link to original | source: [Computerworld] | published: 2009 October 28 6:05 ET

Put simply: As an IT professional, I work on whatever hardware is in front of me.

It seems like people ask me which OS I prefer.  I usually answer without too much fuss, but that question is flawed and my answer should not matter.  I've gotten less flack about my choice (Mac OS X) in recent years than previously. However, the natural assumption that my choice should be their choice is incorrect. In fact, for some things, I'd much rather have an old DOS prompt sitting in front of me (WordPerfect 5.1, anyone).

It all boils down to using the right tool for the right job.  I saw a great example of this just the other day at DevDays in DC.  Joel Spolsky had a slide with a picture of a floor board nailer and a roll of duck tape or something like that.  Only a handful of people in attendance even knew what the floor board nailer was.  His point was that when you're putting down a new floor, nothing works as well as a floor board nailer.  But that is all it does.

The laptop/desktop/operating system/word processor/keyboard/mouse/ergonomic workstation that I use is not necessarily the one that you should use.  I can use a whole bunch of different things and (generally) make them work for the task at hand.  The thing to remember is that all of these things really aren't the end, but rather the means.  If you can accomplish what you're trying to do with whatever it is you're comfortable with, then what I use isn't relevant.  In fact, my choice may actually make you go slower and be less productive.

Like the Internet, the fact that there are so many ways to do any given task on a computer can be daunting.  Keep in mind that you don't need to know 100s of ways to print labels, for example.  All you need to know is one way.  Just because I, or some other knowledgeable chap, print labels differently than you does not make your way wrong.  Sit back, pat yourself on the back and smile.  Good job!

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Yesterday we didn't go outside at all.  It was a perfectly beautiful day with the windows open and a light breeze just wafting through our sylvan apartment.  This annoyed me a little bit, especially in light of having read Things were so different when I was growing up! and a few other 'kids need to be outside' themed blog posts recently, I felt kind of bummed about this fact.

Early afternoon found Alexei and I in the living room listening to a record.  It was a record I had listened to as a kid, but made even earlier.  Choo-Choo The Runaway Engine.  This was followed up with City Mouse — Country Mouse, a less than 4 minute story about two mice.  The thing that grabbed my attention was the background music.  It seemed to fit the kind of day I was having, except in my mind's eye I pictured my son and daughter (and miscellaneous other offspring) sitting on the porch on a carefree Sunday afternoon, rocking in the glider on our front porch, possibly sipping some lemonade, listening to tales of mice and other old-fashioned records.

They say that if you don't have a dream, the chance of it becoming reality is next to nil.  Actually, I just made that up, but it sounds like something 'they' would say.  Anywho, I've got a vision, now I just need to bring it to fruition.

PS. Ten years down the road, would somebody mind reminding me about this post?  It'll be interesting to see what happens.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

A friend called to ask me if I knew a place that printed post cards, with Cyrillic letters. At first I didn't understand, so sent him over to a Russian e-card site.

I remembered that back a long time ago I had sent a few e-cards myself. So I dug through the email archive and pulled out that e-card site. A few hours passed and then when I came back to the computer I started perusing old emails, for fun. And do you know what? A rather important email I sent using the webmail interface of my email provider had the wrong character encoding. Arggh!

A charset of ISO-8859-1 makes for some fine looking Cyrillic — they're all question marks! It took me over nine months to realize my error, and I feel pretty stupid. Oh well, it happens to the best of us.

For your reading pleasure, here's the body of that email. Any idea what I said?

?????? ?????! ? ???? ??????????! ??? ? ????? ??????? ???????? ??? ?????? ????-???? ????????, ?? ???? ??????? (???????) ?????, ? ????????? ? ??????????, ??? ???-?? ?? ??? ????????? ? ????? ?????. ????? ??????? ? ?????????, ??? ??? ????? ? ?????. ?????????, ??? ??? ???? ????? ????? ??????. ? ??????, ??? ?????? ??????????? ?? ????????? ? ????? ????? ? ??? ???? ??? ??????. ? ?????! -???? PS ??? ??????, ? ???? ? ????????. ???, ??? ????? ?????? ?? ?????????? ????.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

link to original | source: [Etsy: bluebirdheaven's shop] | added: 2009 June 2

Last night I added @etsy to my twitter feed on a whim.  Surprisingly, this gem came through today.  Naturally, I wouldn't mind one, but at $168.00 plus $20.00 in shipping, it's a bit out of my price range.

