Thursday, February 7th, 2008 - 2 Comments
I’ve been stuck in meetings all morning and I guess I’ll be stuck in them much of the afternoon as well, so my thought for the day is about how painful/redundant/pointless many meetings actually are.
Meetings
37 Signals write, in their book Getting Real, that meetings are toxic and I could not agree more with that.
In this agile world we live and work in, where a website can be built in a couple of days, why do traditional meetings still exist?
- Hardly any real information is relayed, compared to the time they take.
- Too many abstract words like solution and integrate, people talking lots but never really saying anything.
- Miscommunication and lack of direction slows the whole process down even more
Often it feels like rather than talking and talking about it, actually getting down to the tough stuff and working through the problems could be done in less time than a meeting where you discuss how you are going to go about solving the problem.
What am I trying to say? Not much really, I’m just ranting about how I feel I’m loosing/wasting a lot of time sitting in meetings that rarely ever amount to much.
My lunch today was a cajun chicken wrap, peperami and a heart-shaped strawberry donut
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 - 8 Comments
I’ve been struggling to find the time to post recently, not having an internet connection at home at the moment (don’t even get me started on that) and being busy with work and other projects it’s been hard to squeeze any blogging.
So I’m trying to get back into the habit during my lunchtime, posting a quick thought about current news, an idea or something I’ve stumbled across in my daily surfings.
Portable Web Toolbar
Yesterday I was working on a little tool for myself, with some simple html, I showed it to a few people and they said they would find it really useful too.
Basically it’s a bookmark toolbar but within a webpage rather than installed in a browser you can access it anywhere. You’ve probably seen something just like it on the top of iGoogle and many of googles services once your logged in.
The difference is that it this will be customizable and it will move around with you rather than only appearing at the top of certain websites. Basically it’s a list of bookmarks and an iframe that fits the whole page, with a simple rails application that allows you to add and edit the bookmarks that appear at the top.
The benefit of this is that it required no installation, works on every computer and browser straight away and can be a lot more dynamic than a static installed toolbar, perfect for if you drop into the Apple store and want to access your 6 favorite sites, just hit the site and they will stay with you as you browse around.
The negatives? I can’t get gmail to work with what I have build so far, due to it not liking being in a frame and using javascript to jump out of it, so I’ve gone for a low tech solution for that one by opening gmail in a new tab/window instead. There may be other sites that don’t like it either.
I’ve called it portabletoolbar.com, no website there at the moment, just purchased the domain. I thought I’d gauge what people thought of the idea.
Some other things to grow on:
- It could have delicious/stumbleupon integration quite easily
- It could be powered by a central Rails website to store and manage the bookmarks or be an open source download that you host yourself.
- It could integrate with a service like Passpack to remember you login details and automatically log you in too
See you tomorrow
My lunch today was a Turkey and Bacon Club Bagel
