Clarke Ching's Rocks and Snowballs

Shades of grey

Does anyone know the origin of the following paraphrased quotation?

I wish I was as certain about anything, as he is about everything

Blind into Baghdad

David Brooks of the New York Times counts "Blind into Baghdad" by (one of my favourite writers) James Fallows as one of the best essays of 2004. 

Blind Into Baghdad

The U.S. occupation of Iraq is a debacle not because the government did no planning but because a vast amount of expert planning was willfully ignored by the people in charge. The inside story of a historic failure

by James Fallows

Quick: go take a look while The Atlantic online still has it available for free.

 

Firefox's dilemma

Apart from the lack of tabbed browsing, the major problem with Internet Explorer is that it's so common that it's the obvious high-yield target for virus writers.  But what will happen to Firefox as it gets more popular?

I wonder how Firefox is going to handle this conflict?

	B Give the world a better product	<-	D Promote FireFox to the masses
A Have a successful Firefox product			!conflict!
	C Have a virus free product	<-	D' Don't promote FireFox to the masses

I suspect that they will compromise between D and D' by becoming popular, but not too popular.

The ideal would be to  attack C<-D and make Firefox impossible to attack.  Is that a pipe dream?  When I read this, I start to wonder.

[ I did the tables in HTML all by myself :) ]

Secret History of the Credit Card

Maybe this is too late for you ... but take a look at the streaming video of PBS Frontline's fascinating documentary Secret History of the Credit Card.

[via www.fastcompany.com]

Testing my email bmp

Good luck with  spammers.

Gmail Invites

I've just got 10 more Gmail invites ... if you want one send me an email by clicking link on left.

First come ... first served.

Clarke

TOC success story

Another TOC success story :

A popular novel also figured in the turnaround. Graham bought his two dozen deputies copies of Eliyahu M. Goldratt's "The Goal," a book about managers who save a factory from oblivion. In the dramatic account narrated by the fictional factory director, managers figure out how to address bottlenecks, cut costly inventories and deliver on time.

[Thanks to Google alerts]

[grid::fatherhood] The one thing that nobody tells you ...

They told me about ... the lack of sleep.  Sure enough we got less sleep and we now go to bed at the same time that we used to think about going out.

They told me that ... our child would have armies and leggies, not arms and legs.  They were right.

I already knew about the nappies.  But, they told me that ... they wouldn't be as bad as we expected.  They were ... mostly right.

But nobody told me ... that I'd never [insert you favourite euphemism for going to the toilet] in private again.

Keeping your options open

This nice-to-have is cut-and-paste from a recent job advert:

Any experience of development processes/methodologies (eg RUP, Agile, Waterfall, eXtreme etc) would be beneficial

There's seven of us. We are in a pantomine.

From a story about dwarfism in last Saturday's Herald newspaper:

... Earlier, an elderly lady, trying not to look, approached Mark Sealey, who plays Moany - the characters' names have been changed from the Disney original for copyright reasons - and smiled down at him before saying "There's quite a lot of you today."  She leaned in.  "How many?" Sealy, who is four foot tall, smiled back, cleared his throat softly, then whispered, "There's seven of us.  We're in a pantomime."  The old lady smiled again.  "Oh, really," she said, "which one?" ...

["Short Stories", Mark  Tierney, www.theherald.co.uk, 11 December 2004]