I use Photoshop 7 to create the graphic elements I need for my video. It’s not that I necessarily have a preference for Photoshop, except that its the only graphics creation program that I have… and it’s the only one I took a self-paced tutorial about for Graphics creation in Avid. Photoshop definetely has its limitations, but for my current purposes, it works just fine for me.

I have a number of graphical elements I need to create for the Shiloh video. They include importing still photographs, creating titles, and putting together simple animations. The animations have been tricky. But I’ve so far managed to figure out one issue. I needed to make a map of the Southeast US that shows mound sites. The map would have to be edited into a 10 second clip of the sequence, so I wanted the mound sites to appear to sprinkle onto the map… or multiply. So to do the animation, I put each mound site on a seperate layer, and saved each layer addition as a seperate file. Then, after importing them into Avid, I edited each one in succession into the sequence. It wasn’t by any means fancy… but it didn’t look bad. 16 graphics into 10 seconds… I bet I could add some effects to it… but it ain’t bad for a first effort.

The title graphics are a little easier. It’s only a matter of creating the graphic, creating the alpha channel, then importing into Avid to test it (IT’S ALWAYS IMPORTANT TO TEST GRAPHICS BEFORE INVESTING A LOT OF TIME TWEAKING THEM INTO FINALITY). I created several to choose from, then after the first test, narrowed it down, and continued to tweak as I tested. I haven’t finished the video editing yet, but since I’m in a holding pattern while waiting for my still images, I thought I’d get started on the titles. (I’m still working up ideas for my timeline graphic-which will be the hardest). I can’t always remember how I create elements for the graphic. I should write down everything that I do… but a second best option is to save every composition into an editable version with each layer seperated (and hide layers that didn’t work out instead of delete them). I duplicate the file, then manipulate and save as, if it needs to be merged for alpha channel creation. It does create a lot of files, but then I’m covered if something needs to change or revert back to an earlier format.

Anyway, the crash course in graphics creation continues… slowly, but steadily. I’ve been checking out other archaeology videos on archaeologychannel.com for ideas. All I can say is, out of the vast majority of videos, most have pretty lousy graphics. Oh yeah, my amateur graphics are lookin’ fine…

(From the New York Times)
By SHARON WAXMAN

Published: December 1, 2004

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 30 – For the first time since 1979, the treasures of the legendary Egyptian boy king, Tutankhamen, will tour the United States next year, but will bypass the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York because of a disagreement, Egypt’s chief archaeologist said Tuesday.

Zahi Hawass, the head of Egyptian antiquities, said the exhibit, which is now touring Europe, would open in June at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and go on to at least three other American cities.

The exhibit will allow the American public the first glimpse in a generation of the ancient Egyptian treasures, he said.

“Twenty-six years ago King Tut captured the hearts of everyone,” Mr. Hawass said in an interview. “This will capture the hearts of people again. It will bring peace, and strengthen relations between America and Egypt. King Tut is back.”

The tour after Los Angeles would include Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Chicago and one other city. Mr. Hawass said he was negotiating to take the exhibit to Boston, Philadelphia and the Brooklyn Museum, but hoped it would be shown in Manhattan.

The exhibit will include King Tut’s diamond crown, his gold coffin and a chair from his tomb, along with 47 other objects. An additional 81 objects from King Tut’s ancestors, including Akhenaten and Queen Ti, would also be part of the exhibit, to be co-sponsored by Anschutz Entertainment Group and National Geographic. The exhibit has been in Basel, Switzerland, and is now in Bonn.

Tutankhamen was crowned at age 8 and died mysteriously in 1325 B.C., at age 18. The discovery of his tomb in 1922 was one of the most spectacular finds in Egyptian archaeological history.

Mr. Hawass said a major reason Egypt had decided on the exhibit was to raise money for its crumbling antiquities: the Pyramids, the Sphinx and the priceless statuary and treasures in the Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens.

“There are no free meals anymore,” he said. “We have a task. These monuments will be gone in 100 years if we don’t raise the money to restore them.”

Money was the central reason that Egypt was unable to reach an agreement to bring the new exhibit to the Met, one of the central organizers of the landmark exhibit in the 1970′s.

Mr. Hawass said he received a letter from the Met’s director, Philippe de Montebello, last week saying he had been unable to persuade the Board of Trustees to break the museum’s policy and charge a separate admission for the show. Mr. de Montebello, reached by phone on Tuesday, reiterated that policy.

