Author: andy

I found Eric Sink’s really excellent software/business blog during the week, via a pointer from Brad Wilson’s blog. He’s written a huge amount of good, insightful stuff – check out the feature index. I particularly liked his words on positioning and the browser wars. There’s a strange co-incidence too: at around the time that I found his site, I’d been researching a product called SourceOffSite. It turns out that Eric owns and runs the company, SourceGear, that produces it. Weird. Anyway, check-out his blog.

Heh heh heh… this is good. Fill in a form to describe how you’d like Julie Burchill to meet her end, hit the button, and you get a mock BBC news page reporting the story. As well as being quite nice for us Grauniad readers, its also quite clever. Somehow, it grabs the current front page from the BBC’s site, snips out the top story, and inserts the fake one. I wonder what will happen when the beeb’s lawyers find out about this? #

Cyveillance – a slightly creepy-sounding e-business intelligence outfit. “Minding your business on the net” indeed.

The BBC has a sad article on people in their mid-thirties being affected by ageism. Its the usual story: employers don’t want to employ an experienced, thirtysomething worker when they can get a fresh graduate for much less, and expect them to work stupidly long hours too. You hear about this a lot in the software business.

Why do the suits do this? As a developer, I’m much, much more effective and productive than a twenty-one year old straight off a CompSci degree course. And that’s largely because I’ve been in this industry for twelve years and have acquired some degree of experience. The kind of experience that (hopefully!) prevents projects from turning into disasters. Yes, some people slow down and loose interest as they get older, and you do not want even one such person on a development team. And yes, younger and fresher team members can stop the others from becoming complacent. But surely its obvious that you need experienced people too. Maybe the problem is young, fast-track-promotion managers who only want people younger than them on their team.

I don’t think I’ve ever been a victim of ageism, but how would I know if I had?

Dana Blankenhorn has posted an good article titled “The Coming Blogging Industry“. I’m not sure I agree with his thesis of an advertising-based business model for blogging, but its an interesting read nevertheless. I subscribe to his A-Clue email newsletter, and I recommend it.

I noticed two things today that will prove once-and-for-all just how sad I am.

First, amazon.co.uk is taking orders Uru, a game I’ve been looking forward to ever since I first heard about it over a year ago. It’s the next game in the Myst sequence from Cyan Worlds and, judging by the stunning screenshots, it looks like its going to be absolutely amazing. Amazon are listing its release date as 31st October, but my order is in now.

Second, Fog Creek have a new version of CityDesk in late beta. Who knew?

(Interesting footnote: judging from this, Cyan Worlds are doing some cross platform development. Linux or MacOS X?)

Our wonderful British climate seems to be doing it again. For most of this week its been unusually hot: 32C yesterday and 30C today, according to the BBC. The week before, it rained almost continuously for days and days. Tomorrow, the forecast is for thunder-storms and sleet. At least I won’t have to water the garden…

Today I started a new job. Since this is my first taste of full-time work in about a year, you can bet its going to be a bit painful. Time no longer stretches before me, looking to be filled. Instead, I have to fill it with other people’s priorities and concerns and problems. This is all looking to be quite a shock…

Today was, predictably, disorientating and knackering, But the people are friendly and the job has a lot of potential to stretch me in new ways. Although I’ll have much less time to spare, I’ll try to keep this blog going. Its quite unlikely, though, that I’ll say much about my work.

Last night I got back from a four-day backpacking trip in the Lake District. The weather was kind of mixed, and some of the days were long and hard, but I had a great time.

Starting at Windermere, I walked along Trout Beck and up onto High Street. I then continued North to camp overnight at Angle Tarn, in the mountains above Patterdale. The weather that day was very changeable, with frequent, hard showers. On High Street I walked into freezing sleet and, for a couple of minutes, snow. Although I passed-by Angle Tarn in March on my last trip to the lakes, the last time I had camped there was sixteen years ago, while walking the Coast to Coast walk. This time around, it was much harder to find dry-ish ground to pitch my tent on. The tarn was as lovely as I remembered it, though, and this time I had it all to myself. I watched two gulls fishing on the water. The sun went down and it was calm and quiet. This is what I go to the mountains for.

The next day was clear and sunny and I descended down to Patterdale. Then down Grisedale and over Great Tongue, Raw Pike, and into Langdale. I then followed the Cumbrian Way path to the National Trust campsite at the end of the valley. This has got to be my favourite place in the whole world, and it didn’t let me down. Over a welcome pint at the Old Dungeon Gyll, I watched the sun light-up the tops of the mountains and the Pikes.

The next day was to have been another long haul to a wild camp near Buttermere. Since I was feeling a bit wiped-out from the previous day, I decided to head for Wasdale Head via Stake Pass and Angle Tarn (the other one!). It was another fine day. From near Esk Hause I watched tiny coloured dots, people, slogging up the corridor route to the summit of Scafell. In the evening, after I’d pitched my tent in the field outside the Wasdale Head Inn, I walked over to the tiny church of St. Olaf. The churchyard has a number of memorials to people who had died in the surrounding mountains over the last hundred years.

The fourth and final day was cold, wet and windy, and I did not want to get out of my sleeping bag. I crossed over into Eskdale via Burnmoor Tarn in blowing rain and mist, then headed West down the valley using the old packhorse trail to emerge, on the coast, at Ravenglass in time to catch the train home. It had rained all day.

I had a great four days. With hindsight, it might have been better to camp wild on the last night – near the river in Wasdale Head, perhaps – but I’m happy with how it went. I feel re-charged and centred again. Perhaps I should start writing-up these trips properly, with better route information and notes.

Lots of tasty news about salsa-flavoured pringles over at snackspot.org. Its a product of the same deranged minds that brought us NTK, apparently.

Raed is still blogging: “Prices of weapons on the market have been going up. At one point you could get a hand grenade for 500 dinars, that?s a quarter of a dollar. A Kalashnikov for $200 and a brand new Uzi for a bit more.” Unreal. #

The Guardian has a page of Steve Bell’s Iraq cartoons. #

(Is it just me, or does six years for this seem a bit lenient?)