Wed, 31 May, 2000

New adventures

Posted in General at 11 pm

Last Wednesday, during lunch, I was sitting with our new sales rep bringing him up to speed on web technologies. He’s got 20 years of sales experience, and I’m doing my best to make sure he’s prepared to sell our offerings to his new clients. I’ll be going with him on his first few sales calls to provide technical backup to presentations.

As we’re talking, the owner comes into the lunchroom and begins listening to our conversation. After a bit, he jumps in and begins discussing the vision that I’ve had of our company. They start agreeing with each other.

So the owner turns to us and says, “I want you guys to run your departments like seperate businesses. I want you guys to run your companies.” He wants us to get all of our ducks in a row and our processes dialed in, and dovetail our work so that we can get a good system working between sales and development.

So now I’m basicially in charge of half of the company. I’ve been provided with financials for our 8 guys and charged with making Exact Interactive profitible on a monthly basis, in the next 3 months. It’s a huge responsibility and I’ve also taken on the roll of Project Manager for all of the work that we have and will be getting in-house.

I’m glad that my PSU class has finished off, as I don’t think I would be able to handle all of this at once. Wish me luck.

Scottie Drove to Portland

Posted in General at 9 pm

Last night was my last class for the term. It’s always kinda sad to let my students go, and that’s just after 10 classes. I can’t imagine how Elementry school teachers give up their kids after a full year of 5 days a week schooling.

I had some great students this class, but it was also the first time that I had a class develop a clique. I only watched out of the corner of my eye, but it was there and it was fascinating to watch.

However last night was also game 5 of the Western Conference Finals. Wow. I wish I could have watched it, because it sounds like the Blazers did everything right. And they finally listened to me. Drive Scottie, Drive! has been my mantra ever since game 2. When Scottie Pippen takes the ball deep inside, by himself, he creates foul situations for the Lakers, particularly for Kobe. If he does this early in the game, it has a stunning effect on the Lakers as both Kobe and Shaq have to be in the game, giving full effort in order to win. Rice can only make up for it a little bit.

When Scottie drives, he scores. After the fouls are called, then you bring in the Blazer perimiter game, and let Brian Grant and ‘Sheed do the heavy lifting. (Rasheed’s sky hook last night was just classic. Do you practice that shot, or does it just come as inspiration?)

This Blazer team is going to drive us to financial ruin. But oh what joyful ruin it is. :) Tickets for Game 6 go on sale at noon on Thursday. /This/ will be interesting.

Drive Scottie, Drive!

Fri, 26 May, 2000

Where did the Refs go?

Posted in General at 11 pm

It’s like the Refs left the stadium in the last quarter. Kobe had 5 fouls and the refs simply refused to give him the final foul even though he could have been called on three different occasions.

Then there was the point where one of the Lakers was literally holding Scottie down on the floor… :(

Sunday will be better.

Want DVD? Forget FireWire.

Posted in General at 9 pm

I found this in an link from Slashdot <http://www.newscientist.com/news/news_224031.html:>

Garrett admits that his technology has been made possible by loopholes in Hollywood’s contracts with DVD makers. “All the manufacturers of DVD players have signed an agreement not to provide a Firewire digital output. But there is no mention of SDI,” he says. Firewire feeds high-quality video into computers.

What the hell? DVD was supposed to be the great path to high quality personal video in the home. But there’s a clause that specifically forbids FireWire from being part of the equation? That’s just crazy. Profit at the expense of Progress. I hate it when stuff like this happens.

Thu, 25 May, 2000

MacOS X DP4 … Hands On!

Posted in General at 1 pm

Well, this is interesting…. :)

I’ve gotten my hands on a working copy of Mac OS x Developers Preview 4, which was released at the WWDC last week. It’s more academic curiosity at this point, but it sure is fun running X so many months before the first beta is due (this summer).

I’m having some difficulties, but that’s to be expected with pre-beta operating systems. And some of it may even be chalked up to the loose nut behind the keyboard <http://www.mcs.brandonu.ca/~ennsnr/Tags/Alpha/e.html> rather than any real software problem.

Aqua is gorgeous. The dock kinda sucks, but it’s not bad. I’ll probably stick with DragThing. Who knows, maybe DT will add the cool animation in the next rev.