Mr. Hawass said Egypt made no money on the original exhibit, which from 1976 to 1979 displayed 55 pieces from the tomb. The show, which toured six cities, was a cultural sensation in the United States, attended by millions of people. It opened the era of blockbuster museum shows.

But when the exhibit was transferred to Germany in 1981, one artifact was damaged and the Egyptian Parliament recommended that the treasures not leave Egypt again.

Mr. Hawass and the Egyptian culture minister, Farouk Hosni, went to Parliament last year and persuaded the legislators to allow the treasures to travel again as a way of raising money, both for the antiquities and for a $500 million museum beside the Pyramids in the Giza district of Cairo.

Mr. Hawass said he hoped to raise about $10 million in each city on the American tour. The exhibit is to be announced in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

I once made fun of scrapbooking. I told a girl I know that I couldn’t believe anyone spent that much time, energy, and money pasting photos and things into a book. Coincidentally, she and her friends stopped inviting me to their scrapbooking gatherings. In telling the story later to my hairdresser, she pointed out that scrapbooking offers some women a chance to get together and bond and that some of the work is gorgeous. I told her that I hadn’t thought of that, and for once, felt ashamed that I said bad things about the practice. But the thought was fleeting. I still think scrapbooking is stupid.

I don’t know why, it just seems silly. It’s just an activity I don’t think is fun… so forgive me. Maybe it’s because it’s such a new craft. I have a lot of respect for the crafts my mother, grandmother, and great grandmother did… we’re talking about embroidery, knitting, crocheting, sewing, and quilting. I even do some cross stitch myself. And every winter, I try to learn something new. Last year it was knitting, but I think I need a refresher course. This year I want to learn mosaics. To me, that’s something tangible. Something you can see every day.

I made scrapbooks when I was in high school. Part of the fun was that I was just putting in everything that meant something to me… and not everything looked pretty. That was part of the fun. Besides… I never look at those scrapbooks. What good is it to put all your time and energy into something you rarely enjoy? That’s just me. I’m sure there are people who feel differently, like that girl I must have insulted. But I’m glad I don’t have to make up an excuse not to go to those scrapbooking parties.

I don’t know what it is about December, but there’s either too much to do or too little. This year I’ve decided to skip decorating for Christmas AND I’ve whittled down my activities to just a few. There is still a lot to do on the documentary, but I’m waiting on some images before work can progress.
The good news is, I finally have time to do all that reading I’ve been meaning to catch up on.

I have a stack of books on my night table… The first to leave just recently is the book by British author Lynn Truss: “Eats, Shoots, & Leaves.” It’s pretty light-reading, despite the fact that it’s about the state of puctuation today. I guess I should have laughed more, but sometimes British humor tends to elude me. I like dry humor as much as the next person, but some things in the book that people (I guess) find hilarious, I found merely amusing. Besides, I’m more of a grammar person myself. I tend to notice blantant grammerical problems more so than puctuation. For example, I see typos in the paper all the time. Once, at a gas station bathroom in southern Georgia, I actually began mentally correcting the graffiti I read on the wall.

“Eats, Shoots, & Leaves” is pretty good. It reminds you of how important puctuation is in our language, and how we should still learn it despite the fact that even experts disagree about how it should be used and that advertisers and marketers don’t know much about it. Anyway, Truss’ book was a fast read. I finished the second half in one afternoon.

What else is waiting in the stack of books? David Sedaris’ “Naked”, which a friend tells me is a wonderful way to get aquainted with the author. I’ve never read his work before, but it seems like, lately, that’s all anyone’s been talking about. I also have two Stephen J. Gould books. You know, that’s the author that religious conservatives hate for writing about evolution. I’ve already read one of his books, about the Cambrian explosion of creatures. It was really good. It was “Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History.” The ones I hope to read soon are “The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox” and “Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball.” I’m also reading 2 other heavy books, for research: “The Osage and the Invisible World” and “Ancient North America.” My brother also just gave me Noam Chomsky’s latest, which he said was really eye-opening. Oh, and I’ve got one historical fiction, which is my favorite genre of literature: Rosalind Miles’ second installment of the Guenevere trilogy, “Knight of the Sacred Lake.” So far, I’ve found it to be pretty depressing. The book fuels my distruct of organized Christianity and my feminist side, and it makes me angry with the male-oriented dominance of the Western world. Her first Guenevere book was illuminating. It definetely takes Guenevere out of the side-lines of Authurian lore and present her side of the story from a viewpoint outside of Christianity. In many ways, the customs and sexual beliefs that Miles illustrates as being normal for Guenevere’s people are not that far from progressive thought in the Western World about feminine right to control her own body. It shows the struggle between the old religion of the Celts and their worship of the female with the “new” religion of the Christians, with their desire to supress the feminine, and replace the old female gods with one male one. HMMMMMMMM….

