Matt O' Rama

WLED House Lights

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 03:25:58 +0000

I’ve been playing a lot with WLED and addressable LEDs recently and I decided to do one of
the ulimate LED projects - permanent house lights for holidays and the like. It’s hard to
take a good picture of them but you can see some animation at least.

The box isn’t super well locked down right now but I’ll strap everything down at some point.
The brains of the operation is a QuinLED-Digi-Quad, an awesome esp32-based board that uses WLED.
I’ve got a 12v 300W power supply for the lights and a 5v supply for the esp32. This is so I can
turn off the big power supply (using the smart plug in there) and keep the WLED on in case I want
to access it. You can make the Digi-Quad turn off and on a relay for the lights but I chose this
way since it’s what I’m familiar with.

I only have one string of 1200 lights hooked up now but have room for more if I want to add
more lights at some point. The board gives me enough power plugs to do the power injection I
needed for such a long strip also.

Floss Charm

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 04:40:02 +0000

https://flosscharm.com

My wife invented these cool little embroidery projects you can use as a keychain or
any kind of tag, with your own tiny design on them. We’ll have the blank charm for
sale soon and you use the website to play with designs.

Sim emoji-garden

Sat, 06 Oct 2018 21:45:13 +0000

At XOXO 2018 I saw a fun talk during the Art+Code evening by Monica Dinculescu. One of the things she showed off was her project emoji-garden on Glitch. Seeing this project gave me the idea for a version where you can create your own garden and the other day I finished it.

Click here to see sim-emoji-garden

grassfield1

Sat, 29 Sep 2018 05:18:49 +0000

Click here to see the scene

I’ve decided to start focusing more on art recently, as well as making sure I put things online. This is part of the first project. I had the idea to generate a calming scene of a field of grass. I’m going to make different versions of this scene using different techniques as an exploration and a learning exercise. This one was really fun to create so I’m looking forward to this little project. Stay tuned. Enjoy!

Sunset Cliffs Mavic Drone Video

Wed, 16 Aug 2017 05:40:27 +0000

Drone video of Santee Lakes

Tue, 08 Aug 2017 06:34:44 +0000

I grew up in Santee and spent a lot of time at Santee Lakes. It was fun visiting and seeing all the new
stuff but also the things that are the same.

Frist post

Fri, 04 Aug 2017 05:07:31 +0000

I moved my blog to a new system. Instead of Squarespace, I’m now hosting it myself on Amazon S3 and using a system called Hexo to manage it. I really liked Squarespace but I couldn’t justify spending money on a blog I don’t really update. I do plan on updating more often but I also wanted a little project. Hexo lets me write code to do cool stuff so I plan on doing that more often.

XOXO 2015

Tue, 15 Sep 2015 17:36:45 +0000

The XOXO conference of 2014 was literally life changing for me. It was my first visit to Portland and it was what convinced me to want to move here, which we’ve now done. Dan Benjamin of the 5by5 podcasting network interviewed a bunch of attendees (including me, randomly) and I joked to my wife about the interviews just being 50 people saying the conference was inspirational in different ways. That was no different this year, with the exception of this year being kind of the most inspirational bummer I’ve ever seen (in the best way). Rather than try to put the whole 3 day whirlwind into a narrative, I’m going to get on the journalistic bandwagon of recent years: the list.

Some things that happened to me at XOXO 2015

I briefly met Merlin Mann, a personal hero. I didn’t get to explain how important his work has been to me because I wanted to tell him his backpack was left alone after we vacated the table he left it near, but I was helpful so that’s good.
I didn’t want to bug Kathy Sierra about how influential and important her work has been also but her talk was magnificent.
I overheard a guy saying he was glad he didn’t have much student loan debt, only $70,000. Wow.
My kids talked to Phil Fish (creator of the incredibly popular and awesome game Fez) for like 10 minutes. I thought with all the crap he gets online that he might enjoy just talking to some kids who love his game and I was right. I’m thankful to him for talking to them like they were people, not dumb kids.
I talked to a number of people about my side project, CastFu, and they were pretty excited about the idea of it. It’s given me a renewed sense that this could be something that helps people.
I got to show Andy Baio, a big Suck.com fan, and Carl Steadman, freaking co-creator of Suck, my ancient Suck.com membership card and foldout explainer thing I got a million years ago. Turns out the cards were Carl’s idea and he was even the one who wrote the membership numbers on them. Turns out.
Spent a bunch of time at the podcast meetup sitting with and talking to Jason Snell, of The Incomparable and other affiliated podcasts. He’s a great guy and knows a lot about a lot of stuff. I learned a bunch.
Also at the podcast meetup I talked to 2 great guys about Kickstarter, comedy, and geeking out about internet famous people. Good times.
I met a ton of people on the XOXO Slack setup and thought that would mean I’d be able to talk to a bunch of people in person. For sure, I did talk to a lot of people but it was still really hard and I didn’t do it as much as I should have.
Last year I regretted not talking to Kevin Kelly, but my shyness got the better of me in that case. This year, a similar thing happened with Zoe Quinn. I couldn’t figure out anything I would say that wasn’t “I’m a big fan of your work and also how you have impossibly withstood this year-long monsoon of morons abusing you and wrecking your life for no reason” since I thought that would be too weird. Anyway, she’s great and her talk was amazing.
I got 2.7 billion points on Attack From Mars pinball at Ground Kontrol. You earn an extra game at 2.2B so I think that’s pretty good. One of my faves.
I’m so glad we get to expose our kids to such awesome and creative people. They were probably most excited to see the creators of Baman Piderman although we all laughed like mad people at Hello From The Magic Tavern, which we hadn’t heard before.
My wife and I met a number of people that our 10 year old son had befriended first without us, which was hilarious. He was also kind of the king of the Tinder Box indie arcade one night, including the awesome game Shitty Voltron (imagine a multiplayer QWOP). My wife and daughter also fell in love with 2 Rooms And A Boom, a fun group game.
On the last night we had the kind of lucky experience that is kind of typical of XOXO. My wife had made a friend at a meetup and when we all started talking, we ended up being extremely similar and had a great time talking outside, which turned into dinner. It turns out her and her husband run a pretty well known internet service that we’ve used, and they have very similar thoughts about running their business and building cool stuff. It’s hard for me to make new friends sometimes so when it happens randomly like this it’s really great.

I’m sure I’ll be writing more about XOXO later, after it all stews around in my head for a little while longer. If you want to read more specifics about what the speakers said there’s a bunch of really good posts about that on Medium.

Merlin Mann notes on Time & Attention

Mon, 27 Jul 2015 19:22:07 +0000

Just saving this for later…

521 Saturdays

Wed, 14 Jan 2015 00:58:02 +0000

One of my favorite internet people, Merlin Mann, had an episode on his Back To Work podcast program where he talked about the idea that you only get so many Saturdays in your life. Saturdays being the days that we usually use to do fun stuff, hobbies, cleaning, things that aren’t work. I liked this idea a lot and it got stewing around in my head. Eventually I came up with the idea to visualize this concept of a limited number of Saturdays. To keep the visualization manageable I thought about tracking the number of Saturdays in 10 years. 10 years from now my wife and I be in just past our mid-forties and my kids will either be in college or just out (theoretically). Other than that, who knows?

So as a concrete project, I came up with storing 10 years worth of Saturdays as marbles in a jar. Every Saturday you move a marble into a different jar. I used WolframAlpha to figure out how many Saturdays there are in the next 10 years (taking into account the vagaries of the calendar) and came up with 521. I found somebody selling 500 marbles on ebay for a good price (Which seems to only be possible on ebay. Bulk marbles sites are weirdly expensive.) and filled out the rest of them at the dollar store. I had my kids count the marbles and remove the broken ones, then put them all in a container so I could figure out the size of the glass jar I’d need. I estimated the volume of the container, then went to Michaels and found basically the perfect jars which you can see in the picture.

I really like the way this turned out with the cool square jars. I’m looking forward to seeing the one jar fill up. I think it’ll help us be mindful of time passing and remind us to make good use of our Saturdays.

I’d love for this idea to appeal to somebody else so I can see how they do it. If you make something like this, please let me know! Thanks for reading.

Update: I made an Instructable for how to build your own version of my project. It’s basically the same as this post but now it’s also my first Instructable. :)

Making a pen

Fri, 02 Jan 2015 16:47:00 +0000

I’ve been getting into wood turning thanks to my wife’s interest in it. I’ve made a couple of pens and a pencil that turned out pretty well. Some friends asked for a video on the process so I finally made one of my most recent pen.

I’m also starting to sell the pens and mechanical pencils I make. If you’d like one, contact me at the Contact link at the top of the page. Right now the price is $10 but that will probably go up soon. The pens write really well and the pencils use standard leads so you can use your favorite.

We're Here On Earth To Fart Around

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 02:28:04 +0000

[When Vonnegut tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope] Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.

Thanks to Merlin for that.

On interrupting programmers

Fri, 11 Apr 2014 02:17:17 +0000

[![Share photos on twitter with Twitpic](http://twitpic.com/show/full/dj27dh.png)](http://twitpic.com/dj27dh "Share photos on twitter with Twitpic")

On 2013

Mon, 06 Jan 2014 22:59:18 +0000

An overview on 2013, which on twitter I called my favorite year yet.

I read about 36 books, but I also read hundreds and hundreds of comics. This included the entirety of Preacher and a full re-read of Sandman, both of which are on my favorite comics of all time list. The list of books I read is on Goodreads. Warning: It includes a lot of Star Trek books. I regret nothing!

I helped in an extrememly minor way to put on the first San Diego Maker Faire. I’m happy to have gotten involved with that group and the whole family will be helping more to put on future Maker Faires for sure.

I made a resolution of sorts to do and document 100 creative things throughout the year. I failed miserably on that front because I didn’t document anything. I did a lot of creative stuff but not 100 things for sure. This year I’m trying something a little different which I’ll talk about more later.

I helped my wife coach my daughter’s Lego FIRST Robotics team, which was awesome fun. It was amazing watching these 5th & 6th grade girls go through a lot of the challenges faced by professional programmers/engineers. They all had a ton of fun and learned a lot I hope. They also won a trophy at the big regional competition, taking 2nd place in the Teamwork judging category.

I personally think I kicked ass at work. Shopzilla has been a super great place to work. My first 2 months I was on a regular site team doing website features. Then my coworker and I were made into a team building up a new part of the organization. Then we reorganized and since then I’ve been a one-man team (one programmer anyway, with business/project people) again doing new stuff. This has been really fun and I’m learning a ton.

As usual, I played a lot of Minecraft off-and-on. That game still surprises and gives me ways of spending hours on it. I also bought and built a lot of Lego sets.

I started running and ended up running the Disneyland Half-Marathon in August. This is still a mind-blowing idea to think about as someone who used to joke “I only run if the cops are chasing me”. I’ve been a slacker since then but I’m going to get back into it. I’m probably going to the Disneyland race again and I’d like to do other 5k or 10k races also.

I did a presentation at SoCal Code Camp called ‘Intro To Not Sucking At Presentations‘. People seemed to like it.

And now, for 2014, I’ll let the poet Jay-Z speak for me: “I move onward, the only direction. Can’t be scared to fail in search of perfection”.

Creative Thing #5 : DIY Camera Strap

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:38:37 +0000

This isn’t a very good picture but I made a new strap for my wife’s new camera. Technically I found the idea on Instructables but none of those were exactly right so I made my own version. The real one is by a company called R-Strap and they cost like $60. This one I made from some nylon strap, a buckle, metal dog leash connector, and a screw that fits in the tripod attachment hole on the camera. $12.

Creative Things #4 - A new drawing

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 14:30:52 +0000

This is my first drawing using the blended layer of pencil as a background. Looks pretty nice for this kind of drawing but getting the erasing of the grey to match the shadows on the real hand was a pain.

Creative Thing #3 : Dancing at the company party

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 14:52:00 +0000

I’ve gotten behind on a lot of stuff due to moving to a new house, so I’m going to be a little extra creative in my criteria of what goes on this list. :)

My next creative thing for the year is that I danced at my company’s big yearly party. Kim and I have been taking couple’s dancing lessons for awhile now but it hasn’t really prepared me for the kind of dancefloor activities you find at these kind of parties, not to mention I didn’t have anybody to dance with. But after an hour or so of my usual watching and willing myself not to be a wallflower, a great song came on and I broke away from my spot off to the side and joined the fun on the floor. Now, even with dance lessons I have almost no “moves” as such, but I did my best to move my feet and get into it and it ended up being really fun. As part of my ongoing program to get over myself and not be so self-conscious I count it as a success. And since I had to come up with ways of using what I had learned about how to move my feet in a different setting, I’m counting it as creative as well. :)

The path to mastery

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 19:32:10 +0000

The path to mastery:

Strive to understand fully and completely the tool at hand. Explore exactly how it works and what it can do. In addition constantly learn how to build on what you and others have done before. Aim for clarity and comprehension, and mastery shall surely follow.

On Explanations and Copywriting

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 01:28:44 +0000

If you’d asked me what the hardest parts of making DebugMap would be, I would never have thought writing the explanatory text for the homepage would so high up on the list. Crikey, it’s hard to explain things.

Being so close to the site and what it is, it’s hard to explain to somebody who hasn’t had the damn thing on their mind for 6 months. I made way too many assumptions about how the site worked. So my first stabs at copy for the homepage didn’t really help, even to people who I had previously explained the site to. It was then I started reading about copywriting and how to write for an audience of potential customers.

The big turning point was when the great and powerful patio11 on HackerNews wrote about CopyHackers, a site by professional copywriter Joanna Wiebe. She has some really great stuff on there and her ebooks are chock full of must-have info if you’re in the position I’m in. I haven’t finished all of them but since I have to stop after reading each chapter and implement some of her advice it’s well worth it. Honestly I was hesitant to spend the money at first but I’m so glad I finally bit the bullet. One of the pieces of advice that I remembered from reading people like Kathy Sierra was to stop saying things like ’We can do X, Y, Z’ and replace that with ‘You’ messages about how the user will be better off using the site. Joanna also says this and it’s a very helpful thing to always keep in mind.

Even after finding some wording for the homepage I thought was to the point, short, and powerful, it was a big dud. I got a couple of useful messages from people who basically said they still didn’t know what the site did. Cue sad trombone. So I’m back at it. I’ve actually got a DebugMap going with a bunch of different versions of the text and all the changes I’m making. I’m also looking at other tool websites to see how they’re doing things. I’m hoping that I’m not just putting off working on the site by reading and noodling under the guise of improving the copy. I’m trying everything I can to turn that homepage into something somebody new might read and say “Wow, I need this site!”

I wish I had some great ending to this post where I say “These words increased my conversions by 5000%!” But right now the site is so new I’m glad when I get a few hits a day and a signup a week. So I’m working away and trying not to get too distracted by Minecraft. :) One of these days I’ll find the magic spell.

Thanks for reading!

Introducing: DebugMap

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 21:06:30 +0000

Hello again to both of my regular readers. It’s been a long time. It was a pretty long time ago I posted my previous entry where I optimistically (or perhaps stupidly) said I’d be launching my side project “soon”. Well, you’re in luck! 6 months later: “soon” has arrived.

I’m super proud to be launching my new website for developers, called DebugMap. It’s a tool to help programmers remember what they find while debugging. Unfortunately for all of us, debugging is something we do a lot of. I noticed that I was using a lot of text files to keep things I was finding while looking for some problem. Snippets of code, SQL queries and results, answers from StackOverflow, all that stuff. One day I thought of a way to collect and display all that stuff and decided that might actually be something others could use too. So here it is.

It turns out there’s a ton of little pieces to making something people might pay money for. I’ve launched a number of other sites and even had people give me money for some of them. But I wanted to do this “right”. I wanted to host it somewhere better than my personal server so I learned about Heroku. I wanted to do a more modern interface so I found a good color scheme and learned more modern HTML and Javascript. I’m an armchair design fan so I’ve tried to make it well designed. I did a credit card form with Stripe because nuts to Paypal. But all of this stuff takes time. I did my best to launch an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) without too many features but it still took a crazy long time to get going. I’ve told my friends about it and now I’m telling my vast and influential group of readers about it. Pretty soon I’ll tell more people and hopefully all those people will tell somebody else (hint) and in a few years I’ll have an overnight success on my hands.

Anyway, DebugMap is my new thing and I like it. If you’re a developer I hope you do too. Tell a friend! :)

What I've Learned (Part 1 of X)

Wed, 02 May 2012 14:33:49 +0000

This is a list of things I’ve learned while building my side project (which I’ll talk about soon (really!))

Grails
Groovy
MongoDb
Git
Heroku
Modern HTML, CSS
Design
Color schemes
Modern Javascript
Wildcard SSL certificates
Speaking at conferences

Fun times. :)

Starting An Experiment

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 19:43:09 +0000

I've been neglecting my little blog here for quite awhile partly because I've been working on a side project that I didn't know how to write about. I'm not quite ready to pull the covers off it and talk directly about it yet (soon!) but I didn't want to let the private nature of the site prevent me from writing any longer. In the spirit of just getting something written, this is probably going to be more rambling that usual.

So, I’m building a website. It’s a tool for programmers, which I think is pretty useful. Is it a “startup”? I don’t know. I don’t even really know if it’s a good idea yet. The way I work probably isn’t the way others work so who knows if anybody else will find this thing useful. Programmers are very picky about tools, and rightly so. When talking about my somewhat expensive keyboard I bought for myself to have at work, I said “Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight” which is of course a famous quote but also fits how I feel about tools. Programmers need guns. Metaphorically.

But anyway, I don’t know if it’s a startup. It’s an idea. It’s an experiment. I would love more than anything for this thing to take off so I can hire some of my friends to come work with me. I would love it if this experiment took off enough just to support me working on it. But right now I’m not really interested in the typical TechCrunch / VC / Valley / Bubble / blahblah startup. I’m building this thing myself since I’m doing it for no money. I’m going to bootstrap it, which is startup-speak for actually making money like a real business. At some point if it makes sense to let somebody give me money, I’ll consider it of course. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” and all that. Money isn’t evil, it’s a tool.

I think it’s a shame we’ve lost some of the “2 people in a garage” excitement from the early 2000s. Yeah, there’s a lot to making a modern website. So what? That’s part of being a programmer, learning new stuff. That’s part of why I call this thing an experiment, if it was a business I wouldn’t be able to play around as much. I’m learning about Heroku instead of using a server which is something I already know how to do. I’m using Grails and Groovy instead of Java which I already know. I’m using Mongodb instead of Mysql which, you guessed it, I already know. Even stuff like wildcard ssl certificates is new to me since they didn’t used to have those when I was an admin. Is some of this new stuff going to bite me in the ass since I don’t know it? Probably. But I’ll do what I’ve always done which is learn on the job. And in the end I’ll have built something cool, learned a ton of new stuff, and had fun. And maybe made some money.

We’ll see where this thing goes. More later.

My Minecraft Home Base Tour Video

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 11:32:49 +0000

My Minecraft Home Base

This is the first of hopefully many videos I’m going to make about my adventures in the land of Minecraft. I hope you enjoy, it’s my first time making any videos like this.

none

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 14:24:08 +0000

“I wish in the past I had tried more things ‘cause now I know that being in trouble is a fake idea.”

_ Chris Onstad, _Achewood creator (via eudaimonist)

_1246940)

Nowhere Men - Science is the new rock ‘n’ roll

Job Title

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 10:51:34 +0000

hehe

Patio11 says Hello Ladies

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 18:21:16 +0000

[Patio11 says hello ladies - Spontaneous Evolution](http://akshat.posterous.com/patio11-says-hello-ladies).

A great (and short) video from a great coder about selling software to women. While the talk is about women, really the larger ideas are about anyone.

I’ve been thinking about these sorts of ideas for awhile and I’ll have a post on it soon.

Merlin Mann: Scared Shitless

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 00:16:42 +0000

Merlin Mann - Scared Shitless - Webstock 2011

View more [presentations](http://www.slideshare.net/) from [merlinmann](http://www.slideshare.net/merlinmann)

Sheesh, pretty much everything Merlin does blows me away in some way or another. Even without hearing the talk that goes along with these slides he succeeds in moving me in a very real way that few other writers do. You should listen to [his podcast](http://5by5.tv/b2w), follow [his blog](http://kungfugrippe.com), and keep up with [his tweets](http://twitter.com/hotdogsladies) (which are more of an acquired taste but once you get on his wavelength frequently inspire me and/or make me laugh out loud (for real, not in a LOL sense)).

File uploads with CXF Multipart form posts

Sat, 19 Feb 2011 23:10:32 +0000

Now that the title of this post has scared off all non-technical readers of my blog (sorry Mom! :)) I wanted to come back to hopefully regular posting with a bang.

I’ve been working a side project that involves a REST web service. I needed to upload a file along with some identifying data and for the life of me I couldn’t figure it out. I could get files to upload with a PUT or send the data with a POST, but couldn’t do both in one call. I finally got it and I want to keep it here since finding full examples for CXF stuff isn’t easy.

First, here’s the interface for the method:

@POST
@Path("/stuff")
@Produces("application/json")
@Consumes(MediaType.MULTIPART_FORM_DATA)
public String doStuff(@Multipart("id")Integer id, @Multipart("data")String foo, @Multipart("image")byte[] image);

The @Consumes annotation with the @Multipart annotations on the parameters is the vital bit. These allows you to just grab the parameters in the implementation and not mess around with getting the Multipart Attachments and all that.

@Override
public String doStuff(Integer id, String foo, byte[] image) {
}

I’m sending the file with Android, using the HttpClient api.

HttpPost request = new HttpPost(url);

MultipartEntity mentity = new MultipartEntity(HttpMultipartMode.BROWSER_COMPATIBLE);
ByteArrayBody imgBody = new ByteArrayBody(imageBytes, "image/jpeg", "image");
mentity.addPart("image", imgBody);

//add headers
for(NameValuePair h : headers)
{
    request.addHeader(h.getName(), h.getValue());
}

for(NameValuePair p : params) {
    mentity.addPart(p.getName(), new StringBody(p.getValue(), "text/plain", Charset.forName( "UTF-8" )));
}

request.setEntity(mentity);

executeRequest(request, url);

This is nice and simple, and it works fine for me. Hopefully this will be helpful to you too if you’re like me and Google this issue a hundred times. :)

How I Got My New Job

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 10:19:53 +0000

As the title of this post suggests, I've landed myself a new job. If I may say: whoohoo! The road to this job has been the hardest I've ever gone on and I wanted to lay it out because it's not just the typical "Who you know" story like some of my other jobs have been.

When I finally decided to look for another job, I aimed high. My brother-in-law put my resume in for Google, even though without a degree I figured I’d never get in there. I did it mostly for the interviewing experience, which is a very good thing to do. Interviews (phone or in-person) are tough and the more experience you have, the more relaxed you’ll be. I put my resume in to LinkedIn, Yahoo, Netflix, Zynga, Salesforce; a bunch of places I knew had strong engineering groups where they use Java and where I would learn a lot. Not having a degree hurt more than I thought it would. I thought in 2010 we were past everybody having to have a degree but I didn’t even get a call back from a lot of places, even with a number of years of experience. I ended up having phone interviews with a couple of places and moved on to 2nd level interviews with 1 or 2 I think.

My main problem I think was lack of breadth of experience. I have 10+ years programming, mostly in Perl. I’ve spent the last 3 or 4 years doing Java but at an insurance company doing internal applications and integration work. Most of it is various flavors of “Take data from System X or File Y, put the data in System A or write it to File B”. It’s been fun and I’ve certainly learned a lot, but not about a ton of different things. A lot of people wanted specific experience with Spring or Hibernate or whatnot and learning on the job doesn’t really fit the bill. Learning on the job is mostly how I’ve learned and while I think I’ve been very successful doing that, it does leave gaps in your knowledge where you haven’t had to use some specific technology and it does take time. I set out to fill in the gaps as much as I could, going through videos on algorithms from ArsDigita University (highly recommended) to reading more books. But in the end, I knew I just wasn’t up to the Senior level most companies seem to be looking for. That’s another question I had, how can companies only hire senior people? Don’t most places need or want people at the middle level? People who can get the job done but just don’t have the experience aren’t given much opportunity at big tech companies it seems.

During the early stages of my search, I had applied to a company in San Diego called Awarepoint who were doing very cool things with wireless networks and Java. I grew up in San Diego so this seemed perfect. When I actually got my resume together for them, the position was closed. I was disappointed for sure. A few months went by and I looked through a Who’s Hiring? post on Hacker News where people just posted positions they were looking to fill. I searched for Java and lo-and-behold there was a post by Awarepoint! I was prepared this time and sent my resume immediately. The poster was a member of the engineering team. We talked on the phone and he set me up with more phone interviews with various people. A little while later, they actually flew me out to San Diego for a day of in-person interviews. This would be a pretty big move so I interviewed them as much as they did me. I got a really great feeling from the team and pretty much knew this would be a great fit for me. They were looking for a mid-level person and with my limited experience, I know I’m a strong mid-level guy at this point. Being honest with myself about that really helped me understand that I wasn’t going to get some of those Senior positions and take some of the sting out of those rejections.

I knew I wanted to work there and I got the feeling they wanted me to come on board. I got very excited about the possibility of moving back to San Diego and working for this great company. For various reasons, my position in limbo where they kept saying they wanted to hire me but couldn’t actually make it happen lasted awhile. I knew I’d be moving if they made an offer but couldn’t tell my current boss in case it didn’t go through. This was a pretty stressful time. I got further word from Awarepoint that they wouldn’t be able to give me a firm answer for maybe a couple of months. I felt strongly enough about them that I was fine with waiting. Plus I was supposed to be running a huge project at the current job and felt better about getting that going before leaving since I was given the chance.

In the end, they were able to make me an offer after a month or so and I accepted immediately. I’m incredibly excited to be able to join such a great company (they were just named #1 Best Place To Work in Healthcare) who is doing really cutting edge stuff. The product also makes a real difference in hospitals and could very easily save lives, literally.

So in the end, the road to this job included the Java Posse Roundup where I first started thinking about a new job, the Hacker News community, this blog, and my writing on AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com (which I got because of this blog and Twitter).

I haven’t been writing here for awhile because the stuff I wanted to write about was my job hunting experiences but while I still had my old job I couldn’t exactly do that. Now that I’m moving on, I’ll be writing more.

On Books And Paper

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 20:25:33 +0000

There's a big discussion going on in the comic book world about digital comics. For a lot of people the physical comic is of a piece with the art or writing. I used to be that way too, collecting many long boxes full of books over the years. Recently though, what I've discovered is that while I love comics, I don't love paper. Now part of my decision when buying comics is "Do I want to take care of this paper?"

With the coming of the iPad, the digital comics world has blown up. Once upon a time comics were sold at the newsstands but switched to comic book shops selling only comics. That transition is probably about to happen again with downloadable comics. There will always be physical comics and graphic novels are here to stay, but most people will buy digital. It’s happened with music and it’s probably going to happen to books.

The question for me is, how do I feel about that? I’m not sure. I love books. I’ve been a reader since I can remember. Buying books is a special event for me. Last year I spent a couple of hours in the local bookstore Page 1 with a bunch of store credit and ended up spending $180 on brand new books. It was one of my favorite experiences of the year. I have multiple bookshelves all over my house and can barely fit all my unread books on one six-foot shelf. I’ve bought books I already had just for the cover. But a few weeks ago I bought a Kindle, the new version 3 one. And I love the hell out of that little thing. I’m reading Jonathan Franzen’s new book Freedom which I had originally pre-ordered in hardcover but cancelled and bought on the Kindle (saving a few dollars in the process). It’s unbelievable how much easier it is to carry around the 1/4 inch thick Kindle than it would be to carry a 500 page book. There’s a couple of books I’ve been wanting to read that I’ve been avoiding due to their sheer bulk. Not having to take into account the physical object means I can focus on the reading, which is what I really love. Now that I have the option, I’ll still some books if I want the physical object for what it is. But that’s what the paper is now, an option, not a requirement of the reading experience.

After a lifetime as a book nerd, I’m learning to love books without having to love the paper.

Career Thinking

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 11:21:33 +0000

Both of the Java Posse Roundups I've been to, I've made some fairly big decisions about my career. Now, I didn't even really consider my career until fairly recently. I'd had some great jobs, a couple of not-so-great jobs, and I was finally working as a professional programmer. A couple of years ago though I started thinking about what I'd like to be doing as a programmer in the future, whether I'd want to be a manager at some point, all of that stuff. At the 2009 Roundup, I'd just been reading about managers and finally figuring out that all programmer managers aren't just wastes of space with the help of some people who had been good managers or had good managers. I realized there that I shouldn't just sit around and put up with the bad manager I had at the time, that it was time to move on and try to find a good manager who could actually help me grow. I got a couple of good job offers but for various reasons decided it would be worthwhile to stay put.

At the 2010 Roundup, I was once again faced with seeing people doing things with their career that I want to do. I want to be learning and growing as a programmer the way a lot of Roundup attendees are. I decided that once again I would reevaluate my job and try to figure out what the best thing would be. The difference is, this time I want to figure out what to do not to escape a bad situation but to go towards something good. I haven’t decided what to do yet but I have refocused my efforts toward learning and getting better rather than just sitting comfortably.

I’ve always learned on the job and I’ve found I’m very good at that. The problem with that kind of learning is it tends to leave gaps in your knowledge since you don’t learn as much that you don’t need right then. I’m rectifying that with a renewed course of study in the areas I feel I’m missing. I’m also focusing on the quality of the work I do and the code I write even more. I don’t work for a software company so I’m a little limited in the efforts I can put forth here but now that our boss has decided we’re to run our own projects I’m definitely pushing more quality into my work and I’m prouder than I’ve ever been with my code.

Like I say, I haven’t decided exactly what to do so this blog post doesn’t have some big conclusion. My new focus is a big deal to me though so I wanted to write it here and not forget. More to come!

Roundup Thoughts

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 12:20:37 +0000

This is a roundup of my thoughts about the Roundup, the Java Posse Roundup 2010 that is. If you don't know, the Roundup is the yearly conference put on by the guys who do the [Java Posse](http://javaposse.com/) podcast and tech writer/speaker Bruce Eckel. If you're a Java person, you should be listening to their podcast, no question. The conference is an unconference/open space conference/camp/etc. where it's not about getting lectured to or watching slides but discussing topics with a group. There's no speaker, just a bunch of smart people talking. This was my second Roundup and I very much hope it won't be my last.

One of the best parts of the Roundup is seeing people I met and made friends with in person again. We drove up on Sunday and Bruce had a get-together for early attendees at his house that ended up being mostly returning folks catching up. It was great to see people again, even though I felt like I hadn’t spent any time away from some people thanks to Twitter.

The next day was Day 0 of the Roundup, the language dojo day. I had left last year’s Roundup with a great feeling about JavaFX and had done a little coding in it since then so I went to the JavaFX day Dick Wall of the Posse proposed. We spent the day writing a JavaFX version of OmmWriter (called ZenWriterFX) and fighting with git/github. If we hadn’t had so much trouble with git, we would have made it a lot farther but even so we made good progress. I helped a little generally and ended up doing the little bit that played the background sound for the app. Dick has since moved the project to Bitbucket so we can use Mercurial and I’m going to be participating in further development for sure. I already have some cool ideas I want to try out and I really like JavaFX.

I’ll go into the individual sessions at some later point when I can go over my notes but overall, the sessions were great again this year. I learned a lot, as always, and actually had something to say in more than a few. I do find that I like the sessions where I don’t talk as much more though. :) The Roundup attendees are all super smart people and it’s great to get everybody’s perspective and uses of things.

One of the best parts of the Roundup is the Lightning Talks. These are 5 minute talks people give on any subject that interests them, technical or not. This year there were talks about car engines, shaving, donating bone marrow, open mapping technology, and much more. The talks are recorded and will be on YouTube at some point. I even gave a talk this year! I did a short demo of the note taking system I use in my notebooks. Despite some technical difficulties (turns out Ubuntu does not like to be plugged into a projector while it’s coming back from sleep mode), I think my talk went well. I was super nervous so I rushed and forgot a couple things but people seemed to like it. I’ll have the video here when it’s up.

The Roundup is a very unique experience. If you’re expecting a regular conference or want to just blend in with a crowd it’s not for you. We don’t do technical stuff all the time (though of course if you want to, it’s up to you) and this year I did much less programming than last year. I spent my afternoons snow-shoeing and shooting a shotgun, watching the movie Vertigo, shopping, watching an impromptu demo of Scala, and lots else. It’s kind of a Geek Summer Camp, but in the blowing snow of Crested Butte, Colorado.

Like I said, I love going to the Roundup and hope to do it every year. I have a bunch of new friends because of it, I learned a lot, made some decisions about my career, and recharged my batteries to better attack the year to come.

The hacker, the architect and the superhero

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 15:16:46 +0000

The hacker, the architect and the superhero: three completely different ways to be an excellent programmer « The Reinvigorated Programmer.

Text File parsing with Flatworm and Substring Hacks

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:45:33 +0000

I'm going to start posting more code here, finally. I don't consider myself a rockstar programmer or anybody to be telling others how to program but when I do something I found interesting, hopefully it'll also be interesting to others. I'm always looking for better ways of doing things so if you have suggestions, I'm all ears.

Recently I was implementing a new project at work where I had to read and write a bunch of fixed-width files for communicating with a new vendor. My first thought was that I would have to use Java’s String.substring() method to pull out the individual fields. This is ugly because you end up with stuff like

final String FIELD1_START_POS = 10;
final String FIELD1_END_POS = 20;

When you have a few hundred fields, this is exceptionally ugly. Luckily for code and my sanity, I asked how best to do this on StackOverflow and was pointed to the great little library Flatworm. Flatworm allows you to create an XML descriptor for the file you need to parse, then it reads it into a plain Java bean for you. It also takes care of parsing the data if needed, casting into the correct type, stripping unwanted characters, etc. Very, very useful indeed.

Aside: Of course you could also use regular expressions to pull out the data but I don’t see where that would give any advantage. You still have to encode what the field looks like, where it starts, something of that nature. It just feels even more brittle to me. There’s also the more complete route of using lexers, parsers, etc. I don’t know enough about that process to see how that would be benefit me in this particular case. Maybe it would, I don’t know for sure. But from what I do know, it seems like overkill and not a big benefit.

Fast forward to now, I have another project where I need to read and write text files. “Ah ha!” I say. “I’ll use Flatworm again.” “Nope,” says the universe. Unfortunately the file I need to read runs into a limitation of Flatworm. The file has lines where the data starts on column 10, but then it’s a name that could be any length. Instead of padding out the line to the end of the file, the line ends after the name. Flatworm has no way of handling this. I considered hacking Flatworm to handle this condition (and I still might do this as I think it’s useful) but I wanted to try something else first. What I ended up with was better than my first example I think but not quite as cool as Flatworm.

Here’s a mockup of the file I’m working with for reference (. is a blank space)

.....12345......................................02/01/2010.....$123.45.....
.....One hundred twenty-three and forty-five cents
..........Matt Grommes
..........98765..........1 Test St..............123.45

Here’s the first version of the parser code I had

check.setCheckDate( new Date(checkLines[0].substring(91, checkLines[0].indexOf("$"))) );
check.setCheckTotal( checkLines[0].substring( checkLines[0].indexOf("$")+1, checkLines[0].length()) );
check.setAmountWords( checkLines[1].substring(10, checkLines[1].length()) );
check.setPayee( checkLines[3].substring( 10, checkLines[3].length()) );

This isn’t optimal because there is a ton of duplicated code, plus there are problems with the same lines that tripped up Flatworm. I ended up making a new function called getLineValue()

    private static String getLineValue(String line, int beginIndex, int endIndex) {

        String value = "";

        // endIndex 0 is just a shortcut to EndOfLine
        if(endIndex == 0)
            endIndex = line.length();

        if(line.length() != 0 && line.length() >= endIndex)
            value = line.substring(beginIndex, endIndex).trim();

        return value;
    }

This is of course just a wrapper around String.substring() but it lets me do some extra checks and have extra logic like using 0 for endIndex to indicate “go to end of line”.

Here’s the modified version, using the new function.

check.setCheckDate( new Date(getLineValue(checkLines[0], 91, checkLines[0].indexOf("$"))) );
check.setCheckTotal( getLineValue(checkLines[0], checkLines[0].indexOf("$")+1, 0) );
check.setAmountWords( getLineValue(checkLines[1], 10, 0) );
check.setPayee( getLineValue(checkLines[3], 10, 0) );

This is a lot better to my eye, not as much extra code cluttering things up. It’s a lot clearer what I’m doing since you don’t have to pay attention to a bunch of substring() and length() calls. This is only about 1/5 of the total lines of parsing code so hopefully you can see how much better this looks over the course of the whole method. See the Aside above for thoughts on some other ways of doing this.

This wasn’t a big project and there may be better ways of going about it but I was pretty happy how this ended up. I like seeing less code so when there are ways of cutting extra things out, it’s a win.

Thanks to the couple of redditors that made comments about this post. I’m always looking to get better at this so constructive criticism is welcome.