For all the mindless drivel that comprises the twitterverse, some things make it seem worthwhile.  Kind of like life, I suppose.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

http://www.stockholmpride.org/howhetero/ - I'm 90% heterosexual; for both boys and girls; weird?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/19/the-anatomy-of-the-twitter-attack/ - questionable practice that any of this information is available, but interesting nonetheless.  can never be too secure.  single-fail point of entry for me is my laptop.  grab it and you've got me pwned.

http://lateralaction.com/articles/multitasking/ - makes sense to me.  how do i get in the groove more frequently?

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Stupid, stupid, stupid.  Tried to get brother's phone to sync with outlook properly and it wound up deleting stuff.  Fortunately, I pulled the wire, but not before all the events got whacked from the calendar.  As somewhat of a software programmer myself, this underscores the importance of error checking.

Using my high-school progamming instructor's all-to-frequent thought, I may not be writing code for pace makers or any other kind of medical, life-critical applications.  Still, the inconvenience of losing all the calendar events and contacts, is more than a slight annoyance, especially if no proper backups exist (which they didn't).

I suppose that's enough of a rant for today.  The message I'm taking away is that too much error trapping is better than not enough.  And that electronic gadgets have one commonality - they'll all fail sometime.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Every year, the Washington Post Magazine has an issue with a few short stories in it.  If I have the chance, I enjoy reading them.

For the past hour, I've sat on the couch that my aunt gave me when she found out that my wife-to-be and I were expecting and read the 2009 issue.  Each story was unique, but they all kind of run together in my head.  A continuum of others, if you will.

As a schoolboy, I read more than all my peers.  In some cases, more than them all combined, probably.  Around high school, my pleasure reading started its precipitous decline.  And here I sit, nearly 15 years later, enjoying my yearly foray into fiction.

I'm not sure if this is a new thing or not, but it appears that the Post had the authors read their stories this year.  Although in this digital era, a telephone-quality recording leaves a bit of a bad taste in one's ears.  Here are the direct links to each story:

• English Lesson by Elizabeth Strout
• Becoming Water by Ursula Hegi
• From May through September by Aimee Bender
• The View from Lake Como by Ken Kalfus

As the cumulative affect of an expecting wife, house search, being a full-time dad, memorization for a children's program, work projects in which I'm behind, laundry to be done, and half a container of mint-chocolate chip ice cream consumed earlier this evening race through my brain, I question whether I have time to spend reading the stories, and then cogitating on them here.  Fortunately, in my mind at least, all those reasons only make it more pressing that I did read and that I do write.

For my own sake, I'll remind myself yet again: fiction burdens us with truth.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Getting awakened in the middle of the night usually means bad news, but there is a special kind of tingly excitement when the phone call (or text message) announces a new little human.  So when this message came in a bit past 2am, I didn't mind that it woke me up.

Baby boy was born on July 10, 2009 at 12:26 am, 9 lb 7 oz, 4280 gram, 20.5", 52cm in Washington DC, USA! Happy dad and mom!

Congrats, Keri and Deric!

<disclaimer> Yeah, I probably shouldn't post a picture of somebody else's kid on the big scary Internet. I mean, the little guy isn't even six hours old yet. That's what friends are for, though. Right? </disclaimer>

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Anastasia met Alexei and I on her way home from work.  All together we tried to find an ATM that would take her [physically] large paycheck.  We finally succeeded in Old Town Takoma Park.  While there, we stopped by the ice cream parlor.  Alexei had a scoop of strawberry mango, Anastasia had two scoops of chocolatey something or another in a waffle cone, and I had a lemon flavored shake.

