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Bubba was bragging to his boss one day, "You know, I know everyone there is to know. Just name someone, anyone, and I know them."

Tired of his boasting, his boss called his bluff, "OK, Bubba how about Tom Cruise?"

"Sure, yes, Tom and I are old friends, and I can prove it."

So Bubba and his boss fly out to Hollywood and knock on Tom Cruise's door, and sure enough, Tom Cruise, shouts, "Bubba! Great to see you! You and your friend come right in and join me for lunch!"

Although impressed, Bubba's boss is still skeptical.

After they leave Cruise's house, he tells Bubba that he thinks Bubba's knowing Cruise was just lucky.

"No, no, just name anyone else," Bubba says.

"President Clinton," his boss quickly retorts.

"Yes," Bubba says, "I know him, let's fly out to Washington."

And off they go.

At the White House, Clinton spots Bubba on the tour and motions him and his boss over, saying, "Bubba, what a surprise, I was just on my way to a meeting, but you and your friend come on in and let's have a cup of coffee first and catch up."

Well, the boss is very shaken by now, but still not totally convinced.

After they leave the White house grounds, he expresses his doubts to Bubba, who again implores him to name anyone else.

"The Pope," his boss replies.

"Sure!" says Bubba.

"My folks are from Poland, and I've known the Pope a long time."

So off they fly to Rome.

Bubba and his boss are assembled with the masses in Vatican Square when Bubba says, "This will never work. I can't catch the Pope's eye among all these people. Tell you what, I know all the guards so let me just go upstairs and I'll come out on the balcony with the Pope."

And he disappears into the crowd headed toward the Vatican.

Sure enough, half an hour later Bubba emerges with the Pope on the balcony.

But by the time Bubba returns, he finds that his boss has had a heart attack and is surrounded by paramedics.

Working his way to his boss' side, Bubba asks him, "What happened?"

His boss looks up and says, "I was doing fine until you and the Pope came out on the balcony and the man next to me said, "Who's that on the balcony with Bubba?"

Found through Photography Blog

A severe security bug has been found in greasemonkey (report) which lets malicious webpages access any file or directory from your harddisk. For a more detailed explanation check out Simon Willison's Blog.

Let's play a small game, what comes to mind when you hear the word ... tattoo? Ok, now what comes to mind when you hear the word ... fruit? Did the two thoughts meet anywhere in your mind? If not then read this article.

Lifehacker - "Lifehacker recommends the downloads, web sites and shortcuts that actually save time".

Simply Geeky - Currently my most frequented weblog. Good one!

For someone who's too lazy to read current affairs this presentation is a perfect summary of the all terrorist attacks since '98. I only knew about 5 of these ...

Flash presentation of terrorist attacks

The world has suddenly got too small for us. We cannot find a dream destination that is not in Europe, has got penguins and is cheap.

We spent the last 4 days searching about Patagonia, (you must check this site out Interpatagonia) Chile and Argentina, and after being enchanted by its beauty we realised that September is not a good time to visit. Since this region is in the southern hemisphere almost opposite New Zealand there are the same climate problems. Apart from this, and probably this was a more determining factor, the countries are not as cheap as we thought they are going to be.

Now that we've left our dreams of ice climbing, glacier trekking and a cheap holiday aside we're checking out Ecuador as the next potential destination. The lure for wildlife might be too much to resist especially the trip to the Galapagos Islands. There are some problems here; rebels, malaria, high cost, difficult flight routing … but at the moment they're not scaring us off. Let's see whether this destination will survive the research phase.

These are some tips that I'm trying to follow after listening to "Getting things done" by David Allen. For more detailed description on why these things work I'd recommend listening to the tape or reading the book. If you're interested in the tape send me an email.

1. Do not create todo list but next action lists. The meaning of next action is the next physical action that needs to be done to complete a task. Therefore 'service the car' is not a valid next action but 'call garage for appointment' will be. Service a car is a project because it requires more than 1 action.
2. Write down all the next actions that need to be done. If you don't write them down your mind keeps trying to remind you to do things thus distracting you, so write things down.
3. Use your calendar as a sacred ground for keeping appointments. Make sure that each entry in the calendar can be completed on the date and time specified. This is generally useful for setting meetings, for task reminders use task in your PIM.
4. Keep the following lists:-

   Next action list

   Current next action list (Reviewed everyday)

   Unassigned action list

   Similar to next action but for task that are not going to be acted upon in the next few days. This is my customisation so that the next action list isn't too crowed to discourage me from starting anything. (Reviewed every 2/3 days)

   Someday maybe list

   List of future actions in the longer term (Reviewed weekly)

   Waiting on

   List of tasks that you are waiting for others. Date each item in this list. (Reviewed every 2/3 days).

   Projects List

   A list of projects that you are working on. A project is any task that requires more than 1 action. This list will act as a stake in the ground to remind you on your projects (Reviewed Weekly)

5. If any action takes less than 2 minutes to finish then complete it immediately when processing your in basket.
6. Reviewing a list is as important as the list itself.
7. Make it a habit to tag notes with a date.

E-mail processing scheme
Until I can find a cross platform feature rich PIM and e-mail reader I'm stuck with outlook as my email and PIM. This is the flag scheme I've adopted for e-mail organisation:-

At the moment I'm attaching time reminder to e-mails for deadlines; note that these reminders are not enlisted in the calendar.

