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Monday, July 31, 2000Viva@ 08 pm | PermaLinkJul 31 Mon (02 PM) Viva La Ghia! More info (+ pictures) soon... :)
Sunday, July 30, 2000A quiet week?@ 12 pm | PermaLinkJul 30 Sun (07 PM) No such luck. There's quite a bit of upheavel at work over the past week. Sales have been really slipping over the past couple of months. I'm not sure if it's a lack of focus, leadership, or skills in the sales dept. It's really a combination of all three, in each of our sales people. My department is great. We've been kicking out each of the very small jobs we've had in in record time, even with having been short two people, one on vacation and one laid-off. I've been writing up tons of documentation and stream-lining our department's methods and workflow. It's tight as a drum but... What good is a development department without projects to develop. It's all incredibly frustrating, and that's becoming evident to everyone in the shop. And here at home. The stress of this whole situation is really starting to wear on me. My cold sores are my first red flags. I've had them non-stop for three weeks now. I've been going through Sucrets so fast that I've had to find new uses for the plastic boxes they come in. So far: containers for misc. screws and bolts, and a container for paperclips. <http://www.korlin.com/folio/09sucre.htm> My second level stress warning is this unnatural pain that I get on my shoulders, chest and upper arms, where my skin just feels like it's on fire. The only thing I can do is lay my entire body weight on that side, on the floor and wait for it to disapait. It came on last week on Thursday as I was on my way home. I had just sat through an incredibly tense meeting with the sales staff and management. As I was walking to the car, it hit me like a gun shot and stuck with me all the way home. By the time I had gone the 20 blocks home, I was nearly in tears and seriously nausious. Amy helped me calm down and relax, which was the first thing I needed to do. Coming home most days, my brain feels like mush and it takes all weekend to get it cleared out. Then it's back to the grind again on Monday. I only hope that the decisions that they're finally making at work will come to fruition. I don't know how much longer I can keep this up. Hell, I'm not sure how long Amy can keep this up.
Friday, July 21, 2000More Fun@ 10 am | PermaLinkJul 21 Fri (10 AM) It's been a rough few weeks. Things have been prety hard at work, and we're still getting settled in from the move. Amy's been putting a lot of work into etting the kitchen setled in, and now I can set up the boxes for the recycling and such. Now it's time to get the Bathroom organized, then we can tackle the small bedroom/office/personal room/whathaveyou that has our old bed (that we'll be taking to Goodwill), a desk, the cat's chair (it's an old chair that we've sacrificed to their claws), plus lots of other stuff. I'd like to setup my older Macs in there and have some room to play around with some networking ideas that I've got. I know amy would like to have a room that she can call her own as well. So we'll work out something. Then we can turn our attention to the closets. Oops, I forgot that we've still got some stuff in storage that we can get out, now that we've got more room. That'll take $50 off of our monthly expenses. --- Apple's news about the Dual Processor G4s and the G4 Cube was pretty good. I've caught bits and pieces of the keynote on Quicktime, and it woulds like it was a good presentation. It's cool to see the new stuff, but i think Apple's dropped the ball on the mouse still. Optical's nice, but the scrollwheel and the extra buttons are good stuff that has been rejected by Apple, to their detriment. However, maybe they're just trying to open the market to third-party mice. I would like to get one of the new keyboards to use at work. The USB->ADB converter has been pretty flaky, so I figure the getting an actual Apple Full size USB keyboard might be just the ticket. But I want to have a hands-on first. I'll be checking out at one of the local retailers before I make up my mind. Amy and I have been looking for something to replace her 6400, which is surprisingly slow. I think there are some serious bottlenecks with the processor and the hard drive access. That G4 Cube is looking very very cool. I think, though it's not got any room to upgrade the internals, we sould be able to do just fine with the USB and Firewire ports. We've got a SCSI Zip Drive and Scanner that would be out of the loop, though one of those SCSI -> FireWire adapters might handle them. --- I've finaly got back on track organizing my to-do list and getting things wrapped up. I've got my notes collected into a single pile and soon I'll have my filing system set up in the new apartment so I can keep things clean and such. Lack of organization is a serious bad thing for me. I've noticed that the more disorganized things are, the more stressed out I get. I think I've got a focus problem. If there are too many things for me to focus on, I get overwhelmed on a subconcious level. Claning things up usually means organized stacks of chaos, and once I've gotten that far I can tackle things easier.
Sunday, July 16, 2000First Meetings and Impressions@ 01 pm | PermaLinkJul 16 Sun (01 PM) <http://www.gladwell.com/2000_05_29_a_interview.htm> Very interesting article that was originally published in the New Yorker. Some of the info here is very will be very effective... if our company ever lifts it's hiring freeze.
