So I’ve been at a new job — a full time gig — for a week now. I have to say, after a year of freelance and making my own hours, the adjustment has been pretty taxing.

There’s a ton of work to be done at the new gig and the org chart is fairly flat, which means lots of people coming at the team with lots of projects. So one of my first challenges is to build, quickly, an organizational system that’ll scale well and be easy to maintain. The company maintains a Basecamp account, but I don’t find that a good tool for an individual to track their tasks in, unless that individual is the only one using the account. It’s just too messy for me.

Right now I’m playing around with Backpack and Vitalist, and I hope to have a post about them not too far in the future, as I decide which one I prefer.

I’ve also picked up Getting Things Done again for a re-read. There’s some delicious irony in the fact that I’ve managed to lose my copy so I had to pop into B&N for a new one. While there I saw that David Allen has a second book out, Ready For Anything, and I picked that up too.

One of the first projects at the new gig has been to build an interstitial ad system, which at first blush seems pretty trivial, but the ‘edge cases’ make it more complex than you might think. By ‘edge cases’ I mean people who refuse first party cookies, who mask referrers, and so forth. I actually built 3 systems, eventually scrapping the first two. I might do a post on how I finally did it.

I’ve been unable to keep up with all my blogs since going full-time, and I really miss being on top of what’s going on in the world of tech. I’m hoping to winnow down my list so I can get back on top of things.

Anyway, haven’t had time to post a thing, and I’ve got some ideas I wanted to capture, so this is both a ‘keep-alive’ post and a note to myself.

Still not sure about NaNoWriMo this year….but I’m leaning towards skipping it.

Snack time!
How about a Tornado Potato

and a nice glass of Stress Milk?

And in being had, I’ve lied to you, my faithful reader (if in fact you are still out there).

When I posted about the Smiley’s 25th birthday I did so in good faith. But apparently the Smiley has lied about its age and is in fact much older. At least, according to this article at Snopes.com.

So my apologies, dear reader, for misleading you.

At least I got the “Talk Like A Pirate Day” part right.

Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes — a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis — as a horizontal “smiley face” in a computer message.

Read the rest at CNN:🙂 turns 25

Sept. 19th is quite an auspicious date… in addition to the smiley’s birthday, it is of course also International Talk Like a Pirate Day!

I know that every blog and site on the web is going to have some kind of commemorative 9/11 post today.

I wasn’t going to. My memories of that day aren’t much different than that of most readers of this blog. You all remember the dawning horror just as well as I do.

But I’ve run into one of those TechDispenser quandaries again. A post that is too far off-topic for me to approve for the TD site, but too good to just quietly deny.

So here it is. A post from a fellow who was working quite near the World Trade Center on that morning that changed us all. He gives us a first hand account of what that day was like: September 11th Remembered