Unrealized projects

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:18:58 +0000

> _Every year, [Tim Burton] spent an enormous amount of time on failed projects._ > > A few: Catwoman, Conversations With Vincent, Dinosaurs Attack!, The Fall of the House of Usher, Geek Love, Go Baby Go, Hawkline Monster, Lost in Oz, Mai the Psychic Girl, Mary Reilly, Superman Lives, X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes. > > One key element of a successful artist: ship. Get it out the door. Make things happen. > > [Seth's Blog: Unrealized projects](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/01/unrealized-projects.html). I love that Tim Burton is even willing to put this kind of info in his career retrospective instead of focusing on just his successes.

Mobius Sliced Linked Bagel

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:15:37 +0000

Mathematically Correct Breakfast – Mobius Sliced Linked Bagel.

This isn’t exactly programming related but it’s very geeky. Next time we have bagels at work the keyword will be: Awesome.

A New Theory of Awesomeness and Miracles

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 17:15:25 +0000

A New Theory of Awesomeness and Miracles, by James Bridle, concerning Charles Babbage, Heath Robinson, MENACE and MAGE.

Frequently Forgotten Fundamental Facts about Software Engineering

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:10:37 +0000

> Here are the most frequently forgotten fundamental facts about software engineering. Some are of vital importance—we forget them at considerable risk. via [Frequently Forgotten Fundamental Facts about Software Engineering](http://www.computer.org/portal/web/buildyourcareer/fa035?utm_source=bronto&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Forgotten+Facts+About+Software+Engineering&utm_content=andrew%40badera.us&utm_campaign=BYC-Issue+38-December+3).

Very interesting list of easily forgotten ideas. I hesitate to outright call them “facts” since there’s so little real research in programming (and even the author says they might be figments of his imagination. One of the most annoying things about the computer field is how much we reinvent things and forget old lessons so lists like this and discussions on the topics are always valuable if they keep things from being forgotten.

Random Football Picks in Groovy

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 06:42:17 +0000

My friend runs an informal football picks contest every week and I thought of a way to participate in a very geeky way, **a program that would make my picks for me**. I decided it would be funny to write a program that would randomly make my picks for me since everybody else spends an inordinate amount of time thinking over their picks. Plus, I don't pay attention to football so my picks would have been essentially random in any case.

The contest is simple; pick who you think is going to win in all the games. The person with the most correct picks wins. You also guess how many points the next Monday Night Football game is going to have in total so if there’s a tie, whoever is closest to that number wins.

Here’s the code for my program:

def matchups = [1 : ['Atlanta','Carolina'],          2 : ['Detroit','Minnesota'],
 3 : ['Green Bay','Cincinnati'],      4 : ['Jacksonville','Arizona'],
 5 : ['Kansas City','Oakland'],       6 : ['New York(NYJ)','New England'],
 7 : ['Philadelphia','New Orleans'],  8 : ['Tennessee','Houston'],
 9 : ['Washington','St. Louis'],     10 : ['Buffalo','Tampa Bay'],
 11 : ['San Francisco','Seattle'],   12 : ['Chicago','Pittsburgh'],
 13 : ['Denver','Cleveland'],        14 : ['San Diego','Baltimore'],
 15 : ['Dallas','New York(NYG)'],    16 : ['Miami','Indianapolis']]

def rand = new Random(System.currentTimeMillis() + Runtime.runtime.freeMemory())
matchups.each() { key, value -> println("${value[rand.nextInt(2)]}") }

def score1 = rand.nextInt(5) * 7;
def score2 = rand.nextInt(5) * 3;
println("${score1} + ${score2} = ${score1 + score2}")

I’m a Groovy newbie, one of the reasons I wanted to use the language for this little thing, so I don’t know if this is the best way of doing this but this turned out to be pretty quick and easy. The hash/array data structure I used for the _matchups _variable makes it very easy to pick the various winners with the one-liner on 11. I went with a recommendation I found for super-extra randomness on 10 just make sure.

In the end, my random picks weren’t all that accurate. I think I had 5 right out of 16. There’s randomness for you, so unreliable. :) I also learned that when a random number generator makes your picks, you can’t take the blame for making bad picks but you also can’t take credit for the ones you got right.

Feel free to steal this code if you want to make your own picks. You have to put in all the matchups for the week but I tried to format the code so I could make the list in UltraEdit using its column-editing mode and just drop the teams in. If you have a more Groovy-ish way I could have done the matchups I’d love to hear it in the comments.

I do like my profession, I don't like my job

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 10:24:47 +0000

> To only a fraction of the human race does God give the privilege of earning one’s bread doing what one would have gladly pursued free, for passion. I am very thankful.

The Mythical Man Month, p. 291

via CLOSED-LOOP: The passionate developer: I do like my profession, I don’t like my job.

This is great stuff. I’ve always felt the way Fred Brooks talks about in that quote and this post captures a lot of how I feel about my job as well. Well worth reading.

If architects had to work like software developers

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 11:56:44 +0000

> Dear Mr. Architect: > > Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one. [Monochrome Blog - If architects had to work like software developers](http://blog.monochrome.co.uk/2009/02/if-architects-had-to-work-like-software-developers/).

Painfully true. Very painfully.

I’m trying to decide if sending this to our product owner would be informative or insulting.

My Long Walk

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 07:00:22 +0000

Awhile back I was inspired by a post on a local Albuquerque group blog called [Duke City Fix](http://dukecityfix.com) about a guy who walked across town, taking pictures along the way. I've always liked walking and thought it would be cool to do a similar walk. Every place I've worked at I've taken my lunch hours and walked around, sometimes taking pictures but mostly just exploring. You find a lot of neat stuff walking since you're moving slow and you're close to the ground. Even if you're in an office park or urban area I'd encourage you to try walking around and seeing what you see. You might be surprised.

For my walk I decided to go on Montgomery since it goes basically from one side of Albuquerque to the other. It also goes across the river and through our Bosque / North Valley area which is by far my favorite walking area in town. I started at Tramway, the east side of the city, and walked all the way to Coors on the west side. It’s 10.9 miles according to Google Maps and with a couple of small detours I made I think I pretty much did exactly 11 miles. This is far longer than I’ve ever walked before but I did it. :)

My Long Walk Route

Google said it was going to take 3 1/2 hours, which is about 20 minutes per mile. I thought this was doable but I didn’t factor in the heat. It was 81 degrees an hour or so after I started but it got up past 91 a few hours in. This meant I needed to rest and refill my water bottle more often than I anticipated (thank you McDonalds for having cold water, air conditioning, and 3 locations along my route!). It ended up taking me 4 1/2 hours with rest breaks.

I did a sort-of live tweeting of the walk, which you can find on my Twitter stream. The tweeting was fun for me, and helpful with the nice encouragements I got from my friends on there. That’s another nice thing about walking, you can do other stuff at the same time. It’ s hard to tweet from a bike. :)

The other part of the walk was taking pictures. I decided against taking my regular camera with me on this first walk since I was already carrying a water bottle, so I took some pictures with my iPhone camera instead. It’s cool to be able to upload the pics to Flickr while walking too. The whole set can be found at Flickr if you’re interested.

I’m very glad I did this walk, even with the heat and pain my poor legs felt later. I’m already thinking of how I would do a similar walk going North/South across town in fact.

For now though, here’s a picture of why the North Valley of Albuquerque is my favorite walking area. Right on the other side of this wall is one of the city’s busiest streets and you’d never know it.

Must Be Questioned

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 10:40:46 +0000

[

](http://thisisindexed.com/2009/09/the-world-used-to-be-flat/)

Indexed » Blog Archive » The world used to be flat.

I’ve been following Jessica Hagy’s work on Indexed for a long time and I’m always glad to see her getting more and more popular.

Eye Candy IS A Critical Business Requirement

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 07:09:03 +0000

[Eye Candy IS A Critical Business Requirement](http://www.slideshare.net/stephenpa/eye-candy-is-a-critical-business-requirement "Eye Candy IS A Critical Business Requirement")

View more [documents](http://www.slideshare.net/) from [Stephen Anderson](http://www.slideshare.net/stephenpa).

Great presentation. Goes very fast too, don't be scared of the number of slides.

My Persona and The Other Matt Grommes

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 07:24:07 +0000

![personas_name](http://s3.media.squarespace.com/production/1529026/18137065/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/personas_name.png "personas_name")

Personas | Metropath(ologies) | An installation by Aaron Zinman

This is a very interesting data visualization art piece from MIT. You enter your name and it looks for everything online it can find about you. For reference, here’s mine:

Although I should say this is different than the first time I put my name in a few days ago so I’m not sure what they use to determine that picture. There’s nothing behind the scenes I can see about it either. I’d like to be able to click on the bar and see the inputs but that doesn’t appear to be possible.

There is one weird thing about this project though, and it illustrates the problem with googling for people for job interviews, dates, etc. A few months ago another guy with the name Matt Grommes was involved in a car accident where the other driver died. This has nothing to do with me but it shows up in this bar and in any searches for my name, if you go past the first page of results. The **legal **section of the bar is not about me at all but it shows up pretty prominently. As we use these type of tools (I can see something like this being regularly attached to resumes by the HR department in the near future) more and more, they’ll have not only include more data, but be able to filter out “other” Matt Grommeses. My name is not very common and I still have another guy’s data in my Persona. Imagine what he thinks if he were to put his name in.

Book Review: Release It!

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:00:54 +0000

[Get **Release It!** on Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0978739213?ie=UTF8&tag=mattorama&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0978739213)

A few weeks ago I heard an interview on Software Engineering Radio with Michael Nygard, author of a book I hadn’t heard of called Release It! My wife had been reading Ship It! and I had heard good things about Manage It! so I was happy to hear about this new book. Over the course of the hour or so interview, Mr. Nygard made one heck of a case both for the book and for his way of thinking about writing software.

Mr. Nygard is a operations guy. That is to say his job is to help big companies maintain the software they use. The focus of the book is pointing out ways developers can engineer their software to work better with operations and be more maintainable. It’s an unfortunately seldom seen topic in programming but at least now we have a fairly thorough book to reference on the topic.

The book starts out with a pretty scary tale of a post-mortem the author did on a huge outage at a major airline. It’s a very interesting look at a huge failure that ended up being caused by a pretty small programming error that any of us could make. He also talks here about getting a thread dump of a Java process to find out where it’s having trouble which I had occasion to use in real life right after I finished the book.

The structure of the book is to introduce a topic, then do a section on Patterns and Anti-Patterns around that topic. The first section is Stability. He talks about different types of failure, and defines stability in the first place which ends up being harder than you’d anticipate. Having spent most of my professional career so far writing internal corporate applications, this was the first place where the book veered off from being specifically applicable to my life. Not to say we corporate developers don’t have to worry about customers or uptime but it’s a different set of concerns. Nobody is going to switch to another billing system because the one we work on is down. But still, it’s useful stuff.

The 2nd section of the book is Capacity. Admittedly, I skimmed this section since I’m not working on anything right now that requires accounting for massive amounts of users or fine-tuning my Ajax requests. I will revisit this section for sure when I get onto something more relevant.

The 3rd section is General Design Issues; split into sections on Network, basic Security, Availability, and Administration. Section 4 is Operations. Both of these are very valuable. Just about everything is illustrated with real examples and specific recommendations, which I like to see.

I like reading about Anti-Patterns because I’m always on the lookout for not only ways to do things but ways not to do things. The Patterns are, of course, good things to keep in mind whether you’re developing a website or a corporate integration program. In fact the Patterns in this book are probably the highlight. Things like using Timeouts, Circuit Breakers, and Connection Pooling are timeless and useful all over, hallmarks of really being Patterns and not just quick fixes and bandaids.

Overall if you’re developing any kind of serious software that’s going to have to serve users and be maintained over time, this book should really be on your bookshelf. It’s the rare book that works first as a read-through and then as a reference to be returned to later. Especially if you’re not the one who has to maintain your code, the focus on Operations is a very valuable way of thinking. If you’ve read the book I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts in the comments.

Get Release It! on Amazon

Tr.im and The Short URL Conundrum

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 06:08:31 +0000

I had been writing a post about how my new favorite URL shortener, Tr.im, was [shutting down and stranding all my precious links](http://blog.tr.im/post/159369789/tr-im-r-i-p) when just this evening they apparently [decided to keep the service running](http://blog.tr.im/post/160697842/tr-im-resurrected). **I should be happy about this but I still feel weird about the whole thing.** So in place of the original boohoo post about Tr.im, I'm going to think out loud about the URL shortener business/ecosystem for a bit.

I’ve been thinking for awhile that Google should play a role in this URL shortener ecosystem. They’re big enough not to go away and they maintain such a central role in the web anyway I think they’d be a good default choice. But they’ve shown no interest in getting into the shortener business as a competitor to Tr.im, Bit.ly, and the rest so I was thinking they should take the role of a shortener warehouse. If a service like Tr.im goes away, they transfer the list of links and short codes to Google and the URLs keep working at a minimum. Apparently Bit.ly is trying to get something like this going but I have a feeling since they’re in the business, their competitors aren’t going to sign on. And I fear Tr.im has helped sow some amount of distaste for Bit.ly with their blog posts about Bit.ly’s favored status with Twitter so that isn’t going to help.

But narrowing this down to Tr.im, I’m trying to decide if I should start using them again. I like them much more than Bit.ly, but this incident hasn’t helped them at all. They said originally they couldn’t make a business out of Tr.im if Twitter was going to explicitly favor Bit.ly. This is obviously still true. They’re not on firmer ground now than before, they’ve just made a bunch of noise. **The tempest-in-a-Twitter they caused with their frankly somewhat offensively curt shutdown messages may end up causing Twitter to rethink their One URL Shortener To Rule Them All stance **but if the favoritism really comes from their VCs and board members personal connections, I doubt it. They have to know if they starve out Tr.im and the rest, people will grumble but in the end we’ll all move on.

According to some stats I saw, Tr.im was a minuscule percentage of the number of links on Twitter. I think the brouhaha about Tr.im shutting down was really a reaction to the realization that one of these services could just evaporate almost overnight. And that isn’t going to help them survive but it may kick some kind of warehousing service like I mentioned above into gear. They may have been tricked by feelings of importance when really they were just the canary in the mine, in the end serving only as a warning to everybody else.

So Tr.im hasn’t been saved by this, the creators just caved and the service will limp along not making money like it wasn’t doing before. And on top of this,** their willingness just to shutter the service with very little notice doesn’t exactly inspire confidence**. Until people start hearing news about money coming into the service or of a buyer swooping in where one hadn’t been willing to swoop before, users like me are going to switch if just to minimize the number of links a shutdown would endanger. They may have just doomed themselves to a more public death later with this resurrection.

Merlin on Getting Started

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 07:11:17 +0000

[](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Challenge_vs_skill.jpg)[![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4f/Challenge_vs_skill.jpg "Challenge vs. Skill")](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Challenge_vs_skill.jpg)Challenge Vs. Skill diagram from Wikipedia via [Merlin's footnotes](http://www.43folders.com/2009/08/04/enough).

I was going to write a post about Merlin’s post on Just Enough To Start but I’ll just let him do the talking. As usual he hits it right on the head. His talk at MaxFunCon (linked to in his post) was one of the things that got me off my ass and trying to make a regular schedule for posting to this blog again. I don’t know if he would want to be called inspirational but he is, in just the right way.

Is The Digital Age Stamping Out Serendipity?

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 07:31:04 +0000

> WE’VE gained so much in the digital age. We get more entertainment choices, and finding what we’re looking for is certainly fast. Best of all, much of it is free. > > But we’ve lost something as well: the fortunate discovery of something we never knew we wanted to find. In other words, the digital age is stamping out serendipity. via [Ping - The Digital Age Is Stamping Out Serendipity - by Damon Darlin in NYTimes.com](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/business/02ping.html?_r=1).

Sometimes I read something that’s so far out of my experience that I have a hard time processing it. This article is one of those times. I can’t decide if I’m misunderstanding the point of the article or if it’s really not a problem. The author of the article, Damon Darlin, is saying that the internet and ipods and in some weird way, Twitter, are taking the “randomness” out of finding new stuff. Balderdash, I say. :)

First, he says for some reason finding stuff on a friend’s bookshelf or album collection is “serendipitous” but finding new music on a blog or Twitter is “group-think”. Somehow if people online say something is cool it’s been “filtered and vetted” but finding the same thing via a friend isn’t. I don’t get it.

Not only does his argument not make sense, he’s looking at the problem through the wrong end of the telescope. It doesn’t matter where you found something new because it’s new to you. No matter if you find something through a friend or via a review linked on Twitter or on a Top 10 list, it’s new to you. It’s still serendipitous if you like it.

Every year when the Top X Of The Year music, book, and movie lists come out I go through some of them and see if there’s anything interesting looking. I usually download whatever looks halfway good in the Pitchfork top albums list, then delete anything I don’t like and buy what I do like from Amazon’s MP3 store. I’ve found an unbelievable amount of great music this way. (Seriously, try it.) I don’t pay attention to radio or music blogs or magazines so this is my way of finding new stuff. Is this worse than finding an album though a friend? I can’t see how it is. But it’s still filtered in the strongest way, being a Top 10 list or whatever. When I first saw The Knife as the #1 album on the Pitchfork list a few years ago I thought it was them being willfully weird until I listened to the album a few times, then a few more times, then a few dozen more times until it became one I still listen to regularly. I found my favorite band, The Hold Steady, completely randomly when somebody on a podcast recommended I listen to some teenage girl’s music podcast long ago and Your Little Hoodrat Friend was one of the songs she played. I was hooked from the first 30 seconds of that song and if that’s not serendipitous I don’t know what is.

I really can’t even see what the heck Mr. Darlin is talking about, even if you cut out the mostly pointless but seemingly required paragraphs about Twitter. The internet / digital age has brought so much serendipity to my life this just seems like he must be talking about something else. But like I said, I don’t really care (and I don’t think it matters) where something new came from as long as it’s new.

(During this post I mentioned 2 bands you really should try. There’s some serendipity for you. And if you listen to them, you’re welcome. :))

Netflix's Culture

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:41:50 +0000

[Culture](http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664 "Culture")

View more [presentations](http://www.slideshare.net/) from [reed2001](http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001).

Great, I’ve known Netflix was an awesome place to work for awhile and I’ve been trying to get in there. Now everybody’s going to be applying and I’ll never get in! :)

Rands on Reality

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:54:34 +0000

> **Reality is a constraint to be applied creatively.** via [rands on Twitter](http://twitter.com/rands/status/3113316941)

Rands is one of my favorite writers. His blog is great and he’s one of the highlights of my twitter stream. He’s consistently putting out really interesting, thought provoking stuff. I was in San Francisco during the last Apple conference and he was tweeting telling people to come hang out. To my eternal shame I chickened out of going and saying hi.

The Coefficient of User Innovation Friction

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 17:31:41 +0000

> In February 2007, [Mike Adams](http://blogwaffe.com/about/), who had recently joined Automattic, the company that makes WordPress, decided on a lark to endow all blogs running on WordPress.com with the ability to use LaTeX, the venerable mathematical typesetting language. > > _<snip>_ > > Since then, as reported by observer/participant Michael Nielsen ([1](http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/the-polymath-project/), [2](http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/the-polymath-project-scope-of-participation/)), Tim Gowers, [Terence Tao](http://terrytao.wordpress.com/), and a bunch of their peers have been pioneering a massively collaborative approach to solving hard mathematical problems. [via Jon Udell](http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/07/31/polymath-equals-user-innovatio/), who is The Man

This story is cool in at least 2 ways. First, it warms the cockles of my hacker heart to hear that someone decided “on a lark” to add LaTeX to Wordpress. I never used LaTeX for anything only because I’m not a math person and I didn’t make it far enough in school to go beyond plain text. But deciding you’re going to add support for a beloved but extremely niche typesetting language to the blog software you work on is an impressive thing no matter what.

The main reason this story is cool is the collaborative project that emerged due to this niche feature. Sure, mathematicians could have, and I’m sure did, collaborate on sites before this but from what I read in the comments, adding formulas into websites previously was time-consuming at best. A long time ago there was talk about an addition to HTML called MathML to do just this but I’m not sure what happened to that, and in any case LaTeX is an accepted standard people are used to. So having support for this kind of thing is just the perfect reduction in friction that can help something new emerge. Having to learn a new standard or go through a whole process to display formula is enough trouble that most people won’t participate. If people can re-use existing skills in a new place, more people can contribute and do new things.

When Mike Adams added this feature, I’m sure he thought he helping a few mathematicians add formulas to their blogs and that was it. But the important thing was the removal of friction. If you can remove just a little friction from a social tool that a lot of people use, you’re opening it up to allow people to create new things you never thought of. When a new tool like Twitter or Google Wave comes out, I never pay much attention to the uses the creators come up with. What I really watch out for are the things the users come up with. It cost nothing for users to add hashtags to Twitter, but it’s incredibly useful and cool and will probably end up being part of how they make money. Whenever Google Wave comes out, the important things will be the ones people add later. If the friction is low enough.

How Physicists Build a Bridge

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 10:42:50 +0000

[How Physicists Build a Bridge « Joe Doliner](http://joedoliner.com/?p=36)

This is a short story and well worth reading.

It reminds me of a story I heard about Neils Bohr:

“Describe how to determine the height of a skyscraper with a barometer.”

One student replied:

“You tie a long piece of string to the neck of the barometer, then lower the barometer from the roof of the skyscraper to the ground. The length of the string plus the length of the barometer will equal the height of the building.”
via the almighty snopes

I love this kind of thing.

Debugging By The Numbers

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 08:08:10 +0000

The other day my team had an all-day meeting to try to debug a very weird, ugly problem with some accounts in the new billing system we're finishing up implementing. During the process of trying to figure out what the root cause of the problem was, I went through a process I've been through a few times and thought I'd share.

The issue was with how some money was distributed to the account. Sometimes people get money back and it has to be used in a specific way. In this case it appeared it wasn’t being spread out the way it should have, and the numbers looked very strange. In the main example case, we were using there was a number on the account’s invoice that didn’t match anything. When you’re debugging, these mysterious numbers can be very useful. While everyone else was looking at other stuff, I took a little while to try to find where that number was coming from. Code (hopefully) doesn’t just invent numbers so it had to come from somewhere and I’ve had good luck in the past figuring out big problems just by figuring out the numbers.

In this case, the important numbers on their invoice were

A payment of $562
A credit of $629
A big refund of $2438
A check issued to the account for $1348
A credit balance of $562
First, we don’t usually do credit balances at all. It should have been $0. Then, $1348 didn’t immediately jump out as having any relation to the other numbers. Our non-technical project owner’s first inclination was to believe the program was making things up but I usually go on the assumption that this isn’t the case. :)

The first thing I figured out was that the $2438 had been split into 2 chunks of $1219 on 2 invoices. Since I didn’t know that this shouldn’t have happened (score another one for ignorance), I accepted it and figure out that $629 was $1219 - $562. So this was half the refund minus their payment, which is what should happen. Good.

I then saw that $1348 did have a relation to the other numbers, it was $629 * 2. I started going over this out loud for everybody (also an extremely valuable debugging technique) and it all fell into place. What I finally saw was that the $2438 had been split up over 2 invoices. Then both the month’s payments had been taken out of the refund -> $2438 - ($562 * 2) = $1348. The system had accounted for all the money the account would owe us, taken it out and refunded them the rest. It then held on the $562 for next month’s invoice in order to pay it off then. Whew. Only took about 2 hours.

So going over this math with a clear head and no expectation of what the system should have done, I found the underlying problem. Everything should have collapsed onto one invoice and done everything at once. The refund shouldn’t have been split up and both $562 payments should have been made at once, one of them shouldn’t have been held onto til next month. This is a big issue that makes people’s invoices look weird but the important thing for a billing system is that no money is missing. People had originally thought maybe we were over-paying accounts but that isn’t the case thankfully. Now we need to figure out how to fix it going forward but that’s a job for the billing people.

In the end, once again ignorance saves the day. I didn’t know about some of the particular workings of refunds in this case so I wasn’t making assumptions about that. I know I don’t know all the bits and pieces of how the invoices work so I went through the exercise of finding where the mysterious numbers came from and that led me to the answer. If you’re debugging numbers, writing it down and going through them all with a calculator is immensely helpful. Add them up, subtract them from each other, try to find where the differences are. And talk it out. Maybe you’re going down the wrong path or your lack of knowledge about something is something basic you do need to know. It’s debugging, it’s hard. There’s no map. But don’t let those mysterious numbers float out there, they might be the key to the answer.

Scope

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:35:05 +0000

Scope at reboot11, Matt Webb, S&W

This is a brilliant presentation about design and how it can affect us. Extremely worth reading.

The Psychology of Incompetence

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:31:14 +0000

[YouTube - The Psychology of Incompetence - Ron Burk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_vcy7I0zIM).

Very cool Ignite talk (5 minutes long) about incompetence in programmers and authority. I guess I’m okay because I have no illusions about my competence. :)

(via Ben Northrop)

TheBowlingGame Kata

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 10:06:15 +0000

> [Here](http://butunclebob.com/files/downloads/Bowling%20Game%20Kata.ppt) is a kata for the Bowling Game problem. I have broken it down into the same tiny little steps that I do when I demonstrate it. However, as is usual for a kata, I have left out most of the explanatory comments. > > A kata is meant to be memorized. Students of a kata study it as a form, not as a conclusion. It is not the conclusion of the kata that matters, it's the steps that lead to the conclusion. If you want to lean to think the way I think, to design the way I design, then you must learn to react to minutia the way I react. Following this form will help you to do that. As you learn the form, and repeat it, and repeat it, you will condition your mind and body to respond the way I respond to the minute factors that lead to design decisions. via [TheBowlingGameKata](http://butunclebob.com/ArticleS.UncleBob.TheBowlingGameKata) by Uncle Bob

I’m going to go through this Bowling Game “kata” as soon as I can. There’s some very interesting stuff even just in the first few slides of the presentation.

I’ve seen a lot of these kata exercises and have always wanted to go through more of them in a more organized way; as in make a schedule to do a couple a week. This one though, is the first I’ve seen with enough detail that right away I can tell it’ll help a lot. More on my results / experience with this kata soon.

Just Enough MBA to Be a Programmer

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 13:30:57 +0000

> I've always been curious about what MBAs really do. In my weaker moments, I've even thought that the only reason people got an MBA was to demand a higher salary or to "move up the corporate ladder" into some management job. What did these MBA ninjas actually learn in school? Would having an MBA help me better understand how I affected my company's bottom line? Although I had the curiosity, I never acted on it. This changed when another programmer recommended that I read The Ten-Day MBA by Steven Silbiger. via [Moserware: Just Enough MBA to Be a Programmer](http://www.moserware.com/2009/07/just-enough-mba-to-be-programmer.html).

This book looks like something both my wife and I would both like. I’m like Jeff Moser here, I’m curious about what people actually learn doing this stuff but not enough to read a bunch of boring books full of business-speak. $12 for an overview sounds good to me. It never hurts to be more well-rounded as a team member in any case. Even if I just get an overview of the financial pieces and the jargon people use, it’ll be worth it.

My wife is also in the process of setting up a business with a couple of partners to market some software she wrote. Even though she’s the programmer and her partners are the sales/business end of things, it’s never good to cede control over something that important to somebody else with no understanding of what they’ll be doing.

Jeff does a great job of going over the various sections of the book and what you’ll learn in each and I applaud him for the effort. If you’re cheap, you can probably get by with just Jeff’s post, to be honest. But an overview of an overview is one level of remove too much for me. I read fast anyway so it’ll be time well spent I think. Plus, when somebody asks me something about business I can say I read a book about MBAs, not that I read a blog post about a book about MBAs. :)

Project Coin Updates

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 09:14:31 +0000

[Project Coin Announces Second Candidate List](http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/06/coin2) on InfoQ

At the JavaPosse Roundup a few months ago I got the chance to hear more about Project Coin, Sun’s “small change” additions to Java. I also got the chance to annoy the project’s leader, Joe Darcy, about the fact that BigDecimal math operators were off the table for Java 7. That still hurts but the latest updates to potential changes to be included in Java 7 takes quite a bit of the sting out. This is some cool stuff.

3. Indexing access syntax for Lists and Maps. Shams Mahmood Imam’s proposal aims to provide a consistent syntax for access elements of Arrays, Lists and Maps, so you could write:
myList[0] instead of myList.get(0) and
myMap["key"] instead of myMap.get("key")

I love this change. Much more readable and in line with how other languages do things. I’m always afraid when I say I like things because they’re more Perl-like that it will scare people away or they’ll change it just because of that but this does match my Perl biases from my former life so I like it. :)

4. Collection Literals. Intended to coexist with indexing access syntax for lists and maps and similar to a second proposal from Imam, Josh Bloch adds support for immutable list, set and map literals with a syntax similar to that of array initialisers. An example from the spec:
final Map<integer , String> platonicSolids = { 4 : "tetrahedron", 6 : "cube", 8 : "octahedron", 12 : "dodecahedron", 20 : "icosahedron"};</integer>

Same with this change, I like it a lot. Much less code for the same thing and it’s just as readable. Again, more like Perl without losing readability == good stuff.

Large arrays is a good change to give people flexibility, same with byte and short suffixes and using _ as a comma substitute in long numbers. Perfect “small change” inclusions.

It of course still depends on how much of this stuff gets in but just based on these lists of proposals, it seems like Project Coin will be a success. Everybody running the project and making proposals should be proud of themselves and be congratulated. Java 7 will be quite a bit nicer language because of their efforts.

Good old ignorance

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 10:08:06 +0000

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="500"]![I have decided what you are doing is impossible](http://www.dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/000000/10000/5000/100/15108/15108.strip.print.gif)[/caption]

I’m a big fan of ignorance. One of my favorite quotes goes something like “The one saying something is impossible shouldn’t interrupt the one doing it.” There have been a lot of times in my life where I was glad I didn’t know anything about the project I was doing beforehand because I wouldn’t have done it if I had. This is a very valuable way of looking at things, even though it can be hard to figure out when you actually do need to know something ahead of time so you don’t waste time or reinvent too many wheels. Every time I start a project I think about this balance but I haven’t figured out how to figure it out, if you get my meaning. In this post I want to talk about another benefit of ignorance, being willing to admit your own and how that can be a big help.

The other day at work we had our first design / planning meeting on a new piece of infrastructure. We’ve got enough different pieces needing to communicate that we’ve wanted to put a middle-layer in place for awhile now. Since we’re going to be starting our next big project soon, we all wanted to get this piece done before starting. In the meeting, my old friend ignorance played a big part. Specifically my personal ignorance.

The other 2 main Java programmers on the team and I were meeting with a programmer from our big vendor who also knows waaay more than I do about this middle-layer piece. It might have been annoying to my teammates but since I knew very little about how we were going to build this solution I kept questioning everything and having to have it explained to me. The reason I think this is a useful thing to do is twofold. One, we need to be able to explain this and justify it to everybody so having all of us understand is very valuable. I’m a pretty smart person overall so if I can’t catch onto something or see why we we would do something it’s a good bet others won’t either. The other reason is more important: explaining something to somebody who doesn’t get it forces you to think it through. If you take the first thing that comes to mind and just do it, you might end up with something more complicated than you really need or you most likely will have to redo parts of it later when you hit walls or are otherwise forced to think it through then. I don’t mind being the dumbest one in the room at all because of this. My personal preference goes along with the Agile/XP teaching of “Do the simplest thing that can possibly work” so I bring that along as well. After our meeting we came up with a really good design that builds on things we already have (reducing the amount of work needed), is easy to understand and justify, and will add real value to our system. It’s a testament to how well our team works together that we all contributed bits of work and knowledge and didn’t just rubber-stamp some design we all weren’t happy with.

Not being afraid to question things is a very helpful trait, even though some people might not like it. If you have questions about a design your capital-A “Architect” is proposing, do yourself and your team a favor and ask the question. Make people explain it. You have to be comfortable with the design of the things you build so if somebody else designs it, they need to make you comfortable. At the very least, that’s a courtesy to the team. At best, the design will get better as the designer has to think through answers to questions they might not have considered.

Thanks to the Dilbert Strip finder for helping me find this old favorite.

No is for wimps

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 06:29:03 +0000

> No is for wimps. No is for pussies. No is to live small and embittered, cherishing the opportunities you missed because they might have sent the wrong message. > > There is a point in one's life when one cares about selling out and not selling out. One worries whether or not wearing a certain shirt means that they are behind the curve or ahead of it, or that having certain music in one's collection means that they are impressive, or unimpressive. [Email interview with Dave Eggers](http://www.armchairnews.com/freelance/eggers.html)

I have no memory of how I found this interview, really just an email to the author Dave Eggers and his replies from 2000, but it stuck in my mind and has probably ended up being one of the most personally important things I’ve ever read online. It’s religious to me in the way that Frank Llyod Wright’s buildings are religious to me; they inspire me and awe me and make me want to be better to live up to their standard.

I was recently in San Francisco and finally made it to 826 Valencia, a free tutoring center fronted by a pirate supply store, and I knew it wouldn’t happen but I was really hoping Mr. Eggers might be there so I can thank him for this interview. I’ve read his work and bought every issue of The Believer for a few years, but this is what I would thank him for. The message of saying Yes to things, to not give a shit what people think or how this or that might affect your rep really resonated with me.

What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand. What matters is that the Flaming Lips’s new album is ravishing and I’ve listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people. What matters is that it will stand forever, long after any narrow-hearted curmudgeons have forgotten their appearance on goddamn 90210. What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who’s up and who’s down, but what someone has done and if they meant it.

It’s long and some of the specific references are a little dated but the overall message, the way Eggers smacks down this pseudo-intellectual hipster prick whose asking him “what steps are you taking to keep shit real” with an honest and open soliloquy on saying yes to new things and no to fashion and what others will think, is something I re-read regularly and would memorize if I could. I really encourage you to read it as well, there’s something for everyone to take from it.

I try to live up to this, even though it’s hard for me. I’m incredibly shy and have a problem with new things sometimes but I try to remember “No is for pussies” and press on. When I feel like I’ve let myself down by giving in to my introverted nature I read the end of this interview and am renewed.

I'm Number 1(96)!

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:17:33 +0000

[Top 200 Blogs for Developers (Q2 2009)](http://tr.im/qeUZ)

My former fellow co-author on AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com, Jurgen Appelo, periodically compiles a list of top blogs for developers. This time around, he did a Top 200 and I was surprised to see this very blog at #196! If you clicked over here from there, welcome! Since the list came out on the day I did my first post in a month (!), I’ve been self-shamed into posting more. :)

I’ve been working a bit with JavaFX so I’ll be posting about that and we just started on our next big project at work so I’ll probably be posting about that as well. On top of those topics I’ve made a list of important books I need to work through to help my Java programming so I’m planning on writing about that process. All in all, lots of geeky goodness to come I hope.

Responsibility

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 15:27:49 +0000

> Since I think the word “architect” in a software context has taken on all sorts of horrible connotations (it conjures up images of people who draw boxes and arrows but don’t actually write any code themselves), I tend not to use it personally. Instead, I tend to think of my role on the team as being the guy who should be blamed when things don’t work. Not the guy who should be blamed when something he did doesn’t work, but just the guy to blame, period. from [Taking Responsibility](http://guidewiredevelopment.wordpress.com/2009/06/25/taking-responsibility/) by Alan Keefer on the Guidewire DevBlog

I was glad to see this article get some links from people like Kent Beck on twitter. I read it because Guidewire is a company I’ve worked with very closely (as one of our vendors at my job) for the past 2 years but I’m happy to see it getting read outside the circle of Guidewire customers. I’ve really admired what I know of the technical group at Guidewire and have angled numerous times for a job there. I’ve never met Alan and we don’t use the product he’s the architect on, but I liked this post a lot.

I’ve always thought the job of a manager is to take responsibility for their team, whatever that means. If somebody needs help, the manager needs to help. If there’s political corporatey nonsense going on, the manager is responsible for protecting their people from that. If something doesn’t get done, the manager should be the one taking responsibility for it with the higher-ups. Then if somebody on the team screwed up, it’s the manager’s responsibility to take care of it with that person. Managers that don’t take responsibility are not only not doing their job, they’re actively harmful to their team.

Of course, non-managers should be responsible to themselves and their team as well. I take care of my own stuff at work, but I also try to take care of things the team needs if they aren’t getting done. I’m not a manager but sometimes people just need to take over and get things done. We’re about to start a new project and we have some infrastructure projects that need to do. I could just wait for somebody else to do them or complain that we weren’t given time for them, but I got a whiteboard and started making a list, as well as scheduling a meeting with the parties involved to get a plan for putting these things together. I take that responsibility for my team because I know they would (and have) taken on things for me when I couldn’t. We’re all in this together and if any of us can take on things for the good of the team, we do.

Geek Humor

Sat, 09 May 2009 09:10:12 +0000

> 1936 - Alan Turing invents every programming language that will ever be but is shanghaied by British Intelligence to be 007 before he can patent them. > > 1936 - Alonzo Church also invents every language that will ever be but does it better. His lambda calculus is ignored because it is insufficiently C-like. This criticism occurs in spite of the fact that C has not yet been invented. > > 1940s - Various "computers" are "programmed" using direct wiring and switches. Engineers do this in order to avoid the tabs vs spaces debate. from "[A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages](http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html)"

hahahaha. Except for the part about Perl. :)

The Management Myth

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 11:58:48 +0000

> The strange thing about my utter lack of education in management was that it didn’t seem to matter. As a principal and founding partner of a consulting firm that eventually grew to 600 employees, I interviewed, hired, and worked alongside hundreds of business-school graduates, and the impression I formed of the M.B.A. experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like "out-of-the-box thinking," "win-win situation," and "core competencies."

via The Atlantic Online | June 2006 | The Management Myth | Matthew Stewart.

