globalful

I keep Tim Bray's weblog bookmarked and check it from time to time. I've written about his work before. His interests range wide, his expert knowledge is awesome, and he writes well.

It's time for me to own up that -- more than bookmarking -- I've put in my RSS aggregator the blog of Tim Bray's fellow Sun-worker, Tim Caynes. TC works out of Norwich, UK, while TB works out of Vancouver, CA, and they both work for a company headquartered in Irvine, CA (for California, this time, not Canada).

Tim Caynes' blog has less breadth than Tim Bray's; no interesting photos, no reviews of Isabel Bayrakdarian, no astute political observations, no insider's look at xml. But Tim Caynes has a captivating style. His posts are puzzling and have a breezy slacker charm. Here's a sample:

did you see that?,

that's horrible. I didn't mean to do it, but I just kind of forgot that I'd set up a webcam. I mean, I've done worse things but not captured quite like that before. I really am working, by the way. these phat headphones are for conference calls, I'm not doing a dave doubledecks down here while paul talks about globalization design docs and we check on status. I'm not really hoofing around the gulf of oman in an APC in battlefield2 while you're talking about user-friendliness and reordering things in the authoring temaplates. look, I even sent out some kind of document or other to make it look like I was prepared. admittedly, I put it in the collaboration space so that it will time out before you can load it, but it's there, really. it's got knobs on

I watched 2 guys in space do some repointing on their mobile home on the internet today, which I was quite blasé about really. I mean, they're 224 miles above the coast of france, hovering about on a giant white fork-lift truck contraption, picking out little bits of plastic from between slices of fiber cheesecake with their huge white fingers and I'm seeing this live, as it happens, because they're got helmet-mounted (careful) cameras that are transmitting wirelessly to tracy island or something which is hooked up to some webserver or other that's streaming stuff under the atlantic to the BT infrastructure that's doing better for me today than chris and I'm sat here looking at a 4 inch square streaming video on my monitor in the upstairs office in norwich watching their every move. so that's amazing, right? but am I bovvered? not really. it's sunny outside and I'm leering out the window at 20 year olds on their way to top shop to get a new crop top for saturday cos gary's takin her dahn Lava, innit?

so what I do on the webcam is really not very significant. unless my mum's watching. she'd be horrified.

Incidentally, Sun Microsystems offers blog space to all its employees and many, including the Chief Operating Officer, take advantage.