Sat, 30 Apr 2005
2004 - 2005 Pragmatic Investment Plan Closed
Last September I decided to put a basic 2004-2005
Pragmatic Investment Plan together
to give me some goals and tasks to accomplish over the following 12 months.
Eight months in (and after considering
shorter PiPs) I've decided to mark last years as finished. While I've not
completed every item on the list I've made a pretty good showing and I'm
pretty happy that I could have finished on time.
Halfway through the period covered by that PiP I changed job and my interests and areas of responsibility changed significantly; that's why I ended up taking so long to finish some of the easier ones such as the book reviews. I just lost interest in doing them.
I've not thought too much about what the next bunch of goals are but I suspect they'll be quite different. Anyway, heres to change, progress and advancement!
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Posted: 2005/04/30 17:04 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Training and Losing Track
It's been a long while since I've been lucky enough to be sent on a
training course for anything so I'd forgotten how depressing they can be. I
try and get to as many technical conferences as possible for a number of
reasons, the fact that all the people attending want to be there and make a
genuine effort to chat and learn is a major one and it's
one of the few times I get to meet some of the people I speak to online in
the flesh.
A training course is nothing like these and is (to me) a lot less enjoyable. Some of the people sent just want to relax and not work for a couple of days. Most companies send two or three people who don't mingle outside of their little group (it takes a surprising amount of effort to engage a conversation with this kind of attendee) and it turns in to nothing but wake up, course, food, read course materials again, play with laptop, bed.
The other big problem I have is the disconnect, a week in a hotel by an airport with no Internet connection (although for stupidly high money you can have a shared 14.4 modem), lots of news channels in languages I don't speak and only newspapers to read it's hard to avoid getting further and further behind on everything. Still after next week my yearly training budget is exhausted and I'll not have the opportunity to do this again for another eight or so months.
While I don't expect training to be a barrel of laughs it's nice to learn in an environment where people have chosen to attend rather than being sent to learn something they have no interest in.
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Posted: 2005/04/30 14:59 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Aardvark FireFox Extension
Despite its odd name the Aardvark FireFox Extension is
actually damn useful. Once installed, turn it on using Tools->Start
Aardvark and move the mouse over the page.
As you hover over different parts of the page a red box will outline the current section, show you what HTML tag created it and show the elements "class" or "id" values. What's less useful but still interesting is that once you've selected the element you're interested in you can do a couple of occasionally useful things to it, remove it, colour the background, remove the element but leave a blank spot etc.
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Posted: 2005/04/30 14:13 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
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