Excellent article. I didn’t expect the veer into philosophy there near the end but I enjoyed it. Good stuff.

Holding a model of the code in your head

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 14:08:39 +0000

> This is something I've been thinking about recently - most of the bugs and problems I see caused by junior developers at my workplace are a simple result of not having a model of the software in their heads.

via Shaper_pmp comments on The history of UTF-8 as told by Rob Pike.

Not being able to hold my code in my head is one of the most frustrating parts of my work life. It’s how I like to work but it also causes problems when the model becomes so huge that it gets unwieldy and ugly.

Metrics

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 07:47:10 +0000

The new CEO at my work has directed the heads of all of the departments to institute metrics for measuring their departments. In a lot of the departments, that makes sense. Not so much in IT. We have one department for programmers, system/network admins, and computer support so finding metrics that would fit all of those was proving very difficult. As a programmer, I was against some of the ideas for tracking bugs as metrics outright. Our director asked for input and here's the email I sent in preparation for the meeting we were going to have on the subject, slightly modified for blog posting.

I’m going to comment on the larger issue of metrics in general.

My general thought is it that measuring software development in this way is fraught with danger and unintended consequences. I know this is coming down from above so there’s not much that can be done but things like metrics and performance-based bonuses have to be approached carefully or they risk incentivizing the wrong things and/or disincentivizing the thing you were trying to improve in the first place.

First, here’s a great article from Joel Spolsky on a related topic, incentive pay: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000070.html While this isn’t strictly about metrics, it’s a great read and one of my favorite explanations for unforeseen problems with processes that seem like good things at first. It also goes a little into important things you’ll never be able to have metrics for.

This is a very thoughtful comment made by someone on Joel Spolsky’s discussion forum about research done into metrics. It puts things in a way I would put them so I’m just going to paste it in.

“My manager recently asked me to do some preliminary investigations re: the use of metrics. What I came up with (below) drew heavily on various threads discussing the topic here on JoS (which were the source of most of the supporting quotes):

Metrics are very difficult to do well.

In the context of software engineering, “quality” and “productivity” are very hard to objectively quantify. In the words of Carnegie-Mellon’s SEI: “Unfortunately, most of the metrics defined have lacked one or both of two important characteristics: a sound conceptual, theoretical basis; and statistically significant experimental validation”

As one programmer put it, “… varying projects have wildly differing levels of difficulty. If my colleague spends two weeks writing a reusable, documented thread pooling class, and I spend two weeks dropping controls on forms, he may end up with 200 lines of code, and 5 bugs, I may end up with 2000 lines of code and no bugs. Really, he’s the hero and I’m average. But how will metrics explain this?”

Unless done well, metrics do more harm than good.

Beware the ‘law of unintended consequences’ - accidentally creating incentives/disincentives for the wrong thing(s). Example: if checkins are used as a measure of productivity, incentive is created to check in more often (e.g. at the end of every workday) rather than when it makes sense to do so (e.g. when coding + unit test are complete).

“What ever you decide to measure is what you are going to get… And you’ll get NOTHING else. These sorts of extrinsic measurements (and rewards based thereon) cause you to be less focused on your work and more on the extrinsic measurements. You’ll be thinking “how many hours did I bill today” instead of “what button name is going to be clearest to the customer -resulting in fewer tech support calls, happier customers, and higher net revenue”.

Lines of code is not a reliable indicator of quality or productivity.

Implicit assumption that more code = better, when in software often precisely the opposite is often true. Example: if lines of code are used to measure productivity, then there’s incentive to cut and paste duplicate blocks of code (the larger the better) instead of creating re-usable functions, so as to artificially inflate ‘output’.

“… the best programmer is generally the one who takes the most code away, not the one who adds the most code …”
“The best developers … spend the bulk of their time analyzing the problem, and a small portion cranking out compact, clean code.”
“… a one-line PERL program can be much harder to understand (and therefore more complex) than a 10 line one that does the same thing…”

Metrics should NEVER be used to rate individuals, e.g. for performance evaluations and/or to determine compensation

Effort will be expended (often successfully) to “game” the system. Example: if developers are rewarded for fixing bugs, there is incentive to intentionally introduce bugs (even if presumably easy-to-repair ones) to increase opportunities to garner rewards. Alternatively, if number of reported bugs in a developer’s code is a factor in their appraisal, there is a strong DISincentive for QA to report bugs - either the bug tracking system will be bypassed, or bugs will simply go unreported.

Other examples are as cited in 2) and 3) above.

If correctly designed, aggregated metrics CAN be useful for measuring the productivity of a team. Collecting metrics for an entire project over time can mitigate some of the local variability that leads to the weaknesses described above. But they must be collected consistently over time until a meaningful body of history is accumulated, and even then the limitations of the metrics so gathered must be understood and acknowledged.”

I’m 100% behind trying to produce better quality work. I work hard on my own to improve my code and my processes. If the goal is to improve quality though, it’s much more complicated than just getting some numbers together and seeing if they go up or down in 6 months. Improving quality is a process, and a complicated one at that. One of the things my coworker and I spoke about when he was getting ideas for QA is the philosophy of owning quality for the whole process of development, not just testing. One part of that process could be using the various code complexity and static bug analysis tools on our code. We could use this information, over time, to help increase the quality of our work. But if we were to just implement these tools so someone could record the number of bugs and use that against us in a review, the incentive to utilize the tool to help overall quality would be reduced. I’m not sure what the answer is if we’re required to find some numbers to record and post. It’s a hard problem and one we for sure need to think hard about.

At our meeting we ended up choosing 3 metrics that everybody could live with and we dodged the bullet of trying to use our bug tracking system to produce metrics. That was my goal for the meeting so I’m happy with how it turned out. The programmers also decided that we were going to work on our own informal processes for improving quality and do our peer metrics to help with this, which will be great. I’ll talk more about this later as we work on it.

The War Room

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:17:12 +0000

[![Annexing new office space](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3471/3370578059_9927ba9656_m.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattgrommes/3370578059/ "Annexing new office space")

A month or so ago one of our VPs moved up to what I call the high class end of the building, where all of the execs are. This left her very nicely sized office open and since we’d recently had to give up one of the conference rooms we’d been occupying for a year, we siezed the day and the office. We got a small projector and “liberated” a long table from our big conference room to make a War Room for the programmers to work together and try to knock out the last of the big problems on our project.

This has been hugely effective. We all have different skills and while we communicate fine normally, having everybody in the same room has taken our game to a whole other level. The other day we took the most dreaded task (adding a vaguely defined new line item into a statement that somebody else wrote) and 2 of the guys worked on the technical aspects of it while I dug into why we needed the line and what it really meant. By the time they had figured out the mechanics of adding the line, I had figured out the logic for what numbers to add up and we got it mostly done in that one day. We had a few smaller details to work out but those are done and so far our Product Owner loves it, and says the customers will love it as well.

I’m not sure we’d want to work like this all the time but having the War Room has certainly been an eye opener for us. We’d thought in the past it might be useful to sit with a projector and work together but hadn’t taken the opportunity. Now we know how valuable it is though and will be doing it again I’m sure. Unfortunately they’re about to fill the office with a new hire but until then, we’re camping out and taking care of business.

Normally our conference rooms have little calendar pages on them to tell you who has reserved the room. Since this one didn’t have one, I made this to tell people the room was occupied. I wanted it to be funny though to hopefully defuse any negativity people might have about not being able to use the room. We haven’t heard much grumbling so I think it succeeded.

My First Agile Project: Go-Live - The Final Frontier

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 06:02:34 +0000

**Originally published on [AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com](http://AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com)**

![](http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1331/1376140737_823922f962_m_d.jpg)

Picture courtesy of [papalars. on flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/papalars/)

We did it! The project I've been talking about all this time has finally gone live and is now being used in production. Pretty much everything worked fine on launch day as well, which was nice. :) In this installment of My First Agile Project, I'll talk about the last week of the project and where we go from here.

The last weeks of any project are pretty hectic and this was no exception. Our last week was a weird one though as we were theoretically in a code freeze (more on that below), and we still had to finish final testing, and we had to be done by Thursday so our database admins could start the data conversion first thing Friday morning. We all pretty much ran around like chickens with our heads cut off all week but once Friday came a weird sense of calm had settled over most of us (it might have been a fog of fatigue or brain tiredness, it was hard to tell). The DBAs had run through the conversion process 29 previous times so while they were working, it wasn’t some new process. The conversion process ran like clockwork, even finishing a few hours earlier than projected, and on Sunday we began the final Go-Live steps.

My Agile Team: More Code, More Problems

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 21:22:19 +0000

**Originally published on [AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com](http://AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com)**

![](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/12/18984918_1728c88f62_m_d.jpg)

Picture courtesy of [sa ku ra on flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/sa_ku_ra/)

Welcome to the newest installment of My Agile Team, my team's ongoing series of misadventures in trying to get better at Agile development. This time around, we're still playing Whack-A-Mole on the list of bugs we've encountered since Go Live. We stomp one out, another pops up.

What I’m going to discuss this time is our approach to trying to fix these critical bugs while maintaining at least a semblance of our Agile nature. It’s hard to do a planning meeting and decide on what to work on when you’ve got new things popping up and old things dragging on. Read on for more on how we’re planning in the midst of firefighting production bugs.

FizzBin!

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 10:35:43 +0000

> We need a word that says "I know tech" when you're on the phone with tech support, you'd just say "Fizzbin" and they'd know.

Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen - FizzBin - The Technical Support Secret Handshake.

Yes, I fully support this idea. I hate having to call tech support and sit through the first 5 pages of the support script but I also feel like a jerk when I have to say “I ran an ISP for 5 years, I know what I’m doing”.

My First Agile Project: The Last Mile

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 06:17:47 +0000

**Originally published on [AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com](http://AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com)**

Welcome back to My First Agile Project. I spent a few weeks doing as little as possible but now that I’m back at work we’re starting to head toward the actual end of this project. For real this time; barring any natural disasters, stress-induced insanity, or alien invasions we should be live by the end of the month. So the next couple of posts in this series are going to be about the end of My First Agile Project as we complete this and transition to whatever comes next.

As I’ve discussed before, we’ve missed a couple of other deadlines in the past but this one just feels different. On past deadlines, when we thought we were close enough to done we’d find a 3-day weekend and try to decide if we could finish everything by then (converting all of our old data takes a long time so we have to basically shut the company down while we do it). Of course, things come up and we’re too optimistic so when it comes down to it we’ve had to abandon the previous dates. We thought we were going to be able to do it at the end of November but again we missed it due to changes being made at the last minute and unforeseen problems. This time though, our list of remaining issues is small enough that when we decided on this new date we were all a lot more comfortable with it than in the past. This feels like an actual date of completion for everything, not a deadline we’re rushing to meet.

Evernote API notes

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 17:28:16 +0000

I spent an hour earlier trying to figure out why my Evernote API code was giving an HTTP Error 500 and finally found it. It turns out the code from their example is using old URLs. I'm putting this here so hopefully the next person to google that error will have something to find. If this isn't you, skip this post. :)

Turns out the correct URL as of 3/15/2009 is sandbox.evernote.com, not lb.evernote.com.

Also, the correct URL for the NoteStore is http://sandbox.evernote.com/edam/note/s1

If this helps, you’re welcome. Hopefully Evernote will fix the docs and nobody will ever need this though.

EDIT: Ok, my bad. I misunderstood the addition of the s1 on the end of the NoteStore URL. That’s the shard id that you’re supposed to get from the User. The forum post I read said just to add that on the end but it looks like it’s safer to get from the User object.

SXSW Interactive '09 Tote Bag Design

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 13:51:36 +0000

> I know from my last year at SXSW Interactive that 8,000+ tote bags are given out to SXSW Interactive registrants — so I was driven to come up with an amazing design. > > In this post I'll explain the tote bag design process, including some of the challenges we faced through that process and how we came up with a winning solution.

Rohdesign | Mike Rohde, Designer : SXSW Interactive ‘09 Tote Bag Design.

I love when reading through the process a designer goes through. This is a fun look at the process, thought, and luck that goes into something you might not think about, the tote bag given out at South By Southwest this year.

8 rules to discourage your employees

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 09:35:57 +0000

> If you are committed to pissing off your employees, but can’t quite find the way to do so, you can follow these rules and achieve success.

via 8 rules to discourage your employees | Geek Stuff Daily.

This is one of those things that’s not funny haha, but funny sad.

I’ve been thinking more and more about management recently after the JavaPosse Roundup. I’ll go into that more later but it’s funny how these kind of management things keep popping up since I’ve come back.

JavaPosse Roundup 09 Day Zero

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 19:17:41 +0000

This week I'm in beautiful Crested Butte Colorado for the JavaPosse Roundup 2009 and so far I'm having a great time. This is the un/open space conference put together by the JavaPosse podcast guys. The point of an open space conference is that there's no specific agenda so everybody just suggests topics and attends whatever session they want. Today is the first real day of the conference and so far both sessions I've been to have been great.

My co-worker Ryan and I got here Sunday night and ended up at the house the Posse guys rented. We all went out to dinner and had a great time. Monday was the Day Zero of the conference where we all gathered at the Posse house and did various coding dojos. I did the JavaFX dojo. We started out the day going through the language and some of the sample projects since only one of us, Tor from the JavaPosse, had any experience with JavaFX. Sometime around lunch we decided to build something real in JavaFX and started working on a countdown timer for use later in the conference lightning talks. We built a timer that counted down and at zero played a rude sound and told the speaker to shut up. Joe from the Posse took on the role of a designer and made some really cool images to make the application look like a real clock. At the last minute we got the images mostly integrated into the application and all that remains is applying some effects we only prototyped. All in all I was very impressed with JavaFX and hope to build some real stuff with it one of these days. I’m planning on working on some visualizations that I would have done in Processing before but look much easier in JavaFX.

Making Albuquerque into a real Silicon Mesa

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 06:11:27 +0000

> It would be a pretty cheap experiment, as civil expenditures go. Pick 30 startups that eminent angels have recently invested in, give them each a million dollars if they'll relocate to your city, and see what happens after a year. If they seem to be thriving, you can try importing startups on a larger scale.

via Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe..

When I first moved to Albuquerque almost 15 years ago now, I heard talk of it being “Silicon Mesa“. For a giant geek like me, that was exciting talk. Especially since Albuquerque was Podunk as far as I was concerned, having grown up in San Diego. (I don’t think of it that way any more, so you don’t have to send me hate comments.) But that talk was just hype, basically. We have good tech companies here but nothing like a Silicon Valley culture I don’t think.

This idea of Paul Graham’s though, could make Albuquerque into a real Silicon Mesa.

It will be easier in proportion to how much your town resembles San Francisco. Do you have good weather? Do people live downtown, or have they abandoned the center for the suburbs? Would the city be described as “hip” and “tolerant,” or as reflecting “traditional values?” Are there good universities nearby? Are there walkable neighborhoods? Would nerds feel at home? If you answered yes to all these questions, you might be able not only to pull off this scheme, but to do it for less than a million per startup.

Albuquerque meets all of these criteria, to some extent. We’re tolerant and pretty hip, even according to outsiders like Richard Florida of The Rise of the Creative Class. UNM is a good school, and New Mexico Tech is a great geek school and only an hour away in a city nobody in their right mind wants to live in (sorry Socorro, it’s true). There are a lot of walkable neighborhoods and downtown is coming along nicely. Plus, we have an extremely low cost of living and the weather is livable, even for people like me that grew up in shorts and tshirts.

A plan like this could not only attract startups from outside of New Mexico, but it would certainly help a few startups stay here instead of living for the West Coast. Even for New Mexico, this isn’t a lot of money. Paul talks about giving the startups anywhere from half a million to a million and I think we could do a lot closer to half. That would buy a good standard of living for the founders, and hardware easily. The deal could even include the big data center, BigByte, and give the startups a discount on internet access since they’ll almost certainly be internet companies. Sheesh, give me and some of my friends half a million and we’d have all kind of stuff built in no time. :)

I would absolutely love to see something like this happen, just to get that startup feel in town. That kind of energy would help really get downtown kicked into high gear and would help the areas around UNM as well for sure. Yeah, it would cost millions but unless the absolute wrong startups were chosen, I don’t think it could help but give back to the city.

If one of the 3 people who reads this happens to become the next mayor, get Paul Graham on the phone first thing and get this thing started!

Important Programming Papers

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 07:38:04 +0000

> To me, these are classic papers which contain deep “things you oughta know” about code – the material you work with.

10 Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice) – Michael Feathers

I haven’t looked at these papers but I always appreciate people with more experience sharing important reading materials. I’ll be on the lookout for the blog post where he shares his thinking on each paper.

My Agile Team: On Time Estimates

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 21:20:21 +0000

**Originally published on [AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com](http://AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com)**

![](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3140/2331754875_e6a2a81429_m_d.jpg)

Picture courtesy of [John-Morgan on flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/aidanmorgan/)

Welcome to the second installment of my new series, My Agile Team, where we’re following my team’s progress in getting more Agile and in moving from one project to multiple projects. Right now, we’re still trying to put out fires and finish up the big project. We hope to start adding in things from our other projects in a couple more sprints.

The fires I mentioned are our term for the emergency stuff that pops up and has to be taken care of Now. This is usually things that customers will see; their bill being the most important. These seem to still pop up every couple of days so we have to drop our Sprint tasks and take care of them quick, fast, and in a hurry as my Dad says. It looks like we’ve probably stomped out the bulk of the underlying problems causing the most important fires so this coming week I’m hoping will be a little less crazy (of course now that I’ve said that, we’re in trouble). Once we all have some distance on these issues my goal is to do a deep retrospective just on these issues that have come up since Go Live and see if we can root out anything we should have differently for next time.

One thing I’m struggling with right now is trying to get the Higher Ups to understand why we shouldn’t use real time estimates on the stuff left on the big project. Read on for my thinking on this and how I’m trying to influence things.

"If your error dialog contains the word “may”, you have two errors."

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:42:34 +0000

“If your error dialog contains the word “may”, you have two errors.”

rands on Twitter

Good design: The ten commandments of Dieter Rams I’m going...

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 10:24:46 +0000

![](http://24.media.tumblr.com/pveEWQnNakf6xn4x5snJwqRVo1_400.jpg)

Good design: The ten commandments of Dieter Rams

I’m going to print these out and put them on my wall. Even though I’m a programmer, you can design anything you do.

Using Evernote

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 07:52:42 +0000

> Evernote is becoming a favorite of many people for holding all their stuff. We put things into it. That’s a little vague, if you ask me. > > What Evernote actually does is offer you essentially a blank slate of information capture and management tools, that allows you to use their product for a huge number of interesting and different things.

via 7 Ways To Make Use Of Evernote | MakeUseOf.com.

This is both a good introduction to Evernote and as it says, 7 ways to make use of it.

I really started using Evernote to capture things at the Agile 2008 conference and I’ve been steadily increasing my use ever since. I use it to capture all the web bill payment confirmations (the ones they always say to print for your records), random recipes I find online, travel info, notes and scripts for work, web articles about clothes, all kinds of stuff. I capture mostly using the Firefox addin, then I can pull it all up on my iPhone later. This is especially nice for travel. Between that and TripIt, I have everything I need for travel at hand all the time.

You can use Evernote for free but if you upgrade to the very reasonable Premium plan you get more transfer and some other additional things. I also got a great tshirt but I’m not sure if they’re still doing that.

The best part of this article? I found it when it was linked to on Evernote’s twitter feed and it turns out the first image on the page is one of my notes from Agile 2008. It’s a funny small world.

My new eyes

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:40:24 +0000

After close to 20 years wearing very heavy perscription glasses, I recently underwent a new-ish surgery called [ICL](http://www.visianinfo.com) and am now totally glasses free!

The ICL is an implantable lens (ICL used to stand for implantable contact lens but now it’s implantable collamer lens as that’s what it’s made of and it doesn’t sit on top of your eye) that they put into your eye in between the front of the eye and the lens. The result is fairly amazing.

I went to Dr. Bernitsky here in Albuquerque and everything went super smoothly. Everybody there is very helpful and professional and I would recommend them without reservation.

I went in on Thursday afternoon for the procedure and even right after they did my right eye, I could see better out of it. I went back and forth closing my eyes and looking at the vent in the ceiling and could really tell a difference. That afternoon my vision was fuzzy from all the drops and trauma my eyes had gone through but I could still pretty much watch TV even then. The next morning though, I could see at 20/15 (better than normal!) whereas before I was off the 20/X chart since that measurement requires that you can actually see some feet in front of you and I could only see 6 inches in front of my face.

For the first week I had to wear a pretty uncomfortable plastic eye mask to sleep to make sure nothing happened to my eyes. I’m also still putting 3 drops in my eyes 4 times a day which is kind of a pain but I’m fine with it if it means everything heals up okay.

The end result is that I can actually see better than with my glasses. I’m seeing things in a whole new light and noticing details I never saw before. Even though I’m going to be paying off the cost of the surgery for awhile, I wouldn’t give up my new vision for anything. If you can get it, I really recommend it. If you have questions about it for me, feel free to ask in the comments.

My First Agile Project: So It's Come To This - The Year In Review

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 08:26:32 +0000

**Originally published on [AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com](http://AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com).**

![](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3094/2779573564_51500df291_m_d.jpg)

Picture courtesy of [Vegan Fellow on flickr](http://flickr.com/photos/26513945@N02/)

In the spirit of the season (Year-End Recap and Top 10 List season I mean), in this episode of My First Agile Project I’ll be going over the previous posts in the series and giving my comments. If you’ve read some of the series, keep reading for more you might like. And if you haven’t read any of my posts before, I’ve read some very kind things about the series on readers’ blogs so you don’t have to take my word for it when I say you will like it. If you don’t like it, I’ll give you your money back guaranteed.

what git is not

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 10:24:24 +0000

> There are obviously many reasons why Git is awesome (and why it sucks too), and there comes a point where it helps to dispel some of the rumors and issues surrounding Git. The following list attempts to show what Git is not.

via git ready » what git is not.

I’ve got git setup on my laptop as a test and so far I’m really liking it. We’re switching to Subversion at work so I’ve been using git locally and pushing to Subversion using the gitsvn tool. I’ve only just started playing around with it but I like the flexibility it gives me with branching locally then pushing the changes I want to svn for permanent storage. Once I’ve spent a little more time with it, I’m going to write up my experiences. Having the git to svn bridge gives a good way to start out with git without having to make a big commitment.

If you’re new to git, check out this great cheat sheet as well. I love cheat sheets. :)

Incidental Redundancy

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 16:51:48 +0000

> I humbly submit to you the concept of "incidental redundancy". Incidental redundancy is a repetition of code syntax or semantics that tempts the programmer to refactor, but if carried out the refactoring could damage the elegance and discoverability of the program.

via Turbulent Intellect: Incidental Redundancy.

The use of parallels from physics is a skill close to my heart.

Tumblr to Wordpress Posting Geekery

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 07:28:41 +0000

Even though I'm on Wordpress 2.7.1 (courtesy of the magical new auto-upgrade in 2.7), the Press This bookmarklet continues not to work for me. When I try to use it, I don't see the formatting buttons at the top like I should and text I select on the page I'm blogging about isn't copied into the post like it should be (at least selecting text doesn't blank the input box like it used to). This makes it fairly useless for me. Prior to 2.7.1 it wouldn't even put the URL of the page I was on in the new post so at least it's getting better. I still can't use it for everything, but I can for some stuff which is certainly good.

I’ve been using the great Tumblr service for another blog, Blind Teeth, for awhile now and I love their posting bookmarklet. It’s super easy to post anything so I wanted to figure out how to use that for posting technical stuff to this blog. I suppose I could hack around on the Press This problem to see about fixing that but I’ve spent a few hours on it already and thought I’d try this route instead. I suspect most people will have no interest in this but I wanted something for people googling to find.

First, I setup a new tumblog on Tumblr if you don’t have one for this purpose already. Blind Teeth isn’t really for technical stuff so I didn’t want to post the same things in both places. You can have multiple and it handles that really well as I’ll get to in a second. Once it’s setup, go to it and copy the URL labeled RSS on the right side of the page.

Then, install the FeedWordPress plugin in your blog. It’s very easy under 2.7, just download the zip and use the Plugins page to install it. Once it’s installed, go into the new Syndication box on the left nav menu and add the RSS URL as a new Source.

I set mine up to add new posts as Pending so I can edit them. This is a good idea as the formatting of the Tumblr post probably won’t match the formatting of your blog. Once it’s setup and going, anything you post to the new Tumblr will be added as a new Pending post in your Wordpress blog. You can then go in and edit and Publish from your admin screen. This obviously isn’t as one-click easy as just using the bookmarklet of either service as is but since my Press This doesn’t work this is a good compromise. It might even turn out to be too much friction and I abandon it but for now, it’s working pretty well and it’ll help me post here more.

As I mentioned, Tumblr has a great posting bookmarklet. The cool thing is that when you use it and you have multiple tumblogs it asks you at the bottom which one you want to post to. This means you don’t have to have multiple bookmarklets.

Tumblr is a great service and if you’re looking for somewhere easy to have a blog, try them out. I hope this was useful and if you have comments, please let me know below.

Daring Fireball: Untitled Document Syndrome

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 18:04:15 +0000

> So one conclusion to draw from this is that developers of document-based applications should protect users from themselves. Your work should be saved even if your document is not. Separate the management of items in the file system from the idea that what you’ve typed or drawn or edited should be “safe”

via Daring Fireball: Untitled Document Syndrome.

Great work from Gruber as always. This is something I’ve argued with many people about, an auto-save, versioning file system. Your operating system should save everything you do to a document automatically and not make you save at all. If I want to save a particular version of a document with a special filename to email out or archive, fine. Maybe I’m just used to using version control systems as a programmer but I’d love to be able to make a bunch of changes to a Word document and be able to undo them even after saving. Or rewrite 2 paragraphs, then decide only one of them is worth keeping. There’s no reason users should have to worry about saving and losing changes. Computers excel at storing stuff, let them do it.

"When I first heard I’d be pairing at the new job, I was a bit apprehensive and skeptical. Do I..."

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 14:59:21 +0000

“When I first heard I’d be pairing at the new job, I was a bit apprehensive and skeptical. Do I really have to sit next to some fat developer all day, 40 hours a week? When am I going to check my RSS feeds? What if the other developer is gassy or hasn’t showered? How am I going to listen to my totally awesome Death Metal if I can’t wear headphones? Will the other developer be constantly judging and correcting my code? Will pairing prevent me from hitting “the zone” where I’m just belting code out so fast that my fingers can’t keep up with my brain? Over the last five months, I’ve found answers to all of these questions: “no,” “often,” “that’s rough,” “easily,” “sort of,” and “YES, but that’s a good thing.””

I Love Pair-Programming » Absolutely No Machete Juggling

This is a really, really great look at pair-programming for real, not the theoretical discussions you usually see. Pairing is one of the biggest Agile practices I’ve never been able to wrap my mind around but this post gets me a long way there.
_

My Agile Team: On The (Scrum) Road Again

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 21:18:34 +0000

**Originally published on [AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com](http://AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com)**

![](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/48/150325125_e7e0cc18c9_m_d.jpg)

Picture courtesy of [qmnonic on flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/qmnonic/)

Hello and welcome to the start of my new series called My Agile Team here on AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com. This series is a sequel of sorts to the [My First Agile Project](http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/mattgrommes/my-first-agile-project-go-live-final-frontier) series. From here on out, the plan for this bunch of articles is to follow my team as we move from being on one big project where we (mostly) used Scrum to being on multiple projects where we will (hopefully) really use Scrum. We all intend to learn from our mistakes the first time around and to adhere more closely to the recommendations that make Scrum work so well. But, as everyone knows, when the rubber hits the road even the best of intentions can go by the wayside, accidentally or intentionally.

In this first post in My Agile Team, I’ll talk a little bit about the team’s plans and what happened during the first 2 weeks of our transition. In our last project, Scrum was brought to us by the vendor and our management signed on fairly enthusiastically. This time though, we’re on our own to implement and stick to the plan, at the same time moving from a big project we all worked on to multiple maintenance projects. We know what we want to do, but will that turn out to be what management wants to do? Will we even be able to make the transition successfully? Keep reading to find out!

My First Agile Project: Did we need a coach?

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 13:20:57 +0000

**Originally published on [AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com](http://AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com)**

![](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/215/488576106_e537232fbb_m_d.jpg)

Picture courtesy of [unoguy on flickr](http://flickr.com/photos/bobbalinks/)

In the previous part of My First Agile Project I talked about the recent tempest in a teacup regarding the failure and fall of Agile. A commenter on that post ended up crystalizing something I thought during the reading of various posts on the subject; should we have hired an Agile Coach to help us start going on Agile? This is an important question for me in trying to figure out what we could have done better as well as for other teams starting out on Agile as well. This is an issue for Agile itself as well, whether a coach is needed for teams to succeed or not. Read on for more on this question and whether I think all new Agile teams need a coach.

When we started this project, our vendor brought Scrum to us. They recommended we buy Ken Schwaber’s Agile Software Development with Scrum and had one of their people give a presentation about Scrum. After that, we were on our own. Most of us read the book, me included, but none of us apparently internalized all the important parts of Scrum. As I’ve mentioned before, we didn’t do a good job of keeping track of our backlog or estimating things to know how much work we were adding to the project. These two omissions were the main reasons we got offtrack so badly without knowing it.

Would a coach have helped us with this?

Architecture of news.local.ch - Patrice's Weblog

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 13:11:11 +0000

[Architecture of news.local.ch - Patrice's Weblog](http://weblog.patrice.ch/2009/02/20/news-local-ch.html):

I wish this look at how a big news site uses Amazon’s various web services was a little more detailed but it’s a good overview. I’ve been meaning to get more into the AWS platform beyond just reading, it looks very nice.

Big Time Continuous Deployment / Testing

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:50:23 +0000

[Continuous Deployment at IMVU](http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/continuous-deployment-at-imvu-doing-the-impossible-fifty-times-a-day/)

The high level of our process is dead simple: Continuously integrate (commit early and often). On commit automatically run all tests. If the tests pass deploy to the cluster. If the deploy succeeds, repeat.

Our tests suite takes nine minutes to run (distributed across 30-40 machines). Our code pushes take another six minutes. Since these two steps are pipelined that means at peak we’re pushing a new revision of the code to the website every nine minutes. That’s 6 deploys an hour. Even at that pace we’re often batching multiple commits into a single test/push cycle. On average we deploy new code fifty times a day.

This is amazing stuff. This team commits and deploys constantly. They’re 100% reliant on their tests (and a cool sounding rollback system), which I find scary as hell but I would imagine it focuses them on writing good tests, for real. Very impressive. I wonder if they’re hiring… :)

Reflecting on The Decline of Agile

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 10:05:18 +0000

**Originally published on [AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com](http://AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com)**

![](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/142/376154526_4387249cf4.jpg)

Picture courtesy of [J.H.C. on flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/jhcinc/)

Recently James Shore wrote an article called The Decline and Fall of Agile where he talked about how Agile, and Scrum in particular, is failing many companies. The main reason I started writing this series of articles on our team’s experiences was to help myself examine why we’d had such a hard time with Scrum in various ways. In this part of My First Agile Project I’m going to go through Mr. Shore’s article and compare it to our experiences.

In the article, Mr. Shore focuses mostly on the engineering aspects of Scrum, or lack thereof. In our experience, Scrum’s lack of proscriptive engineering processes is hardly the biggest problem. It could be that we haven’t had enough time to run into the walls of difficult-to-manage code that he’s seen but thanks to some of the other problems we’ve had with shifting requirements and the like, we’ve all revisited chunks of our code during the project and we aren’t slowing down because of it. Read on for more on Mr. Shore’s essay and how I see it through the lens of our project. It may be that Agile is declining, but if so it isn’t for the reasons he’s seen.

My First Agile Project Part 12: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly - Our Retrospectives

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 20:39:53 +0000

**Originally published on [AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com](http://AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com)**

![](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3123/2844741296_5bf727525b_m_d.jpg)

Picture courtesy of [cliff1066 on flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/nostri-imago/)

Welcome to Part 12 of My First Agile Project. Inspired by Peter’s recent 5 minute retrospective article, this time I’ll be talking about our retrospectives, which we termed our GBU or Good, Bad, and Ugly meetings. Our vendor brought these GBU meetings to us, along with the Scrum methodology, and while we weren’t doing everything by the book (not a surprise if you’ve read any of the other parts of this series) I think they were very valuable and still light-weight and easy enough to be adapted for other teams looking for retrospectives.

Read on for more on how we ran these meetings, what we got out of them, and what we’ll be doing differently in our next meetings.

Rands on Managing

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 11:46:27 +0000

Rands (not sure if that's his real name or not) is one of my favorite internet writers. His website, [Rands in Repose](http://www.randsinrepose.com), is one of my favorites and he posts great stuff [on Twitter](http://twitter.com/rands) as well. His article for today is on moving from an engineering role to a management role and it's one of his best.

Management: Trust So You Can Scale

I’ve thought about moving from a programmer to a manager. I’ve taken on sort of an unwritten team lead role on my current team and I’ve thought in the past about whether or not I’d even want to make that leadership role more permanent. I don’t think I do right now since I’m still focusing on becoming a better programmer but if the chance were presented, I don’t know what I’d do. I don’t think I’d be a good manager at my current company since there’s a lot of HR nonsense and politics that I wouldn’t have the patience for. If being a manager we just a matter of leading a team of professional programmers, that would be awesome. I kind of do the parts of management that I enjoy now, just unofficially. I help my teammates get things done, make sure everybody is happy, help them get books and supplies they need, etc. But dealing with HR is something I wouldn’t enjoy and would probably be bad at. Reading this article is a good, real-world, primer on the issues and I’m glad Rands of all people wrote it since his sensibility seems close to mine, just with more experience.

Steve Jobs

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:17:34 +0000

Steve Jobs unexpectedly announced he was taking a 6 month leave of absence from Apple today due to his ongoing medical problems. I very much hope Mr. Jobs is okay and he returns to the company he founded and rescued. Steve Wozniak, his co-founder in Apple, is one of my personal heroes and Steve Jobs has always held a special place in my heart because of his partnership with Woz and his central place in the history of computing. My family's first computer was a used Apple IIe and even though I wasn't always a Mac fan, I've really admired what Apple has done since Jobs's return. He, Woz, and Bill Gates are at the top of the list of people who invented the personal computer and in very real ways the world we live in today, as well as the device and industry that has given my life focus and meaning since I can remember.

Get well soon Mr. Jobs.

Mind Bites

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 11:27:42 +0000

[![](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3289/2594659793_3403573684_d.jpg "infected by misunderstanding")](http://www.flickr.com/photos/will-lion/sets/72157604445314847/) [Mind Bites](http://www.flickr.com/photos/will-lion/sets/72157604445314847/)

Absolutely fascinating set of psychological findings set against Flickr images. Really worth clicking through and reading.

Java Exceptions

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 11:18:28 +0000

[10 Best Practices with Exceptions](http://www.wikijava.org/wiki/10_best_practices_with_Exceptions)

Exceptions are one of the big areas of Java that I still don’t feel like I have a good handle on. I mean, I understand what goes on and why I need to throw or catch them pretty much. But when it comes to where specifically to catch, to throw, what to do with the exception, etc., I’m a little foggy. I’m going to sit down with this and some of my code and go through all the recommendations and see what I can learn.

Also, I hadn’t heard about this WikiJava site before but it looks like there’s all kinds of good stuff there.

Not Me

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 20:54:19 +0000

> A Chevrolet van driven by Matthew Grommes, 24, was pulling out of the business' lot and turned into the path of Watts' motorcycle. [Motorcyclist Dies In Collision; Van Driver Ticketed](http://www2.tbo.com/content/2009/jan/11/motorcyclist-dies-collision-van-driver-ticketed/news-breaking/)

Wow, color me surprised. My Google alert for webpages where my name appears came up with this today. I’ve seen a few other Grommes’ (even one with my Dad’s name who writes computer books) but I’ve never seen a Matthew or Matt before.

Agile Stand-up Meetings

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 20:00:57 +0000

> Stand-up meetings are a healthy part of the daily routine. They are a useful forum to keep everyone up to date with the happenings of the team, escalate any blockers that may have arisen and set direction and focus for the days activities. > > However, in practice they can easily degrade to daily habits, where each person talks, no one listens and nothing is accomplished. Observable signs that this is happening in your team: > > [Improvements to the standard stand-up meetings](http://sarahtaraporewalla.com/thoughts/agile/improvements-to-the-usual-stand-up-meetings/)

Our project started out with excellent stand-up meetings. Even though our team was about a dozen people, they never lasted too long and were very informative. Over time though, as our project moved through different phases we took to doing longer meetings and moved them from the beginning of the day to 11am. Hopefully once we move off this project and recommit to our Agile system we’ll go back to real stand-ups and I’m for sure going to look at using some of these tips.

