Hey I need to find something, and I’m sure someone out there has it.
I need the ultimate “bring your laptop to bed” prop up your head thingie. They have those goofy little pillows with the arms, but they don’t work so well.
Problem is my bed doesn’t have a headboard of any kind, so I’ve gotta kinda scootch up against the wall, which isn’t all that comfortable.
Anybody come up with something that’s just the right thing?
I’m SICK of it. It just doesn’t work right. Text messaging is fine, internet stuff is fine (albeit slower than carrier pigeon.)
But the goddamn phone is just the most frustrating thing I’ve ever tried to use. The interface shuts down at a moments notice whenever you’re trying to talk or make a call, only to reactivate just long enough for you to hit the mute button with your ear.
It’s just not right yet.
Now to figure out how to get rid of it and get something else.
Yeah, I’ve been running around like a chicken with my head cut off over the last week or so. Don’t mean to be quite so quiet about it.
The new job is really quite awesome so far. At this point it’s more promise than anything else.
It’s so very strange having a job with a metric buttload of work and having none of it actually be coding. After identifying myself as a programmer for something close to 20 years, it really…well… I expected to be a bit lost. The surprising thing is how damn FREE I feel from all of it.
I’m still processing it, especially since it’s my first week.
It’s the kind of work so far that’s really quite engaged my attention. Add to that my old team’s insistence on bugging the crap out of me every chance they get, seeming to pause only long enough to figure out who’s turn it is.
And you get one pooped uncommunicative Mikey.
I saw this on the 4 train this morning:
Tell all the truth but tell it slant,
Success in circuit lies,
Too bright for our infirm delight
The truth’s superb surprise;As lightning to the children eased
With explanation kind,
The truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind.- Emily Dickinson
Truly brilliant
3 hours and it’s already weird that I’m not a developer any more.
Fun though.
Seems a lot more like it’s actual work instead of writing code.
Here it is.
His mentor turns on bin Laden - International Herald Tribune
After Osama bin Laden reappeared on the world’s television screens on the sixth anniversary of 9-11, commentaries focused on his newly blackened beard and his changed message. But more important was the reaction of a Saudi cleric.
In an open letter, one of bin Laden’s most prominent Saudi mentors, the preacher and scholar Salman al-Oadah, publicly reproached bin Laden for causing widespread mayhem and killing.
This is what I’ve been waiting 6 years for. A prominent Islamic cleric (”cleric” always makes me think of D&D though) coming down on ABL and his merry band of spiritually bankrupt monsters for their behavior.
I’ll be very interested to see how this plays out.
(ht to: Sondrak)
“biofuels” produce more greenhouse gas than oil
…Rapeseed and maize biodiesels were calculated to produce up to 70 per cent and 50 per cent more greenhouse gases respectively than fossil fuels. The concerns were raised over the levels of emissions of nitrous oxide, which is 296 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. …
nah.
too easy
Life has been absolutely inside out lately. All in a good way. It’s been harrowing.
If you’ve been following at all you’ll be wondering what the hell is going on. Yeah, me too.
Friday was supposed to be my last day at work. It ain’t. But it is. It’s complicated.
Thursday afternoon I sent around a couple “cya o/” emails. You all are internet people so you know that’s a phonetic shorthand of “see ya *person waving*”. But in a business context, well, let’s just say “cya” is an abbreviation for something you tend not to want to say out loud in professional communications.
I almost immediately received a call from the guy in the company responsible for a great many things, not the least of which is development practices and training throughout the organization.
See, last year we had lots of trainers come in. Mike Feathers, Mike Hill and Robert Martin (yes, THAT Robert Martin.) They each did a week long brain blast of XP and Agile development practices/methodologies. I went to all these things, did a lot of heckling, asked a lot of questions and railed against a bunch of things that really frustrated me about the whole thing (pair programming anyone?)
Turns out I was pretty highly visible (who moi?)
I talked at length with this guy I got the phone call from on Thursday. He talked about a best-case scenario where he’d have an internal team of XP/Agile trainers who would work with a project team for a month or two at a time, set them up on FIT for unit test automation, coach them in other XP practices and help them decide what does/doesn’t work for their team and be available for refreshers and questions. Most of all these people would be within the company so they’d have some domain knowledge as well.
We had a lot of conversations after-hours that were far far more frank than I have any right being in a business context. One of the results of this is that we had each others’ numbers.
Anyone see where this is going? Ok everyone? Ah well.
So yeah. It took about 18 hours of frantic decision making, weighing the alternatives, calling friends and family.
There’s not so much of a punch line yet. I’m going back to work on Monday.
It wasn’t as easy a decision as this sounds. I was going to be done. I was going to start trading, working freelance somehow.
But this is such a different world. I’m not a developer any more. Not professionally. Sure, there’s some coding involved. But me, the guy who 10 years ago was pretty much the ultimate introvert, I’m going to be
teaching.
Well thank fucking god.
