A while back, there was a TV commercial (for a product/service I can't recall)¹ that showed a group of businessmen having a meeting in a shower. They were there because the executive that called the meeting wanted to leverage the fact that his best ideas came to him in the shower.

That commercial hits us as relevant because nearly everyone has had the experience of being in the shower and having that thought, solution or idea completely come out of "nowhere" that is exactly what we want.

Of course, the commercial takes that experience and attempts to apply it in a way that obviously won't work. It's obvious to pretty much everyone. But, why?

It's because it's not about the shower. It's actually about the "slack" time and is key to innovative thinking. The beauty is that, while gathering your team into the shower won't foster this innovative thinking, it *is* possible to deliberately make these moments happen and is a topic I've been looking at quite a bit lately.

Lots of people develop their own ways to manufacture these moment. I like to think that I did a reasonable job at it myself. However, my recent interest in the junction of economics, neurology, psychology, self-improvement and my longstanding interest in cross disciplinary learning have been coming together to better understand and debug my own brain. Deeper understanding of how my own neurons are working can lead to better decisions and more effective practices.

On this particular topic, recent interest was sparked by an EconTalk episode with William Duggan. He was talking about his book: Strategic Intuition.

The conversation was very enlightening and I bought and subsequently read the book. While I've got lots I could say about the book (it really resonated with me), what's really worth taking away from it is the core idea of what exactly "strategic intuition" is.

Basically, it's those "shower" ideas. It's the kind of thought or idea that is the result of disparate portions of your brain come together and make a connection. Those that are able to engage in strategic intuition regularly are often able to really shine in the midst of their circumstances.

So, how to cultivate moments of strategic intuition?

1. Harvest and gather information.
2. Make space for the background processes in your brain to do their thing.
3. Feast on the great ideas.

Harvest

In order for your brain to make connections, there need to be things for it to connect. The more diverse the inputs, the better. If you read nothing but self-help books or nothing but fantasy novels or nothing but political blogs that you agree with, there's not much distance between the stuff in your head and distance is good.

The further apart the 2 ideas, the more satisfying the idea. Incidentally, this is also true of jokes. The further you travel to "get" the joke, the funnier you find it.

So, in pursuit of the harvest of information, I read books on varied subjects, RSS feeds from varied topics, listen to podcasts, watch TV, etc. I also make a distinct effort to take in stuff that I disagree with.

Make Space

There's a commonality to the situations in which most people experience strategic intuition naturally. I've heard people mention:

• the shower
• mowing the lawn
• standing out and having a smoke
• driving
• raking leaves
• cooking (one of my favorites)
• walking in the park
• umm, sitting on the toilet

The thing common to all of them is that the "thinking" part of our brains get freed from being put to work. The task at hand can usually be performed without "thinking". That frees our brains up to do the work that leads to strategic intuition.

The busy lives that everyone seems to be living today are a hostile environment for this kind of space at first glance. However, when things like the drive to and from work can function as the kind of space we're after, it's not as foreign as it might first seem.

Regardless, when I carve out the time and have been putting lots of good input into my head, it is ALWAYS rewarded.

¹There's a lesson in there somewhere for being clever in your advertising but failing to get your brand attached to the cleverness.

For something that really should be part of my daily routine for the rest of my life, that seemed like a pretty good approach.

I'd heard people throw out a 14 day timeframe for things to "become a habit". In my own experience, however, that's proven to be wholly inadequate unless I already was inclined to do the thing.

So, I basically doubled the "conventional wisdom" and rounded to 30 days. The hope was that at the end of the 30 days, that mechanism in my brain that makes me feel guilty about not doing other stuff would be employed in keeping me going to the gym.

Measurement

I used Don't Break The Chain as a quick way to track whether I complied with my rules. I also kept an ad hoc kind of notebook along with my other notes for things like my weight and body fat percentage. I wasn't as thorough as one should be for really understanding what happened. However, I'm also pretty sure that if I'd imposed greater measurement requirements, I would have abandoned the whole thing.

While I don't have access to the REALLY accurate body fat measurements (i.e. the big water tank), I *do* have a scale that reports my body fat percentage along with the weight. It's the same scale I had when going to the weight loss doctor and the numbers were always fairly close to the ones that the more expensive equipment in her office reported.

I measured my weight and body fat percentage about 1-2 times a week for the duration. I logged those numbers along with the actual body fat in pounds, as calculated from the numbers that the scale spit out.

All of the workouts were between 30 and 60 minutes with most between 30 and 40 minutes long. I didn't track this for very long before patterns started to emerge. Most consisted of 25-35 minutes on the treadmill followed with 10-15 minutes of weight training.

The treadmill portion consisted of walking at 2.8mph at 9% incline with interval spikes of either a 15% incline or 1% incline and running between 6-7mph (only on some days). That consistently got my heart rate into the recommended range for cardio conditioning. I'd love to have gotten my VO2 measured before this (and should probably look even now), but didn't.

Weight training was mostly squats, bench press and seated row. From a training perspective, I pretty much just aimed to slowly bring up my condition without pushing things too far, so the weight stuff wasn't terribly intense.

Evaluation

Boolean Success/Fail

The actual goal was not achieved as I didn't actually make 30 days in a row: only 27. This is due in large part to my poor planning. The decision for the starting date was dictated almost entirely by the day that I finally got fed up and just jumped in. Had I looked at the calendar on that date, I would have noticed that I would be out of town in rural Iowa (where my gym is not) for my sister's wedding at the tail end of this 30 days.

However, once back in town, I started back up and it's clear that the *spirit* of the project took as going to the gym is now a habit. As such, I consider the project a success.

Weight and Fat

I expressly did not include any specific goals with regard to weight or fat loss.

At the beginning, my total body fat was 81.28 lbs. As of this morning, that's dropped to 74.24 lbs, for a drop in body fat of about 7 pounds. At the same time, my actual weight went UP from 253 to 256.

The combined math says that I gained 10 pounds of lean tissue and lost 7 pounds of fat in the last 30 days.

Cardiovascular

I wish I had tracked some things in this area better. Alas, it's probably unlikely that this will improve much going forward either. I *do* know that my endurance for bursts of running has improved pretty steadily.

Going Forward

Since the goal was to establish the habit of regular exercise, I do plan to keep this up. I've now been back on track for 2 days straight and see no reason to stop. There will undoubtedly be days like the wedding weekend where I can't get to the gym, but it looks like the habit is getting ingrained enough that those won't derail me.

I *have* heard from several people that I shouldn't be going every single day because I'll "overtrain". To me, that makes little sense, sorry. I spend 8-12 hours a day sitting in front of a computer plus 30-60 minutes of exercise on a treadmill and a few weights. That, compared with the amount of physical activity *demanded* of 99.99% of the population for all of human history except the last 30 years or even my own youth is preposterous.