My First Agile Project Part 11: A Tale of Two Dark Clouds

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 12:36:43 +0000

**Originally published on [AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com](http://AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com)**

![](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/185/441459676_0874da03d0_m_d.jpg)

Picture courtesy of [iowa_spirit_walker on flickr](http://flickr.com/photos/revdave/)

And now, a story about physics. I’ll get to programming in a second though, I promise. In 1900 Lord Kelvin (of the Kelvin temperature scale among many other things) spoke at the meeting of Royal Institute in London. There was a consensus at the time that physicists had succeeded in discovering almost everything knowable about the universe. Kelvin was one of the believers in this idea and also one of the most powerful and influential men in science. His speech at the Institute was on 2 ‘dark clouds’ he saw on the horizon, 2 experimental results that didn’t fit in with what they knew at the time. Since they thought they knew almost everything, Kelvin was confident that these clouds would be found out and moved past sooner rather than later. What he couldn’t have known was that within the next decade, those 2 dark clouds would revolutionize not only physics but would literally lead to the invention of our modern world, including the computer you’re reading this article on.

Read on for how this story relates to Agile projects. Although if you’ve been on a sufficiently large project, you can probably see the connection between things on the horizon that seem small and end up having a huge influence on your project. In this part of My First Agile Project I’ll talk about a part of our project that seemed like a ‘dark cloud’ and ended up being a tornado tearing through our town.

The Year of Reinvention: Learning how to dress

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 14:26:10 +0000

The first real step I've taken in my year of reinvention is to try to figure out how to dress less like a lazy geek and/or slob. Since I'm a geek and know nothing about fashion besides that I like tshirts, I started like I normally do with new projects and researched the topic like crazy. I spent way too much time reading various websites on men's fashion to see what the basics were and what I liked out of that stuff. I finally read a book I bought awhile back as well.

For my web research, I used my favorite new tool, Evernote, to keep track of what I found. Evernote’s Firefox add-on lets you clip parts out of websites and store them in a special notebook in Evernote. Then when I went to Old Navy (the first place I could think of that might have the clothes I was looking for despite never having had shopped there before, surely a triumph of advertising) and pulled up the notes in Evernote on my iphone. Yes, I’m a geek. They were having a good sale so I was able to go out on a limb and get a number of things I wouldn’t have otherwise bought for not too much money.

I’m still trying to get used to wearing long sleeves instead of my t-shirts and polos. But overall I’ve been happy with my choices. So far I think I look a little more polished without sacrificing my personal style and I’m fairly comfortable. I credit a pragmatic attitude and baby steps with this. If I had tried to jump whole-hog into everything I saw in my research, I wouldn’t have been as happy. So far so good.

2009: The Year of Reinvention

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:16:34 +0000

Thanks mostly to Arthur C. Clarke and his books, both 2001 and 2010 have always rung of The Future to me. Thus, I've decided that 2009 is going to be a year spent in preparation for My Future. I don't know exactly what this means yet but so far I've been trying to think of things I might need to work on this year.

I’ve always liked the old quote of Thoreau’s “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” and a recent issue of Warren Ellis’s comic Doktor Sleepless talked a lot about reinventing (or just plain inventing) yourself so in that spirit as well I’m reexamining how I do things and reinventing myself at least a little bit.

So throughout this year, I’m going to be posting a little bit on my progress; what I’m doing, how I’m doing it, etc. Part of my plan is definitely to blog more so if this stuff isn’t interesting hopefully I’ll be posting enough for you to find something to like.

Good looking Java web reference app

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:09:20 +0000

[DSO Guy: Web 2.0 Scaled Out Reference App...](http://dsoguy.blogspot.com/2008/11/web-20-reference-app.html) > Well check out the [Examinator Web Reference App](http://www.terracotta.org/web/display/orgsite/Web+App+Reference+Implementation). It's goal is to demonstrate and document everything from "Build and test" to "Deployment" for a high scale, realistic, web application. It strives to be well written and as simple as possible while still being a good demonstration of best practices. It also strives to document all the relivant pieces so others can learn from it. This is quite a challenge and I'm sure dissagreement will exist on some of the choices. I think it's an excellent start and the right set of goals. I love real examples and this looks like great.

JavaFX Eclipse Plugin is available

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 16:01:02 +0000

JavaFX Eclipse Plugin is available - The Java Posse.

Good, I was looking for this to happen before I start playing with JavaFX.

10 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs | How-To | Smashing Magazine

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 13:22:51 +0000

10 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs | Smashing Magazine.

A bunch of good and easy-to-implement tips. Smashing Magazine does a great job so if you like this article, check out some of their other stuff.

Update: Here’s another good article from Smashing Magazine “Data Visualization: Modern Approaches“ which includes a ton of cool infographics like this one:
Musicovery screenshot
I played around with visualizations using Processing and I hope to get back to that sometime soon. It’s a very fun and surprisingly interesting area.

Java 7 Announcements - Finally!

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:07:37 +0000

[Java 7 Update from Mark Reinhold at Devoxx](http://hamletdarcy.blogspot.com/2008/12/java-7-update-from-mark-reinhold-at.html)

That link has the full list of announcements of stuff that will be in Java 7. This isn’t everything but it’s a good list. Here’s my favorites:

What will be in

Modularization - 294 and project Jigsaw

Cool.* 292 - JVM Support for dynamic languages

Yay!* Null dereference expressions - Null checks with ‘?’ syntax similar to Groovy… lettingn developers avoid a nest of null checks.

This is objectively awesome. Less code is a big win.* Multi-catch - (yes!) allows a comma seperated list of disjunctive exception types in catch clause.
What will not be in

BigDecimal syntax

One of the commenters on this post questions the lack of mention for JSR310 which is a revamp of the Date/Time system. I’d love to see this go in and since there’s already a great implementation in use I hope it makes it. Dates are second in my list of complaints right behind BigDecimal in terms of API confusion.

In all, I’ll be excited to see how Java 7 evolves as it comes closer. It’s still a year away probably but it’ll include some nice changes.

Rands in Repose tshirts to support First Book

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 13:13:29 +0000

[![](http://i.buyoly.com/rands-med.jpg "Rands in Repose bamboo tshirt")](http://www.buyolympia.com/q/Item=rands) [Rands in Repose bamboo tshirt - Supporting First Book!](http://www.buyolympia.com/q/Item=rands) One of my favorite bloggers, Rands, is giving 100% of the proceeds from his new tshirt to First Book, which helps give books to kids from low-income families. [Like Rands](http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2008/12/05/a_pleasant_elsewhere.html), books are one of the most important things in my life and I'm more than happy to help give kids books. Please consider donating to First Book even if you don't want one of the rad tshirts.

Google is smarter than your company

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:05:20 +0000

> You may have heard about our [directory assistance] 1-800-GOOG-411 service. Whether or not free-411 is a profitable business unto itself is yet to be seen. I myself am somewhat skeptical. The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model … that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search. [Google shows Microsoft how to connect the dots « counternotions](http://counternotions.com/2008/12/03/411/).

Man, Google is on the ball. One of my favorite quotes about them comes from Adam Bosworth (coincidentally one of the favorite CS thinkers). He said Google uses Bayesian algorithms the way other companies use the if statement. Even if you don’t know what those are, I’m sure you can guess that Bayesian algorithms are more complex than if. They’re working at such a higher level of abstraction than other companies it’s laughable. MS collects data from the web to make search better, Google collects data from the web to make everything they do better.

Gift Ideas For People Who Are Not Me

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 11:30:34 +0000

As everybody who might buy me presents has told me already, I'm very difficult to shop for since I tend to just eventually buy everything I might want for myself. So, here is a list of things I'm putting on my personal wish list I'll be sending to Santa, disguised as a bunch of gift ideas for somebody very cool in your own life so I don't seem like the kind of doofus who puts his christmas list on his blog.

Gift Ideas for Other People
Books (everything here should be findable on Amazon.com)
PulpHope
Heavy Liquid
Herbie Archives Vol. 1
Locas
Absolute Sandman
Scott Pilgrim Vols. 1 & 2
USA trilogy by John Dos Passos
Refactoring to Patterns by Joshua Kerievsky
Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks
Liberation by Brian Francis Slattery

Xbox 360 Games (again, on Amazon or a local game store)
Midnight Club: LA
Lego Batman

Blu-Ray movies
Godfather trilogy (the Coppola Restoration)
The Dark Knight

My First Agile Project Part 10: 5 Important Issues for Teams

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 06:10:37 +0000

[Originally published on AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com](http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/mattgrommes/my-first-agile-project-part-10-5-important-issues-teams)

![](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/31/92047417_dfc690784d_m_d.jpg)

Picture courtesy of [jeffk on flickr](http://flickr.com/photos/jeffk/)

I’ve written a lot about mistakes we made and the parts of Scrum we didn’t follow, to our detriment. We’ve got a late, still as yet unlaunched project, reduced credibility and lowered morale. And yet, even with all this going against us we still have one big thing going for us: an incredibly strong team. In this part of My First Agile Project I’m going to address this issue of teams and the importance of strong teams in Agile projects.

Read on for 5 important issues teams should look for. Some are good things, some are bad. But I believe we have a strong team and hopefully our lessons can provide some insight into building a strong Agile team.

We’re all friends.**
Everybody on our team are friends. We hang out after work, we joke around; even if we didn’t work together we’d be friendly. I’ve worked at places where everybody was friendly and I’ve worked at places where everybody talked about everybody else behind their backs. Since Agile teams are supposed to be self-managing, it really really helps if people at least get along.

The problem with this is obviously if your team doesn’t get along, you can’t force it. Plenty of companies try to do “team building” exercises and these are even less effective for programmers than for other types of workers. Unless you’re trying to unite your team against management (which can be an effective tactic actually), you can’t build teams by doing inane activities. One thing you can do is try to split people up into smaller teams of people who get along. Having teams of friends contributes to the next couple of important issues and is vital for those reasons.

2) We communicate

The biggest benefit of being friends is that we talk. We talk about how we solved certain problems, we talk about things that went well and things that didn’t. If something is taking too long to finish, somebody will ask if they can help. Not only do we talk as a team, we talk to our Product Owner and she’s as much a part of the team as anybody. If we don’t like an idea she has, we’ll try to talk her out of it. This all contributes to the strength of the team.

An Agile team shouldn’t be just a bunch of people taking orders and going back to their cubicles to code/design/whatever. An Agile team is a team of professionals who should work together on their project and hash things out as a team. If your team isn’t talking, they’re not working at the level they should be.

3) We share work

During our sprint planning meetings, our practice was to assign work to specific individuals. Some people advocate assigning work to the team but we never had a problem giving work to people because we all knew it was really the team’s work to complete. None of us had a problem taking other people’s work if they got done early. Of course people’s first instinct is to be optimistic about finishing their work and not to voluntarily say they need help, but when everybody is friendly the risk of judgment is lower and people share their status and give up work more easily.

4) We Play

“Team building exercise” is kind of a joke around our department but we do things together regularly. Awhile ago the company was kind enough to pay for everybody in the company to go to the movie theater across the street for team building, my first exposure to the phrase. We all questioned how much team building could be done sitting in a dark room for 2 hours but it was a free movie. From then on though, whenever a new must-see nerd movie came out we would take off for a long lunch on Friday and see a movie as our own “team building exercise”.

In addition, at the end of our month-long sprints we would always try to do something as a team. We went miniature-golfing, bowling, out to dinner and drinks a few times, just drinks a few other times, things like that. We’ve also gone to a local laser-tag place for long lunches a couple of times, which is great fun even for the people who don’t think it will be. I really recommend activities like this for teams, it builds the team up without being any kind of explicit corporate-endorsed exercise. Even if your team is new or not up to friend status yet, everybody likes shooting at each other or beating the others at a fun game like bowling or miniature golf.

5) We let people go

The hardest part of keeping any team going efficiently is knowing when people just don’t fit. We (meaning our managers really) have had to let people go from the team twice during this project. The first was a programmer who just wasn’t picking things up quickly enough. When you’re sprinting, you can’t give people the same amount of time to come up to speed as you might on a regular project. The second time was someone who was slow and also didn’t follow our sprint procedures the way the rest of us did. He didn’t tell us during our morning sprint meeting that he was still working on something for the 3rd day and didn’t stick to the tasks assigned, taking half a day to work on random other things. These kind of things just take too much time to deal with when you’re packing each sprint to the gills with work and trying to get everything done. It’s incredibly difficult to get rid of people, but the integrity and efficiency of a team can’t be compromised when you’re in the middle of a project.

Conclusion

A good team can make up for almost any other deficiency in process. A good team can make a good product with no process or bad processes. A bad team can make a bad product no matter what. Good processes can’t help a dysfunctional team. A good team, with good processes, can make a good product and can make it fun. Increasing communication is the single best way to improve your processes. Helping people share information is good for cross-training, sharing the workload, and for increasing morale. Making a good team isn’t a magic, but it’s not easy either. If your process just doesn’t seem to be working or your team is going slower than you all think you should be, you might take a close look at how well your team gets along and work on that first. I know the strength of our team has helped us immensely through some pretty rough spots.

Please share any ideas you have for real team building in the comments. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you back here next Monday! You can also reach me on Twitter as mattgrommes.

My First Agile Project Series
Part 1: Doing 80%
Part 2: Inception & Planning
Part 3: Viral Videos and Bad Jokes in Scrum Demos
Part 4: How to lose credibility and jeopardize your project with lack of management buy-in
Part 5: Our Top 5 Agile Mistakes
Part 6: The First End of Our Project
Part 7: Adventures in Agile Testing
Part 8: 9 Things We Disliked (and Liked) about ScrumWorks
Part 9: Choosing A New Tool - VersionOne

My First Agile Project Part 9: Choosing A New Tool - VersionOne

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 08:09:53 +0000

[![](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3070/2977325520_b98e09b581_m_d.jpg)](http://www.versionone.com)

Picture courtesy of [VersionOne and me](http://www.versionone.com)

In my previous post, I talked about my team’s experience using ScrumWorks as our Scrum backlog management for the first year or so of our project. After our vendor’s license for ScrumWorks ran out, we thought we were close to the end of our project so we stopped using any tool for tracking tasks beyond our bug repository. As I’ll talk about in this post, a combination of factors led us to start looking for a new backlog / taskboard tool and the one we’ve settled on is VersionOne. Read on for more details about why we chose VersionOne and how we plan on using it, even once we’ve moved on our first agile project.

First, a word about Part 8 of this series, where I outlined the things my team and I didn’t like about ScrumWorks. I didn’t intend that article to be a review of ScrumWorks at all but more of a look at how we used it and why we didn’t like it at the time. It expanded and was seen by some as too harsh on ScrumWorks, especially since I was talking about an older version. It appears that ScrumWorks has done some good updates and fixed a lot of the issues we didn’t like about it. But some of the problems are philosophical and I’ll get to those in a bit. But if you’re looking for a Scrum tool, make sure you do your own evaluation and don’t take my word for it. Every team is different.

Also, just so there’s no misunderstanding; neither I or Agilesoftwaredevelopment.com have any connection to any tool I mention here beyond using them.

Time To Find A New Tool

Our license for ScrumWorks running out happened about the same time we thought we were nearing the end of the project and we refocusing to work strictly on bugs that came up during testing. We all had bugs related to things we’d worked on so we didn’t see a big need to track things and do sprints like we had been doing. There’s more on this phase of our project in Part 6 of this series. But overall we liked the Scrum process and had been laying the groundwork for making sure we kept doing it even after we moved off of this project, the one that had introduced Scrum and Agile to our company. To do that, we knew we’d need a tool so we looked around a little for one while continuing work on the existing project. A few months later I went to the Agile2008 conference in Toronto and found a couple of good alternatives to ScrumWorks.

[![](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3070/2977325542_c4e01cdd89_m_d.jpg)](http://www.versionone.com)

Picture courtesy of [VersionOne](http://www.versionone.com)

At the conference I saw a couple of products but was most impressed by VersionOne, by far. Everything was done in the web browser, which I was specifically looking for after disliking ScrumWorks' use of a web browser and desktop app for different tasks. The UI looked easy to use and didn't get in your way. It looked very easy to add different projects to keep the various tasks we had in our company tracked together. Part of my search for a new tool was one that was easy enough to use that it wouldn't take too much maintenance or setup. I was trying to get our department and company to accept wider use of Scrum and Agile methods and a tool that would add a bunch of work would just be an impediment. Another very cool feature was their open API that allowed people to write integrations and tools on top of VersionOne. We use [Jira](http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/) at work for bug tracking and VersionOne has a synchronization tool for Jira that looks like it'll fit our workflows very well.

When I returned from the conference, I setup a trial with VersionOne that allowed us to use the tool for a month to really get a feel for it. I used it to run a small sprint we were doing on a bigger integration piece we needed to get done quickly and it handled that very well. I also imported all of our Jiras as a different project as a test and although the importing process had some problems it worked well (there’s an XML importer but no example XML I could find and the CSV importer didn’t appear to allow importing notes from Jira which we use extensively). I didn’t setup the automated Jira synchronization due to a lack of time. If you’re looking at Scrum tools, I’d encourage you to get in touch with VersionOne and try their demo, it’s very enlightening to actually get your hands dirty on a tool and it’s easy to setup with them.

[![](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3009/2976469967_16e3070dde_m_d.jpg)](http://www.versionone.com)

Picture courtesy of [VersionOne and me](http://www.versionone.com)

Working with VersionOne, the biggest thing that stands out is how it doesn't try to force you onto a specific path. ScrumWorks tries to keep you on the strict Scrum path, which according to the product manager who kindly responded to last week's post, is their intention. That's fine but just didn't work for us. I'm not a big fan of strict processes and like the ability to go the way that suits us best without having to work around things we don't need. We want a way to keep track of tasks, make sprints, etc. We don't care about a lot of the stuff other teams might want or need and VersionOne doesn't force us to. I think the only required field by default on backlog items and tasks is the title. Other than that it's up to you.

Transitioning from one agile project to many

As I mentioned, I’ve been working on convincing our department (and by necessity, our customers in the rest of our company) to move to a more Agile process. Before starting on this big Scrum project, our process was pretty much non-existant. We didn’t even really do waterfall, we just came in every day and worked on bugs and issues from Jira. Luckily for me, I was only with the company a few months before we started using Scrum on this project.

What I’m hoping to do, and I’m pretty sure I’ve convinced my manager and director that this is the way we should be going, is to do Scrum on a multi-project basis. Instead of almost all of us being on this one big project, we’ll make 2 week sprints out of issues from the various projects in Jira. VersionOne’s Jira integration will allow us to keep having people enter tasks in Jira like they always have, then we’ll pull them over into backlog items and defects and enter them in sprints to work on. Priorities will be set by our manager, in a modified Product Owner roll, and we’ll be removed from the management back-and-forth of those decisions in a way we weren’t in the previous process (we hope anyway, we’ll see how that works in practice :)). This will let us work as a team on multiple projects at once, without having to multitask and switch projects based on which department manager is at our desk that day. Or we can put all of our resources on a big project for awhile to get big chunks of work done. It’s a very flexible system and I think will work out well for us once we can get everybody on board.

But the reality of the situation is that I’m just a programmer with ideas, a big mouth, and a genetic inability to keep quiet about things. My management tends to listen to me but we’ll see how these plans work out when they hit the corporate reality. I plan to write more about how this transition is going in real-time once it gets closer and I finish out this My First Agile Project series.

As I say every time, thanks for reading. If you have any comments on any of this, please use the comments form below.

Blocking thinking with information

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:01:29 +0000

_In the interest of posting more, I'm not going to be as diligent about making links to everything since for some reason that always takes more time than anything else. You can google for anything you want to find more about anyway._

Since almost the creation of the format of podcasting, I’ve been an avid listener to podcasts of all kinds. I was an early listener to ITConversations and for a time listened to every single program they put out. I phased most of them out except for select ITC shows and some other technical programs (the list of what I listen to can be found below). I was listening to a talk given by Tom Kelley from IDEO, one of my favorite writers on innovation from one of my favorite companies, and he talked in there about how he used to listen to tons of audiobooks (also a love of mine) but when he started writing his own book he found that listening to the audiobooks blocked his own creative process.

I thought about this and I think that it’s true to an extent. I fill most of my time listening to new shows and learning, but I definitely notice when I’m thinking and not paying attention to the show. I don’t want to get into the position of just stuffing new information into my head without giving myself time to think on it. I’m doing a couple of particularly boring tasks at work recently and usually I’d be listening to some program or another at the same time. Today though, I just turned on music the whole day so right now I’m listening to Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust album instead of the most recent Planet Money show. I’m going to have to get past the feeling I always get where I’m falling behind on my shows but maybe this will just make me go to the gym more. I can’t bring myself to get on the elliptical without something to zone out to.

My podcast subscriptions

Java Posse
Stack Overflow
Planet Money
This American Life
Software Engineering Radio
SPaMCast
Mark Kermode's movie reviews
Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders
various IT Conversations technical shows

Daring Fireball: iPhone-Likeness

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:22:12 +0000

Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience.

Daring Fireball: iPhone-Likeness.

Not only a good idea for iPhone apps, a good idea for all apps. Too often people just say ‘Do the simplest thing that could possibly work’ and don’t carry on with the polish.

My First Agile Project Part 8: 9 Things We Disliked (and Liked) about Scrumworks

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 08:25:48 +0000

[Originally published on AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com](http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/mattgrommes/my-first-agile-project-part-8-things-we-disliked-and-liked-in-scrumworks) - _This started out as a comparison between Scrumworks and VersionOne and turned into a bit of a rant and slam on Scrumworks. I was pleased to hear from various users of Scrumworks that they've fixed some of the specific issues I mention._

[![](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3054/2957307360_27713189f8_m_d.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattgrommes/2957307360/in/photostream/)

Picture courtesy of [Danube and me](http://danube.com/scrumworks)

This installment of My First Agile Project is going to be a little different than the previous ones (Table of Contents for the series available at the end of the post). Today I’m going to tackle the topic of tools. During the first year or so of our project we used ScrumWorks by Danube. It was brought to us by our vendor along with the Scrum methodology. After our license ran out we didn’t like ScrumWorks enough to get our own license or even go with the free version, which I’ll go into more detail about below.

For our last couple of sprints, we’ve been making due with a whiteboard and evaluating other tools. The one I like the best and we’ll probably be going with is VersionOne, which I’ll be talking about in more detail next week. Honestly VersionOne makes ScrumWorks look old-fashioned and barely functional. I had a list of things I didn’t like about ScrumWorks and one of the first things I noticed during my initial demo was that VersionOne didn’t do any of those things, obviously a big selling point. This week’s post is that list of pros and cons about ScrumWorks.

Choosing a tool can be very important in a lot of software development and choosing where to put your backlog and tasks is extra important to Scrum. Since the whiteboard/corkboard + stickies/index card approach is basically free, you want to choose a tool that gives you some extra benefit. Read on for my team’s pros and cons about ScrumWorks and hopefully it’ll provide some insight on this important decision.

What we liked about ScrumWorks

The first thing I should say is that we started using ScrumWorks over a year and a half ago and I only recall doing one update so my experience might be out-of-date. I didn’t bother looking at ScrumWorks again when looking for a new Scrum tool. Also, these are my and my team’s opinions only and I’m not affiliated with either Danube or VersionOne beyond using them.

Gave Us Structure
As I said, our vendor brought ScrumWorks with them along with the Scrum methodology when they came to work with us on our project. Since this was our first exposure to Scrum, bringing a tool they were familiar with was a good idea. If we hadn’t had the guidance on the process that ScrumWorks brought just by having a set workflow and screens that asked for the important information for backlog items and tasks, it would have been a lot more work getting going. If we’d had to figure out what needed to go on cards, which cards went where, how to make a burndown chart, etc., it would have taken a lot of time.

** 2) Did the Basics**
We also liked being able to see our tasks and make changes online, run reports, make graphs, etc. Being essentially lazy, having a program automatically make the burndown chart alone is worth a lot to me.

An aside about Burndown charts

One unrelated note on these automatically generated burndown charts: make sure your upper management doesn’t fall too in love with them. We had problems early on with our management not understanding the process and using whether or not the line on the chart was going up or down as their only view into how the project was going. Managers love graphs and will (ab)use them if you let them. You learn things and change estimates and the line goes up. This is fine.

What we didn’t like about ScrumWorks

This is the bigger of the 2 lists, unfortunately. ScrumWorks gave us the basic functionality required for a backlog/task manager. How it did that is where the annoyances came from. Now, these things might not annoy you and I’m sure they made some of these choices on purpose but they didn’t suit our team. Tools are very individual and I think ScrumWorks is pretty popular so other people must love the heck out of it. That was not our experience.

[![](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3224/2956464269_3e2c47d13c_m_d.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattgrommes/2956464269/)

Picture courtesy of [Danube and me](http://danube.com/scrumworks)

3) Too Many Required Fields
The first annoyance we ran into was that ScrumWorks makes too many things required. To enter a backlog item you have to do your difficulty estimate, and enter a value for business benefit before you can save the item. This gets in the way of just entering things into the product backlog so you don’t forget about it later. Estimating difficulty should be the team’s job (or at least the team member responsible for the item), not the job of whoever enters the item. And being forced to enter a benefit in just so ScrumWorks can do its priority calculation (it gives you a ratio of difficulty to benefit) was extra annoying because we never used the calculation it gave. Since our project was to replace an existing system, everything we entered at first was functionality we had to replace so how were we to determine the benefit? We tried at first but it just wasted time in planning meetings. At the end we were just entering 5 for everything it required us to fill in just to get past the screen.

4) Too Much Required Workflow
In the same vein, you also have to estimate tasks as they’re created and you’re not allowed to assign a task to somebody before you put the item into a sprint. It’s one thing to suggest people follow the proper procedure, it’s another when your tool forces you to do things a different way than you want to for no reason. I can’t tell you how many times we were forced to stop our planning flow to do things the way ScrumWorks wanted us to.

5) Can’t Split Items Between Sprints
Another big irritation was the inability to split up items between Sprints. If you don’t finish a task during a sprint, you’re forced to move the whole backlog item to another sprint, losing the history of when you first did what. The first chunk of our planning meetings was spent going through unfinished items, checking if they were actually incomplete or if we just forgot to close them out, and moving the item to the current sprint. I was beyond pleased to find that VersionOne gives you an easy way to split things up between sprints.

[![](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3187/2956464197_09f095bcf9_m_d.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattgrommes/2956464197/in/photostream/)

Picture courtesy of [Danube and me](http://danube.com/scrumworks)

**6) Forces You To Use 2 Different Tools** ScrumWorks is actually 2 tools, a web-based taskboard and a regular desktop application for sprint and backlog maintenance. I can only guess that either they, unlike VersionOne, didn't think the web could handle the maintenance interface or they added the taskboard web interface later. In either case, it's jarring to have to go from the taskboard to a different URL to launch the desktop app for certain things. But the web interface is the one you use most of the time so that's not a huge concern.

7) Can’t See Only Your Tasks
First is that you can’t just see your own tasks and items. All the items are shown in a long list and you just have to scroll or search for yours. They’re highlighted with a color but you can’t just show yours. This led to a lot of problems with people not knowing they had been assigned something or forgetting to update a task because they skipped over it. Just because you can’t sort or filter a whiteboard with index cards doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be able to filter a web list of tasks. That’s a head scratcher of a decision to me, it makes no sense.

8) Web Interface Became Unusably Slow
The more sprints we went through, the slower the web interface became. I won’t guess at how they designed the thing to say why that might happen but it was almost unusably slow after 9 or 10 sprints.

9) No Way To Find Each Team Members’ Hours
There’s no way to find how many hours of work you have assigned to you. It’s not in the web interface and if it’s in the desktop app we never found it. What we always had to do was export the sprint to Excel and use the Filter feature to show each person’s tasks, then add up the hours. Obviously not ideal.

Conclusion

I hope that gives you a feel for what we liked and didn’t like in ScrumWorks. It does what its supposed to, giving you control over items and tasks and whatnot, but the way it does those things ranges from no-frills to annoying to infuriating. It was never really a question on our team if we wanted to continue using it or not, we even considered just writing our own basic version. As I said, our experience is a year old now and they might have revolutionized the product for all I know. But for now, we’re all glad to be off ScrumWorks, even if it means being without a good tool for the time being.

I meant this entry to be a review of both ScrumWorks and VersionOne but in the interest of not putting any more of my readers to sleep than I already have, I split this up and will give each tool the space they deserve. If you’re dying for a VersionOne review before next week, I give it a big thumbs up and encourage you to talk to them about doing a demo. They let you use it for 30 days and I found that a big help. They also have a ton of videos and tutorials that give you a feel for using the tool. More on our experience next week! Thanks for reading.

If you have experiences with ScrumWorks you’d like to share, please do in the comments below.

8 Years Late

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:54:14 +0000

The other day I was watching some reruns of The West Wing and told my wife that if things didn't go right during this election, that show might be the last vision we see of government as capable, intelligent, and standing for something. I honestly think we've avoided that future with the election of Barack Obama as our next president. I'm looking forward to finally starting to move this country forward into the 21st Century the way we should have 8 years ago.

Merlin Mann on blogging

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 19:00:50 +0000

[How To Blog](http://www.slideshare.net/merlinmann/how-to-blog-presentation?type=powerpoint "How To Blog")

View SlideShare [presentation](http://www.slideshare.net/merlinmann/how-to-blog-presentation?type=powerpoint "View How To Blog on SlideShare") or [Upload](http://www.slideshare.net/upload?type=powerpoint) your own. (tags: [blog](http://slideshare.net/tag/blog) [blogging](http://slideshare.net/tag/blogging))

![](http://counters.gigya.com/wildfire/IMP/CXNID=2000002.0NXC/bT*xJmx*PTEyMjU1ODc*NTQ5MTImcHQ9MTIyNTU4NzQ2MDQxNSZwPTEwMTkxJmQ9Jmc9MiZ*PSZvPWFiM2FhMWY5ZWVmZjQ2YjVhMThlZWM2MDdlNDM2OWMw.gif)

I started out trying to do this but got “too busy”. I’m done being too busy. I’ve written over 10,000 words for AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com and I’ve been neglecting my regular blogging for that and work and family. I’m done working extra hours at work for awhile so I’m going to redirect that energy to this blog again and hopefully Get Better. Thanks for the inspiration Merlin.

My First Agile Project Part 7: Adventures in Agile Testing

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 11:38:35 +0000

**[Originally published on AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com](http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/mattgrommes/my-first-agile-project-part-7-adventures-agile-testing)**

[![](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2248/2282734669_596c7822ee_m_d.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/sebastian_bergmann/2282734669/)

Picture courtesy of [Sebastian Bergmann@flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/sebastian_bergmann/)

In Part 7 of My First Agile Project, I’ll be talking about how we went about testing on our project. This part should stand alone if you haven’t read the other parts but if you want to catch up, see the series Table of Contents at the end of this post.

Our project was to integrate and configure a new billing system to replace an old custom Oracle forms app. Doing an integration and configuration project presents a lot of challenges to testing, which I’ll talk about below. In addition, like all projects, ours had a special set challenges. At first we thought the developers would do most of the real testing on the project with unit tests and verification of configuration changes by our Subject Matter Expert. The original plan included 3 sprints of testing at the end of the project just to make sure we had gotten all the needed functionality in during development. Looking back at this plan now, we all wonder how we could have so stupid. :)

Keep reading for more on how our plans went during development, what happened once we got into testing and why we’re still doing testing now - 6 months past our original go-live date. As I said, testing on a configuration / integration project presents special challenges so I hope our adventures will help other teams avoid some of the pitfalls we encountered. If you’re doing a similar project or have had different experiences you’d be willing to share with me and others, please post in the comments.

Working On An Unfinished Product

As I mentioned, we started the project intending to most of our testing as we developed, then doing 3 testing sprints (12 weeks) of regression / integration testing. Our thinking was that since we would be working on a pre-built base product doing mostly configurations we wouldn’t have to test functionality in the base product. There was a big problem with that assumption though.

Our company had decided, along with the vendor, that we would start working on our integration of the product while it was still in development. This was meant to give us a jump on going live. In my opinion the vendor was far too confident of the state of the product in saying it was okay to do this. Working with an unfinished product gave us the opportunity to influence its design but also meant we were delayed many times waiting for fixes or changes we needed. Since the platform we were building on wasn’t finished, a lot of things we completed broke in later sprints and needed reworking. So testing as we went along developing didn’t work like it should have, leading to lots of retesting later.

In addition, we’ve ended up testing every part of the application, even the parts built by the vendor we thought would work out of the box. Next time we do an integration project we’ll be much more careful to factor in time for testing the base product instead of assuming it’ll be correct from the start. I’m also going to recommend against starting work on a product as far from complete as this one was, the trouble it caused just wasn’t justified by the benefits. Our Product Owner might think differently but from a developer perspective, working on something that’s changing underneath you is really difficult.

Developer Testing Isn’t Enough

A billing system touches a lot of parts of the company which means we had a lot of integration points to develop. We ended up integrating with about 10 other systems and had probably 30 points of integration with those systems. With the product we were integrating, that meant a lot of Java code but also a lot of rules written in the product’s custom language and a ton of custom web services to pass data around, also written in their language. The Java code is easy to unit test, which gives you a certain level of comfort with the code but not 100% comfort to be sure. Where it gets hard is testing the rules and web services. We still don’t have a good way of testing that part, so we have to rely on our unit tests and manual tests to make sure the data we want is coming back and the rules are acting properly in the application.

We’ve found it very difficult to test a product that runs from a rules engine. The various levels of customization and rules add complexity very quickly. Once you’ve customized enough of a complicated product, finding if a bug is in your code or the product gets harder and harder. Also, “bugs” can be of multiple types; problems in the code that cause error messages, numbers not adding up or processes not being followed, and just incorrect behavior. There were a lot of times where the designers of the base product had an idea of how to do something and our Product Owner thought that was just wrong. So we would have to either work with them on changing the behavior or try to change it with customizations. This type of thing leads to a lot of work since it’s not just a bug to fix.

Since we relied on unit testing of integrations for most of the project, we didn’t find a lot of these bugs until late, when we started doing manual verification of every process and function in the application. A unit test is never going to see that an account that should have gone into delinquency after 15 days actually waited 16 days in months with 30 days. Or that all the charges on the invoice PDF file were 2 days off from when they should have happened. What we should have done is work in bigger chunks of functionality and have somebody go through and test the whole process and all the scenarios early on. If we’d spent our sprints doing both development and testing it would obviously have slowed the pace of development but that time would have been made up and more by eliminating a ton of rework.

Manual Testing

Once we figured out that we’d be doing a lot more testing than we originally anticipated, our Product Owner (the manager of the billing department) enlisted her billing team as manual testers. During development we had written literally thousands of test cases to use to verify all parts of the system. The new testing team went through these books and added new test cases all the time. They manually went through and compared a percentage of accounts in the new system with the old, checked invoices against the legacy invoices, and went through their daily procedures in the new system. This was hard but absolutely invaluable. For untrained testers, they’ve done a great job. I should have done some training on how to file good bug reports earlier on but we’ve worked well together.

I wish we had done some automated testing of the system for regression testing, but keeping UI tests up to date is a job in and of itself and isn’t as flexible as manual testing by a mile. The bugs we’ve discovered doing this manual testing has made up almost all of the work the developers have been working on for the past few months. Also, nothing is as valuable for finding what the users really want from the system than sitting with them and watching what they use, curse and smile at.

A Cross Country Journey

In trying to explain the difficulty of a big software project to a non-technical friend, I came up with the following: A normal big software project is like driving across country without a map. In a non-Agile project you try to work out in detail where you’ll be going before you leave. With Agile, you start out headed in the right direction and adjust as you go. Sometimes you hit a highway and make excellent time. Sometimes you hit the Grand Canyon and have to drive days out of your way. Our project, I said, was like driving across country without a map in a car that was still being built.

At the user conference for the company we purchased our billing system from, our Product Owner was asked to be on a panel about testing their products. The other participants had big teams of professional testers, hugely expensive automated testing tools, and lots of other advantages it would have been very nice for us to have. But even without them, we’ve done a good job of testing I think. We’ve got a very tight product that will be as right as we can make it when we go live, which is very important for a billing system. Even if you’ve got a small team, there’s no reason to think you can’t do a good job of testing your application, no matter if it’s a custom project or a configuration project. Yes, it takes time. But it’s worth it.

Thanks for reading and if you have testing experiences you can share please do so in the comments.

Mad Science Alphabet Blocks

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:16:35 +0000

[Mad Science Alphabet Blocks | Xylocopa](http://www.xylocopa.com/product/mad-science-alphabet-blocks).

Mad Scientist Alphabet Blocks

I know what the Grommes kids are getting for Christmas now! Click on the picture and check out the detail on these, they are 100% awesome.

Using evolutionary algorithms to make a walkthrough for the light-bot game with C# at Chris' Babbling Blog

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 10:33:58 +0000

[Using evolutionary algorithms to make a walkthrough for the light-bot game with C# at Chris' Babbling Blog](http://splinter.com.au/blog/?p=38).

