The original speaker has fallen through, not a large enough audience, and we don’t have the capacity for a very large one, so I guess it’s all good. There is a possibility for a speaker from Novell to show up tonight, but I don’t have confirmation on that either. I am going to bring along a short video I saw years ago that may be new to most people. Hopefully the VGA adapter I picked up for my mac works with the projector.

There I was at the local HTCIA meeting and the presenter was nattering about HCI and passed this comment: There are only two industries where the customer base is calles users: Computer science, support and design Drug Trafficking It struck me as worth repeating. For the acronymically challenged… HTCIA - High Tech Crime Investigation Association HCI - Human Computer Interaction

I was so happy with a recent book purchase that I decided to install the book review module. It installed with no issues, and appeared as a content option as expected. Then the trouble started… It appears that there is some incompatability with the module. It says it is installed, I can fill out the forms, but when I save it, nothing. After wasting a day on changes, attempted fixes, and browsing the database (of course I had opened the wrong one so nothing appeared to be working properly), I decided to uninstall it.

I was dragged to Barcamp 3 yesterday. It seems Carleton U has been granted some provincial money to “foster open source” so one of their contributions was to host Barcamp. Barcamp seems to be a once-in-a-while (every month-and-a half? every two months?) event. I think the Ottawa event was started by some vulture/venture capitalists who wanted to meet techies to slave, I mean work in their startups. But, this time they seem to have attracted some actual techies.

I have to admit, I’ve never sat in a coffee shop and worked on anything with a laptop before today. It’s a pretty great thing. Fresh coffee, semi-fresh food, good access (not the cheapest), etc. I’ve been working on a side contract and this was a convenient spot to meet with the other person working on the project, have some face time and get started on the project tasks list and timelines.

A friend of mine sent this around. From: Arnold XXXXXXXXX arnold.xxxxxxx@xxx To: Engineering Staff engineeringstaff@xxx Subject: cable management Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 08:55:11 -0400 Hi All, Thought I would share a tip I just thought of… In pursuing the contract here at yyy, I got a mitt full of fibre yesterday..lots of pretty single and multi-mode 6’-10’ cables. Annoyingly, I realised these would end up a tangled mess as there are no twisties to be had (the metal wires in the “garbagebag” variety are not something you want around exposed circuit boards, obviously!