Loose Ends

I haven't posted for a while, but I had a few short things to report on:

• Trackbacks -- After 773 pieces of trackback SPAM, I finally received a legitimate one. Thank you Nikki Massaro Kauffman! This represents a signal to noise of 0.13%! And I was complaining about my e-mail...
• CSG -- I attended the Common Solutions Group Workshop last week in Ann Arbor. The long (whole day) workshop was about Cyberinfrastructure and the short workshop (half day) was about Creating a More Agile Central IT Organization. More on this later.

• PDF Optimization -- I presented at the CSG. Since my instance of Apple Keynote went south, I did the presentation "Old School" using LaTeX and PDF. Al Williams put me on to the "PDF Optimizer" in the Advanced menu in Adobe Acrobat. It took my presentation from 226 kB to 74 kB without any loss of presentation, graphics, or font clarity. If you have a an instance of Acrobat, I highly recommend it.

• The Pens -- Although you might not believe it, the Pittsburgh Penguins came up in the discussion of agile organizations at the CSG meeting. As a pre-workshop exercise, each attendee was asked to name an "Agile Organization" in an anonymous survey. The list, of course, contained many of the usual suspects -- Apple, Google, GE, but it also had The Pittsburgh Penguins (there was a good CMU presence at the workshops). The person who remained anonymous, obviously figured he or she would be questioned, so the comments field cited the Wayne Gretzky quote, "They skate to where the puck will be." An interesting analogy. Whether you believe that or not, the Pens are in the Stanley Cup finals. Go Pens!