Neil Hopcroft

Who made you the president of the world? – in the style of Winonas Big Brown Beaver.

Another way of looking at the world, well 200-odd other ways…(image heavy)

XCP – because the world isn’t complicated enough already.

I’d forgotten just how interesting Cryptome can be sometimes (“Cryptome welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance — open, secret and classified documents — but not limited to those. Documents are removed from this site only by order served directly by a US court having jurisdiction. No court order has ever been served; any order served will be published here — or elsewhere if gagged by order. Bluffs will be published if comical but otherwise ignored.”)

“This real-size robotic hand can detect and catch objects. It is made of LEGO bricks. I’ ve worked one month on this project, I wanted to build a LEGO hand that looks real and works fine.” – Lego prosthetics, its only a matter of time.

Spork II

Celebrating 60 years of Anthrax research … seems I was a bit of a latecomer only getting into them in the 80s. Lots of other interesing maps elsewhere on that site. Maps of all kinds of things.

“As if making space-noodles in standard ramen flavor wasn’t cool enough, Nissen is offering SpaceRam in four different flavors: soy sauce, miso, curry and pork broth.”

Silophone

Today we had a meeting. A meeting with a customer. It was one of the worst meetings I’ve been to in a long time[0]. Not because there was a lot of anger or problems or anything. It was just very unstructured.

Theres six of us in the meeting, two techies from the customer, two business guys from my company and us two techies. We’ve all been in the industry for a number of years. Theres a need they need addressing, they don’t really understand it but they know they want dealt with. We don’t think what they’re describing will be able to do the job that we think they want it to do.

We end up arguing over syntax when we should be figuring out the semantics. Noone is in control. It shouldn’t be my place to do that, I don’t want to wrestle control away from my companies directors. Not unless they want to give me control. And I don’t think they know me well enough to trust me to do that yet.

And now its my job to write up the requirements document.

Do you know how to hold a meeting? Do you find that people drift off topic? What can you do about that? Do you need to do anything about it?

[0] Notable career lowlights so far being the Racal Mug Incident, and the Yokoyama Torture.

A night at the ricers – Masa-san gets fast and furious with the roulette group.
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“Damn you, damn the brocolli and damn the Wright Brothers“

Schneier – Shoot-to-Kill

Bumpass, Virginia – I can’t work out if this is Heaven or Hell…
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SMS: “you’re my wife now”

How would you respond?