Thanks to Rich and Pat for pointing to this fun site.

Except Thailand, these are places that I stayed for more than a few hours between air planes.
And like Pat, I came to claim China for a day spent in Hong-Kong.

Is this going to be the meme of the week ?

I just saw that Simon Phipps wrote today about FreeMind.
This must be a coincidence, but in an effort to get better organized
and efficient, I’ve just started to use FreeMind a couple of days ago
and I already love it. Not just because it’s open-sourced, truely
multi-plateform, 100% Java brewed, but also because it’s easy, fast and
easy to lay down tasks, ideas and links to files or URLs.
My mind map is not fully dumped yet, but I already start to get the
benefits of this simple tool. So if you’re looking for a way to reduce
the amount of postit notes around your screen, FreeMind is really worth trying.

As Pat as already mentioned here, there are new marketing presentations of Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition publicly available from http://www.sun.com.
First there is a Sun Net Talk,
a less than 10 minutes presentation on Directory Server Enterprise
Edition by Don Bowen, Product Line Manager for Directory Server.
And there is this white paper detailing the Directory Services that are offered by Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition.

Both presentation are re-enforcing the fact that Directory Services
play a central role in Identity Management, as directory veterant Dave
Nesbitt recently pointed out in this article published in Digital ID.

Mark refering Tim Bray‘s conclusion about blogging not being dangerous for your job is asking “why go read a journalist’s article about something when you can get it straight from the horse’s mouth (or blog)?“.

Well, first I don’t pretend to be a writer (unlike Mark who is our lead Technical Writer for Directory Server
and who did a wonderful job with some of the programming guide) and
clearly it takes me some effort to lay down my ideas on paper or a
blog. I usually end up throwing raw technical material, with a little
background and short conclusion rather then a compeling story with
illustrations, anecdots… not mentioning style.
My wife being a journalist,
I perfectly understand the difference between an expert talking it’s
mastered subjects and a writer expressing someone else expertise for a
targeted audience. Writers and journalist have the skills and practices
to adapt their article to different audiences, depending on the values
that need to be passed on, while engineers tend to go for the details
that they find “cool”.
As a result, I believe that we will still need people to write about
what we do for different audiences, as I will keep on relying on Mark’s
skills to describe what our products is doing.

I agree with Tim Bray here with his “Ten Reasons Why Blogging is Good For Your Career” and with Jim Grisanzio addition that it’s Fun as well (although I personally have more fun reading than writing).
But I’m not blogging to get promoted (and considering the number of
blogs that have greater numbers of hits, I’m not in the short list
anyway :-)).
I’ve started blogging as a way to better share my ideas and knowledge
with my collegues and customers (if any are reading), and at least to
get better organized, improve my communication and potentially reduce
the amount of emails that I was exchanging every day. In other words,
gain efficiency. With that matter, I’m starting to see the value.
I never thought that blogging would make me more important or more
elictible to a promotion, but if it comes, I’m not going to refuse 😉