Toronto Project Manager – Paul Henman CSM

I had meant to update this blog every few days but no sooner do I kick it off, I have not one but two hard drives die on me!

One of them was my main boot drive (Windows XP / Fedora Linux dual boot) which was backed up pretty often, so I didn’t lose much data but it’s taking forever to reinstall/configure everything back to how I like it. (Unfortunately you can’t simply restore Windows applications or some programs config settings.)

The other drive was a 500Gb backup drive, containing all of my photos! Fortunately it was half of a RAID 1 pair, which means everything I save is written to two drives, and therefore one of them dying means I still have one good copy left. However, I’m very reluctant to do anything with that remaining drive until I get the dead one replaced and rebuild the mirror, just in case it dies too and then I’ve lost everything!

Anyway, all that was to say that I’ve been somewhat distracted the past week or so, hence no blog posts. I’m still fighting with some issues, but hopefully I can get back on track soon.

Mitch Wagner, over at InformationWeek.com, says that the size of your email signature is inversely proportional to your importance, i.e. “If you’re a billionaire, you write your e-mail entirely in lower-case and sign it with the one-syllable nickname you had in prep school”.

I still go by the old-fashioned email “rules”, that your signature should be no more than three lines, each of 72 characters max. but then I also believe “styled text” (fancy fonts, colours, backgrounds etc.) have no place in email (professional or otherwise), and that anything bigger than 2Mb shouldn’t just be attached to your empty email and then fired off to everyone on your mailing list. (more…)

I was reading Martha Stewart Geeks Out for Wired’s Annual How To Guide and spotted some interesting snippets:

First of all, they [geeks] can learn to prioritize, and they can learn how to make things beautiful. It’s about using your hands and your mind to make things work better. Whether you’re a programmer or a seamstress, it’s all about new techniques, simplifying old techniques, and consolidating steps. Making things go faster — but not worse. Better.

…and…

“You own it if you made it.”

While I think of it, here’s another quote – I don’t remember where I saw/heard this but I noted it down a while ago as a good maxim:

Do it.
Do it right.
Do it right now.