What do you bring?

One of the things about working on many small or medium projects is that you sometimes hand off what you've done to someone else while you start something new. Yes, you can advise the new people, but now it's their project. Everything brings something unique to the table, good or bad. Most people bring a mix of both.

So sometimes it's hard to look at something that you have done and see that people are not working how you would have. They're not following the process you set up. *shrug* There's nothing that you can do about that if they know about the process. You can guide, you can suggest, but in the end it's someone else's project now and that can be hard to remember sometimes.

Dilbert blog QotD

To put that in capitalist overlord economic terms, the fourth yacht-hooker of the day doesnít make you that much happier than the first three.

From the dilbert blog.

"Long overdue"

To quote ryan's BulletBlog: long overdue. What the hell am I talking about? It's Canadian musicians getting together and saying that suing their customers or DRM isn't the solution to file sharing. That in fact it's been shown that people who share their music are more likely to go out and buy music.

I just love Steven Page's interview on Canada AM. Gotta love the artists that know if they keep on providing great content, they'll be okay. It's just great to know that there are people like CMCC who are looking out for music's best interest.

Update: now I see that it's also a slashdot story.

Pissed off...

I got hit with a bunch of comment spam. Not so unusual in itself. They refered to blogger pages that would redirect to a porn site. Now if I get spam from mySpaces or some other service, I try to report the abuse. Not so with blogger. I have to have a blogger account to write to them, and I can't use the "mark as questionable" part on the blogger page 'cause it redirects. *sigh* I understand why blogger to trying to have the masses mod it's own content, but it doesn't help me to contact them.

</rant>

If anyone has a blogger account and feels like reporting the abuse for me, I'll send them the list of 1600 ish bad accounts.

Life of Luxury

One of our friends lent us a dishwasher. Not that we're allowed to have one, but we've got it. We've only done one load, but it was so nice to be able to wash dishes like that... no more glasses or plastic for me!! (those are clearly the most hated items to hand wash). That and the fact that it gives us more counter space as well as somewhere to put the dishes that have not been washed yet... by adding an appliance, my kitchen just got bigger. ;-)

The thought that makes me sad though? We'll be returning it in like 6 weeks. *sigh* What we'll have to do is replace the void left by the dishwasher with a house. Let the house hunting (that we can afford) begin!

We won a trip!! (sort of)

Last night we got a call from great vacation destinations saying that we had won a trip after having entered a ballot at the wedding show last weekend. We filled out every ballot that we could there, so it was possible that we won. Woo-hoo!

It sounded great. 7 night vacation. It included a 2 night cruse, 3 nights in orlando, a rented car for a week, tickets to disney land. Somewhere in their spiel there was a 3 night vacation to cancun and 2 days in Las Vegas. Sweet.

All we had to do is pay the small administrative fee that we "knew about already" and the airfare. But what a vacation! Let me tell you more about it!

If you didn't pick up on that, our "free vacation" turned into a "fee vacation". Oh, and we'd have to sit through a small 2 hour sales pitch at one point of the trip. What was the price of this admin fee you ask? 399 USD per person. All we had to do is tell her our credit card number. Oh ya, we weren't allowed to hang up and call her right back.

So we were like "no, we can't afford it right now" to which the sales girl responded "that's why we put it on your credit card, so you can pay it back in little chunks". Riiiight. No thank you. For anything that we win, I don't expect to have to pay several thousand $ to take advantage of it.

So, in other words we didn't take advantage of it. Laura also pointed out that on their website, the "contact us" and "about us" links aren't even active. Doesn't inspire confidence that it's not a scam. I think that it's as close to a scam with it still being legal. Another funny thing that the sales girl said: that we "won" because we fit the right demographic. I'm a little sad 'cause that means we are in the "young and stupid" demographic. Ah well.

Great Security

A co-worker sent this article to me and I thought that it was so funny... that's why I think that it's good to have developers who have some testing experience (in a QA group). They'll have a "better" mentality. One of "how can we break this" rather than "how can we make this work".

Oie.