Learning to hit the delete key.

In an ongoing effort to increase my day to day productivity and reduce the amount of time it takes to backup my files when I pave my laptop I decided to start using the delete key in Outlook.

Around the same time I read this post by Rory Blyth in a response to an earlier post he made directed at John Dvorak’s recent piece on podcasting (sorry, I don’t have a link to John’s piece because I deleted Rory’s original post, I don’t have access to the Internet sitting on this bench at the bus terminal and I couldn’t be stuffed waiting for LookOut to index the 70,000 items that I migrated to my Deleted Items folder).

To use Rory’s own analogy (if I understand it correctly), his post directed at John was a virtual kick in the nuts (I hope it hurt). Unfortunately the tone of the post didn’t resonate very well with some people and they left criticism in the comments - and even called apparently.

Apparently it got so bad that Rory was compelled to use another colourful post to explain is approach (I’m with you Rory, sounds like a great way to go - have you shared your fantasy with your new lass?).

Do I have a point? Ummm, yeah, sure - but men sitting outside in Canberra in the evening should be allowed to type a bit longer just to allow the heat coming from the CPU and hard disk to warm them up.

OK - the point. My point is that Rory shouldn’t have even had to make the second post, John Dvorak is a guy who spends his whole life giving other people his opinion - every now and then he needs to be able to accept some highly concentrated nut crunching criticism back.

And for all of you that followed up on the first post with shock, I urge you to learn how to use the Delete key and let opinion posts slide. Just imagine - if you employed my practice then you wouldn’t even be reading this message (assuming your are using NewsGator).

If you are having trouble letting posts in your RSS reader slide I am running “E-mail Horders Anonymous” and “Learning how to let it slide” workshops upon request. Travel and accomidation for me (or you) is at your expense and my rate is $2000.00 a day. Dress code is slovenly casual and wearing of groin guards is encouraged.

Dress Codes are Interesting

When I lived and worked in Queensland (tropical coastline on the east-coast of Australia) I quite often would wear shorts and leather reefs (sandals/jandals) and a polo shirt. I spent most of my time tucked away in a server room doing user administration or crawling around fixing up computer installations. It was a customer facing role, but the other customers weren’t afraid of showing a bit of skin either.

The subject of dress code is a favorite of consulting firms and was brought up at a workshop out company did a few weekends ago. At Readify I’d say that we shy away from the classic consulting garb in that we generally don’t wear a suit or white shirt ‘n’ tie. We do however wear long pants (this post by Don Box is what got me writing this) and we have some polo and button up shirts which we use for most engagements. Sometimes I deviate when I am going for a very specific effect (which we also talked about at the workshop) - actually I did it today and I am pleased to say it worked like a charm.

At home and when I am out and about on the weekends I continue to get around in shorts, even in winter when there is snow on the hills behind us - why? Because that is my only way of expressing my cultural heritage (for culture see Queensland), and to be honest, if I had the option I’d probably wear it every day.

WSE 2.0 Proxy Implementation

Drew raises an interesting point about the design of the SoapClient class in WSE 2.0. I must admit that when I was evaluating the early and interim builds of WSE 2.0 I did wonder the same thing. In the end I decided not the raise an issue because I thought that the approach they took might actually result in some good implementation patterns emerging around proxy construction.

Whilst its tempting to just throw the bits out there on the wire using a simple (even static) method call longer term it could bite you in the butt, especially in situations where your prototype code ends up going to production and you are suddenly asked to add security, address or other cross cutting concerns.

I’m sure Drew has evaluated these scenarios - but would everyone? I think the greater issue here is that WSE doesn’t really provide an integrated designer experience beyond the settings dialog (an issue that I did raise during the review phase). My hope is that WSE 3.0 and Indigo add first class support for designing complex service agents without having to drop into code (except in the most specialized circumstances).

Given that I am a huge designer fan, hell, I even feel there is scope for this functionality to be added now . . .

Microsoft’s C9 Special Effects

I’ve seen this effect too, although its not a glitch. I like to think of it as the Redmond Inverse Reality Field.

Microsoft has done a good job securing Windows XP with SP2.

I have proof. It is now easier (see more productive) for me to sign into MSN Messenger with two different accounts and send a file between two boxes that way instead of getting the network set up to share files.

Not being sarcastic - I actually see this as a positive.