Category: Technology

I was recently talking to a former colleague who was complaining about dealing with the Finance department. My first reaction was, “I don’t miss that”. My next reaction was, “you know what else I don’t miss? Having to wear socks”.

Which of course led me to think about all the things I really, really do not miss about corporate software development. So, in no particular order, here are ten things that I really do not miss.

1. Having to work inside on a beautiful day.
2. Mediocre colleagues
3. Really lame colleagues
4. CYA (this should probably be #1)
5. Conference calls that are not useful (if you are saying to yourself, “there’s no other kind” you haven’t worked with a team of four really smart people).
6. Time tracking
7. Decisions that take longer than five minutes
8. Socks. (seriously, other than for running, weddings, or funerals, I haven’t worn socks since April).
9. Long pants (see #9).
10. Any activity that doesn’t lead to better software (other than drinking, which occasionally still does)

I’m sure there are more. I do miss people, but just specific people (see #2 and #3).

Again, really cool…

… to see images of a nebula 7000 light years away.

I haven’t tried the 149MB high res download…

Here’s a good brief discussion of “free” as a business model (with lots of good links like this).

How many of the “100 Essential Skills for Geeks” do you have?

For the record, I can recite Monty Python and the Holy Grail pretty much start to finish…

With money tight, I had been going largely open source with software. Instead of Outlook, I’ve been using Thunderbird. But since Origami Risk is part of Microsoft’s BizSpark program, we get Microsoft software for free.

With the cost objection gone, I have been slowly coming back to the dark side (MS Office, that is). I needed to test Word and Excel because Origami reports export to those formats (among others) and using OpenOffice wasn’t a valid test. I love OneNote, so I’m back using that for meeting notes (Evernote was OK but not as nice).

But I didn’t have any real complaint with Thunderbird. So I kept it for a long time.

Today I installed Outlook 2007 to give it a spin. My first reaction was, “damn it’s slow”. Then I went to sync up my Google calendar and contacts. Ouch.

In Outlook you can have an “internet calendar”. Cool, just like Thunderbird. But in Outlook it’s read only. So you could view your Google calendar, but not add to it. Google does have a sync tool for Outlook, so that’s a better option.

But Thunderbird (with the Lightning calendar add-on) simply works as a Google calendar client. It works with regular Google (my personal calendar) and Google apps (Origami Risk calendar). You could argue that there is a downside to that if I have no internet connection, but overall I think it’s preferable.

Thunderbird certainly isn’t pretty. It doesn’t do Tasks as well as Outlook. Did I mention that Outlook is slow? I never really noticed it when I used it all the time, but after using Thunderbird it seems really pokey.

I’m going to play with both for a while. I may go back to the dark side, but so far I’m leaning open source…

I’m finding myself using Chrome more and more. It is just so much faster than Firefox. But I miss the add-ins. I’m a big TwitterFox user and just having the five day weather forecast on the bottom of my browser is really nice.

So I go back and forth, Chrome, Firefox, Chrome, Firefox. And just for kicks I added Bing as my Firefox search engine. I’ll start comparing Bing and Google.

But Bing hasn’t indexed OrigamiRisk.com yet…