With several accounts that average 2000-3000+ spam messages a day, dealing with the email on the new server didn't exactly appeal to me. Having heard about how some plenty smart people enjoyed the switch over to outsourcing their email to Google, I figured I'd give it a shot.

The thing about Gmail (and Yahoo mail and Hotmail) is that lots of large companies actually block them. When you do the contract development gig like I do, that can get in the way of actually doing your job. None of those companies block any of my domain names.

So, I followed all of the instructions for changing the MX DNS entries to point things over, set up the email accounts and was able to send and receive email. However, even when setting up webmail.example.com, the browser still gets forwarded to Google's domain.

Fortunately, Google recently added IMAP access. When you combine that IMAP access with a copy of Squirrelmail installed directly on the domain, you can use any of:

• The GMail interface that many know and love
• IMAP access using Thunderbird, Outlook, etc.
• Squirrelmail access

• do a few Google searches
• open the best results into a bunch of tabs
• read the info
• come up with a few, more detailed questions
• repeat

As that loop progresses, the questions I end up asking Google get more and more specific. By the time I've been digging for an hour or 2, the bulk of the results are starting to come from forums, mailing lists and other discussions of the technology in question.

That's when one of my pet peeves rears its head. You put a fairly detailed question into Google, get a page from a forum where someone asked your EXACT question (including most of the nuance for your specific needs) and, after a few people saying they don't know how or aren't sure, the original questioner pops back in and says, "Nevermind, I figured it out".

And that's it. Nothing else.

Particularly gnarly questions yield more than one such incident. Even worse, there are often 5 or 6 people just as frustrated, asking this person exactly HOW they figured it out. 

To me, this is an online etiquette and/or karma thing. If you go asking other people to explain how to do something, and you figure it out on your own, telling them "Nevermind" is just the first step. It is now your responsibility to explain back to the forum/mailing list/etc. what you did to figure it out. 

Sure, your solution might not work for everyone who will stumble across the discussion, but it's a whole lot better than being mocked by someone saying they *have* the answer, but haven't shared it.

I make a swing past a bunch of sites like Freshmeat, C Sharp Source, CodeProject, Codeplex and Sourceforge
every week or 2, looking for new and updated C# (and PHP, etc) projects and libraries that are up to interesting stuff.

One article on CodeProject today caught my eye. The article is entitled: Generate Complete Web 2.0 Applications in Minutes. That sentiment is all over the software development industry. The Microsoft Windows Server 2008/SQL Server 2008/Visual Studio 2008 launch last week showed the attitude at several different points.

Basically, it boils down to excitement at the ability to quickly build "applications" with little more than a wizard. That exact sentiment was expressed to me multiple times at a consulting company I worked with for a while. The person in question believed that if we just used one of these magical tools, our projects would go from a couple of hundred hours down to a single day.

The problem with this whole approach to software development is not that the tools themselves aren't great or that they promise something they don't deliver. It's that they're asking a question that doesn't matter in the context it's getting asked.

That's because neither I nor any software developer that I know is collecting a paycheck or getting an invoice paid for "building applications". At least, that's not what the payment is in exchange for in economic terms. Rather, I am getting paid for *solving problems*.

And, the thing about getting paid to solve problems and magic tools that make some kinds of problems easier to solve this year than last year (which is what most of these tools actually do) is that that just changes the problems that people pay for.

When tools that do easy CRUD generation or data entry applications show up in the marketplace, that doesn't mean that software developers magically get to use those tools to only work 2 hours a week and then coast for the rest. It just changes the kinds of problems that earn developers money.

I love this chain of progress. That's because it lets me solve ever-increasingly difficult problems with the same effort. That's very cool. However, it doesn't promise easy street and it bothers me when that's what's implied by this whole attitude.

Anyone who has sat through an intro to economics course even at the high school level has spent their fair share of time drawing and looking at supply/demand curves.

Similarly, if you've ever gathered statistics on nearly anything, you've seen a bell curve.  For those who have been following the book The Long Tail and the subsequent media frenzy, power law curves are likely very familiar.

It's that very media frenzy that can be described by a graph that I'm fond of and tend to see in lots of places. It's called the hype cycle and describes how lots of things, technology in particular, go through a pattern of enthusiasm, disappointment and maturation.

What's wonderful about this curve is that once you know about it and start looking for it, it shows up all over and really puts lots of breathless technical press into perspective.

Basically, the idea of the curve is this:

1. Someone invents new technology. (Hey, here's this thing called XML)
2. Some people start using it and telling everyone how great it is. (Look what you can use XML for)
3. People start buying into the hype and looking to use the new technology EVERYWHERE they can. (XML cures cancer)
4. Some of those places are deeply inappropriate and those who didn't recognize that end up disappointed. (Umm, no it doesn't cure cancer)
5. Backlash that leaves people rejecting even valid uses.
6. Things settle down and the technology lands in its permanent niche.

The trick is that when you realize that a given technology or product is on this track, it's much easier to avoid getting caught up in it.

All of that is to explain why, when I was reading this article at Techcrunch that I laughed out loud when the graph loaded. The article is about a technology was hyped heavily last year and the article talks about whether it's demise is happening or not. However, what I found funny was that the graph was fairly close to the hype cycle.

And, for the record, I see many things in today's tech world that are teetering on the edge of falling into the trough of disillusionment at this point. Among them is that I've seen a new outcropping of backlash articles on Twitter, Lifehacking, etc. These are pretty much right on track and predictable.

Nothing to see here.

However, when I graduated from college, my situation effectively purged all of the physical activity I was getting all along. Because I'd always just gotten my exercise doing things I already had to do, I didn't pay attention to the fact that The Great Sitting Down necessitated changing my eating or replacing the activity.

As many of you know, I did lose about 50 pounds a couple of years ago by addressing the diet and climbing the stairs at my project site. Alas, again, when 28 flights of stairs were no longer between me and my desk, that loss stopped and I've spent the last couple of years pretty much stuck in the same general ballpark.

While I've messed with a couple of things on the dietary front, I hadn't really done much to acknowledge the physical activity side of things.

Knowing this needed to change, a few months ago, I did like so many others and signed up for a gym, went twice and then kept paying the bill, but little else. Once I'd paid for 3 months and never set foot in the place, I decided that something needed to change.

Clearly, economics says that the best way to ensure that I actually do this thing that I consciously want to do is to leverage incentives or disincentives. I'd heard about a site where you could take out a contract on yourself where money would be sent to a charity you disagree with if you don't follow through (stickK.com). I gave it a look and even got about half way through signing up before abandoning that idea.

The big problem is that even though the goals are weekly, you have to give them the total cost of failure up front. So, you could say that failing to exercise this week would cost you $10, but if you wanted to commit to a year, you'd have to give them the whole $520 off your card up front.

