Bag of Blix

Traveling on a budget

Consistently one of the most enjoyable sites I've yet to come across, sleepinginairports.com has the quaint feel of a homemade site that brings together a unique community. What's most surprising is how many airports have taken the initiative to make bleary-eyed travelers feel at home. Apparently Singapore is the best place to find yourself stuck. Whenever you travel and accidently nod off in airport, come back to this site and let everyone know the firmness of the benches.

A choice example of airport hospitality.

CONS - "It takes the local police 10 minutes to track a sleeping person and to point with a Kalashnikov to his face"

Klick to enlarge

The ever-shifting geography of the Netherlands is one of the more well-documented phenomena of modern times. The good folks at the IDG see to that.

Urbanisation in Holland

Thus proving the theory...

The running joke among those who do not necessarily work in IT departments, but must cooperate with them to get their jobs done, goes something like this. Most decisions regarding use of one technology over another is usually related to its ability to enhance job security. This runs quite apart from the more benign inattention of corporate leadership that often choose a Microsoft solution because of a safety-in-numbers mentality.

These assumptions get put on their ear and put to the real world test by the Nicest of the Damned who actually attempt (and succeed) in running a business on OS X and Linux.

]]> Maybe it's jumping on an increasingly crowded bandwagon to say that single-vendor (and platform) business computing solutions are dangerously irresponsible. But it bears mentioning.

In the lingua franca of business the word "stewardship" holds a special place. It graces many a mission statement and countless PowerPoint� presentations in expressing noble aspirations. Stewardship allows us to transcend the present fiscal quarter, look into the future today and plan for the sustainability and permanence of a given corporate entity.

Too bad this high-minded talk counters much of the demonstrated nature of the humans who actually make these organizations go. And so stewardship remains an empty word on the page, glanced at and wondered about, but rarely acted upon. And so it goes with the Windows-centric office. Rational self-interest jettisoned in favor of heuristics.

The above pontification aside, the Nicest of the Damned take this philosophy to heart and actually use it to get their work done. Bless them!

The Power of Analogy

Ever feel like these are end times in this glorious republic of ours? Well, comparing compatriots, you're not the first in line to knock the vaunted American dream down a peg. Though the Romans little hegmony machine may have passed away awash in its own decadent torpor, I think we owe it to ourselves to at least indulge our navel-gazing just a little bit more and dive into the analogy's aptness. Facile comparison or just too obvious not to be true? You be the judge.