work news

Good News #1: Today we wrapped up an internal release of the software we have been working on for the past year. It's really just improvements to the underlying structure of the code, making it a lot more solid, a lot more flexible, and all in all a lot more correct. The code is 100% cleaner and we've got something really good. We had to make some compromises to launch last year to get it out in time, and we learned a lot along the way. I'm proud of it now and really proud of the team. Tomorrow we start adding some features.

Good News #2: The annual January weight-loss competition ended with me as a champ. 9 pounds (4.455% of my original weight) lighter. I've still got a lot of extra on me. We decided to do it again in February, starting Monday.

Good News #3: My coworker Josh made it official today that he is moving to greener pastures in professional sense. I put this in "Good News" since Josh is a damn find software engineer and I think he's going to do a lot of good out there. It's been great working with him, and he'll be missed.

Bad News: None.

The scariest story of the year | Democracy in America | Economist.com

The scariest story of the year | Democracy in America | Economist.com

Seriously. Seeing as how everyone is ostensibly worried about terrorism, you'd think that would have been a headline.

further geekery

I'm doing the half day again today. I woke up late, my sinuses were full, everyone has been sick at work, and I don't have anything super-pressing going on, so I see no reason to risk my health.

I did some push ups and sit ups (which were very difficult) and went for a nice walk. It's really sunny out and it's quite a beautiful winter day. I listened to BBC Newshour from last night (podcast) while I was out and about, and then came home and had a nice bowl of oatmeal with blueberries and maple syrup. I'm having some tea now.

During breakfast, I finally figured out how to forward my Northeastern CCS email to my regular account. It's called a '.forward' file and it's really ridiculously easy. I sent a few test messages from my work account. Voila! Another task on my geek todo list down. (I have a couple different todo lists; "geek" is just one of them.)

So that's been my morning. It's nearly time to be off to work.

Oh, before I forget, I updated my LinkedIn profile a bit last night (just jobs and school), so if you are on that site link up with me.

Ok, off I go.

geek

I finally got my ubuntu box all set up as a webserver, as well as setting up apache to give access to my subversion repository as well. (If you don't understand that, no worries, it's geek-talk.) That's a big set-up step that I have been meaning to get working for a while; you got to have source control for any sort of project. It really wasn't that painful, either. I learned a lot as I went along, and made a few missteps, but I'm happy with the result.

I also started my taxes last Saturday, and it looks like I'm going to owe some. Which figures, since I did that freelance gig last summer. I really wanted to spend that money on other stuff, too. Oh well.

So that's my big news. Exciting, eh?

'There is no war on terror' | Special Reports | Guardian Unlimited Politics

'There is no war on terror' | Special Reports | Guardian Unlimited Politics

geek videos

The other day I found (via reddit) a talk given by Kent Beck sometime last year. He's what you'd call a big deal in the software engineering field. The talk was really good, not so much technical as a personal/professional talk about life, and was exactly what I needed to hear on an otherwise downer day (sometimes I get in a professional funk).

Anyway, you can find the talk here on youtube; the title of the talk is "Ease at Work" Enjoy.

little tasks

I was sick this weekend. It sucked. Oh well.

I think I'm all done playing around with my ubuntu machine to make it look a bit more like my mac; no more brown backgrounds for me! It's pretty nice, except I boned the icons in azureus somehow, so now the "file open" and "create torrent" icons are super huge. Not a big deal, since I hardly ever actually look at that app, just check status every once in a while.

So far I like amarok quite a bit. The hardest part of using ubuntu (for me, anyways) has been trying to figure out what app to use. There are about a million different apps for whatever you want to do, and it's hard to know which is best. The good folks over at lifehacker have a few guides, so if you're interested, check them out. Their tips are generally pretty good.

Anyway, that's my big excitement. Yeah, real big, I know. Later.

half day file copy

So I decided to sleep in this morning for a bit and take a half day so that I could get my files transferred from my backup to the mac. I hit a snag along the way.