Naturally, this impromptu excursion shot any chances of me working, but I'd say it was worth it.  Walking around a shop or two, grabbing some 'healthy' eats, and watching the Metro zoom by was the best possible thing for my growing fam this evening.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

link to original | source: [Flickr: House of Sims'] | published: 2009 January 16 

For some reason, Alexei and I were both starving this morning when it came time for breakfast.  Before I even had a chance to start my bowl of cereal, he had finished his Cheerios and was asking for seconds.  It's been a long time since I ate that much cereal, but today I even had two full bowls before we were through.

I remember vividly sitting in Mrs. Odesky's kindergarten class and sharing what I had eaten for breakfast.  All the other little kindergartners said they'd had a bowl of Trix or a Pop-Tart or something normal like that.  My answer was four bowls of Cheerios.  That's right, a little fat 7-year-old kid ate more than his teachers.

My days of four bowls for breakfast are thankfully finished.  In a small way, breakfast this morning brought back the good old days.  No doubt, my son will soon be the age I was.  Maybe then we can share eight bowls between the two of us.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

One of the values I find in my all-to-often reading of Twitter is the diversity of information.  Take twecipe.com (or its Twitter counterpart @twecipe), for example.  A brilliantly executed service to find recipes.  All one has to do is feed it a list of ingredients and a recipe will pop out.

By itself, that is pretty amazing; Anastasia was in love with it the moment I mentioned it to her.  However, the cool part for me came when I read the rest of the story.  Niall Harbison has succeeded in coming up with a truly useful idea and implementing it.  The fact that it only cost $300 and took five days from concept to reality is icing on the cake.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

link to original | source: [mummytips] | published: 2009 July 7

Sweet, a nice new seat! Of course, the free one from the guy at work with 3 kids seems to be still working fine. On second thought, maybe I'm not ready to plunk down $200+ for a highchair.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

I was listening to the traffic channel on my way home from work an hour or so ago and heard at least the fifth mention this week of July 1 being the 30th anniversary of the Sony Walkman.  Here are two of the more interesting nuggets I came across:

link to original | source: [WTOP news] | published: 2009 July 1 22:07 EDT

Walkman Released 30 Years Ago This Week by Gregg Stebben Listen on Posterous

link to original | source: [BBC News Magazine] | published: 2009 June 29 11:10 BST

When the Sony Walkman was launched, 30 years ago this week, it started a revolution in portable music. But how does it compare with its digital successors? The [BBC News] Magazine invited 13-year-old Scott Campbell to swap his iPod for a Walkman for a week.

The classic walkman explained:

1. Clunky buttons
2. Switch to metal (that's a type of cassette, not heavy rock music
3. Battery light - usually found flickering in its death throes
4. Double headphone jack (not to be found on an iPod)
5. Door ejects - watch out for flying tapes and eye injuries

Possibly the thing I find most serendipitous about all this walkman hullabaloo is that a few weeks ago when my parents were cleaning out their basement, they came across an old Fisher Price record player that I had when I was a kid.  That's not all that noteworthy, but they gave it to me.  Ever since, Alexei and I have been getting our daily dose of vinyl.

Yes, I'm sure cassettes were an amazing thing in their time, but for me (and my kids), LPs are where it's at!

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Sweet! Now I need to find/hack a phone to live stream the footage shot on two of these bad boys and the world can watch Alexei and me on our bike trips. The fact that nobody would watch is besides the point.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

I've been reading a rather interesting blog for the past few weeks.  One post in particular, Never Judge a Book By Its Cover, struck a chord with me. Well put, Michael, well put.

If you're feeling brave, Michael's twitter feed is an interesting read as well.  This tweet is a nice précis of him.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

I wouldn't mind one of these mugs.  It is a bit warm for tea now as summer is less than a week old, but you never know when you might get the hankerin' for some hot cocoa or something like that.

Then again, I suppose I should get the twitter name I want before buying one.  I would accept a free donation from @mugmkr, if he's listening. :)

Permalink | Leave a comment  »