NPR and Blogging
As I sit here in my car outside Starbucks, NPR is doing a story on blogging. They describe a site with One Minute Vacations – sixty-second sound clips of people’s trips in various cities. You can jump online, take a quick respite from your busy day, and transport yourself to Ghana, Stockholm, or any number of interesting places. Nifty. I prefer photoblogging myself – Photojunkie is a great example. So I’m listening to NPR talk about a site about blogging, while I surf it, from my car. (Life doesn’t get much better than this – or does it?
Over the last couple of days, we’ve talked a lot at work about switching programming languages to Java. I’m blogging about this because I think it’s a pivotal moment in my career.
I don’t have any interest in learning Java: over the last couple of years, I’ve gotten more and more interested in true RAD tools. My recent research into integrated UML tools only solidified that push: it came as a shock to me that there are UML tools out there that will literally produce parts of your code if you do your design work in diagrams up front. The nicest (and most expensive) ones, like Rational XDE, even integrate completely into the development environment, so you’re using one tool to do all your work. How cool is that?
But back to Java. I’m faced with the prospect of moving to the polar opposite end of programming: doing everything in text editors, no wizards, no drag-and-drop, no work automation. Is that how I want to spend my day? Can I see myself staring at text editors for hours on end? No way.
So then, forget the company for a moment: what do I want to do for a living over the next five or ten years? I love doing analysis, project management, not text editors. Long morning already, I guess.
Exhibit A: the last photo from my laptop webcam. Not as in the last today, but the last one. I opened the screen of the laptop, and the webcam came off in my hand. A piece broke off, a particularly vital plastic piece that holds the USB connection together, and now it’ll no longer work. Dang. Well, it worked for quite a while – good deal for $40. I probably won’t get another one for the time being: I wasn’t that impressed with the performance of the Thinkpad Ultraport Camera. Even though it’s nicely integrated with the top of the screen, it’s just too slow to refresh images.
I ended up falling in love with a few custom-built concrete houses with a gorgeous modern look to them, so I’ve pretty much determined at this point that we need to build our own. Erika and I are never leaving Houston, knock on wood, and we like very architecturally interesting houses, of which there seem to be exactly zero on the market. Mom & I toured the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum at the Menil Collection last month, and that was a great example of the architecture I’m fond of. Don’t be fooled by the name – there’s nothing Byzantine about the museum building itself, pictured here.
Got my game face on. I’ve always been the kind of guy to make strange faces and noises while programming, and working at home has increased my wackiness. While testing a new stored procedure, the webcam caught me with my fist up, getting ready to give my computer the finger if it didn’t succeed. I happened to notice the webcam so I thought I’d save the pic for posterity. No particular reason. (And no, the stored procedure didn’t work the third time, either.)
The database server is undergoing maintenance at work, so I’ve got a few minutes. (And no, the machine pictured here isn’t the server.) I surfed over to Tom’s Hardware, one of my favorite review sites, and they’ve got an excellent evaluation of the new mini-ITX motherboards from Via. Mini-ITX is a relatively new compact form factor for motherboards that allows you to build a computer in much smaller packages. The motherboard itself is about 6.5″ by 6.5″, so you could pop one of these in a glovebox relatively easily. Plus, these Via models run cooler than conventional computers, and require less power, so they’re perfect for in-car applications where you don’t want fans or huge power inverters.
Fall down go boom. Lost a CPU in my dual-cpu server last night after I went to bed. For the last couple of weeks, the temperature monitor on it had been reading 195 degrees F, but I thought it was a mistake, since I could put my finger on it without yelping in pain. Either I’ve got a really high tolerance for pain, or else the CPU was fried, and it looks like the latter.
I finally got a digital camera. I’ve been putting it off because I couldn’t justify spending even $100 for a digital camera that can’t take better pictures than my traditional camera. (I still can’t find a camera under $500 that outshoots my Kodak.) Anyway, I got an el-cheapo $40 SiPix Blink II because it was small enough that I’d leave it in my laptop bag. The photo quality is abysmal (640×480 pixels max, no flash, no LCD) but more than good enough to enrich my blog.
Hmmm, I’ve finally run out of USB ports. I’ve been a firm believer in USB – it’s a simple, easy-to-use connection standard that accommodates a lot of peripherals. Today, I ran out of USB ports. I’ve been using a USB keyboard, mouse, webcam, radio, printer, and scanner, and the straw that broke the camel’s back was a new USB storage device, one of those memory keys. MicroCenter had ’em on sale for $20, and I couldn’t pass that up.
Just call me Brent Millionaire. For the last week, Erika’s been excited about this new show on Fox called Joe Millionaire. It’s a direct ripoff of The Bachelor with the interesting exception that the guy in question isn’t actually well-to-do: he’s a construction worker making $19k a year, just pretending that he’s recently inherited fifty million. Twenty women are holed up in a French castle with this guy, and he has to whittle them down to just one that he wants to keep.
I’m proud to announce the newest member of our family. He’s an inch and a half long, he weighs two ounces, and he’s a natural born swimmer. We haven’t named him yet, though.