A word of advice for couples: if you can avoid long distance relationships, do. It’s not that they can’t be survived. A relationship can even be stronger after dealing with the long-distance frustration. But it’s hard. Really hard. Andy and I are dealing with our second long-distance relationship. The first one lasted three years and ended just before we got married. At the time, we had the luxury of taking turns to drive and see each other every other weekend. We were only 3 hours apart. This time, we’re three states apart and more than 500 miles. Fortunately, we have cell phones and unlimited PCS to PCS minutes this time. And with the holidays, time off to fly to see each other. Still, combine the stress of moving with that of the holidays, plus the strain of missing the one you love, and hearts tend to weigh heavy. I thought it would be easy. Only a few weeks and bam! It would be over. As it turns out, it will be a bit longer than we planned. In fact, it sometimes seems as if it will never end.
So I offer one more piece of advice for couples: hang tight, but if you have to be apart, talk as much as you can and let the other person vent, vent, vent. I promise you, they’re not mad at you. They’re mad at the situation and the stress, and it’s better to get out all those emotions. Pent up feelings can cripple you. Take it from someone who knows, and who’s been through this a few times herself.

(WBUR.ORG) 11-23-04

A federal judge in Georgia is expected to rule soon on a case about disclaimers that were placed inside biology text books in suburban Atlanta. The disclaimers reads: “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.”

The Georgia case is one of several challenging the teaching of evolution, Raja Mishra of the Boston Globe has covered the story. He writes that evolution is considered by scientists to be among the most important and supported scientific theory of all time.

The debate between evolutionists and creationists is being played out in schools, and in the six bookstores in the Grand Canyon National Park. A faith-based book called “Grand Canyon: A Different View” is being sold in the park’s federally funded bookstores.

It reflects the young earth theory of creationism that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that Grand Canyon was formed as a result of Noah’s great flood.

Critics say a faith based book should not be sold in federally funded bookstores.

Elaine Sevy, a spokesperson with the National Park system, said in a written statement that government attorneys are reviewing the matter. Sevy wrote: “Our nation values freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Because park bookstores carry books presenting a variety of ideas and perspectives, does not mean the park system endorses those viewpoints any more than a public library endorses all the views of the books it contains.”

Tom Vail is the books author, and a rafting guide who runs Canyon Ministries, rafting trips with a creationist point of view. Here & Now asked Vail to explain his view of the Grand Canyon’s genesis.

http://here-now.org/shows/2004/11/20041123_2.asp

(From the New York Times 11-27-04)

Surrounded by hundreds of shoppers grabbing bargain-priced flat-screen television sets and portable music players early yesterday morning, Jill Mulhere was trying to figure out what happened to her shopping cart, heaped with presents, at the Best Buy store in Paramus, N.J. She had paused to look at just one more deal – an Allegro DVD-VCR combination for $59.99 – before joining the long checkout line.

“Somebody actually stole my shopping cart!” Ms. Mulhere said. “I said, ‘That’s it; this place is a zoo.’ ”

Instead of returning home, though, she drove to Circuit City, about a mile away along Route 17, a slow-moving highway lined with strip malls. Circuit City was only slightly less chaotic, but she ended up buying the DVD-VCR player, a Sony, for $134.

“You know,” she said, “my brother asked me at Thanksgiving, ‘Was there really all this Black Friday pandemonium when we were growing up?’ ”

Across the country yesterday, millions of Americans – most of them taking the entire day off from work – rushed into suburban malls, filled downtown shopping streets and department stores and mobbed discount stores everywhere.

Often, they were waving colorful circulars and shopping lists, hungry for the hundreds of bargains promised to those who got there first.

Merchants, eager to lure crowds of buyers wielding credit cards, opened even earlier than last year – in some places well before dawn.

Any specific figures on how much people bought yesterday will not be available until the end of the weekend at the earliest – and maybe not even then. Nonetheless, based on anecdotal evidence and some initial soundings, retailers generally were optimistic about the coming holiday shopping season.

“We’ve never had so many early birds come out for the specials, not in numbers like this,” said Karen MacDonald, a spokesman for Taubman Centers, which owns or manages 22 shopping centers across the country, including the high-end Short Hills mall in New Jersey.

And with just about every store promising an unbeatable deal, the day after Thanksgiving – which had lost its status as the highest spending day of the year a decade ago to the Saturday before Christmas and regained it just last year – looks likely to hang on to the distinction another year.

Not far from Union Square in San Francisco, Pam Donohue, 49, an aide at a senior citizens’ food delivery service, said she was buying the brand items coveted by her two teenagers: Ugg boots, an Ugg black purse and BCBG black shoes. But she was also comparison shopping to get the really big present for this Christmas: a Hewlett-Packard Pavilion desktop computer the girls need for school.

In Chicago, Tammy Jowers, 40, and her family braved a snowstorm Wednesday night, going from their home in Dyersburg, Tenn., to line up in front of Marshall Field’s at 5:30 a.m. “Everybody wants an iPod,” Ms. Jowers said. “Instead of a cruise, we’re getting iPods.”

For this year’s Black Friday – called that because it is the day retailers traditionally expected to break into the black, or profitable territory, for the year – the emphasis was on electronics, according to retailers, analysts and a host of shoppers interviewed yesterday.

Part of the reason, according to pollsters like Britt Beemer, chairman of America’s Research, a survey firm in Charleston, S.C., was that toy manufacturers had failed to come up with any must-have new toys to compete with the MP3 players, high-definition television sets and heavily promoted new computer games that seemed to be on millions of lists. And no particular articles of clothing were creating much buzz either, retail experts said.

At the Sears stores in the New York region, John Ford, the district manager, said consumer electronics was definitely the top-selling category yesterday. Larry Costello, a national spokesman for Sears, Roebuck, said foot traffic was significantly higher than last year in every major market, probably because Sears tripled its number of sales promotions over last year. The chain gave out $10 gift cards to the first 200 people in line at each store, along with offering early shoppers digital cameras for $49.99 and DVD players for $19.99.

Wal-Mart, by far the nation’s largest retailer, has decided not to release one-day figures for the day after Thanksgiving, as the company did in the past.

“Although we expect to have one of the best days of the year, it’s not fair to use it as a barometer for the whole season,” Karen Burk, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said last night. She added that the company was “cautiously optimistic” for the holidays.

Scott Krugman, a spokesman for the National Retail Federation, repeated his trade group’s projections for the holiday season: a rise of 4.5 percent over last year, slightly down from the 5.1 percent increase over 2002. This year, pollsters and consultants, in e-mailed predictions, are using words like “respectable” and “decent” to describe expected sales for the 2004 holidays. Ever since 1999, when sales increases reached double-digit levels at most retailers, the industry has been forced to live with much more modest gains.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/27/business/27shopping.html?hp&ex=1101618000&en=d0146089706f3bd4&ei=5094&partner=homepage

The newspapers are filled with stories of shoppers mobbing stores for early morning bargains, pushing, shoving, and the kinds of behavior Santa would definetely not approve of. Yes, the Christmas season is here. Threats of the fast-approaching holiday season in Old Navy commercials finally full-filled themselves, and that traditional season of buying everything you can for your loved one, decorating to the nigh, and throwing Christmas parties is here. Ahhh, time to crawl in the house and hide.
I’m somewhat torn about how I feel during this time of year. I usually enjoy Christmas, and the decorations, and the food; but, at the same time, I feel loathsome toward the blantent commercialism that has hijacked this religious holiday. Each year I feel less and less jolly as Christmas approaches. I was hoping this year would be better, now that I’ve shed my mall retail job, in lue for one at a specialty shop. I’ve also managed to avoid working the entire week of Thanksgiving; however, it hasn’t helped much. Oh sure, being with family is great. And, I’m very appreciative of this time I have with them: especially since this is my first Thanksgiving home in years. But I just can’t get anymore excited. Am I the only one? Am I the only person who looks out on the yearly rush of the holidays as an incredible bore that merely causes me more stress and weight gain than I need?
This year, with the move to Austin, I’ve decided not to drag my Christmas decorations down from the attic. I would be the only one there to look at them, anyway, and would they really bring me that much joy?
Perhaps the holiday spirit will strike me in the coming days, when I receive a card, or witness some act of kindness and giving. Or when I realize how to express my love to different family members with gifts I actually thought about and made, instead of handing over my credit card. High hopes indeed.

Victory! Well sort of. I’ve spent the last month working on gathering images of artifacts and depictions of Mississippian cultural life for the Shiloh documentary. I’ve finally made some headway. I have permission from two photographers to use their images of artifacts… and the pictures are beautiful… professionally shot. I have yet to have the images in my possession, but permission goes a long way. One photographer is actually a professor at the University of Memphis who shoots artifacts on the side. His work is beautiful and is featured prominently in a catalog that accompanies a current Chicago Art Institute exhibit on Mississippian art. The other photographer works at the McClung Museum at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. I should have them all in about 2 months. Meanwhile, I almost did a cartwheel today when I got a message back from an artist who’s letting me use his work. Martin Pate painted several pictures depicting what life may have been like at the Shiloh Indian Mound complex. I thought he would ask me to pay, but he didn’t! And his work is beautiful, too. I know… you probably don’t think it’s exciting. But it’s a step. It’s a learning process. I’m just learning how to contact these artists about using their work. And it’s not all cake. I’m still waiting on the National Anthropological Archives to get back to me about who holds the copyrights to several reels of film I would like to use. I need permission to use them if they aren’t in the public domain. Locating the images and film clips tends to be easy over the internet, but unfirtunately, many sites do NOT post who holds the copyright. Many libraries offer images readily, but for commercial or video use, you have to secure permission from any third-party copyright holders. I’ve found there are also a proliferation of websites that offer hefty prices for stock footage or photographs. Generally, for my purposes at least, you don’t need them. A lot of archaeological film and photographs are held in federal or state government departments. The way I found out about the photographs in Knoxville and Memphis was just by asking. I met people, found out what was available, and agreed to help them out by giving them on-screen credit and/or recommending them to other people. People tend to be really helpful, too, when you tell them about your project. It helps if they see how excited you are about the project, because they get excited and want to help. It may not work when your budget is high or the project is non-educational, but at this point (no-budget), people understand. That’s reassuring, because it helps the learning process, and hopefully, future victories will come along a little easier and faster.

(This test was found on a website blog- it’s kind of inspiring)

Sometimes I just can’t get anything done.

Sure, I come into the office, putter around, check my email every ten seconds, read the web, even do a few brainless tasks like paying the American Express bill. But getting back into the flow of writing code just doesn’t happen.

TetrisThese bouts of unproductiveness usually last for a day or two. But there have been times in my career as a developer when I went for weeks at a time without being able to get anything done. As they say, I’m not in flow. I’m not in the zone. I’m not anywhere.

Everybody has mood swings; for some people they are mild, for others, they can be more pronounced or even dysfunctional. And the unproductive periods do seem to correlate somewhat with gloomier moods.

It makes me think of those researchers who say that basically people can’t control what they eat, so any attempt to diet is bound to be short term and they will always yoyo back to their natural weight. Maybe as a software developer I really can’t control when I’m productive, and I just have to take the slow times with the fast times and hope that they average out to enough lines of code to make me employable.

Go read The Onion for a while.

What drives me crazy is that ever since my first job I’ve realized that as a developer, I usually average about two or three hours a day of productive coding. When I had a summer internship at Microsoft, a fellow intern told me he was actually only going into work from 12 to 5 every day. Five hours, minus lunch, and his team loved him because he still managed to get a lot more done than average. I’ve found the same thing to be true. I feel a little bit guilty when I see how hard everybody else seems to be working, and I get about two or three quality hours in a day, and still I’ve always been one of the most productive members of the team. That’s probably why when Peopleware and XP insist on eliminating overtime and working strictly 40 hour weeks, they do so secure in the knowledge that this won’t reduce a team’s output.

But it’s not the days when I “only” get two hours of work done that worry me. It’s the days when I can’t do anything.

I’ve thought about this a lot. I tried to remember the time when I got the most work done in my career. It was probably when Microsoft moved me into a beautiful, plush new office with large picture windows overlooking a pretty stone courtyard full of cherry trees in bloom. Everything was clicking. For months I worked nonstop grinding out the detailed specification for Excel Basic — a monumental ream of paper going into incredible detail covering a gigantic object model and programming environment. I literally never stopped. When I had to go to Boston for MacWorld I took a laptop with me, and documented the Window class sitting on a pleasant terrace at HBS.

Once you get into flow it’s not too hard to keep going. Many of my days go like this: (1) get into work (2) check email, read the web, etc. (3) decide that I might as well have lunch before getting to work (4) get back from lunch (5) check email, read the web, etc. (6) finally decide that I’ve got to get started (7) check email, read the web, etc. (8) decide again that I really have to get started (9) launch the damn editor and (10) write code nonstop until I don’t realize that it’s already 7:30 pm.

Somewhere between step 8 and step 9 there seems to be a bug, because I can’t always make it across that chasm.bike trip For me, just getting started is the only hard thing. An object at rest tends to remain at rest. There’s something incredible heavy in my brain that is extremely hard to get up to speed, but once it’s rolling at full speed, it takes no effort to keep it going. Like a bicycle decked out for a cross-country, self-supported bike trip — when you first start riding a bike with all that gear, it’s hard to believe how much work it takes to get rolling, but once you are rolling, it feels just as easy as riding a bike without any gear.

Maybe this is the key to productivity: just getting started. Maybe when pair programming works it works because when you schedule a pair programming session with your buddy, you force each other to get started.

When I was an Israeli paratrooper a general stopped by to give us a little speech about strategy. In infantry battles, he told us, there is only one strategy: Fire and Motion. You move towards the enemy while firing your weapon. The firing forces him to keep his head down so he can’t fire at you. (That’s what the soldiers mean when they shout “cover me.” It means, “fire at our enemy so he has to duck and can’t fire at me while I run across this street, here.” It works.) The motion allows you to conquer territory and get closer to your enemy, where your shots are much more likely to hit their target. If you’re not moving, the enemy gets to decide what happens, which is not a good thing. If you’re not firing, the enemy will fire at you, pinning you down.

I remembered this for a long time. I noticed how almost every kind of military strategy, from air force dogfights to large scale naval maneuvers, is based on the idea of Fire and Motion. It took me another fifteen years to realize that the principle of Fire and Motion is how you get things done in life. You have to move forward a little bit, every day. It doesn’t matter if your code is lame and buggy and nobody wants it. If you are moving forward, writing code and fixing bugs constantly, time is on your side. Watch out when your competition fires at you. Do they just want to force you to keep busy reacting to their volleys, so you can’t move forward?

Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP. The companies who stumble are the ones who spend too much time reading tea leaves to figure out the future direction of Microsoft. People get worried about .NET and decide to rewrite their whole architecture for .NET because they think they have to. Microsoft is shooting at you, and it’s just cover fire so that they can move forward and you can’t, because this is how the game is played, Bubby. Are you going to support Hailstorm? SOAP? RDF? Are you supporting it because your customers need it, or because someone is firing at you and you feel like you have to respond? The sales teams of the big companies understand cover fire. They go into their customers and say, “OK, you don’t have to buy from us. Buy from the best vendor. But make sure that you get a product that supports (XML / SOAP / CDE / J2EE) because otherwise you’ll be Locked In The Trunk.” Then when the little companies try to sell into that account, all they hear is obedient CTOs parrotting “Do you have J2EE?” And they have to waste all their time building in J2EE even if it doesn’t really make any sales, and gives them no opportunity to distinguish themselves. It’s a checkbox feature — you do it because you need the checkbox saying you have it, but nobody will use it or needs it. And it’s cover fire.

Fire and Motion, for small companies like mine, means two things. You have to have time on your side, and you have to move forward every day. Sooner or later you will win. All I managed to do yesterday is improve the color scheme in FogBUGZ just a little bit. That’s OK. It’s getting better all the time. Every day our software is better and better and we have more and more customers and that’s all that matters. Until we’re a company the size of Oracle, we don’t have to think about grand strategies. We just have to come in every morning and somehow, launch the editor.