Category: General
This has gone too far
It happened yesterday. I was boarding an Alaska/Horizon flight from Los Angeles, Ca to San Jose, Ca. After the 'regular' security stuff: coat off, belt off, phone, keys, wallet and the rest in a crate, notebook in a seperate crate, shoes off, NOT in a crate but on the belt, soles DOWN!, through the scanner device and hoping you didn't forget anything, I finally boarded the plane. I was just entering the plane when we were told to get off again, back to the terminal because of a 'mechanical failure'. After a few minutes I saw a van with what appeared to be the airline's 'mechanical failure rapid response team' driving to the plane. 5 minutes later we could board again and all seemed well .. until the announcement. The announcer mentioned that although the problem hadn't been fixed, we would still leave. 'What was the problem?' someone asked. 'Te plane has a broken toilet seat' was the response. So, they grounded a plane, got everybody off board and accepted a flight delay … because of a broken toilet seat. I then realized that we have taken this whole security thing over the top. It has gone too far.
The beginning..
I had never thought it would come to this.
I have (to put it mildly) not been a big fan of blogging. There are 2 main reasons for that. One is that I'm lazy (which still is a major thread to the survival of this experiment), and the second is that I just didn't 'get' this blogging thing, in the same way that I still don't 'get' this whole web 2.0 thing.
Two weeks ago I was in New Zealand for the Web on the Piste conference (perfectly organized by the guys from Straker Interactive and the guys from Gruden), where I did a session on Flex applications using LiveCycle Data Services and a ColdFusion backend. Someone who had attended my session came to me and asked me "Do you blog?". My response was "no, I don't".
Last week I was in Bangalore, India, where I did a week of 'Flex Train the Trainer' for Adobe India. One of the delegates of the training asked me "Do you blog?". "Nope", I said. "You should" was his reply.
So for those two guys (and my mother) I have decided to give it a try.
That decision left me with a whole new set of problems. First of all: Software. I remembered attending a session done by Laura Arguello of ASFusion a few months earlier at the FlexManiacs conference in Washington DC, where she mentioned their new Blog product, named Mango Blog. In short, I liked it.
Next problem: A title. Blogs have cool and catchy titles and now I needed one too.
Let me take you back to Queenstown, New Zealand, the Web on the Piste Conference.
One of the gold sponsors was Microsoft, so they had sent a bunch of their guys to do some sessions. One of the guys was a MS Evangelist (they have 'em too!). He started his session (that I really enjoyed) with showing an episode of 'Ask a Ninja'. In short, I choose the title because it doesn't make any sense, like this whole web 2.0 thing doesn't make any sense to me.
