I see that Noam Chomsky is presenting the Annual Amnesty Lecture in Dublin. Tickets are available on a first come first served basis. Noam Chomsky has been a persistent critic of American foreign policy since the Vietnam work and has written extensively on the issues facing American political mono-culture.

Boing-Boing reports on a video cover done by two guys that is apparently swarming all over the web. They obviously spent some time on it becuase the lip synching isn’t bad and the dance moves are reasonably well executed. Is it breach of copyright? Who cares, its out there now and it ain’t goin’ back in the box.

There are some other nice details that give it a “for real” feeling like the bandage/split on the arm of the singer on the left.

But what is they guy in the background doing for the whole song?

I went to see Crash tonight. I love it when a movie drags great raggedly strings of emotion out of you and Crash had me hunched up in my seat on several occasions. It’s a film full of moral ambiguity with only the viewer having the god like vision that allows him to give meaning to the seemingly random violence, anger, pain and frustration of the protagonists. It plays with your own view of stereotypes and sucks you in, only to give a big smack upside the head just when you thought the god view was all you needed to feel comfortable.

Ace, King, Check it Out!

The gateway to the European community is buried behind this URL http://europa.eu.int/index_en.htm. Whats with the kerrrazzy .int domain?

Amazon UK’s top 100 DIY list has this chainsaw at number 1. Goddamn, I want one so badly I think I’m going to spit!

I attended Tech Camp at the weekend and presented on Setting Up an R&D Organisation. The other talks were excellent and I particularily liked the Digital Rights Ireland presentation. Amongst other things they revealed,

I was listening to Dave Winer on Nerd TV earlier today. Dave always has interesting stuff to say but I think he made some prescient comments that should serve as a warning to all us budding irish software entrepreneurs.

He is talking about his second company and its intermingled with a discussion about Steve Ballmer, so I hope he’ll forgive me for paraphrasing. The basic gist of it is, on your second company you want to do it on your terms, not the VCs or the boards or any of the other guys who want a piece of you. So you buy a nice PC, you work sensible hours, you get other people to do all the heavy lifting.

Unfortunately this never works out because you are always competing against another company with a crazy founder who will work all the hours god sends, live on peanuts, debase himself before just about anybody to get his idea of the ground, and you just can’t compete.

From slashdot TCP/IP enabled speakers. They have built in amplifiers and just take a digital signal. I wonder if they can be made to work out of the box with the Roku, SlimDevices or Sonos digital player systems (or indeed iTunes).

I’ve been slowly trying to eradicate the wireless madness in my home, looks like Infoworld have a solution for the power cable.

I spent some time in Argentina a few years ago. At the time the travel books were raving about how a large influx of immigrants from Italy had created a home away from home, so I spent a good part of my time frequenting various Italian eateries as a break from the Argentine staple of (divine, heavenly) beef in all its guises.

What I discovered is what you get if you’ve seen a picture of a pizza, but never actually eaten one.

These strange concoctions looked like pizza but varied in style and texture between sliced pan and cheese on toast. Significant ingedients (like tomato sauce, cheese) were often omitted unless specifically ordered as an extra. When they did appear they often turned out shockers like pure tomato puree (like sucking the barrel of a gun) or some liquid cheese disaster left over from the set of a Night of The Living Dead movie.

I say all this not becuase I want to be hard on the Argentinians but more as an analogy for what passes as management in many of the software companies I’ve worked for. They’ve seen a picture of it (they may have even seen it done) but they never thought to inquire as to the ingredients or what it should taste like. So we see teams that get increasinly disillusioned with vacuous and empty headed “team building games” or morale boosting “incentive programs” that usually have the opposite effect.

Its not that these managers are bad people (far from it) its more the case that they are trying to skip a essential learning curve. Observing is not doing, just as doing is not always learning.

Writing good, useful software takes time and learning to create and manage good, useful software teams takes even longer.