In my college days, I played way too many card games - Hearts, Spades and Bridge. When you’re at an engineering school, you constantly encounter and incorporate new bidding gadgets in your game. Strictly speaking, I should have adopted a complete bidding system. But practically speaking, it was easier to evolve my game by slowly adopting pieces - especially when playing with a variety of partners.

And that’s how I approach Extreme Programming. Strictly speaking, I should probably adopt the whole thing. But practically speaking, it’s easier to adopt pieces as I gain understanding of each. This post marks the beginning of a series on how themes from XP fit into my life.

• Sometimes good enough really is good enough: a task is done when it satisfies its role within the whole.
• Test driven management: tests put you out of the box where you don’t belong and into the connections where you do.
• Tests are the real contract: if the interface is a contract, then it is a terribly underspecified one.

Blogging is an escape, not an addition. If it was truly addicting, then there wouldn’t be a high infant mortality rate for blogs. Long time bloggers wouldn’t just stop and walk away. There would be withdraw symptoms when you stop rather than a vague sense of something undone.

Blogging is an outlet, a way to connect. It’s a cry out in the darkness. An itch that we scratch with every post. An ego boost measured in Google PageRank, Technorati Source Influence, and page reads.

If blogging is an addiction, then I’m addicted to checking the stove before I leave the house.

Encourage me, will you? I know you care! I do. Sometimes at night I just start to fade into my oblivious state and with good intent but somehow the sleep takes over and another day without blogging passes. What do you want to hear about? Talk to me.

I don’t travel as much as I’d like. I haven’t been on a motorcycle in years. And my oenophile days are behind me. But I know what it’s like as long as Allan is in my aggregator.

It’s strange how things turn out. I wasn’t really looking for anything new. I was just following some trackbacks from SixApart’s How are you using MoveableType when one thing lead to another. Now I find myself number 188 of the TextDrive 200.

[TextDrive is a new webhosting servce] designed to be the best possible host for Textpattern (indeed for all PHP/MySQL software), but has blossomed into something more: a webhost that offers the best in performance, security and stability, backed by intelligent configuration and great software.

My first thought was that I’d continue to use Radio Userland. But as I thought about the new toys available at TextDrive, I realized that this was the perfect opportunity to get going with PHP. I’ll be playing with Textpattern over the next few weeks. No promises on what will happen then.

Sam (foreground) and Mark enjoy some time in the sun. It’s good to be a cat.

I need to pay more attention to the Broncos. The ESPN Broncos Offseason Overview informs me that Alex Gibbs has become Assistant Head Coach of the Atlanta Falcons. With Clinton Portis traded to the Redskins, this is not a good time to be without the long time offensive line guru. I’m more convinced than ever that this will be a pivotal year for Mike Shanahan.

Given the intense media coverage of the Broncos by the Denver media, I’m surprised that I’m not able to subscribe to an RSS feed for it. A quick search turns up the Rocky Mountain News eNews, but no equivalent RSS feed. I think they’re missing a great opportunity. It would be easy to bundle the online edition excerpts in an RSS feed.

Stanford selects Trent Johnson as Basketball coach. The former Stanford assistant coach and Nevada head coach was the one of Stanford’s primary targets once Montgomery left. He has experience with Stanford admissions and he has shown that he can take a team to the second week of the tournament. Now it’s time to see if he can do both at the same time.

Loyal readers know that I’m a troglodyte who doesn’t believe in Tivo. My problem is that I’m sold on the Tivo DVR but I’m sceptical about the Tivo service. And since the first doesn’t work without the second, I can’t commit to the purchase.

The good news is that Tivo has licensed Tivo Basic to Toshiba and Pioneer for their integrated DVR/DVD units. Tivo Basic is what happens when Tivo can only see 3 days in advance – no forward looking services such as season pass, wish list, or repeat skipping. This is perfect for sceptics, as it comes with a free trial and provides a fallback position if Tivo is too expensive.

The bad news is the selection in entry level Tivo Basic DVR’s is pretty slim. And the most interesting product that turned up in my search is the non-Tivo Sharp DV-HR300 DVD/DVR. Unfortunately, Sharp marketing has absolutely no clue about what they’re selling.

If you’re in the market for a DVR, then your top four features [in no particular order] are:

1. Ease of programming
2. Time Shift Viewing – real time pause and resume
3. Chasing Playback – viewing a program from the beginning while it’s being recorded
4. Watching while Recording

The DV-HR300 loses on ease of programing. Sharp doesn’t license Tivo Basic, so the DV-HR300 programs like a VCR. And I’ll be darned if their site says anything about the other three. Fortunately, a review on the Amazon DV-HR300 product page mentions an article in Sound and Vision. A quick trip to my local library for the DV-HR300 review confirms all three are supported.

Attention Sharp Marketing – do you think that it would be possible to actually mention three key product benefits on your site. And I assume that it I can watch a program stored on the hard disk while recording, then I can watch a DVD while recording. But it’d be nice to know for sure.

BTW, the other product I’m looking at is the Toshiba SD-H400. The Toshiba has Tivo Basic and is about $100 cheaper. But the Sharp has DVD-R/RW recording capability. I’ll let you know what I choose.

Without knowing anything about the SixApart pricing discussons, I just bet that someone asked How much money are we leaving on the table? While this is a useful question to ask, it tends to produce vendor centric answers. And the answers often focus on what customers are doing rather than what they want to do.

Bloggers are optimistic on blogging. And while most of us may have a single weblog with a single author, many of us want to do more. So I’m going to break the rules and link to How are you using MoveableType even though I don’t use MoveableType. Because I think they should offer licenses for unlimited posting from a single author and unlimited authors at a single weblog. Appropriately priced, I think that they would be the most popular choices.

We choose weblog software to match our desires, not our reality. Lock us out of our dreams, and we’ll lock you out of our hearts.

Scoble wonders Why can’t you all use the XML icon?. I think that he’s forgotten that Radio Userland overloads the XML icon for both RSS and OPML. I decided that the color was more important than the letters and switched to a text RSS with an orange background for my feeds.