This is cool. I’ve always been very interested in genetic/evolutionary algorithms and one of the ways I’ve wanted to practice is writing a simulation of a creature that figures out how to walk a path. This guy used this same idea to solve a real game. Nice stuff, although I wish there were some more technical details. (He does provide the code though).

A cool thing he sees is something a lot of GA research finds, that the algorithms often evolve unintuitive or extra-complex solutions. Just as in real life, evolution is only interested in solving the problem.

My First Agile Project Part 6: The First End Of Our Project

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:19:10 +0000

[**Originally published on AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com**](http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/mattgrommes/my-first-agile-project-part-6-first-end-our-project)

[![](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2350/2022740376_944d7f44e6_m_d.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/mojodenbowsphotostudio/2022740376/)

Picture courtesy of [Photo Mojo@flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/mojodenbowsphotostudio/)

Welcome to Part 6 of my team’s first adventures with Scrum. If you want to start from the beginning, see the table of contents at the bottom of this article. Each part stands alone though so don’t worry.

In this part of the series, I’ll talk about what we did when we approached what we thought was going to be the end of the project. As it turned out it was only the first deadline that we would miss. Near the first deadline we went off of doing Scrum sprints and planning in favor of fixing bugs as they came up in testing. This cost us a lot of team cohesion and focus. Read on to hear about what led us to missing the deadline, why we went off Scrum and how we got back on the right path. As usual, I hope our story helps illuminate some decisions teams make with the best of intentions that can lead to unforeseen negative consequences.

During our Inception Phase the vendor whose billing system we were working with came up with a development model (basically a complicated spreadsheet) that was a SWAG at how long they thought this project would take, based on how many people we had on the team and a rough estimate of how much work we had to do. The model showed we would need 9 month-long development sprints and 3 integration testing sprints. As we neared the end of the development sprints, we knew we would need more time so we said at first we would take the first testing sprint and finish up the last development. Of course we needed more than that sprint so we pushed back testing another sprint leaving about a month for final testing before go-live.

The idea with leaving the integration / User Acceptance Testing to the end was that we thought unit testing and developer testing would be enough to flesh things out during development enough that we would just be squashing bugs during the final sprints. There were a couple of reasons this didn’t work like we thought it would but that’s a bigger topic that I’ll be going into in more detail next time.

Going off Scrum

Once we came to what we thought was going to be the final push to going live, we decided not to do structured sprints and just hit the bugs that came up in testing as fast as we could. We didn’t think we had enough left to justify doing a sprint. So for a few weeks we just followed the testing team, trying to take care of bugs as they came up. The more we went along though, the more apparent it became that testing was uncovering a lot more work than we thought it would. I don’t remember when we finally admitted that we weren’t going to make the deadline but it was after we should have admitted it. We were in denial.

After the first deadline passed and we were still working hard, as well as uncovering lots of work still to do, we should have gone back to doing sprints. I think we were still partially in denial as a team, thinking we would finish up soon and be able to go live. Team denial is a strong force and I think the only way to get around it is to make sure everybody speaks up. The whole team wasn’t 100% in denial about the amount of work we had but each person’s low level of unease should add up. We all had thoughts, we just didn’t listen to each other enough and put things together. It’s everybody’s responsibility to speak up and if they have reservations about something on the project they need to make sure everybody else is listening. If we had really been paying attention to our data conversion team, for example, when they said they weren’t comfortable with the initial deadline we would have pushed it back before hitting it. And we should have been more honest about the amount of work we were still uncovering. It’s been almost 6 months since the first deadline passed and we’re still finding things, which tells us something about where we really were back then (luckily now the new findings are going on the post go live backlog).

Loss of Team Unity

Since we thought we would be going live “any day now” and we weren’t doing sprints, we lost some of our cohesion as a team. One good thing we did was keeping our morning Scrum meeting, although it morphed a little. When we were going to be hitting bugs in preparation for go-live, we decided a sit-down meeting that might last more than 15 minutes was appropriate since we would be discussing bugs more and making first passes at solutions during the meeting to expedite the work. These meetings meant we all still knew what everybody was doing, but not keeping a taskboard or doing demos ended up being much more important to team unity than we thought. It’s a subtle thing that didn’t really realize until recently but looking at everybody’s work as a team effort and showing your stuff at the end of the sprint really pulls people together. By this time we all had areas of expertise in the product and we were working largely on fixes and additions to those things independently of each other. We still worked together a lot but had we not been a close, friendly team I think we would have drifted apart a lot more.

Sprinting Again

After a few months of what I called wandering around, instead of sprinting, fixing bugs and taking care of issues from testing, we’ve recently gone back to sprints. We’ve all been broken of our delusions about going live “any day now” and know it’s going to be some time still. I think it’s a testament to our team that we’re not all disillusioned and we still have our team morale. We’ve gone back to 2 week sprints, which helps planning meetings not take all day and gives us much more flexibility. Before we went back to sprinting, we had a big meeting with our vendor to work out a plan and a new model for completing everything. This model showed we were going to be at this for quite awhile longer. Once we started sprinting again however, we blew this model away with what we were getting done and the finish line looks closer than ever. Going back to the Scrum processes we liked has really re-energized the team. It’s very tempting to try something different when things get tough but we should have resisted the urge to move away from Scrum. Not doing sprints when you’re about to go live and are squashing the last-minute bugs is fine I think but we shouldn’t have left the path as early as we did. We’re all glad we’re back on now though and moving forward faster than ever.

Next time, I’ll be talking more in depth about testing. Why unit testing isn’t enough, how we did user acceptance testing, and why we should have started our testing team going much earlier than we did. Stay tuned and thanks for reading!

Typing speed test

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:35:45 +0000

[Speedtest - how fast are you?](http://speedtest.10-fast-fingers.com/).

Steve Yegge had a post the other day about learning how to type faster, a skill most programmers probably ignore. I know I did. I’ve never really properly touch-typed. I don’t use the home row or any of that stuff but I don’t look at the keyboard either and I type fairly quickly. I knew I could get better though so I was happy when I found this test. It doesn’t take too long and it seems like just doing this a few times a day will help. For the record right now I’m hovering right around 52 words per minute. I’m hoping to get up to 60 average in a month and see how hard that is to achieve.

My First Agile Project Part 5: Our Top 5 Agile Mistakes

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 08:01:56 +0000

[**Originally published on AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com**](http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/mattgrommes/my-first-agile-project-part-5-top-5-mistakes) This has been, by far, my most popular post on ASD. People like lists, and mistakes.

[![](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3127/2772299972_874e5bf779_m_d.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/definingdavid/2772299972/)

Picture courtesy of [DWQ Online@flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/definingdavid/)

In the previous parts of this series (1, 2, 3, 4), I went into a lot of the initial issues of how we ran our project and some of the things we did wrong. For Part 5, I’m going to focus on the 5 big mistakes we made in the project before I move onto another phase of the series.

For some background, the project was to integrate an off-the-shelf (but highly customizable) billing system to replace an aging custom Oracle forms app. This was our company’s first foray into Scrum and Agile as well as the first Agile experience for most of the development team. After we sailed past our second management-imposed deadline I started thinking about how we could correct our process for this project and the next ones we do, which led me to write it all down in this series. Keep reading for the Top 5 mistakes we made (in no particular order). Where possible I also give some detail about how we’ve worked on correcting our process. I hope this list helps you avoid these mistakes and make your own all-new ones. :)

Not tracking backlog
This was by far our biggest mistake I think. As I mentioned in Part 1, we failed to keep track of how much work we were adding to our backlog as we went along. We all assumed that since we were being Agile, we would add work as we fleshed out requirements and learned new capabilities. The problem came with not tracking how much work we were actually adding and comparing it to how much we were doing in each sprint. Without doing this, another of our mistakes - Scope Control - became much more of a problem than it might have. Not reassessing the backlog periodically meant we didn’t know how scope creep was really affecting the project, which meant a downward spiral of allowing the scope to creep, not knowing the effect of the new scope, allowing scope to creep more, etc., etc.

Since we realized a few months ago we should have been doing this, we’ve been keeping much better track of what gets added to the backlog and making sure we’re being as ruthless as we can about moving features to Post Go-Live and only working on important bugs. As a result we have a much better view of the finish line of the project.

Too much planning upfront, not enough later
In Part 2 I talked about our Inception Phase where we had our initial meetings to get a rough estimate of the integrations we would be doing and business requirements from other departments who would be using or relying on the billing system we were building. The mistake we made here was in the amount of requirements gathering we did and how we did it. We took a “snorkel, not dive” approach where we didn’t get too many details, which is a good approach. But we also made requirements documents complete with flow charts of integration program flow. These documents took much too long to write and didn’t end being used by the developers at all. Once we started sprinting and doing the work, we re-learned, or un-learned, pretty much everything in the documents but it all made more sense since we had the context of our code to work in.

Obviously not getting deep technical requirements up front means you need to get them later and this is part 2 of this mistake. We should have made it our practice to start getting requirements for the next sprint so we could start working without waiting. As it happened, our Product Owner/Subject Matter Expert was busy enough that we spent a lot of time waiting for requirements before we could start.

Boring business people with technical demos
I was tempted to make this mistake “Didn’t get management involved properly” but I think the early mistake was our demos. As I said in Part 4, we demoed everything we did that sprint, including infrastructure and behind-the-scenes integrations. This is good for the team to get to show off but it’s boring and turns off the business people and management. Once you’ve turned people off the process, it’s hard to get them back into it when you need their input. They’re still going to give you input, it’s just going to be later than you expect and usually after you think you’re done with the thing they should have seen 3 sprints ago.

Making the demos boring for the business folks also meant we failed to properly engage our upper management. We ignored this problem for too long and once they started getting more engaged, it was after the deadline had been blown and they weren’t aware. Not a good position to be in. Having more business focused demos wouldn’t have guaranteed anything but combining better demos with an insistence that the business / management people attend would have helped immensely.

Not estimating product backlog items
Part 1 of this series talked about how we were Doing 80% of Scrum. What we missed was a chunk of related, but separate processes around estimating and planning the backlog. This mistake is tied to a couple of the others because of this but we committed them all separately so I’m listing them separately. Our product backlog was basically just a list of work we had to do. Our Product Owner prioritized her most important items before the sprint planning meeting, then we moved the items we were going to do over and estimated them then. We didn’t estimate the backlog items ahead of time so she could know how hard we thought things were or so we could know how much more work was ahead of us. We had rough ideas that Integration X would take longer than Configuration Y but without real estimates, we couldn’t start harder things earlier in the process or push things that were hard and low priority off until later, both of which are vital for planning.

Since we’re in bug-fixing mode right now, we’re struggling with fixing this mistake more than with any of the others. I got a bunch of Planning Poker cards from Mike Cohn at Agile2008 and we’ve been trying to use those but it’s hard when the issues you’re estimating are bug fixes that only the person who worked on it originally knows about. If you have any suggestions on this, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Scope control
Not controlling the scope of the project, combined with our lack of estimates and not monitoring the growth of the backlog, constitute by far the largest cause of problems with our project. If we had been estimating our backlog items it would have helped us track the amount of work we had left, which would have helped us know when and what to remove from the backlog and keep to the next release. Since we didn’t do any of those things, the backlog grew too much, which pushed back the set of testing sprints we had scheduled, which pushed back the work that testing revealed, which put us in the position we’re in today, with a late project, lower morale, and lost credibility with management.

One factor I’m struggling to figure out is that the nature of our project seems to limit our ability to control scope. We’re doing an integration of a new billing system to replace an old system. This means there’s a set of existing functionality we have to duplicate in the new system that can’t be pushed to the next release. Also, being a billing system you have to get things right the first time. You can’t send out a partial invoice, for example, just because doing the whole thing will take too long. But I’m sure everybody thinks there are exceptional things about their particular project so I don’t want to fall into the trap of saying we can’t learn anything about how to control scope because our project is the exception. There’s always something that can be pushed back and if you’re doing the right things with estimation and monitoring your backlog it makes finding those things much, much easier.

We’ve been in bug-fixing / testing mode for the past few months and have tried much harder to keep things out of the backlog if they didn’t 100% need to be there. There’s still things going in, but now we make sure each thing is absolutely needed for go-live and everything else goes on the list for after.

Mistakes != Fail

We’ve made mistakes on our project, for sure. We’re not done yet so I’m sure we’ll make more. But we’re learning, which is the important thing for our next projects. As a team we’re all committed to Scrum and being Agile so we’re going to make the effort to improve our processes where we think it’ll help. The more technical-oriented aspects of Scrum are incredibly appealing to us as developers. Keeping a backlog, committing to work, keeping interruptions to a minimum, sprints; all of this we’ve done mostly correctly and we love how it’s worked over the past year and a half.

I’ve spent the last 5 parts of this series talking about the basics of how we ran our project and the lessons we’ve learned while we chugged along sprinting. Next time, I’m going to start talking about what happened once we missed our first deadline. We changed our process, halfway-unknowingly moved away from Scrum, and suffered for it until recently when we did a reset of our process and got mostly back on course. Stay tuned next week and as always, I’d love to hear any comments you have on this series. Thanks for reading.

ScrumShocked writes about my articles

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 09:41:36 +0000

I've been following a very interesting series of posts (starting here) from Matt Grommes detailing his experiences managing his first agile project

ScrumShocked.

This is cool. This guy found my articles on AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com and writes about our experiences compared to his teams. This is kind of like being recognized on the street, awesome but strange. I like that people are getting something out of my articles though.

My First Agile Project Part 4: How to lose credibility and jeopardize your project with lack of management buy-in

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:42:26 +0000

**Originally published on [AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com](http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/mattgrommes/my-first-agile-project-part-4-management-buy-in)**

[![](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/58/194598532_e130d732f7_m_d.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/shazwildcat/194598532/)

Picture courtesy of [shaz wildcat@flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/shazwildcat/)

Welcome to Part 4 of My First Agile Project. If you haven't read the others in the series, don't worry. Each part should stand alone. If you want to read the whole story though, the other parts are available: [Part 1](http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/mattgrommes/matt-grommes-my-first-agile-project-part-1), [Part 2](http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/mattgrommes/my-first-agile-project-part-2-inception-planning), [Part 3](http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/mattgrommes/my-first-agile-project-part-3-viral-videos-and-bad-jokes-scrum-demos).

In Part 3 of this series, I talked about our demos and I mentioned how they unfortunately turned people off the demo with presentations about mostly behind-the-scenes features. My first instinct was just to say that those people lost their right to have input since they weren’t involved in the demo. In reality, the business world just doesn’t work like this, much to my chagrin.

What happened was the people who didn’t care to come to the demos just came later with changes and “suggestions” for new work we had to do. Also, since a lot of the ones who were supposed to be coming were upper management, their lack of knowledge about the Agile processes we were using led to a lot of problems and misunderstandings later in the project. Read on to hear more about how we failed to get our management on board as much as we should have. Hopefully you can avoid that mistake and some of the problems we’ve faced.

Consequences of Boring Demos

Our tendency on the project was to demo everything. We wanted everybody to get credit for their work and the audience to get to comment on everything. We wanted to be transparent so we showed everything, even though we knew it was sometimes boring for the business people in the audience.

At first, I didn’t think this was as big of an issue as it really was since I thought people understood the process and would pay attention because this was their chance to give feedback. Instead, we got comments from people like “I’m not going to waste 2 hours sitting there listening to IT clap for each other.” This wasn’t to our faces but behind our backs when higher-level people were asked to explain why they didn’t bother coming to the demos.

I’m not sure what the answer is to this. It’s valuable to have these kinds of demos so people can show off their hard work and get the team on the same page. And it does give people the chance to give feedback, but in practice, demos for stuff that happens behind the scenes can turn people off the whole process, which we learned can be worse than just not getting some feedback. Once somebody decides they’re not going to come to the demos any more, it’s hard to get them to reconsider when you get to the stuff they should be seeing. What ended up happening was that we would get feedback many sprints after we thought we’d “finished” some piece of functionality as word got back to somebody about what we’d built. We had to do a lot of rework due to this. Even things like finding out later what paper we were going to use for printing invoices came back and caused rework.

Getting Management Involved

Beyond rework, not having management involved is an even more important consequence of turning people off the project. At our company, managers and directors do a lot of the work so we invited a lot of upper level people to our demos. Getting these people on board and understanding the process is more important to an Agile project than I originally thought. Our project was the first exposure that our company had to Scrum and Agile processes so we tried to explain what it all meant so everybody would know. It was clear early on that the Agile ideas weren’t being understood at the higher levels of the company so at our second or third demo I gave a small presentation about the Scrum process and thought that some upper management people would be there to learn about it but they didn’t end up coming. We tried as we went along to get everybody on the same page as well but we mostly used the demo as the communication channel so with people not attending the demos knowledge of the problems didn’t get out there like they should have. In retrospect we were not as forceful as we should have been in getting the information out there. You just can’t expect that business people will be interested in something like Agile without a lot of hand-holding about it.

When we got down the line and were in trouble with problems on multiple fronts our management just saw the project was late and we were responsible. The clash between how a company wants to work with big projects (set deadlines, set budgets, etc.) and how Agile deals with big projects is real and if you don’t work hard to get people to understand the differences, you can’t come in after the deadline has been blown and expect to educate anybody. You need to start early with planning and estimating, make sure everyone involved knows where the project is at all times, only then can they reconcile how the project is going with the budgets and the deadline. See Part 1 of this series for more on the problems we had with not estimating and planning correctly. But you can do all the planning in the world and if the information isn’t getting to management or if they don’t know what it means, it’s just noise and people will ignore it, to your peril.

If we’d been communicating all along, we’d be in a much better place. As it is now, I can see that we as a team have lost a lot of credibility and I believe our ability to continue using agile processes is probably in jeopardy.

Team Responsibility

We can argue that a lot of the problems we’re having are because of bad 3rd party vendors, complications in the product we were integrating, problems converting data, etc. but at the end of the day we’re a team and this is our project so the responsibility is on all of us. Agile isn’t just about getting management off your back or freeing the team from over-documenting. It’s about the team taking responsibility and part of that is not giving up power over your project any more than you can help. Good managers don’t just shrug their shoulders and let things happen to their projects and that includes self-managed teams. We should have insisted that certain people attend our demos and keep up on our project status just like we insist that our fellow team members don’t slack off and endanger the project. That takes some courage, to be sure, but it’s important. When you’re building a product for internal use, the users and management are a part of the development process just like the development team is. This is a change for a lot of people but the team has to insist that everybody participate if the outcome is going to be a good one. We’ve certainly learned this lesson the hard way but sometimes the hard way makes the best teacher so we won’t soon forget.

If you’ve had issues with getting management involved on your project, please share. I think it’s in the nature of most developers to not place the importance on management participation that the issue deserves so if you’ve learned this lesson, or if you think I’m putting too much emphasis on it, I’d like to hear about it. Thanks.

Clean Code Review

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:30:31 +0000

> As developers, system admins, and a variety of other roles in IT, we have to deal with code on a daily basis. Sometimes it's just one-off scripts we never have to see again. Sometimes we stare at something that, for the life of us, we can't understand how it came out of a human mind (or, as the book puts it, has a high WTF/minute count). But there is a time when you find code that is a joy to use, to read and to understand. Clean Code sets out to help developers write that third kind of code through a series of essay-type chapters on a variety of topics. But does it really help?

Slashdot | Clean Code.

Good review of a book I’m hoping to get to reading very soon.

Creating Scrum the Product Backlog: Start with the Users!

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 07:22:41 +0000

[Creating Scrum the Product Backlog: Start with the Users! | Agile Software Development](http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/peterstev/creating-scrum-product-backlog-start-users).

I like this approach. One thing we haven’t done as much as we should have is focus on the users of the product. We tend to focus on replicating the existing functionality and if we come across some way to improve things, we do it. We should be trying to find better ways first.

Joshua Bloch on Bumper-Sticker API Design

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 10:03:10 +0000

> It is my hope that these maxims provide a concise summary of the key points of API design, in easily digestible form: > > **All programmers are API designers.** Good programs are modular, and intermodular boundaries define APIs. Good modules get reused. > > **APIs can be among your greatest assets or liabilities.** Good APIs create long-term customers; bad ones create long-term support nightmares. [InfoQ: Joshua Bloch: Bumper-Sticker API Design](http://www.infoq.com/articles/API-Design-Joshua-Bloch).

We’ve been working on building web services for our big project here at work and the API of the services has been a concern of mine for awhile. We’ve mostly been throwing these things together for one-off needs but I’d like to start formalizing a bit of what we’ve done to make it more manageable and maintainable. I think I’m going to print this list out and keep it handy.

My First Agile Project Part 3: Viral Videos and Bad Jokes in Scrum Demos

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 08:00:25 +0000

[Originally published on AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com](http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/mattgrommes/my-first-agile-project-part-3-viral-videos-and-bad-jokes-scrum-demos)

Welcome to the 3rd part of my series on my first agile project. This time, I’ll be talking about every introverted programmer’s favorite part of Scrum, the end-of-sprint Demo. More specifically I’ll talk about how we cracked wise, showed internet videos, heckled each other, annoyed our management, and occasionally showed off the work we had completed during the previous sprint.

Even though we usually dreaded them, our demos almost always went off okay and we all came out alive. If you’re not familiar with them, the demo is where the team shows off the work they’ve done during the previous sprint. We were doing 4 week sprints so we usually had quite a few things done by the demo. It’s sometimes the first chance your teammates have to actually see what you’ve been doing and to to catch up the rest of the team in a more concrete way than the daily stand-up meeting. It’s also where you’re supposed to get the feedback of the stakeholders and customers involved in the project. With our billing application project, we were interacting with a bunch of different departments in the company so we had a lot of stakeholders. In theory, all of these people will see the product and give feedback. In reality, this doesn’t always end up working like you’d hope. Getting your demo right is much more important than we initially thought.

Integration Project Demoing Challenges

Demoing an integration project isn’t a topic I see discussed very much. A lot of the writing about Agile in general is geared toward new product development, not configuration or integration of existing products. Demoing an integration project is a lot harder than the literature on demos would suggest. With a new product, you can show off a new piece of functionality or screen, something like that. On a project like ours, we had a product that was mostly complete looking. And since you’re showing your work off to business people, how it looks is most of what they’re getting out of your presentation. Even interface configuration changes can be subtle and uninteresting, which is extra important if the change is very valuable since you want people to pay attention.

We had a lot of “behind the scenes” processes and integrations with other systems to build as well, which presents a whole different set of demoing challenges. In a billing system, the interface consists of lots of numbers. For a lot of our integrations, you literally work for a month on something and your demo ends up being “I’m going to simulate Event X in this other program by pushing this button and Voila! this number appears in the billing system.” Our team was split roughly into integration programmers, configuration specialists, and database specialists. For the programmers, most of what we did was this kind of thing. “Once a month, this process will run and generate this not-human-readable file to send to the bank.” This isn’t as much of a problem showing off to your team but to the stakeholders, this is nap-time. Part 4 in this series will go into the issues we ran into with disinterested management. It’s a big topic and one that deserves more space than I can give it here.

We had 10 to 12 people demoing and another 10+ in the audience so we did our demos in a conference room on a large projection screen, not at the developer’s workstation as a lot of people do. Doing a demo on a big screen lets more people see it but a lot of what people think of something is based on actually using it. We’ve put in tons of fixes nobody suggested at the demo but came up immediately when the same people sat down and actively used the product. I really recommend getting people to sit down and use your product as early as possible, it’s extremely helpful.

Coping Mechanisms

Getting up in front of a bunch of people and showing off your work doesn’t tend to land high on most programmers’ list of favorite activities. For some people, this means getting stage fright of varying seriousness. We decided early on not to take too much time from doing our real work to try to work on our presentation skills. We just did our best and every demo we got better. Of course we had some people who aren’t good at presenting but since we knew what they were talking about we tried to help each other as best as we could. I’m a shy person by nature so I don’t enjoy presenting but I compensate by making jokes and basically entertaining myself while up at the podium. As long as you’re not taking up too much time with non-work stuff, people don’t mind the joking around. Since we had 10 to 12 people on the team and a month of work to show, our demos lasted a few hours usually and the audience was as ready to break up the flow as I was. One of our team members is very funny and always did the best presentations. Once during his presentation he told everybody “that buzzing you’re feeling in your head is your mind being blown”, which cracked everybody up. One month I used the Dramatic Chipmunk video in my demo before an important thing happened. Then after that I introduced our champion presenter using the Dramatic Lemur video, which uses the THX sound you hear before movies. This definitely helps to break up the demo for everybody so I would encourage letting people “off the leash” a bit and try to make their demo a little more entertaining.

We’re trying to figure out the best way of doing our demos so please share your demo stories below. I guarantee my team won’t be the only ones interested in your experiences and ideas. As always, thanks for reading.

History Hacker TV Show

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 06:31:17 +0000

Bre Pettis | History Hacker on History Channel.

Watch Bre Pettis’s TV show pilot this Friday at 8pm and Midnight on the History Channel. Bre is awesome and the first episode is on Tesla, one of my heroes.

On Scala

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 14:23:43 +0000

[Why Scala?](http://www.slideshare.net/al3x/why-scala-presentation?type=powerpoint "Why Scala?")

View SlideShare [presentation](http://www.slideshare.net/al3x/why-scala-presentation?type=powerpoint "View Why Scala? on SlideShare") or [Upload](http://www.slideshare.net/upload?type=powerpoint) your own. (tags: [c4](http://slideshare.net/tag/c4) [scala](http://slideshare.net/tag/scala))

I’ve been using Groovy quite a bit and I really like it. It’s a JVM language so I can use Java stuff but it’s Perly enough to warm the Perl hacker bits of my heart. The other day I heard an interview with Martin Odersky, the inventor of Scala, on Software Engineering Radio and it’s made me very excited to learn it. I’d heard of it but was into Groovy so I didn’t get too far beyond having heard of it. It’s looks extremely powerful and exciting though. This is a small presentation but it’ll give you a bit of the flavor. For more info, I really encourage you to listen to the Odersky interview. It’s technical but still a good overview, with good explanations of the features and functional-programming things it uses.

My First Agile Project Part 2: Inception & Planning

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:00:00 +0000

[**Originally published on AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com**](http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/mattgrommes/my-first-agile-project-part-2-inception-planning)

[![](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2123/1739299123_aa61714ba8_m_d.jpg?v=0)](http://flickr.com/photos/ghindo/1739299123/)

Picture courtesy of [ghindo@flickr](http://flickr.com/photos/ghindo/)

In [the first part of this series about my team's first Agile project](http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/mattgrommes/matt-grommes-my-first-agile-project-part-1), you read about some of the mistakes we made in only doing 80% of Scrum. In this part, I'll talk about the initial Inception Phase of the project and about our Sprint Planning meetings. As usual, we did some things right and did some things we hopefully won't do again. I'd love to hear in the comments how our experience compares to yours.

Inception Phase

The first part of our project was what we called the Inception phase, a sprint or so of basic requirement gathering. Some people call this phase Iteration Zero, a name that I like a lot for nerdy comic-book fan reasons. This phase was good and bad. For me it was good because I was fairly new to the company and I learned a lot about how the business works. For some background, I work at an insurance company and the project is to integrate a new billing system to replace our decade-old custom Oracle form app. Billing in insurance is fairly complicated; both insurance agents and insured companies are involved, there are deductibles, claims, premium charges, etc.

For a month, the senior programmer and I did almost constant meetings with various parties around the company, taking notes and trying to figure out where and how the billing system needed to integrate. This gave us a good list of what integrations we would be writing (talking to the claims system, printing checks, probably a dozen primary integration points overall) and what some of the customizations we would need to do were. What I didn’t like about this process was that we were directed to write integration documents for each integration point, including descriptions of what they did but also flow charts of program flow and a lot of detail we didn’t need. Being new, I did learn from these documents but nothing I wouldn’t learn again, or in some cases have to un-learn, later when we started doing more in-depth requirements gathering. Next time, we’ll do the meetings to get a handle on what integrations we have to do but we’re not going to do all the documentation again.

Since we were doing Scrum, we weren’t supposed to get too much detail in these meetings. “Snorkel”, not “Dive” was the direction given. Eventually though, you do need to dive deep to get enough to work with. A problem we had a lot was that our Subject Matter Expert / Product Owner had a lot to be expert on so she was incredibly busy all the time. We would assign tasks in the sprint planning meeting, then go get deeper on requirements gathering. This meant a lot of the time we were waiting on her and the people she needed to meet with to get enough detail to work with. If you’ve ever had to wrangle the schedules of more than 2 managers/directors in a company, you know how the days can fly by trying to get everybody in the same room.

I’ve since learned that the recommended practice is to make sure your SME starts gathering requirements for the next sprint’s tasks. This would have made things run a lot smoother. Since your backlog should be prioritized ahead of time, the SME should have a good idea of what’s going to get worked on next time even thought it’s the team that decides. With a good base of details in place, work can usually start and intelligent questions asked once the clock is ticking on the sprint.

Sprint Planning

We did 4 week sprints on our project and we had around 10 developers, including 2 database experts for converting our old data. This meant that our sprint planning meetings ended up being all-day affairs. We tried a lot of things to shorten them but never really succeeded. As I mentioned in Part 1, we didn’t estimate difficulty on our backlog items ahead of time (a mistake, in case you missed Part 1). We had our list of integrations and known configuration changes, and it was somewhat prioritized. So in the planning meetings, the first thing we would do is take the top bunch of items and move them one at a time into the Sprint Backlog. As we did that, we would take our best guesses at who would do the work and how long that person thought it would take.

I know some people say you shouldn’t assign work directly to people in your sprint planning, instead assigning it to the team and letting people pick work off the team list. We didn’t feel like this would be the best plan. Even if we hadn’t done specific assignments, tasks would have mostly fallen on the same people anyway due to experience levels, specialties, etc. And when you assign to people, you have a better idea of how full everybody’s plates are. Of course it’s still a team and we all did our best to help out with everybody’s tasks so even though someone’s name was on something we all knew we should take or give tasks as needed. If you have people who don’t take tasks or appreciate the help, that’s probably Job 1 to take care of. Agile is largely about the team and if your team doesn’t work together, it’s a lot harder.

At first we didn’t do very much breaking down of stories into tasks since we were so new to the product and really didn’t know what each tasks would entail. Without a lot of good information about the tasks to go on, our estimates were hit or miss, honestly. Sometimes things that looked easy would run into some snag in the product and take 2 days. Sometimes things we thought might be impossible took 2 hours. (Being able to say “We thought this might be really hard but I got it done in 2 hours” is impressive during a demo, believe me.) Doing estimating on an integration project with an off the shelf product with an architecture of its own that you need to get familiar with is a different beast than green field development. You can know how to do something from scratch and have no idea how to do it so it integrates with somebody else’s product or APIs. It’s worth doing your best to figure it out though. If you start a sprint without a good idea of how much work something might be, you could spend all sprint just getting requirements nailed down.

Next Time

Once you’ve planned and done your tasks for the sprint, you need to show off what you’ve done and get feedback from the people involved. The next couple of posts in this series are going to be about our demos and issues of management buy-in and stakeholder involvement. What we did, the successes and failures we had at demos, and more coming soon. Thanks for reading and I’d love to hear your comments and experiences below.

My second agile story is up

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 05:41:12 +0000

[My second post about our team's experience with agile](http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/mattgrommes/my-first-agile-project-part-2-inception-planning) has gone live on [agilesoftwaredevelopment.com](http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com). I'm really proud to be able to post on that site, the other writers are posting great stuff all the time. I'm still getting used to having to write a good-sized article every week so we'll see how it goes. The problem isn't the writing so much as the editing, trying to get the posts to not be so rambly like just about everything I write on here.

Starting back on Scrum

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 20:02:59 +0000

Right around the time of our first deadline, we decided to stop doing iterations and start just banging on whatever bugs we found. After we didn't go live we never went back on the iterations, which was a mistake. Today we had our first sprint planning in a few months. Unfortunately it'll only be a week sprint since most of the team is going out to San Francisco next week for a vendor conference. Of course it's hard to feel too bad since we'll be in San Francisco, my favorite city, but it did make for a somewhat half-hearted planning meeting. We used to use Scrumworks but our licenses are gone and we never really liked it anyway so this sprint is going to be tracked using a spreadsheet and a whiteboard. After we get back I'm planning on using [VersionOne](http://www.VersionOne.com) to track things. I've been using it on a trial basis and I like it a lot, I just need to get the team using it to see what they think.

For this half sprint we decided to take a couple of core areas we’re still struggling with bugs in and hit those as hard as we can. Another teammate and I will be hitting the invoice bugs that somehow are still popping up with alarming regularity. The others will be hitting one of the other statements and a few of the high-priority financial issues. I’d like to see a good number of these things knocked out before we leave so the testing team doesn’t have to deal with them. Testing a billing application is ridiculously time consuming and any one bug can cause hours and hours of testing to be wasted if it affects a balance somewhere unanticipated.

Before the planning meeting we got together and did a short session of planning poker as well, our first. It went pretty well. Once I explained how it was supposed to go, we moved through a bunch of issues really quickly. One problem we had was that the stuff we’re working on mostly now are bugs so it’s hard for everybody to have an idea of how hard something will be to fix. I think we’ll try again but the planning poker will really be helpful once we’re doing new development work again.

Complexity Theory In A Nutshell

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 19:59:27 +0000

> This problem looks difficult, is it because it is really difficult or because I'm stupid?

Christos Papadimitriou on the question asked in Complexity Theory. From August Dr. Dobbs

Agile Discussion on StackOverflow

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 11:04:28 +0000

As [I mentioned the other day](/blog/index.php/2008/08/20/thinking-about-windows-programmers/), Jeff Atwood from [Coding Horror](http://www.codinghorror.com) is building a site called [StackOverflow](http://www.stackoverflow.com) for programmers to ask and answer questions. So far it looks really good. Unfortunately you can't see it right now since it's in private beta but they're supposed to be launching Real Soon Now. There's a good question about [Getting Started with Agile & TDD](http://beta.stackoverflow.com/questions/11941/getting-started-with-agile-and-tdd), [Pair Programming](http://beta.stackoverflow.com/questions/38109/pair-programming) and others. Good stuff.

When it does launch, I’m really looking forward to seeing the discussions around Agile. Jeff is somewhat deluded (or maybe just in denial) about how the site is actually going to be used, which is for discussions. He wants it to be about “Ask a question” then “Get an answer”. In reality, lots of questions don’t lend themselves to One True Answer. This is really true in the Agile world. I can tell you how I do things but it’s not the True Answer and it might not work for you. But in that case, I want to know what didn’t work for you so I’ll learn something. The site lets you have wiki-like functionality for correcting answers and questions to hopefully make them living documents, not the stale 3-versions-old answers you typically find when searching for technical questions. To me this lends itself to discussions but who knows how it’ll work in the real world. Hopefully Jeff will come around and accept how the site is actually used rather than how he wants it to work, rather than quashing the real behavior like he seems to want to based on what he says in the StackOverflow podcast.

So once the site launches, I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of good Agile Q&A and discussion there.

Retrospective Prime Directive

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:55:34 +0000

> Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand. [Retrospective Prime Directive](http://www.retrospectives.com/pages/retroPrimeDirective.html).

Say yes.

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:52:03 +0000

> No is for wimps. No is for pussies. No is to live small and embittered, cherishing the opportunities you missed because they might have sent the wrong message.

Awesome old Dave Eggers interview. It’s worth reading the whole thing. One of my favorites ever.

Agile2008 - Agile as a plank road?

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 09:14:29 +0000

The first session I went to at Agile2008 was Mary Poppendieck's presentation [The 5 dimensions of systems](http://submissions.agile2008.org/node/2029). In it she talks about a lot of things but one of the things that made me think the most was when she asked if Agile is a 'plank road', or an expensive dead-end that will be replaced as its flaws are revealed. I'd never heard of a plank road before but I guess they were mostly East Coast things. They were early roads made from wood planks and paid for with tolls. The problem was that the investments made in plank roads were meant to pay off in 10 years but the roads themselves started to rot away and require huge maintenance expenses after only 4 or 5 years. Her point was that sometimes you don't know about the flaws in something as big as Agile until many years down the line.

My issue with this, which I asked her about in the Q&A at the end of the talk, was that even if something is a plank road technology and it gets replaced, you can’t skip the plank road and go right to the next step in the evolution of the technology. You need the failures and intermediate steps to learn from and provide the investment for the next step. The lessons learned from the plank roads helped engineer the next roads. The people who invested in that road probably didn’t go invest in farms or something, I’m sure some of them got involved in the next road technology. The plank roads did help immensely and they planted the idea of something better than dirt roads in people’s minds. When I questioned her about this, she seemed to agree with me that you need the intermediate technology which kind of invalidates the plank road metaphor as she used it. To me the plank road is like the dot-com bubble. Yes, people were hurt financially and companies went out of business due to many, many practices I can’t get into. But in the end, some people did get rich and some companies and infrastructure came out of it. A lot of people who made their money in the bubble went on to build really cool things, such as Doug Kaye of IT Conversations and Ev Williams of Twitter. In addition, a lot of people learned a lot in programming and systems design in that time that is now becoming very valuable.

