Engtech tagged me on his original What’s Your Web 2.0? meme.  I’m behind on responding to a few tags and post requests, but I decided to bite this one off first, because it’s the easiest.  In this simple meme, you gather all the “Web 2.0″ sites that you use and classify them based on how frequently you use them.  Then you tag some folks.  It’s that easy. 

What’s considered “Web 2.0″ is left somewhat in the eye of the beholder, but basically it’s any place where you can put data out on the web for the FBI to spy on.  So here we go, web 2.0:

Daily use

• WordPress (self-hosted) for my personal podium
• FeedBurner and R|Mail to pipe my drivel to you
• Newsgator (via FeedDemon) to get my own dose from others
• Google Analytics to obsess about how many people are viewing what content
• Technorati to watch my mythical blog rank bounce up and down
• MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog to coerce mutual linkage with a smile
• Wikipedia to link to a plausible authority for questionable information

Occasional use

• Del.icio.us for, um, just bookmarking
• Digg and Reddit for helping my friends game the system
• ResumeBay to review it for Randy (hopefully I won’t ever need a job)

Almost never

• Twitter for reducing the signal to noise ratio
• LinkedIn to reconnect with people from whom I escaped long ago

Now for people to tag:

Shelley, Tish, Mohan, Randy, Joseph, apotheon, and anyone else who would like to join in.  Link to this post as well as to the original, then tell us your web 2.0.

What a relief!  Last night I finished planning my OO presentation for the SPC and sent the PowerPoint slides to Synergex.  I’m looking forward to giving this talk, but lots of other things had kept me away from working on it, and the deadline for slides was today.

It’s been about five years since I last presented at a conference, and I’m taking quite a different approach with this one.  Usually in the past, I would write my presentation as bullets (essentially the overheads) and just talk from them.  That worked OK, provided I was lucky.  And alert.  And not too nervous. 

But typically, I’d talk too fast and forget half of what I meant to say, and end up at the “Questions?” slide about half-way through the allotted time, with nobody asking any questions because they hadn’t even begun to follow any of the jargon-laced broken sentences with which I peppered them like so many live rounds — the “ums” acting as tracers.

Or else in trying to avoid that scenario I would pack my slides full of content so there would be no way to run out.  Which resulted in me talking even faster and flipping through the last slides just as time expired, finishing off with “Questions? OK, great.  Thanks, bye.”

This time, I started by writing my presentation out longhand.  This came very naturally to me, now that I’ve been blogging for over a year.  It only took me a couple of days to write it, almost as if it were a lengthy blog post (in fact, I used Windows Live Writer to compose it).   From that, I went back and created my slides.  Some of the slides act like graphics for the post, others outline certain sections of it.  So when I present, I’ll be more or less repeating my narrative and flipping the slides that go with it.  I’m thinking that will be quite a bit more natural and interesting than flipping to a slide, studying it for a moment, and then trying to think of what I meant to say.

Another difference that five years has brought:  I’ll be referring to blog posts for the first time in a presentation.  Specifically, Steve Yegge’s Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns and Chad Perrin’s OOP and the death of modularity.  It may seem strange to use ostensibly anti-OOP posts in a presentation on the benefits of OOP, but both of their arguments really zero in on what bad OO design looks like — even when it’s necessitated by a lack of language capabilities.  I hope to use their points to indicate by contrast what constitutes good OO design, and how that’s supported by Synergy/DE 9.

Now I just need to figure out how to keep Richard and Steve from getting me thoroughly boiled as an owl the night before.  <O,O>

Turkish for 84 sounds like “sex n dirt“.  That title got me linked from whosthehosttest.info, topic: “sex”.

Kent points us to some useful information on the legal issues around blogging.  Seems to me that bloggers, by definition, create legal exposure.  Can you imagine a blogger replying ”no comment”?

Aki linked me up with the Automattic Stats plugin for WordPress.

[Geeks are Sexy] Technology News has been nominated in the “Internet and Technology” category for what will be The Top 5 Blogs of 2007.  Congratulations, Kiltak!  Congratulations also to Tony Clark: Success From the Nest made the “Work and Career” category.  Everybody go to everybody go to and vote.

