Joe Stump, the lead architect for Digg, makes a comment that really bugs me, while another is positive, in a recent "my life as a programmer post" (that's the Google cached version... ironically Digg has overwhelmed his own server):

More practical advice is that you should learn to know and love design patterns and avoid GUI’s. I have a real problem with people who say they know SQL because they’re well versed with an ORM or a DB’s GUI. Go back and read up on relational algebra and SQL92 before you say you know SQL okay?I’ll probably get flamed for this, but I think people should learn a single environment in and out and stick with it. This might mean you learn Microsoft’s technologies in and out or Cocoa or LAMP. You simply can’t be an expert in an area of computers without picking a single environment and sticking with it.

On one hand, I give him credit for his comment that you should get to know a particular platform inside and out. Extra +1 for not flaming Microsoft's platform.

I do not, on the other hand, agree with the notion that GUI tools are bad. I thought this stigma went away with VB6 (which I suppose is largely responsible for it), but come on man... there are some tight tools out there and they make it a lot more fun and efficient to write code. Using them does not equate to not understanding what's going on under the covers.

I've had work on the brain a lot lately. I have a certain amount of anxiety that I should be doing some certain amount of it, only to realize it's some poorly defined result or end game that I seek. Just as you do with software problems, you have to break them down.

My last post stops short of asking, "What do you want work to be?" I don't think our culture teaches us to ever ask that question. For decades there was the simple expectation that you figured out how to do something for a living, did it for years, had a reliable pay check and insurance, tried to put some money away, then retire and start to actually live. Whether or not that was what you wanted was not part of the discussion.

In a lot of ways, it's easier to think about what I don't want work to be. I don't want it to be measured in face time. I don't want countless meaningless meetings. I don't want meaningless tasks that don't challenge me.

On the other hand, I know I want to be a part of some act of creation. I want to make something. I want to make enough money to support my travel habit. I want to be challenged. I want to lead and mentor. I want the opportunity to learn something new every day. I want a gig that compliments my life, not replaces it.

I had two interesting encounters today. One was lunch with a friend. The company she works for is in a bit of turmoil, and her future there is not certain. She equated leaving or losing her job to a loss of time, much the way you might think of the end of a long-term relationship as wasted time. But talking her through it, I think she agreed that she's now more than the sum of that experience. I think her line of thinking was influenced by what she described as "sacrifice" during the years she had at that job. If you're sacrificing anything for a job, that's reason enough to quit.

I also caught up with one of my fellow lay-offees. His experience out in the world has been similar to mine. There is plenty out there, and you can pick and choose. That's unfortunately not a luxury that everyone has in every profession, but given that the circle of people I know best are in the biz, it's relevant to me and them. But the point remains that there's no reason to sell yourself short for a paycheck.

I know a lot of people feel that this line of thinking isn't realistic or whatever, and that's fine. I just don't understand the desire to put your life on hold for more than four decades or sacrifice the life in front of you to make what may or may not be a sweet run of your golden years. Why not do something with today?

Others believe that this is some kind of slacker mentality. I think that's a total load of crap. I've never suggested you don't have to work, and I don't think anyone like minded would make that case either. What I do think we'd agree on is that work should never be something that takes precedence over everything else you do. The word "sacrifice" should never come into play. Even if you like your job, I can't imagine it's more important than your friends and family, or simple joys like a sunset, or reading a book, or seeing a movie, or whatever else it is that allows you to really embrace the moment.

Today's 37signals Kool-Aid on freedom and security...

I don’t personally like to work 60 or more hours per week. Even 40 hours is pushing it. At 37signals, we all try to work just four days a week. That’s a perk in addition to the fact that we don’t count vacation days (I probably spent 4 weeks last year) and many of us often attend conferences and other out-of-the-daily-rhythm activities.

But when I actually do sit down to work, it’s very often that there’s nothing else I’d rather do. And I don’t think that’s really an uncommon phenomenon. I think lots of people really like what they do and for bursts of the time consider it the most interesting thing they could be working on.

And it only took until the second comment for some jaded, beat down opinion to be shared.

The guy who wrote the Fake Steve Jobs blog is doing his own thing as himself, and you know what? He's really a douche. It's like he's assuming the role of Fake Steve still, only without the Jobs reference, it's not funny, just stupid.