The point of this is that you have to be willing to learn from failures and not just sweep them under the rug. “Fail faster” is one of my favorite sayings. If you invested in a plank road you can’t just ignore it and pretend it didn’t happen. Take what you can from it. Sometimes you won’t even know what you learned until you do the next thing. I don’t think Agile is a plank road no matter how you look at it, but even if it somehow is, we’ve learned a heck of a lot and the practice and profession of programming will never be the same. That’s a success to me.

Home Tech Heads

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:34:48 +0000

[![Me, soldering for the IPL article in the Alibi](http://s3.media.squarespace.com/production/1529026/18137065/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/me_alibi_big.jpg "me_alibi_big")](http://alibi.com/index.php?story=24361&scn=news)

Home Tech Heads

Hey look, it’s me! That’s right, it me in this week’s issue of the Alibi. It’s from a great article on the Idea Propulsion Lab, the hardware hacker club I helped found here in Albuquerque.

My Agile2008 Notes on Evernote

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:29:33 +0000

[mattgrommes's public notebook: Agile2008Notes](http://www.evernote.com/pub/mattgrommes/Agile2008Notes/).

I’ve published my notes from the Agile2008 conference on Evernote. My handwriting is poor in these notes but the searching of the images that Evernote provides works on some things. If you’re interested in a particular session, try searching for it. Even if you don’t find it, the interface is pretty good for just scrolling through. Hopefully they’re useful!

Exciting news

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:37:32 +0000

Exciting if you're me (and possibly if you know me) anyway. :) I've been invited to start writing some articles over at the [Agile Software Development](http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com) group blog / news site! I'm going to be doing weekly posts on our project at work; what we've learned, how we're doing things, etc. I've never written for another site before so it's a great opportunity to get my name out there and to start communicating with other people about Agile. It's also going to be great to have a deadline and have to keep writing regularly. I'm really looking forward to it.

The other news is that the Idea Propulsion Lab hardware hacker club I founded is going to be featured in the Weekly Alibi paper here in Albuquerque. I think the issue with the club in it is going to be out tomorrow (8/26). A photographer was here yesterday taking pictures of me pretending to solder and of some of the stuff I’ve built. I’m one of the least photogenic humans around so hopefully it’ll turn out okay.

My friends were joking around that I was going to need a PR person to handle my media before too much longer. :)

Thinking about Windows programmers

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:32:11 +0000

[IT Conversations | StackOverflow | Episode Seventeen](http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3787.html).

There’s a website for CSS and HTML called “Don’t meet your heroes“, which has always been one of my favorite website names. This podcast always makes me think of that phrase. I really like Coding Horror, which is Jeff Atwood’s blog about programming. It’s great, even though I don’t always agree with him. But now he’s doing this podcast about a website he’s building called StackOverflow and listening to him, he keeps losing cred with me. He’s a Windows programmer, which earlier in my life I equated with brain damage. I’m a lot less judgmental now, especially since my wife has done a lot of Windows programming, but I’m still biased against Windows if I’m honest. The problem with Jeff on this podcast, especially this particular episode which is the “Developer Episode” where they talk nuts & bolts about StackOverflow, is that the things he’s discovering are really old hat to anyone who has done development on Linux (or anywhere but Windows I imagine). I can’t tell if the Windows development environment is really stunted from basically having one IDE, Visual Studio, and the related tools from MS, or if he and his team don’t pay much attention to programming practice.

They’re really surprised about continuous integration using Cruise Control versus the MS tool which apparently requires you to install Visual Studio on your server (!!!). They all seem to be new to the very idea of MVC (model, view, controller) programming, which has been pretty standard for years, because MS is just now coming out with their approved MVC product/environment. Jeff talks about LINQ like it’s the only option for not putting SQL directly in your code, despite various ORM tools and similar things being around for quite some time. They do use nUnit, which is the .Net port of jUnit, so they do have that going for them.

But don’t even get me started on Jeff’s decision that writing tests somehow makes you less agile. Yeah, not having tests lets you write crappy code much faster. Great!

Now, I have no doubt that all 3 of the guys on the StackOverflow team are much, much better programmers than I am. Even without seeing their code I would venture to say I know they’re better than me. No slight to them personally, at all. At all. But I can’t tell if the lack of knowledge of what I consider basic standards is them or their environment and that’s bad. I guess if I’m a Windows shop and I come up against somebody who has never heard of MVC, that’ll be fine since I won’t have heard of it either. But if I’m used to people who think MVC and continuous integration and unit tests are given parts of good projects and I come up against people who only have experience with Windows stuff, they won’t seem like they’re as experienced. And I’ll have missed out on good programmers, most likely.

On the other hand, Joel Spolsky is a Windows programmer and well, he’s Joel freaking Spolsky. He and many others are probably existence proofs that I have no idea what I’m talking about.

Are Windows programmers missing out on so much good stuff because they don’t pay attention to the tools used by other programmers? Java has a rich environment of tools by many, many different parties. I have 2 different static code analyzers (just for an example of a totally niche product) in Eclipse (1 of 4 really nice IDEs for Java) telling me about bugs in my code. Does Visual Studio have anything like that? I can think of 3 different continuous integration tools. It seems like if they paid attention to other programmers’ tools, MS would have to provide more than they do or the environment of 3rd party tools would be a lot stronger.

I’m not sure what the point is of this post, I’m just trying to figure out how somebody who obviously knows a ton about programming misses out on so much of what I (and others) would consider very basic ideas. I don’t think it’s just that there’s stuff about .Net programming that I’m missing out on. I read a lot about programming in a lot of different languages and it really just seems like the Windows development ecosystem is missing a lot of things because Microsoft hasn’t put whatever-it-is out in a box with Visual Studio. Jeff even talks about using some 3rd party code diff tool, for pete’s sake. How can you use an editor to work on code with other people without a diff tool and source control built in?! I still like Jeff and Coding Horror and I’m sure I’ll love StackOverflow from what I’ve seen of it. I guess I’m just going to have to accept that different environments can produce different kinds of programmers. Smalltalk people are probably laughing their asses off at my I consider my toolset so it’s all relative.

If you’re a Windows programmer, I’d love to hear more about working in that environment in the comments. Thanks in advance.

Pair programming. What researchers say on the costs and benefits of the practice. | Agile Software Development

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:18:26 +0000

[Pair programming. What researchers say on the costs and benefits of the practice. | Agile Software Development](http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/artem/pair-programming-what-researches-say).

Just what I was hoping would come from the post the other day about pair programming, data on its effectiveness.

First Java servlet

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 22:10:39 +0000

As I mentioned on [twitter ](http://www.twitter.com/mattgrommes)today, I wrote my first Java servlet today. I had written part of a webapp using the Tapestry framework a few months ago but stuck and haven't gone back to it. This was a basic servlet to take a chunk of XML and send it via JMS to a queue for testing a new JMS integration architecture we're working on for work. It seems like everything in Java has some weird name that always makes me think it'll be harder and more complicated than it is. I'm used to Perl where you just drop a file in Apache and use CGI.pm to pull out the parameters. Turns out writing a servlet is almost that easy, although the setup to get all the files and classes deployed in Tomcat is much more complicated. Luckily I've done enough with Ant to hack a deployment script together and we have [an Ant expert](http://www.linkedin.com/pub/0/977/869) I can ask for anything hard. As usual, what I did was find a couple of examples and hack the heck out of them until I understood them and they did what I wanted. I did go through part of the first chapter on servlets from my [Head First Servlets & JSP](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596005407/mattorama) book that I had barely cracked the cover of before, so that's more research than I usually do ahead of time. Overall this basic servlet was pretty easy, although I know I just scratched the surface of the power and complexity available. Tomorrow I start working on figuring out how to send JMS messages. Luckily my team is incredibly good and I have good examples to hack on.

Funny Processing update

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 12:44:35 +0000

16 Aug 2008
Processing version 146 released. It's one better than 145. Download here

hehe. And what do you know? It is one better.

Mik Kersten presents Mylyn 3.0 (Webcast)

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:20:20 +0000

[Mik Kersten presents Mylyn 3.0](http://tasktop.com/videos/mylyn/webcast-mylyn-3.0.html).

I haven’t watched this yet but I love Mylyn and I just upgraded to Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymede) so I want to start learning about the new features.

Five risks of solo programming

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:05:06 +0000

[Five risks of solo programming | Agile Software Development](http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/artem/five-risks-of-solo-programming). > * High defect rate > * Distractions that force you out of the zone > * Low focus and discipline > * Low incentive to adhere to common practices > * Slow learning Pair programming is one of the practices I've always had a hard time wrapping my mind around. I've been told a bunch of times how great it is, and I've even been party to the benefits in small amounts as debug sessions and the like, but I can't get to the point of accepting that I should be doing it all the time. One of the commentors on the post basically gives all the standard complaints and I hope the author or somebody gives a rebuttal. At the conference a lot of people stated pair programming as a given good, "proven" to work. I haven't seen that proof but I'd like to find it.

Shades of grey

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:07:36 +0000

> Outside the world of fanboys, people realize that most everything available sucks in one way or another, and most everything has a positive side, too. And while we all have our favorite technologies, most of us don't obsessively troll every thread that discusses them. > > For example, Haskell on Linux is my language/platform combination of choice, but I am occasionally called on to write large amounts of Visual Basic at work on Windows systems. And while I don't like doing it, and I could give you a laundry list of things I hate about VB, there are also things about it that don't suck. Having an opinion and a preference doesn't mean that it can't be a nuanced opinion or preference. > > I think the rest of reddit is frankly just sick and tired of hearing all about how much you hate technology X. Really, we don't give a shit. [808140 comments on Mono isn't just for Apes](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6wewu/mono_isnt_just_for_apes/c051yqt).

One of the most promising things about the Agile2008 conference was the idea that Scrum and XP are really just on a spectrum of Agile methodologies, not completely black-and-white different things. I think what this Reddit user says is true for discussion Agile as well. Both camps need to get over themselves and realize they’re really just one camp.

Kim and I are going to speak on our experiences at Agile2008 at the meeting of the Agile New Mexico group next week and this is one of the topics I’ll be talking about. I think it’s great and since it was a big theme of Bob Martin’s keynote, I think people will actually listen.

Bringing people around to Agile

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:52:24 +0000

This is an email I wrote my department yesterday, talking about keeping on with Agile. The team has decided we want to keep going with the successes we've had with Agile but we obviously have to convince the people above us. Since I'm not a manager I have to put out my ideas and work more behind the scenes to make changes. I don't know how useful this might be to anybody but if you're looking at introducing Agile to your work, just think about putting your ideas out there to stew around in people's heads.

Since the email is pretty long, click Read More to read it if you’re interested.

BarCampAlbuquerque

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 18:25:00 +0000

[BarCamp wiki / BarCampAlbuquerque](http://www.barcamp.org/BarCampAlbuquerque).

I’m definitely going to try to attend this, should be fun. Maybe I’ll try to present something about my experiences with Agile. hmmm…

Twitter / rands: How to yell on your iPhone:...

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 06:25:11 +0000

How to yell on your iPhone: Tap Settings, Tap General, Tap Keyboard, Tap Caps Lock, YELL

from the brilliant rands on twitter.

iPhone / Google / Outlook Calendar Sync

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:58:39 +0000

I've finally gotten my various calendars to sync and I thought I'd pass along how I do it. By sync I mean I can enter an event on my Outlook at work, my Work calendar on Google, or my iPhone calendar and it'll appear on all 3\. Pretty cool.

First, to sync between Outlook and Google Calendar, Google provides the Calendar Sync tool. I only had one calendar in my GCal so the items from Outlook just went into that one. I then created a new calendar for personal use and renamed the old one to Work so I could color them differently and differentiate events.

To sync GCal and the iPhone, there’s a website called NuevaSync that will do it for you. NuevaSync is still pretty beta but it works fine for me. They’ll also sync Contacts, Email, and Tasks but I’m only interested in the Calendar.

Once you have all 3 set up, events will be synced from all 3, using GCal as sort of the intermediary. Now, sync is one of the all-time Hard problems in programming because of the many, many failure modes so this system might be fragile for you if you’re a hard-core calendar user. I’m not though, I just want my iPhone to tell me if I have a meeting in 15 minutes I forgot about.

If you like this hack or have a similar one of your own, I’m all ~~ears~~ eyes.

UPDATE: Jason Brett has posted more detailed instructions on his blog

Trends in the world of Agile: Notes after Agile 2008

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 09:34:08 +0000

[Trends in the world of Agile: Notes after Agile 2008 | Agile Software Development](http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/artem/trends-in-agile-post-agile2008).

Good overview of one of the major ideas from Bob Martin’s keynote at Agile2008, that being Agile has taken over for the specifics of being Scrum or XP.

Also at the bottom of the post is a list of links to other people’s thoughts on the conference.

Wireless Trick

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 17:56:55 +0000

After struggling for who-knows-how-long trying to figure something out, I finally got it. I upgraded my wireless router a long time ago with the DD-WRT firmware but I never could figure out how to get the wireless clients to be on the same network subnet as the wired line. This meant I had to do various hacks to get some things to work, like accessing windows shares and more recently getting my Remote app on my iphone to control iTunes on my computer. Since they were on different subnets, Remote wouldn't see my computer. Well, after hosing my router setup and resetting to factory defaults, I managed to find the setting I needed all this time. Under VLAN settings, if you set the W line to VLAN with LAN, it works. Magic. Hopefully this will save somebody some searches since I couldn't find anything in many searches.

Agile2008 Initial Thoughts

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:20:43 +0000

I just got back from Agile2008 in Toronto and boy, that was a great conference. I took almost 30 pages of notes and I've got tons of ideas on things we can do in our team at work. I'm going to write in more depth about the stuff I saw and learned but I wanted to say some quick things about my overall impressions.

For some great writeups on sessions (the kind of writeups I wish I was going to be doing) check out Gojko Adzic’s blog http://gojko.net. I met him at the conference and he’s a very sharp guy with a great blog.

My first big takeaway is the focus on engineering practices. We do Scrum at work which doesn’t set out any specific coding practices. At first I thought this was great, to leave the programmers alone to work as they wanted. And to be sure, I’m not advocating forcing a lot of practices on people where they might not fit. But overall, I’ve come around to thinking that a team should at least talk about doing things like test-first development, pair programming, etc. The benefits have been shown, it’s just a matter now of not doing something just to be doing it, but because it makes a real benefit. We’re going to start talking about these things soon.

The other thing I came away with was that we’re doing a pretty darn good job of being agile on my team. A lot of people I spoke to and heard have big problems with team dynamics and following the agile practices. We’re probably 80% of the way there but I think doing another 10-15% of agile methods would help us big time.

I’m going to have a lot of things to writeup and talk to my work about and I think we’ll be able to do a lot of agile things that will help us and the company out. We’re lucky that our Director is a programmer and knows to let us do things if we think they’ll help. We don’t have the kind of pushback from management that a lot of teams seem to have, which is great.

More later!

My new blog

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 07:05:18 +0000

I've been trying out a new blog system called Tumblr that I'll be updating instead of this blog for awhile. If you're one of the 3 people who reads my blog, go to [blindteeth.tumblr.com](http://blindteeth.tumblr.com) for some actual updates.

blind teeth

My awesome new tattoo

Sun, 25 May 2008 16:08:59 +0000

[![](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2104/2522830688_829d39f0d4_m.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattgrommes/2522830688/ "photo sharing")

My awesome new tattoo

Originally uploaded by MattGrommes.

Courtesy of Alex Werder at Star Tattoo in Albuquerque and his magic tattoo gun.

It looks somehow more mind-blowing in person. Even though it’s on my arm and I watched him do it, I don’t understand how he does it.

And yes, I’m a big nerd.

Idea Propulsion Lab update

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 10:59:28 +0000

We now have 23 people signed up at the website for the [Idea Propulsion Lab](http://ideapropulsionlab.org). This is an awesome number. I was hoping to get 10 or so before starting to plan our first meeting so this is great. I'm planning the first meeting, which is really a "beta" meeting where we'll be talking and planning the next meetings. I'm going to have it at my work since we have a great big conference room with a projector, chairs, tables, all that stuff. I'm probably going to present a few things so we don't have to rely on people presenting at the first meeting.

The next thing I’ve been looking at is getting our own actual space to work. It’s a little premature I think right now but I’d love to get an office space with a few rooms to setup benches and let people come work. Like I say it’s a bit far off but something I’d really love to do.

My new electronics hobbyist / hacker club

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 14:18:04 +0000

I'm in the process of setting up a club for hardware/electronics hackers and hobbyists in Albuquerque. It's called the **Idea Propulsion Lab**. I've setup a site for the club at [http://www.ideapropulsionlab.org](http://www.ideapropulsionlab.org). Check it out.

I’ve always loved the idea of getting smart people together and seeing what new ideas can be created. Everybody always thinks it’s weird but I always use the image of rubbing a bunch of brains together and seeing what sparks fly off, what fires can be created. The thing I really loved about going to New Mexico Tech was having a bunch of smart nerds in one place, building off each other, sharing ideas, challenging everything. So I want that to be a big part of the Idea Propulsion Lab, sharing ideas and teaching/learning about hardware, robots, electronic art, whatever.

We’ll be having regular physical meetings so people can show their projects or teach classes. I’d love to have classes where somebody can teach a bunch of people to solder, or make LED art, stuff like that. I want meetings to be live action Instrucables, if you’re familiar with Instructables.com (and if you’re not, you should be). My primary inspirations are MAKE: magazine and Instructables.com.

The most important thing to me is that I want this club to be for people of all skill levels. I just learned to solder in the last month and have only just started my explorations of all this stuff. I have no interest in just having a bunch of experts sit around and talk expert stuff that’s over the head of everybody else. I want club members to teach, to show people just how easy fooling around with electronics has become.

This is going to be fun.

Man, I'm waiting for this

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 09:22:22 +0000

My first Arduino circuit

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 08:59:34 +0000

[youtube]uysGAD4uDVk[/youtube]

My first actual circuit built using my new Arduino board. I built it using a Protoshield and tutorial from LadyAda.com. If you’re interested in Arduino or just want to start building little circuits, I’d recommend Lady Ada’s site. She’s got a bunch of cool projects you can build, Arduino stuff, and the tutorials are 100% awesome.

First Wiimote whiteboard experiment

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 11:51:56 +0000

[youtube]ZLQMWR2Hbo8[/youtube]

My first Wiimote whiteboard experiment, running on my laptop.

The Nerdiest Nerd in Nerdtown

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 18:51:34 +0000

I borrowed my friend Tom's Wii on Friday and got my cheapo diy Wiimote powered whiteboard working just now. **Whoohoo!** I hit one small snag when I realized that I built my IR light pen using a normally-closed button instead of a normally-open one (which makes the light always on except when you hit the button, instead of the other way around). Oops. A trip to Radio Snack will solve that one though so no worries. I hooked my laptop up to the big TV and got things to mostly work, which is awesome.

I need to remake the light pen and then I’ll post a video of it working. I may or may not post my first video of the rig working, it’s of me writing I AM COOL on the screen of my laptop, hence the title of this post. :)

[tags]electronics,wiimote,whiteboard[/tags]

My new time-sucking hobby

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 22:44:19 +0000

I've wanted to start doing electronics work for some time but never got around to buying a soldering iron and related tools, finding a good project, etc. It's not like I don't have anything else taking up my free time though. But this year Kim gave me a [really cool book](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596510519/mattorama "Making Things Talk") on some electronics projects and told me to buy the tools and parts needed so I'm finally going to start with my new hobby. Whoohoo for me! Coincidentally, a guy at work passed around [an awesome video of an electronic whiteboard](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s5EvhHy7eQ) you can make with a Nintendo Wii remote and an easy-to-make IR-led light pen. During this 4-day weekend I'm going to make up a couple of the light pens and a few of us at work are going to make one of these whiteboards. Another co-worker pointed out a project called [Crayon Physics](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsTqspnvAaI) where you draw shapes and make them interact (it's cooler than I'm making it sound) and once we get our whiteboard going, we're going to either use it to play with this Crayon Physics or write our own version specifically to use with the whiteboard. Working with a bunch of like-minded geeks is highly recommended. :) I'll be posting about my projects and about our whiteboard geekery in the coming months. I'm hoping to get an [Instructable](http://www.instructables.com) or two up and some videos as well.

[tags]electronics, wii, wiimote, whiteboard[/tags]

The New

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 10:53:16 +0000

[![](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2317/2131488688_af9eb798ea_m.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattgrommes/2131488688/ "photo sharing")

Obviously I haven’t posted in awhile so I figure this is as good of a place as any to start again. I decided I needed a change so I shaved off my beard. I’ve had the beard for awhile so I’m still getting used to my new face. I’m not excited about taking up shaving again but I think it’ll help me focus on other changes I need to make.

50 Miles Is A Lot

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 10:01:26 +0000

Man, 50 miles is a long way to ride your bike. I did a 50 mile ride on Saturday as part of the [Albuquerque Century](http://www.abqcentury.com) and it was hard. I mean really hard. It didn't help that I hadn't been riding my bike almost at all in the past 6 months. So really I had no right to ride that far and if the last 15 miles hadn't been downhill or flat I don't think I could have finished. But while I was unreasonably happy to see the finish line, I did it.

The main thing you forget when you don’t ride long distances for a while is how much sitting on a bike hurts your ass. That and my back muscles hurting from not being used like that for so long were what almost did me in, not my legs which is nice because it means I didn’t lose all my leg fitness. Now that I’ve done this insane ride I’m going to push myself to be ready for the 100 miles next year. That ride has 2 insane hills as well as big rolling hills on Tramway so there’s no faking that one. I’ll have to be ready for real. I’m also hoping to do some triathlons next year since I’ve been a slacker and don’t think I’ll be ready this year. We’ll see though.

I do have one suggestion for the ABQ Century folks: Do some kind of real finish line. I showed up at the finish to no applause, no picture, nothing. I figured I was just late since it took me awhile to finish but some other people there said there had been nothing the whole time they had been there either. Now to a lot of people, doing those long rides might just be another weekend but the rest of us would appreciate some kind of atta-boy or something. I don’t even need a plaque or anything. Hell, a whoohoo and a congrats would have sufficed.

But overall it was great. The food/rest stops were very well done and the route was mostly well marked. Hopefully next year some of the roads with no shoulder will be widened but that’s up to the city, not the ride people. I’m glad I did it and I look forward to going again.

New Digital Rights Protests, Just Like The Old Ones

Wed, 02 May 2007 15:12:56 +0000

[Digg on HDDVD "key" posts](http://blog.digg.com/?p=74)

Recently one of the keys that is used to encrypt the new high-def DVD discs was found and released online. Using this key you can decrypt the movie and put it on a computer or otherwise get around the idiotic restrictions the movie companies have put on the discs. This is obviously troubling to the movie companies since the HD encryption schemes were said to be “un-hackable”. hahaha.

So this key has been floating around and the movie companies have started issuing what are called “DMCA notices” to websites printing the key. These notices are the result of a law, the DMCA, that says you can’t get around restrictions on copyrighted stuff. This is a horrible law and has been used in even more horrible ways to restrict many people from doing various projects, giving speeches, etc. The notice says you have to take down the offending material and the website Digg had been fighting its users all day about them trying to post the key on the site. Finally, Digg relented and has stopped fighting its users and will not comply with the DMCA notices in this case. Good on them I say.

But what interests me about this is how similar it is to the situation a few years ago around the DVD key that was released which allowed the creation of applications to read regular DVDs, again to the chagrin of the movie industry. That also involved a released key, basically just a series of numbers, and attempts to take down the number. However, that was before the DMCA. Before the industry had a real legal tool to use to try to get people to remove this number from their website. In the DVD case, they tried and failed to use the standard copyright infringement against people, which didn’t work and which backfired just as in this case as people who would have never heard or cared about the key heard about the controversy. Now that the movie industry has the DMCA though, they could have actually stopped this information from being released. That’s the danger of the DMCA, it is a tool used solely to information from flowing. Has the key been found by an academic who set out to “release” it in a paper or a presentation, they could have been stopped. People like to think that information is always going to be replicated infinitely out on the net but with laws like the DMCA, the information can be stopped before it even reaches the net.

Also, with the previous DVD key release, the geek community rallied behind the release of the key. Tshirts were made with the key numbers on them, people even got tattoos of the key. Now though, the DMCA forces sites like Digg to fight its own users on this stuff. It’s not like the guys at Digg were itching to rile up their users or delete stuff from their site. They had to, under the law. Even if the notices end up being bogus (as some people are saying since the key is really just a number), Digg had to remove it.

The DMCA is a gift to big media companies and serves no one but them. It stops innovation, silences speech, holds back progress, and much more. This incident should serve as yet another example of why the DMCA needs to be repealed. I hope that the big blowup about this with Digg and the many other sites involved leads to real change. Eventually the DVD key issue went away and a great many new projects and applications sprung up around DVDs. The industry will surely fight for their “right” to stop people from knowing this key so they can try to control HD-DVDs a little longer but just like with DVDs, they’ll fail in spite of the new legal club they have to bludgeon people with.

Here’s a good article on the DMCA notices

[tags]hd-dvd,dvd,key,09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0,digg[/tags]

Spam and (Un)Popularity

Wed, 02 May 2007 13:36:50 +0000

I just implemented a new whitelist system for my email that has pretty much eliminated all the spam I was getting into my Inbox and I've discovered a weird side-effect. I'm a lot less popular than I once was. I used to keep my home webmail open all the time and every time I'd flip over to that tab in Firefox I'd have a bunch of email to go through. Now that I've gotten this whitelist going and only email I specifically allow into my Inbox gets in there, I get a lot less real email than I thought I was getting. Now I can not check my home email but 2 or 3 times a day. The fact that I was seeing tons of email in my Inbox fooled me into thinking I was getting a bunch of real email. Strange but very useful.

It’ll be a geeky post but soon I’ll go over my whitelist setup. It’s not something most people will be able to setup but it’s turned out very well so I want to share it. If you have Postfix with Sieve email filtering going this is a good compromise between getting a million spams and losing real email to a spam filter. Stay tuned for more details and some Perl code. Admit it, you can’t wait!

[tags]email,spam,postfix,sieve,whitelist[/tags]

On Atheism

Tue, 01 May 2007 09:44:52 +0000

> "_A quote by _[_George Santayana,_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santayana)_ "My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety toward the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests."_ From [this article](http://www.inteldaily.com/?c=155&a=1859) on a PBS series on atheism. I've always liked what Frank Lloyd Wright said when asked about his personal religious belief: _"I put a capital N on Nature and call that my church."_

I love how the people in the article speaking out against this series and atheism argue that this is anti-Christian and shouldn’t be allowed based on that. Just showing an alternative to religion doesn’t say anything one way or the other about religion. The idea that you can’t show or learn about something because it might offend people who don’t believe it is just stupid. And as I always think, if your religion is so weak that you have to be afraid of people learning about an alternative, you need to reexamine your faith.

[tags]atheism, religion, pbs, santayana, spinoza, frank+lloyd+wright[/tags]

Kurt Vonnegut is Dead

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 08:35:31 +0000

[Kurt Vonnegut, Counterculture’s Novelist, Dies](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/books/12vonnegut.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin) NY Times

Dammit. I’m as sad about this as I guess I can be about somebody who I never met. Like a lot of his fans, Vonnegut’s work meant a lot to me. More than most writers, even ones whose work I also love. I did feel like I knew him at least a little bit, based on how much of him was in his work. I started reading his work because I’d heard he was a science fiction writer, during the period when I was young (probably no older than 12) when I read only science fiction. Of course his work ended up being much, much more than just sf, without the nose-in-the-air refutation of the genre you get from people like Margaret Atwood. He always said he was glad when his work was finally removed from the science fiction drawer since people tend to mistake that one for a toilet. Slaughterhouse 5 was his best book, but I always loved Breakfast of Champions. BoC was a fun book, as dark as it is in some parts. The part near the end when Vonnegut, in the book as a character, remembers that the other character is supposed to be a speed reader and quickly makes him have taken a speed reading course so he can speed read the book he’s holding just blew my writer’s mind when I was younger. The sheer audacity of that impressed the hell out of me.

One of the things that makes me even more sad about his death is that he had to die during the Bush administration. Those people made him so angry and just confirmed his worst feelings about the darkness of humanity that I’m sad he never got to see their consignment to the scrapheap of history. I hope he did see things turning around though, as I think they are.

Luckily for us, we still have his heart, spread around through the characters and books he created. Even still, I’ll miss having him around.

So it goes.

EDIT: Jessica at Indexed (one of my favorite new sites) has such a great memorial to Kurt Vonnegut I have to share it. She nailed him completely.

[tags]kurt+vonnegut,vonnegut,death[/tags]

Grand Canyon Skywalk - Lame?

Mon, 09 Apr 2007 09:25:02 +0000

[http://www.hicks-wright.net/blog.php?id=5173](http://www.hicks-wright.net/blog.php?id=5173)

This blog post is a review of a trip this guy took to the new, highly cool-looking, Grand Canyon Skywalk. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s basically a glass-floored walkway that sticks out over the Canyon. Sounds awesome, and I’ve wanted to go on it ever since I first saw the pictures. According to this post, it pretty much sucks. First they charge you way more than advertised, then it’s not even finished, and they don’t let you take cameras. Let me repeat, NO CAMERAS. What? You’re at the Grand Freaking Canyon and they don’t let you take pictures?

I was just at the GC recently for the first time and I was pretty impressed by the tourist parts that were there, hopefully this will get better over time. But if they think they can just foist off some lame, overly-expensive, half-built thing on people (and not even let them take pictures for pete’s sake) and not have the bad word-of-mouth spread they’ve got another thing coming. I have no plans to go back to the Canyon anytime soon but until I hear that things have gotten a lot better at the Skywalk I’ll be skipping it.
[tags]grand+canyon,skywalk,grand+canyon+skywalk,lame,ripoff[/tags]

Free trip to San Francisco? Um, yes please!

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 13:30:02 +0000

I wanted to take a Java programming class for work so I signed up for one here in Albuquerque. A week's intensive class in a new language sounds like a good time to me, as weird as that sounds. So I was surprised and for a minute I was sad when they called me and said the class here was canceled due to low attendance. Of course I brightened up when the woman continued talking and said if I wanted to go, they would pay for my flight and hotel to take the class in San Francisco. Uh, sure, yeah, I can do that. Whoohoo! San Francisco is one of my favorite cities, I fell in love with the place after taking a bus tour with my family when I was younger. I'm going to be in class most of the time I'm there so it's not really a vacation or anything but the free trip is just an awesome opportunity. Besides being away from Kim and the kids for the week (the longest I've ever been gone), I can't wait just to be back in SF for awhile. [tags]san+francisco,java,class[/tags]

Trying for the triathlon

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 15:39:05 +0000

I've been doing my triathlon training, although my inability to get up early enough in the morning has been hindering my attempts somewhat. I've been swimming and running more than I ever thought I would, but I haven't been back on my bike much. I'm bringing it to work tomorrow and I'll get a chance to do a good ride since we get to leave early (a guy I didn't know passed away so we're closing early).

I’ve decided to do either the Socorro Triathlon or the Bottomless Lakes Triathlon. The Bottomless Lakes race is in a big lake I visited once before and I’d like to do that but being my first tri, I think it might be a good idea to do the Socorro one since it’s in a pool. I’ll have to decide soon so I don’t miss my chance. Both of these races are Sprint distance, which is good with my lessened training schedule.

I’m excited. I think I can do it, with my least confidence being in the running. The Sprint tri includes 3 miles of running, about 3 miles more than I’ve ever run at one time. :) I’m getting better but it’s going to take a lot more pavement pounding.

Flickr is not Yahoo

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 13:55:03 +0000

This topic is going to interest approximately 0% of people who read this blog but I have to say something. Flickr, one of my favorite websites, was acquired by Yahoo a year or so ago. This is fine, I have no problem with this and I'm glad the creators/owners of Flickr got fat checks for their work. **Yay for them.** The problem is that part of the deal with the Yahoo acquisition was that they now have merged the signin for Flickr with Yahoo's account system. This is lame. **Flickr had its own feel**, its own vibe/mojo/whatever. Yahoo has none of that. I remember using Yahoo back before Jerry and David even owned yahoo.com but I have no place in my heart for Yahoo. They are, to me, the new AOL. A do-it-all-for-you "portal" for people very unlike me. Granted, Yahoo is opening up a bit and now owns 2 of my favorite sites and gives money to people I like and respect (as much as you can like and respect people you don't know) but still, I never wanted a Yahoo ID and still don't want one. Never the less, I now have one (or rather, found out that I actually signed up for one at some point and had totally forgotten about it. I probably got it to try out some service I never went back to.). Signing into Flickr now, you're sent to a Yahoo login page. This is **like asking your dad for the keys to the car**. "Please, annoying authority figure I'm only passing near to get where I want to go, will you please let me move along as quickly as possible and go hang out with the cool kids?" So now I'm logged in to Flickr but every time Yahoo times out my sign in, I'm going to be reminded that now I have to get the keys from Dad. Lame. [tags]yahoo,flickr,account,lameness[/tags]

Find a new triathlon

Fri, 09 Mar 2007 22:17:29 +0000

So it looks like the triathlon I was planning on attending is cancelled. I found this out in the newsletter for a New Mexico based Triathlon club, [The Outlaws](http://www.outlawstriathlon.com/index2.html). So that sucks, but I found a triathlon club I might want to join so that's a silver lining. Although from reading about some of the members, I don't know if I'm up to snuff. One of them does 150+ bike rides, for pete's sake. I'll keep an eye on them though and see how my training goes. I'm going to sign up for one of the other triathlons around the same time as the defunct one soon. Speaking of training, I'm doing a lot better than I thought I would. I'm swimming a lot farther already and I'm getting better at breathing. I'm trying to keep to the techniques I read about in the book Total Immersion, which I recommend if you're into swimming and want to get better, or if you're like me and have no old habits to break and want to get better. I'm also running more and walking less in my training runs. Next is to get my flat bike tire fixed and see how much of that fitness I've lost not riding for 6 months. It's probably going to be pretty pathetic. And I'm anticipating my ass hurting, a lot. That's the price you pay for not riding. [tags]triathlon,training,running,swimming,cycling,new+mexico,albuquerque[/tags]

On Africa and Africans

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 08:48:01 +0000

[How to write about Africa](http://www.granta.com/extracts/2615) In Granta by Binyavanga Wainaina

I finished reading The Wizard Of The Crow a few weeks ago and can only now really appreciate this essay I think. Everything we in American seem to hear about Africa and Africans comes directly from what he says here. I was really blown away by the portrayal of everyday Africans in that book since I never see that. If you have any interest in Africa, I encourage you to read books by native African authors, you get a completely different sense of the place, as a setting instead of as a character itself like most non-natives seem to want to write.

[tags]africa,africans,writing[/tags]

Words as video

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 12:49:00 +0000

['What does Marcellus Wallace look like?'](http://www.motionographermedia.com/jarrattmoody/intonation.mov)

This is a completely awesome video of a speech from the movie Pulp Fiction. They’ve made the words just as riveting as the scene in the actual movie. This is both a testament to the power of video and to the just plain coolness of the Quentin Tarrantino’s script for the movie (and actor Samuel Jackson’s forceful speaking style as Jules, the hitman who gives this speech).

It’s 100% Not Safe For Work but do yourself a favor and watch it anyway, when you won’t get fired. :)

[tags]words,video,pulp+fiction,samuel+jackson,quentin+tarrantino[/tags]

Buzz about Co-Working

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 12:03:26 +0000

Well, this is a good sign I'd think: [BusinessWeek is covering co-working](http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/feb2007/sb20070226_761145.htm), which [I've written about before](/blog/index.php/category/coworking/). The first time I saw an ad featuring a reference to the internet without specifically explaining what it was, just assuming you'd know, I knew that was a marker for the future. Even though I doubt I'll ever get to do my own co-working place here in Albuquerque it sure is fun to think about and hopefully this article is a sign of things to come.

Also on that note, a friend of my wife’s (thanks Kevin!) sent me a link to a local place here in town that is sort of a cross between a co-working place and a regular executive suite and when I was at the gym the other day I saw an ad on TV for the place. It’s called Office Alternatives and while it’s a little more high end than I was thinking for co-working (they have receptionists and a lot of other amenities that I’m sure are musts for people in suits but not for geeks who need a place to put their laptop), it’s a step in that direction.

[tags]coworking,business,albuquerque,businessweek[/tags]

I Endure

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 14:38:44 +0000

I found a site called We Endure through a typical internet round-a-bout way (a comic book writer whose forum I used to frequent's wife had a link to it on her site) and I'm really happy with it. While the site's name is kind of strange, it's for endurance sports training so it fits. You add all your training to it: how far you ran, what much you swam, etc. It also does a countdown of days until the events you specify so now I know I only have 149 days till the Triathlon. Yikes. But anyway, if you're interested in training for some endurance event, I'd recommend using We Endure, it really helps to see all your training laid out in front of you.

My site is available here, if you’re interested.

[tags]weendure,endurance,triathlon,training,exercise[/tags]

A triathlon? Wha...?

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 11:25:16 +0000

The last place I worked had almost no opportunities for exercise, which I always thought was weird since it was the administrative center for a giant hospital. Plus it was very near a bunch of good restaurants. Those factors combined with my general lack of willpower and food issues to cause me to totally obliterate all the progress I'd made in losing weight. My new work is right next to a great bike trail I've always liked (the trail where I first learned to really ride actually) and has a deal with the nearby gym (the same one I used to go to when I lived in this part of town) so I've been really looking forward to getting back to working out and exercising. I haven't ridden my bike in like 6 months for pete's sake.

