jne

It has a been a long time since I did a postpourri, but I wanted to capture a few links:

• Required Javascript Reading - a very good list.
• 30 Nerdy Coffee Mugs
• MAKE weekend projects Google+ entry: the actual link to the projects is here
• YoYo Games Framework - don't know if I'll try this out.  Was looking for something Eryn might like to use.
• Eryn tried out a Johnson Telecaster and liked it while she was buying her oboe for band next year.  I see they just came out with a Wilko Johnson Telecaster, but I don't think that's it.  My wife said it was fairly inexpensive and Eryn liked the sound.  Might have to ask the oboe salesman what he showed her.

Passing Time

Wow.  Twelve days.  I've got no excuse.  Or too many.  You can blame...

• Going back to work after nine weeks out of office.  I'm trying to put in a good showing and demonstrate I can provide value immediately.  I'm a bit of an ass kiss, just without any intention to kiss ass.  I just like to do a good job.
• Physical therapy - I am exhausted after pretending to walk without a limp all day, and then doing exercises in the evening to ensure I'm back on my bicycling as soon as possible.
• Snarky - since we moved to concerning ourselves about SEO and attaching significant text to every blog post, it's gotten more intensive.  Add to that the fact that I'm trying to make up for lost time sucking up my coauthor's time, and I'm putting in a lot of writing.
• A reading habit developed during my convalescence - I spent a lot of time reading whatever looked interesting on the Kindle app on my iPad.  I'm in a reading habit.  I could have blogged about all those books - many of them so new I'm not sure you could find them in stores, only in bytes - but I didn't.  I used that time to read some more.
• Making up for lost time - family things.  Going to Beyond the Black Rainbow at the Trylon with Kyle (plus a peanut butter burger - called a jiffy - at the Blue Door).  Erik's last gig this weekend.  Breakfast with whomever will have me.  A weekend out with Adam and Kyle to Wisconsin coming soon.  Covering an application release weekend, despite not having to (see #1).  Reading a book to my daughter and hanging with her when I can.  
• Other writing - damn it, I took a break to gain some perspective on my book, found it, and now I have to implement it.  And I have another writing project.
• Just talking to everyone I missed over the last two plus months.

I've got no intent to give up my blog.  It's therapeutic to scribble out here.  I apologize, but your reading doesn't matter as much as my mental health.  I'm making an effort to get back into the groove of things.

So many great software links to read lately...

Some interesting links from lately:

• A book review of WROX's Professional Mobile Web Development with Wordpress, Joomla!, and Drupal by James Pearce. "Chapter 5, "The Mobile Toolbox," will probably be of more interest to web developers than the earlier chapters, because it surveys the mobile development techniques, server-side technologies, and development tools that are most often used for creating mobile-ready websites. For nondevelopers, the section that describes the key components of a CMS, can be valuable as an introduction to CMSs." And from Amazon: "I really wish Pearce had written 4 books. One on mobile web development and design in general, and one each for Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla. If you are new to Drupal, give this book a pass for right now. But if you want an introduction to design and development for the mobile web along with a bit of guidance to get you started with mobile Drupal, this may be a good place to start."
• 15 Criteria for Evaluating Software - I don't think this is a definitive list, but I like that they ask if you can promote it cost effectively.
• The Line interviews Dan Grigsby, who I saw speak at MHTA Spring Conference.  His live discussion with a Microsoft evangelist got down into the nitty gritty of MVC, Mono, and specific language preferences, and half the audience seemed to wander off, but for a techy at a conference with more of a managerial feel, it was Nirvana.  "Say you're a technologist and you have a kind of entrepreneurial bent to you. You go from having a job to setting up a consultancy that works with several firms. You do essentially the same kind of thing you would do with a job--write code--but you're your own boss. You pick a technology that's emerging, like mobile, so you get a higher rate. That higher rate gives you a surplus of income, so now you have extra time, and if you organize things right you also get the intellectual property rights to what you develop--and soon you go from having this income-replacement business to having what I call a cash-cow business. You build up a portfolio of intellectual property in an emerging space like mobile and ultimately this leads you to product."
• The Myth of the Flat Fee, by 80Beans - "We then try to explain that we can't give an estimate, let alone a price, based on the supplied information. We'll invite you to first work with us so we know exactly what you want to achieve. Talk to us, join us in making wireframes/click demo's and writing user stories. You'll be surprised at the advancing insight you will develop while going through this process. There will be things you didn't think about, while some other essential features seem to be redundant. We can use the outcome of this process to base an estimate on, and it can be used by you to obtain more accurate proposals from others....Every project consists of three attributes, also known as the "project triangle" or "triple constraint". There's scope: the features your app has. There's time: how long will it take to build your app. Finally there's cost...During the initial phase of the project — when it becomes clear what you really want — they will say that's not how they interpreted the scope for some feature. Now you're faced with a few options. You can alter the scope so the cost remains exactly the same: the feature will be dropped, it will not be developed the way you wanted or you need to slim down the scope later on. Or you can decide to pay more to get what you wanted in the first place. There the flat fee goes out of the window. A few weeks later the same situation occurs. First there's a conflict, then there's choosing between building something you don't really want, or paying more."
• How to write a game in GWT - not pretty, but an interesting exercise.
• I should make Eryn do an exercise where she doubles pennies on a sheet of paper.  Not because it's a learning experience, but because I think it would be funny to have her count one hundred million+ pennies.  I wish I had a million dollars to bring home the lesson in style.  Maybe if I win the last Powerball of the month for the corporate powerball pool.
• BigDubb pointed me at The Curve of Talent - "The more that you manage people in your career, the more you’ll find that it is very hard to find people who can execute well on what they are asked to do... It was a very candid moment of talent assessment in which the bar of performance wasn’t innovation, but simply competently executing the expected job."  That describes my whole career arc from contractor to manager.  I am competent.  If I don't feel I'm competent, I make myself competent, no matter what it takes in terms of personal time.  If there's something that needs to happen, I try to make it happen, and in an informed manner.  Everything else is extra.  I very much like the reference in the article to The Peter Principle, which The Hairy Swede and I recently used for a Snrky.
• Getting Real by 37 Signals - if for nothing else, the chapter on uninterrupted alone time (f - I almost typed interrupted) sums up 99% of what's wrong with software development in a large corporation.
• Don't Plug Your Leaks When You Got No [Fucking] Boat - points you back at Getting Real by 37 Signals and 15 Criteria - don't build shit that fulfills what you think is important but doesn't fulfill a sizable customer need.  This applies to software products and software developer stickfigure cartoons.

