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	<title>michaelw.net</title>
	<link>http://www.michaelw.net</link>
	<description>Random thoughts from michaelw</description>
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		<title>Using shopping card data to manage food safety</title>
		<description><![CDATA[As a card-carrying, tinfoil hat member of the privacy zealots group, I&#8217;m not a big user of shopping cards.  Today I read about what can only be described as a meaningful use case for those cards.
The CDC used shopping card data to track down a salmonella outbreak.  They did it in exactly the right way [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.michaelw.net/2010/03/using-shopping-card-data-to-manag-food-safety/</link>
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		<title>It&#8217;s about the people, stupid</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I have found myself using Buzz lately.  Considering my refusal to use other networks as more than address books, this is a bit of a surprise.
Facebook is primarily a way for me to see what old and truly old friends are up to.  It&#8217;s nice to see news from old friends but quite a bit [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.michaelw.net/2010/03/its-about-the-people-stupid/</link>
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		<title>Good luck finding good content</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I recently wrote about the inevitable death of journalism.  The Washington Post sees the same thing.  Tech Crunch describes Fast Food Journalism, and Paul Kedrosky points out that Google is starting to fail.  While I&#8217;m sure PageRank has been improved and tweaked, the same basic idea applies.  How people link to a page is a [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.michaelw.net/2009/12/good-luck-finding-good-content/</link>
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		<title>Do something useful</title>
		<description><![CDATA[As I read about the Apple&#8217;s latest acquisition I am struck by the incredible amount of useless software is being developed.  More and more software is about some entertainment, a social networking twist or a new workaround for obsolete copyright laws.
All the new software I seem to see these days is either about search, entertainment [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.michaelw.net/2009/12/do-something-useful/</link>
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		<title>The inevitable death of journalism</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Recently I read about the latest form of media spin control through google adwords.  The story is about a NY Times article about hoki fishing in New Zealand.  The hoki is a relatively obscure fish that surfaced as a major source for McDonalds as other stocks came under overfishing pressure.
It would have been nice if [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.michaelw.net/2009/11/the-inevitable-death-of-journalism/</link>
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		<title>URL shortener failure</title>
		<description><![CDATA[From tr.im

tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately.
Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward.
However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009.
Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.
We regret that it came to [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.michaelw.net/2009/08/url-shortener-failure/</link>
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		<title>Looking for two fingered scrolling on my new Netbook</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I just bought an Asus Eeeeeeee PC 1005HA.&#160; Of course Asus has so many variations of each product that I actually need to be more specific and say that it&#8217;s the Eee PC 1005HA-VU1X-BK which means that it has the N270 Atom and no Bluetooth.&#160; I hadn&#8217;t realized it didn&#8217;t come with Bluetooth but I [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.michaelw.net/2009/07/looking-for-two-fingered-scrolling-on-my-new-netbook/</link>
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		<title>Pseudo-random seldom does the job</title>
		<description><![CDATA[My friend Adam has hammered this one home.  A weak RNG can undermine the security of a system that uses it.  A recent scenario we worked on together involved a multi-player game.  If you can predict the RNG outcome then you can incorporate that into your game strategy.  Why engage in an attack if you [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.michaelw.net/2009/07/pseudo-random-seldom-does-the-job/</link>
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		<title>Management skills don&#8217;t scale up</title>
		<description><![CDATA[One of the key lessons I learned at Microsoft was courtesy of my friend Paul who got it from Jeff Raikes.  What Raikes said was, that each level of management required completely re-inventing one&#8217;s role. It was never just more of the same with broader scope. It was always qualitatively different.
In other words, the skills [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.michaelw.net/2009/07/management-skills-dont-scale-up/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Generalizations are always wrong</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;m as bad as anyone when it comes to generalizations and simplifications.  Yet even as I state that nothing is ever that simple I still believe there&#8217;s a lot of value in generalizations.  They help us see patterns and anti-patterns.  I see even more value in the effort to simplify problems.  Much of what we [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.michaelw.net/2009/07/generalizations-are-always-wrong/</link>
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