So to make a long story even longer, somehow the idea of doing a Triathlon got lodged in my head and for the first time in my life I’ve been running. Only twice so far but that’s 2 more times than I’ve ever even wanted to run in my life so it’s a step in the right direction. I bought some running shoes and some goggles for swimming, along with a Triathlon book, a running book, and a swimming book I read about a few months back in the Cool Tools mailing list. The triathlon I’m aiming for is at the end of July and it’s what’s called a Olympic distance: Swim 1500 meters (almost a mile), Bike 25 miles, Run 6.2 miles. I figure that’s enough to make it tough but not impossible. I don’t know if I’ll make it given that I can really only train at lunch and a little on the weekends but I’m giving it my best shot. I’ll be writing more about my training as it goes along hopefully.

One thing I learned today about it is that I’ll be competing in what they call the Clydesdale division, that is the division for people over 200 pounds. I’m not sure how I feel about the Clydesdale definition but since I have no chance of actually winning I don’t care one way or the other. If I just finish it’ll be a miracle so whether I’m beat by skinny people or fat people doesn’t matter to me as long as I cross the finish line and get healthier doing it.

Wish me luck. I need it.

[tags]triathlon,Clydesdale,training,swimming,cycling,running[/tags]

Finally, the ghost of Edison is leaving the building.

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 14:13:53 +0000

[Australia To Ban Old-Style Lightbulbs](http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/B/BAN_THE_BULB?SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT) > The Australian government on Tuesday announced plans to phase out incandescent light bulbs and replace them with more energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs across the country. This is great news. Hopefully this, and Wal-Mart's new commitment to CF bulbs will lead to similar action here in the US. I converted us to all CF awhile ago and have looked forward to the death of the old bulbs for even longer. There's no reason to use 100 year old technology. Internal combustion engines, you're next! :)

[tags]cfl,compact+fluorescent,light+bulbs,Australia,global+warming[/tags]

Google now significantly less useful

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 11:45:04 +0000

Google seems to have made a change to their searches that will now make them **significantly** less useful for me. I searched for 'typelist xml' and most of the search results contained searches for 'type list xml' with the 'type' and 'list' separated. This is not what I searched for and is completely distracting since phrases about 'types of lists' and 'things of type list' are dominating the results. Blah. It's one thing to put the 'Did you mean to search for ...' links and it's okay when they split your results up into multiple sections for results that hit multiple topics, but **don't do it invisibly**. This search is now completely useless on Google. Giving me these pointless search results is going to make me use a competitor for these types of searches and I don't think I'll be alone if they keep this up. People doing technical searches need precise results, and those are the people who turned everybody onto Google in the first place. [tags]google,searching[/tags]

A Reader's Dilemma

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 13:13:33 +0000

I just finished the very good and interesting, but also very long, book The Wizard of the Crow (750+ pages) and of course now I'm looking for the next book to read. I got my copy of Sacred Games and of course I want to read that next but it's 900 pages. I've always been in the habit of sort-of cleansing my palate in between big or tough books with a short paperback, usually some science fiction that won't tax my mind. It's a weird practice, but I went through a phase where I read the last page of everything I read first so I'm used to my eccentricities. The rub comes with my 2007 goal of doing an autodidact literature "class" for myself by using my website [Unreads.com](http://www.unreads.com) to deeply read and really study a bunch of classics. I listened to a couple of audio courses from The Learning Company (everything they have by [Arnold Weinstein](http://www.teach12.com/store/professor.asp?ID=81), my new personal learning guru, and Books That Have Made History) and bought a bunch of the books. Those courses were an incredibly enlightening experience I'll post on more later, they're very much recommended. So I've painted myself into a corner by wanting to cleanse my palate but also not wanting to waste any reading time with fluff. My compromise is that I brought my collection of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays to get in some of my "studying" without having to commit to a whole book while Sacred Games is beckoning to me. Being a reader is fraught with problems, I tell you. :)

[tags]reading,books,sacred+games,the+learning+company,literature[/tags]

Cool workspaces

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 15:34:49 +0000

Ever since I first heard of the author Po Bronson's shared Writer's Grotto office space I've thought it would be extremely cool to set up a shared workspace. There's a new thing coming up called Coworking that's focussed on geeks that I would love to get into. The idea is that you get a space and outfit it with desks, chairs, couches, wifi internet access, a fridge, etc., and get people to work there instead of in coffee shops. You either pay for a day's use of a desk or longer-term. The ideal place would have the same kind of cool vibe as a coffee shop without the random crowds and noise. Cheaper than paying for a regular office, plus with other people around doing stuff for inspiration, ideas, etc.

My dream is doing programming for myself, hence the creation of Mattorama Heavy Industries, and if I get the chance to make money doing that, I’m seriously considering setting something like this up. My only fear is having to deal so much with running the space that I don’t get to work on my own things but that’s probably the business equivalent of premature optimization, worrying about things that won’t end actually being a problem. I don’t think it would take much money to get started either, which is a bonus.

For more info, check out this NYTimes article on a space focussed on writers, and this blog post about ideal working environments. If you’re in Albuquerque and have think this is a good idea, please comment on this post. I’d love to hear there’s a ton of interest in this type of environment here in town.
[tags]coworking,Albuquerque,working[/tags]

Haggard! Now with at least 5% more heterosexuality!

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 15:05:02 +0000

[Haggard now "completely heterosexual"](http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070206/ap_on_re_us/haggard_sex_allegations) > DENVER - One of four ministers who oversaw three weeks of intensive counseling for the Rev. Ted Haggard said the disgraced minister emerged convinced that he is "completely heterosexual." Yeah, riiight. He's just going to start hanging out at local fire departments and doing the keynote at the next lumberjack convention. But he's not gay, oh no. The crack religious psychiatric commando team they put together to "cure" him also had this to say: > Another oversight board member, the Rev. Mike Ware of Westminster, said the group recommended the move out of town and the Haggards agreed. > It was also the oversight board that strongly urged Haggard to go into secular work. "So congrats, you're cured. But leave town and get out of our church." I almost feel sorry for Haggard. The self-loathing he must feel is just terrible. But then again, he's a bigot whose words have instilled the same loathing in other gay people and their families so I hope he stays in the closet and hates himself for life. Maybe he'll take up self-mutilation like a lot of other gay people have when forced to deal with the stress of hating who they are. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy. [tags]haggard,gay,homosexual,bigot[/tags]

I wanted the new Aenied translation, but...

Sat, 03 Feb 2007 17:20:16 +0000

![picture(1.jpg](http://s3.media.squarespace.com/production/1529026/18137065/blog/wp-photos/20070203-172015-1.jpg "picture(1.jpg")

40 freaking dollars? It’s not even 400 pages! This is looking like one of those books people buy to say they have it so I guess they’re trying to squeeze as much money out of people as possible. Sheesh. If I get around to wanting to read it before the paperback comes out off to Amazon I’ll go I guess.

I had another similar expensive book experience the other day. I bought Infinite Jest for $10 and along with that Lolita which is probably 1/10th as big for $15. I know the size of a book doesn’t determine how much it’ll cost but man, that stung.

[tags]books,aenied,money,expensive,infinite+jest,lolita[/tags]

Compact nonsense

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:05:08 +0000

[Great Books In Half The Time](http://jennydiski.typepad.com/biology_of_the_worst_kind/2007/01/compact_readssh.html) > Weidenfeld and Nicolson have come up with 'Compact Editions'. Tag line: Great Books in Half the Time. > > in the first series of Compact Editions _Anna Karenina, Moby-Dick_ along with _David Copperfield, The Mill on the Floss, Vanity Fair _and _Wives and Daughters_ will be 'sympathetically edited' down to fewer than 400 pages. But don't fret - so sympathetic are these editors that they will keep the central plot, characters and historical background. There's not really much else I could say to add to what Jenny Diski says about this abominable practice. It's one thing for someone to read the Cliff Notes of a book instead of the book but when **publishers** start "compacting" great books into less than half of what they once were, it's unconscionable. Diski is completely right about this, a cut-down Moby Dick is not Moby Dick, it's some other book written by someone who I assure you is nowhere near as talented as Melville. Why not just read the [read the Wikipedia page](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby_Dick) and pretend you read the book? It's the same practice. You haven't read Moby Dick in either case so what do you care? It's only giving people a safe way to lie about having read the book since in theory the words were all written down by the original author, just not in the same order, placement, or with the same impact. Yes, Moby Dick is a long book and it contains probably too much detail about whaling and whales but **THAT'S PART OF THE BOOK**! You can't take that stuff out and pretend you read Moby Dick, you just can't. You can't drive halfway to your destination and then tell everybody you went there and it was great and wasn't it awesome that you got to do it in half the time by avoiding the boring stuff, which is actually what made everybody else go there in first place? **ARRRGGGH!**

[tags]books,reading,stupidity[/tags]

Charlie Stross on living as a writer

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 12:28:46 +0000

[The writer's lifestyle](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/01/the_writers_lifestyle.html) > So, to summarize: it's badly paid, the hours are weird, the office environment can be claustrophobic, you can't get the staff, you're selling your wares to big corporations who can roll over in their sleep and crush you if you don't make nice, nobody's going to give you a champagne reception, a stretch limo or a signing tour, there's lots of business admin stuff to deal with, and you _still_ have to cram in a normal social life or you'll go mad. > > On the other hand: you're doing exactly what you always wanted to do (or you'd get frustrated and go do something else). And what could be better than that? This is why there's the phrase "Everybody wants to be a writer but nobody wants to write".

[tags]writing,charles+stross,writers[/tags]

Professor Buckaroo Banzai?

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 11:07:33 +0000

[Robocop, PhD](http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/posts.html "Robocop, PhD from Wired") in Wired

This article makes me smile. It’s about the actor Peter Weller, best known for being Robocop and Buckaroo Bonzai is now a professor teaching about Rome. I love to see smart people being able to do their thing and learn, which is what he’s doing now. He’s even an architecture buff, which makes me like him even more. His class on comparing movie portrayals of Rome to the real-life culture sounds incredibly interesting too, I wish I could take it.

It’s hard to imagine what freshmen think when they wander into Professor Banzai’s lecture hall. Weller reports that he loses a lot of students after the first class. “They thought they were going to get the easy A from old RoboCop,” he says with a laugh. The 450-page course reader tells them otherwise.
[tags]robocop,buckaroo+bonzai,actors,peter+weller,wired,professors,learning,rome,teaching[/tags]

Surviving an Internet vacation

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 10:20:04 +0000

[I Survived my Internet Vacation](http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,72546-0.html?tw=rss.index) By Lore Sjöberg

Lore Sjöberg is one of my favorite humor writers. He did one of the funniest sites ever to exist, Brunching Shuttlecocks. I don’t think it exists any more but you can still get some of the goodness with this Wired column. He also has one of my favorite author bios at the bottom of the page:

Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become…(some new thing every time)
[tags]humor,wired,internet,vacation,haha[/tags]

My new favorite phrase

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 14:30:03 +0000

I just read an article that contained my new favorite phrase: **potentially straightforward**. Any project you can think of is potentially straightforward if you know nothing about it. "Speaking as someone whose knowledge of geology could fit in 14 point font on a 3X5 index card, drilling to the center of the Earth is a potentially straightforward project." [tags]words[/tags]

The Pluto formerly known as a planet

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 11:52:06 +0000

> At the 2006 IAU meeting held in Prague this past summer, the scientists voted that every planet must also have "cleared the neighborhood around its orbit." Since only spheres with a large mass can achieve such orbital dominance, Pluto was no longer a planet. The scientific bureaucracy had spoken; our solar system had shrunk. Too bad for Pluto. But in the end I think this will turn out to be one of those nitpicky things only people like me know and bore everyone with.

“Did you know that technically a tomato is a fruit?”
“Is that right?”
“Yes, a tomato is technically a fruit but it was ruled a vegetable for tariff purposes. Hey, wake up!”
“Did you know Pluto isn’t really a planet because it doesn’t clear the neighborhood around its orbit?”
“Oh really…zzzzzzzz”

Pluto will stay a planet in everybody’s mind because it’s always been a planet. The IAU should have just grandfathered in Pluto, saved everybody a bunch of trouble, and made themselves heroes to every kid with even a passing interest in space (which should be a lot more of them).
[tags]space,science,pluto,planets[/tags]

Things My This Girl's Boyfriend Says

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 17:49:07 +0000

[http://www.thingsmyboyfriendsays.com/](http://www.thingsmyboyfriendsays.com/)

This is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time. If you have a sensitive brain or are offended by naughty words, don’t click. NSFW if your boss can read.

[tags]funny,humor,sayings,boyfriend[/tags]

Nokia N800 Internet Tablet: yummy!

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 12:23:26 +0000

[![Nokia N800 Tablet](http://mobilecrunch.com/wp-content/ScreenHunter_156.jpg "Nokia N800 Tablet")](http://mobilecrunch.com/2007/01/18/nokia-n800-a-real-world-review-after-one-months-use)[Nokia N800 Tablet: A real-world review](http://mobilecrunch.com/2007/01/18/nokia-n800-a-real-world-review-after-one-months-use) on MobileCrunch

I want this. I wanted the original Nokia internet tablet, the 770, and this looks like they even improved on that one. It’s definately a wishlist item for when I have too much money but it’s just so cool. It runs Linux so you can put all kinds of different applications on it, it has a great screen, plays videos or music, just tons of stuff. $400, which isn’t bad for a device of this caliber, but still more than I have to spend on a frivolous purchase I have no real pressing need for. A geek can dream though.

[tags]geekery,geek,nokia,n800,tablet,toys[/tags]

Building huge websites

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 13:28:37 +0000

[Inside Myspace.com](http://www.baselinemag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=198614,00.asp) >

**Membership Milestones:**

**500,000 Users: A Simple Architecture Stumbles **

**1 Million Users:Vertical Partitioning Solves Scalability Woes **

**3 Million Users: Scale-Out Wins Over Scale-Up **

**9 Million Users: Site Migrates to ASP.NET, Adds Virtual Storage **

**26 Million Users: MySpace Embraces 64-Bit Technology**

Wow, if you're into reading about massively scalable websites, and I am, this is a great article. The numbers [Myspace ](http://www.myspace.com)is running up against are just insane. I'm extremely surprised to learn they run everything off of Windows servers with MS SQL Server databases. Their Windows admins' lives must just be hell. I'm biased though (having a vital Windows2000 server completely die for no reason after a reboot to install an important security patch will do that to you) so they could sleep like babies for all I know. I do wonder how much more they could do with the equivalent Linux servers running [Mysql ](http://www.mysql.com)or [Postgres](http://www.postgresql.org). Based on my somewhat limited experience, a lot more. But I'm sure Windows fans would argue, they do that. :)

[tags]myspace,architecture,windows,linux,scalability[/tags]

Zadie Smith on reading

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 14:39:56 +0000

More from [Zadie Smith's essay](http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1988887,00.html): > A novel is a two-way street, in which the labour required on either side is, in the end, equal. Reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing - I really believe that. As for those people who align reading with the essentially passive experience of watching television, they only wish to debase reading and readers. The more accurate analogy is that of the amateur musician placing her sheet music on the stand and preparing to play. She must use her own, hard-won, skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift she gives the composer and the composer gives her. I'm going to start a series of posts on reading **Any Day Now**. After listening to a bunch of [literary courses on audiobook](http://www.teach12.com "The Teaching Company") and thinking hard about reading in building [Unreads](http://www.unreads.com "Unreads"), I want to say some things about reading that relate to this topic. More soon.

[tags]reading,zadie+smith[/tags]

Zadie Smith on writing a Great Novel (or not)

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 13:15:02 +0000

[Fail Better](http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1988887,00.html) Zadie Smith from The Guardian > 1\. The tale of Clive > I want you to think of a young man called Clive. Clive is on a familiar literary mission: he wants to write the perfect novel. Clive has a lot going for him: he's intelligent and well read; he's made a study of contemporary fiction and can see clearly where his peers have gone wrong; he has read a good deal of rigorous literary theory - those elegant blueprints for novels not yet built - and is now ready to build his own unparalleled house of words. Maybe Clive even teaches novels, takes them apart and puts them back together. If writing is a craft, he has all the skills, every tool. Clive is ready. He clears out the spare room in his flat, invests in an ergonomic chair, and sits down in front of the blank possibility of the Microsoft Word program. Hovering above his desktop he sees the perfect outline of his platonic novel - all he need do is drag it from the ether into the real. He's excited. He begins. I'm even more glad I picked up Ms. Smith's 'On Beauty' during my year-end Borders shopping spree now that I've read this.

[tags]writing,zadie+smith[/tags]

Worldwide Information Sharing

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 14:44:25 +0000

[Build an open source, universal nut sheller (for peanuts)](http://www.redhat.com/magazine/026dec06/features/full_belly/?sc_cid=bcm_edmsept_007)

This is the type of thing that would have been mostly impossible not too long ago. These guys are building a cheap, durable machine to help people in developing countries shell peanuts and make money. Before we were able to share information and help each other out across the world, these types of programs took enormous amounts of time and/or money to get working. But now, these guys can do an interview with Redhat Magazine and get the word out to potentially millions of interested people in no time. And this is a real project too, not just some company coming in and getting a photo op that will never be practical or amount to anything.

I’ve been very interested in the micro-lending programs where you can loan somebody say a few hundred dollars to buy what they need to get a small business going. As soon as Kim and I get some more of our bad debt paid off, I’m planning on helping out with micro-loans and real-world projects like this one. There’s no reason we can’t use the net to help out people around the world in a small way and end up making a big difference. You don’t need a huge World Bank style operation to help, a bunch of people making small contributions can really do some good. I’ll be posting more about this as time goes on.

MORE: The Full Belly Project, PopSci award given for the machine

[tags]redhat,money,peanuts,open+source,full+belly+project[/tags]

Awesome Samurai T-Shirt

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 12:15:03 +0000

[![](http://www.threadless.com/product/607/minizoom.jpg)](http://www.threadless.com/product/607/No_More_Bento?streetteam=tcritic)[No More Bento](http://www.threadless.com/product/607/No_More_Bento?streetteam=tcritic)

This is a just plain awesome shirt. I’ve been on a martial arts movie kick recently so while I saw this shirt previously, it slash its way into my brain then the way it’s doing now.

This reminds me that I haven’t gotten a Threadless newsletter in awhile so I’m behind on their new shirts. That’s probably a good thing though since my current job doesn’t allow tshirts. I’m looking for a new job though so I’m really hoping I can go back to being casual again.

[tags]tshirts,threadless,samurai[/tags]

On Pessimism

Sat, 13 Jan 2007 22:05:41 +0000

In: [Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2007](http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/289/Bruce-Sterling-State-of-the-Worl-page01.html) By: Jamais Cascio (cascio) Thu 11 Jan 07 08:38

“Pessimism is a luxury of good times. In difficult times, pessimism is a
self-fulfilling, self-inflicted death sentence.”

–Norwegian social scientist Evelin Lindner

I choose to be optimistic.

Dancing Hams

Sat, 13 Jan 2007 12:11:40 +0000

[Photo Sharing](http://www.dropshots.com/) - [Upload Video](http://www.dropshots.com/) - [Video Sharing](http://www.dropshots.com/) - [Share Photos](http://www.dropshots.com/)

Make Your Own Everything!

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 15:16:36 +0000

![Home Fabricator image from New Scientist](http://www.newscientisttech.com/data/images/ns/cms/dn10922/dn10922-1_250.jpg "Home Fabricator image from New Scientist")

Desktop fabricator may kick-start home revolution

Man, I can’t even describe how cool this is. It’s home CNC machine for fabricating objects out of different types of materials. Say you need a special wrench for a one-off nut in your car? Just create or download the plans and print one out for yourself out of a block of plastic. Or use plans for a model of a baseball player, put your kid’s face on it and throw some more plastic in the machine.
The real treat is near the end of the article where they talk about the guy who made a fab that could make its own parts. Self-reproducing fabricators in the home! For $2000! It makes me giddy just thinking about it.
Your kids may never buy physical toys or other simple (and in the future, not-so-simple) objects. They’ll download the plans and print them out.
[tags]future,diy,fab,diamond+age,science[/tags]

Woohoo! A new Vikram Chandra book!

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 12:20:51 +0000

I happened on an article in Salon.com yesterday talking about [Sacred Games](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0061130354/mattorama), the new book by [Vikram Chandra](http://www.vikramchandra.com). You're already excited, I know. He's the author of one of my top 10 favorite books of all time, [Red Earth and Pouring Rain](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0316132934/mattorama). I used to go to the library and pick out a random book from the New Releases shelf to read. Red Earth's cover, of a monkey with his arm resting on a typewriter, caught my eye and I absolutely fell in love with the book. After reading it for free I bought a copy, lost it somehow, and bought another one because I couldn't bear not to have it available to read. That was in 1995\. He released a book of short stories in '97 which I never got around to reading for some reason, then nothing until now. I just placed my order for [Sacred Games](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0061130354/mattorama) with Amazon and I'm sure the temptation to dig into it as soon as it arrives will be strong. I've got 2 books from the library however ([Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0156030489/mattorama) and [The Wizard of the Crow](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/037542248X/mattorama)) so I'll have to wait. I just hope Chandra's next one doesn't take so long, I'm already waiting for it. [tags]books,vikram+chandra,india,bombay,fiction,sacred+games[/tags]

Bruce Sterling is my god

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 11:24:11 +0000

[This is Bruce Sterling's State of the World](http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/289/Bruce-Sterling-State-of-the-Worl-page01.html) "talk". It's Bruce talking and answering questions about how he sees the world starting 2007\. Bruce is a science fiction writer by trade but he's really a professional thinker (which really all sf writers should be but sadly aren't, as evidenced by the cover of ASIMOV'S sf magazine this month which features an Icarus figure with metal wings for pete's sake. Sometimes I want to shake sf writers and yell THIS ISN'T THE FIFTIES! GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR ASS AND INTO THE 21ST CENTURY! But I digress.). He travels all over and his personal HQ is in Serbia so he sees a lot more of the world than most people. He's also an inveterate pulse-taker so he has his fingers on a lot of different areas. Even if you're not an sf fan you should read what he has to say. You might get your mind blown. Every time I read something of his or hear a speech he's given, it's like a big old shock to my electrodes that breathes life into my piecemeal brain. I feel like I should be writing or building something again. 2006 was kind of a Sit Around And Be Lazy For No Reason year but I'm planning on making 2007 a Go Do Something year. Thanks Bruce. [tags]future, bruce+sterling, world, green, science fiction[/tags]

Movie / Cinema / Film fans

Fri, 05 Jan 2007 10:38:27 +0000

![7samuraicompare.gif](http://s3.media.squarespace.com/production/1529026/18137065/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/7samuraicompare.gif)

This is a funny comparison. I think you can safely say that people who would buy the 3-disc Criterion collection of Seven Samurai aren’t your average movie watcher.

Our yard the night of the storm

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 11:33:28 +0000

[![](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/124/339010382_8d02cc395c_m.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattgrommes/339010382/ "photo sharing")

Our yard the night of the storm

Originally uploaded by MattGrommes.

Even more snow fell after this. For more pics, click here and see my Flickr pictures.

Ack! Snow

Sat, 30 Dec 2006 14:48:23 +0000

Man, we just had our second big snow storm in 2 weeks. There's probably a foot of snow outside, more than I've ever seen in my life. Pictures to follow.

300 Posts?

Sat, 23 Dec 2006 12:21:43 +0000

Man, I just noticed that the previous post was my 300th on Matt O' Rama. I've actually done a lot more than that but I used to split my posts up to different blogs. I started the original Matt O' Rama website is probably 1997 in college at New Mexico Tech. On it I had a proto-blog I called Brain Radiation, which was just part of that website before people just starting having their blog be the whole site. Then I started collecting links on a Blogger blog called Research Can Be Fun. I also had a wedding blog I didn't post to as much as I should have, and finally I started Matt O' Rama at some point long ago. The recent switch to using the Wordpress system turned out to happen at just the right time: 300 posts, almost the new year, etc. Here's to 300 more!

Woohoo! New camera

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 22:28:33 +0000

I had my eye on a Panasonic Lumix digital camera for awhile after it was recommended on the (awesome) [Cool Tools](http://www.kk.org/cooltools) mailing list. The problem was the camera he talked about was discontinued. Luckily, a new version of the same unit was released and once I saw it favorably reviewed both by Kevin Kelly on the Cool Tools list but by Cory Doctorow on [Boing Boing](http://www.boingboing.net), I knew I had to get it. Our old Toshiba was great but it was getting old and the extreme slowness of it's shutter was really bugging me. You wouldn't believe the number of shots I deleted in [Picasa](http://picasa.google.com/) before uploading to [Flickr](http://www.flickr.com). So my new Lumix TZ1 was delivered today and the battery is charging as I write this. It's a great little camera. 5 megapixels, fast shutter, numerous helpful "modes" to help my photography-challenged self take better pictures. But the big thing is the 10X optical zoom, using some kind of folding mirror system. The big zoom is the main feature for me, I like to take pictures of plants and things on my walks and of stuff I find riding my bike. Plus it was only $240 with a free 1GB memory card and carrying case at [Newegg.com](http://www.newegg.com), my favorite online computer store.

So the moral of the story is that there will be tons more pictures in my Flickr account soon. I might make 2007 the year I upgrade to a Flickr pro account and really start learning more about how to take good pictures.

[tags]camera,flickr,lumix,digital+cameras[/tags]

Welcome

Sat, 18 Nov 2006 10:55:14 +0000

This is the new Matt O' Rama, now built with Wordpress. For all 3 of you who read my blog, this is part of the reason it's taken me so long to post here. Plus, extreme laziness, a new job, busy-ness, and extreme laziness. I will be posting here more now though.

I don’t know if I’m as in love with this theme for the look of the site as I was a few weeks ago so things might be changing here some more. If you have comments, please let me know.

[tags]wordpress,mattorama,unreads,grommes[/tags]

Stop helping the terrorists!

Fri, 25 Aug 2006 10:18:00 +0000

[Schneier on Security: What the Terrorists Want](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/what_the_terror.html) > The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act. > > And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want. Once again Bruce Schneier is right on point. We've effectively given terrorists a whole new weapon; our own over-reaction. They can pretty much count on us mucking things up royaly even when there's been no attack. The guys in London with their magic liquid bombs were no where near blowing anything up and they were caught but we're still banning liquids on planes for who knows how long (which itself is pretty useless but that's a different topic). All any smart terrorist group has to do now is make up a plan for using laptops as bombs and leak the info to the authorities and watch global business flying evaporate when laptops are banned for real. All without really having to do any hard work. We need to chill the hell out and start thinking instead of pissing ourselves every time 2 people with dark skin check their watches at the same time.

Tags: grommes, schneier, terrorism, terrorists, airlines

Don't Believe The Hype

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 10:21:00 +0000

Kung Fu Monkey: “Wait, Aren’t You Scared?”

“Wait, Aren’t You Scared?”

Errr, no. And if you are, you frankly should be a little goddam embarrassed.

This is just plain great. Read it.

Tags: grommes, terror, fear, terrorism, bombings

Nice try at least

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 17:03:11 +0000

[The Observer | The 100 greatest novels of all time: The list](http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1061037,00.html) No list like this is ever going to please even a fraction of people but this one is a little strange even considering that qualification. It's very heavy on the English authors (which isn't too surprising since it's an English paper doing the list) but any list of greatest novels whose only Hemingway is a book of short stories is a little off in more than one sense (no Sun Also Rises? And since when is a collection of stories a novel?). And no Vonnegut? That puts me off right there. No Delillo? No Pynchon? Don Quixote as number one is a safe choice but a good one. But I guess my liking for The New biases me against any list like this which has to be heavy with The Old to appease people who think anything from the past century is automatically disqualified from Great status. Like I say, nice try.

'Kettle, you sure are black', said Pot.

Sat, 29 Jul 2006 12:12:47 +0000

[Joel on Software](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/07/29.html) > Third. I can't really think of anyone less qualified to "protect" you from "geeks" than a bunch of insurance salesmen. Get over yourselves. Have you looked at your own actuaries? Have you noticed how insurance people dress? This is great. I used to be very offended by ads like this, which used to be a lot more prominent before the .com boom when the geeks were the ones rolling in cash, but I stopped even noticing them. Joel sure noticed this one though, and his takedown is a must-read.

Travel Lessons

Thu, 20 Jul 2006 11:18:04 +0000

I've travelled a bit. Not as much as a lot of people, but more than most people I know. But I learned quite a bit on our recent family trip to New York City and northern New York state. Here's a few of the lessons I learned.

New York City isn’t scary, even with kids.
I had been leary of travelling to and around NYC (abbreviated for laziness, not coolness) but it’s not bad at all. Even with the kids we got around everywhere we needed to go quickly and easily and with no hassles besides too much walking until we got the gumption to take the subways. We were in the Times Square / Theater District area which is very well lit and full of other people at all hours.
If anybody ever tells you to visit Newark, New Jersey you should immediately punch them in the head as hard as you can.
I’ve never been to such a craphole of a city. Sorry if you live there but you should leave immediately. It’s like a whole city made of those city blocks you see where the buildings are all shuttered and the billboards haven’t been changed since they put up the ‘Try New Coke!’ signs. And as my brother-in-law put it, it’s as if they designed the streets by sneezing on a piece of paper and connecting the dots. Bleh.
People suck, and they hate middle seats.
Delta Airlines, in their infinite wisdom, decided to put me 20 rows away from Kim and the kids. I asked the woman with the seat that rightfully should have been mine next to my family if she’d mind switching and she said fine, until she learned that I had a middle seat. Then she refused. She couldn’t have been more than 5 and a half feet tall and in no way needed more legroom than I do at 6 feet but as she explained to the flight attendent “I just don’t want a middle seat” as if that was an explanation. So I switched and finally was able to move Kim and Allison’s seats up to mine, tying up the whole plane just so that idiot wouldn’t have to have a middle seat.
Rental car companies will screw you if you’re prepared.
If you make a car reservation ahead of time, the rental company charges you more than if you walk up and get a car with no reservation. And not a little more, a lot. Like almost 100% more. We had an ordeal with Avis about their not-written-down-anywhere policy of requiring a corporate ID if you use a corporate discount. We didn’t have an id. Not that we forgot it, we were never given one. In the course of trying to get them to honor the discount, the lady said she’d just give us the walkup rate, which was almost 50% of the reserved rate. My brother-in-law and I were so taken aback by this we questioned her on it to the point where she probably would have liked to just kick us out and not rent the car to us. They basically figure that if you’re consciencious you either really need the car for something specific or you’re a corporation. In either case they feel perfectly alright with totally screwing you. If it was a little more to plan ahead, maybe I’d understand. If you do a walk-up rental, you’re helping them out by renting a car they wouldn’t have rented otherwise so they give a discount. But they take advantage of your need or corporate pocketbook to an absolutely absurd degree and all it does is make me want to find a way of putting in a reservation under one name, cancelling it the same day and walking in to rent the car under another name.
Southwest values old people and children. Delta Airlines values rich people and VIPs.
I’m used to flying Southwest. Both because I’m cheap and because they do a heck of a job. There are reasons beyond price why Southwest is the only profitable carrier and has been profitable for literally years in a row while the others are in bankrupcy. When boarding starts for Southwest they let people with kids, the disabled, and the elderly get on first. Delta lets their VIPs on first, with first class next and everybody else afterward in some kind of seemingly random class system. Right there tells what each carrier’s values are. If Southwest had assigned seating, I’d guess that based on the values I see, Southwest would not split up families on every leg of a flight. Delta knew we were all together and we had a baby but still, I got a seat on the other end of the plane despite buying our tickets fairly far in advance. And the attendents don’t care even a little bit. I understand that not everybody can be in the seat they want but it’s insane to put two parents with two small kids, one of whom isn’t even 1 year old yet, in different seats. I’ll never fly Delta again.
Tags: grommes, travel, new+york, flying, delta

Scientists Are Cool

Mon, 03 Jul 2006 09:51:55 +0000

[Long Now: Views: Essays: Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine](http://www.longnow.org/views/essays/articles/ArtFeynman.php) This is a really good essay by Danny Hillis, one of my favorite people, about Richard Feynman, one of my other favorite people. Hillis gets right to the heart of what makes some scientists the best kind of people. Feynman was incredibly curious, generous, smart, and willing to talk to anybody about anything he knew about. And when you're Richard Feynman, you know a lot about a lot. If more scientists were as open and willing to break things down to explanations "regular" people could understand, we wouldn't have as much of a problem with the sciences as we do. I think people tend to feel dumb when talking about science since anymore we know so much that it's easy to get bogged down in details and complications. I make it a point to talk openly and easily about science with kids so they feel like it's something they can get their arms around and not some far-off thing only people in lab coats can understand. Feynman was the ultimate example of that, somebody who could make anybody understand even things like quantum chromodynamics. Of course, he's also the one who said that if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you're wrong.

Tags: grommes, scientists, science, feynman, hillis

Screw The Censors

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 13:11:48 +0000

Light Blue Touchpaper » Ignoring the “Great Firewall of China”

However, because the original packets are passed through the firewall unscathed, if both of the endpoints were to completely ignore the firewall’s reset packets, then the connection will proceed unhindered! We’ve done some real experiments on this — and it works just fine!!

This is a very easy-to-use way of getting around most of the censorship done by the so-called “Great Firewall of China”. I applaud any attempts to route around censorship, especially political censoring like the government of China does.

Tags: grommes, china, censorship

This Sucks

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 16:11:09 +0000

[KRQE News 13 - Flames wipe out four businesses](http://www.krqe.com/expanded.asp?ID=15965) One of the places apparently destroyed by a stripmall fire this morning was The Comic Stop, the shop I went to weekly for years. After I dropped out of comics for a few years I decided to find a shop and see if there was anything I was interested in. I found the Comic Stop and quickly returned to the comics habit in full force. The owner, James, was in a lot of ways a stereotypical comic geek turned shop owner but he's a hell of a guy and I could live with occasional ranting about things like changes the new Battlestar Galactica made to the Viper's wings. Going to a comic shop every week means you get to know the people at the shop and hopefully become friendly with them. I still fondly remember George, the guy who owned Comic City, the shop in San Diego that my parents drove us 30 minutes to every week for years and years over a decade ago now. James and Mary, who also worked in the shop, became friends of mine pretty easily, not something that usually happens to a introvert like me.

This is a terrible and sad thing to happen. Thankfully nobody was hurt. Since we moved pretty far from the shop I haven’t been there but I hope he starts up again. There’s not too many genuinely nice and friendly comic shop people in Albuquerque and he deserves to try again.

Tags: grommes, comics, fire, comic+stop, albuquerque, friends

Puppetron Rocks!

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 14:11:48 +0000

One of my favorite artists, Beck, was in town on Friday and I was lucky enough to get to go see him. It rocked. I'd heard that he was performing partly with puppets and I was skeptical but man, those puppets were so cool it's crazy. He had a mini stage setup with puppets of the band performing behind the real guys. Then the puppets were broadcast on the big screen behind the stage so you saw Beck, and Puppet Beck performing everything. It wouldn't have worked with very many bands, I'd think, but Beck has always had a playful / weird streak so it completely worked. I was happy enough with this show that I'm not really all that disappointed that I'm probably not going to get to see Tom Petty and Pearl Jam in Denver next weekend.

Tags: grommes, concerts, music, beck, puppets

How About Banning Unfeeling Idiots From Library Boards?

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 16:59:00 +0000

[The Porter County (Indiana) library system board of directors, apparently realizing that they'd rather not spend their afterlife roasting in hell, has lifted their ban on lending books to homeless children living in shelters.](http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2006_06.php#009239) Sheesh. These people should all lose their jobs for even thinking of something like this. A library should be a place for people to come and have a chance to better themselves or at the least get a break from reality, something I'd imagine most people living in homeless shelters would welcome. They don't need to be treated like criminals and denied access to books, of all things. Shame on this board, I hope they never have to be treated like they've treated the residents of the shelter.

Beware Falling Books!

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 09:46:25 +0000

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000;}.flickr-yourcomment {}.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px;}.flickr-caption { font: 75%;/* color: #666666; */ margin-top: 0px;}.flickr-buddyicon { margin-right:5px; vertical-align:middle; border: solid 1px;}.flickr-postedby { font: 75%;}

[![](http://static.flickr.com/61/170057515_23ce0a628a.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/klara/170057515/ "photo sharing") [problem in the library](http://www.flickr.com/photos/klara/170057515/), originally uploaded by [Klara Kim](http://www.flickr.com/people/klara/).

The horror! The horror!

Unreads First Real User!

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 11:02:56 +0000

So I'm looking at the [Unreads.com](http://www.unreads.com) homepage the other day and what do I see? The site's first actual user! [Click to see Cinqo's Unreads Stack](http://www.unreads.com/user/cinqo). Awesome. I have no idea who this person is but from the look of the books on their list, I'm intrigued. They look like my kind of person. Whoohoo!