jne

I don't think I've done a miscellaneous posting list in a while. Now that I have an iPad, I have a habit of just twittering the links so I can comb back through them any time I please. But there are a few items I've found particularly interesting lately.

• How Pac Man's Ghosts Decide What to Do (via Boing Boing)
• Why I Didn't Like Riding the Bus as a Kid (e.g. Nazi Bus Ride) by Oatmeal
• Dilbert's Confusopoly - hits a little close to home
• The benefits of unemployment $ vs. tax cut dollars (Taylor)
• Tea Party Nation President Proposes Taking Away Vote from Tenants (funny if you have a duplex you rent)
• The Winter 2010 Intelligence Report (SPLC)
• Anti-gay Groups added to SPLC hate groups
• Loop Optimization (via Dr. Dobbs) and Loop Optimization Theory on Wikipedia
• Adam Savage Mythbusting TSA Airport Security (video)
• The SPLC Hate Map (one of my favorite links)
• What the f*** are you wearing - I include this because I can't decide if it's funny or obnoxious.  Likely both.

A Few Favorites

Most of my favorites things to read/watch today came from Pharyngula:

• Christine O'Donnell on evolution
• Richard Tillman on his brother's relationship with God
• The bad science of evolution in science fiction, including the Star Trek Voyager episode, "Threshold", that was apparently incredibly bad that I never saw.
• In combination with the Badger Trail coming out of Madison, the Grand Illinois Trail may be my bicycling target of choice for next year.
• Erotic Monster Manual entries via Boing Boing.
• 2010 Hugo Award Winners

Hero

Thank you to Wali for providing me the link. Truly inspirational.

http://en.tackfilm.se/?id=1276474031954RA79

At some point (with addendum)

Ming was crawling around under my desk with his little chub hanging out. I don't feel safe and I don't feel respected. But I've carried his love to Kyle.

ADDENDUM: I forgot to mention. Ming taped up his little chub, but was discovered when his taping job failed and his chub popped out. (NSFW: Clerks II)

Poop

I can't believe the Mac thesaurus in Word won't let me loot up alternatives to "shit". Fortunately, The Poop Thesaurus has my back covered. However, it doesn't include "night soil", so I find it a dubious reference. It looks like you have to go to Thesaurus.com and use poop and manure to cross reference all the various permutations like meadow muffin, cow pies, feculence, and dung, many of which, even if they do show up in Word, don't link to much more than "droppings". Wikipedia at least goes the distance and gives me a 16th century drawing of a human defecating in a squatting position. Sometimes research is difficult.

Ugh

Obviously, I was drinking more caffeine than I thought. Because going cold turkey is rough.

