Will this effect affect anything?

When to use affect and effect is something which in the past, I have relegated to guesswork. For a time, I used just one, figuring, I'd be right half the time.

Now, I've got a bug report to fix, saying, "Use the terms Affect and Effect consistently". One screen has "Effect" on a label, the other has "Affect" in a heading.

Well, it's not meant to be used consistently! It's meant to be used correctly! But all the same, I could not say with any confidence that it was right - so I Googled it, and guess what, it was wrong, in both cases listed on the bug report. Completely backwards. Whoever raised the report didn't know that either - they wanted it the same. But hey, the report was fair enough - it looked dumb, and in fact, was dumb.

So, for the record (at least my personal record): Affect is a Verb. Effect is a Noun.

You have a "Tax Effect" of some attribute in our system, and therefore that attribute "Affects Tax" in a certain way.

Affect is Verb, Effect is a Noun.... Affect is Verb, Effect is a Noun.... Affect is Verb, Effect is a Noun.... Affect is Verb, Effect is a Noun.... Affect is Verb, Effect is a Noun.... Affect is Verb, Effect is a Noun....

I need a rule to remember this.AVEN or ENAV ???

Trello for everything, except when Teux Deux...will deux!

I've said it before, I love lists....

so here's
 Why You Should Use Trello For Damn Near Everything
- for everything else, use Teux Deux.

Why hard work is valuable

Thanks to Seth again for this train of thought.
(http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/03/of-course-its-difficult.html)

If something is hard to achieve it will be scarce.

If something is scarce it will be valuable. (Remember scarcity, demand and supply and all that...)

Hard work is valuable. Easy work is not.

You can have any colour you like as long as it's Red, Green, Blue and Yellow.

Statistics gathered from over 3800 US government websites, using analytics software custom built by Google indicate that Desktop computing and Microsoft operating systems may not be a "dead" as many would like to believe. 

There is a fairly noisy anti-Microsoft movement (I.T. techy types probably the most outspoken on that issue) that loves to point out the Microsoft is dead, Windows is gone and [insert new technology of your choice] is here to take over.

Recent findings might indicate differently.

Interestingly, despite claims from some many leading software companies with products of their own to push, real world users (particularly businesses) still use predominantly desktop computers and by far most of those computers still run Microsoft operating systems.

Desktop computers constitute over 67% of traffic to the 3800 websites analysed (many of them among the most widely used consumer sites in the US, such as weather and IRS queries). Microsoft Windows still holds a healthy 86% of the share of PC operating systems in Apple's strongest market - the U.S.

With the "end of life" of Windows XP (meaning Microsoft no longer support it or provide security updates) Windows 7 has rocketed to the top, boasting 71% of all the Windows operating systems. Windows 8 is also becoming more significant.

So take it with a grain of salt, next time someone tries to tell you "nobody's using Windows anymore" and "everything is mobile".

We (particularly small businesses) still all need viable, easily supportable, affordable I.T. and software solutions.  Sometimes the elegant, beautiful, artistic and aesthetic options don't come with the supportability or readily available expertise to make them practical. Maybe it's a case of, like Henry Ford bringing cars to the people by providing them in any colour they liked, as long as it was black. Maybe sometimes we are settling for less, maybe sometimes we take what we can get / afford, but maybe sometimes we just need to get the job done.

See this article for more details and some colourful follow up - any post about Microsoft in Tech news brings out the trolls.

(This is a cross post with www.constructor.com.au)

Constructor's new promotional video

The final product is now up on our web site and YouTube Channel. After an exhausting day a couple of weeks ago, and some wizardry from Mio at Video Vault, here's the end product.

www.constructor.com.au

Apps you can't LIVE without?!

I just read a list of 36 killer apps you shouldn't live without - seriously, 36?! and heaps of them double up, performing the same as others in the list. 

Here's a list of 5!

Evernote - record everything, to do lists, scan documents, diaries, links to web sites, take it everywhere, phone, tablet, PC, whatever. This is the last app I would remove and the first app I pay my annual subscription for.

KeePass - great secure way to store passwords for the plethora of accounts, we need to log in to these days from network to your electricity account....when combined with Dropbox, Google drives or someother cloud storages, you can take it anywhere...and there's mobile apps for it too. Invaluable.

Trello - organise anything....

GMail - these days you have to have webbased email - give up that ISP email address you've had and never change your email address again. (I've had mine since 2004!)

Teux Deux - it's kind of like my scratch pad list, before items get promoted to full on Trello Cards!

