So I'm giving my Rules Are Made To Be Broken presentation at cf.Objective:

Raise your hand if you've ever received a client change request in the middle of a project?

A few hands are raised - not as many as I'd expected, but Sean Corfield dutifully raised his hand.

How many of you like client change requests?

Sean smiles, raises his hand further and waives it about.

How many of you would like to be flooded with client change requests?

Sean considers the question, lowers his hand and mumbles "hrm... not so much."

The honest truth is that I've never been terribly impressed with the world of blogs or the idea of blogging and I don't think it's just my abject distaste for buzz-words. Blogging by and large seems at least to me to be largelyan affirmation of the belief that valuable insight can be gleaned from someone else's carelessly half-crafted incomplete paragraph when a several page article would really be more appropriate.

So it should be no surprise that I haven't blogged in quite some time.

No one consults me to find out what the latest trends should be, however and so the web ambles quickly and clumsily forward as always into the future and drags me kicking and screaming with it. So in the coming months I'll do my best to provide information here about the projects I'm working on in an attempt to prove that the onTap framework and related projects are still alive and in active development.

In the next few days I hope to publish several notes about my recent experiences speaking at cf.Objective in Minneapolist last weekend, some related to the framework and some merely anecdotal.

Several of us were standing around in the hall at cf.Objective chewing the fat, and someone says "necessity being the mother of invention". Of course being the contrary person I am I couldn't let this slide and interjected "that's why most software sucks". It occurs to me in retrospect that the response to my comment makes perfect sense, because the comment itself wasn't well qualified.

Sean Corfield replied "you mean, I have a problem therefore I need a solution"? And in a nutshell, yes, that's precisely what I meant. But to be fair it's deeper than that.

It's not merely that problems are solved out of necessity but rather that they are often not solved out of a desire to solve them. I've come to the conclusion that with a great number of software problems the people involved in creating the solution are much less interested in the problem or the solution than they are in a paycheck. I don't blame them at all and certainly problems do indeed get solved this way, but I'm inclined to think that they'remuch better solutions on the odd occasionwhen necessity coincides with desire.