Thursday, July 13, 2000Free Speech, Free Silence@ 08 pm | PermaLinkJul 13 Thu (08 AM) Today, Dave Winer of Userland <http://www.scripting.com/> took a little swing at Apple: As far as I'm concerned Apple goes it alone, blazing their own trail, picky about the developers they work with. [Irish Times reporter] Karlin is right, I am obsessed with this free speech First Amendment thing, I've been part of a system where saying what you think was considered bad manners. Never again. Apple, as an incorporated entity has Free Speech rights as well, but the back side of Free Speech is Free Silence. Unless a topic has serious health or human rights concerns, anyone has the right to *not* say anything. If Apple doesn't want to talk to someone that they feel will call them on it, that's their perogative. I think it shows weakness on Apple's part, but to say that your own Free Speech trumps someone else's Free Silence is a one-sided view.
Monday, July 10, 2000Many Small Notes@ 01 pm | PermaLinkJul 10 Mon (01 PM) Self Props: I used this phrase on a recent post of the Standards list. I worked on it for 10 minutes, so I wanted to share it here: "Just because XML requires quoted attributes doesn't mean that we've found some electro-utopia." Geeky humor to be sure. Shower Thoughts: I want an aquarium, but in the shape of Rodin's sculpture "The Thinker" that would be about the size of a 21" monitor. Maybe I'm being to particular, but that seems like a good open space shape for an aquarium. If you've got leads on funky shaped aquariums, let me know. Sucrets really numb your entire mouth. The Black Cherry Maximum Strengths are wicked powerful. I keep hearing recommendations for Peter Gabriel's Passion album. I want to pick it up this week. Amy and I finally started actually *living* at the new apartment: The Stereo is now hooked up. Yesterday's rotation: Gus Gus, The Dirty Three, Roy Orbison, John Cale and Brian Eno.
Previously, that same day...Here we go again@ 09 pm | PermaLinkJul 10 Mon (09 AM) <http://www.drudgereport.com/mnd.htm> Oh gawd. This is crazy. A Media company being bought by a Communications company... I can see that. But a Media company buying a computer manufacturer, and an addition movie studio? This Disney + Apple rumour has been floating around since Jobs came back to Apple years ago. It's just crazy talk, and I can't believe that I'm adding to the hoopla.
Friday, July 07, 2000A List Apart@ 08 pm | PermaLinkJust two short weeks after I finished the first draft, my article 'A Design Method' has been published by A List Apart <http://www.alistapart.com> which is the Jeffery Zeldman-headed web designers magazine. I'm quite pleased with the article itself, and I'm hoping to follow it up with 'A Presentation Method' which will the cover the steps after Design. I'm guessing that a lot more people than usual will be checking out my site. I went ahead and framed my current site which is located on a temporary server, from my final site which will soon change from Netscape Enterprise to Apache, with all it's additional XSSI functionality. <http://www.smartnetworks.net/~rosso/xssi/> which I use extensively throughout this site. For those of you interested, I have further articles in the WebDev section of this site, and I try to write one per month. You can use the Input field at the bottom of this page to send me feedback about my article via my pager. I won't respond unless you include your e-mail address. Enjoy.
Wednesday, July 05, 2000Fashion vs. Convention@ 01 pm | PermaLink<http://webreview.com/pub/2000/06/30/feature/index01.html> This is a good article, and in a similar vein to what will be published in A List Apart, but one thing really stuck me as 'whoa!' I really object to Mr. Forkan's lumping splash screens of and left hand navigation systems together as some design fashion. Though the former may be a passing fad, the latter is a fashion in the same sense that a car having it's gas pedal on the left and the brake pedal in the middle. Sure, the car designer can change it, but they better have a damn good reason for it.
Tuesday, July 04, 2000Home Again@ 11 am | PermaLinkGreatest picture from MacHack: <http://www.tidbits.com/resources/537/esr-think-different.jpg> In case any of you don't recognize the photo, it's Eric S Raymond, one of the leaders of the Open Source movement, in front of an iBook that was gifted to him by the attendees at MacHack. Boy that sure was quite a week. The stress of moving to a new apartment, my presentation at PSU's Macromedia Daze conference, and heading off to Montana to visit relatives from all side of my family really wiped me out. I'm glad I've got the 4th of July off from work. I think I would have made into work, but it's taken me 2 hours just to begin catching up on my mail and web reading at home. I'm sure I've got twice as much facing me at work. But it sure is nice to be home again, even if it's a long way from being put back together. That's my big project for the next week or so, then I can focus on collecting, scanning and organizing all the new found genealogy information that my Dad has loaned me. I'm going to be working up 4 'books', one for each of my pairs of great-grandparents: Olson, Coleman, Vasboe, Gessners. It'll be a lot of work, but I've got a great start.
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July 2000
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