A nice way to look at the cost of cutting corners and making strategic decisions about putting things off..

The term "technical debt" was coined by Ward Cunningham to describe the obligation that a software organization incurs when it chooses a design or construction approach that's expedient in the short term but that increases complexity and is more costly in the long term.
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What is Technical Debt? Two Basic Kinds
The first kind of technical debt is the kind that is incurred unintentionally. For example, a design approach just turns out to be error-prone or a junior programmer just writes bad code. This technical debt is the non-strategic result of doing a poor job. In some cases, this kind of debt can be incurred unknowingly, for example, your company might acquire a company that has accumulated significant technical debt that you don't identify until after the acquisition. Sometimes, ironically, this debt can be created when a team stumbles in its efforts to rewrite a debt-laden platform and inadvertently creates more debt. We'll call this general category of debt Type I.

The second kind of technical debt is the kind that is incurred intentionally. This commonly occurs when an organization makes a conscious decision to optimize for the present rather than for the future. "If we don't get this release done on time, there won't be a next release" is a common refrain—and often a compelling one. This leads to decisions like, "We don't have time to reconcile these two databases, so we'll write some glue code that keeps them synchronized for now and reconcile them after we ship." Or "We have some code written by a contractor that doesn't follow our coding standards; we'll clean that up later." Or "We didn't have time to write all the unit tests for the code we wrote the last 2 months of the project. We'll right those tests after the release." (We'll call this Type II.)

http://blogs.constru...echnical-debt-2.aspx

I just did a fresh nLite install and wanted to get rid of IntelliPoint. Anyway, I integrated the drivers for my MS mouse but didn't want to be dependent on the bloated software that let's me remap the keys.

Today I found X-Mouse Button Control, a nice little program that does just what I want without all that other crap that I won't ever use. Now when I click the right side button, my clipboard (ClipX) pops up just where I need it.

A Few of the options in those combo boxes:
 

•     Copy/Cut/Paste
•     Volume Up/Down/Mute
•     Media Player control
•     Send a custom keystroke sequence
•     Launch you email (or any) application.
•     Capture screen (or active window) image to clipboard.
•     Click-Drag [Sticky Buttons].
•     Vista support with some Vista only featurs such as 'Show Sidebar', 'Flip 3D' etc.

Tower Defense Games Collection

I searched the forum for tower defense games, and made this list with all the online ones posted on the forum.  Enjoy them as your productivity decreases!

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To make a long story short, I googled red-monday thinking it was either just a strange website, a movie or game promotional thing, or...
I found a reference to a term handed down from McCarthyism, and caught a suggestion from a blog post and a forum post that it may be a rabbithole for a new ARG.
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I googled ARG and was introduced to a whole new world:

An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions.

I am continually amazed at what an overwhelming communications system like the internet is capable of spawning, and this is the latest thing that has got me saying "Well, looky there... that's very interesting..."

I've been looking for backup software to do versioned differential backups. I tend to prefer hands-on packages and was trying out SyncBackSE when I noticed zridling's mini-review of Super Flexible File Synchronizer.

Back in May some people expressed the intention of switching to SFFS from SyncBackSE. Now that the dust has settled, are people happy about the move - if they made it? Or, on closer inspection, did they find features of SyncBackSE that they preferred to those of SFFS after all?

Both look to me as if they would do what I want, but I didn't see much in the way of detailed comparison that would have enabled me to make a choice between the two. Unfortunately, my trial of SyncBackSe has run out so I can't compare them in action.

In favour of SyncBackSE, it has a very lively forum, lots of documentation, and is about $10 cheaper than SFFS - even with the latter's discount. I also tend to like companies that offer decent free versions of their software as well as paid ones (e.g. like SyncBack and NoteTab). In favour of SFFS, it has a rather neater interface, and some enthusiastic users here.

Today is a special day for Cody our mascot.  His creator just made two special new pictures..