The Agile Micro ISV Blog

As always, December 31st is a day for looking back over the last
year and ruminating; picking out the highs, lows and learning some
lessons.

Some things in no particular order:

The Book

Bob Walsh is to blame for making
me want to give up the highly lucrative agile consultant / developer
gig in favour of late nights sweating over a code base, adwords, web
site design, credit card service providers, landing page optimisations
and other things I’d never even given a thought to this time last year.
Thanks Bob.

Reading thing this book lit so many light bulbs in my tiny mind that onlookers suspected I’d been irradiated.

The Technology

Without
a doubt, Windows Presentation Foundation. Although I’ve been using it
since 2006, this year I’ve relearned what GUI means, I’ve been pushing
WPF to its absolute limits, and then some. See Ergo as an example, more eye candy in the new year as my product (Home Document Manager) hits 1.0.

WPF offers some outstanding opportunities for the Micro ISV -
Windows eye candy just got serious, and small players can steal a march
on their less manoeuvrable corporate competition because it’s so easy.

The Politics

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, messers Bush and Brown are
still trying to convince the world that Iran, a nation that hasn’t
invaded another country in living memory, presents a clear and imminent
danger to the peace and stability of the world, pressing ahead with
their attempts to manufacture public consent for yet another illegal
assault on a sovereign state. The mainstream media is, as always,
obediently playing its part.

The Family

Rose arrived in October, making my family feel complete. The late
nights and early mornings she brought with her provide an unexpected
opportunity to work on ‘the project.’

Helen
and I are happy to announce the arrival of our third child, Rose
Elizabeth. She arrived yesterday weighing in at 6lbs 1oz. Mother and
baby are doing well. Our boys Joe and Ned are a little perplexed by the
sudden influx of pink.

—–

Fitting
in nicely with VP Gore’s recent Nobel Prize, Blog Action Day is a
global effort for thousands of bloggers the world over to blog about
the environment.

My views on the environment are a little more niche, and I feel quite happy about that. I’m a member of the Optimum Population Trust,
an organisation dedicated to educating the public and their leaders
about the world’s population levels, and more importantly, the
population levels that our planet can sustain.

Now, there are a number of problems with the OPT. They have a message, an important message, so they have a great website and blog, right? Wrong. They have a lame online presence. Their blog
has 3 posts. They haven’t blogged at all for Blog Action Day. It might
be a resource issue, but I think they simply don’t get it.

They can’t rely on convincing politicians and then expecting the
politicians to do the driving. The vast majority of politicians want
one thing above all others, power, they want to be elected. If saying
“the sky is blue” made them unelectable, they wouldn’t say it. They
can’t voice the theories and evidence of the OPT because they are too
“left field”, they would be branded anti-people, and would become
unelectable. They shouldn’t rely on the doctrinal systems to put their
message across either. Pretty much all western mainstream media outlets
follow the Chomsky-Herman propaganda model to the last detail.

The Internet would allow the OPT to sidestep the official channels.
The OPT cannot gain traction until it already has public mind-share.
Get public mind-share first, then the doctrinal systems will take note,
pressuring the politicians to act. It’s sad, but that’s how it works.