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As the sun begins to set earlier and earlier in the day, we take the opportunity of this somber seasonal transition to empty out the clutter in the cerebral attic. Please enjoy these random ramblings we found just sitting around on the hard drive…please don’t sue me, Larry King…

• A rolling stone that gathers much moss...
  “Katamari Damashii” is the name of a new Japanese videogame where you roll a sticky ball on the ground which grows and grows as it picks up increasingly larger objects like dogs, fire hydrants, cows, trees, houses, etc. This reminds me of the PLM software industry. Over the last few decades, we’ve seen PLM begin life from its simple CAD file management roots, grow up through “CAD/CIM Database” childhood, struggle through the teen angst of “Product Data Management (PDM)”, and is still trying to find its way to maturity (and a moniker with staying power), still unsure where it best fits in the world. Today, PLM promises to encompass the entire product management process, including the fuzzy front end, manufacturing, field service, and more. Gee, sounds familiar. Does anyone remember “PDM II”?

• Someone has to say it once and for all: There are such things as stupid questions and money does buy happiness. The opposing view is PC wishful thinking. I know this because I ask stupid questions all the time, and sometimes the best pick me up is an unnecessary impulse splurge.

• The miracle of email...
  I consider email to be like human sentience, both a blessing and a curse. I used to love how email boosted efficiency, how it compressed communication, put details into writing, could be stored and retrieved, and how it was faster than the post office but slower than the phone. I still love those things, but the romance is fading, and for reasons I probably don’t have to list for you to understand. I believe that email is destined to become an historical artifact, and while I don’t know what will replace it, I have a suspicious feeling what we enjoy today is akin to when indigenous Americans communicated over distances with a campfire.

• Banned from the OED...
  Words that need a vacation: Value proposition, mindshare, business ecosystem, and any new word that ends with “ware”.

• Signs of the digital apocalypse?...
  For a long time I have been saying that eventually the Internet will become self-conscious and perhaps turn on humanity. Whether or not you noticed, that day has arrived. My evidence of this is two fold – "non-infecting viruses" and what I call “non-spamquitors”.

  “Non-infecting viruses” occur when a virus ridden email is distributed with your email address attached to it as the sender, even though you never activated it yourself by receiving and opening an infected attachment. My theory here is that some virus has become a “smart virus” and decided to circumvent its top constraint, human participation. It just lifts your address off the Internet somewhere and pastes it onto its disease, without needing you to do anything to help. It’s what the Internet is best for, eliminating intermediaries.

  A “non-spamquitor” is a piece of spam you receive that does not sell anything, with no link inside to any website, no phone # to call, and possibly no message body other than gibberish. I believe spamming has become so server-automated that non-spamquitors are created and distributed by them with humans no longer directing them or controlling the process. Perhaps it’s the byproduct of attempts by newborn sentient machines to speak with other newborn sentient machines, kind of a computer “baby talk”. I admit I am a little afraid.

  Follow the white rabbit and take the red pill.

• A skunk by any other name?...
  Regarding computer software, I’d like to lead the campaign to change the word “upgrade” to “update”. Upgrade infers something improved, which may be true on the whole, but is not an accurate enough description of how most of us experience new versions of software.

• Less sizzle, more steak...
  Businesses and consumers seem to be headed in different directions sometimes. Some companies spend more and more on flashy, complicated marketing campaigns, when all the customer probably wants is reliable quality at a cheap price. This lesson is abundantly clear with Wal-Mart and Costco’s popularity.
  
  And what’s the deal with sales and special offers lately? Many of these “deals” are increasingly driven by complicated codes, algorithms and databases. While the technology is meant to keep the company from being fleeced (or to “maximize” profits), the hoops you have to jump through to redeem these offers can be a greater deterrent to action than Soviet nukes. Sure, Wal-Mart and Costco rely on IT as well, but it’s typically transparent to the customer.
  
  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to wait in a phone queue when I call a company to fix my order because it was screwed up trying to take advantage of a “custom special whiz bang exclusive price time-limited region-specific just for you use this special code” offer to save 5 bucks. It probably cost them over 50 times that amount in customer service expenses and bad will. But I bet these campaigns sure sound like great ideas in a PowerPoint chart, and of course, justifies all of that IT investment.

• More often than not, I find dogs are better than people. Sometimes I wish they could work in the service industry.

• E-Mail features we'd like to see - CC:(-ATTACH)...
  Why can’t I CC somebody in an email WITHOUT the attachments? Sometimes I just want the CCers to know the email was sent or be aware of a detail in the message, without encumbering them with a hefty attachment. I did a Google search to see if this was a feature in somebody’s email client, or if it was even on anyone’s radar. Guess what? Nada. And I know I’m not alone out there. It must be some constraint in software engineering, otherwise I’d think this feature would be there. Coding gurus out there, please enlighten me.

  CC: Reminder Pop-ups...
  A little less bothersome than the above, but email clients should prompt you when you reply to a message with multiple recipients but forget to press “reply to all”. A box should pop up that says “Do you want to reply to all recipients listed on this email?” (with the standard option checkbox to never show the message again). I would bet $100 this is the number one mistake made by all email users, number two being forgetting to add an attachment.
  
  Somebody please steal these feature ideas! Are you listening Steve Ballmer?

Any reaction to this article? Send your feedback to gregg@roundtable.com

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At TCP, we love to waste time so much, we just have to share our time wasting best practices. The following sites, coincidentally they are both of European flavor, provide some unusual and quick ways to blow a few minutes while you’re on your next boring conference call.

#1 – Cykram Airtos

 Link: http://www.sticky.tv/game/cyrkam_airtos/  

From Sticky, an international creative agency that specializes in digital media, this very addictive free online game simulates wastebasket basketball with some very well coded virtual game physics. You use your mouse to catch a wadded paper ball and then must adroitly slide and click to throw it into a basket on the floor, either straight in or via ricochet. Although the site puts you in a “queue” to play the game, I have yet to wait very long, but those who love the game can skip the queue by signing up for “elite” membership.

 #2 – Die Wagenshanke

 Link: http://www.wagenschenke.ch/

The point of the game at this website is to use your mouse to keep a drunk man from falling over as he walks towards you on the sidewalk. That may sound cryptic, but believe me, once you visit the site you will understand. I’m not even sure what language this website is in (my guess is Czechoslovakian[?]), so I’m not sure what the little guy speaks as he wobbles forward, nor am I sure what this game is promoting, but it’s a fun and peculiar ride regardless.