Home of the Soul Cookie

In the tradition of Abe Vigoda Status and Is Twitter Down?:

Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet?

You’ll be happy to know that:

Congratulations. You’re still alive.

Yeah, it’s been a while.

I am, in fact, still alive. I just haven’t been blogging.

Obviously.

But I’ll be resuming posting shortly.

For now, enjoy the fresh coat of paint that comes with a new blog template. It’s just a start; I’ll probably be continuing to modify it.

Or starting over with another brand new template.

‘Cause I do things like that.

Whee!

On that note, here’s Jonathan Coulton’s “Still Alive” from the video game Portal.

The one and only post of significance (i.e., ignoring the WordPress default “Hello world!” post) on a new blog called Just Say “No” To Google claims to be a mass-distributed email from the Microsoft email network comparing and contrasting their company to Google.

Life at Google - The Microsoftie Perspective

The following has been making the rounds on just about every internal email list I belong to in Microsoft. Here it is to share a little insight with the rest of the world. Microsoft is an amazingly transparent company. Google is not. Any peek is a good peek.

Many of you were asking for the feedback I received from my interview with the former Google employee I hired into ABC Development as a Sr.SDE. [...] Here is his take on Google’s environment as well as areas Microsoft should consider improving in order to be more competitive.

For instance?

3. What are the office arrangements like? Do you have an office or cube space?

Google believes that developers are, with few exceptions, interchangeable parts. This philosophy shows through in their office arrangements which in Mountain View are all over the map.

[...]

Google doesn’t seem to think that private offices are valuable for technical staff. They’re wrong.

After reading through the post, I’m amazed at how many of the comments wish all sorts of harm on the poster for daring to share such information with the outside world.

No Name Says:
June 26th, 2007 at 10:30 pm

What is wrong with you? Why would you publish this? This is internal only.

Thanks for ruining it for the rest of us.

[...]

Pissed off Says:
June 27th, 2007 at 2:30 am

Idiot, idiot, you should quit. You should be ashamed. Hopefully HR will figure out who the hell you are and can your ***.

A good move for the guy’s long-term career? Probably not.

…but it is a fascinating look under the hood at Google and into the zeitgeist of Microsoft.

[via Ethan Kaplan/blackrimglasses]

I graduated high school 15 years ago today.

Hmm.

Designers, developers, project managers. Writers and editors. Information architects and usability specialists. People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Who are we? Where do we live? What are our titles, our skills, our educational backgrounds? Where and with whom do we work? What do we earn? What do we value?

It’s time we learned the answers to these and other questions about web design.

If you downloaded and installed the recent 2.1.1 version of WP, it is critical that you upgrade to 2.1.2 immediately.

Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.

Full details over at the WP DevBlog.

No? Let’s flash back to MTV 1983.

What we have here is three hours of vintage Music Television, hosted by Mark Goodman, and complete with commercials!

via Do Gooder Press (nee Henchman Publishing)

One of the highlights of moving to WordPress from my old Blogger weblog was the ability to categorize my content. I had some fairly well-structured categories defined, and it was good.

Then, WP introduced the ability to add categories on the fly, and it, too, was good — so I thought. But I’ve watched the category list grow out of control as I haphazardly added varying levels of specificity to each blog post. In short, I was using categories like tags. The two are related, but differ in their semantic applications.

I’ve installed a plugin called Ultimate Tag Warrior that should help me better deal with the folksonomy of my blog’s contents.

For now, until I revamp my site template (i.e. look and feel), you’ll see the tags listed in the metatext block on each individual blog post’s page:

I’ll soon undertake the process of switching all of my existing categories into the new tag system; for those of you reading this via my RSS feed, I wouldn’t be surprised if my tinkering causes some recent entries to “republish” in your feedreader.

As for the categorization system, I’m open to suggestions from any interested party. At this point, I’m leaning toward adapting the category structure of Digg (see pic; text behind the cut) to my own needs.

Read More…

Expect a return to, y’know, actual blog posts ’round here very, very soon.

F’r real.

Seriously.

I mean it.