I’m loving the rendering of icon names. This may seem strange, but the icon names are white, with a black outline stroke and a drop shadow. It should be noted that all drop shadows are from the 12 o’clock point, not the usual 10:30/45° angle.

I don’t find the floating, useless Apple in the middle of the menu bar to be all that distrcting. It disappears if the menu items grow enough to cover it, so it’s fine.

I’m curious to see how long it takes me to adapt to the new button locations. It’s dawning on me just how often I use the ‘expand’ button in the upper right hand corner of most windows. I think that’s the green button on the left hand upper corner now, but I’ve still got to play with it.

One other interesting UI change is the option for the scroll bar. Currently when you hit an empty area in a scroll bar, the windows will jump down one page-full of info. MOX has an option to just the thumb directly to where you click. It’s an interesting concept, but I think combining the two would be great. If you click within a single-window’s jump of the thumbnail, the window should shift down one page-full. Outside of that, the new direct jump method should kick in.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on topics that haven’t generally been covered elsewhere. I’ll be investigating more in the future to be sure. :)

Tue, 23 May, 2000

From an old summer camp tune…

Posted in General at 9 pm

May 23 Tue (09 AM)

Another rewording for Blazers and your enjoyment. It’s set to the tune of a song we sang at summer camp titled ‘Where, oh where, oh where is Lucy’:

‘Where oh where oh where is Scottie?

Where oh where oh where is ‘Sheedy?

Where oh where oh where is ‘Smitty?

Way down younder in LA LA Land!’

‘Pickin’ up loose balls, put ‘em in the basket.

Drawin’ in foul calls, put ‘em in the basket.

Pickin’ out jump balls, put ‘em in the basket.

Way down younder in LA LA Land!’

 

Mon, 22 May, 2000

BLAAAAAAAAAAAAZZZZZZZEEERRRRRRRRRS!

Posted in General at 10 pm

May 22 Mon (10 PM)

Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow!

WoooooHOOOOOOOOOOOO!

That was Amazing! I am SO impressed with the Blazers, Sabonis, and Rasheed! That was so great.

Rasheed Walace will now be known as High Tech. :) After the last game we can all have a laugh about that. Great job ‘Sheed!

 

Fri, 19 May, 2000

Furi

Posted in General at 8 pm

May 19 Fri (04 PM)

You’re still using Napster? That’s so 00Q1. Get with the Furi side of things: <http://www.jps.net/williamw/furi/> and <http://gnutella-mac.n3.net/> (You do have the latest MRJ JVM compenents, right? <http://www.apple.com/java/> Do it, DO IT NOW!)

And don’t forget to share what you find:

A) Create a folder just inside your hard drive called ‘furi’

B) Go to the Setting Menu, select ‘File Sharing Setup’.

C) Enter ‘/[your hard drive]//furi/’ into the first text entry.

D) In the ‘include files:’ text box put in ‘.‘.

E) Go To the ‘Upload’ Tab, and hit rescan.

The whole thing is really alpha ware, but wow, what alpha ware. It’s like being dialed into every warez BBS that ever exisited… Or at least it will be once everyone joins in.

 

Fri, 12 May, 2000

Blazers

Posted in General at 8 pm

May 12 Fri (08 AM)

(To the tune of Miss American Pie:)

Bye, Bye Mr. Karl Malone

Drove my Blazers to the Delta

but your Jazz were not home

From the fans in the stands

all we heard were the groans

Sayin’ “Karl, can I get you some Doans?

Stockton, can I get you some Doans?”

 

Thu, 11 May, 2000

More Usability Issues

Posted in General at 1 pm

May 11 Thu (01 PM)

The latest issue of the ITG Newsletter Internetworking is now available at <http://www.sandia.gov/itg/> This is a great usability resource. It’s pretty thin, but there’s a great review of Jacob Nielson’s latest book and a link to a summary of the book at <http://www.webreference.com/new/nielsenbook.html>

More good stuff from the ACM CHI-WEB mailing list, this time on registration systems. <http://www.acm.org/archives/wa.cgi?A2=ind0005b&L=chi-web&P=1872> I notice that I’m constantly pointing to messages that simply codify what I mostly have picked up already. In all reality, I’m a librarian at heart, and this is just a place for me to save these notes and references.