Should hand shaking be phased out?

The "power" shake

Hand Shaking Is So Medieval. Let’s End It is an interesting blog post that got me thinking about hand shaking and its place in society. According to Wikipedia it's been around at least since the 2nd Century and originated as a peace gesture, showing the other person you are not holding a weapon. In the age of Swine Flu and other highly contagous diseases should we continue to shake?

The blog posts some interesting alternatives to hand shaking, such as the "elbow bump" or the Vulcan salute.

The Vulcan Salute

However, there are also plenty of cultural grettings that more easily lend themselves to spreading disease.

Hawaiian lei greeting

Maori nose rub greeting

And of course there are more culturally exotic greetings...

Hawaiian three-fingers-folded wave

Will Code For Hope - My Obama-like poster

Courtesy of Obamicon.ME

Get your own bailout package from the Bank Of Obama

Feel like you're missing out on all of the cash currently being splashed around? Well now you can get your share from the Bank Of Obama!

Pairing as part of a job interview

A small company gets candidates to "pair" during their job interview process in order to test their ability to do things the XP way (more details here).

I don't know how effective such a short test would be in identifying Agile individuals, but it doesn't sound any more arbitrary than other things I've done in job interviews (brain teasers, code a small project, whiteboarding software architectures, etc) :)

An interesting quote from the interview that rings very true:

Sheridan: The traditional interviewing process is two people pleasantly lying to one another for an hour or two and then making a really big decision that they will live with for years to come. Harkening back to Thomas Edison's interview process: Try as hard as you can to simulate the work environment in the interview process.

Have your business cards printed on meat!

Do you want a way to differentiate your business cards from the rest? You could get them printed with transparent sections or sparkly bits.

But for a truly unique card have a look at MEAT CARDS, who have come up with a creative way of combining beef jerky and a 150 Watt CO2 laser :)

Mmmmm, yummy business cards.

The CSS coffee mug

If I have to explain why this mug is funny then you haven't used CSS enough :)

(Might make a good interview question...)

Microsoft joins AMQP enterprise messaging effort

Surprising news that Microsoft have joined the AMQP working group, whose aim is to standardize a wire-level messaging protocol, allowing financial firms large and small to break free of the near monopoly IBM (Websphere MQ) and Tibco (RV and EMS) have with enterprise messaging.

The news is surprising to me because Microsoft have their own proprietary messaging protocols that they have been pushing (which I have yet to see deployed on a large scale), and supporting AMQP will in many cases mean Microsoft on the client side and something else on the server side.

I've personally never had major issues with MQ, RV or EMS (except for the occasional trade message RV loses:)), but I always wecome choice. So go Redmond!!!