Small fun things at work

Today is jeans day, which means it is the last Friday of the month and I can wear jeans if I donate to this month's charity. I really miss parts of former positions in this company. For example, my old department is wrapping up a 'jeans week' today. They typically wear jeans every friday. If we go a bit further back, the ISP I originally worked for didn't even have much of a dress code. I wore jeans and a t-shirt just about every day (I sometime wore shorts).

On the other hand, another good thing today is free pizza. It's great to have friends who decide to invite your department to their planned lunch treat. I've moved up into more corporate working environment, but there are still good people around if you pay attention.

In other news, I think many of you share my joy at the prospect of a three day weekend.

Tags: job perks bright_side

Geeking out - What I want to play with

There are several new items of interest that I have been wanting to investigate first hand. Some, like the new PalmOne LiveDrive is probably not within my reach for a while. However the great thing about being a geek these days is the broad range of fun that can be had for little or no money. Here's a bit of a list of things that have caught my attention lately.

Tagging/Folksonomy
You can't talk about tagging without mentioning del.icio.us and I even have a reference to back that up! I love using this site. I only hope I get around to reading all the things I'm tagging toread! To get a beginners view of delicious click here.

Weblogs
Obviously this is on my mind as I write a post for my own blog, but some of the sites that have my attention include: Bloglines, FeedBurner, and Technorati. I recently added my 100th feed to Bloglines. FeedBurner is great for collecting stats on the feeds you publish and it rolls in the del.icio.us links I post each day. Technorati is another site that allows you to search the current state of the blogosphere and has the bonus of allowing you to tag your posts with rel links.

Ruby on Rails/AJAX
Rails is the next big framework I want to learn, as I think I might have fun putting together some of the ideas I am seeing in places like Backpack and GMail. Backpack is the latest offering from the people at 37signals. They are the ones who came up with Rails, which is a web application framework for Ruby. AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and you can find out more about it here or read an article on it here.

Wiki Wiki Web
I have been nuts over the Wiki concept for ages. The latest coolness from this area is a all-in-one html file wiki that you can save to your harddrive or USB thumb drive called TiddlyWiki. Once you turn off the animation option this is a very neat way to play with writting into a web page on the fly. There have been many changes and developments including a version for:

Getting Things Done
I have to admit that I have had this book for several months, but I haven't even read it through once! David Allen has managed to write a book that gets motivated people moving on getting their things done. I love to read about the tips, tricks, methods, and ideas that this methodology has spawned, but I haven't effectivly implemented it myself. See more good stuff at 43Folders including the HipsterPDA and the newish 43Folders wiki (already filled with lots of useful advice).

Time Passes Swiftly - Anniversary

How amazing it seems now to know that three years of marriage can go by this quickly! Even through tough times that everyone will face, it doesn't take much for me to feel that flood of amazment, joy, and love that comes when I realize that she decided that I was the one for her. I am increadibly grateful to know that I have the rest of our lives to continue to learn about my wife.

We have two beautiful boys, who amaze us almost daily with how wonderful they are. I couldn't imagine being a parent with anyone else.

I love you Raleigh.