I like the long journal entries. Keep 'em coming. Wish I had more time to read (and write) them, tho...
I wish that I could see all the entries that I haven't read yet, even those that have scrolled off. I think the activity is growing to the point where diaries are popular enough to not be able to keep up with completely. I've been reading in the morning and in the evening for the past few days and I already know that I've missed some--and I have no way of knowing what I missed so that I can try to find it again. (The same comment applies to posts in response to articles, too--though this is the first place I've been where I've actually somewhat cared about keeping up with replies to articles, since I never have on Slashdot.)
I also wish that new entries for a person wouldn't bump the old ones off the list--but that may just be me.
Maybe we're going totally beyond the intended bounds of the diary system, but I think we've got a novel system here and rather than try to curtail it, we (ahem, The Powers That Be) should let it expand into what it really wants to be--if that winds up being an actual message board of sorts, then so be it!
I've seen others, when making a comment on somebody else's entry, making it into a hyperlink to the person's info page (and, thus, to their diary). I'll try to discipline myself into doing that; unless/until something more full-fledged in the way of a message base comes along, I humbly suggest that we adopt doing that as a semi-formal practice for replying to diary entries.
dhd: Re project management and small inferiority complexes: I feel your pain. My only advice: Hey, cut it out, that hurts! <jk>
Seriously, I'm nagged by those doubts at times:
- I rationalize my equivalent of #5 (and the impact that
has on #1) by
saying that if I don't keep up with new, potentially useful
info when I have
something like down time (meaning, nothing's due tomorrow)
that I can use to
absorb it, it won't be around for those times when I'm
called upon to do
something with it right away, to fix something that just
broke, that nobody
can figure out how to fix or rewrite to do things like they
should have been
done six months ago when it was originally deployed.
(Insert appropriate Mr.
Scott "miracle worker" comment here.)
- #6 doesn't bug me too much, literally, though I do
wonder why I
didn't think of x before when we really needed it.
(See above.)
- I actually tend to pride myself on #4.
If I understand your statement correctly, you tend to say "Yes I can do that" when you know that you can't do it (or can do something but can't do The Right Thing(TM), etc.) I tend to go the opposite direction: When I feel pressured to come up with the "yes, ma'am, I can fix it this afternoon" answer that they're wanting, I tend to say "No, we can't do that until next week" even if I know that if I tried, if it were really critical to get fixed NOW, I could get something going right away, just because I want to see to it that The Right Thing(TM) gets accomplished.
On the general project management discussion front, for those of you who haven't read it, I absolutely recommend Rapid Development as the definitive book of insight into how a project should be run. Though it nominally talks about how to handle a project whose primary goal is a short deadline, it really covers good development/management practices for all kinds of projects.
kelly: Reminds me of: "The love of money is the root of all evil"--I Timothy 6:10--which is probably one of the most misquoted verses in the Bible. I absolutely agree with your exegesis.
lkcl: It seems that we need some defense against unclosed HTML tags...