While that is a perfectly valid way to do it, I shied away at that point.

When I sat back to consider the situation, I remembered a study that I had read about the amount of effort people will go to to avoid something so simple as doors closing on a computer screen. That mirrored what I've seen watching other people play video games. Even simple games where you have to keep things going can lead people to get REALLY concerned when nothing more than a few pixels are going to "fall" or break through a wall, etc.

That same principle is what is at work in Jerry Seinfeld's "don't break the chain" productivity method. Given the effects that just losing that incrementing number of completed days, I wondered what would happen for me if nothing more than that number WAS the thing I'd lose by not going to the gym.

So, revived something I've done for lots of other stuff with a 30 Day Challenge. I'd go to the gym every day for 30 days. Period. The challenge wouldn't be over until 30 days in a row were touched by a visit to the gym. Of course, the first few days are often easy and then, hopefully, the cumulative effect of the incrementing number would kick in.

I'm not bundling any sort of goal to lose weight. I'm not bundling any specific gym routine; stepping in the door counts. And, I'm now 12 days in. Twice, so far, I've had a "reason" to miss, but went out of my way to do it anyway, something I've never done with previous attempts at physical activity.

In other words, it's working.

Apparently that was too late because as I sat down to upgrade/patch Wordpress, I saw that one of the most recent posts (one on the front page) had tons of spammy text hidden from view with CSS. As that was a telltale sign of having the site exploited.

So, I quickly changed a bunch of passwords and went looking for other posts that had similar text in them and found none. Having cleaned up the mess, changed passwords and upgraded Wordpress, I moved on.

Then, yesterday, I checked in on my Adsense revenue. I only do that once every couple of weeks as it's pretty consistent. What I saw was disturbing. The number of page impressions was WAY down. As I had more pressing matters to look at (it's tax season, ya know), I made a mental note to check it out in more detail this morning.

It was then that I found that the drop in traffic actually dated back to April 3. On every day since then, the traffic was a fraction of normal. Instead of hanging out just south of 3000 page views a day, it was closer to 500. Uh oh.

I headed to the normal site stats and noticed that somehow, MSN's Live.com was now the highest source of referrals. Hmm. Where were the Google links?

Sure enough, a search for "site:wynia.org" returned absolutely no results. Yikes.

I went looking for an explanation and discovered that I wasn't alone. Others had been booted from Google because of their Wordpress installation getting hacked. A few more searches and the comments on that past revealed that I needed to use the Google Webmaster Tools to resubmit the site.

I did that, but am uncertain exactly when or if the 1000+ pages of this site will reappear in Google. That's because there's no way to actually test whether you got all of the offending content. They just give you an "example" of the kind of thing that got you de-listed.

They just point you to the webmaster guidelines. That's all fine and good if the reason you were removed was deliberate action. However, in this case, even Google indicates that they know it wasn't a result of my actually building the pages this way:

"This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party."

Beyond that, from what I can see, it was that single post on the front page of the site that triggered the blacklisting. A single page out of 1000+ (that was up in it's incorrect form for less than 48 hours) causing the complete removal from the index is something that strikes me as not exactly in keeping with the motto "don't be evil".

So, I guess what I'd really like is if anyone sees this problem here on the site, PLEASE let me know so I can get this all cleaned up.

This morning, I came away with more notes than average, so I thought I'd share some of the stuff we talked about.

A lot of the conversation revolved around Aaron's master's thesis/project: Complexity Machine 1. He's doing some really interesting stuff that deals with the intersection of emergent behavior, simulated flocking behavior, generative architecture and computer science. Complexity Machine 1 is the software that's the result of his research, where he's asking:

My question to those of you who are willing to explore is: how can you imagine this software could be used to create architecture? Consider it a kind of speculative Rorschach test. Perhaps you don't consider it useful at all, or feel it needs some some vital piece of functionality before it's useful.

Along the way, Aaron mentioned that he'd picked up a copy of Seed Magazine (due to an article related to his research) and found it to be a really decent magazine. When I got home, I hit the website and think I might subscribe.

At one point, the conversation turned to non-textbook books that help in the understanding of how computers work. I mentioned that I think that anyone with an interest in the workings of computers should read the novel: The Diamond Age.

He seconded that recommendation and also through out The Advent of the Algorithm from David Berlinski as worth reading along with Berlinski's A Tour of the Calculus. Both were critical to his actual "getting" the topics.

I mentioned that I had a copy of The Turing Omnibus sitting on my shelf that I've been wanting to get a chance to dig into.

On my way to drop him off back at home, the topic of my quest to find a better way to create presentations that are destined for online distribution rather than live presentation.

Powerpoint, Keynote, S5 and others all frustrate me in some way and what I really want is something that makes it much easier to focus on the content of the presentation and still generate something that fits with the aesthetic that Presentation Zen is pointing toward.

Aaron mentioned that he'd messed with Quartz Composer, Soundslides and Quicktime for what I described. And, of course, with most of his thesis research being done in Processing, he sees some serious promise for a nice presentation system.

I've since gone 8 full months with the laptop setup I already had: the Dell 700m running Ubuntu, the Mac Powerbook G4 and a client-owned laptop for project work. The fact that the extra time went by just fine points to a change that's necessary in my cycle. I really do need to move to a 3 year laptop replacement cycle instead of the shorter 18-24 months that I've been thinking.

Regardless, that actually puts right now as either right on time on the new schedule or overdue on the old, so I'm looking to buy a laptop before we leave for Ireland in July. I'm trying to make sure I haven't missed any hidden gems out there, so here's a quick rundown of the specs I'm looking for right now.

• Ideally in the $1500 ballpark, but up to $2000.
• 13" or 14" screen.
• 4GB of RAM
• 7200 RPM hard drive, preferably the 200GB that's out.
• Real video card
• DVD burner
• Intel Core2 Duo T7000 or better
• Bluetooth
• Webcam
• Extended battery. The longer the life the better.
• Wireless N if possible
• Pre-installed OS doesn't matter as Ubuntu will be installed

Beyond that list, the overall plan for the machine is that it will run Ubuntu64 (falling back to 32 if I just can't get along with 64). Layered on that will be VMWare Workstation, to hopefully take advantage of the new Unity features for Linux/Windows. Windows Vista Ultimate (and my Visual Studio dev environment) will then be in a VM (hence the large fast hard drive) and I can get to individual applications and windows on the Ubuntu desktop.

So, who's selling such a beast at the moment?

Oh, and for the record, I am also considering a parallel track wherein the base hardware is, indeed, a MacBook with VMWare hosting Ubuntu and Windows, but am not 100% convinced.

I've tinkered around with starting implementations of both a client and a server on my own ever since. Part of that activity was because there weren't very many tools that supported Atompub. That actually makes doing that kind of development a pain.

