Chatting with a friend in Australia, and I came up with this gem: “my code is like a tank”.
It’s slow, but built to withstand any sort of shit and abuse. I was describing the code that underlies GrabPERF. It was built to be ignored for long periods of time, performing a lot of self-maintenance.
I am no photo geek, but we finally buckled down and bought a real digital camera: the Kodak Z612.
And here is the first picture out of the camera.
Technorati tags: Kodak Z612, Flickr, digital photography, camera
The Network World article on telecommuting appears to be getting a lot of play this morning on the RSS feeds.
I agree with Daemon at the Web Worker Daily: Yeah, and your point?
I learned a long time ago that I would NEVER be happy as a do-nothing management hack (whoops! did I say that out loud?). Career advancement to me is an out-dated way of life, and those that are desperately hanging on to this ideal are this generation’s answer to The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit or The Organization Man.
What does career advancement mean in a world that is mobile, engagement-based, driven by accomplishment, not by success? Career advancement is a growth in the respect in which you and your skills are held. Titles become meaningless; generating buzz and delivering on it are what define your success.
Time to raise the controversy element: The people who see telecommuting as a career negative are those that can only survive in a herd. Those who cannot generate their own motivation. Those who need to be away from themselves, to not hear the voices in their heads.
Some of the people I hold in highest regard have no title, and would be seen by corporate types as “drop-outs”.
Guess that makes me a drop-out. Bully for me.
I spent my entire life escaping from Golden. It’s a much different place, 20 years and one massive ski resort development later.
But, as you got on the Trans-Canada Highway to leave, hopefully for the last time as a 25 year-old grad school dropout, you looked over your left shoulder, and saw this.
[Photo: raarky]
An eerie beauty…the sterotypical vanishing point, where man gives up control to the wilderness he has carved a town from, where the land rises, and swallows your ego.
When I lived in Victoria, BC, there was always a ship idling in the harbour, engine turning over, a low steady hum that was always there when you went to the water.
Well, they have built an on-shore power plant for that ship, and it looks like they may have brought in a new one, but the vessel is always there…waiting.
When a cable breaks out in the North Pacific, this ship is gone in an hour. Apparently there are cable repair ships stationed all over the world…waiting.
Here’s Neal Stephenson’s article on the first segment of FLAG, and the whole submarine cable business.
It’s always funny when somewhat tech-savvy folks purposely make their bandwidth bills higher than they need to be.
Here’s TechCrunch’s HTTP header response.
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2007 16:02:23 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Debian) DAV/2 SVN/1.4.2 PHP/5.2.0-8 mod_ssl/2.2.3 OpenSSL/0.9.8c X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.0-8 X-Pingback: http://www.techcrunch.com/xmlrpc.php Status: 200 OK Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html; charset="UTF-8"
Port80 Software’s Compression Checker gives us some idea how much bandwidth Mr. Arrington, et al. could save just by activating this little feature, which comes baked into Apache 2.2.x.
Turn. On. Mod_deflate.
Ok, now that I have your attention…
Nissan has a test program in Japan that is placing receivers in cars to alert drivers when children wearing special RFID/WiFi bracelets are in the area. This is supposedly for the protection of the children. [here]
Do you see a few problems with this, mainly due to the naivete of the implementation?
Pedophiles can’t live near schools or parks, or other places where children gather. Now they will not be able to buy Nissan vehicles, for it could be used as a hunting rather than tracking tool.
The tracking bracelet idea sounds good on paper, but it is extremely naive, and likely will never appear in the US, or any other half-sane nation.
It’s the places that you go when you’re a child that stay with you for your whole life.
My grandparents lived their entire lives in the Crowsnest Pass. This narrow, sometimes forgotten section of the Rockies emptied itself of its coal to feed the engines of Canada and the world for more than a hundred years.
My grandfathers, and my great-grandfathers, all gave their lives to the dirty work of ripping this black gold from the bowels of the earth. Their bodies showed the scars of a life lived in darkness, straining to pull themselves through another day.
When it got to much, they drank. They fought. They dreamed. Some escaped, some took their own lives, many just survived.
The Alberta side of the Pass — no one who has spent any time in the area ever uses “Crowsnest Pass” — is slowly dying. The generation who mined underground is dying away. The next generation, and the one after them, has taken to tearing the tops off mountains in BC.
Or they just left, like my parents did. They empty carcasses of a life abandoned for economics are still there.
I was back there this summer for the first time since 1999. It has come a long way, but their is an aura, a feeling that the end is near. All the money from Calgary can’t save them. The old, independent life, the hardened bitterness, the brutal economics of coal that bred a people that accepted all into the brotherhood of the black gold, is gone.
There was a bluff outside the Pass community of Coleman, full of what the locals called “black diamonds”. I’m not sure if it was jet (made from extra compression on some of the coal deposits), or obsidian (from the volcanic activity that dominated the area in previous epochs). Sometimes, if the light was right, you could see the light reflecting off the pieces showing through the bluff.
Then, about 15 years ago, in order to straighten the highway and let more huge trailer trucks roar through Coleman on their way to the rest of the world, the bluff was blown away.
Sometimes, in the rush of time, the memories in our blood get blown away, each individual event glistening in the sun one last time, before being scooped up and swept away.
In Victoria, BC, double-decker buses have been used as tourist icons of a faux-english heritage for many years.
Here is what happens when these wonderful old beasts outlive their usefulness.
They deserve a better fate than this.