Speed of Slowness

The speed of the internet connection I have actually ends up having a significant impact on my productivity at work. It's somewhat scary how much I notice a slowdown. I guess that's what happens when I spend most of my day bouncing around forums, doing research, downloading upgrades, etc.

I'm starting to approach dial-up speeds today for some strange reason. Then things bounce back up to "big pipe" speeds. Either way, it's driving me nuts... Impatience is becoming my number one emotion while on a computer at work. :-(

Retro Chic

In the spirit of keeping with the "look" of our house which was built in the 60's, we decided to buy some furnature that went with some of other hand-me-down stuff. We ended up picking up a kitchen hutch, table and chairs made by Vilas Furniture Manufacturing Co. Probably meant to be a dinning set (Laura tells me).

I wish that I could find some info about that company, but all that I can find is that they used to operate out of Quebec and they have been closed for a while now. Ah well, I guess wikipedia doesn't actually have everything yet.

I think that we need to take a break from used ottawa for a while now.

Happy news

Something that Laura and I have been talking about for a couple of years has finally and we're both so very happy. We've been trying for the last little while and it's finally happened. We've got a foosball table and we couldn't be happier. :-P

iPod as a gateway device

Something that occurred to me today was how dangerous MS must see the use of iPods being. First people start using an iPod. Then maybe at a party someone is passing around a mac and they try it there. Pretty soon they're buying a mac for themselves for when they're at home "working". A small step from that is them bring it into work and then it all just goes to hell. That's all assuming that they don't switch to the hard stuff.

MS has to be concerned about iPod use. Apple targets children and children are our future. Why won't someone please think of the children?

Super Mario - JS version

A friend pointed out that there is a super mario that's done totally in javascript. No images, just js. Pretty cool....

Now on Leopard

I've just upgraded to leopard on my macbook. It was far, far smoother than I thought it would go. The part that took the longest time was backing up all my data (which makes me just realize how bad I am at making backups). It was pretty much insert disk, click next a couple of time (selecting "archive and install") and then it rebooted. All my files are where I left them, even my desktop picture is the same. That's crazy smooth.

It's not magic

One thing that I find I have to do when dealing with a new technology is come up with a "realistic" mental model of how it works under the covers. It doesn't have to be accurate in the sense of implementation details, but it has to make sense as if you were writing it in pseudo code. If it has a step 2 of ? or involves the word "magic" in your pseudo code, it's not good enough.

Code / config you write in language: assembly, C, java, or ruby, it all comes down to operations for the hardware and the last time I checked there was no read_programmers_mind() function. It's not magic.

There's always a learning stage when picking up a new framework / language. Don't give up, keep working on that mental model. Don't leave step 2 blank.