Why success is like a duck.  Mine’s usually more like a canard.

Go deep!  Web research beyond Google and Wikipedia (thanks, Rebecca).

Tish added me to her “Hot Blogs” roll. Cheers, ChattieKat!

Yesterday I received two new goodies.  First, my copy of The Ruby Way, second edition, by Hal Fulton arrived.  Randy Morin sent me this tome of wonderful wizardly spells as a “thank you” for suggestions on how to improve his service-in-development, ResumeBay.  Randy is giving out $20 worth of Amazon.com merchandise to the best suggestion each month, so check out ResumeBay and send in your ideas.  Thank you, Randy!

Second, I picked up my new pair of glasses.  As always, I’m adjusting to them — especially the location of the progressive bifocal shift — but my driving has improved, now that I can read street signs again.

On the flip side, I can now distinctly perceive each of my gray hairs. It’s always a trade-off.

Living north of the 47th parallel, Halley and I now have enough sunshine to see our path and each other when we leave the house before 5AM on our daily run.  I miss viewing the stars, but it’s interesting to see what the neighbors have done to their properties over the winter.

The air is warm, quiet, and clear.  I can hear a train over in Seattle — al lthe way across the Sound.  There aren’t any tracks on Bainbridge, and it’s definitely coming from the east.  Not another noise except the constant chirping of hundreds of birds — so many at once that you can’t pick out an individual song.  Reminds me of Twitter.

I can also hear Halley panting as we jog along, and I’m silently whistling to myself an old Dire Straits tune: Walk of Life.  I picked up the habit of whistling noiselessly from my grandfather.  He would go about his chores saying not a word, whistling silently while my sister and I tagged along.  He spoke so infrequently that I can’t even remember his voice.

Despite the daylight, the waning three-quarter moon shines brightly, turning her beaming face towards the sun that she barely preceeds.

Halley pays no attention to the sheep grazing across the road.   They’re old news now.  For the first year or so that we ran this way together, they held quite an attraction for her: ears pricked, tail straight out.  And when they beheld my little predator, they all stood in frozen attention.  One time Halley charged them, barking, and sent them fleeing in terror before I could pull back on her leash.  Now, though, they quietly ignore her.

Yesterday I didn’t get as much accomplished as I had hoped, so today I’ll have to hit the ground running, so to speak.  Get back home, give Halley the remaining treats (good girl), head inside and get to work.

Kona: the average temperature in Kona, Hawaii is 83 degrees, which is the source for the name of the company 83 Degrees (the creators of 30 Boxes and other projects).  They chose the name because their first project was weather-related (according to Narendra Rocherolle, one of their Principals).

MacKenzie thinks that Microsoft’s patent for UAC may be vulnerable to prior art: sudo.

Just in case I ever win the Nobel prize, Google Maps provide driving directions from Bainbridge Island to Oslo.  Step #27 may require some serious preparation.  Thanks, Robert.

What does Shelley do with the definitions of web versions?  Shrink.

Jeff Atwood points to an amazingly intuitive explanation of Bayesian reasoning.  The only question it didn’t answer is whether you pronounce the “e” in “Bayesian”.

Jenn includes my tag cloud widget in her table (hush) of WordPress plugins.  She gives it four stars (“I’d be willing to pay for the plugin”) and comments, “Probably the coolest thing on this blog.”  Thanks, Jenn!  But the coolest thing on your blog is your excellent content.

The Aleph Engine uses the tag cloud widget, too.

Today when trying to leave a three-word comment, I was presented with a CAPTCHA that read “zesuxks”.

Yus et duz.

Comment spam gets stranger by the day.  Today I received this nice comment on my OPML blogroll widget page:

Please, do not delete the given message. Money obtained from spam will go to the help hungry to children ugand

Yeah, right, I’m sure.  Into the spam bucket with you.

Better to be honest, like the disheveled fellow on the street with the sign that says “Need money for beer.”  I always give that guy a dollar.

From Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound (458-460), where Prometheus names his gifts to mankind:

And numbering as well, preeminent
of subtle devices, and letter combinations
that hold all in memory

If Prometheus had only known what was to come of that — gifts far more powerful than fire.

Maybe He did.