That's because you're trying to do both ends of a client-server implementation without having either side ready to work. It's always much easier to work on one end of such a system when the other end is already in place.

While there have been tools for testing Atompub servers, some early servers, etc. out there, but most required quit a bit of yak shaving before you could work on the other side.

Fortunately, that's starting to change. While I still am pursuing my own implementations, I now have adequate implementations to work with on both sides: Windows Live Writer on the client side and Wordpress on the server.

One of the things I'm aiming for in working with this whole chain of tools is a central repository of content that I create: notes, bookmarks, articles, documents, images, etc. all in one place. From there, the content can be pushed out to the various sites I want it on.

Anyway, one of the things that I wanted to do as part of this was to get a copy of all of the content from this site as individual Atom documents. This would give me a large test set of posts that reflect my own real usage.

So, I wrote a bare minimum export to get all ~900 posts. One of the secondary reasons I wanted to use this is that this site's installation of Wordpress is chronically messed up.

Accordingly, a real implementation should actually query the service for the list of posts instead of just looping through the list. For whatever reason, this site's setup, that didn't work, hence the for(i) loop. But, that means some 404 errors in the middle from deleted posts.

Regardless, in just a few lines of C# code, I had a nice directory containing all of my posts. The code follows.

    1 using System;
    2 using System.Collections.Generic;
    3 using System.Text;
    4 using System.Net;
    5 
    6 namespace WordpressExportPOC
    7   {
    8   class Program
    9     {
   10       static void Main(string[] args)
   11       {
   12         String WordpressAtomUrl = "http://www.example.com/wordpress/wp-app.
   13                                   php";
   14         WebClient WordpressExporter = new WebClient();
   15         WordpressExporter.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential(
   16                                         "USERNAME","PASSWORD");
   17         for (int i = 1; i < 901; i++)
   18           {
   19             try
   20               {
   21                 WordpressExporter.DownloadFile(WordpressAtomUrl + "/post/" +
   22                                                i, "example_com\\" + i + ".
   23                                                atom.xml");
   24               }
   25             catch
   26             {
   27 
   28             }
   29         }
   30     }
   31   }
   32 }
   33 

I'm about as big of an advocate of the use of Creative Commons licenses for my creative work as you'll find. Nearly everything I make online is licensed under either the most permissive of the Creative Commons licenses (for things like articles, photos, documents, etc.) or one of the most permissive software licenses (for code and software), like the BSD license. That enthusiasm with a shared pool of resource led to my recent Photos from the Commons project and really drives much of my online activity. There has, however, been a longstanding problem with Creative Commons licenses that is probably going to get worse before it gets better. This problem exists on one of the axes on which Creative Commons helps people apply copyright license control. Those axes are:

• Attribution. If you republish, repurpose or create something from my work, you can't claim it as your own. My name needs to be attached. All of the licenses include this protection.
• Keeping the work free. The ShareAlike axis determines whether any changes you make to my work must also be licensed in the same way. This is often called a "viral" nature in license like the GPL and works similarly in Creative Commons.
• Commercial use. This is where things go from nice and black/white to a nasty shade of muddy gray.

That tricky axis of commercial use is specifically why I am steering entirely clear of any photo that includes a NonCommercial clause for the photos project. The problem, articulated in a much better way than I would do here, is that no one can really agree on what exactly *constitutes* commercial use. That can lead to really nasty confrontations that I want no part in. Adding to the confusion is the fact that for photos, there's an additional dimension wrapped up in the commercial use that could actually get messed up even if the use is non-commercial. The actual reproduction of a photo is covered by copyright. If you wanted to make prints, posters, etc. you needed a copyright license. However, if your chosen photo contains recognizable people (and sometimes inanimate objects as well), and you're using it as part of packaging or advertising something else, you also need a model release. This is illustrated by an episode of Friends (which is scary to realize is now nearly 15 years old) where Joey had a photo taken only to discover it on a billboard with a caption along the lines of "This man doesn't even know he's got herpes". That issue has caught a few businesses using Creative Commons photos for advertisements, even though the photos in question weren't restricted from commercial use. Fundamentally, these are the kinds of problems where rapid changes in how the law works along with a massive increase in the number of people now affected collide. Unfortunately, changes like automatic copyright and extensions with no registration, while partly intended to handle the influx of work under copyright without additional staff at the copyright office actually amplified the problem by creating enormous piles of copyrighted works by people who have no idea how copyright works. Alas, I'm certain it will get much, much worse before it starts to get better.

Back at the beginning of 2007, I had an idea to highlight some of the amazing photographs that are added to The Commons every day. In my zeal for the idea, I jumped right to trying to do a "Best of 2006" book, but didn't start until January of 2007. Thus was the project doomed to the inevitable interference of life.

Fast forward to early this year and I got the itch to revisit this project. However, fully aware of how easily a grandiose book project could get pre-empted, I instead let it brew for a while before just jumping in where I had left off.

What I've seen works best for side projects like this idea is when things are built up out of small components. Those small components or small tasks lend themselves well to an hour here and there generating actual progress and usable results. There is no grand churning in the background with a final product emerging at the end.

So, for this idea, I think it makes much more sense to use the domains I bought for the project (fromthecommons.com and .org) and the subdomain I set up for the photo version specfically (photos.fromthecommons.com) to do smaller highlighting of great Creative Commons photos on a daily or weekly basis using a blog format.

A later book at the end of the year would thus be much simpler as all of the nominated photos would already be chosen.

So, I set up Wordpress on that domain and modified my tools for finding great photos from The Commons and it's up and running. Because I plan on putting ads up, I'm currently limiting the photo selection to those that are licensed Creative Commons Attribution. While I think that there's clear freedom to also use some of the other licenses, this one is clear and there's no shortage of great photographs to choose from.

The theme I'm using isn't exactly what I want for the long haul and I need to change the photo template HTML a bit, but those are tweaks that can come as things progress. In the mean time, if you enjoy good photography and are interested in open source creative expression, it's probably a site you may want to watch.

CreateSouth is at least aiming to do things a bit different:

The idea of the conference is that if there is some project you want to do but haven't tackled because the learning curve is too high, you should walk out of the conference knowing where to start and maybe with an email address or three of people that can help you if you get into trouble.

One of the things that keeps me from attending many conferences is my tendency to scale the learning curve on topics quickly. Basically, if I'm interested in a topic to any level above casual, I dive in and get myself to a pretty good level of understanding.

That's resulted in a situation where, if I'm interested in a field enough to want to attend a conference on it, I find little of value in the panels and presentations.

I know, I know. Everyone says that the value in attending conferences is in the hallway conversations. And, for the conferences I've attended, that has been the case.

However, I don't do well in crowds and do really poorly at *starting* those conversations. I've found that if I don't take measures to compensate, I tend to find myself accompanied mostly by silence.

