I’ve read jPod… and enjoyed it, so I figured I’d try microserfs by Douglas Coupland
A really fast read (just like jPod) and very interesting… lots of parallels into the software world for sure. Though I’m not convinced that it was better than jPod, I still think that a bored geek could rip through this in a week or two (in my case).
The basic story (without disclosing it all) is that it’s a diary of a geek in a large corporate world, as a software developer, who tries to figure out life and love, while joining a startup.
Sounds familiar? :) Could I perhaps draw parallels between my own life and the book? I’ll leave that one rhetorical…
With all of this talk lately (from the .Net crowd) about ALT.NET… I think I have to say that it’s all in good if you live entirely in a Microsoft ecosystem… but I don’t. It still has that mainly .Net feel to it, which I can’t live with…
Here’s my new classification: ALT.Developer
The manifesto:
I will always get my work done the best way that I know how.
I will always make conscious choices about the software and platforms I use, to best suite the solution to a problem, while understanding that myself and the solution has to be agile and can change.
I will always enjoy writing software with the platforms that I choose.
I will always be pragmatic.
I will always be scientific with my software creation. Testing, hypothesizing, sharing information, and keeping in mind that my theories / solutions could be proven wrong.
I will always share the thoughts and ideas I have with younger developers looking for more knowledge and with colleagues looking to validate their ideas.
I will always love you… Whitney Houston ladies and gentlemen
Now, I don’t expect this to pick up as much as ALT.Net… and in fact, I’m quite certain that people like @sbellware and @chadmyers are going to laugh in their comfy chairs sipping lattes… if they even get around to reading it, but for those out there who are passionate about software development… Make up your own classification and manifesto! Be creative… stick to it and love what you do!
Wow… it’s been 4 months since the day we got Lucy… and though it started rough, I can say, without a doubt, that it has been really amazing to see her grow up to be a 6 month old puppy with some manors, tricks, and commands that she knows! Quite the intelligent dog.
Here are a few reference shots of when we got her (6 weeks old and 5 lbs):
Here are a few recent shots near the same bowl (6 months old and 50 lbs):
My first attempt at a completely sealed ecosystem (biosphere) including the ever brave Aquanaut! (Ghost Shrimp)…
It was a fun little project I read about back at MAKE Magazine Issue 10… It’s quite cheap (I recommend Hobby Lobby for the sealable glass containers)… the shrimp and snails you can get for free from a pet store if you bargain to buy the hornwort, neutralizing salt, and calcium carbonate… You can find the duckweed, other important organisms and soot from your local pond…
And the aquanaut from the smaller container, Diomedes, a brave young soul who runs around all day long in circles
The aquanaut in the larger container, Odysseus, was unavailable for photos…
Neil (who, btw, just had a beautiful baby girl)… gave me a MAKE Magazine subscription just for shits and giggles…
Yeah, freaking awesome right?
Well… I wanted a back issue and they are going for $14.99 in the store. Kind of pricey, so what could I do? Well… they have this wonderful feature for subscribers… a digital edition of the magazine. You get all of your issues for free digitally, where you can print the articles out and share them with your friends for 14 days… pretty cool feature, but they only give you the issues that you get with your subscription.
That is, unless you pay for another year and setup “auto renew”… then you get the status of Premiere Maker… and you get access to every issue digitally! For only $29.95… So for $10 more than the price of a back issue, you can get every digital issue plus another year of paper issue… Pretty good deal if you ask me.
So yeah, if you see a back issue you want access to… just peep me an email (jake@whoisjake.com) and I’ll give you access for a few days :)
So last night… there was a rumor that there was a bad Texas spring storm heading our way…
Yeah… that beast was producing a few funnels here and there and golf ball sized hail… From my house, I had the perspective of being on a hill overlooking the storm coming in and it looked like a plague. Super dark clouds and lightning kept edging closer, with next to no wind and that calm before the storm feeling.
At any rate, things started to come down and let me tell you, I’ve never seen hail like that before… the ground was completely covered in hail (the largest being marble sized). High winds and lots of lightning made for one heck of a storm.
And yeah, I hate storms… and not really liking the fact that Texas homes don’t have basements… I was under a blanket in the hallway, cause you know, the mighty blanket protects you from everything….
It’s a hosted environment that allows you to run Python driven applications within Google’s hardware… You already put your entire digital life into Google, your thoughts (blog), desires (search), and conversations (email)… why not your code and new website?
Test it out! Hit the site and download the sdk… includes a runtime and APIs for all of Google’s services and features for the App Engine, including a persistence layer (Bigtable and GFS)…
The killer feature right now? Is that you can host up to a 5,000,000 hit per month website for free… not bad, not bad at all… The interesting tidbit is the app configuration where you specify the runtime. Can we say runtime = ruby?? Soon enough my friends, soon enough.
Right now I host all of my domain email on Google Apps, soon enough I’ll move my blog to a platform that allows me to host it for free but have control over it. (The day this blog hits 5,000,000 hits a month, is a day that it makes fiscal sense to host my own… right now it’s just a geek factor)
So if I’ve been quiet the last week… it’s because I have been shredding the mountains of Beaver Creek…
Sam invited the company (drop.io) out to Vail, CO for a week of fun and work… and let me tell you, it was one of the best vacations I’ve ever had.
See that picture? Yeah, that’s me… with a snowboard! Yup! It has been one of my dreams since a child to get on a snowboard, so with this perfect opportunity at hand, I took professional snowboard lessons. I caught on real quick too! I was carving the mountainside the second day on the board! It… was… unbelievable…
And then a few days later, the Socialthing! team showed up… making for mad Rock Band sessions and a whole house full of smart people…
So I picked up the “The God Phone” SDK the other day just for shits and giggles… and it gives me a pretend iPhone on my laptop so I don’t have to spend the $500 to get a real one!
It comes with a “forms” designer and lots of code examples. Pretty nice SDK for a phone, except for the fact that it’s 1.4 GB… Yeah… The Windows Mobile Compact Framework SDK I believe is around 25mb, granted, if you count the Visual Studio Install base, it brings it right back up to normal..
At any rate, one major major annoyance. I used to use Quicksilver for my keyboard application launching needs… it was fast, tightly integrated, and easily customizable… but with Leopard I switched over to using Spotlight again…
Well now, when I want to use Safari or Calculator or any app that is on the iPhone, the iPhone SDK documentation and references come up first… instead of the real app! BOO!! Guess I’ll have to customize the Spotlight indexing service not to search the SDK…
Ohh and btw, Aptana is a pretty interesting IDE… wish it weren’t backed by Eclipse, feels super heavy… Easy IDE for working on Rails, AIR (all flavors), and iPhone stuff…