These are apps that I would and do pay for, and you know what? If I was pushed, I do believe I could in fact "live" without them, but they make life that little bit easier.

How to install the Dot Net 3.5 runtime to a Windows 8.1 Pro system

I've been attempting to add the Dot Net 3.5 run time to my new Surface Pro 3 running Windows 8.1 Pro for about half a day now.

Initially the normal web installer for the 3.5 run time was failing with error:

"0x800f0906 : “The source files could not be downloaded. Use the "source" option to specify the location...". 

After a bit of Googling I discovered (in fact remembered because I think I've been here before) that you can only install the Dot Net 3.5 run time from the Windows "Add / Remove" features section of the Control Panel. However, this too failed, with the same error.

Now our Internet traffic in the office is all routed through a Web Guard proxy. There is however a work around for this exact scenario which I promptly implemented, ensuring I was bypassing the proxy - still the same error.

Next, I discovered there was a security patch, which could actually prevent the run time being installed - but that could be resolved using security update 3005628. I ran the Windows 8.1 x64 version of this - guess what, no change.

Now you always find what your looking for in the last place you look right? The next discovery on my part was that, as the only way to add the Dot Net 3.5 run time to Windows 8.1 Pro is via the Windows Update service (no stand-alone installation is going to work) you cannot be running your Windows updates via WSUS. Guess what, We are!

So, the work around for this is a command line option - found here.

DISM /Online /Enable-Feature /FeatureName:NetFx3 /All /LimitAccess /Source:installationMediaDrive:\sources\sxs

But alas, that too was failing.... still failing to locate the required files, with the same error!

Next, to disable the WSUS Group Policy. Luckily, we are a very small company, and I, as the developer and also "the I.T. Guy" because, you know, I know how to restart a server!

So I located the Group Policies in question, recorded the settings for each relevant one, then disabled them. (For the record, they are in the Computer / Policies / Administrative Templates / Windows Components / Windows Update branch of the Group Policy editor.) Having run "gpupdate /force" on the Windows 8.1 Pro machine, I tried again from the command prompt. It didn't work!  I was attempting to use a Windows 8.1 Pro MSDN disk as the source for the component.

So, I went back to the control panel, and tried adding the feature the original way - now that my WSUS Windows update policy was turned off, I was optimistic - with good reason - it worked! The Dot Net 3.5 run time was installed, on my Windows 8.1 Pro, Surface Pro machine.

------------------------------

Now I don't expect many people to read all that diatribe - here's the executive summary:

For error 0x800f0906: The source files could not be downloaded..... when attempting installing the Dot Net Runtime on a Windows 8.1 Pro machine:

1. Make sure you are not accessing the Internet via a Proxy that is preventing access to Windows Updates (pretty unlikely you'd hope) - you must have Internet access as this is the only way, for Dot Net 3.5 on Windows 8)
   
2. Remember, you need to be using the Control Panel / Programs and Features option to "Turn Windows Features on or off (you can find Control Panel in Windows 8 by just typing "Control Panel" from the Start Screen.)
   
3. Make sure Security Update 3005628 is applied.
   
4. Find out if you are using Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) for windows updates as this will prevent you PC from accessing the files required to add the feature. If so, you'll need to get it disabled for this process. If you're like me and in control of those Group Policies, temporarily disable them. If you work for a larger organisation where that is impractical, you will need to see if you can get yourself temporarily excluded from that policy, while you add this feature.

If none of these things have helped solve your problem, I'm sorry, but as I mentioned, step 4 fixed mine, and you also find the answer in the last place you look! (sorry I didn't keep looking for answers, after I found one).

Game Changer

I loved my first ASUS (Android) tablet. Still use it daily after nearly three years. It's mainly a social tool though for Facebook, Email, and then some Evernote.

At work I develop on a desktop computer and have a development laptop which I take home, for all that after hours stuff I do! I remember not that long ago, when we were debating whether you could develop satisfactorily on a lap top!

Yesterday however, my 4 (and a half) year old work laptop was replaced - yep - with a Surface Pro 3. It's an i7, 8GB RAM and 256Gig Hard Drive - and it works like a tablet, and like a lap top.

It comes with a 12 inch screen, which makes for some pretty small fonts at times, but considering we also got the dock, I can hook it up to a couple of monitors and all is good.

I guess this means I'll end up doing a bit more work at home in the near future - well considering what I'm supposed to be shipping over the next 12 months, that's to be expected.

