The Blog of Harald

An internal news clipping service led to a Google search, and I eventually found the original article “Information Security ROI: Not Every Expense Is an Investment”:http://www.metagroup.com/cgi-bin/inetcgi/jsp/displayArticle.do?oid=41867 by Tom Scholtz of “the META Group”:http://www.metagroup.com/.

bq. “Organizations should not consider every expense to be an investment,” adds META Group analyst Chris Byrnes. “Many security expenditures are completely valid and necessary and even legally required, but they are not investments that will produce a quantifiable return. In many instances, ‘What is the return on investment?’ is simply the wrong question to ask.”

This is true of many more things than Information Security, or even IT. Money is not always the right measure; sometimes it’s completely misleading (this is particularly true of environmental issues, but that’s a separate rant).

I’m glad to see someone “official” saying this for a change…

(The META Group article was originally published on 17 July 2003; why is it making the news in September?)

“Halley”:http://halleyscomment.blogspot.com/ has a couple of “entries”:http://halleyscomment.blogspot.com/archives/2003_09_14_halleyscomment_archive.html#106366535915388637 about people who are lucky vs. unlucky Including a pointer to “a book on the subject”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0786869143/.

The basic premise appears to be that people make their own luck, essentially by expecting and anticpating opportunity.

Sounds like several people I know, on both sides of the coin. Me, I like to think I’m lucky; despite the roller coaster ride that inserts itself into my life, things generally work out for the best. Is it fate, or my positive outlook? Only the gods know for sure… <grin>

“Apple – PowerBook G4 15"”:http://www.apple.com/powerbook/index15.html

bq. Fully loaded with a 1.25GHz PowerPC G4, 512K of L2 cache, AirPort Extreme Card, megawide display, Radeon graphics and a slot-loading SuperDrive, the 15-inch PowerBook G4 boasts jaw-dropping features – including its price: all this is now just $2599. And models equipped with the Combo drive start at just $1999.

I still can’t justify it right now though…

Retail Alphabet Game

bq. you will be presented with 26 alphabet letterforms, extracted from product and corporate logos within the United States.

bq. Your job is to figure out the source of each.

I managed to get 9 on the first test, with 5 that I _should_ have known; 11 on the second test, with 2 more that I should have known; and 10 on the third test, with 3 more that I recognize but can’t place.

Most of the ones I don’t recognize are from US products or chains that don’t exist up here in Canada, so I may be excused for my poor showing :-)

From ryochiji’s blog:

bq. I accidentally ran over my PowerBook with my dad’s SUV today.

bq. It’s not very often that someone gets to say that. But perhaps what’s even more surprising is the fact that I’m writing this on that very same PowerBook. Hold a 12″ PowerBook G4 and you can just tell it’s sturdy. It’s thin, but not flimsy, and the aircraft-grade aluminum case makes it feel like a lump of metal, rather than a sophisticated high-tech gadget.

If I ran over my Acer, there’d be a pile of pieces on the ground. While the lid is wrapped in metal, the rest of the system is plastic case and layers of circuit board…

From “Edd Dumbill”:http://usefulinc.com/edd/blog’s “Things that Just Work”:http://usefulinc.com/edd/blog/2003/8/29#12:34 I was led to “Gallery Remote”:http://gallery.menalto.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=phpWiki&file=index&pagename=Gallery%20Remote. It’s a client-side interface to “Gallery”:http://gallery.menalto.com/ (the PHP-based photo album manager) that makes it a lot easier to upload a bunch of images to a Gallery site. The UI is a little rough around the edges (that’s standard for Java applications, alas), but it certainly does the job, and it’s much easier to drive than the web-based upload interface. Recommended.

In “How To Change Anything”:http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2003/08/27.html, “Dave Pollard”:http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/ summarises “a paper by Dana Meadows”:http://www.wholeearthmag.com/ArticleBin/109.html. It describes how to change anything by using one of ten system leverage points. I like both his summary and the original paper; they resonate with my own personal systems-oriented view of the world.

