Sing it with me:
“Well we're movin on up,
To the east side.
To a deluxe apartment in the sky.
Movin on up
To the east side.
We finally got a piece of the pie.”
Suzy - Congrats to Suzanne. A couple months ago you graduated with your masters degree and today you're moving into your own apartment. The new job starts next week. Best wishes on both fronts. We're excited for you!
Timothy - I got home from work late tonight because it's the night I pick the girls up from gymnastics. I also had to pick up two of their friends who are sleeping over. Because of this, I didn't get to see the twins tonight as they were already in bed. I was folding laundry again and Timothy plopped down next to me playing Dora on a Gameboy. Timothy is actually quite good considering he's only two years old. He has this annoying habit though. When he gets a bit stuck, he hands you the Gameboy hoping you'll bail him out. If you try to avoid it, he just keeps shoving the Gameboy at you, practically forcing it into your hands. You might even get one of his few words: "Help!". Don't play for more than about 10 seconds though. He assumes you've 'saved' him and starts forcefully grabbing that Gameboy back. "But wait, I'm not done yet," you say as you wiggle while trying to get him past the obstacle. This recurs on roughly five minute intervals.
He had another great "Timbo moment" today. Michelle called me late this afternoon to say that she had just dropped the girls off at gymnastics and to remind me to pick them up. She was relaying that she felt bad that she couldn't get them there on time. I interrupted, "wait, what time does Claire's class start?". "Five o' clock," she answered. "But it's only a few minutes before five now," I replied. "You mean it's not ten past five?" she asked, somewhat relieved, somewhat puzzled. "Grrr… I guess Timothy was playing with the clock in the van!"
Work - Today seemed like an unproductive day. In truth it wasn't but it just looked that way. I keep a little paper calendar with me to scribble actions, notes, to-do's, etc. Today's page had three accomplishments. One was to attend the benefits open enrollment meeting. With continuously rising health care costs, I can't remember the last time I went more than one year without changing health care providers. Whenever the second year for a provider rolls around, the proposed rates go up 10-20% and the employer shops around for another provider. Every year it's the same thing, regardless of the employer. You sometimes wonder whether all the time and mistakes caused by the changeover justify the savings the switch is supposed to bring about.
The second and third accomplishments involved resolving reported customer bugs. Sometimes we can just intuit these based on customer description and a little research. On those days I might answer over a dozen customer problems a day. Other times we get involved in what we call 'waveform hell'. Actually it's not that bad. Today I had two of those — one before lunch and one after. Customers send us these huge files (100MB to 1GB) that contain digital waveforms from their chip simulations. They say 'such and such is going wrong' and ask us why. It almost always involves something we can't reproduce here or some strange environment setup that we never would have anticipated. We download and import those large files and just bit by bit trace the logic backwards until we find out the root cause. It takes hours. In some respects it's like software debug except that it's digital logic. Unlike software where things tend to happen sequentially, in hardware there are always thousands of things happening simultaneously at the same moment in time. It's an orchestra of events that must all work together in harmony. I've often commented that after all I've seen in this industry, I'm amazed anything digital works. *grin*
Weblogging - I've done some more web software tinkering lately. Every so often I do a little searching to see whether something else might be a better fit for what I'm doing. Over the weekend I did an installation on my laptop of one of my sentimental weblog favorites, Blosxom, supposedly "The Zen of Blogging". This approach had been popular because it's fairly minimalist "out of the box" but left a lot of room for customer hacking and extension. Unfortunately it seems the author did an alpha release of version 3 over a year ago and we've heard nothing since.
While I happily use an old version of MovableType, I took yet another look at what some might call its arch-nemesis: WordPress. Unlike Blosxom, WordPress is in active development and maintenance, almost wickedly so. The thing that drives me crazy is that it seems allergic to ever generating a single piece of static content. Your front page might get updated once a day, but WordPress wants to re-compute it every time it's fetched, thousands of times per day. Same with your RSS feeds. Caching is your friend people! I looked over what was available to add some static page functionality but nothing really fit. Ah well. My old software is still doing the job, doing it quickly, and staying out of the way.
I've also considered just upgrading to the latest version of MovableType. I'm on version 2.661 from January 2004. Version 3.2 is imminent, but it's not all that compelling to me. The last thing I've been toying with it doing away with comments. Visitors are sometimes afraid to submit them out of fear of email spam. Weblog maintainers get nervous because of the constant threat of what's known as "comment spam". It's like email spam except that crud is left in your comment boxes at your website. No matter which software you use, the technical support forums always have questions about combatting comment spam. I'm starting to think it's not worth it. Worse yet, it diverts the software developers' resources from generating more useful innovations. Instead they waste time on "comment management" schemes.
In a way I'm starting to think that the weblogging software field is becoming like the desktop word processing domain. Microsoft Word is filled with so many features that most folks (myself certainly included) only use about 10% of the program's ability. Once word processors got spell checking, style sheets, and decent printer support, didn't that cover the needs of about 90% of us? In a similar manner, when I look over some of the features and "plugins" on weblog software, it all seems like website "bling bling". Examples:
The list goes on and yet, the website doesn't become any more interesting. You have to write and hopefully write well. If you're going to recommend a link, there should be some decent context as to why. And no one cares what phase the moon is in. My favorite anti-weblog weblog example is The Bleat by James Lileks. Updated daily, it has almost no trendy weblog creeping featurism, just good writing that makes you come back for more (at least if you lean a bit libertarian-conservative...) combined with a bit of retro art to make it visually interesting. What, no comment submission?! Just a man and his adventures of balancing work, wife, and daughter? Heck, if he can write that well about his one child, you'd think the stories of raising five would just be pouring out of my keyboard.
Hey Scott- thanks for the congrats! Today is my first day of work and the only access I have now to the internet! Ahhhh!
Posted by: suzy at July 18, 2005 01:01 PM