Tammy Bruce: Small Favors: NY Denies Ahmadinejad Ground Zero VisitThe New York Police Department rejected a request by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to visit the lower Manhattan site where al Qaeda terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
Ahmadinejad, who plans to be in New York City next week to address the United Nations General Assembly, made the request to visit Ground Zero earlier this month, Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Browne said in an e-mailed statement.
Browne said police department officials decided to deny the visit after a meeting with representatives of the U.S. Secret Service and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site.
“The site is closed to visitors because of construction there,” Browne said in the statement. “Requests for the Iranian president to visit the immediate area would also be opposed by the NYPD on security grounds.”
Bad enough that evil closet monkey is allowed to set foot on our soil.
More than a drug.
A way of coping.
Is it:
“The final temptation to sell out on my dreams”
Or is it:
“The opportunity that arises when you’ve embraced the step into the unknown.”
Details when I’m unemployed.
Posting’s been light primarily because they’re pulling me in 19 different directions at once in work. (What, where did you THINK I outlined my post ideas?)
But now it’s 1:30 in the morning again. And no, I’m going to write anything significant.
Just kinda pinging while I’m chatting with Stevie in another window. o/
I started commenting on this, but I ran off a bit.
The Power of Exercise | Chubby MommySure, exercise is good for you. Wouldn’t it be great it if was good for the environment and your wallet, too?
Apparently, that’s not such a far-fetched notion. Inventors are working on ways to use exercise machines to power lighting and fixtures, with the excess stored in batteries for later use.
pretty slick stuff. I’ve been wanting to get involved with hardware electronics stuff for a while. One of the big reasons it keeps occurring to me is the amount of wasted kinetic and solar energy I see around.
I have a little cubicle desk toy which is a solar powered flower that just quietly bops back and forth under the fluorescent light with the help of a 1.5″ by .25″ solar collector thingie.
I just find it impossible not to look at the rest of the surfaces in my office. Cubicle walls, deskspace, the sides of computers, cabinets, etc. wondering how many plain old usb chargers you could run, how much electricity could be reclaimed from the unused lighting.
Sure, probably not such a great percentage of the wasted electricity could be reclaimed. But why settle for none of it?
hmmm… starting to sound like a post.
Aye, it’s driving me nuts.
ARRRR!
It be that day once again…
Oh yeah, one more thing:
Is it my imagination or in the Pirates of the Carribean movies, did anyone else notice there’s actually no actual…you know… piracy?
*snicker*
IC PublicationsThe world should “prepare for the worst … (which) is war” over the Iranian nuclear crisis, but seeking a solution through talks should take priority, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said on Sunday.
“…and then let us know how it went when you’re done.”
any idea where I might’ve put the recipe for the cookies I promised I’d make for work?
UPDATE: phew. I found the version that I give to other people when they ask for the recipe. The secrets that take it from there to the real thing are emblazoned in my mind for all time :-)
2 hours ’til cookies.
BWAHAHAHAHA! Then they’ll ALL PAY!
WTF happened to Post Secret?
I’m pretty keen on keeping watch for little red flags in my life. I know above all things that I don’t know much above all things. I spend perhaps more than a healthy amount of energy assessing whether or not things I do make any damn sense, even to me.
Imagine my quandary, if you will, when I realized this:
I use del.icio.us to keep track of most of my bookmarks. All those “ooh, gonna have to check that out” and “I should definitely pick up one of those” and “I’ll bet THAT’S the PIM to end all PIMs”. They all go in to del.icio.us under “ReviewMe”, “BuyMe” or “DownloadMe” tags respectively.
I also use bloglines to keep track of all the rss feeds I read. For the most part, I don’t much use the internet but for rss feeds and the places they lead me.
Through del.icio.us, you can subscribe to a feed of bookmarks someone posts. I subscribe to Les Orchard’s for example, because he’s usually talking about or working on something that interests me terribly.
I also subscribe to my own del.icio.us feed, just to make sure things come through alright.
But today, this morning, I caught myself trying to save a bookmark in del.icio.us of a link that came across in my del.icio.us bookmark feed, because I’d put it there an hour earlier.
Yeah.
Red Flag
I wonder if the 2 liter bottle of diet coke I just polished off on an empty stomach have anything to do with it.
*twitch*
The site of course is “This is London”
If so, then maybe I don’t need it so high on my list of travel destinations. Check this shit out:
| News | This is LondonA mother who had her bag snatched was told by police it was not a crime - because she chased after the thief and won her property back.
Sam McAlister was queueing in a coffee shop with her ten-month-old son when a woman grabbed the bag from the back of the pushchair as an accomplice distracted her.
Miss McAlister, 34, left her child with staff at the Starbucks cafe, whom she knew well, and set off in pursuit of the woman.
She confronted the thief in a nearby shop and was eventually reunited with her bag after a struggle.
But when she went to a police station to report the crime, she was told by an officer behind the desk that it was not a crime because she had got the bag back.
Are you fucking kidding me?
First the whole “don’t defend yourself, you’ll only make it worse” now this?
Unreal. No wonder people are leaving there by the hundred thousands.
