A Renewing Mind

There are a plethora of wonderful tools on the web that I would like to be taking advantage of. The problem is, I haven’t been able to come up with good guidelines on when to use what. For example, I really like 37 Signals’ tools. Specifically, Writely is also pretty good. The latter is geared more towards word processing while the former seems better for informal sharing of information. But that only provides a clear case for Writely when I want to do word processing online (which is not often). Then there is Basecamp, a great easy to use project planning tool. It is not nearly as sophisticated as MS project, but that is its core strength. On the other hand, my whole company uses Project so to use Basecamp, I need an easy way to export a plan into some format that can be imported into Project. We also use Sharepoint a lot, but in a crippled fashion. They is something like a 3G limit for each Sharepoint (making it near useless as a document repository) and we only allow people to use the Sharepoint Services functions (basically folder management). That makes me want to use a Wiki and/or Backpack.

I’ve decided that software architecture is really about convincing clients that you have a vision. It doesn’t really matter much what the vision is, as long as you can depict it on a piece of paper. People want to see pretty colored boxes that fit together. If the boxes have plugs and recepticles, so much the better. There are some general guidelines that any architect should follow:

I bought a Tivo at lunch today. It isn’t for me, though it does sound like a fun device. It is for my daughter who is attending school at the University of Illinois (in Urbana-Champaign). I’ll be taking it down this weekend. Hopefully I’ll be able to see her long enough to get it installed and configured. Maybe I’ll take it on a trial run tonight, just to make sure everything works the way I think it should.

Last night, while I was working off some pounds in the YMCA, some enterprising individual acquired a new laptop by smashing a window in my car and nabbing my briefcase. They also acquired a PDA, wireless mouse, and reading glasses. It was an IBM ThinkPad T40 – nearly three years old and approaching the end of its lease. It cannot be worth much on the street. It makes me sick to think of the years worth of accumulated source code, email archives, and other documents that are forever lost. I almost left it at the office last night, but I’ve recently moved to an area of the building with heavier traffic and I wasn’t sure it would be safe to leave it. Arggghh!

There are shadows there on the sidewalk. The sun really does shine here once in a while, and when it does, it can be beautiful.

There is a webcam on top of the Space Needle, just a couple of blocks away. Cool! If you click on the Monorail (in landmark locations), you can see the Westin – its the tall round tower to the left of the monorail.

Why do 1,500 people go to a conference about a project planning tool? Beats me, but there are clearly some people that are passionate not only about project management in general, but Microsoft Office Project in specific. The former I can understand. The latter baffles me. That said, I can see MS is including some nice features in Project 12. Stuff like: multi-level undo, selecting tasks not assigned to you during timesheet entry (yea), improved Outlook integration, and more. I haven’t seen anything yet on an RSS feed to provide project task status updates. To me, that would be cool.

The Internet connection here at the Seattle Westin is spotty – doesn’t matter if it is the wireless connection or the cable connection up in the room. It is generally slow and frequently seems to drop out. This afternoon I’ll be switching over to TMobile. It will be worth the walk over to Starbuck’s.

I arrived in Seattle this afternoon for the Microsoft Office Project conference. Frankly, I am amazed that there is enough interest in a project planning tool to warrant a conference. This is not exactly a technology that I am passionate about, but the Project team back at the office wanted an architect to come with them, so here I am.

I went for a walk around the downtown tonight. This is a nice area – if you like shopping at Nordstrom’s or Tiffany’s. I have always stayed in Bellvue when visiting in the past. Staying downtown is a nice change. In spite of the rain, I think I’ll like it here. Oh, I went looking for a Starbuck’s tonight. It took about 45 seconds to find the first one. Then they started popping up every 90 seconds after that. There are, oh, maybe one bazillion of them in the downtown area.

One thing I’m having a hard time finding is free wifi. I know it exists, but I’m not finding anything nearby the hotel. The Westin hotel charges $10 per day. That includes wireless access throughout the hotel, which sounds nice, but I’m limited to the hotel. On the other hand, I could pay $10 and go to any Starbuck’s or the nearby Border’s Bookstore. Of course, I’d then have to leave the hotel. I’d rather not pay $20 per day for both, but I may have to do that.

Yesterday I found a way to access Google Mail from behind firewalls which might normally block browser access to the Google Mail website. I’m not sure I even want to link to this directly. I’ll just say it wasn’t terribly hard to find and I’ve left a breadcrumb trail here as well.