Itchy

I haven't been blogging lately. While I can blame part of it on Call of Duty Modern Warfare (for the Wii), I have to blame at least two days on being itchy. As near as I can tell, two days ago the itchiness, which rapidly turned into stomach cramps and overwhelming tiredness, was brought on by some sort of nut associated with the hot chocolate set from Penzy's Mean Mr. Mustard gave me for my 41st birthday. I grated a little into my hot chocolate per instructions. New nut...new liminal allergy. Figures.

Yesterday, it seemed to be a product of a spider bite. A spider bite I got at work. I'd blame Ryan for bringing the little bastard from downtown to the burb offices, but I got the bite shortly before he showed up, not shortly after. It was (actually, it is) on the back of my left hand, by the thumb and pointer finger. Couple of hours later, the itchiness it caused spread from my hand to my arm. A few hours later, both arms. By 9:00 p.m. it was my whole body. Then I was exhausted from itching and went to bed.

I seem fine today, although I can still see the spider bite, and some of the nut is still sitting down here by the computer where I left it after staring at it to see if it would give up the secret to its itchiness causing powers.

Spit

I was at Erik (the Hairy Swede)'s house tonight, talking shop and drinking a few India Pale Ales. His dog, Henry, was playing with a ball and tossing it around, and that was all fine. I didn't give a thought to the fact that he's a rather drooly dog. I took a long drink on my beer and thought, "that tastes....chewy...and gross". I'm 99.95% certain I got a big wad of dog spit before the beer kicked in. I hope the alcohol kills dog STDs.

Kyle's a Girl

Kyle, I know how much you like to cook, but I quote the Target Christmas advertisement kitchen section, "What she wants: the KitchenAid kitchen. What you love: one less trip to the mall."

Apparently Target doesn't pay much attention to the chefs on the Food Channel, the Travel Channel, any channel with Andrew Zimmern, or that most of the local chefs seem to be male. Except for Chef Lenny Russo from Heartland on Facebook, he could really be anyone, male or female - so stop following him on Facebook and making suggestions about how to improve the spicy cornmeal-crusted Great Lakes walleye with braised winterbor kale and golden cauliflower sauce.

Geeking Out

I think it says something about me that I'm excited this evening because I get to do the initial parts of a unixODBC install on a SUSE VM, and because the new Harvard Business Review that arrived in the mail has the title "The Drucker Centennial: What Would Peter Do?"

Where Am I?

I swear, I cannot keep up with much of anything lately. There's no shortage of activity - we've been caching, gymnastics, Eryn's at her grandparents all week, we refinanced the house, I have a stack of books I've read by myself and with Eryn - but I don't seem to be doing a very good job of discussing any of it. Maybe if I quit playing stupid Facebook games I'd have more luck. Or maybe if I wasn't working with the laptop all night. That's probably the bigger issue.

The refinancing of the house is the biggest deal in the last week. The closer showed up tonight to walk us through the e-signature process. Which was cool, because I saw a panel at Code Freeze present on building an e-signature application and their agile process. It's been a pain to close because credit lines have tightened up, so they had to reassess our credit rating, get us to close out the line of credit (which was painful), and generally dick around for almost two months about little issues like why my W-2 doesn't have the same name as my employer (according to the closer, she's had that same problem with several people at my company). But it's done, we're over a point lower, and we're running about $220 leaner, not including the $30 for the line of credit. If I prune my DirectTV bill (my goal for tomorrow, sometime between interviewing candidates and the other 6 hours of meetings), we might be down by $300 a month. If my wife wasn't breaking the struts on her Focus, we'd be saving up for our next car.

Odds and Ends - MS 60, Slacker Manager

Erik the Swede put me on to this site, Slacker Manager. It's a useful enough source of managerial reading material that it's in my links list. I also added a link for the weather in Eagan. It's so specific it tells me the inside temperature. Now I have to look around the house for the weather station.

I am in the MS 60 this year. Not the 150. I decided to go for a single day event rather than the two day abandon the family for the weekend version, particularly as I'm running away to RAGBRAI for a week. A friend donated $50 in my name, so I at least meet the minimum, but I encourage people to donate anyway. You can find the Wild West Outlaws team here, and we're a long ways from our target. If you don't feel like donating to me, try donating to Ming Tan or Kirat Sekhon - both of them need to meet their $50 minimum.

Stuff About Minneapolis has an article on Community Agriculture with a list of Minneapolis CSAs via Heavy Table. MNSpeak/Secrets of the City has an open post up on CSAs as well. I think we'll be doing this in my family this year.

Let's Go Crazy sung a capella (MNSpeak via MNStories)


There's a new Dora! If you're protesting, you have a problem.