One of the compensations I've found particularly useful is *being* one of those experts. That's not because I'm particularly worthy of being called an expert. Rather, I've found some of the greatest joy in life by sharing what little I *do* know with others.

Doing so on a panel or in a presentation is often enough of a catalyst in the situation to help conversations find me.

However, in an environment like the one that Dave and the others behind CreateSouth eliminates the need for that particular crutch. When everyone is there to share what they know and help others, then the conversations really DO happen on their own.

All of that is to say that I was excited about the idea of attending CreateSouth and looked seriously at being there. Alas, the realities of life in all its aspects have rendered that decision for me in the negative.

When I realized that, I did some thinking about it. Prior to making that decision, I had been willing to pay $600 for a flight, another couple of hundred on a hotel, money for food and a day of lost consulting revenue. I had wanted to do that for a mixed desire to help others and to receive and enjoy the experience.

So, when Dave mentioned that they were looking for sponsorship, I dropped him an email. Sure, by not being able to attend myself, I'm unable to get the benefit of the receiving portion of the equation. However, there's no reason I couldn't still help.

It wouldn't be the same contribution as being there in person, helping people with their blogging or other new media skills. However, I figured I might be able to help defray some of the infrastructure expenses.

So, on Monday, I sent a check over that I know that Dave and crew will put to good use. Hopefully that ensures that there's a 2nd annual CreateSouth and I can actually attend that one.

This morning, I awoke to a white blur outside my bedroom window. As I put on my glasses, the white came into focus and I could see that snow was clinging to every surface in sight.

The heavy, wet snow of an early spring storm was stacked on every branch and twig; all of the horizontal surfaces had 6 inches of the sticky stuff on it. This happens only a few different times each year and it's always truly beautiful to behold.

Unfortunately, most of the time when I am greeted by this sight out the window, I'm getting ready to go to work or otherwise obligated to move on with my day. By the time my obligations are fulfilled on those days, the snow has melted in the spring sun and the opportunity to enjoy the scenery is gone.

This morning, on the other hand, was a weekend.

I showered, threw on my hat, coat and boots and grabbed my camera for a trip to the closest park: Lake Palmer. It's a combination of forest and wetlands that is just 5 or so minutes from my house.

This being Minnesota and above freezing, I wasn't alone in enjoying the park. However, all of that snow muffled all sound but my own breathing and the wet crunch of snow under my boots. That deep quiet emphasized just how noisy and chaotic life has been for the last 3-4 months.

I wandered for about a half hour, taking pictures as I followed the trails, leaving them whenever I saw something interesting.

The cattails were particularly interesting, with ice and snow layered over the exploded fluff of the tips of the plant.

That time alone with my thoughts, taking pictures of the natural beauty surrounding me was some of the best time In recent memory and a great way to enjoy the warm weather.

The photo highlights from that session are here.

photo credit: Liel Bomberg

I often push people who work as employees to view themselves as actually being self-employed. When you take a job, your little business just sold some of your time to a company for an agreed-upon amount of money per year. It's a business arrangement, so treating it like one makes sense.

When people make that shift, they often start to see their resume's more like potential "customers" of their services (employers) do. The resume and anything that accompany it are your marketing materials to land an interview. In that interview, you need to push the "deal" forward, but if your resume ends up in a stack with dozens or hundreds of others only to be tossed en masse, you don't even get that chance.

Sure, lots of places are pushing resumes into giant keyword databases. And, for that, you should make sure the text itself is optimized. However, there are still PLENTY of places where your carefully formatted resume gets viewed by a real person.

In those cases, having a resume that catches the eye makes a big difference in getting someone to actually read it and call you in for an interview.

If your resume is based on one of the 3-4 that come with Microsoft Word, consider something a little more unique. This great sample of really nice-looking resumes came through the feed reader this morning really shows what can be done to wake up a tired resume.

Some are more feasible than others if you aren't a graphic designer, but the ideas should certainly spark some changes in yours.

photo credit: tibbygirl

I was in the grocery store earlier today after a trip through Crystal. Along the road every restaurant that I passed seemed to have suddenly added corned beef and cabbage to their menus or managed to dig out the big ol' bottle of green food coloring and started dumping it into every water-soluble substance in their kitchen.

Once in the store, the same trend was magnified. Half of the end-caps were covered in shamrocks and a significant portion of the pastries found themselves coated in green goo.

The thing is. There's lots of really good Irish food that I'm seriously looking forward to taking part in from the source when we are in Ireland in July.

Wanting to get a taste in advance of that trip, I headed to my new favorite food/recipe site: Recipezaar. I've got quite a few food sites in the list I go to when it's time to whip something up. Recipezaar isn't exactly the Web 2.0 poster child. There are plenty of other recipe sites that "feel" better. I mean I really like the look of Open Source Food.

However, Open Source Food, despite the gorgeous photography and things like tagging, when it comes down to it, a site like Recipezaar delivers on the actual task at hand. See, I use a site like these to find food worth making. And, on those features that matter, Recipezaar delivers.

If you're looking to move beyond corned beef and cabbage or want some Irish food that is more than just a cliche, it's worth digging through some of the related recipe lists they've got. I usually sort everything by rating, which brings out some really good commentary on how good or bad the recipes actually are.

St. Patrick's Day Recipes

General Irish Recipes

Recipes Containing Guiness

Once you find some that you like (I'm thinking Irish Pub Stew and Soda Bread sound good to me or maybe some Irish Cod Pie), one of the features of Recipezaar really shines. Their printable format is really one of the best of all of the recipe sites out there. You need to register for a free account to hide the stuff that shows at the top of the page and then you get nice, clean layouts with nutrition information, original comments by the submitter and a quick URL for looking it up again at a later date. Nearly every recipe I've gotten from them fit on a single side of a single sheet of paper.

Combine these nice printer-friendly layouts with a default PDF printer and you've got an easy way to save recipes for later printing or review.

This morning, I ran out of my pomade, digging the last of it out of the jar. I headed to the closet to grab another, thus ensuring that my nasty cowlick in the back stays put tomorrow. Unfortunately, while the shelf proudly displayed my stash of extra shaving cream and an extra tube of toothpaste, there was no pomade.

Since I don't know when I'm going to get to the store to pick up some more, I made a quick check at Amazon to see if I might be able to just throw it into my next purchase.

That's when I discovered a feature of Amazon that I hadn't seen before. Apparently, you can subscribe to get stuff like pomade delivered on a regular basis. So, every month, 2, 3 or 6 months, if I subscribed, another couple of jars would show up. They discount it as well and I found myself reflecting on how well Amazon serves its customers.

