I'm sitting at work right now, on a Sunday afternoon, frustrated with the status of my current project. We are in the process of re-platforming a huge number of our applications / systems. For many reasons, which I won't get into here, the project is taking quite a bit more effort to get to the finish line than we had expected. Now, I'm not a neophyte - I've been through plenty of projects that took serious effort to complete. This one is pretty painful though.

Needing some inspiration to get through this push, I realized that I had posted an appropriate quote back in December of last year. Call this post whatever you wish... I just needed to see it on the front page again.

If you do not assume responsibility for breaking the system in the way you want it broken and then integrating it to a better plateau, it will break by itself to a worse plateau. So inaction does not save you; it gives the power of your demise to outside forces.
Ichak Adizes, Managing Corporate Lifecycles

Jeff Schneider, over on Service Oriented Enterprise, really made me laugh with his Should Stupid People do SOA? posting. It's based on this article.

My favorite part is below:

Stupid people shouldn't do SOA (on-shore or off-shore). Stupid people shouldn't do object oriented. Stupid people shouldn't do ERP. Stupid people shouldn't have white-collared jobs... but they do.

Wonderful, brilliant and obvious.

All of the blogsphere arguments about the use of the term AJAX in the last couple of months has been driving me nuts. It's not that I really care, one way or the other, about the use of the term. What's been bothering me is the this is becoming another one of those dogmatic battles that just wastes people's time. And, yes, I understand that I can avoid wasting my own time by not reading the rants - and I don't. However, the rants are typically in my virtual path, and there's nothing I can do to avoid having to wade through them. I just don't understand these arguments. First of all, for those that insist on reminding everyone that "AJAX is just a stupid buzzword for something I've been doing for years", I have the following to say. It's a term. Terms are good. They help us communicate. This one helps us search for information about what others are doing with a particular design pattern. It's now a pretty useful tag to search with, as witnessed by using it on any of the social bookmarking sites out there (such as: http://www.blinklist.com/tag/ajax/ or http://www.technorati.com/tags/ajax). Secondly, for those that insist that AJAX is a "new and spiffy approach to web development", I simply say: No it is not. But then again, who cares? Now that I've contributed to the problem, I vote for everyone getting back to work.

I don't usually add political commentary or non-technology/business related content to this site, but I just read an article that I believe is worth reading. I'll agree with some that arguments can be made about each of the points that the author makes, but it's the general trend (and a whole lot of coincidences) that concerns me. Our current policies of "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" need to be changed. Hurricane Katrina brings a foretaste of environmental disasters to come

I had intended to write in this blog on a regular basis, but for the last several months I've been pretty focused on the "doing" part of my job. That being said, not having the time to write about my thoughts doesn't mean that I'm not exploring what other people are thinking about. So (mostly so that I can keep track of my own mental wanderings) I've decided to try out BlinkList. It's one of the latest batch of tag / favorite management sites, and it allows me to post a feed of my latest "blinked" sites.