“The sys­tem in which they are rel­e­vant is not called the mar­ket econ­omy, not the finan­cial sys­tem or cap­i­tal­ism, but democ­racy. Democ­racy is about a com­mu­nity shap­ing its future together. And the media, in all its forms – print, broad­cast and dig­i­tal – is one of its most impor­tant cre­ative forces. The proof of the rel­e­vance of the press is 177 years old, begins in 1832 and con­tin­ues right up to the present day. It arises out of the entire his­tory of Ger­man democracy.”

Elis­a­beth Hen­drick­son builds a suite of dio­rama scenes based on her Word­Count Sim­u­la­tion of project man­age­ment, a great exer­cise I’ve had the plea­sure to par­tic­i­pate in, and which I rec­om­mend to any­body work­ing in “knowl­edge work”.

“And yeah, almost none of it was funny — and as much as I wish I could, I’m not sure I can make it funny. Taken as a whole, it was too dispir­it­ing, infu­ri­at­ing and flat-​​out exhaust­ing to be funny.

So, maybe the only way to go — the best part­ing shot to take — is to sim­ply say a hearty “fuck you, 2009″ and look only forward.

I’ll begin doing that in a cou­ple of days. For now, though, I’m crawl­ing back under my desk and hid­ing. I just don’t trust this year; it’s still got some fight left in it and, like I said, 48 hours is a long time.”

“Lawyers rep­re­sent­ing Demi Moore sent a threat­en­ing let­ter to Boing Boing over the hol­i­days which demanded that we remove a post I pub­lished in Novem­ber, or face legal con­se­quences. In the ref­er­enced Boing Boing post, I pub­lished pho­tog­ra­pher Anthony Citrano’s spec­u­la­tion that a recent W Mag­a­zine cover image of the actress may have been crudely manip­u­lated by mag­a­zine staff to alter her hip, and appear thinner.”

“On a dis­trib­uted Scrum project, indi­vid­ual team mem­bers need to meet each other face to face. If the whole team can­not get together, one or two mem­bers from each team, at least, should spend time vis­it­ing team mem­bers in other cities. Think of them as ambas­sadors. I’ve found that the per­sonal rela­tion­ships estab­lished by ambas­sadors can be extremely valu­able even long after the ambas­sador returns to native soil.”

“Now we can add to all the back­slap­ping and self con­grat­u­la­tory rhetoric about avoid­ing a full-​​blown cri­sis, another finan­cial mile­stone – Australia’s debt to GDP ratio has now bro­ken through 100%. That’s right, Aus­tralian house­holds col­lec­tively hold more debt than the entire Aus­tralian econ­omy earns in a year. Let the good times roll!”