ITauthor

Graham Campbell writes ...

Just a quick note to say I'll be attending the ISTC Conference in Nottingham next week. I'm not known to many (any?) of you, but I plan to get as many faces to blog names as possible while I'm there. So on that note, who else is attending? I hope to grab as many people as possible for impromptu, informal chats that may form the basis of a future podcast. If you'd be willing to donate 5 minutes of your time and insight to the ITAuthor podcast I'd love to hear from you.

When I return I'm sure I'll provide a round-up of the conference either in here or on the podcast itself. Alistair has been away at the UA Conference this week and may provide an update himself when he gets back.

One thing about writing a blog is that most of the time you have no idea who's reading your posts. As a result, I usually assume no one's reading apart from me, until occasionally someone at work will mention something I wrote about. Of course I don't mind having an assumed readership of one because, by and large, I write this blog is for my own benefit and I do quite often use it to find out technical stuff I would otherwise have spent much longer finding via Google.

However, once in a while I'm reminded that other people might be reading some of this stuff too from time to time. This evening I logged into my WordPress dashboard (not something I often do, because I always post to my blog from Live Writer) and I noticed there was a comment sitting awaiting moderation.

Turns out it was a comment by brian d foy (his preferred style, in case you're wondering), the founder of Perl Mongers, author of Mastering Perl and co-author of Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl. Nice to know that at least one of my posts has had such an esteemed reader.

Oh and by the way, if you're reading this post of the front page of my blog, the way to post a comment is to click the post heading to display it as a single page and then scroll down the the comment form.

Following on from my previous post. I was looking for a way of getting emailed whenever anyone updated a shared Google calendar and I came across RSSFWD.

Here's how:

1. Copy the URL of the RSS feed.

Note: For a Google calendar, go into Settings, open the settings for the calendar you want to subscribe to, scroll to the bottom of the page and copy the URL for the publicly available RSS feed.

2. Go to
http://www.rssfwd.com/

3. Paste the URL into the "Enter the URL ..." field (replacing the text that's in there already).

4. Click Submit.

5. On the next page, enter your email address.

6. Select an email format from the drop-down list.

Note: As of today, individual emails are only being sent out once a day. I got a clutch of emails all sent at 2.40 am. So, given that you don't get individual emails throughout the day, you may as well choose one of the combined email formats.

7. Untick 'Share at "popular feeds" page'
THIS IS IMPORTANT!

8. Click Subscribe.

9. Go to your email application and check for a new email from <feed name>.

10. When you get the email, click the link in it to confirm your subscription.

You will now be emailed updates to the RSS feed - for example, changes to a shared Google Calendar.

1. Get your RSS feed URL (for example, the RSS feed for this blog is http://www.itauthor.com/feed).
2. Paste the URL into the field below.
3. Click Submit Query.

YouTube is a wonderful thing. A few years ago there would be no way I'd ever have been able to watch a complete lecture given at a US university. So, like millions of other people who have watched it on YouTube, I'd have missed this lecture (below) by Randy Pausch, who died of cancer last week.

When he gave the lecture, he knew he had a few months left to live and he gives some sound advice for how to live your life, including the following:

• You can't get there on your own. You need people to help you
• Tell the truth
• Be earnest ("I'll take an earnest person over a hip person every day, 'cause hip is short term, earnest is long term")
• Apologise when you screw up
• Focus on others, not yourself
• Brick walls are there to let us show our dedication - [they're there to separate us from those who don't want the thing on the other side of the wall as badly as you do]
• When people give you feedback, cherish it and use it
• Be good at something, it makes you valuable
• Find the best in everybody, even if you have to wait a long time for them to show it

Right now the points from this list that most resonate with me are:

Tell the truth
Professionally and in my personal life, I've increasingly come to wish that everybody would just stick to the truth. Things would be so much simpler and people, projects, companies would get in much less trouble if we really tried to tell the truth. Or, if you really can't tell the truth for some reason, just say nothing at all.

Focus on others
I'll admit it, this is not a strong point for me. I've recently been reminding myself on a regular basis that I've got to put more effort into this one.

Be good at something, it makes you valuable
Luckily for me I know I'm good at something. I'm good at documentation. Bid deal you might think, and maybe a year a go I was thinking that too. And, okay, it's not curing cancer or reversing global warming, but it's not nothing. I think it's something valuable, so it's worth trying to do it really well.

Find the best in everybody
I sometimes feel like I work in a very negative environment, where people take every opportunity to find fault in other people. And it's a very infectious thing. I admit to giving in to this bad habit. This is another thing I'm determined to work on. Maybe it just takes a few people to buck the trend and create an infectious habit of pointing out the good in people.

Here's the lecture: