Blogging is bad for your health ...

A recent study showed that a group of students that was maintaining a web log was more stressed and physically in a less shape than a group of non-bloggers.

Is this disturbing news or what? Well, it is just one of those studies that we see wuite often. Red wine is supposed to be good or bad every five to six months depending on the nationality of the researchers. French institutes obviously always show the ebnefit of drinking red wine. And the some months later one is supposed to drink white wine. Or beer if the researcher comes from Germany or Belgium.

I just read these reports, or rather the extracted news item. This is always out of context and therefore much more readable, more newsworthy and thus much more fun. It gives yet another smile and a nice piece of discussion food for lingering a little longer at the coffee machine with co-workers.

Coming back to the blogging being bad for one's health. The reason that people were less off with blogging is the bloggers tend to go on and on about things that bother them. In that way they never got over it and the problem got bigger in stead of less by writing about it.

Any how, I will keep on blogging and I'll be careful not keep going on and on and on about little things that bother me.

But then again in five moths time some other researcher will have proven the opposite. Or that we should drink red wine while blogging. Cheers!

Just another day at the office ..

Eventhough I should not generalize I must admit that this morning I did bang my head on the table muttering: Those stupid Belgians! They are not all stupid, but some of them tend do these horrble nasty things that just do not make any sense. Some of them are OK, one of my collegeaus is from Belgium.

So what happened?

Well we have another software project going on, under the ususal time pressure. (One of these small changes, that according to them was a simple case of copy-n-paste: a five minute job, including documentation. My first estimate on the other hand was 160 hours of work. Just a weeny tad more than five minutes.

What really annoyed me this morning that I specifically insisted on having a separate development environment as the present changes would already have impact on the present application and we would not want the users to get all confused, now would we? So what I found out that they have created a mixed developemnt and production environment for me to work in. Users all of a sudden now have an option to select things that are not giving them the desired results, just complete bogus.

And .. oh how we try to deliver quality!

Elections ...

Looking from the other side of the ocean it is difficult to suppress a smile every now and then when observing the Presidential campaigns of both Bush and Kerry. They seem to focus on very few things to get the most attention from voters and potential voters. They cannot say anything to radical or outspoken because they need votes from another group as well. But the race being so tight means that they are even more careful. They both need the same group of voters so they can not step too far apart from that group nor the other candidates opinion.

Also the pathetic mud slinging at each other almost makes one smiles. I think the Republican convention was an ethical low in that sense. Trying to break down the other candidate by looking in a very detailed and out of context analysis of voting in the past seems to me as ridiculous. As if someone can not for some reason vote for a proposal and later against another one that seems to have some superficial link.

But this only almost makes me smile. Because for some reason this country has so much influence on the lives of so many people and countries outside of North America. And then to realise that the Greatest Democracy in the World is being governed by the person with the most money in their campaign, the most efficient PR machine and not by default the Best man for the job, should be more than enough to start worry any person who likes democracy.

More news on the future ...

I just read the September issue of my horoscope on Astrology Zone and apparently my big day of this onth can either happen on the 14th or 21st or the 20th.

I can hardly wait!

Web design in miniature ...

Now with so many people walking around with these tiny PDA thingies and web enabled mobile phones, the time has finally arrive for designing web sites that fit these small screens.

A List Apart has just published yet another good article on this subject.

A List Apart is one of those sites that you just need as a resource for good web design technology. I must admit that I learned many of the tricks from this site and I use them all the time.