Impromptu Road Trip

In which an experimental orbital assembly accidentally ends up somewhere else.

Cunning Social Media Plan

Since we are, indirectly, on the topic of social media: if you recall, when I last mentioned this I was wondering how to participate in social media in a way that was good for both me and my audience.

My conclusion is that even though my audience is on Twitter and Facebook, I will probably move primary content generation to Google+. But I have a cunning plan to glue everything together.

See, I have located a service that generates RSS feeds from Google+ profiles.  I also have, in the past, written a perl script that can post to Twitter (which I have since lost somehow probably when the hard drive in the old Voyager died).  Twitter, as you know, can be read by Facebook.

Which means: wi the right perl script, I can post to Google+ and my audience elsewhere will either get the content, or a link to said content.  I will still monitor Facebook and Twitter, but for some reason the Google+ experience is making me happiest these days.

Now all I have to do is re-write that perl script.  How hard can that be?

Elementary and Sherlock

One of the series that we are watching this year is the Sherlock Holmes series Elementary.  It seemed like a suitable replacement for House, since House was basically Sherlock Holmes in a medical setting.  The main character feeds our need for an arrogant, antisocial ass who just happens to be able to draw useful conclusions from flimsy evidence.

Someone told me that Elementary was poor when compared to the BBC series Sherlock.  So since the pilot episode was one of the Apple freebies this holiday season, I downloaded it.  And yes, it was better, so far as it went.

We have purchased the rest of the Sherlock episodes available (all five more of them, as it happens) and are very slowly making our way through them.  Last night we watched S2E2 which means that we only have one more remaining unseen.

And that is where the principle difference between Elementary and Sherlock comes in to play.  Elementary is designed to be a weekly, 40-odd minute story with a beginning, middle, and end.  Sherlock episodes are more like self-contained movies that need to be spaced out much more because there is so much more in them.

Elementary is weekly TV, a weekly fix of entertainment; Sherlock is an event that needs to be scheduled and prepared for.

I read on Google+ (yes, I use Google+, stop laughing) that the second episode of series three has just finished principle photography, and now there will be a break in production to permit other commitments to be satisfied and that principle photography on S3E3 will start presently.  So within a year we should get the next batch.  But we will undoubtedly get many, many more Elementary episodes before then, weekly fixes that I look forward to.

Illuminating

In which we shed some light on things.

First Post

In which I publicly celebrate my heaviest lift to date.

Dave's Rules Of Home Renovation

Not that I'm an expert or been involved in many of these things,but it seems that one thing has been true every time we've done this:

1. Any renovation will take longer than you, or the trades, or anyone thinks.
2. ...even after accounting for rule 1.

Sharepoint Hate

The more I work with Sharepoint, the more I realize that I absolutely loath it.

It has the same total-lack-of-organizational-structure that a good wiki has, but throws in an awful web-based Word-style "formatting" and "style" markup toolset for presentation.  It has the same insistence-on-doing-the-wrong-thing that old versions of Word had (and maybe modern versions have if you have not come to grips with the formatting tools there).

The difference is, I can bully Word into A) staying out of my way until I want to do the formatting, and B) looking more or less the same as all the other documents I produce do.

The Sharepoint wiki thing is awful.

(I'm also not a fan of the Sharepoint ideal of just-write-everything-in-Word and storing those in Sharepoint.  The wiki is best in theory, but its like they've deliberately made it unusable.)

Somehow I elected myself policy master, and that means I get to write all the first drafts -- including the documents which describe how documents are to be written, named, and filed.  And being forced to use this tool just makes me want to hurt something.

The old wiki had the same lack of standardization and lack of ingrained organizational structure -- but at least I could do the markup language without thinking about it.

Since we are going to have to write another how-to-wiki document anyways, I'm wondering if changing our storage medium is really a good idea in the long run.  I'm starting to suspect that this is more about abandoning our messy past than actually fixing the future.