|
 
|
Wednesday, May 31, 2000New adventures@ 11 pm | PermaLinkMay 31 Wed (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.
Previously, that same day...Scottie Drove to Portland@ 09 pm | PermaLinkMay 31 Wed (09 AM) 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 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!*
Friday, May 26, 2000Where did the Refs go?@ 11 pm | PermaLinkMay 26 Fri (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.
Previously, that same day...Want DVD? Forget FireWire.@ 09 pm | PermaLinkMay 26 Fri (09 AM) 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.
Thursday, May 25, 2000MacOS X DP4 ... Hands On!@ 01 pm | PermaLinkMay 25 Thu (01 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 generaly bee covered elsewhere. I'll be investigating more in the future to be sure. :)
Tuesday, May 23, 2000From an old summer camp tune...@ 09 pm | PermaLinkMay 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!'
Monday, May 22, 2000BLAAAAAAAAAAAAZZZZZZZEEERRRRRRRRRS!@ 10 pm | PermaLinkMay 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!
Friday, May 19, 2000Furi@ 08 pm | PermaLinkMay 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.
Friday, May 12, 2000Blazers@ 08 pm | PermaLinkMay 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?"
Thursday, May 11, 2000More Usability Issues@ 01 pm | PermaLinkMay 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.
Tuesday, May 09, 2000Search Engines@ 03 pm | PermaLinkBuilding a search engine or adding one to a web site? here's a great note on how general surfers use the search engine at Magellan: <http://www.acm.org/archives/wa.cgi?A2=ind0005b&L=chi-web&O=A&P=924> Most of the time, I've been using <http://www.google.com> over just about every other search engine. The only time I use <http://www.AltaVista.com> nowadays is when I've got a particular string of words and I'm trying to track down the source. Of course I don't use AltaVista's main page. I use their text only interface at: <http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?text> but I may switch that to <http://www.raging.com/> if I find that it uses the same style of searching as AV does.
Monday, May 08, 2000April showers... May recovery@ 01 pm | PermaLinkA few of you got worried about me and my little journal here. Well, I'm finally back online and running. It seems that my ISP must have made some changes to their system, what web servers are running as and permissions and such. That stuff must have happpened around March 29. It looks like I got things cleaned up. I think some stuff may have been caught off-guard by the leap year, perhaps not. Either way, it couldn't have come at a worse time because of all the projects that have come up and wielded their ugly heads. Work projects, colds, projects for my PSU class, flues, Amy's parents moving, my spring cleaning bug, car problems, freelance work issues. Wow, April was a busy month. Good things happened though. I got a new G4 at work with a big beautiful monitor. Now my eyes won't wig out after a day of work. We brought on an Actual Project Manager, which was something I'd been waiting for. Now we've just got to get him into the flow of the company, and get the sales reps to give up thier control on individual projects and trust the new guy. I started actually cleaning up stuff at home. It's that spring cleaning bug, I'm sure. Amy and I got a storage unit to keep some furniture that her parents gave us. Till we have room for them, we've got them in storage, and since there's lots of space left over, I've been moving some of my less used stuff over there, like vinyl albums that I can't play till I get a good turntable and get 'em recoded into MP3s. Still lots of stuff to clean out, but it's getting better. Amy and I have been going to a few Blazers games which have been a blast. She's really excited by the team this year, and I've gotten swept up in the fever myself. I love seeing her enjoy herself at these games and really having so much fun. It's brought more of those beautiful smiles to her face in the past few months. I finally got a Keyspan Twin Serial Adapter and now have a way of connecting my Newton to my G3. Just this morning I sync'd up my address book, and now I'm back to carrying it around with me. (It had fallen out of use because while I had consolidated all my contacts and address books in to Palm Desktop, I needed a way to upload that stuff to the Newton. Now it's there and I'm pleased as punch.) And yes, I'm still working on getting Amy's 6400 running Photoshop correctly. It'd been a bit of a pain, but I'm narrowing down the problem. I'll probably work on it a bit tonight, while she eats dinner and isn't working on her freelance work. A few other meme spews: we have html for a standard format for pages. what would a standard format for a downloadable database look like? I'm thinking of this for stuff like a recipe terminal in the kitchen. === I want a Keyspan Digital Media Remote. Badly. === The OpenUsing CMM is wonderful <http://www.home.aone.net.au/carter/> === I don't trust the guys at Firestone on Powell. They just seemed fishy. Hopefully either Les Schwab will be open on Sunday or we'll get our flat tires on Saturdays. === <http://www.blogger.com> is very cool, but I'll stick with my home grown solution for Dwelling and put my other web stuff on Blogger such as <http://www.gaff.cc> === Gates is nuts. They ought to disolve the company. === My desktop picture collection is growing. I now rotate it on a daily basis. Once I move this site, I'll link to the archive. === Speaking of moving this site, it looks like we'll finally be moving from Netscape Enterprise Server for our web hosting to Apache. Joy! Now all my Perl and XSSI stuff will work. More later, as I've got a whole month's worth of comments to type out here... :)
Previously, that same day...Fixed the problem@ 01 pm | PermaLinkI think i got the problem fixed. This will show us for sure.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
May 2000
|
Part of the OrderSomewhereChaos family of sites
|
|
