Last night at dinner I learned from my kids that eating cauliflower brings bad luck. They also believe that the more you say it the truer it gets. From what I could gather they did not develop this theory on their own – some other children believe it as well. It seems that they already get truthiness

Later that night Stephen Colbert, in a very funny segment, again pointed out that on wikipedia if enough people agree with something then it becomes the truth (”wikiality”). This was in the context of reports of Microsoft paying bloggers to edit wikipedia. I incorrectly read a lot into this news. They made it sound like it was something that happened a lot and was an open invitation to anyone who would write positive things about Microsoft. Also I somehow got confused and thought it was about Vista. Perhaps my mind was being reactive because the programming on Comedy Central last night seemed like one big Microsoft Vista commercial. I was surprised to find that it was a specific person, Rick Jelliffe, who I know of because I’m a big fan of Schematron. After reading Rick’s post I don’t think its that big a deal. Although I wouldn’t want to see it become a common practice.

Stephen offered to pay $5 to anyone who replaced the wikipedia entry on Reality with “Reality has become a commodity”. If one were to believe that wikipedia is always true then reality was a commodity for about one minute. I’m OK with wikipedia being out of sync with reality for one minute now and then.

Actually the truth is subjective and reality is a commodity that corporate marketing and government propaganda are paying to influence every day. The advice about reality went from “don’t believe everything you read” to “don’t believe everything you see on TV” to “don’t believe everything you see on the Internet”. On the Internet there are so many facts and they spread so quickly that it is hard to keep up with your fact checking. I only bother for things that are important to me. On the plus side I have such a bad memory for facts that I will likely forget most of the misinformation I read.

Now I’m off to check my facts on cauliflower…

The redesign is complete. Let me know if you find anything broken. Constructive comments welcome. Thanks.

So the background picture is now gone. Someday I may create a page for photos

I’m planning a redesign of this blog soon. I got some feedback on the overall layout and style. A few people commented that the picture on the left was out of place given the technical content of the blog. I tend to agree. One reason for the picture and the effect of the header text sliding over it was simply to play around and get more practice with CSS. The other thing I got comments on was the color scheme. I plan go with something much more plain and simple. Hopefully it will be ready in a few days.

I really like how customizable the presentation of WordPress is.

I sometimes find myself defending Wikipedia to people. Usually their concern is about random people being able to add incorrect information. Although this is possible it is usually corrected quickly. My experience in using Wikipedia is that it is generally of very high quality and, if nothing else, gives me some good links to check out.

I usually begin my investigation of a new subject with Wikipedia. Sometimes even before Google. Depending on how important it is that I’m getting complete and accurate information for a given subject I will check out the references and possibly the discussion page.

The other day I was looking up Favicon on Wikipedia and was impressed to find that the W3C article “How to Add a Favicon to your Site” links to Wikipedia. What this means to me is that the Wikipedia Favicon article is of high enough quality that the W3C (the people that write the specs) links to it as an authoritative source of background and supporting information.

Here starts my blog.

For years I’ve been writing professionally. At each place I worked I wrote many technical specifications, high-level architecture documents, detailed emails explaining how things worked or should work, position papers, and wiki pages on various topics. As jobs come and go so do the things I write.

Here my opinions, ideas, and thoughts may have a little longer shelf life and the opportunity to be seen by more people.