I had backed up the files by simply copying my home directory onto my ubuntu machine by booting my mac up in target disk mode, where it acts just like an external firewire drive. That was really handy and pretty quick. The problems occurred, however, when attempting to write the files back this morning. For some reason, I could not write to the mac. Even as root. Weird. I couldn't find a setting on the mac or on the web, so I decided to plug in the ethernet (wireless is too slow for this much stuff) and go the scp route.

Music is copying now. Photos and Movies are left. Those are the big three.

Weird that the firewire wouldn't work, though.

hard drive installed

I installed my new hard drive in the laptop tonight. The old one was nearly dead. OS X is all installed, updates are downloading now. I'll probably restore my files tomorrow.

The only casualty was the little spring under my F11 key. Not too shabby for an amateur.

Rollins opinion on Net Neutrality

Throw away your TV - Rollins opinion on Net Neutrality

my sister is coming

My sister is bumming a ride from a friend and is coming to visit me this weekend. Sweet! If only I could think of something fun to do...

usability

So Macworld is happening, Steve Jobs' keynote presentation was today. Apple is introducing some good stuff. Check it out. The presentation is long, about 2 hours, and so far (I'm watching it now) it's good. You should watch it to see how the usability on the new iPhone is. Here's a hint: it's good. Damn good. Every other phone is shit. Text messaging on other phones is shit.

Apple is good at usability. I think they really nailed it here.

Anyway, it's worth looking at. Especially if you write software, because this is how things should work.

2007 - resolutions

We're almost a week into 2007, and so far the resolutions are going alright. I also started reading lifehacker again, which is handy, and gave me a bit of a kick-start. Things I am doing:

1. Got a spreadsheet with a project monthly budget.
- I also made a spreadsheet just to track every cent I actually spend this month, in order to see how good my guesswork is. I usually have this stuff on random scraps of paper, so I figured that I should get it all collected in one place, rather than redoing it every time I want to figure out where my money is going.

2. Dieting. Well, cutting back to reasonable amounts of healthy food is more like it. The office "how much weight can you lose in January" contest is back on, and honestly, I am tubby. This has not been bad at all, since when I cut back on amount, I generally eat a lot better in terms of variety. I feel a hell of a lot better already as well.

3. Exercise. Ok, this has been a slower start. I've gone for a run a couple of times, but I'm leaning more towards getting in the habit of walking now, since it takes less motivation. And really, I am a creature of habit. If I can get in the mode of walking (or doing anything, really) at a given time every day, I can keep it up. So I figure that I can move on to running and more strenuous forms of working out once I am in the habit of doing something. I'm a string believer in small steps. I already went for an hour walk this morning. It was really tough to do in this harsh New England winter. (That, of course, was sarcasm. It's just about 70° today, my windows and back door are open to let the breeze through.) So anyway, I'm working on it.

4. Organization / Motivation
- I have a hard time motivating myself to do anything. I had found before that the "Getting Things Done" process has a lot of helpful ideas. So I've been going with that, keeping lists of what I need to/want to do around. My company even got me one of those Hipster PDAs, though they don't know it.

5. Side projects
- I've been meaning to do more as far as working on different stuff at home. Geeky stuff. Resolution #4 has been a big help in this arena. I've got my network set up a bit better for transferring files between my ubuntu box and the powerbook. I got azureus up and running, subversion installed (still needs some configuration, and apache running. In other words, a lot of the base framework for development has been laid down. I've been babying the powerbook lately, since the hard drive is a ticking time bomb. I backed that up for the last time last night, and ordered a new drive this morning. So hopefully by the end of next week I'm going to be back to using OS X as my prime operating system.
- Also, I am all caught up on The Office (which, oddly, make me miss my home state, in addition to laughing out loud).

So there it is, my second post of the year. I have to go clean the kitchen and take the garbage out now. Until next time...

Happy New Year!

Let's make 2007 a good one, shall we?