Incra

Paul is NOT dead. Paul goes into the studio, alone, no songs prepared at all. Thirteen songs in thirteen days -- one each day -- Paul playing every instrument, writing lyrics on the fly, ripping a line from a poem, the next spontaneous, off the cuff, really gutsy. The album, Electric Arguments, to be released next month.
Maybe getting fleeced in a public and nasty divorce was the best thing to happen to this man. I've not liked much if anything I've heard since he split from his old song-writing buddy(s) but I damn sure love this single -- “Nothing Too Much Just Out of Sight” – it's ragged and rugged, the thing bleeds and howls and moans. I'm gonna buy the album -- Electric Arguments -- as soon as it's out.

Imagine being excited over a Paul McCartney album!?!

But I am.

Free download of Nothing Too Much Out of Sight here.

Geertjan's Blog

Toni's photos, taken last week at the NetBeans Platform Certified Training in Wuerzburg. The training was delivered by Pavel Kotlov, David Strupl, Toni Epple, and myself.

This course is offered for free to universities (and colleges and similar institutions), but only if the course is embedded within the existing curriculum of the class. (I.e, it should be taken seriously by everyone involved.) The course fits very well within an advanced Swing curriculum or within a curriculum that focuses on architectural concerns for large and distributed Java applications. It is probably less appropriate for a class of complete newbies to Java. We have a number of trainers available around the world, in particular in the US, Europe, and Australia. A good report on the whole experience is here in Toni's blog, where he writes about his 1st experience being a trainer on this course.

WASHINGTON/LONDON (Reuters) - The U.S. government pushed on Saturday to finalize a plan to buy direct stakes in American banks as the International Monetary Fund warned markets could drop another 20 percent in a worst-case scenario.

I've heard it said by Dave Winer and many many others: if only Dean had reinvested half the money raised into the Internet, then ...

OK, so you're the Dean Campaign Chief Information Officer in August 2003. The money starts to roll in. $20 million over six months, $2-4 million per month.

What would you spend the money on?

1. What does your monthly budget look like?
2. What is your application and infrastructure portfolio?
3. How much will you allocate to maintenance?
4. You're building from scratch, so what problems do you hope to avoid through wise architecture?
5. What are your big milestones?
6. Who are your key vendors?

How do you spend in consonance with the campaign strategy?

1. How will you use the Internet to bring offline voters into the campaign at the same numbers as radio or television broadcasts?
2. What is your online strategy for responding to attack ads and opposition pundits in radio, television and print?
3. Online community takes time to build and is very hard to organize geographically. What will you do to match the state-by-state primary schedule?
4. What can you do with online services to serve the campaign in caucus states?
5. You are preparing for Bush to launch in Spring 2004. What are your countermeasures to reach out to moderate Republicans online while the GOP uses its advanced voter email systems to barrage 200 million validated email addresses?
6. How will you lower the cost-per-vote vs. the GOP?

Ballooning costs, feature creep, vendor lock-in and just plain bad technology have contributed to some of IT's most spectacular project failures. Here's what we can learn from past mistakes.