I've thought for a long time about doing a blog about, well, the not funny narcissistic tech blog crowd, and this only fuels that.

It's pretty sad that so much time has passed since I worked on CoasterBuzz v4 that I can write better code to do some of the same things.

The good news is that I got the park and coaster detail pages working, and that's a big step. What makes me particularly pleased is how little code I have to do it. I won't post it (I sent it to two programming buddies ), but it was neat to use C# 3.0 features, delegates and reflection all in the same area.

I found some more good news when I realized how much better the whole club membership thing is. I shouldn't be surprised that I wrote some of that stuff early on, seeing as how that generates real revenue.

I've now started to get the track record stuff in order. The good news is that I think I can keep the old data. The weirdness is still that you could technically have the same coaster twice if you wanted, or that the two records actually point to the same ride (think X-Flight and Firehawk). Once the data is cleaned up a bit, you'll actually see the listings for previous instances of the same ride (WWRCDBD, I know).

Importing all of the data from the old site takes about a half hour on my laptop. Ouch.

I'm still feeling a little overwhelmed at the scope of what has to get done, but at least I'm not fearful of it. I'm trying to take it one step at a time, and leave new features off the table, prioritized, for future iterations.

I had a Blue Screen of Death, in the virtual sense, on my Mac, which is pretty weird. I run in "coherence" mode, which means that all the Windows junk interacts with OS X as if they're native windows. All of a sudden, it reverts to windowed mode, does the blue screen, and resets. When it's done restarting, it lets me know, as if I didn't already, that a serious error occurred.

Jacob was born early this morning, about two weeks late, by way of C-section. Apparently he's a bruiser, weighing in at 9 pounds and not really fitting newborn clothes. Mom and baby are fine, if not really tired.

Hooray!

Font Conference - CollegeHumor Video

I know that Skydiving Jeff will be troubled at who the hero is.

I can't even tell you how nice it is to be mobile again. Writing code on my laptop, on my lap, is not always ideal, but when you can bring it out on the deck, or to the living room couch, or some random restaurant that has Wi-Fi, you see things differently, and the change in scenery stimulates your head.

CoasterBuzz has of course been the bane of my existence for years because it's too fragile to try and modify, but large enough in scope that I throw up mental obstacles to rewrite it. The biggest barrier is probably that I want a big bang moment that not only replaces the site with a maintainable code base, but has all kinds of new features.

I know from experience that's a shitty way to develop stuff for the Internet, that iterating and delivering something frequently makes a hell of a lot more sense. So I'm trying to scale back and not solve every problem on my list all at once. The plan is to be feature equivalent and build from there.

I've gotta reach this point before I go back to work, or it'll feel too overwhelming. I don't know if that's a month or a couple of weeks or what, but I'm trying to apply some sense of urgency to it. I've already begun rewriting some of the simple underlying framework stuff, and I feel like I'm getting somewhere.

To help make things feel more real, I knocked out the page template, with all of its ugliness. The idea is only to create structure, and a place for stuff to live. Colors, typography, graphics, etc., can come at a later point.

Wired has a pretty good article about the movie War Games, which is now 25 years old.

I think Ally Sheedy was my first movie star crush. I still crush on her when I see that movie! It's also funny to think about the state of the technology at the time, like 8" floppy disks and dot-matrix printers. Today we have iPhones. Crazy.

I saw a link to this TED talk with Ken Robinson, and I'm absolutely inspired by it. I feel like someone gets me, and gets what's wrong with education.

Two seconds of Google power led me to an app called Fan Control that allows you to establish a temperature to fan speed curve. I set my minimum to 1,000 rpm, and anything over 120 degrees would raise the speed, with 172 degrees at the 6,000 rpm cap. Generally, with Parallels running and the other usual stuff, the fan is now running between 1,500 and 2,000 rpm, which is a lot more in line with what it did before the repair. It doesn't get audibly louder until 2,500 rpm.

While this will naturally impact battery life, it'll also preserve my nuts. I'll take a few less minutes of portable computing to preserve my goodies.

I was chatting with someone today who works at a company where they pretty much know that there are layoffs coming, at all locations. The company is run by an ego and has a long history of not seeing the value of its people. The result is a culture of fear and uncertainty.