As exciting as new toys are, it's now time to squash that lizard brain and get on with using the new toy tool, to ship today's work!

My Little Golden Book

When I was a really young boy, I loved a "Little Golden Book" called "Danny Beaver's Secret". No-one wanted to help Danny build his pool; "too hot, too tired, too busy, you'll never do it." In the end, when summer came, they were all happy to swim in it though....

I would ask my Dad to read it to me every night, night after night after night. One night at about the age of 2 or 3, he found me "reading" it to myself, the way plenty of kids that age manage to do, completely by rote, turning the pages at pretty much the right time, reciting my beloved story - that's how well I knew it.

It's so easy to be negative. It's so easy to say, "that will never happen" or "you can never do that..." and is it ironic and pessimistic of me to say you will probably be right, most of the time.

What a downer of a meeting I've just come from, hearing team members scoff when you bring up dates that you're planning to release things by. And if I'm completely honest, they've probably just acquired these negative (realist as they like to call it) attitudes over years and years of being let down by over optimistic schedules and grandiose plans.

Right now I feel a bit like Danny Beaver - I'm drawing close to the end of a mega-development project that will be the springboard to the next 10 years at this company - many think it's never going to happen, but I bet they will all "be around for a swim" later this year, when it does! So like Danny, I will not give up, and when I'm done, I'll welcome everyone in!

On the movie set

Something different at work today,as we spent the day with Mio from Video Vault, shooting the footage for a 2 to 3 minute promotional video for Constructor.

This is a project we've been putting some time into for a few weeks now. We took advantage of a generous promotional offer from Video Vault to have a few videos done and have settled on one, fairly ambitious video to be made, in the style of the "Sliding Doors" movie, about a builder who decides to buy Constructor (and also doesn't buy Constructor - that's the sliding door!) and the difference it makes to his lifestyle.


That's quite a bit to pack into a couple of minutes. Shooting took all day, and we were quite organised, with a well planned story board, locations etc.


I can't way to see the finished product. We should have the first draft copies of in a week or so.

It was great to have Kieren and Toby involved too, as kids being picked up from school (or left alone waiting...on the other side of the sliding door).

So tempting to blame the user for bad design...

The me from 15 years ago would've blamed the "dumb user" for this, but in these days of UX Design, usability and delighting the user I'd like to think I'm bigger than this now....

I am working on a line of business, Windows application which involves quite a bit of data entry. The screens are nice and consistent in their layout across many aspects of the system ranging from CRM and Sales tools to Accounting and graphical estimating tools. (www.constructor.com.au). Users are presented with summary information and choose to open the information they want to edit. Slightly old fashioned but with a decent user base around the country and the promise of lots of fancy new services to hang off this system, the windows client will suffice for our desktop users for sometime to come.

Today the boss came in, a little sheepish, asking if we had a back up. He'd just deleted an important client he'd been working on. He admitted to not really reading the message that popped up, but also insisted that he'd just altered some information and thought he was just confirming the "save before closing" style message.

Now the messages in both these situations (saving and deleting) are in fact quite different. We use these HTML message boxes (a custom thing I wrote years ago), so save confirmations are all green and blue, positive look and feel, with "Save Now" captions on the buttons etc, and delete confirmation messages a red with the item you are about to delete bolded, and so on.  But still, I found it intriguing that a relatively experienced user could "accidentally" click the delete button and confirm the action, on a screen he swears he wasn't using.

Turns out, I guess it's something of a design flaw on my part - if I'm tough on myself. It's still going to bite me again at some point though if I don't do something about it now. 

I watched briefly as my boss explained what he thought he'd done and something jumped out at me - the detective work here did impress him in the end, helped perhaps by the fact he was already somewhat placated by the fact I have backups occurring every two hours so the information he thought he'd lost was pretty simple to recover.

After entering a diary note against a sales lead he was working, he "just saved then clicked yes to confirm the save and close"....

Now that's strange, because you shouldn't have to confirm the save if you click on save - that would be just silly. You would only have to confirm the save, if you clicked on "close" and had made some changes that maybe, ought to be saved.

So I watched....

"Yeh, I just entered the notes in here the clicked here to save them and close" - I watched as he moved the mouse up to the "Save and Close" button and double clicked it....

Wait!  You double clicked....

Here's what it looked like when you close the diary screen....

So, directly under the "Save and Close" button, as "design" would have it, is a delete button. (At least when the screens are maximised.)