I've been a customer of Amazon's for so long I had to actually go an look at when my first Amazon order was (1998). In that 10 years, I've gone from buying the occasional book to Amazon being my default choice for buying something. I often only bother looking for a local store that carries the item if Amazon can't get it to me in time or doesn't offer it. I've even become a member of Amazon's "Prime" program, giving me free 2-day shipping on everything from their warehouses.

Over that time, I've consistently been impressed with how they've smoothed out the road in front of me as a customer. Between setting up easy wish lists, carts that don't flush out when I close my browser, one click shopping, Prime shipping, making customer reviews central to purchasing, finally getting me DRM-free MP3s for purchase, etc. it's clear that they're focused on customer satisfaction.

This Christmas, they even went WAY above my expectations on a package mixup.

I had ordered a bunch of stuff as gifts and nearly all of the items had been delivered. However, one shipment was listed as "delivered" that I hadn't ever seen. I fully expected to be handed off to UPS to file a claim of some sort, to wait for a followup call from them, etc. After all, that's what every other vendor I've ever worked with has done when something goes wrong with the shipment.

However, with no questions asked, they just sent me another shipment, totaling something like $90 as a replacement. When I found the package, in the back yard, between the garbage cans, buried in snow, I felt terrible. But, you've got to be impressed with a company that just keeps looking for ways to keep customers coming back.

And, now, apparently, I don't have to ever run out of pomade again.

Dave's response to me really hit me when he commented on that stance. See, that quick summary of being open and transparent really is an oversimplification. That Dave called the stance hardcore really made me want to clarify my actual policy and describe it as it actually is for me.

When I was young, I constantly heard my parents and other adults say, "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all". You probably did too. As I grew up, I developed a more sophisticated understanding of the underlying principle of that statement. Sometimes the "not nice" thing is, in fact, the right thing to say.

However, at its heart, I believe that that old adage points to the importance of being responsible for what you say. That principle has always stuck with me.

Another principle that I integrated pretty deeply is a belief in transparency as a check on integrity. When your words and actions are out there, you think about what you say and do in a different and, I believe, more critical way.

Those principles have always been at the fore of my mind when writing for this site. On every single post, I ask myself a question:

1. Is there anyone that I'm nervous about reading what I'm about to write?

I then *assume* that, sitting out there, ready to read it is that very person. And, I write as though I am 100% certain that the person in question *will* read it. When that filter stops me from writing, it's usually a sign that I probably shouldn't be saying it in person to anyone either because it's not worth saying.

The thing is that I actually have a filter that's earlier in the process. That filter is the one that wasn't mentioned in my discussion with Dave.

I look at my writing on this site as well as conversations that I have in person as my way of sharing my experiences, knowledge, opinions, etc. with others. I value the exchange of ideas highly.

However, the absolute first thing I ask myself before even sitting down to write or sharing a story at a gathering is: "Is it mine to share?".

Lots of things that make up portions of my day aren't mine to share. The details of my work for clients belong to them by contract. Most of the things that go on in the lives of my friends and family, despite me often being involved, aren't exclusively mine to share. Sometimes, anonymizing the incident can work to make something mine to share, but often that's not the case.

Incidentally, that whole policy tends to lead one to spend more time focused on ideas and opinions than on people and incidents. It keeps gossip out of your conversation and guards against ad hominem attacks.

That question has actually been the source of a fairly deep online silence the last few weeks. On a normal day or week, there are things that are: mine to share, worth sharing (at least by my measure) and something I want to write about. The more frivolous of those things go out over Twitter. Those things that are a bit more involved go here on this site.

The last few weeks have seen very little make it past both filters. There's a lot of stuff going on and the vast majority of my days lately haven't been mine to share. On several fronts, it looks like that might be changing in the next few weeks. Only time will tell.

Unfortunately, in many environments, this scenario is repeated a couple of times a month. I say unfortunate because the original reason for running these kinds of jobs overnight in the first place is that batch jobs that consume computing resources shouldn't interfere with regular daytime work activities. However, when *everything* gets scheduled at midnight (and in many shops, that actually ends up happening), all you've done is shift the bottleneck to the middle of the night.

I've worked in environments where the bunched up batch jobs all scheduled at midnight thrashed the hard drive and CPU all night and are often still running at 9 or 10am the next day.

When we changed the scheduling to stagger them out a bit, from 10pm through 6am, the total burden on the server dropped dramatically and we actually dropped the overall time spent running these jobs just by being more careful about scheduling.

So, if you happen to be in that meeting today and someone says "midnight", please, just check to see what else is running at midnight and consider a different time slot.

Photo: Kevin Dooley

If you were to go through my Visual Studio "Projects" directory or my personal development web server, you'll find about 2/3 of the directories are named SomethingPOC or SomethingExperiment. The former has become my convention over the last year or so and stands for Proof of Concept.

I spend a good portion of each day with one or more of these projects open. That's because I consider the use of the Proof of Concept to be integral to software development. Whether the official methodology of the project encourages them, is indifferent or actively discourages them (and I've worked in all of those environments), I will insist on using them.

First, a quick explanation of what exactly I mean by a POC. Basically, it's the simplest possible program that will answer a question that you have about the tasks in front of you.

Say, for instance, that you wanted to retrieve an RSS feed and store the individual entries into a SQL Server database. I'd probably do a quick POC to connect to the database and insert a record. Then I'd do one for fetching an RSS feed. I might also do one that checks a feed for new items vs one's seen before.

In other words, each POC tests out one concept and proves that you can do what was a question mark in your project approach. If you end up with more than one method in a POC, you're probably doing too much and it should be broken down into more than one POC.

I deliberately name the projects and classes with names that can NOT work in the final project. This helps to hedge against the inclination to do a quick copy and paste into your real project. This is important because POC's should be quick and loose. They don't have error handling, don't do validation (unless that's what you're proving) and generally don't follow many of the rules of good software development. That's a good thing.

That freedom means you can quickly explore the problem and work through some possible solutions in a "sandbox" without worrying about whether you're doing it "right". However, it's also a good thing that you throw the POC away or only use it as a reference.

If you do lots of POC's, name them to encourage disposable coding and then move on to do your "real" development, you'll find that you have often left those crappy early mistakes in the POC, have already run into and overcome many of the typical problems you run into in new solutions.

Once you're into your "real" development, lots of people abandon POC's. However, I keep using them throughout the project (even into the bugfixing and testing phases). Every time I'm asking myself a question about whether an idea will work, rather than trying the experimental code in the permanent code.

Over time, this ends up being a constant cycle. You ask yourself a question that can only be answered with code, do a POC to come up with an answer and then move back to the full project to implement it. If you aren't used to this kind of cycle, I'd recommend giving it a shot. I won't work without it.

Last night, when I couldn't sleep, I decided to check something off of the list that I wanted to see as a proof of concept for the Atom Publishing Client part of the toolchain: HTML Tidy cleanup to XHTML of HTML before putting it into an Atom entry document.

