Cameron Marlow (creator of Blogdex and a friend) is running a survey about weblogs. If you're a weblog author, it will take you about 15 minutes to complete and asks some straight-forward questions about when you started blogging, what you link to and why, etc. Don't worry, no essays are involved, you just check some boxes and click some buttons. Please consider taking a moment to participate if you're a blogger. With surveys, like parties, the more the merrier! And diverser!

Before I left for Ireland, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Halley Suitt for an audio series she does called Memory Lane. We spoke about everything from my trip to computer camp in fifth grade (NERD!!) to the founding of Pyra and the rise of blogging. It was a lot of fun speaking with Halley and I think it's one of the best interviews I've done, and by done I mean talked a lot while Halley gently nudged the conversation down interesting paths.

The whole thing is available here: Memory Lane interview with Meg Hourihan in various formats (Windows media, MP3, etc.). It goes about an hour and weighs in at 27MB. My favorite part is at the end, when I talk about bloggers not really being media consumers but more media regurgitaters. It's my new favorite way of describing what bloggers are doing these days.

If you've got sharp eyes, you might have noticed that categories have made their way back onto megnut.com entries. As part of my "slow but steady" redesign process, I've recategorized all my entries into topics more manageable than I had before. I haven't set up any category archive pages yet, but will at some point soon. I don't know whether this will be useful or not, but it seemed like a good idea to me.

I had a really great time earlier this week in San Francisco at the O'Reilly Media and Adaptive Path Ajax Summit. It was just the thing to get my brain jump-started into programming mode, and I feel like for the first time in a very long time, I've got lots of ideas of little apps and do-dads I want to build. Now if only I could find the time!

As someone who's started two companies, I know the horror and thrill that comes with giving up a steady paycheck to follow a dream, and I'm so happy to see that Jason has decided to join the ranks of entrepreneurs and devote himself to full-time blogging at kottke.org.

Jason is not going to support himself through advertising, rather he is asking for readers to act as micropatrons of his site and contribute to its upkeep. Please consider supporting him, not only because he writes a great site and because supporting dreams is important. This is the chance to support something new: an "amateur" deciding to edit a blog full-time without corporate support and without advertising. It's a long time blogger chosing to go pro, and Jason is the perfect person to do it.

Some of the things I had no idea were on my computer's desktop, discovered while cleaning it up:

1. A recipe for Pickled Oysters with English Cucumber "Capellini" and Dill
2. A map of the Madaket (Nantucket) bus route
3. Various torrents of things I never listened to, like Jon Stewart's Crossfire appearance
4. More strange .pdf files that I must have inadvertantly downloaded than I care to admit
5. An Excel spreadsheet from 4/2003 comparing the costs of purcasing an espresso machine to going to the local coffee shop to making due with my French Press pot at home
6. My brother's "updated" résumé from early 2004

From here on out, I resolve to be neater! Next job: cleaning up the 6,935 emails in my inbox (all either read or skimmed), oldest dating back to 9/13/01!

Perhaps the most succinct — and best — advice about software development that I've ever come across. Jamie Zawinski, in this post about groupware, boils it down to:

If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

So simple, and yet nearly impossible to accomplish.

I have complicated multi-tiered spam filtering technique I use, the result of which is that I have a folder called "suspect" that I manually check to make sure there's nothing in there for me. These days, with pitchers and catchers reporting in less than two weeks and football shortly disappearing until fall, baseball has been on my mind. Too much on my mind in fact, because I've been clicking on emails about "the Big Unit" in my suspect spam folder. Needless to say, they are not about Randy Johnson.

Now that I'm living in the wilds of New Hampshire, I've been required to turn to satellite for my television reception requirements. My housemates and I ordered the DISH Network and opted for the DISH player with DVR (receiver model 522). After only a few days, we decided that the DVR feature wasn't as user-friendly as TiVo and I purchased a new TiVo. Soon we discovered that more often than not, when we went to watch a taped program, all that TiVo had recorded was a floating DISH Network logo. It appeared that the DISH receiver had (unbeknownst to TiVo) turned off.

I called DISH to report the problem with the receiver, only to find out that the DISH receiver is programmed to go into "sleep mode" after four hours of inactivity. Which means that every night it turns off (and most times it does so during the day as well), making it nearly impossible for TiVo to tape anything. The DISH representative suggested I program the DISH DVR to record the same event as TiVo, thereby guaranteeing that the receiver would be active when TiVo began to record, but that seems like a ridiculous solution to a problem that shouldn't exist.

(Never mind the fact that with TiVo season passes and wish lists, you don't even know when something you want will be broadcast unless you are constantly checking your "To-Do" list. I pointed out how time consuming it would be to have to do this double-step for each and every show one wanted to tape, but he claimed once I learned how to do it, it would take me only a minute or two at most per program.)

I asked the DISH support person if there were someway to turn off the sleep mode, or lengthen the amount of time before the sleep mode became active, but he said that wasn't possible. According to him, the receiver, "is complicated and needs downtime for updates and maintenance." Also according to the support person, I'm the only person who's reported this problem and found the "solution" to double-record unsatisfactory. "DISH Networks has over 10 million satisfied customers," according the support rep. My 1 in 10 million "luck" makes me think I should enter the lottery more often.

So my question for you is: Do you have a DISH receiver? And if so, have you experienced this problem? Do you know of any way to hack the DISH receiver so it doesn't go into a standby or sleep mode? And do DirecTV receivers do this? Because if they don't, I'm very willing to change my service. Thanks in advance for any advice or suggestions you may have.

The New York Times reports the F.B.I. believes its $170 million systems overhaul may be a total failure: F.B.I. May Scrap Vital Overhaul of Its Outdated Computer System. Recognized as a critical component to fighting terrorism, the FBI sought to develop a paperless solution with many customized features. From the following description of their current situation, it sure sounds like they need some upgrades:

As it stands now, the bureau's counterterrorism files are largely online, but investigators often may not have immediate access to data from other parts of the bureau. So, for instance, an agent may not be immediately aware of information from an investigation into credit-card fraud that could be relevant to a terrorism case. In addition, the bulk of the internal reports and documents produced at the bureau must still be printed, signed and scanned by hand into computer format each day, officials said.

Anyone who's been involved with critical, large-scale software development projects knows how hard they can be to complete (regardless of whether they're on time and/or budget). In a statement that will resonate with clients and consultants everywhere, a senior official from the FBI stated:

"I did not get what I envisioned" from the project…But he said the F.B.I. today had a better understanding of its computer needs and limitations as a result of the effort. "The lesson we have learned from this $170 million is invaluable," he said.

Jeez, it seems like you could have figured that out for a lot less than $170 million! A better use of the funds would have been $11.53 for The Myth of the Paperless Office, $33.24 for the classic The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, and $33.95 for the excellent Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams.

So $170,000,000 – $78.72 leaves $169,999,921.28 to put towards requirements definition, prototyping, and ultimately programming. Surely overhauling such a massive system is a daunting, difficult challenge, but as Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont said, "Bringing the F.B.I.'s information technology into the 21st century should not be rocket science." When projects are this critical, and this expensive, they cannot be allowed to fail.