philcrissman.com

Ubergeek has some slick animations; most of them are well known, but some readers may not have seen them. The best are the “Switch” parodies (Switch to Apple, Switch to Linux) and the Intellitoast commercial. (XML!)

Here’s the first draft of a Reading List for the Fog Creek Software Management Training Program; Fog Creek is, of course, the software company of Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software fame.

I’m a sucker for booklists. If there were a local support group for out of control bibliophiles, I should probably join it (Hi, my name is Phil, and I’m a bookaholic…).

This list is interesting because it combines two of my favorite subjects: business and software. I have not read most of these, so I peruse a few of them in my local bookseller and try to decide if I want to expand my library with them.

Is anything missing? I have a couple ideas:

• Something by Tom Peters. If not In Search of Excellence, then perhaps something a little more recent.
• Dale Carnegie is a good choice, but I’d possibly throw Zig Ziglar in there too. For something motivational, Zig is hard to top.
• How We Got Here : A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets, by Andy Kessler. I’ve only read the first couple chapters so far, but it’s interesting; perhaps not essential, but a good history.

Slashdot reports that many are saying the XBox 360 is unstable, crashes, etc. I’ll refrain from making additional jokes at Microsoft’s expense, but this only strengthens my resolve not to buy one of these for at least a year, possibly longer. I don’t have that much time to spend on games, anyways.

When I first saw digg.com, I thought, hey, cool. Neat links. As time has gone on, though, it’s seemed more and more useless to me.

Whatever is of passing interest to me on the front page of digg is usually also on the front page of slashdot, and the comments on slashdot are consistently of a more interesting quality (as a caveat, I usually browse slashdot at a threshold of 4 or 5), not to mention quantity. The comments on digg, by contrast, are generally not worth reading, unless you just enjoy being annoyed. Slashdot comments are also threaded, meaning that you can follow the conversation tree down the many different discussion paths with some measure of ease; digg comments, aside from being generally trivial, are displayed in one simple list, which effectively will bar them from ever being as complex or as interesting as the comments on Slashdot.

It’s uncontestable that digg has been a success, but I, for one, am visiting less and less. I added it to my Firefox bookmarks toolbar, but I’m considering removing it, because it’s taking up valuable space (I like to have useful links in those spots).

Now, Slashdot has its faults; despite having been retooled to conform to xhtml and css standards, the site design looks a bit dated. Some (many?) of the comments are stupid, ridiculous, or more or less offensive. Some of the institutions which hover at the lower comment threshold are downright disturbing. (Note for the non-Slashdot readers: Slashdot comments are moderated, and are assigned an aggregate score (from 1- to +5) from the sum total of moderations done to them; this generally causes the more interesting comments to get a high score, and the most banal to receive a low score. You can choose to have only comments over a given score visible to you, the idea being that you are seeing the most insightful (or funniest) comments, and not the rest of the foofarah.)

Despite its faults, though, Slashdot will not be leaving my bookmarks toolbar; my digg bookmarklet is on the verge of being deleted.

Why? In slashdot terms, you could say that the entire digg.com website could be moderated -1; Redundant.

This is a throwaway post; I have a lot on my mind, a lot to do, and I don’t think I should waste time writing about it just yet. There could be some big changes coming up for me in the near future, but I’m going to wait to post about that until it’s certain (no, my wife is not pregnant… just to dispel that one).

I read today that Peter Drucker died on November 11th; if you’re interested in business or management at all, you probably know who Peter Drucker is. His career as America’s management expert covered 1939-2004; as far as I know, maybe even 2005. His impact on business was huge. I know next to nothing more than that about him, but it seemed important enough to be worth a mention.

Microsoft says they’re going to open up their Office formats. Hm. It’s about time, but it’s worth remembering that they wouldn’t be doing this if they didn’t think it would be beneficial to them. It will be, of course… if the Office alternatives start using and understanding Microsoft’s formats even better, then it just makes it that much easier for Office to be seen as “the Standard.” This is a thorny issue, not one I’m sure I know how it will all turn out.

Interested in job security? Writing unmaintainable code may be for you. On the other hand, you might keep your job, but you probably won’t be promoted…