyone aware that the makers
of Konfabulator were also the makers of Kaleidoscope, and that back
during their Kaleidoscope days, they got into some kind of legal
tussle with Apple for purportedly lifting the Aqua interface and using
it in Kaleidoscope? By Bill Palmer (via MyAppleMenu) Grok Description matches for $3 gas within a year GrokA matches for $3 gas within a year
$3 gas within a year
The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry:
