Kevin Lawver's blog about life, programming, culture and learning.
Wow… this is so beautiful (found @ openbrackets and by David Berman):
When it’s snowing, the outdoors seem like a room.
Today I traded hellos with my neighbor.
Our voices hung close in the new acoustics.
A room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling.
Because I don’t edit… I won’t replace the last post with this one. Has anyone come up with a geographic Blog Directory? I think it would be really cool to see local bloggers. Ok, maybe not REALLY cool, but it would be interesting. And then you could do a big map with dots on cities and the number of bloggers in that city. Yeah, good idea… too bad I don’t have time to do it. I COULD do it, really I could. I just don’t have a public place to host AOLserver, Postgres and RedHat. Maybe when I get DSL… I keep saying it, and some day, it’ll get out here in lovely Sterling. I just don’t know when.
Ok, this is weird, and it’s a totally personal problem. I think because I started my bloggy life reading people who live in San Francisco, or other West Coasty places, I’m still surprised when I find blogs from people living IN MY AREA! Go figure. With more people online than anywhere in the country OTHER than San Francisco, there are probably tons of DC area blogs… I’m just too stupid to realize it. Ok, back to my fetal position under the desk. Ring the bell when it’s time for dinner.
So, basically, the concept of the day is comparative advantage. I couldn’t find a good definition on the web, but, basically, it means “do what you do best, and leave the other crap to people who do it better than you do.” In my case, I know I’m not so hot at graphic design. I’ve resigned myself to that fact. At work, I don’t try to design products anymore. I’ve given it up to the people who do it. They, on the other hand, don’t know HTML or Tcl or how to put a site together from scratch. That’s what I do well. So, that’s what I do…
So, it’s time to redesign because I’m tired of the white, and well, I kind of half-assed it this morning while I was waiting for an e-mail. Trust me, it won’t stay like this for long.
It must be a slow news day, cuz I have nothing to talk about…
There are tons of beautiful colors that fall outside of the web-safe palette. I can’t wait for the day when I can use them all. I found a great orange today that I’d love to use, but alas, we must remain members of the Web-Safe Army and only use the approved colors!! Let’s all march to the tune of 216 colors of happiness and long for the days of many colors, when it will be safe to come up with fabulous designs that use colors that no one’s discovered, lying under hats in the closet to the left of the old shoes we never wear and should probably give to charity. Yes, I’m talking about THOSE colors!! Aahhhh, what a nice dream, maybe some day.
I’ve realized that there are two types of people in the world – target=_new people and who don’t mind if someone else comes in and talks for awhile. Unfortunately, I’m a target=_new person…
So, what am I doing? I think next week, I’ll start posting a bunch of the cool AOLserver stuff I’ve done on my own, like the adp-tag db call, the calendar and my instructions on how to install AOLserver and Postgres in Linux. How does that sound? It’ll be nice to have some content up here other than my ramblings and Max’s pics (which are cool and need to be updated).
I’m also thinking of building a search engine into AOLserver. There used to be this cool text indexing stuff built right in back in 2.1 when Illustra was still the primary db (and which I still have running somewhere on my O2). I’d love to see it come back. Why, you ask? Because I’ve been doing Search stuff for two years and think I can do it. So there.
What has to go into a search engine? Here’s what I’ve got so far:
So now I have a Linux box on (under) my desk. It’s nice to sit here and look at a lovely GNOME desktop while doing my work. Linux is fun. Linux is groovy if you want to run a website on it. Linux isn’t so hot when it comes to working in a company that’s 100% windows-centric. So, I’ve got Win2k in the middle, a Sun box to the right of me, my RedHat box to the left, and my Powerbook in a drawer. Does it get any better than that?
You know what sucks about having a job? I have to do stuff even when I’m uninspired. On most of the stuff I build, I find some way to get there. I find some new trick, or concept and blow it out in whatever the project is. Now, I’m working on something I’ve already done once, and I’m just not there. I don’t feel like rebuilding the wheel. I don’t feel like hours and hours of pushing pixels around, squashing bugs and answering the inevitable “That’s not like what I sent you.”, “Why does it do that?” questions. Maybe it’s time for another vacation, or at least, a donut.
Unfortunately, I have no donuts. I only have my Powerbook. My PC at work fried somehow this weekend. I came in yesterday morning, and the video card is all messed up. It’s bleeding all over the screen so everything looks like it’s behind chifon venetian blinds, and semi-distorted. I called our help desk people, and am still waiting for them to come fix it. So, I’m uninspired on a computer I’m not used to using for code, and tired of sitting here. Maybe I’ll go work in the cafe or something.
It’s times like these that I miss working in Tucson. When I was uninspired, I could stop. The stuff I built didn’t have deadlines or money attached to them. They were for fun. Now, everything has to be done now. It has to get out the door yesterday or I get calls from people all over. It’s fun to live a stress-free life, only it doesn’t pay so well. Ok, enough rambling… lunch is over and I have work to do.