Posts

I had an out-of-body experience at church last night, right in the middle of “Shout to the Lord”. I was happy, sad, sweaty, crying and not-quite-there all at the same time. I lost all consciousness of my surroundings and the other people singing, as though the sound enveloped me with waves of tactile velvet. My senses lost all meaning, much like that passage in “A Wrinkle in Time” where they land on the planet whose inhabitants have no eyes: “No, don’t describe what it looks like, dear. Describe what it *is*.” ...

…men who wear ballcaps indoors… I agree hathead sucks, but it’s just…disrespectful.

Quality must be considered as embracing all factors which contribute to reliable and safe operation. What is needed is an atmosphere, a subtle attitude, an uncompromising insistence on excellence, as well as a healthy pessimism in technical matters, a pessimism which offsets the normal human tendency to expect that everything will come out right and that no accident can be foreseen – and forestalled – before it happens. -- Hyman Rickover, founder of the US Navy Nuclear fleet. ...

I WANT THIS CAR - under 200k miles - it’s an iS model with all the sport goodies (Limited Slip Diff, etc.) - it’s from Napierville, Illinois, which is the ultra-posh part of chicago (A BMW is like a Honda Accord there…) Only thing would be underbody rust. Thing should sell for ~$5k in that condition.

Okay, so I decried myspace and Hi5, but 43Things is just, well…neat. Here’s my page

Okay, here’s the scary reality of writing software: It’s like building a railroad from Chicago to Los Angeles. Everything’s hunkey-dorey until you get to Denver and go: “Who put a MOUNTAIN RANGE here?”. Sad part: A project manager would look at the above and say, ‘well, we’re halfway there, and it only took us 6 months so far, so you should be able to surmount…um…whatever’s in the way from here on out…in 8 months. Work overtime. Think outside the box.’ ...

I’m not much for prophesy, but I believe we’ll see the death of the personal computer in the next 5 years, at least in its current form. Reason? Virtualization, the ability to be at one terminal, but feel like you’re on a completely different machine. Case in point: Here at LXK, we go to meetings. Alot. However, in each of those over-attended, useless meetings, 80% of the people have some form of laptop open multitasking–IM to their team or answering email. This ’laptop’ culture has gone through several distinct phases: ...

Place Score Driver & Navigator Club 1 211 Ginny Eager & Robin Murphey SCCA 2 240 Lo Arnold & Phil Schneider SCCA 3 495 Ken Partymiller & Lee Wegner PCA 4 690 Whitney & Harold Combs SCCA 5 801 George & Deanne Luxbacher PCA Not DFL, but pretty close. However, the more I think about it, this was my first “real” TSD rally as a navigator, and Whitney was driving an unfamiliar, non-performance car (hard to make turns on a dime, plus you can’t maintain speed in an automatic as easily)

Church was amazing today, with the music, atmosphere, message, and Sunday school coming together perfectly. I was very glad to be there. Gary had a rally today, and I stank it up horribly. It was a straight TSD, without all mileages, so I had to navigate using mileages and times AFTER each offset. I was irritable, intense, and it turned out, I did it for nothing–we came in 4th out of 5 cars, beaten by two novices. Along the way, I managed to act like a baby, screw-up my calculations, and forget to feed Whitney the next instruction (we got lost in Stamping Ground…) ...

Glorious rant by my pal Josh

Shameless Ebay link :) I’m selling everything that’s not nailed down.

This godawful tripe, shot in location in Ireland, is slow, pointless, and invents ways to make love, battle, and death boring. Don’t see it, even on netflix. You’ve been warned.

This isn’t normally a tech blog because: there are enough of those I generally don’t think about computers outside of work However, I wanted to write a quick blurb about subversion. Subversion is a “version control system”, which is a computer program that lets you store incremental versions of things. Back in the old days, when computer programs were on punch cards or tape, there were jobs for people who kept the cards or tapes, catalogued them, and lent them out to programmers who were working on them. Today, that job is fully automated by systems like RCS, CVS, subversion, Clear CASE, PVCS, etc. ...

Today’s wonderful Joel Spolsky article. My comments: Amen. I was taught CS at a very small, liberal arts college, but it was REAL Computer Science, damnit, including sections on Data Structures, pointers, linked lists, compiler design, operating systems concepts, etc. This was from 1997-2001, and even then the shift from “harder languages” and platforms like C, LISP, and pascal to java was already underway. In essence, Joel’s argument in the article is that some people just won’t ‘get it’ enough to survive interesting computer applications in the hardest areas. That is, you can be pretty dim–and I’ve had such people on my team–and stil get by in the Java/J2EE world. Java hides enough ugliness from you that you can be mediocre and get by. ...

Not only did I get this, I converted the hex in my head and almost had the ASCII offsets memorized. Thank you, Bryan Crawley.

Daddy wants one of THESE BABIES Dual-core intel chips, 4x faster than my powerbook….15.4" high-contrast display…YEAH!

Starbucks info Yeah, if you ask for a “regular,” you’re nuts, but if you ask for a “short” they have to stand and deliver. Grand!…er…Grande!

March of the Pengins does many things for you: Makes you thankful for being human Impresses you with the stark beauty of Antarctica Reminds you how fragile life is This is a wonderful film to share with the family, and became the centerpiece of a warm evening with Whitney, Joey, and I in front of the fire.

As I sit at my desk on a sunny day, I’m contemplating Murphy’s law, which states that whatever can go wrong will, at the worst possible time. :-) today, would seem like that day. I came in this morning to merge and commit some changes to the library, and then do about 3 hours of administrative/clerical stuff that needed to be done, helping out my programmers as needed. Yeah, about that… ...