Oh, and the best part about working here? We make up codenames and stupid words for things and then don’t tell anyone what they are. So, if you go to a meeting with another group, they have their own codenames and stupid words. It’s so like speaking another language that the first thirty minutes of the meeting is spent coming up with translations for each group’s terms and agreeing on what to call them for the second thirty minutes of the meeting, at which point everyone forgets the new words and confuses the living hell out of everyone for the rest of the meeting. After the meeting, we send out e-mails with the new glossary and translation charts, which everyone then prints multiple copies of, binds and then stick on a shelf – because we’re a technology company, and that’s how we store information.
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Dynamicizin’
You know what I love about our industry? We make up words. We make up stupid words. At AOL, we make up stupid acronyms and codenames for things. The other day, I was in a meeting about a project to add dynamic content to a currently static product. It was me and a bunch of uber-geeks and we were struggling to describe the process of taking this static content and making it dynamic. That’s when I made up Dynamicize. So, this is how the rest of the meeting went, with frowns from the guy with no sense of humor:
Me: So, it gets dynamitated after it leaves System X and before it gets to System Y or does it happen somewhere else?
Other Guy With Sense of Humor: No, the dynamicization happens between System Y and System Z, as you can clearly see in my squiggly lined illustration on the white board.
Guy With No Sense of Humor: Ok, the process to create this dynamic content happens here (points to white board, frowns, head explodes).
and… scene.
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I am hooked.
I am hooked.
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Blues That Fit in Your Hand
Whenever I wonder why I don’t have a PDA, I try to think of this. That’s what a handheld should do. And yes, I don’t have a cell either. I just have my lovely work-provided two-way pager. I don’t want an electronic calendar. I want a phone, browser and organizer all in one. Soon, it will be possible, and then I’ll think about getting one. I’ve held out this long, I can wait. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway.
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Give it to me now!!!!
I know I’ve been slacking about posting, but I have perfectly valid reasons. Like anything with life, stuff runs hot and cold. Work is hot right now. Blogging – eh – not so hot. I’ll still post daily, but probably not the deluge I had been offering. Also, life is hot. Max has decided that sleeping is not his ‘thing’ at the moment, and that means everyone at the Lawver house is doing a little adjusting. Jen’s not getting her normal nap because Max isn’t taking his. We’re staying up later because Max is. We’re getting up earlier, cuz, yet again, Max is. So, we’re making due with Carry-Out and lots of help from my family (and moral support from her parents in Tucson). Once I wake up, I’m sure I’ll be all chatty and sharing again.
In the sharing vein (which, kids, you should never do. Remember, sharing veins is for foreigners and weirdos. If you share veins, the terrorists have already won! Ok, you can ignore me now.), I’ve rediscovered iTunes radio tuner feature, and am totally addicted to Groove Salad. It’s trancey, groovy and conducive to half-awake coding.
In good work news, my new LogCrunching machine should be here in the next week or so. It will be berry berry nice:
- Dual Xeon 1.7ghz
- 1gb Rambus RAM
- 2 36gb SCSI hard drive
- nVidia Quadro2 video card w/ 64 mb
- dual NICS
- RedHat 7.2
- Sweet free mouse pad
What will I be doing with this machine? I’ll be crunching lots of files and extracting numbers from them like a SuperJuicer. How? I can’t post the code or anything, but I’ll be using AOLserver because it does a great job of scheduling jobs and I already know it. I’ll use Postgres to dump the numbers into. It will be lots and lots of fun and give me my desktop machine back so I don’t have to run the numbers I run now on it. A winner all around.
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My poor little Powerbook.
My poor little Powerbook. I have one of the older G3’s with the bronze keyboard (pre-firewire). It’s been through so many complete wipes and re-installs that I think it’s having a personality conflict. After getting tired of waiting for OS X to load anything, I’ve decided to switch to YellowDog 2.1 again now that Ximian‘s available.
What’s funny is I don’t really use it for anything. I used to take it home and use it for MAME. Now I use my poor little Dell laptop for Civ3. So, I’m turning the Powerbook into my little crash machine where I can play with compiling kernels and other geeky stuff.
Speaking of geeky. I’m sliding down the slippery slope of complete geekhood. I had a dream in code the other night. I now speak Tcl better than I speak English. I find it harder and harder to relate to non-geeks. I have dark circles under my eyes. I wear geeky shirts – like today. I got this nice polo from the guys at Overture, and well, I’m wearing it. I also got really excited yesterday when I got mail from the guys at YellowDog saying they’d posted my Howto and are sending me a t-shirt.
I need to start painting that huge canvas in the basement. I need to read that book. I need to stop thinking about work all the time and get a good night’s sleep.
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Please, Mr. TiVo
Jen and I have talked about this one a couple times, and man, I wish TiVo would just do it. TiVo should have playlists. For example, say you have a two year old who loves Blue’s Clues and you’re exhausted because said toddler woke up too early. Wouldn’t it be great to hit the Keep Max Happy playlist, put it on repeat, and escape to the couch for more sleep? Yeah, that’s what I thought.
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Ahhhh, finally. Ximian GNOME is
Ahhhh, finally. Ximian GNOME is finally available for YellowDog 2.1. Let the geekRejoicing begin.
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Unlawful Combatants
Our government continues to classify the “detainees” in Cuba as unlawful combatants, and therefore are not covered under the Geneva Convention. While I agree that they may not be traditional POWs, I still think we should go out of our way to afford them every privelage given to POWs under the Geneva Convention. What?! Yes, I know. Just yesterday I was all for stringing them all up by their toes until they tell us everything they know. I realized that in all of the future, yet-to-happen fighting, undoubtedly some of our troops will be captured. We don’t want to give the other side any excuse to not extend the same privelages and treatment to our soldiers.
We have to be beyond reproach in this respect. We’re America – the biggest, the strongest. We can’t go gathering up the angry little guys and putting them in cages. We have to treat them like soldiers even if they’re just terrorists. Just because this is a “new kind of war”, we shouldn’t stoop any lower than we have to. Treating the captured Taliban and Al-Queda fighters as POWs is an easy and internationally visible way to start.
Crappy Segue
If I hear anyone else from the Bush administration call Al Queda “the evildoers” one more time, I’m going to lose it and start throwing things. It’s President Bush’s favorite phrase, and just yesterday on Meet the Press, I heard it from Andrew Card, the Chief of Staff. Come on. Don’t you think that over-simplifies what they are and what they’re trying to do? Al Queda is not Doctor Doom, or Boris and Natascha or Muttly. They’re fanatics who believe that America is the Great Satan. And that’s just the beginning. Calling them “evil-doers” and “the bad guys” turns this into an episode of Starsky and Hutch. It minimizes the threat into a two-dimensional comic book instead of a global ideological war, a bloody culture clash that could drag on for decades. So, stop it, you poops.
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If the people who play
If the people who play EverQuest have too much time on their hands, what does that say about the people who spend months researching them?