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Added a couple more book reviews: The Mythical Man-Month which I actually read about a year ago but forgot to review, and The Art of Possibility which I just finished.

Next time you’re reading something, try to understand what the text is really saying. Imagine you are that person inside the text. How does it feel? How big is it? What is really going on here.

When the CIA warns about possible chaos in Afghanistan, imagine what it’s like to be there on the ground, to be a warlord, or to be a citizen caught in this struggle. Or imagine who that “CIA” is, imagine the people at CIA looking into this and making these conclusions; who are...

I’m amazed at the level of anger and frustration over ArsDigita being vented (anonymously) over at F**kedcompany.com.

It proves my point, though: People are angry because they’re hurt. They’re hurt because Philip verbalized our deep professional and personal dreams.

We all felt “this place is different, this is the place I want to work for”. But then we were let down, and now we’re really angry.

Got an email this morning from Bryan Quinn talking about serendipity.

I’ve been meaning to look that word up for a while now (you know, what with the movie and all), but didn’t get around to it until now.

Yes, baby, serendipity’s the shit. Before I moved to New York back in ‘99, I went there on a one-week trip for some job interviews, and to try to find a place for us to live. All I got was an offer for a $10/hour internship at a random web shop. But then I started...

There we go again: “Failed to Register Scheduler DLL in AvSynchMgr”. Didn’t I uninstall it yesterday?

Apparantly not. So I uninstalled it just now, and now Outlook won’t start, because it’s missing some McAfee DLLs that, apparantly, McAfee’s uninstaller forgot to remove entries for.

Did all the good programmers leave McAfee?

Update: Found instructions on how to get rid of those errors. Couldn’t find them on McAfee.com, but Google, as usual, helped...

You’ve probably heard of Scandinavian open-faced sandwiches.

What you may not know is that they’re in fact so common, that they’re simply called “foods” (madder):

One food (en mad). Multiple foods (flere madder).

Simple as that! We eat plenty of foods.

Amazing. As the Argentinian economy has collapsed, people turn to trade goods for goods in a good old-fashioned barter economy, anno 2002. They even print their own “bank” notes, which are worth a lot more than the peso.

Maybe this can help us find a more humane way of doing business?

Along with nearly 500,000 other Argentinians in a similar situation, Ms Iglesias has joined one of the 800 “barter clubs” that have sprung up around the country, where haircuts are...

I have a new cell phone number: (+45) 26 37 47 07

I’ve been doing a couple two-week projects as a freelance developer. It’s quite fun, and it’s good training to do development projects on such a compressed time scale.

During the first day or two, you have to make sure that you’re in agreement on the specification. Then you have about a day or two to design the thing. That leaves you about three or four days to code, before you have to start wrapping up, iterating with the client to check if there were any...