I realised that I hadn’t checked for dead links for ages, and ran LinkSleuth.  In fact, I may never have used it since setting up the WordPress blog.  This is a great little program that has always worked very nicely in the past, but this time it apparently caused complete chaos.  Half the posts on the site vanished, the theme changed back to the basic old WordPress look, and all the Categories vanished.

I am still not quite sure what happened.  I may have entered the URL into LinkSleuth in such a way that it behaved incorrectly; the way I have my site set up with redirects may have upset LinkSleuth; or LinkSleuth may just be a bit dangerous with WordPress for some reason.  I’m not sure about this, but I can’t find anyone else complaining about it on Google.

Ironic that I was about to take a full site back-up and install a later version of WordPress!  Thankfully, my host service provider, my good friend Stephen Brehaut at Sricom, was able to ride in on his white horse this morning and roll back the site to Tuesday, and I have not lost anything!

It is at times like this that you realise how much you come to depend on your blog, particularly when it is at the heart of your business!

Still, if you rely on older technologies like paper, they can be just as vulnerable to various sorts of damage…

He has brought this great Michael Wesch YouTube video to my attention – Information R/evolution.  This was posted by Euan Semple.  This is something everybody should watch!

The title of my post here is a line from the video, and is a nod to this site and its associated book, which also looks interesting.

I am also learning that the WordPress editor does not seem to like embedding YouTube videos – although it does apparently do automatic emoticons…

Serena raises the perennial question of how to cope with vendor presentations at such major events.  KM is about people, but I think that most of us agree that many (although certainly not all) KM initiatives require some technology to support them.  Events like this need funding from vendors to make them possible (or they will come with much higher fees).  The vendors need to see some return on this investment, so they need a speaking spot.

The result is two entirely different types of presentation.  One from the viewpoint of people (and these may be either actual case studies or may be more about possibilities and research) and the other from the viewpoint of IT systems. 

Ark did concentrate on having the vendors present much more from a Case Study point of view this year, which did help.  But one vendor case study presentation that stuck in my mind still tended to focus much more on the actual system implementation and rollout than on the business situation that the technology solution was intended to address.

I worked in IT for five years – I am used to the mind set of IT vendors.  But surely it would be a better pitch to have presented this same case in a different way?  Hearing about the implementation does not make me more likely to buy the boxes and software.  If I heard more about the human and business sides of the same story, and liked what I heard, then I may be even more interested in buying the solution.  (Which of course assumes that I have a budget to buy it…)

Thanks to Patrick Lambe for sending me the link to this site…

The kind people at iKMS gave me a copy of Patrick Lambe’s (previous) book The Blind Tour Guide: Surviving and Prospering in the New Economy.  I have only had time to read the first few pages, but it has already given me fuel for a post here!  This relates to the distinctions we make between our personal and professional lives – but more on that later.

Reading the book gave me cause to wonder how long I have been dabbling in computers and web sites.  I could probably dig up some old archives on floppy disk at home to be more precise, but a good way to look at the history of any web site is to use the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

This tells me that a copy was saved of my first web page on 3 Dec 1998.  I set it up a bit earlier than that – the copy here is a later version.  However, if I use that date, that means that I have been editing web sites for just over eight years.  This is pertinent to the discussion to follow.

More dates of significance – I first saw a computer and started programming (in BASIC) in 1973, at the Gordon Technical College in Geelong, Vic.  This was my first year out of secondary school, when I started a course in Electronics.  (I eventually graduated in Computer Science in 1994, at RMIT.) 

The programming had nothing to do with the course – a few of us just got interested.  Student use of the computer was via grey plastic ITT teletypes, with perforated paper tape storage (I managed to almost completely miss out on punch cards over my whole IT career.)  We had access to enough memory to program it to deal a hand of cards – but not enough to play a game!

I remember that the computer itself was a SuperNova.  Later research indicates that this was a Data General computer.  Little did I know that 13 years later (1986) I would commence five years’ work programming its successor, a DG Eclipse MV/10000.

I bought my first PC in the same year – an XT clone.  By coincidence, this was also the year my daughter Renée (aka Paris) was born.  We still have the computer, but the poor old CGA monitor finally failed just recently.  Renée has commandeered the computer to keep as some sort of a memento.

While I am still working with web sites, computers and software, I really see my IT career as having finished in about 1990 – I am now on my third career since then.