So, I’m looking at my budget today, and I notice that I’m spending ~19% of my take-home pay on housing (yay–well within our means), but 27% on transportation, including: Van payment, gas for 3 cars, registration, repairs + upkeep, and insurance. :-) I’m thinking of moving to new york! * * * On the opposite tack, I came home last night to find that someone had left the passenger-side sliding door open on the van. For 2 hours. In a driving thunderstorm. ...
Harvid, my mom still reads yr blog. She’s Oba… Biru - Jan 4, 2008 Harvid, my mom still reads yr blog. She’s Obaming! The market will hit a “true” bottom when its sorrow & woe is on the front page of the NYTimes– not the business section, the front page. Then you & I will sweep in and buy Vanguard no-load index funds and sit on them until our noses bleed money. Mutual funds have too many fees! ...
I’ve been with Firefox ( originally Phoenix, then Firebird, forked to IceWeasel) for years now. Yes, it was the chip off the old block (Son of Mozilla, rise!), and it was build upon Good Code©, and it bore no hint of That evil corporation that won the browser war by not playing fair It was the best parts of mozilla, with none of the bloat of the suite (that email program that no one used) ...
Tired. Bored. Lonely. Bitter. Angry. Helpless. Controlled. Concealed. Afraid. Aggravated. Imprisoned. Obligated. I really don’t have anywhere to hide today. I’ve ALWAYS had somewhere to hide–work, women, racing, ****, friends, school, academics, video games, chat rooms, reading. That’s the comforting thing about being obsessive–you lose yourself in things, easily. You’re not YOU when it’s uncomfortable to be there. Obsession, fantasy, denial–they all go hand-in-hand. They’re my trinity of “not dealing with stuff”. ...
I can identify with trying to remove distractions … Jeff Roberts - Sep 5, 2007 I can identify with trying to remove distractions and make time to just be still. We all need to be in our own little bubble sometimes it is what keeps us sane. And yes I think that everyone goes through the same struggles. ...
So, I’m reading through the documentation on Windows printing, trying to learn what this is all about. My team writes stuff that sits between the Windows Spooler (spoolsrv.exe) and the Kernel-model communications pieces. Anyway, so I come to a great fork in the road: GDI and XPS. GDI (Graphical Device Interface) is the way that earlier windows programs (Win32) talk to the display and printing subsystem. Essentially, everything in GDI is a bitmap. This is “the old way of doing things”. ...
Project management in the software industry seems to suffer from a level of delusion that would get a person heavily medicated and assigned to a padded room for their own safety. One definition of insanity is expecting different results from the same input. And yet project after project gets planned with the same naive assumption that deliverable dates will be met, changes will not be added at the last minute and that senior VPs will not want to mark the project by making a pointless last minute addition just so they can say they had input into the project and justify their salaries. ...
As title states. I took one of my India guys to the movies on our team outing two weeks ago, and it was a different sort of experience, just riding in the car with him. His mind seemed alive with questions about America–how we get to work, our various religions, how my family is organized, politics, culture, etc. Then, when I got him back to his place, he invited me to come in and sit awhile, relax and have something to drink. We then continued our discussion of education, and the various differences between American and Indian public education. ...
They say we’re ignorant and apathetic, but I don’t… Jeff Roberts - May 3, 2007 They say we’re ignorant and apathetic, but I don’t know and I don’t care. :-) I have no words of wisdom. I’m sorta balancing right now but only precariously. I can relate. I was borderline rude the other day to one of my co-workers just because she stopped in to chat for a moment at a moment while I was stressing over various work issues/questions. You have to maintain your humanity … it used to be so much easier for me. I’m not sure what has changed. ...
Underworld Meh. Take Blade, remove the throbbing soundtrack, satisfying action sequences, suspension of disbelief, and credible (!) backstory, add Kate Beckinsdale in a catsuit. You have KATE BECKINSDALE in a CATSUIT for TWO HOURS! How the freak do you make a movie this bad?
(That title sounds vaguely Latin…) Let me be as clear as possible: Imus a curmudgeon, a former coke-fiend who disdains ALL humanity. He’s mean. He’s ugly. He’s also intelligent, incisive, and provocative, in a way that brain-dead Howard Stern CAN NEVER BE. Not that I’ve not laughed at some random Howard Stern bits that I’m too ashamed of to post on a blog my mother reads. (Google ‘Sybian’ and ‘Howard Stern’ if you’re feeling particularly raunchy) ...
Yeah, mountain out of molehill. What he sai… Jeff Roberts - Apr 1, 2007 Yeah, mountain out of molehill. What he said wasn’t good, but: - If ANY person of color had been a guest on the show and said it instead, no story. - If I called into the show (is it even a call-in show?) and he called me a bible-thumping republitard, no story. (This is where someone jumps in and says I can change my religion or political affiliation) ...
I’ve been through many bad meetings at LXK, but my 3 o’clock yesterday ranks right up there as one of the worst. Ingredients * Meeting shouldn’t have happened. It’s a meeting that should’ve been a whiteboarding session between me and one other guy. * Six people, each with a slightly different agenda. * No common manager, hence no one to make a decision if there’s a conflict. Anyway, so it’s a meeting past my threshold of exhaustion (I suck at meetings after 3pm…it’s too late in the day and my brain is tapioca.). ...
Two powerpoint presentations for my Managers to present. Kill me now.
Yep. It’s Columbus Day Celebrate the greatest conquest & associated genocide in recorded history? No thanks.
Apparently this holiday is for the overtaxed gover… Whitney - Oct 1, 2006 Apparently this holiday is for the overtaxed government workers…not for actually celebrating. I was told tonight that a certain Goble gets at least three government holidays per month. Egads.
Got to be really good friends with vimdiff today as I tried to kick-start the build for our “End of Lifed, never need anything else but a plugin” product. Yeah, well. We need it again, and she’s not so happy to build this time. We played with the build significantly for the last product, pseudo-integrating Ant, while leaving around lots of makefiles, an arcane language of rules, predicates and suffixes ...
I think this post by Delerium sums it up pretty well I’m in the top 10%, but not by much and I DEFY you to find anyone near this point who can: Afford to send 2 kids to a decent college Take expensive vacations Pay the mortgage, car loan and credit card loans Maintain cars and house Heat, electric for house and gas for cars Feed the family well Pay for your multiple insurances ...
So, on the news today this story: BP said that it would have to shut down a segment of the pipeline for a period of up to six months to replace 16 miles of the structure. Okay, why does BRITISH PETROLEUM own the Alaska pipeline? Why doesn’t an American company (or better yet, the federal gov’t!) own it?
The new Golf and Jetta weren’t just late to the U.S. they were several model years late. And to make matters even worse, VW dealers were fending-off irate customers who were saddled with quality problems from the get-go. And those customers rewarded VW for their callousness by abandoning the brand in droves - never to come back. taken from: Peter’s latest Rant I am Volkswagen’s ideal customer. Or, at least, I used to be. I really wanted a BMW, but I couldn’t afford one. (I argue no one can really afford a new one, but that’s another topic for another day!) The VW Jetta Mk.IV was like a baby 3-series, solid, serene, teutonic, and just snobby enough to be above the rice-burners from Honda and Nissan. ...