Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Take a break from your Harry Potter and try my latest Guardian piece: Stepping Up Support.

Overworked IT departments need to get away from fire fighting and find the time and budgets to develop new systems, but buying in support isn't as simple as it used to be. Open source technologies are appealing, but unsupported software isn't. Meanwhile, consolidation is transforming the IT marketplace, and making familiar products and platforms obsolete.

All is not lost. A new generation of support services and technologies is arriving to help IT departments handle these changes.

In which I find out how open source support can make money, how to deploy Windows painlessly, how they do IT at the V&A, and what happened to Kim Polese and Marc Andreessen. Yes, even IT support can be fun...

Action figure gets some real weed action. Funniest Flickr photoset yet?

(via Piers)

Researching a Guardian piece, I came across Tripods.

It's a multi player game running over a Google map of New York. Click the buttons to move your piece and attack the invading tripod blobs, while moving the map around. Just don't get squashed by the tripods. You can even talk to other players to set up a strategy, all by the magic of AJAX...

Why yes, I am working!