Secrets of the City also posted a link to this commentary designed to piss off cyclists. The comments are the good part.

Branding

I was reading the corporate blog today and a lot of people were discussing our brand and that they'd seen it on television, on sports figures, and in video games that feature sports figures. This reminded me, I too had seen an interesting placement of our brand, but in my case it wasn't on a golfer or in a video game, but in a picture I'd encountered while looking for some pictures and information when composing my post about the midwest burlesk review.

A warning, this is no doubt the most NSFW for work link I've ever posted on my blog unless you include the one where Mean Mr. Mustard is in bed with Spike. I'm pretty sure I have to post it here and not on the company website.

http://www.thebeefboy.com/images/fanpage/dita_von_teese.jpg

Slacker Weekend?

It felt like I didn't accomplish much this weekend, like I'd just been sitting around trying to motivate myself to do something. But I tried to recount what I'd been up to, and it seems like I managed to finish more than I suspected.

I went on a 23 mile bike ride with Ming and Kyle on the Gateway (pictures below) and formulated a plan to try and eat a 30" inch pizza with them if we can get Dan'l to be our fourth (free t-shirts, win or lose! Free pizza if we can eat it in 30 minutes. Just over a 14" pizza each).

I watched a large portion of Hogfather on video with Eryn and Pooteewheet, as well as Leatherheads. I enjoyed seeing The Great Atuin and his four elephants supporting Discworld more than I enjoyed George Clooney.

I went out to Origami at Ridgedale for sushi with Kyle, Pooteewheet and Eryn, post bike ride. On top of the pizza it was almost too much. I did several hours of yard work on Saturday, mowing up the leaves, mowing the grass that was way overdue, packaging it all up in about 6 multi-load bags beyond the standard plastic container that usually manages, and putting away all the sprinklers, hoses, swimming pool plus toys, hammock stand, and other things littering the yard.

And the family went out and bought a new recliner and a new sofa that has recliners on both ends. That's right. As of next weekend there will be three reclining locations in our basement, and a new area rug (already in place) to make it look like we replaced the carpet, when we really didn't. This will make my mother exceedingly happy, as she's disgusted with the lack of reclining locations within my extended family.

Oh, and I figured out how to buy Wiipoints and purchase the internet browser so my family can listen to music on YouTube while we play board games on the new area rug. I also bought Mario 3, which may excite my sister almost as much as seeing The New Kids on the Block did.

The Gateway Trail. Pretty in the fall, despite that it was a little wet and kept getting colder.


Ming and Kyle, dressed for warmth. We had to wait about 45 minutes for our pizza, which seemed like forever because it was so cold after riding.


Ming learning all about the park he bikes to several times a summer. More than anything, I wanted a picture of the pretty tree in the background. Ming was incidental to the picture.


One of my favorite things to photograph, a no biking sign.


My bike, all covered with muck and out for perhaps the last ride of the season before I move my rides indoors.


Eryn enjoying a skewer during the post-ride trip to Origami for sushi. I'm proud of her as she tried a small taste of wasabi tobiko.

Panty Liner

I got to Eryn's school festival yesterday, where I was scheduled to run the ring toss, and after I entered the gymnasium, Pooteewheet was flashing one of these at me from her pocket and pointed out that they could be won for scoring a successful ring toss. All I could think is, "Why would they give away panty liners to children?" Followed closely by, "What sort of idiot makes and/or wears a psychedelic panty liner?"

Turns out, it's a book mark. I should have known. Although if it WAS a pantyliner, perhaps this was the intended use.

Astigmatism

Someone named Jellybean commented on my blog today, and I noticed on her blog that she had a link to Yearbookyourself.com. I got there, and decided I'd rather do a grizzly bear from the Minnesota zoo exhibit than myself. But when I got to the folder with the grizzly pictures I noticed a picture of Pooteewheet's zombie eye.

Oh, he knows what the ladies are digging today, if today were circa 1988. They are digging landing themselves a handsome cyclops boy with an awesome haircut. I particularly like how the eyelashes form a nice teenage-style beard.

Advice

When playing Resident Evil 4, it is bad form to try and shoot a zombie, but instead shoot the president's daughter in the head. I think this in some way makes me the poor man's Keanu Reeves (that's a difficult one to wrap your brain around).

I'd like to note that Erik stood me up for breakfast this morning. I drove all the way downtown from Eagan and ended up eating at Key's in the Foshay by myself. Given that I got to sit downtown, eat a great breakfast, and read The Onion, it could have definitely been worse. But he's still in trouble for making me eat alone. Advice, if you're going to stand someone up for breakfast, it should be me, I'll make an omelet.