The Noble Art of Maintenance Programming: "We should probably have our best developers doing software maintenance, not whoever draws the shortest straw."

+1

There's a set of skills, like the ability to delve into an unfamiliar codebase and architecture and try to work out what's going on, which doing maintenance work builds. And whilst it can be frustrating and sometimes doesn't offer the same opportunities for creative expression that starting-from-scratch can, it's really good experience IMHO.

One of the projects we have on at the moment has a hefty maintenance angle to it, and it's been interesting watching the guys doing the work go through the daunting process of familiarising themselves with the project, the frustration of working out sometimes baroque elements of it, and the eventual satisfaction when things come together.

The Genius Sperm Bank: "He insisted he was just trying to take advantage of the possibilities of genetics. The women came flocking."

Some nice snippets from Mike Rowehl at BayCHI: "When women text message they tend to have multiple threads of conversation bundled into each message, and there tends to be more of a structure to the message itself. Standard things like a sign off for each message (kisses, love you, etc). Messages from men a simple and normally singularly focused."

A nice post drawing analogies between physical and digital spaces: An Elite Is Inevitable?: "As I think about building an online space which recognizes the value of proximity and unintentional contact, it seems like a technical infrastructure which forces space to be a finite, limited resource with transferable control has the potential to increase the value for people in that space."

...though of course, I'm not sure why it matters that online spaces "tend to become sprawling ghost towns", or why reuse of land matters when this sprawl is entirely virtual. Viva la sprawl!

Walsh alert! "Mark Walsh, from the Aiki Corps, has just sent us a report from Awassa, Ethiopia, where he went to teach aikido for three months"

I'm looking forward to hearing some good stories, Mark ;)