Is SharePoint wiki evangelist an oxymoron?

I was nominated to proselytize on wikis at work, with a goal of helping build a departmental wiki. We have SharePoint (tm) and at first I didn't think this was feasible, given the term wiki doesn't return any hits on the internal SharePoint search engine.

After a quick Google, I found instructions for creating a wiki site, and while minimalist to the point of oppression, it seems feasible.

I managed to get in touch with Stewart Mader, of the wikipatterns book and site, and am hoping for professional help.

I shared the 90-9-1 theory with my boss; my "going-in" position is that we can't expect a lot of participation, but measuring usage will be important.

My previous post on the inadequacy of SharePoint's blogging tools got reaction, as well as new contacts for future feedback.

New Year's Resolution - come up with a better name for what I'll be doing than Evangelist or Proselytizer. Suggestions?

Traditional Irish Music

Billy McComiskey and The Hedge Band played at the Creative Alliance tonight.

The crowd was a little slow getting into it, but by the second set there were plenty of tapping feet. It was also a slightly older crowd than the ones I've seen at J. Patrick's in Locust Point.

The possible highlight of the evening was Irish step dancing, starting with a precocious girl who later stated her age as "Six. And A Half." The two teens were just tremendous, and danced several times, including stepping through the aisles of the Creative Alliance performance room.



Billy's stories were as expected, wandering the ages and people of Irish music. The crowd pleaser was his announcement of how well the Old Bay Ceili Band did in the all-Irish contests earlier this year. You might need to be from Baltimore to see the humor.

The band consists of Donna Long on piano and fiddle, Laura Byrne Egan on wooden flute and whistle, Pat Egan on guitar, and Billy McComiskey on button accordion. Everyone sang, though Pat was under the weather, and declared he was doing a Barry White set.

CDs were available, but I think I have all of them already. Here are links if you want to find them on Amazon or elsewhere:

Billy's latest: Outside The Box - Compass Records

Laura Byrne - Tune For The Road (mp3 $) - home page

Patrick Egan - home page

Donna Long - home page

Not the most high definition or fidelity, but here are a few seconds of the event from my camera phone.





Sent from my Windows SmartAleck® phone. And then fixed later on the web.

A Tale of Two Pegs

I'm working on a hobby project. I've used a couple of pieces of wood that were out in the shed (or "wood pile") left over from an IKEA bedframe (metric, to boot), as the base. The pegs I've collected over several years, as I would go to the store, think "do I have any pegs?"

I ended up with more than a dozen, each in "2 per" bags. After I ripped them open to fit into the holes I had drilled, I noticed there were 2 styles - both the package front and back were different. There were a few subtle changes.

• Old style had English and French; new style adds Spanish
• "FSC - 100% from well-managed forests" - see below
• Old style says "Established 1949 West Germany"; new style says only "Germany"
• New style has web link to www.wolfcraft.com
• Slight grammar improvement from "they come in a useful selection of sizes and shapes" to "Available in a wide variety of sizes and shapes"
  

Here's the FSC logo found on the newer package:


There is:

• http://fscus.org/
• http://www.fsc.org/
• and http://www.fsc-info.org/

FSC is the Forest Stewardship Council, and per their web site - "FSC is an independent, non-governmental, not for profit organization established to promote the responsible management of the world’s forests."

Being the data conscious person I am, I looked up the certification number, which I read as "SW COC 1564" or maybe 1584, or maybe even 1594. Alas, no hits. The only thing I found was that Wolfcraft in Germany has "Certificate Code: IMO-COC-25333." It does list a contact, with email and phone number.

I'm just curious if the certification is still valid.

What would Norm do?

The night the parking place stood still

I went to the 10PM Saturday showing of the colorized version of The Day the Earth Stood Still at the Senator Theatre, figuring parking would be easy, the crowd would be eccentric and the midnight moonlight after the end would be eerie.

The tiny photomosaic of 4 shots started as 4 different angles, taken from my cell phone camera, at 9:30 PM, e.g.:

bash-3.2$ jhead 1213082136.jpg
Nonfatal Error : '1213082136.jpg' Illegal value pointer for tag 9286
File name : 1213082136.jpg
File size : 344089 bytes
File date : 2008:12:14 06:38:24
Camera make : SAMSUNG Electronics
Camera model : Anycall SCH-i760
Date/Time : 2008:12:14 02:36:03
Resolution : 1280 x 960
Flash used : No
Focal length : 1.0mm
CCD width : 12996.92mm
Aperture : f/3.2
Focus dist. : 2.86m
ISO equiv. : 200
Exposure bias: 0.86
Exposure : shutter priority (semi-auto)
Comment : File written by Adobe Photoshop 5.0

The camera phone knows it was 2:36 AM GMT, but seems to think I'm in California. Ah well. The photomosaic was done with jpegtopnm, pnmscale and:

$ pnmindex -black -across 2 1213*pnm >1213-index.pnm

I then used XPaint with autocrop to save the JPG above. As a result, 4x350KB JPG shots condensed to a 10KB image.

I had enough room to squeeze into a spot between 2 meters, other than the car that was parked between 3 parking meters, in other words, halfway into 2 spots. I circled the block briefly, through a gas station, in order to get this brightly lit spot.

It must be society that is to blame, for planting parking meters at astronomical distances apart.

Oh, and the movie? Here's my 1AM (2008-12-14T05:24:15+00:00) tweet:

You'll enjoy the colorized The Day the Earth Stood Still more if you realize Keanu Reeves is playing Al Gore, not an alien.

Thanks Netflix, for having the 1951 version on Instant Watch.