Posts filed under ‘Ramblings’
From The Economist Special Report on the future of finance, Jan 24th:
Mr Rajan of the University of Chicago says academic research suggests mortgage originators, keen to automate their procedures, stopped giving potential borrowers lengthy interviews because they could not easily quantify the firmness of someone’s handshake or the fixity of their gaze. Such things turned out to be better predictors of default than credit scores or loan-to-value-ratios …
In other words - if the devs found something difficult to deliver they descoped it. Pretended it didn’t exist. A viewpoint that is more common than you might think: to develop software you need certainties (if x occurs then do y).
Not that this viewpoint is limited to devs. In my work with buyers I’ve seen a marked reticence to even attempt to quantify the non-price elements of the bids they are being faced with, and certainly a reticence about weighing up the non-price elements of bids against the price (e.g. is a 3-year warranty worth an extra £x per unit).
It’s almost as if there is a tendency to ignore the subjective when what we should be doing is incorporating the subjective, but accepting it as such.
Service interruption
Just dropping a quick post to let you know that I am now a proud father second time round – hence the absence of postings over the past couple of weeks… Normal service should resume from next week.
All the best.
Service interruption …
Hiya
Just dropping a quick post to let you know that I am now a proud father second time round – hence the absence of postings over the past couple of weeks… Normal service should resume from next week.
All the best
No Joke – this is what my Windows Live looked like this morning
I did a double take when I saw this. I had clicked on an uninteresting story and lo and behold while Vista was taking its time loading up Internet Explorer, lo and behold, this is what the Windows Live app showed. Eventually it refreshed with correct “news” but not before I was able to take this screenshot.
Looks like I was treated to a Windows Live wireframe. If so it’s entertaining to see the level of humour and cynicism amongst their designers.
Looks like a windows live wireframe
Alien Abductions – the most compelling/entertaining theory I've heard
… as told to me by a fellow member of my ante-natal group a few years ago.
Alien abductions are misty recollections of having your nappy (diaper) changed as an infant.
Think about it. What do so many alien abduction stories have in common?
- Sudden transportation away from what you were doing – a transportation you are helpless to resist
- Bright lights shining in your face
- Out of focus humanoid people whose faces are a bit similar to your own, only narrower
- Being made to lie down on your back while your abductors carry out bizarre medical activities – ofteninvolving the nether regions
- Being dumped unceremoniously back into the normal world as suddenly as you were taken away.
Hmmm …..
Cuil: A Pedant Writes
So I had a go on Cuil the other day. And thought it was a neat idea. I did a search for “forgings” and it seemed to categorise the results in a more logical way than Google would. And I think the black screen and the typeface are quite neat.
Nick Carr wrote about Google dumbing us down. Cuil is continuing that trend – at least as far as English grammar are concerned. Have a look at the category box. There is a difference between less and fewer. You can choose to see “fewer categories”, not “less categories”.
Sort it out guys.
Wordle: A bit of fun
Wordle.net is a fun utility that picks out the most significant words in blocks of text (e.g. documents or web pages or RSS feeds). Like an automated tag cloud generator. FYI I picked it up from this posting: http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2008/07/07/transparent-and-explicit/
Here are Wordle pages for some supply chain blogs:
Spend Matters
Sourcing Innovation
Plenty of talk about Challenges, Sourcing, Execution and Johnson (again – see Spend Matters)
e-Sourcing Forum
And of course, mine:
e-Sourcing Place
Fame already! w00t
Golden Pebbles has only been going for a week or two and already it’s in the top spot at Google!
No joke. Look here.
Number 1. Numero Uno. The big kahuna.
Ok, admittedly it might have something to do with the fact that I’ve spelt “scaleability” with an “e” and most seem to spell it without the “e”. But heck. It was fun to see some traffic coming through from that search.
Roger. Out.
Where next for Where Next?
One day a long time ago I was trying to convince my CEO to start a company blog; he ended up convincing me to try one myself. To see what would happen.
So I did. And looking back over these past 20 months I can say it’s been great fun. And a very positive experience in a number of ways:
1. I’ve met physically and now count among my friends some great individuals who are as passionate about what they do, as I do about what I do. Like Jason who I have the good fortune now of crossing paths with whenever I’m in Chicago.
2. I’ve learnt about new technologies that are now making TradingPartners more effective at product development. In particular Rails (which we use for prototyping) … thanks Doc for posting about Coupa.
3. I’ve learnt a lot. “When Doc Searls first talked to me about blogs being provisional, I learnt something important for myself. Being unsure is a useful prerequisite for learning.” Thus spake JP Rangaswami and he’s right. Blogging ideas, and discussing them is (for me) a great way of thinking my ideas through properly, developing the good ones and jettisoning the bad ones.
4. It’s also been very flattering to discover that I made it onto page 1 of Google for a search on “eauctions” (in the US only, admittedly – from Google in the UK I am nowhere but even so let me have my moment of glory)
However, it has been over a year and a half that I’ve been doing this. Like so many other people with a technical bent, I have a fairly short attention span and always want to figure out how to do/make things better. So while I was on holiday recently – in particular whilst spending an afternoon walking round the near-deserted remains of Rome’s ancient port, Ostia Antica - I had a chance to mull over the direction of the blog and try to figure out where next for Where Next.
Net result: I’m thinking about forking the blog into two: of taking one blog down a supply chain route while focussing another one on the life of a tech company CTO.
With two blogs in play I’d be posting even less frequently than today. But it would mean each would be more focussed which would be more satisfying for me, and hopefully also more usable for readers.
I’ve come up against 2 issues:
1. If I want to use my own domain name then can I still host on WordPress or would I need to arrange my own hosting?
2. What a pain it is to get a domain name. They’re all being squatted, or have been registered and then forgotten. I’ve dropped 2 emails to registered owners of (apparently unused) domain names and have yet to receive any kind of reply. Not even a “No, it’s not for sale”.
Any thoughts?
Off on holiday
So I’ve been a bit quiet recently – but will now be completely silent for the next week and a half or so. I am off to Rome on holiday. See you in a couple of weeks.
All the best
Alan