I currently do most of my writing for this site in Windows Live Writer. However, that's more of a compromise than an ideal choice. While I could probably hack a plugin together that would make Live Writer a more suitable long-term choice, I really want a very specific set of features that includes getting away from the XML-RPC API that all of the server-side engines Live Writer works with are based on.

So, I've been tinkering with a multi-tabbed Windows app for editing posts. The WYSIWYG tab for quick editing uses the MSHTML engine from Internet Explorer. I've looked around and unless you're willing to pony up $299 for a commercial control, that's the most reasonable choice.

However, the HTML that MSHTML spits out is horrible and really needs to be cleaned up. So, I set out to figure out how to use HTMLTidy in a C# project.

I tried to find a .NET wrapper for HTMLTidy and thought I had scored right away when I found one here. However, when I tried to use it, not even the sample code would build without errors on my development machine.

So, I dropped back to trying the COM object version. The last update to it was back in 2000 or so, but it looked like all of the features I needed were in that version, so I decided to give it a shot.

To use the TidyCOM library, you add it as a reference and insert your "using TidyCOM" statement in your class. The actual usage is fairly straightforward.

Example:

TidyObject TidyObj = new TidyObject();
TidyObj.Options.Doctype = "strict";
TidyObj.Options.DropFontTags = true;
TidyObj.Options.OutputXhtml = true;
TidyObj.Options.Indent = TidyCOM.IndentScheme.AutoIndent;
TidyObj.Options.TabSize = 2;
String CleanHTML = TidyObj.TidyMemToMem(HTML);

That code assumes that the "HTML" variable has your messy HTML in it and at the end, "CleanHTML" has your cleaned up XHTML in it.

My little multi-tabbed prototype is using a buffer object to keep the "current" HTML in it. Whenever you switch tabs, the old content is scrubbed through this code before the new tab gets updated out of the buffer. That means that whether it's the WYSIWYG tab that messes it up or you in the HTML editor, you still get valid XHTML in the eventual output.

I also extended my CleanupHTML method (that contains the above code) to scrub out the HTML header tags, body tags, etc. Since the HTML will actually end up as one part of the Atom xml file and not as a standalone HTML file, I only want the content from the editor and both MSHTML and HTML Tidy will always put that stuff back in unless you strip it out.

While I'd still like an assembly that's a little more current, this clearly does the job well enough to check this feature off of my checklist. Now, on to RESTful services on IIS with C#.

The thing is that I usually don't really want a printed copy of it, despite really wanting to keep a copy. As I was on my Linux laptop, I just printed it to PDF. That way, I have a copy of it in a form that matches what I would have gotten if I had printed it. I could have saved the HTML page, but like the single document approach of PDF for this.

On my Mac laptop, this is just as easy and on Windows not much harder. Both Ubuntu and Mac OSX make it really easy to have a PDF printer. However, what I noticed as I went to print this particular receipt to a PDF was that on none of my machines was this PDF printer the default printer.

Because of that, I was only getting a PDF when I saw in advance that I might want one instead of printing it for real. That sparked a bit of curiosity in me. What would happen if I made the PDF printer my default and sent everything through there first.

So, for the past few weeks, that's been the setup on all of my workstations. The results make it clear that I want to make this the default setup from here on out for a few reasons.

First is the number of times where I printed something to PDF, sent it to the printer marked up the printout and eventually dropped the paper into the recycling only to go looking on my desk for that printout a couple of days later. No problem, since the PDF was sitting in my PDF output directory.

It's also become a really decent way to save a web page article or snapshot of a document in an easily retrievable format. When combined with my recent JungleDisk installations on all of those machines and the automatic backups that include those PDF directories on all of the machines, I now have access to anything I've printed or wanted to keep, no matter where I was when I printed it.

While I still use bookmarking engines quite a bit for marking things to find later, it's happened more often than I am comfortable with that the page/article in question goes away by the time I want it a few months down the road: not the case with exported PDF's.

Finally, when you turn off your browser's headers and footers, you can easily use straight HTML or any of the online word processors for document editing and get nice PDF's for sharing by email, etc.

Given how I can quite easily write simple documents in raw HTML faster and make them look more consistent (with standardized CSS) than I can do the same in MS Word or OpenOffice, this is pretty useful.

Overall, pretty slick and handy. If you haven't ever tried setting your computer up this way, I highly recommend giving it a shot.

Every few weeks I seem to see clusters of discussions about "young people" and technology. Typically, it starts off as I notice someone doing a news story or just spouting off in a restaurant about how amazing it is that "kids today" are growing up with computers/cellphones/iPods and how amazed they are by how adept and sophisticated they are in using those devices.

Nearly always, within 1-2 days, I see another article or just happen to see an incident that points to just how wrong that generalization is. From computers ripe with thousands of viruses and bits of spyware to reports of college professors citing how poorly students grasp the very concept of citing sources and the simple basics of research, examples seem to point to a much more complicated picture.

It's clear to me that there seems to be a segment inside EVERY age group that seems to just "get" technology. Many of the sharpest technologists I know are in their 50's or 60's and some of the most clueless are 16-25. Of course, the plural of anecdote isn't data, but there certainly seems to be enough indication that the full spectrum from tech novice to tech genius exists in nearly all of the age brackets.

One of the criticisms leveled at the non-savvy portion of the younger brackets is how often they will pretty much stop at the first level of Wikipedia when researching a topic. It's so common that many colleges and Universities have had to put actual bans on citing Wikipedia in academic papers.

Given that I was told that the encyclopedia stopped being a valid primary source at some time in 8th grade, this troubles me like it does many others. Wikipedia and Google are starting points for exploring or researching a topic.

I've mentioned before how often I've been asked how/why I know something. That's been followed more than a few times by people asking how I manage to learn as much as I do about the topics that sparked the discussion in the first place.

As I recently used my "normal" process just recently on a topic, I took note of how I dig into a topic and I thought I'd share. This isn't an approach to writing a formal paper/thesis/dissertation. Rather, it's an approach to to satisfying curiosity, getting acquainted with a topic, and getting a dedicated hobbiest level of knowledge in a given topic.

Taking Notes

First, particularly if you aren't particularly practiced at any sort of methodical digging into a topic, you're going to need a way of taking notes. It can be regular paper notebooks (like the Moleskine), 3×5 notecards or software, like the recently launched Ript or a mindmapping tool like Freemind. Regardless, you need a way to keep track of the stuff you find.

As you get used to this approach to information gathering, it's pretty likely that you'll figure out your own best way to keep track of the new information.

For the most part, I mostly do a small notebook that goes with me everywhere in combination with lots of online bookmarks. Regardless, the very act of writing information down itself has been shown to increase your retention of the information. I've seen that effect so strongly that I could often write something down and then throw the paper away and have the exact same result.

