@madpilot makes

I, like most other people in the world receive a lot of spam. I do have a spam filter, but it isn’t perfect, and errs on the side of caution – and for good reason. It is my business account and I don’t want to miss any potential leads. This does mean that I still receive a number of spam emails a day. Now most of these are obvoious spam mails, but a couple have come through that were legitimate. The only reason I opened them is because something about the name or subject triggered a response. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case.

So here are a couple of things to think about when sending emails out to other people:

1. Use your FULL name. That includes both a first name and surname. Getting an email from “Joe” makes me think it is spam. “Joe Bloggs” is better. This is especially important if you have a common name and if you are emailling someone for the first time.
2. Take some time thinking about a decent subject line. Avoid common spam terms like “Hey” or “Hi
3. To take the subject line thing further – don’t just reply to an un-related email. It makes searching a pain in the arse. I had one client who would do this and when I was searching for a particular email I had to sift through 400 emails all entitled “Re: “.

Anyone think of any more?

Australia Day is my favourite holiday of the year. What has happened in previous years is we would all assemble at Trashy Central for the world famous potato salad contest. It is amazing how, when you say you are having a potato salad contest, ever persons response follows the lines of “I make the best potato salad EVER!” Judged by the party host, the winner gets taken to the restaurant of their choice.

Then down to the foreshore to watch the fireworks, whilst the host stays back to prepare for party: Stage 2.

The party continues once everyone meanders back up.

What happened this year? I worked. It was for a UK client, so cries of “But it’s Australia day!” went unheeded. So I spent the day in front of my laptop, with the TripleJ hottest 100 blaring.

I did mange to finish by 6 and walk down to Maylands (Just down the road now that we are in Mt Lawley) with Giovanna and her family to watch the skyworks – so not all was lost. Still would have been nice to hang with the Knutsfords though :(

Next year – I’m partying!

I’m about to sit the final exam of my university degree this afternoon. It is for a unit called Internet Technologies, and I have to write two essays – “Pretend you are writing two articles for a technical magazine. You cannot select the topic you covered in your talk or project”. The list of topics are:

1. C#
2. ASP.NET
3. Advanced ASP.NET: UserControls
4. SQL Server 2005 & ADO.NET
5. Handling session information in a ASP.NET application
6. Security. Authorization and authentication in ASP.NET, .NET Framework and C#
7. Design Patterns
8. Intro to source code control & Use of CVS
9. Intro to issue and bug tracking. Use of Issue/Bug Tracking software
10. Open Source: The impact on corporate development practices
11. Introduction to SOAP & Web Services
12. XHTML and CSS2
13. XML and XSLT
14. LDAP and DirectoryServices in .NET
15. Refactoring
16. Agile processes & Extreme Programming
17. Advanced C#: New features
18. Team Foundation Server: Collaborative Development Environments
19. .NET Compact Framework: Developing for PDAs and Phones
20. C# and MS.NET vs Java J2EE: Pros and Cons
21. Developing for Accessibility
22. HCI Issues in web applications

Since my talk was on Design Patterns and my project was on Web Services, I have selected Developing for Accessibility and XML and XSLT. Since I have a pretty bad case of the flu, I thought I might draft them here first to try and coerce my brain into a thinking mode again. Wish me luck :)

…is drinks with your peers and talking about what matters to you most.

…is like minded people throwing ideas around, making you think about things you haven’t thought about before

…is realising that your opinions do matter, and there is always someone that is interested.

Just did my honours thesis seminar. Was pretty under-prepared, but I think I swung it. Now, I just need to hand in my poster (It’s at the printers) and all that is left of my university career is one exam. Woot!

Six years of toil has culminated to one anti-climatic week. Still a relief though – psychologically, it has been a huge weight lifted, although things that I’ve said I would do “after my thesis” have just moved up a notch on my todo list.

I really want to get some work done on Taste.net.au soon (Hurry up Ruby books!), but I’m enjoying the freelancing at the moment (That’s right kids, I’m back on the market!)

And I’m looking for to my day off on Wednesday, because my beautiful girl, Giovanna is back from Sydney (Longest week ever!) and we are going spend the day together.

Things are lookin’ up. :)

It is important to step back sometimes, and to look at what is going on. It is all too easy to become completely immersed in things in what is going on in your own life, that you forget how lucky you really are.

Today, I went to the launch of the Breast Surgery Gallery – a system that was developed by a uni mate of mine, Patrick MacQuillan as his honours project a couple of years ago. My honours supervisor (David Glance) was Patrick’s supervisor, and he asked me to do a quick re-design for their website before the launch today, which is why I was invited.

It was quite strange – as we walked into the offices, we noticed their was only two other guys there – the rest were woman. Now nothing was explicitly said, but it is pretty safe to say that a majority of the woman there (If not all) had been affected by breast cancer at some point in their lives.

As I was standing there, listening to the presentation, it hit me that these woman have had to deal with something that I could not even begin to fathom. Yet, they were here smiling – genuinely happy to see each other and to witness the official launch of a product that is actually helping people.

David, who has worked in large software companies for many years said something very profound (Maybe more so when you think about it) – he said: it was good to see a piece of software that is helping people.

We have all probably thought that a system we were writing was going to help someone, but not in the same way as this one did. The stuff that we write day-to-day will probably make someones work day more efficient, or allow them to shop more convienently – ironically the sort of stuff that in the whole scheme of things doesn’t really matter. This software was playing a roll in easing the pychological pain of life changing and life saving surgery, helping the suffers on the road to recovery.

It really isn’t often that software does that…