Didn't I write that we were going to New Zealand yesterday, well today we changed out plans completely after spending the last 5 months believing that New Zealand was going to be our next destination. The courageous decision was made when we admitted to ourselves that September is really the worst month to visit NZ because of the adverse weather. We knew this for quite some time but we always tried to convince ourselves otherwise until. Our destination instead is most likely to be Patagonia in Chile and Argentina to keep it a snow and cold holiday. After seeing these pictures 1, 2 the frustration of having to change destination faded out.

Today I received the Sudoku book from play.com. These puzzles require more patience then I expected but I think they'll turn out to be fun to solve.

It's haven't blogged for some time now but at last I've finally sorted out my CV and the site is back up again after yesterday's downtime. First of all I must say a big thank you to Kelly Penguin Girl for mentioning me on the Linux User Show podcast Nr. 6- I'm flattered.

Today we brought Lonely Planet for New Zealand in view of our next holiday in September. September seems to be the worst time of the year to visit the island but unfortunately we were restricted to take leave by September the latest because of the outsourcing thing.

Did you know that?

• There are lions living in India in a place called Gir.
• Smallest inhabited island is Nauru with a total size of 21sq km
• Minsk is the capital city of Belarus and Tombouctou is a city in Mali
• Kangaroo Island in the south of Australia is full of Koala Bears
• You can specify the minimum font size for web page display in Firefox so that text size is displayed correctly in Linux. Options -> General -> Fonts & Colors -> Minimum font size

It's haven't blogged for some time now but at last I've finally sorted out my CV and the site is back up again after yesterday's downtime. First of all I must say a big thank you to Kelly Penguin Girl for mentioning me on the Linux User Show podcast Nr. 6- I'm flattered.

Today we brought Lonely Planet for New Zealand in view of our next holiday in September. September seems to be the worst time of the year to visit the island but unfortunately we were restricted to take leave by September the latest because of the outsourcing thing.

Did you know that?

• There are lions living in India in a place called Gir.
• Smallest inhabited island is Nauru with a total size of 21sq km
• Minsk is the capital city of Belarus and Tombouctou is a city in Mali
• Kangaroo Island in the south of Australia is full of Koala Bears
• You can specify the minimum font size for web page display in Firefox so that text size is displayed correctly in Linux. Options -> General -> Fonts & Colors -> Minimum font size

Knoppix is as easy as ABC and as useful as a Swiss knife, it's just too good. The whole thing about it is that it's a live CD which means that you pop it in your CD-ROM, reboot and off you go with a 600Mb Linux installation that's got all the software you'd normally use on a personal home PC and more, with loads of eye candy and user friendliness. In the words of Kelly Penguin Girl, eye candy is good (I took of my sys admin hat here). Apart from being a desktop Linux tool it's got hundreds of other useful uses;

• you want to browse the web and loose any trace of the history – now you can with Knoppix
• you haven't got any rights to do anything on your work PC because the windows machine is tightly secured and you've got no Administrator password - run Knoppix;
• you need to run a program on a machine and you don't want to install the program - run it from Knoppix;
• you want a mobile software repository so you can use any machine as your own familiar machine - customize Knoppix and run it;
• one of your web servers died and you need a quick backup fixer - run Knoppix to minimize down time ...

Start using this great tool and the ideas keep flowing and flowing. Knoppix Hacks from O'Reilly has another 100 hacks to get you started.

I'm officially looking for a job anywhere in the world preferably not in Europe and especially not in my country. My web search history is littered with Sabre Holdings and Monster.com

Tomorrow we are going to be asked to describe our job and role at the company in view of the imminent outsourcing of the department. For this reason I created a knowledge ABC list to help me brainstorm and remember all the different hats we have to wear at work. These lists really work.

A – Automation (Administrative Tasks) / Analysis (System)
B – Beta Testing
C – Configuration Management / Crisis Management System
D – Database administration / Data distribution medium
E – Enterprise Java Beans / ETL Manager
F – Free open source tools / Focus (the lack of)
G – Goal oriented
H – Helpdesk support (2nd level) / Helpdesk application
I – Integration / IntelliJ / Information Systems
J – Java
K – KPI
L – Leave Management System / Linux
M – Maintenance / Management Information System
N – Negative vibe
O – Object orientation
P – Prototyping / Patterns
Q – Quality
R – Revenue Management
S – Standards / Software Engineering / Scalability
T – Testing / Team
U – Usability / Understaffed
V – Visual Diagramming Tools / Visio
W – Web Server / Web analytics / Workflow system
X – Xtreme programming
Y – Young and talented
Z –

After listening to some fiction audio books while driving I decided to try something a bit different, self help books. When I was a bit younger I was a great fan of self help but it has been some time since I've read something recently. The book that started me going in this area was Getting Things Done by David Allen which was followed by "The memory optimizer" by Paul Sheele and Vera Birkenbih. After listening to these programs I debunked some myths I used to have:-

• You're limited to listening to radio or music in your car – no! you can make better use of this 'piggy-bank' time listening to books (or maybe podcasts)
• Writing things down is a sign of bad memory – no! writing things down actually improves your memory and is important.
• Listening to something more than once is wasting time – no! it's no sin to re-listen or re-read to things. They are more likely to get memorised this way.
• ABC word lists and games like names, places and people are babyish – no! actually these word lists can help your memory and creative thoughts greatly. These lists are central to the memory training program and I also found them mentioned in the inspired creative writing book I just brought.

• Joel on software– The editor of the new title Best Software Writing I. The introduction sample is very promising, I must get this book.
• Does anyone actually like their boss? – Join the discussion
• ASP.NET for JSP/Servlet Developers Webcast Series - Though I secretly hope I'll never need these I think keeping them as reference might come in handy.