http://carljoseph.com.au/blog My personal high horse Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:16:33 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I finally finished up the magazine rack I wrote about earlier. Here it is in production ... I'm quite happy with the end result. It's a simple, clean design with a few nice elements. I'm also very happy with the way my first dovetails turned out. This is in fact a ... http://carljoseph.com.au/blog/2008-08-22/finishing-the-magazine-rack/ ... Primarily because of articles like this one by CIO Magazine. I found this article through Ameel's website, so hat tip to Ameel for that one. Every once in a while someone publishes a "nn reasons why your IT project fails" article. Every time it leaves me with some longing for ... http://carljoseph.com.au/blog/2008-08-16/really-why-do-it-projects-fail/ After a few weeks getting our house in order, I've finally been able to spend some quality time with my tools. I'm making a very simple magazine rack. My hope is that it will hold my New Scientist and American Mind magazines, but I fear it will end up stuffed with ... http://carljoseph.com.au/blog/2008-08-03/power-tools-a-cut-below-the-rest/ This isn't about the Jeff Kennet addition to our Victorian number plates, but rather our house move over the weekend. Still with a throat infection, we managed to get it all done in daylight and rain on Monday. As much as I enjoy bagging other companies out for their poor customer ... http://carljoseph.com.au/blog/2008-07-08/on-the-move/ On his blog, Scott proposes a new type of credit card account. Essentially a debit card, with an interest free period attached to a savings account. It's an interesting idea and one which anyone can put into place with a little discipline. It prompted me to briefly explore our situation. We ... http://carljoseph.com.au/blog/2008-07-06/credit-cards-and-offset-accounts/ Most of what is published about agile/scrum methods doesn't talk about this area very much. It tends to be focused mainly on a team dedicated to getting a single product to market. As an internal team, we often don't have that luxury. We run multiple concurrent projects, some with different ... http://carljoseph.com.au/blog/2008-06-07/multiple-projects-one-team-agile-practices/ Advice: Don't buy from DigiDirect.com.au. A month ago I purchased a new Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-W300 camera from DigiDirect. I did my research and decided that this was the best buy for my budget and gave me all the functionality and quality I would like. Since then, I have spent the month making ... http://carljoseph.com.au/blog/2008-06-04/dont-buy-from-digidirectcomau/ I'm a tool/model addict. I love them all. Anything which makes my thinking easier is a bonus. I sometimes struggle with forming my thoughts into cohesive structures, so I find models an invaluable additional to my arsenal. One of the major benefits to an agile development process is the Inspect-Adapt loop. ... http://carljoseph.com.au/blog/2008-06-03/a-useful-tool-for-reflecting/ I liken packing supermarket bags to playing tetris. You somewhat randomly take the items out of your trolley and place them on the conveyer belt. The checkout chick/person then uses their skillz to scan and pack items nice and quickly into the bags. Packing these bags is definitely an aquired ... http://carljoseph.com.au/blog/2008-06-01/supermarkets-and-tetris/ At Melbourne Business School, we've started using Scrum to manage our software development projects. Over the last few months, we've used it very loosely on a project as a trial run. The elements we picked up were the very basics of scrum. I'm nervous to even say that we were ... http://carljoseph.com.au/blog/2008-05-29/stand-up-and-be-counted/