Vocabulary

The key thing that I think about when I want to dig into a topic is that it's really rare that I have the right vocabulary for the topic I'm interested in. That means that my starting point is indeed a combination of Wikipedia and Google. In order to get very far in learning about a topic, you have to know the terms used for it.

For instance, the topic I was recently digging into came up in an article where someone offhandedly mentioned the raising of tilapia and hydroponic vegetables together as a way of raising your own food. I was interested and hit Google, looking for "tilapia" and "hydroponic". It didn't take visiting many of the results for it to be clear that the term for this was "aquaponics".  That term derives from 2 others: aquaculture and hydroponics. All 3 terms go onto a vocabulary list. The more I already know about a topic, the less literal my vocabulary list becomes.

That list of vocabulary becomes the list of search terms used in future digging.

Wikipedia

As soon as I have a few terms, I move on to Wikipedia. Most of the terms that make good entries on the vocabulary list also have their own Wikipedia page. I check for each vocab term and read the entry. This often yields another few terms for my list. It also often helps me start a couple of other lists: names, dates, sites and other resources.

Basically, everything up to this point is used to generate a set of lists of search terms as well as giving me enough of a quick overview to determine whether it's worthwhile even going further into the topic. For lots of things, this is the end of the road and I don't really go any further. For the rest, I rarely return to this point again. Wikipedia becomes just a stopping point on the journey and an early one at that.

Beyond

As these lists of search terms grow, I gradually spiral outward and into greater detail. I take the list to Google and start searching for those terms, in combination with several other regular patterns, usually visiting the first 20-50 links in the Google results.

Some of the patterns I use (adjusted where they wouldn't make sense) are:

• searchterm FAQ
• searchterm tutorial
• searchterm overview
• searchterm history
• searchterm shopping
• searchterm accessories
• searchterm buy
• searchterm kit
• searchterm sucks
• searchterm rocks
• searchterm magazine
• searchterm industry
• searchterm expert
• searchterm beginner
• searchterm whitepaper
• searchterm theses
• searchterm paper
• searchterm conference

You get the idea. The goal here is to start getting a look at all of the sides of the topic. Anything that's remotely interesting online, I bookmark for future reference. I repeat much of this same process on several other websites that serve as decent aggregators of various other views of the world.

For instance, I search Amazon.com for products related to the terms where that would make sense. This usually yields a list of books, as well as the information necessary to have an idea of, in the case of hobby-like topics, how much participating in this new hobby is likely to cost. If I'm really interested, I take the list of books, sorted by customer rating and read through those reviews. Usually, there are one or 2 that have good reviews and are available used for a fraction of the new price. That can often cost little more than $10-15 to get 2-3 books on the topic.

Similarly, I hit sites like Technorati to look for blogs/feeds that relate to the topic, del.icio.us for popular bookmarks on the topic, Flickr for images of the bits or to get an idea of what things look like, YouTube for interviews with the people or how-to videos or presentations at conferences on the topic,  visit the forums found in earlier phases and search for postings on the subtopics, etc.

This whole cycle repeats with more and more granular searches. As a dead-end is reached, I go back up a couple of levels. You know you've reached a dead end when you see the exact same links over and over or you've already seen every page Google knows of for that search term.

Over the course of a few hours, it doesn't take long before your notes on the topic are pretty extensive. You've got a working vocabulary of the topic, lots of bookmarks, a couple of books, some feed subscriptions and a much better understanding of the topic.

If you are looking at a more academic bent to your research, this whole approach can be used as topic exploration and to determine whether a topic has enough "room" for the kind of paper you'll be writing. At that point, the actual rigorous research needs to kick in, where you cite actual research, actual experts, actual studies, etc.  The benefit of going through this process is that you have a much better idea of where that research, those experts, those studies, etc. actually reside.

And, if you, like me, are just plain interested in knowing about something or in pursuing something in a hobby capacity, this is a process that can really get you the information and learning you're after. It works well for article research, for getting background for a presentation or just getting a Cliff Clavin level of useless trivia sure to keep you in a corner by yourself at parties.

At any rate, it's a process I use on an ongoing basis for nearly everything that piques my curiosity. I'd be interested in hearing augmentations of the approach that other people use.

I've worked on several applications where we used .NET DataSets as the container for passing records between web services and other components. They work pretty well to keep things nice and loosely coupled when you're building lots of separate components that may or may not all be using the same language, etc.

One of the greatest things that they included in the DataSet classes is the ability to read and write them to XML files. That gives you not only an interchange format, but a file-based version of it pretty quickly. You can easily use those files as your "gold standard" for building all of the components at once. As long as each component emits and consumes that sample file, things are golden.

Anyway, one of the side benefits of that ability to read/write those XML files is that it not only handles the DataSets you create via code. The ReadXml() method actually will convert nearly any XML file into a DataSet. That can come in really handy when your entire application is already passing DataSets around.

That's because nearly any application of reasonable size pulls in information from somewhere outside of the control of your code. In many of those cases, that data will be in XML format. You can, therefore, use the ReadXml() to get DataTable access to all kinds of useful XML stuff.

When it gets read in, .NET does some pretty cool automatic stuff, like creating identifier columns on your tables, etc. However, if, unlike the "normal" DataSets, your imported XML data is nested 2-3 or more levels deep, it can be kind of hard to predict exactly what the DataTable structure will look like.

I'm not a huge fan of automatic or "magic" methods, because you usually have absolutely no way to see inside the black box. That's not the case here because, while the method does some pretty cool magic, it is still possible to see inside of what it does.

I decided that I needed something to deal with the black box today and after dinner tonight, I wrote a quick console app to take an arbitrary XML file and dump out all of the tables, columns and rows in the DataSet in a way that makes it more clear how you'll need to use the tables to grab the data you're after.

That's the information you're going to need to establish your DataRelation objects to tie things together. It's been fairly illuminating for the few files I've sent through it so far and I'm thinking this will be a permanent part of my utilty folder.

I run it using Powershell and the "Out-File" pipe the output to a file, giving me a record of that schema (which I find much easier to read than the output of the WriteXmlSchema() method).

In case you'd like to use it as well, here's a copy of the code.

The last 100 years of manufacturing, particularly the last 60 or so, have rendered the bulk of several generations incapable of seeing certain items as anything other than the result of factory production.

For food, that means that really simple items like croutons and whipped cream, when made instead of bought generate incredulity. It's as though those items have been moved from the class of things you can make yourself into the class of things you pay $3 for in the grocery store in a hermetically sealed container that's been on the shelf or in the refrigerator for 6 weeks or 6 months.

Fortunately, the whole "Maker" movement is helping to rectify some of this problem. Lots of people are taking these matters back into their own hands and discovering the joy of having made this stuff yourself as well as product