Now as I said, firstly there is no need to double click a toolbar button in any Windows system I've ever used, but, it does seem to be a common misconception.....and I have worked hard to have a very well worded, "are you sure" message, with RED text, and "no" as the default choice. We do however try to live by one other little golden rule here - use message boxes as a last resort. Try to design so you don't need them, and try not to build rude software the continually interrupts the user with such dialog.

We use message boxes sparingly and even then, they don't get read!

So now, I have to set about redesigning this scenario.

It appears far harder than it should to simply capture/handle the double click event on the toolbar buttons of the standard Toolstrip control in .Net. (At least not when you also want to handle the click event.)

Do I just move the delete button somewhere else - it is probably ironic that it lines up so perfectly with the save and close button on all our standard summary and edit screens (especially when they are all full screen size). Do I work harder on fixing the actually response to a double click on a toolbar button, of can I just step back in time, and blame the dumb user?

I think I'll sleep on this one....

How do you use templates in Word 2013

I can only see Online Templates, none of which I have ever needed!

Word 2013 will only show you the "Featured" AND "Personal" options on the "File / New" screen, if you have something entered in the "Default Personal Templates Location", which can be found in the Word Options screen. (Go To "File" in the top left, then down to options.)

Enter the path to your templates, in the "Default Personal Templates Location" field - I am sticking with the old Office 2010/2003 etc location.

Once you have a valid path in that field, the "Personal" link will appear on your File / New screen, and you'll be able to see your old documents.

Discouverable software - right! - discoverable only using Google.

Support Notes....

I'm going to point people here in the future...

... it's all common sense, problem is, common sense isn't always that common.

DYPII questions! http://www.forbes.com/sites/micahsolomon/2013/10/22/speaking-the-language-of-customer-service-recovery/

Any list of things has to be good too - http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10-things/10-things-help-desk-techs-can-do-to-improve-service/

I love lists.... and Trello

Geez I love a good list.

I'm the guy that needs lists to organise his lists.

I loved Teux Deux for a long time. So simple, so clean, so easy... and you get to cross stuff off! I also have an Android phone and tablet, so when they started charging a minimal subscription for Teux Deux, and still didn't offer an Android app, I bailed....

At about the same time I discovered Trello. (I am a complete Trello fanboy.) However it's not cutting it as a To Do list for me. It is so much more! I have too many boards. I have detailed cards, with attachments, and check lists and tags. I want something like a Trello overlay - something I can scratch notes onto, before they warrant a card in Trello, before the evolve into a fully fledged Trello card.

I've been trying the Momentum add-in for Chrome for a few weeks now. It's almost perfect. Beautiful background picture, a one liner to get you focused for the day, it's in your face when you're about to derail and head into Facebook, or anywhere else you need to not be for a while... and it has the simple, Teux Deux style list in the bottom right corner. I've read that momentum is by no means finished, and there's more to come so I'll definitely be keeping an eye on it, but, lack of centralised storage is the road block for me. If I drop a quick, "remember to read this" not on my Momentum task list, I really need to see that, when I open Chrome, on my laptop or my tablet or phone, of home pc or... Unfortunately, it seems, the to do list is stored locally so what I decide to do at work can't follow me home, and vice versa. So close!

Then, in my eternal quest for the perfect to list, I stumbled across "Remember the Milk". Looked great. I signed up, confirmed, linked to Evernote, Twitter et al. I started entering some tasks and quickly discovered this is a seriously powerful solution. I forced myself to keep my number of lists to three, downloaded the Android app which was pretty slick I must say, and battled on with the clunky web app interface, because, hey it's free - you get what you pay for, I can wear that. The App was nice and I'll spend most of my time there anyway.

So, I checked that my first task entered on the web, showed up on my phone, and pushed on. I entered a couple more tasks, and went to check how tasks in different lists appear in the Android App.... nothing.   Ah ha.. theres a sync button. (Press).... "please wait 24 for your next available sync - or sign up for the Pro version."

Now that's fair enough, nice app, gotta pay - they aren't a charity I get that, but really, I'm already uneasy about the tangents this app is taking me on.... priorities, multiple lists, tags, interaction with other apps, reminders.

Back to my original goal, a simple high level view of what I need to get done. I've got Trello for the details...I'm happy there... I love Trello....I said that didn't I.