It's easy for me to understand that business is business. Things happen, mistakes are made, whatever, but there are still two kinds of environments that people can work in. There are the kind where people feel like they're contributing and have a real connection with their work, and there are the kind where you're not empowered or expected to have any meaningful impact. My friend works for the latter.

People have gotten wise that there's no such thing as just a paycheck. You spend more than 2,000 hours a year working, so you damn well better get something out of it other than money. The expectation that people have is that the company be as beneficial to them as they are to the company. When that equity does not exist, it results in failure and missed expectations.

A recurring theme goes something like, "This place could be amazing to work at, and we could dominate our market if only..." That says to me that we haven't turned into a nation of whiney bitches, it says that countless companies have no idea how to use what they've got. People aren't lazy... they genuinely want to be a part of something that doesn't suck. And yet there's this giant disconnect between the marble floors and the cubicle walls.

Unfortunately not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur, and frankly I don't think everyone wants to be one anyway. So countless people are looking for that meaningful job from The Man. If I knew anything about scaling up a company that did something clever (and profitable), I'd snatch up these people, just from those that I know.

I suspect that the poor morale that so many people live with is part of the reason that our nation isn't as competitive as it used to be. Perhaps the solution is for these driven people to get to a place where they become The Man, and remember where they came from.

The DHL guy finally came around 2 to drop off my laptop. They did not replace the logic board, but they did replace some audio components, the fans, some cabling and the latch for the screen. No shut downs after an hour, but shit does it run hot again. I suspect the innards are back to the pre-cooling adjustment state I fixed shortly after getting it.

I ran a 1080p movie trailer, full screen, and looped it for about a half hour just to give the CPU a work out. It got up to 160 degrees, which is within spec for the CPU, but it's so damn hot. The little strip between the keyboard and screen gets hot again, and the underside gets a little uncomfortable too. The fans never vary from 1,000 rpm, which seems so arbitrary.

But I suppose if I'm at the end result, that it doesn't shut down, then I can roll with the heat. The whine is still there, although subtle. I'm crossing my fingers that this is it though, as I miss being mobile. The repair work has a 90-day warranty, so I'll be working it out hard for the next month.

EDIT: I looked up in my disassembly manual to see that the sound hardware and power stuff are on a separate board together, and that's what they replaced. That instills confidence that the problem is fixed.

I didn't do anything constructive this weekend, and I'm totally OK with it. I finally managed to just let myself do whatever and not feel like I had to be producing something. Granted, something out of my control annoyed me and put me in a bad mood, but I still had a pretty good time. Between Kennywood, the Irish Festival, watching Raiders of the Lost Ark (and playing the Lego video game version), I just screwed around all weekend, and it was good.

This week should be interesting. I feel energized enough to work on my projects, and I should be hearing some more about the one job prospect that interests me. I've got a lunch with an old boss too, and I'm not entirely sure what his motivation is to reconnect. That'll be interesting.

Meanwhile, I'm waiting for the DHL guy to return my laptop. If we didn't go to Kennywood Friday, the thing would've made its round trip in 48 hours. That's service. Go Apple. Of course, I realized last night that we couldn't do the podcast without it, so that's on the agenda tonight. Better late than never!

I ran into Katie Reece and her parents at the Irish Festival yesterday. Katie was my second favorite kid of all time, even though she was way behind the other kids on the team I had that year. She was my bench utility player. At the time she wasn't that confident, a little intimidated, and suffered from three years of shitty coaching at the Elms. Something clicked toward the end of my season with her, and she returned to high school for a very successful senior year.

What I loved about her though was her work ethic, and the fact that her desire to be a better player panned out. She even made her college team, though she dropped out as the time commitment got to be too ridiculous. She was one of those kids that you'd throw into a tough situation and watch them crumble or rise to the challenge, and she was not a crumbler.

That was also the team that I had Shirkey on. She was just so naturally gifted. I'd like to think I helped guide her, but most of her success came from something else. She'll be doing her last year, four years starting. Katie and Caity are both seniors. I can't believe that!

I realize now that I think I took those coaching years for granted. I had great kids, an average record, and great parents. The club was one of reasonable integrity with great coaches too. Some days we'd get beat up, and other days we'd win tournaments. But the thing that I remember most were the nights in the hotels, the parents stocking their coolers in the lobby, the kids showing each other photos from winter dances, travel stories... lots of good times. I was particularly fond of the tournaments in Baltimore.

