Bunk and Rambling

Once you put aside your experience bias, don’t be surprised if the problem turns out to be completely different than you originally thought.

http://www.guerrillaconsulting.com/newsletter/2008/issue45-jul-08.html

Mike McLaughlin has posted an interesting article on the knowledge trap that I see many consultants getting caught in. In our rush to solve problems quickly we sometimes forget to understand the whole problem first. Instead we rely on our experience to provide us with a shortcut to a solution rather than taking the time to find the right path for each particular circumstance.

The view from our apartment in Chicago.

Well, I have struggled for long enough with memory problems with Mephisto and have moved over to Wordpress. As a result of the move I have lost comments from earlier posts (for now). I will also be restoring any old links as time comes available.

It appears that Mephisto and Rails 1.2 are stabilising in their memory usage for this site. Now I can get back on the case of blogging real content!

Just a quick note to say that I am having memory issues with Rails 1.2 and Mephisto. Hopefully I can resolve these soon and start posting some real content again.

For those of you that have visited the site over the past few weeks, you may have noticed that things were not looking their best. The delay in getting the site back into shape was mainly due to a recent switch of hosting providers and a holiday being slotted in there somewhere. As a part of the move I have also converted my site from running Typo to Mephisto. While I have kept the links for all old articles the same, some of you may notice that the feeds have been broken. I have decided to do this intentionally and to rely on anybody subscribing to the site to switch to the new atom feed as desired.

Having taken a break for a while I seem to have accumulated some blogworthy stuff which I hope to start sharing over the next few days, so make sure you come back!

Texter is a freeware application that allows you to add text replacement/expansion to your Windows applications. Reading through the product site, you can see its value in inserting signatures and common text into e-mails. Personally, I think the greatest value that the product adds is text expansion for SQL queries that I constantly find myself creating in SQL Developer. So if you find yourself getting frustrated with writing the same set of queries (that can’t be set up as views or stored procedures) over and over, give it a try.

From scrumalliance.com…

Often, questions starting with “why” can be construed as being confrontational, but asked with a genuine interest in learning the reason behind something it is possible that we can stop “wasting a lot of good meat:”

The grandmother stared at her daughter in amazement.
Every time you cook a pot roast you cut a 1/4 inch off the ends?
Every single time?
Yes!
She answered her mother.
Every - single - time, just like you showed me.
Honey, all I can say is you been wasting a lot of good meat over the years. The only time I ever cut the ends off the roast is if it’s too big for the pan!