Adventures in HttpContext

In a comment to my earlier article Thoughts on Kanban someone brought up the subject of end dates. Businesses obsess about the “When can we have it?” question. Dates and deadlines trump all. Let me tell you a secret: dates are bullshit. It is a prohibitive mentality in today’s world. Technology needs to reframe the question. Stakeholders need to change their engagement. No company ever succeeded because they made dates. Companies succeed when they continuously deliver innovation. It is not about the destination. It is about the journey and where you end up.

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By far the trickiest part of building the single speed bike (and, consequently, the most fun) was building the wheel.  I was a little hesitant to take on wheel assembly, but I couldn’t cop out and not try to give it a shot.  It turns out, it’s rather easy and a lot of fun.  Once you get the pattern down lacing the spokes is pretty straightforward, and out of all the parts of bike building this step really connects you to the bike.

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As we’re getting ready to gear up for summer, my wife was looking for a new bike.  I wanted to get her something cool and unique, and (selfishly) use the opportunity to indulge myself in a bike building project.  I heard building a bike was a pretty straightforward process, and in a worse case scenario I’ll just bring the parts to a bike shop and have them finish it up.  We knew we wanted to go with a single speed- a friend has a Trek Soho S which I fell in love with.  A single speed is perfect for jetting around the city- really light and nimble.  The acceleration is surprisingly easy and you hit a nice cruising speed quickly.  I’m anxiously awaiting to compare this custom build with other commercial bikes. Read More

I recently moved this blog and some other smaller websites to a virtual machine running on Rackspace Cloud. So far I’m loving having my own server, and have been able to get my hands dirty with Linux administration, apache, and mysql.

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