So, "Remember the Milk" want $25 for a year's subscription - a very reasonable price for a very powerful system... but I don't want a very powerful system. I want an online task list - that's it. Items in, a couple of lists like I write on the notepad on the desk next to me, that I can get at where ever I am, in the car, at the cricket club, at home on the couch or when I wake up a 3 in the morning and remember that one thing...

Sound familiar - yep, it's Teux Deux. Break out the credit card and subscribe. It's time. Teux Deux will be my 10000 foot view of things, that I don't want to forget. I'm not looking to collaborate, Tweet, blog, email, or share - I just want to move stuff around in  lists and cross them off. When I need to keep notes, comments, add attachments, I'll use Trello (did I mention I love Trello). For the rest, its Teux Deux for me.

I really like all the products I've mentioned here - it comes down to "horses for courses":

• Trello - (I love this one - www.trello.com)
• Momentum: (find it in the Chrome Web Store)
• Remember the Milk (www.rememberthemilk.com)
• Teux Deux - this is where I've landed... www.teuxdeux.com/

Some in sight into how Google Calendar Quick Add works

Using IF THIS THEN THAT (www.ifttt.com) I automate several entries to a journal calendar in Google Calendars.

Recently, one of those automated entries contained the phrase - "13 years" in the middle of a decent slab of text - from a Facebook status update actually.

So, you can guess what happened in my calendar. Yep - the "13 years" was removed from the text that was used as the description for the calendar entry and a 13 year entry was made.

I've used the quick add feature often from the calendar page in the browser and often entered text like, "for 2 hours" or "for 1 day" but never realised that any text related to any time frame would simply be stripped out and used as the duration, regardless of the context of that text.

More invaluable life advice from Seth...

Read this! Again and again and again and again! (then once more!)
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/05/on-teaching-people-a-lesson.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fsethsmainblog+%28Seth%27s+Blog%29

My Windows Azure Tangent

I lost a couple of days earlier this week when I decided to look into alternatives to us hosting our own web site in house, which is basically just a little DotNetNuke site these days, but many moons ago, well before the plethora of Content Management Systems that are available today, we had a very cool ASP (Classic!) site with CMS capabilities, before anyone knew what is was. (I'm talking 1998.)  Anyway, the rest is history, and remnant of that system remain, and we still rely on sharing one portion of the back end SQL database, with an in house app.

I looked into a few hosting solutions which provided DotNetNuke. They were all awesome and clearly selecting one of these very affordable hosting solutions is the way to go. Unfortunately, throwing our SQL database into the cloud, and running our ancient VB6 app against it, was going to impact performance too much at this stage. Suffice to say, some re-factoring (rewriting) of that old app is now on the agenda so we can get some stuff that ought not to be in house, out of house!

Along the way though I signed up for a three month trial of Windows Azure, only to discover when I logged in using my Windows Live ID, the same Windows Live ID that links to my MSDN Premium subscription, that I receive a Windows Azure account along with that subscription. Hadn't realised that, but how good is the sign up process that just realised it all for me.

Now I can build web sites / web servers etc on Azure. Looks like that might just be the way to go next. After a day or so of playing I'm quite excited about the prospects, but for now it's back to the day job before someone notices... but I have got a few things I'm busting to try out.

Unfortunately though, correct me if I'm wrong but it doesn't look exactly straight forward to move an existing SQL Server database onto SQL Azure. Certainly not a simple as a backup and restore, as I had originally hoped.

Keep it real

As so often happens, a recent post by Seth Godin titled "Hard Work on the Right Things" struck a chord with me.

I'm so guilty of concentrating on the wrong things, and even more often, focussing on the wrong things at the wrong times.

Customers (of the "end user" variety") and even managers, especially in the building industry, don't care about your code, how good it is, what language it's written in or whether your curly braces line up. They don't want to hear you talk about how well architected your system is. They want to know it works, and they want to know it does what "they" want it to, and nothing else.

Most of the time, "what they want it to do" is different to everyone else, and most of the time they can't understand why on earth any other customer would be different, but most importantly, they don't care. It doesn't matter.... to them.

What your software could do for them, and how well it could do it, are completely irrelevant. They are interested in knowing what they want to know right now - be that a problem a prospective customer is trying to solve, or an issue an existing customer on the phone to help desk, is trying to resolve, of a non-technical manager wanting to know when your latest project is going to be ready.

I know what Seth is getting at in his post is intended to apply to any discipline, in any industry with any customer, but I find it is particularly relevant to a developer especially one who is in close contact to the end user of their software.

This is not to say robust, well designed code isn't important or that refactoring your code to make it maintainable, optimised etc isn't vital. It is. Clearly! These just aren't things the customer is interested in (usually).

