A middle-aged businessman decided he needed some rest and relaxation. He was stressed over work, his family and life in general. He wound up visiting a small coastal village in Mexico. After a turbulent night’s sleep, he woke up and decided to take a stroll through the main street. As he was walking, his eyes spotted a craftsman at work in his woodshop. The man was making beautiful skateboard decks.

“How long does it take you to make one of your decks?” inquired the businessman.

“Not that long; I can usually make two or three a day,” replied the craftsman.

“Why don’t you make more?” asked the businessman.

“I make enough to support my family and give a few to friends,” said the craftsman as he carefully sanded the wood.

“But…What do you do with the rest of your time?”

The craftsman looked up and smiled. “I sleep late, skate, play with my children, take an afternoon siesta with my wife and stroll in the village each evening, where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life, señor.”

The businessman laughed and shrugged his shoulders. “Sir, I graduated from Harvard with an M.B.A., and I can help you. You should spend more time working on these beautiful skateboards, and with the proceeds, hire more people. In no time, you could buy some serious equipment and fully automate your production. Eventually, you would be able to produce thousands of boards a month.”

The businessman continued, “Instead of selling only a few boards, you would set up a distribution center and ship all over the world. You would control the product and processing. You would need to leave this village, of course, and move to Mexico City, then to Los Angeles, and eventually New York City, where you would run your thriving business with proper management.

The Mexican craftsman asked, “But, señor, how long will all this take?”

The businessman replied, “Oh, probably 15 to 20 years, maybe – 25 tops.”

“But then what, señor?”

The businessman laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right, you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would then make millions!”

“Millions, señor? Then what?”

“Then you would retire and move to a small coastal village where you sleep late, skate, play with your children, take an afternoon siesta with your wife and stroll in the village each evening, sip wine and play guitar with your amigos.”

My argument is this: a single hand of poker is a game of chance. A session requires skill.

Think of it this way: Roulette or crapps are pure chance. Even if you play to lose you might still win. However, poker is a game of skill, because if you play to lose, you will lose. The converse of this is: if you play to not lose, you might not lose (not if you play to not lose you will win)

Early

Middle

Late

In other news: I finally ordered some slalom gear. It should be here next week. Now I just need to find some more people…

…but I found a workaround. It goes like this:

You have a whole lot of pages with the template ‘oldtemplate.dwt’ and you want to convert them to ‘newtemplate.dwt’

1. BACKUP - you might break things
2. Rename ‘newtemplate.dwt’ to ‘newtemplate.dwt.bak’.
3. If you already have some pages in ‘newtemplate.dwt’ DW will ask you if you want to update links. Select ‘Don’t update’
4. Rename ‘oldtemplate.dwt’ to ‘newtemplate.dwt’
5. DW will ask you if you want to update links. Select ‘Update’
6. Delete ‘newtemplate.dwt’ (what was ‘oldtemplate.dwt’)
7. Rename ‘newtemplate.dwt.bak’ to ‘newtemplate.dwt’
8. Run ‘Update Pages’ for ‘Files that use’ ‘newtemplate.dwt’

If you have named all of your editable regions the same this should just happen. If not, you may have to use the dialogue box to point the old region names at the new ones.

The greatest band in the world (perhaps greater than The Beetles, but can we compare across generations?) are in New Zealand this weekend.

I missed them in the 90s and regretted it. I didn’t get tickets this time and regret it too. At the time I didn’t think I could afford tickets and travel, but I think I’d rather regret spending the money.

Still, not as big as when I released a PHP-Nuke module to parse RSS feeds which made the PHP-Nuke homepage.

Determinants of effective website management in New Zealand government websites.

How are websites managed and how does this affect their effectiveness in achieving the outcomes for which they are maintained?

In this research I will examine different types of government websites (e.g. informational, educational, transactional) looking at how they are managed (including governing structures, authorship models, development models, history), and determine if there is a relationship between these variables and their effectiveness.

I have narrowed the topic to NZ govt sites just to stop the research getting too huge, but any research on website management with a sound methodology in a different domain (e.g. ecommerce, activism) would be a good start for me. I’ve hunted around all of the academic abstract databases etc I can think of but with no luck. Everything I have found is focused on the technology and functionality, rather than the people side of website management.

Do you know of any research, theses, papers or anything else remotely related to this topic?

from Gaping Void