Doug is back from vacation and has commented on many posts. Always appreciated.
Archives for July 2006
July 31, 2006
Too Cool to Bluff
On today’s errand walk, another sudden lyric occurrence, in isolation, apart from the song, leaving me wondering. She was too pat to open and too cool to bluff If you follow that link, you’ll find I got a lot more than I bargained for. After some preliminaries, there’s a lengthy excerpt from my old haunt […]
July 30, 2006
Morning Earwigs
Earwigs are disgusting in many ways, but they’re especially disgusting when, on a Sunday morning, up a bit earlier than you might prefer, and slightly hung-over, you find a pack of them nibbling away happily inside the wrapper of your virtually untouched Scharffen Berger chocolate bar. Besides the waste of fine chocolate, the shock and […]
July 29, 2006
IPtables is Fun!
Highly technical Internet practical joke. If you don’t get the tech stuff at the top, scroll down to the resulting images. Very amusing.
July 28, 2006
RMA Please
Dear Andrew, I’d like an RMA to return the microphone stand purchased on order #L23298760, invoice #6098612. The reason for the return is that the metal boom of the stand, when delivered, had two stickers on it, put there by the manufacturer. One was a white paper UPC bar code sticker. The other was a […]
July 26, 2006
A Version of Me
The strangest thing about selling my car was the feeling I had today when the buyer drove it away down the driveway. Suddenly, exhausted. About to fall asleep right now exhausted. So at 3:30 in the afternoon I walked into the living room, lay down on the couch, and fell asleep. I woke up at […]
July 26, 2006
Dynamic Scenarios
My friends Anika Schriefer and Michael Sales have published an article describing their work at the intersection of systems thinking and scenario planning, which they call dynamic scenarios. I have watched them develop their thinking over the past 18 months, and have contributed ever so slightly to some conversations along the way. I find this […]
July 26, 2006
Tesla Roadster
Now here’s an electric car worth waiting for. Lots of new here. It will be sold over the web starting next summer. According to their blog they have engaged Lotus for key contract engineering skills.
July 25, 2006
Good Work If You Can Get It
It’s all good, for BP: The company announced a profit of $7.27 billion in the second quarter, 30 percent more than the comparable period a year ago and the equivalent of more than $55,000 a minute. Now that’s some profit! Simply amazing, this world we live in.
July 25, 2006
Cogitating Is Doing
In software engineering it’s common to spend much more time understanding and characterizing something than actually implementing a feature or fix. For example, we just spent almost two hours pair programming to figure out 1) if the observed behavior is correct by design (yes); 2) why the error message is wrong (null set); 3) finding […]
July 25, 2006
It’s Not That Men Are Dumber
Sassy Pants is in fine form this morning: It’s not that men are dumber, they just choose to use their brain less if there is a female around. There are two reasons for this. The first is that their brain tends to be a little lower in their body when a woman is around. Second, […]
July 24, 2006
Things Programmers Say
Notio: There are a lot of CGI.pm flags for controlling the HTTP headers. Does our code send any of those? P: Hang on, let me look. … No. Notio: For instance, it says “The -nph parameter, if set to a non-zero value, will generate a valid header for use in no-parsed-header scripts. You will need […]
July 24, 2006
On Sweeping
On my lunchtime errand walk the phrase, “Swept me off my feet” popped into mind. I decided that it’s a lot easier to sweep someone off their feet once you know them—who they are, what they like, how they’re motivated. Via amplification and inversion, the feeling of being swept off your feet prior to really […]
July 24, 2006
What Matters
Falling asleep last night it occurred to me that in the past few days I have * Really gotten motivated playing guitar, reminding me how much I loved playing when I was young. It’s hard to remember that in the mid-1970s I was the best guitar player in my school district, and I just walked […]
July 23, 2006
Weekend Snapshot
After seven hours of financial straightening (I’m probably one-third through the project) I offer 15 minutes of guitar snapshots. Detective Mystery.mp3 (2:01) Swimming.mp3 (4:19) Dee Vee.mp3 (1:48) Simple Chords.mp3 (2:01) Big Noise.mp3 (3:58) Are You Fire.mp3 (2:36) Now it’s all about dexterity and stamina (ain’t that always the way) until I start to work out […]
July 22, 2006
Rainy Ghost of the Golden Age
An impromptu music video I shot this afternoon…. Rainy Ghost of the Golden Age (YouTube, 4:35) A mood hit and I grabbed the camera and restarted the song. The video compression makes it hard to tell how hard it was raining, and hard to see the ghost. But watch carefully and pay attention, and you […]
July 22, 2006
Guitaring
On Thursday I picked up the guitar for the first time since at least January. The last time I had callouses on my fingertips was at least a year ago. Around that time I had wanted to build a positive feedback loop with my playing, and rented a gadget that connected to the computer to […]
July 21, 2006
Perfect Music Marketing
This whole weblog thing is pretty amazing. I wrote that post the other day on finding music – it was a toss-off, essentially, a cool service that made me think about how I used to find music and how much harder it is now (for me). Then, in the comments, this: Hello Michael J. I […]
July 20, 2006
Things Managers Say
I can’t exactly read what it says on that flip-chart over there but I disagree with it.