Sadly, I find myself working mostly at the bottom of the list :-)

The rest of Mr. Pollard’s website looks interesting too; Another reason to crack open a new can of spare time?

Why do you have to click the Start button to shut down?

bq. That’s when we decided to label the System button “Start”.

bq. It says, “You dummy. Click here.” And it sent our usability numbers through the roof, because all of a sudden, people knew what to click when they wanted to do something.

The real science of usability… (laughter)

Turn Down the Lights

Apparently too much light is bad for all of Nature’s creatures, including us humans.

I live in a (relatively) dark part of the city, but it’s still pretty bright at night. From memory, downtown Toronto was much worse. I vaguely remember what it’s like to be out in the _dark_ at night, but it has been a long time…

Why do they keep yelling at me?

bq. Silence is bad. Management cannot differentiate between someone who’s gone off the deep end and is over their head, someone who is malingering, someone who’s trying to solve an intractable problem, and someone who is making progress on a hard design issue.

Stuff I want pointers to, but don’t really feel like commenting on right now (which is different from my sideblog how? I don’t know :-)

* “The Magical Number Seven”:http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html – It plagues us, it does!
* “ongoing: Big, Small, and More”:http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/06/29/BigSmall – an interesting variation on big picture vs. details.
* “ongoing:Web Architecture, 2003/06/27”:http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/06/30/WebArch20030627 – I need to read this at some point soon.
* “Marketing and Human Connection”:http://www.plaidworks.com/chuqui/blog/000522.html – I have to agree with Chuqui; too many companies treat me as a wallet (or a pair of eyes), not a person.
* “How Long Are You A Customer?”:http://www.plaidworks.com/chuqui/blog/000523.html – If you haven’t spent money with a company for a period of time, are you still a customer of theirs?

“blog.org”:http://blog.org/archives/cat_useful_web_resources.html#000716 → “Playing with Time”:http://www.playingwithtime.org/ :

bq. “Playing With Time”:http://www.playingwithtime.org/ is an exciting, new project that looks at how the world around you is changing over many different time periods.

bq. Here at the “Playing With Time”:http://www.playingwithtime.org/ web site, unseen worlds of change will be revealed. You will see time sped up and slowed down, and behold the beauty of change.

I have always been intrigued by visualisation techniques; manipulating time is another one. Taking ordinary events and speeding them up or slowing them down often reveals existing patterns that we cannot normally perceive.

“Playing With Time”:http://www.playingwithtime.org/ has both fast motion and slow motion movie clips revealing a variety of changes. I particularly like the shots of the same location on several different time scales; you can watch the clouds move over a period of minutes, or see the tide roll out, or see the grass grow and die over a year. Fabulous stuff, and worth a visit.

“GeoURL”:http://geourl.org/near/alt.html?p=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.cfrq.net%2Fchk%2F&lat=&lon=&dist=100 → “ThatGrrl”:http://www.thatgrrl.com/ → “Bloggers of Ontario Unite!”:http://www.ringsurf.com/netring?ring=bloggersofontario;action=list .

Now to find Canadian bloggers, and I’m all set… :-)

Space Station Science Picture of the Day: High Tea

I wish NASA would do more of these “life in space” bits. They’re fascinating, and there is a lot of interesting science hidden away in them.

How do you drink tea in zero-G? with chopsticks, of course! How do you make sure your can of honey doesn’t float away? put a drop of water on the bottom, and use surface tension to stick it to the table! This, and more, can be found in the videos at the bottom of High Tea…

Six months ago Google and I couldn’t find very many Toronto weblogs. Today, while reading a fascinating story, I discovered the Greater Toronto Area Bloggers site.

Cool.

(go read that fascinating story, btw. Nothing I could say captures it.)

I got 155 on the Peter Schmies’s Word Classification Test, much better than I expected. Apparently all of that Latin in grade school paid off…

The Fly Guy is a fabulous little daydream; fly around, explore, have fun!

Thanks to Ginger for the link.

I am very glad that I have never had to deal with this, and I hope I never will.

That man can write…