Meryl's Notes Blog

• Tweet
• email

• Tweet
• email

Shame on me for not sharing this little secret with you much earlier. It’s the only newsletter I receive at work since it’s related to the job. StickyMinds from STQE Publications is a resource for everything related to building better software (hey, Joel, do you hear this?). Here are tidbits from the latest issue:

Reflections on "A Fable" is a follow up to last year’s "A Fable." Parents will understand the similarities between getting a kid to clean up her room and getting developers to test their code.

The other item I enjoy in every issue is Robert Coutre’s "Our Take." It’s a lighthearted editorial and either I learn something new or I nod my head in agreement thinking, "Yes, I’ve been there." Coutre writes, "The Holiday Season is upon us. As quality professionals, one important gift we might give ourselves is "quality of life." And few things in life provide a feeling of quality more than personal or professional accomplishment. So here are my top-ten suggestions for improving quality of life. (Perhaps a “New Year’s Resolution” in the making?)"

1. Write a proposal to your management to give yourself a raise, citing all you have contributed and the talents you bring to the company. (Whether you actually send it to your manager or not, it is a great reaffirmation to yourself to compile your productivity, achievements, etc.)
2. If you have experienced a particularly good conference or training session, read a good book or article, or something else–then write a note of appreciation to the person responsible for the experience (the instructor, the author, etc.).
3. Study your company’s competitors’ Web sites: Look at their offerings, product information, and any other useful information. (This is good simply to be informed, but it also may generate some good ideas of your own.)
4. Play a game of chess (on a real board with someone, as opposed to a computer game).
5. Read a good software-testing-industry book (Meryl says: I reviewed one of their excellent books on Web Testing Handbook. Yikes! The review is offline! I’ll fix later.)
6. Become (more) involved in a special interest group or online exchange with other software quality professionals.
7. Formulate the procedures for the Glass Bead Game (esoteric reference from the novel “Magister Ludi”).
8. Write an article and submit it to a magazine (or a publishing Web site).
9. Start your own personal journal for possible process improvements, product ideas, ideas for future articles, etc. Whenever possible, find ways to implement or turn
   these into proposals.
10. If you manage to do even a few of the activities above, you should reward yourself. So here’s #1 on the list: Create a classic chocolate sundae with vanilla ice cream, Hershey’s syrup, nuts, and a cherry.

Amen!

Shirley and Dave got unlucky to have their emails become a spammer’s return address. Like them, I don’t want to hide my email. I tried leaving off the mailto, then someone wrote to me asking why I didn’t use it. Then, I just told myself to forget it and use it because of the various articles I’ve published list my email address with the mailto. <sigh> Fortune writes about "Finding the Perfect Spam Catcher." Also, SendMail has an interview with Tim Pozar of Brightmail discussing spam.

I made a new friend through Dave and he provided some more spam goodies (wow, spam and goodies in the same sentence!). Rick writes:

"If you get mail from a *NIX server of any kind, or from any server that can run procmail (an *excellent* mail filtering tool!), there is a great tool/script/procmail recipe out there, called Splonk. It’s got a perl script that it uses to make editing your .procmailrc easy, just a matter of answering a few questions. I have my own procmail recipe going, so I just cannibalized his recipe a bit for some excellent ideas."

Jeremy Allaire shares his thoughts on "What’s Next?" Ah-ha! Clarification on the difference between Flash and Shockwave.

Subscribe to this here blog: RSS or E-mail