Fog Buzz Wolrd Tour

Joel on Software is coming to Vancouver! I coincidently already have the day off. I was a bit worried he was going to come when I was out of town.

I'm looking forward to seeing Joel speak, and I might actually learn something. I've been reading his blog for a bit. I don't always agree with what he says, but it's always an interesting opinion. I'm also just about done his latest book.

CFL Needs An IT Wakeup Call

I'm currently playing around with Google Reader. I like it so far -- I can aggregate all the sites I visit into one play. Plus, it's all online, so I can get it from any computer or my blackberry. I can even view it offline with Google Gears.

I've been slowly adding feeds from the various news sources I scan. I went to add the BC Lions news feed. It doesn't exist from their website. I went and checked CFL's site as well. Again, no RSS feed linked off of their website. They both have news sections on their site, but no links to any feeds (and firefox didn't show its RSS icon).

I did find a feed by searching inside of google reader. It's useless though. It boils down to subject lines and the occasional description sentence. What's the point in that?

While I'm on the subject, they do a horrible job of updating their website with their scores. I was standing in line, waiting to get into Bard on the Beach one night. I was missing a game and tried to browse online using my blackberry to check the score. I never found it.

Who's running this league anyway? No wonder it's always in financial trouble.

Vacation So Far

4 days in and I've finished off a number of books already. So far,

• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by JK Rowling
• The Wal-Mart Effect, by Charles Fishman
• Up the Organization, by Robert Townsend

And I'm currently work on Smart and Gets Things Done by Joel Spolsky. I'm also going to try and get through The The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson and Ancestor, by Scott Sigler (the audio version of this was awesome) before my time is up.

Harry Potter was alright. I would have done it differently. I think the ending was too "and they lived happily ever after." I expect that from American authors.

Wal-Mart Effect was eye opening. I don't really shop there to begin with. I typically prefer help from experts and an over all pleasant experience. I'll never look at those rolling back the prices commercials the same way again.

Up The Organization was neat. It was kind of like reading Heinlein, in that you replace "typewriter" with "computer" and "secretary" with "receptionist" and it is relevant.

Amazon SQS

I hadn't heard of Amazon Simple Queue Service before. I stumbled upon it today. It looks neat. It could possibly be used to keep EC2 nodes in sync, or the basis of some sort of ready many, write few file system. Not many people seem to be using it publicly yet.

I also like the idea of a spread listener that could redirect to the queue. You could then use an EC2 machine to read the queue and write it out to an S3 bucket for storage.