Likewise, as Seth says;

"what matters changes by culture, by buyer, by product, and even by day of the week". 

The message I take from Seth's post is (in my world) "work hard at building good quality software but be especially attuned to what really matters to the customer/manager/colleague/prospect/friend you are currently interacting with, and relate to that and you'll be a winner."

This has parallels with listening with empathy and "seeking first to understand, then be understood".

Am I "Enjoying the Journey"?

Personal Blogs: a mixture of a personal diary, opinion posts and research links.

I've often heard the advice that all developers should write a blog. Jeff Atwood calls it sharpening the saw. Hey, I'm a massive "7 habits" fan, so what on earth am I doing here?

I started this blog over 8 years ago. I just read the first post - back then I thought my career was heading towards project management. I was working at a fairly large company and learning about leading small teams. I loved it there, but it didn't work out there. I made a lot of good friends that I still keep in touch with, but there's been a few twists and turns since then. I still think I started the blog with the right attitude though - "a little to say and a lot to learn..."

The title of my blog says, "enjoying the journey", but I've never really kept up any form of discipline with regards to this blog. I have enjoyed the journey, but this blog doesn't have a lot to show for it.

Now I do believe there is great benefit to be had in documenting one's work,  ideas and even some personal stuff. I've read where, in order to blog successfully you need a strict plan, a timetable for blogging. I'm not sure that's what I want though. I'm not trying to build an audience. I'm trying to clarify and record.

One other major inhibiting factor, and possibly excuse, for my lack of blogging and the tumbleweeds scattered around my site, is the fact that in my mind, I'm just a "Winforms developer". I've found myself back at a small, software vendor (the very definition of the term Micro-ISV) who is still desperately playing catch up in a technical sense, in a market which, thankfully, isn't demanding cutting edge, high-tech solutions in the line of business software...yet. Our software product is a line of business application that includes accounting and is marketed to very small businesses. In general they want a product, that comes on a disk that they can touch and feel, with a manual or two, and that they can install on a PC in their office.

The product we currently sell (and maintain for an annual fee) is written in VB6. For the last 3 years, I've dedicated around 75% of my time to a complete rebuild of the system on the .Net platform.  The redevelopment started about 2 years before that to be honest, but never got any traction until about 3 years ago. Now, when you say that out loud, it sound ludicrous. But when you live it, every day, for some reason, it doesn't feel like a death march project. I am rebuilding, from scratch a system that was built over three or four years, by a team of three or four developers, on my own and I'm really close to finishing. I have a detailed development and implementation plan for these final stages - much more detailed than the broad brush strokes of a plan I've been working towards until now. I am accountable to the owner of the company and we're all on the same page as to why this is needed. Essentially the product badly needed re-architecting, in order for us to be able to start thinking about web based solutions for our customers and of course now, mobile device apps. This massive project, is the enabler for all this - it's future proofing us.

Back to my point about this blog - my feeling has always been, what value could I possibly add to the Internet, by blogging about my WinForms work?  Once this product is released, it's still going to be about 8 years behind the times. That's about how old the VB6 app was, when I started this.

But now I'm looking at things a bit differently. If I'm going to catch up again, if I'm going to expose myself to the world of web and mobile development (I have done a little of that in the past by the way) I'm going to need to put some "skin in the game" - to get a bit accountable, to myself and to the general public. This blog can achieve that.

There is another side to this too - while I love to listen to and read the likes of Hanselman, Atwood, Spolsky, Godin etc, it's quite a high standard that they set. There is quite possibly a large, probably silent, majority out there in a very similar situation to myself. Maybe, in addition to gaining all the aforementioned benefits of documenting the journey, the lessons, the opinions (as they form) and so on, just maybe, I may even add a little value to the Internet somehow after all.

So bring in on blogosphere. Start teaching me your lessons.

You will SUBMIT

I just received an email from HP, apparently because my email address ended up on a mailling list somewhere (I did buy an HP laptop about 3 years ago!) that is so full of marketing speak and "glossy" pictures I can't tell what it actually wants me to do.

I promptly clicked on the "unsubscribe" link at the bottom - or so I thought - I missed it by 3 or 4 pixels and was taken to a page containing this:

I had to "LOL" at the "instruction" at the bottom. "Submit and Subscribe Now" - that's it - no alternative but to submit. You are going to subscribe, resistance is useless. Thank goodness for the back button!