I feel like that time was from my other life, and volleyball is on hold now while I figure out other things and try to establish some level of stability with my future wife and a career I can live with. I'm OK with that, because honestly the experiences I had were so high quality that I could go a long time before jumping back in.

But I can't believe my girls are going to be graduating soon.

http://yourscenesucks.com/

Pretty hilarious stereotypes. I admit, I dig generic emo girl, even if she is a carbon copy of every other girl that fits the stereotype.

Friday we finally made it to Kennywood, after talking about it pretty much since before the season even started. I haven't been there in years, I think the year Phantom's Revenge opened or something, maybe 2001 or a year or two after. I got the hook up... and it was totally worth the price of the gas.

The first big change I noticed was the whole gate plaza area. I'm pretty sure that was new since the last time I was there. Very nice. They also have the smoking policy thing nailed down. There is a big sign prior to the tunnel that says: "Smokers: Take One," which presumably has the smoking policy and locations for the designated areas. Good thinking.

We started by actually eating, since it was nearly noon. The park wasn't all that crowded. We ate at the Casino building in the middle of the park, where Diana was impressed that her sandwich was actually made, not frozen, on good bread, and on a real plate, and not nine dollars. Such was the case really with everything we consumed. It wasn't a bargain, but it wasn't excessive even for an amusement park, and more importantly, it didn't outright suck.

Our first ride was Ghostwood Estates, which is a pretty nifty shooting dark ride with the trackless vehicles. The pre-show is well done, and the scenes are continuous with interesting stuff to shoot that reacts to your hit. Your scoring ability is limited only by your sense of direction. There are targets everywhere, even behind you. Diana unfortunately had a bum gun, so her score wasn't great.

We didn't hit as many non-coaster rides as I thought we would, in part because the heat and humidity was a bit on the oppressive side. Of course we had to do the Turtle, because it's such a classic. We also did Garfield's Nightmare, which, I dunno, didn't impress me. Why they took a hundred-year-old ride and splattered it with fluorescent paint is beyond me. Cosmic Chaos is a ton of fun! I haven't been on one since IAAPA 2003, or whatever year Zamperla introduced it, but it's a good time.

First coaster was Phantom's Revenge. We waited for the front seat, despite the single train operation. It was Diana's idea, and I'm glad she talked me into it. I forgot just how ridiculous that ride is. It pulls some great G's at the bottom of that second drop. The airtime is nuts. It's also incredibly smooth, which leads me to believe that perhaps it's not the old Arrow looper trains that are an issue, but rather the track most of them run on.

Next coaster was Exterminator. Wow is that an aggressively run Reverchon. For some reason I thought the spinning release was earlier in the ride, but in any case, it just blasted through those hairpins. Well done!

By sheer luck, we got the front seat on Jackrabbit. Love that double down. Does anyone know when they adopted that strange logo?

Thunderbolt ran extremely well. I always seem to recall getting a little beat up on that ride on previous visits, but it really ran extremely well, especially in the bowl. I'm astonished at how well that ride is maintained.

Racer was running pretty well also, even though our train lost. Diana was inspired by the crumbling foundation under the midway and queue area.

Our last ride of the day was Log Jammer, the flume. I love that dip in the middle of the ride. They really need to consider just replacing the trough entirely at some point. I've never seen one so patched and rough before. It has definitely seen better days. Some of the boats are showing extreme wear and tear too.

We were in the park for about six hours, and I think if Diana didn't have shoulder pain from stress and sleeping funny, and I wasn't being a grumpy bastard for other reasons, we might have stayed longer. But we did get to ride most of what we wanted. The only negative encounter we really had was with this chick who had an attitude at the smoothie stand. In the general sense Kennywood did a great job showing us a good time. And I finally got my Potato Patch fries!

Morgan has a nice quick round up of what was announced at E3, and who better to tell you than the only thing worth watching on G4. (Good hair look for her this episode. )

The thing I'm excited about? All of these sequels and new games are making the previous lot cheaper, and I never got around to buying them.

Wow, I can't seem to focus on anything today, and nothing is stimulating me. I think the thing that is most difficult about this working at home on my own thing, thing, is that it totally lacks human contact. I think that's why I don't really want to do any of the things that I like to do, because I'd end up doing them by myself.

Thank God me and The D are doin' stuff this weekend.