SPAM and Blogging - September 14, 2005

Does SPAM really work? I mean, does anyone really follow up on a junk email message? Someone must be if they persist in sending junk emails. Well, I get a bunch of junk comments on my blog that I have to go in and delete. Who knew? I think there is a way to prevent this but I am not sure how to do that yet.
I have also found that working on a blog in the evening is difficult because it's slow and it crashes a lot. Probably because 10,000 other people are blogging. So I will have to do this in the mornings.

Here is a photo of Ty in our usual position of Ty on my bent legs. I know the photo isn't overly flattering because it's too close but this is the best time when he is smiling at me. We do this every morning over coffee and the Today Show. I will miss that show when I go back to work. It's the right combination of news and fluff, probably heavier on the fluff. My mom doesn't like Katie Couric but I'm not sure why. I think my sister might not like her as well. Maybe she is too liberal for our Republican family.

And speaking of Republicans, I have been thinking a lot about the war in the context of project management. A project is defined as "something that has a definite beginning and end." See, where I work, we always put together a plan before we launch a project. Part of that plan describes what we are going to do and what the success criteria is. You know you have had a successful project if you meet the success criteria. You also know when the end is here. We also have checkpoints throughout the course of the project to make sure that we should be continuing the project. Sometimes we discontinue the project if we don't think we will meet the success criteria or maybe the business conditions have changed or maybe even something more critical to the business has occurred (like a hurricane). I think we should apply the same discipline to this war and just about everything we do in the government. How do we know when we are done? What does success look like? What problem are we solving? Just think of all the debate that could be settled in the United States if we just applied a little project management methodolgy to our government. I've always been an advocate of having a business person in the role of a president in lieu of a politician but now I am advocating project managers in that role. Hope that wasn't too boring but it feels good to get it off my chest.