I’m going to start emailing people today to have them look at the site so hopefully more people will be giving me feedback before too long. I’ve been working on the text and the Help popups and man, it’s hard. I’m very wordy so boiling things down to their essence is tough stuff. It’s useful though, it helps me crystallize my thoughts on the site. You work with something and you have an idea but actually communicating that to people who don’t know anything about the site makes you figure out just exactly what the thing is supposed to do. Unreads can appeal to lots of different people with different uses but I can’t just list a bunch of ways to use the site, it has to pull people in. Hopefully I’ll make enough money off the site eventually to hire somebody to help me out in this area.

Onward and upward.

Tags: grommes, unreads, startup, web2.0, design

DIY

Fri, 16 Jun 2006 13:19:09 +0000

[MAKE: Blog: DIY Smoker](http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/06/diy_smoker.html) ![](http://www.makezine.com/blog/img413_834.jpg) This Trashcan Smoker I made last weekend was featured on the MAKE magazine blog. The author of the article in ReadyMade magazine where I got the idea also found it. Awesome!

The coolest shoes in the universe

Thu, 15 Jun 2006 10:55:00 +0000

[![](http://static.flickr.com/67/166462274_1532691abf.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattgrommes/166462274/ "photo sharing") [The coolest shoes in the universe](http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattgrommes/166462274/), originally uploaded by [MattGrommes](http://www.flickr.com/people/mattgrommes/).

A birthday present from my parents. Thanks!

PEACE

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 09:32:59 +0000

[Thinking Peace, Fight Terrorism, Robert Alberti](http://www.thinkingpeace.com/pages/Articles/Archive1/arts003.html) > We have an opportunity, now laid so grievously before us, to start and win a war with our most powerful and uniquely American weapons: love, opportunity, education and hope. Excellent. Just excellent. Read it.

READING

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 09:32:10 +0000

[Field Tested Books](http://www.coudal.com/ftb/index.php) > The Field-Tested Books project is our version of the Heisenberg principle: reading a certain book in a certain place uniquely affects a person's experience with both. The writing you'll find here is grounded in that idea. You won't find any book reviews here. You'll find reviews of experience. While as a sciencey type person I find the connection to Heisenburg's uncertainty principle tenuous at best, this is a great idea. Reviewing the experience of reading is something I'm very into.

Tags: grommes, books, reading, coudal, experience, reviews

same as free-climbing El Capitan because they’re both rocks. People think reading is just something you can do with no preperation. Reading a hard book is hard. You need to practice and work your way up to the hard ones, just like with any hobby or skill. Jumping in to Ulysses without working up to is like expecting to understand French just because you have ears.

Saying you were turned off of reading because your teachers made you read hard books in school is just an excuse. You’re an adult, you can read whatever you want. Start with “bad thrillers on hot beaches” as she says she does read, and make the commitment to move up from there. Maybe someday you’ll get to the scary books you were forced to read before and you’ll like them. If you don’t care, you’ll never get better at anything. You can’t free-climb El Capitan on your first go but if you want to, you’ll get there. Of course if you force your kid to plow through Jane Eyre as a high school freshman, they probably won’t like it (I didn’t). But if you force your kid to spend all their free time on the piano, they won’t like that either. It’s not about forcing, it’s about introducing. Kids should be made to know that there is a wonderful world of hard but rewarding books out there that they can work up to.

I read a quote but an author whose name I can’t remember where he said when he first read a hard book “he bored the book.” But when he had grown up and lived life a little more he had something to bring to the table in his relationship with that book and he enjoyed it. That’s a very writerly way of putting it but it’s true. You need to bring something to the table to appreciate a hard book. Getting kids going down that path early is the best thing you can do for them. Just saying that “it’s not what they read that counts, it’s that they read” is gibberish if all they ever do is read fashion magazines and never work up from there. Nobody says it’s okay for someone to play Happy Birthday on the piano over and over again because “it’s good that they’re playing” you can’t just let kids read at the same level forever. But you can’t beat it into them either because then you end up with this lady, crowing about her ignorance.

Tags: grommes, reading, books

BUILDINGS

Fri, 26 May 2006 11:15:58 +0000

[The Longest Building I Have Ever Seen](http://www.geartekcorporation.com/dailyphoto/2006/longestbuilding.html) > It is totally windowless and stretches for at least a mile, although it seems to defy laws of space-time so it may be longer or shorter than that. From certain angles the building's length actually converges perfectly on a vanishing point. As I walk alongside the building I can only imagine it as a thought, a single orthogonal receding to infinity. This is great. I would have been freaked out by the sidewalk as well.

HACKING

Wed, 24 May 2006 09:34:29 +0000

[brad's life - How should I hack?](http://brad.livejournal.com/2226237.html) > From: jwz > > I think all of those sound boring. > > I think you ought to figure out what to do to make people stop defecting from LJ to Myspace, because I hate having to ever look at that piece of crap. Ask a stupid question, never know what you're going to get. The creator of LiveJournal asks "How should I hack?" meaning what project should he work on, with a poll and everything. Everybody comes along with their wishlist until one of my favorite hackers, jwz (coder on original Netscape, creator of Xscreensaver, many other cool things) lays the smack down both on his ideas and LJ rival MySpace.

BILL MOYERS

Tue, 23 May 2006 22:26:26 +0000

[Pass the Bread](http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0522-35.htm) > Civilization sustains and supports us. The core of its value is bread. But bread is its great metaphor. All my life I've prayed the Lord's Prayer, and I've never prayed, "Give me this day my daily bread." It is always, "Give us this day our daily bread." Bread and life are shared realities. They do not happen in isolation. Civilization is an unnatural act. We have to make it happen, you and I, together with all the other strangers. And because we and strangers have to agree on the difference between a horse thief and a horse trader, the distinction is ethical. Without it, a society becomes a war against all, and a market for the wolves becomes a slaughter for the lambs. My generation hasn't done the best job at honoring this ethical bargain, and our failure explains the mess we're handing over to you. You may be our last chance to get it right. So good luck, Godspeed, enjoy these last few hours together, and don't forget to pass the bread. Man, I admire the hell out of Bill Moyers. I've been a fan of his since I can't remember and I almost cried when I heard he was leaving his most recent PBS show, NOW, for retirement. But if he keeps this kind of speechmaking up, I'll be satisfied.

Tags: grommes, bill+moyers, hamilton+college, address, speech

SHOES

Mon, 22 May 2006 16:41:25 +0000

[![](http://www.tactics.com/i/p/m/44328.jpg) Vans Hosoi LTD SK8-Hi Skate Shoes](http://www.tactics.com/vans/hosoi-ltd-sk8-hi-skate-shoes)

Dang. I want these. I was a big fan of guys like Hosoi, Peralta, Caballero, Tony Alva, and of course pre-video game god Tony Hawk back in the 80s despite having no skating talent myself.

Unreads.com

Thu, 18 May 2006 15:41:53 +0000

The 4 or 5 of you who read my blog regularly will probably have seen me mention the website I've been working on. Well, it's in place and I'm ready to start doing what are called Beta tests on it. That means the site is live but there still might be broken things I'm getting to. Beta is also the time when you start to take feedback on things people want changed. So I'm proud to announce [Unreads.com](http://www.unreads.com), a website for readers. Unreads allows you to keep a bookblog, or journal, of the books you're reading and share that with others. You can see what books other people have on their "Unread Stack" and see what they have to say about those books. It helps you read more deeply and take more from the books you spend your time with, as well as helps you choose what to read next. So please check it out if you have some time and [let me know what you think](mailto:matt@unreads.com).

The benefit of launching the beta of the site here is that very few people read this blog so I’m not in much danger of crushing my server with the load. But the more people hitting the site the better during the testing phase so if you have friends who might be interested, please tell them to visit. Have them email me and mention you sent them and there might be something in it for you too. :)

Tags: grommes, unreads, books, reading, litblog

ati.com/tag/books), microformats, hreview, beta, web2.0

CHANGES

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 15:20:17 +0000

I've been having some big problems with my ISP so I'm in the midst of changing my hosting around. I have this blog here temporarily while I move things around. Please excuse the mess.

DOING STUFF

Fri, 14 Apr 2006 10:27:00 +0000

Boy, I've been a slacker about the blog recently but I have some good reasons. I've been working like mad (or as mad as someone with a full-time job, a wife, and 2 goods can work) on the web project and I'm close to going live with a beta (test) version of the site for people to check out. May 1 is my self-imposed deadline so I'm working hard to get there.

Here’s some stuff I’ve been meaning to post about, in tiny chunks:

POLITICS

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 11:24:24 +0000

[An Evening with Ann Coulter: Opening Statement by Al Franken](http://midwestvaluespac.org/blog/156/an-evening-with-ann-coulter-with-full-speech) This is a great speech given by Al Franken in a debate he had with Ann Coulter. He's right on the money and at the top of his game the whole time. I would love to see video of this and of whatever Coulter had to say in response. I really encourage you to read the whole thing.

And this isn’t relevant to the rest of what he says really but it’s my favorite “joke” from the speech.

But my son doesn’t feel that he got where he is because he is some kind of rugged individual. That he did it all himself. He knows that he stands on the shoulders of those who stood on the shoulders of those who stood on the shoulders of those who stood on the shoulders of those who stood on the necks of Indians.

Tags: grommes, politics, al+franken, ann+coulter, speech

nough to help this time, I’ll say that. I’m not someone who would feel comfortable going door to door or calling strangers. But what I am good at is writing and analyzing. So I’ll be doing that this time around, at least at first. I plan on doing more this time, because this cannot be allowed to happen again. We were close to winning and structural and idealogical problems with the Democratic party were just enough to lose it. The country is not turning Republican. Even in the big red swath of states the news people love to look at, Kerry didn’t lose in a landslide. This is not two countries. The vote was close. We were close to winning. There are many reasons we didn’t but none are insurmountable. So I’m going to be doing some thinking and on issues like this, for me thinking means writing. I’m going to discipline myself to update this site more often with my thoughts on what we need to do to win. And not just in 2008. We have an incredible opportunity here to utilize the internet for pushing a progressive agenda long term. We’re here at the beginning of the 21st century and I refuse to believe we’re turning towards fear and conservatism. We must push forward.

I’m not saying anyone will, or should, listen to me but I’m going to talk anyway. I want discussion. Discussion and community are the hallmarks of the internet and they are the antidote to the right’s idea machine. I’ll be posting here for the most part not to get anyone to listen to me but to help myself formulate my ideas. I’ll be doing more to involve myself in politics from now on and this will be my starting point. If you couldn’t care less about my views, I’ll still be doing book reviews and such but this is important and I can’t allow myself to just sit and do nothing. If you don’t want to hear ideas you don’t like, there are plenty of right-wing websites you can visit. If you don’t like my ideas, there’s a Comments link below. Please use it. I want discussion.

KIDS

Tue, 28 Mar 2006 17:03:14 +0000

[Up With Grups - The Ascendant Breed of Grown-Ups Who Are Redefining Adulthood -- New York Magazine](http://www.nymag.com/news/features/16529/) > Let’s start with a question. A few questions, actually: When did it become normal for your average 35-year-old New Yorker to (a) walk around with an iPod plugged into his ears at all times, listening to the latest from Bloc Party; (b) regularly buy his clothes at Urban Outfitters; (c) take her toddler to a Mommy’s Happy Hour at a Brooklyn bar; (d) stay out till 4 A.M. because he just can’t miss the latest New Pornographers show, because who knows when Neko Case will decide to stop touring with them, and everyone knows she’s the heart of the band; (e) spend $250 on a pair of jeans that are artfully shredded to look like they just fell through a wheat thresher and are designed, eventually, to artfully fall totally apart; (f) This is a great article. I guess it's about people a little older than me (35-ish versus 27 for me) and being NY Magazine it's about people who are more trendy than I'm familiar with but it's interesting. I'm always amazed when I see or hear about trends that both describe me and point out just how out of it I am. I own an ipod, but have never heard of Bloc Party. I like the New Pornographers but don't know who Neko Case is. I wear jeans and tshirts but I bought the Decepticons Transformers shirt I'm wearing to work today years ago because I actually liked the Transformers, not because it's ironic. I'm wearing jeans and Vans but the only way I would pay $250+ for pants is if they came with a supermodel to put them on me every morning and tell me how good I looked in them.

A lot of the stuff in this article seems pretty lame, actually. I listen to my music around Allison and she knows who Johnny Cash is (for the record she likes Walk The Line the best) and recognizes The Hold Steady but I sure hope she gets her own tastes and we don’t like the same stuff. I think it’s only right if the next generation makes up their own stuff and pushes past their parents. I’ll be very disappointed if I like the same stuff as the kids in 10 years. That’ll mean they haven’t progressed, not that I’m a super cool “alternadad”. I’m glad we got Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and lots of rap that my parents didn’t like. They listen to country for pete’s sake, what do they know. :) I don’t want to be skateboarding with Sam, I want him to be hover-jet-skating around his old man and laughing at me for being old and lame. Parents shouldn’t try to keep up with their kids because it’s cool. Parents should do their own thing and if that means shock! horror! you aren’t hip and don’t know who the hot new group is, that’s okay.

QUOTE

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 07:50:35 +0000

From 'Purity of Blood', the new Captain Alatriste book by Arturo Perez-Reverte: > Never trust a man who has read only one book. This is good advice in general but the character is talking specifically about people whose entire worldview is based on their particular religious text.

BUSINESS

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 10:59:35 +0000

Part 3 In Which I Am Shocked

Two quick things that gave me a serious case of eye-widening this morning.

On the latest Gilmor Gang, Michael Arrington of TechCruch said that the new news site NewsVine is “probably only burning $100,000 a month”. Jeeminy Christmas. My friend might have hooked me up with a free hosting option for my new site and I’m extremely happy to save that $60 a month.

TechCrunch also has a post about a new Web2.0 parenting site called Minti. The site just launched and is basically an old-school advice site with Web2.0 goodness and Ajax baked in. He mentions that they’ve raised $1.6 million in initial seed financing. Cripes. That’s a lot of freaking money, especially for a site that’s just barely out of the gate.

Sometimes I think that all this stuff about how cheap it is to start a new startup is only cheap from the perspective of all these guys who know VCs and are older with lots of money in the bank. I’d love to prove that somebody like me can launch a site, build a community, and get something real going without having access to all the stuff these big companies have. I’m a big fan of being ignorant so I can not fall into the traps people who know more fall into but I’m hoping that I’m being ignorant, not stupid.

I’m pretty close to going live though so we’ll find out. :)

Tags: grommes, business, startup, money

The stumbling block I’ve run into is that I had two potential sources of free bandwidth that have both gone away on me. The ISP I used to run, Spinn.Net, was sold to a larger outfit a few months ago and all the people I knew there left so I have no ‘in’ with them now. I also thought I might be able to put the server in temporarily in the rackspace we have for our servers where I work at my dayjob but our guy in charge of Engineering said no for various reasons, but it’s not my call and I respect his decision. So now I’m looking around. I’m going to talk to the data center we host our servers for work at and see if they might be able to do something for me. My boss at SpinnNet used to get people to let him do a ramp-up period where he wouldn’t pay anything or he’d pay a fraction for the first few months until some revenue started coming in. Hopefully I can get somebody to do that for me. I’m not as good with people as he was though so I don’t know what’ll happen.

I’m doing this on the extreme cheap so it’s presenting a great many challenges. Just coming up with $700 for a server was work. And everytime you see people talking about starting a company they always say flip things like “If you can’t raise $10,000 for your business, you shouldn’t be in business” which I think is dumb. I don’t have rich friends, rich family, anybody who could give me that kind of money (or even half that) for whom the money wouldn’t hurt them if I never am able to pay them back (a real possibility for any business starting out). I’ll have more to say about that later. Maybe in the end that flip wisdom won’t seem so flip but for now I’m counting on my cluelessness to get me going.

More later.

Tags: grommes, business, startup, web

GAMES

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 17:22:00 +0000

[Spore Gameplay Video - Google Video](http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8372603330420559198&q=spore)

This is an absolutely amazing demonstration of a computer game I’ve been looking forward to since I first of it. It’s from Will Wright, the creator of the Sim games, and it’s called Spore. The point of it is to evolve a creature up from multi-cellular form to spacefaring multi-planet civilization. I knew it was going to be amazing from talks I’ve heard Mr. Wright give but the demo he gives is completely mind-blowing. I mean completely and totally amazing. It’s 35 minutes but after watching only a few minutes I guarantee you’ll watch the whole thing. I don’t actually play many games but I’m not going to be able to stay away from this one.

Tags: grommes, games, will+wright, spore, sims

NUMBERS

Wed, 22 Feb 2006 09:49:00 +0000

[A Book for People Who Love Numbers - New York Times](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/22/books/22stats.html?ex=1298264400&en=2210f2c860bd77e5&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss) > Richard Sutch and Susan Carter don't expect anybody to take their new book to the beach. > > For starters, it weighs 29 pounds. It has five volumes. And it's densely packed with more than a million numbers that measure America in mind-boggling detail, from the average annual precipitation in Sweet Springs, Mo., to the wholesale price of rice in Charleston S.C., in 1707. Wow. This is awesome. I applaud these two crazy number nerds on their phenomenal achievement putting this thing out.

Tags: grommes, numbers, books, america

114026531055251949

Sat, 18 Feb 2006 05:21:50 +0000

**links for 2006-02-18**

[How my home made lathe works by John K Wilson](http://www.macarthurmusic.com/johnkwilson/hobbies/howmylatheworks.htm)

(tags: [diy](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/diy) [tools](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tools))
*
[www.welie.com -- patterns in Interaction Design](http://www.welie.com/patterns/)

Web Design Patterns

(tags: [web+design](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web+design) [patterns](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/patterns) [links](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/links))
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[Google Answers: whistling](http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=419588)

(tags: [answers](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/answers) [whistling](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/whistling) [tutorial](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tutorial))
*
[All Web Design Graphics Blog » Blog Archive » A Guide to Combining Colors & Color Schemes for Great Web Design](http://www.allwebdesignresources.com/webdesignblogs/graphics/webdesigncolorcombinationsguide/)

(tags: [web+design](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web+design) [colors](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/colors))

114017902184183699

Fri, 17 Feb 2006 05:23:41 +0000

**links for 2006-02-17**

[PVC Bench-top Bike Repair Stand](http://www.instructables.com/ex/i/3FEA2EAEBAED10289B50001143E7E506/?ALLSTEPS)

A simple and inexpensive bike repair stand for the bench-top. It's not quite as sturdy as the commercial floor-standing models but it works really well and you can spend the money you save on that Campy derailleur set you've always wanted.

(tags: [diy](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/diy) [bike](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/bike) [repair](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/repair))
*
[How to build a 1,024,000 mcd portable light](http://www.instructables.com/ex/i/A9D07B9C83FD1028A786001143E7E506/?ALLSTEPS)

(tags: [diy](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/diy) [light](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/light) [leds](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/leds) [electronics](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/electronics))
*
[25 Free Grunge Fonts - Web Design Times](http://www.webdesigntimes.com/article/25-free-grunge-fonts)

(tags: [fonts](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/fonts) [free](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/free))
*
[Doug's RGB Color Chart](http://www.hypersolutions.org/pages/rgbhex.html)

(tags: [colors](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/colors) [rgb](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/rgb))

DOOFUSES

Thu, 16 Feb 2006 11:25:00 +0000

I had a great idea the other day that anyone is free to steal since I'll never have time to do it. A website called something like bluetoothdoofuses.com (which is available) where people post pictures of doofuses wearing their bluetooth wireless earpieces in innappropriate places. Sort of like [FUH2.com](http://fuh2.com) without the middle fingers. Or with them, I don't care. I got a Jabra bluetooth headset for free with my trusty T610 2 years ago and thought they were somewhat goofy then. That was before I had to deal with stifling snorts of laughter at Grandma walking through the grocery store not talking on her wannabe-futuristic headset hanging on her ear. Now I just want to point and laugh and inspire others to do the same.

Don’t get me wrong, if you’re using the thing, great. But unless you’re getting calls every 2 minutes and are Important, take the damn thing off when you’re not talking on it. Or else you’re liable to get your picture taken and posted for ridicule on the net.

114009250820672704

Thu, 16 Feb 2006 05:21:48 +0000

**links for 2006-02-16**

[Autocompletion in scriptaculous wiki](http://wiki.script.aculo.us/scriptaculous/show/Autocompletion)

The script.aculo.us Autocompleter controls allow for Google-Suggest style local and server-powered autocompleting text input fields.

(tags: [scriptaculous](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/scriptaculous) [javascript](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/javascript) [effects](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/effects) [autocomplete](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/autocomplete))
*
[Princeton Architectural Press: DIYÐDesign It Yourself](http://papress.com/bookpage.tpl?isbn=1568985525&cart=1139614038138309)

DIY: Design It Yourself, provides you with all the tools you'll need to create your own projects, from conception through production. Here you will find:simple ideas on how you can "think like a designer"

(tags: [design](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/design) [diy](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/diy) [book](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/book))
*
[Spray paint stencil for laptop](http://www.instructables.com/ex/i/C9560254EBBB102896C2001143E7E506/?ALLSTEPS)

Make a stencil, and custom spray paint your laptop.

(tags: [art](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/art) [diy](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/diy) [laptop](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/laptop) [paint](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/paint) [stencils](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/stencils))
*
[Developing games with Perl and SDL : Page 1](http://arstechnica.com/guides/tweaks/games-perl.ars)

SDL_Perl is a perl interface to the Simple DirectMedia Library.

(tags: [perl](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/perl) [coding](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/coding))
*
[Mastering Ajax, Part 3: Advanced requests and responses in Ajax](http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-ajaxintro3/?ca=dgr-lnxw01MasterAJAX3)

In this article, I move beyond the basics in the last article and concentrate on more detail about three key parts of this request object: * The HTTP ready state * The HTTP status code * The types of requests that you can make

(tags: [ajax](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/ajax) [ibm](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/ibm) [details](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/details) [xmlhttprequest](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/xmlhttprequest))
*
[tvtime: High quality video for Linux](http://tvtime.sourceforge.net/)

tvtime is a high quality television application for use with video capture cards on Linux systems. tvtime processes the input from a capture card and displays it on a computer monitor or projector.

(tags: [tv](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tv) [linux](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/linux))
*
[slayeroffice | code | image cross fade redux](http://slayeroffice.com/code/imageCrossFade/xfade2.html)

(tags: [javascript](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/javascript) [images](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/images) [css](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/css))
*
[gethuman cheats](http://gethuman.com/us/)

Use these cheats to talk to a human on an automated phone system.

(tags: [phone](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/phone) [cheat+sheets](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/cheat+sheets))
*
[Accessible Heading Icons : Tutorial : Paul Michael Smith](http://www.paulmichaelsmith.com/blog/examples/headingicons/sample.php)

Here I will explain how by the magic of CSS we can use one image to load a range of different icons for specific headings. Enabling you to keep one image and the user gets all the icons in one neat download and the heading is accessible to boot!

(tags: [css](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/css) [images](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/images) [tricks](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tricks))
*
[The Perfect Site Structure — mtsix [Oliver Zheng]](http://mtsix.com/articles/2006/02/the-perfect-site-structure.html)

I realized the importance of a site structure. It’s the very essence of accessibility. The need to generate a working site structure should occur as part of the planning of a site, but is made possible during the coding.

(tags: [web+design](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web+design) [site](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/site) [site+structure](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/site+structure))
*
[Inside Firefox - The Inside Track on Firefox Development](http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/009749.html)

(tags: [firefox](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/firefox) [memory](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/memory) [settings](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/settings))
*
[Rumble Box](http://phackett.com/rumblebox/)

all of the characters are made of simple objects which stay around in the level even after the character is defeated. The game takes place inside a giant box, and the ultimate goal of the game is to pile up enough defeated enemies to get out of the box.

(tags: [games](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/games))
*
[The Little Things](http://www.sourcelabs.com/blogs/ajb/2006/02/the_little_things_1.html)

Here are some examples of little things from software of features that whenever I use them, I think, I'm so glad that made the cut.

(tags: [bosworth](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/bosworth) [web2.0](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web2.0) [features](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/features) [coding](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/coding))
*
[David Lanham](http://www.dlanham.com/)

(tags: [art](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/art) [wallpapers](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/wallpapers))

114000613053754095

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 05:22:10 +0000

**links for 2006-02-15**

[5 Steps To Change Any Habit](http://credit.about.com/cs/motivation/a/010103.htm)

(tags: [habits](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/habits) [success](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/success) [steps](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/steps) [tutorial](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tutorial))
*
[Selenium: Selenium Reference](http://www.openqa.org/selenium/seleniumReference.html)

(tags: [selenium](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/selenium) [tests](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tests) [ref](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/ref))
*
[Ajax Lessons » Blog Archive » Ajax Workshop 1: Ajax basics & building a simple email verification with prototype.js.](http://www.ajaxlessons.com/2006/02/11/ajax-workshop-1-ajax-basics-build-a-simple-email-verification-with-prototypejs/)

n this introduction we will build a simple form that submits a user’s information to the database and confirms if the user’s email address is already in the database. We will be using a common JavaScript library by the name of prototype

(tags: [prototype](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/prototype) [javascript](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/javascript) [tutorial](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tutorial) [forms](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/forms))
*
[Guardian Unlimited | Arts critics | How Rothko's Seagram murals found their way to London](http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/critic/feature/0,1169,931796,00.html)

(tags: [art](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/art) [rothko](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/rothko))
*
[LED Throwies](http://www.instructables.com/ex/i/7DBB34EAEDFF1028A1FC001143E7E506/?ALLSTEPS)

(tags: [led](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/led) [diy](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/diy) [electronics](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/electronics) [projects](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/projects))

113991982701466047

Tue, 14 Feb 2006 05:23:47 +0000

**links for 2006-02-14**

[Postfix Configuration Parameter Overview](http://spike.porcupine.org/test/html/postconf.5.html)

(tags: [postfix](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/postfix) [mail+server](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/mail+server) [sysadmin](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/sysadmin))
*
[Continuing Intermittent Incoherency » What else is burried down in the depth’s of Google’s amazing JavaScript?](http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/?p=538)

(tags: [javascript](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/javascript) [google](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/google))
*
[Alternate Ajax Techniques, Part 1 - WebReference.com](http://www.webreference.com/programming/ajax_tech/)

(tags: [javascript](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/javascript) [techniques](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/techniques) [tutorial](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tutorial))
*
[Pictures of Pennies](http://www.fincher.org/Misc/Pennies/)

The following is the basic pattern for building cantilevered structures with Pennies. Although it looks trivial, we can build amazing structures with these pillars.

(tags: [cool](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/cool) [coins](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/coins) [coin+stacking](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/coin+stacking))
*
[DevGuru Jet SQL INNER JOIN Operation](http://www.devguru.com/Technologies/jetsql/quickref/inner_join.html)

The INNER JOIN operation can be used in any FROM clause to combine records from two tables. It is, in fact, the most common type of join. There must be a matching value in a field common to both tables.

(tags: [sql](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/sql) [join](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/join) [tutorial](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tutorial))
*
[Free Trebuchet Plans!](http://www.ripcord.ws/plans/plans.html)

This is a set of plans and instructions for building a small-scale hinged counter weight (HCW) Trebuchet suitable for hurling tennis balls with.

(tags: [diy](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/diy) [trebuchet](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/trebuchet) [plans](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/plans))
*
[CSS Basics - Making Cascading Style Sheets Easy to Understand](http://www.cssbasics.com/)

(tags: [css](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/css) [tutorial](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tutorial) [basics](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/basics))
*
[Google techtalks - Google Video](http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=Google+techtalks)

(tags: [google](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/google) [techtalks](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/techtalks) [video](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/video))
*
[ACM Queue - A Conversation with Jarod Jenson - Tales from the trenches with a former Enron performance guru](http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=363)

(tags: [sysadmin](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/sysadmin) [performance](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/performance) [interview](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/interview))
*
[Main In Blue - Technicolor](http://www.themaninblue.com/experiment/Technicolor/)

(tags: [colors](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/colors))

113966047137298317

Sat, 11 Feb 2006 05:21:11 +0000

**links for 2006-02-11**

[How to fold a fitted sheet](http://www.target.com.au/html/homewares/sheets.htm)

Making the bed is so much more pleasurable when your sheets have been folded properly – and not only do they take up a lot less space, they look great in your linen cupboard too!

(tags: [folding](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/folding) [sheets](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/sheets) [tutorial](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tutorial))
*
[SCORE "Counselors to America's Small Business"](http://www.score.org/)

(tags: [business](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/business) [unreads](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/unreads) [advice](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/advice))
*
[Mason HQ: FiltersAndHTMLFillInForm](http://www.masonhq.com/?FiltersAndHTMLFillInForm)

The mason FAQ mentions using HTML::FillInForm from CPAN to assist in filling out forms automatically in the filter section

(tags: [mason](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/mason) [perl](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/perl) [unreads](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/unreads))
*
[Announcement: new Javascript/Canvas Graph library](http://aslakhellesoy.com/articles/2006/02/09/announcement-new-javascript-canvas-graph-library)

The overall goal is to provide similar functionality to Graphviz/Dot - running entirely in the browser - and with better interactive features.

(tags: [javascript](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/javascript) [canvas](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/canvas) [libraries](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/libraries))
*
[Proximity Cards](http://cq.cx/prox.pl)

Build a prox. card reader and copier

(tags: [diy](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/diy) [electronics](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/electronics))
*
[ipBS: How to get your missed TV shows with Azureus and Bittorrent](http://ipbs.blogspot.com/2006/02/how-to-get-your-missed-tv-shows-with.html)

(tags: [bittorrent](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/bittorrent) [tv](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tv) [mythtv](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/mythtv))
*
[Cacti: The Complete RRDTool-based Graphing Solution](http://www.cacti.net/)

Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool's data storage and graphing functionality.

(tags: [sysadmin](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/sysadmin) [logging](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/logging) [mrtg](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/mrtg) [rrdtool](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/rrdtool))
*
[Hacker's Diet Tracker - Login](http://infohost.nmt.edu/~carmiac/whdt/whdt.cgi)

(tags: [diet](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/diet) [hacker+diet](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/hacker+diet))
*
[Free Diet Plans at SparkPeople](http://www.sparkpeople.com/)

(tags: [diet](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/diet) [eating](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/eating))
*
[Interview to Steven Wozniak](http://www.maccare.com.ar/entrevista_wozniak_ing.htm)

(tags: [woz](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/woz) [interview](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/interview))

113957409561213525

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 05:21:35 +0000

**links for 2006-02-10**

[Cribcandy - a thumbnail bookmark blog with the best stuff for your home](http://cribcandy.com/)

A Wists powered thumbnail blog with pictures & links to cool things for your home. Updated constantly from around the web.

(tags: [furniture](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/furniture) [home](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/home) [shopping](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/shopping))
*
[Autonomous Robot Project](http://golem5.org/robot1/mailblog.html)

This robot is my first electronics and embedded systems project. I studied Electronic Circuits and Applications for six months and then rebuilt and cross compiled my home computer systems with a Linux From Scratch book to prepare for it.

(tags: [robots](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/robots) [electronics](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/electronics) [diy](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/diy) [tutorial](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tutorial))
*
[Jon Udell: Search engine, find engine](http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/02/09.html#a1385)

(tags: [udell](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/udell) [search](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/search))
*
[Dynamic Drive DHTML Scripts- Advanced RSS Ticker (Ajax invocation)](http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex17/rsstickerajax/)

Well, with this powerful RSS ticker script, you can now easily display any RSS content on your site in a ticker fashion!

(tags: [rss](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/rss) [feeds](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/feeds) [javascript](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/javascript))
*
[Things to look out for when building a large application.](http://simon.incutio.com/notes/2006/summit/schachter.txt)

by Joshua Schachter, del.icio.us

(tags: [delicious](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/delicious) [apache](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/apache) [unreads](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/unreads) [sysadmin](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/sysadmin))
*
[Building a Web App on a Budget](http://simon.incutio.com/notes/2006/summit/carson.txt)

Ryan Carson - Why it's important, and how much was actually spent on DropSend

(tags: [business](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/business) [unreads](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/unreads) [sysadmin](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/sysadmin))
*
[Perlbal](http://www.danga.com/perlbal/)

Perlbal is our Perl-based reverse proxy load balancer and web server.

(tags: [load+balancing](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/load+balancing) [sysadmin](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/sysadmin) [perl](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/perl) [web+server](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web+server))
*
[Wired News: Forget Jobs, Let's Worship Woz](http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70180-0.html?tw=wn_technology_4)

Truly my hero in life.

(tags: [apple](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/apple) [woz](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/woz))

FLOW

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 13:27:16 +0000

[Here are some](http://www.43folders.com/2006/02/09/flow/) good quick explanations on the flow state stuff I [mentioned yesterday in relation to my new diet/eating approach](/2006/02/diet.html). > A few good links and snippets on Flow — a topic that’s come a couple times before here and on the group, but which seems more germane than ever given a lot of what [the royal] we have been talking about lately. 43Folders is a great site for organizational topics. It's a little too Macintosh centric for me but he does a great job generally.

113948783836126897

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 05:23:58 +0000

**links for 2006-02-09**

[Writing the Other:](http://www.aqueductpress.com/conversation-pieces.html##Vol8)

students expressed the opinion that it is a mistake to write about people of ethnic backgrounds different from your own because you might get it wrong, horribly, offensively wrong, and so it is better not even to try.

(tags: [writing](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/writing))
*
[Particletree · Lightbox Gone Wild!](http://particletree.com/features/lightbox-gone-wild/)

In this tutorial, we’ll take a look at how to create a modal window using some nifty JavaScript and CSS.

(tags: [javascript](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/javascript) [css](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/css) [modal+dialogs](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/modal+dialogs))
*
[Encytemedia: Prototype Meets Ruby: A Look at Enumerable, Array and Hash](http://encytemedia.com/blog/articles/2005/12/07/prototype-meets-ruby-a-look-at-enumerable-array-and-hash)

(tags: [javascript](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/javascript) [prototype](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/prototype) [tutorial](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tutorial))
*
[DIET](/2006/02/diet.html)

(tags: [grommes](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/grommes) [diet](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/diet) [flow](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/flow) [mihaly](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/mihaly) [csikszentmihalyi](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/csikszentmihalyi) [food](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/food))
*
[Encytemedia: Working With Events In Prototype](http://encytemedia.com/blog/articles/2006/02/08/working-with-events-in-prototype)

Events drive interaction for almost everything and the web is no exception

(tags: [javascript](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/javascript) [prototype](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/prototype) [events](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/events))
*
[Encytemedia: Rico rounded corners without all of Rico](http://encytemedia.com/blog/articles/2005/12/01/rico-rounded-corners-without-all-of-rico)

I extracted and made very minimal changes to Rico’s rounded corner implementation so I could use it without needing all of Rico.

(tags: [javascript](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/javascript) [css](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/css) [rounded+corners](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/rounded+corners) [rico](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/rico))
*
[Custom CSS Cursors](http://www.javascriptkit.com/dhtmltutors/csscursors.shtml)

Using CSS, you can change the default cursor icon associated with a particular element, even specifying your own cursor image (in IE6+) instead.

(tags: [css](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/css) [cursors](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/cursors))
*
[Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO » New robots.txt tool](http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/new-robotstxt-tool/)

(tags: [apache](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/apache) [sysadmin](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/sysadmin) [robots.txt](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/robots.txt))
*
[In your wallet - 43FoldersWiki](http://wiki.43folders.com/index.php/In_your_wallet)

List of things to keep in your wallet. Lots of good ideas.

(tags: [43folders](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/43folders) [ideas](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/ideas))
*
[+ Jimi™ The Wallet For People Who Hate Wallets +](http://www.thejimi.com./jimi.php)

Tiny minimalist wallet

(tags: [jimi+wallet](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/jimi+wallet) [wallet](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/wallet) [organization](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/organization))
*
[mnot’s Web log: Little Orange “feed” Buttons](http://www.mnot.net/blog/2006/01/25/feed)

Rather than confronting people with a miniature forest of icons and badges for different formats, I’ll be gracefully transitioning to Atom by first changing the icons to feed, and eventually pointing them at the Atom feeds instead of the RSS

(tags: [atom](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/atom) [feeds](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/feeds) [icons](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/icons))
*
[MacRumorsLive.com : About](http://www.macrumorslive.com/about/)

The aims required a system that could update the transcript without reloading unnecessary objects (i.e. images, CSS & existing transcript text).

(tags: [sysadmin](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/sysadmin) [ajax](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/ajax) [web+server](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web+server))
*
[Current style in web design](http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/current-style.cfm)

(tags: [web+design](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web+design) [layout](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/layout) [css](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/css))
*
[Social Software - Viral Vectors](http://www.sourcelabs.com/blogs/ajb/2006/02/social_software_viral_vectors.html)

Web software involves a lot of thinking about building scalable services, design, robust algorithms that filter the burgeoning depth of information, social features etc. But what really seems to be driving growth in web software is "viral vector" features

(tags: [web2.0](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web2.0) [web+design](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web+design) [unreads](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/unreads) [viral](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/viral))

DIET

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 10:50:37 +0000

I just finished reading the book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (I believe it's 'chick-sent-me-high') and I really recommend it. It's about getting into what he calls a 'flow state' or what other people call 'the zone' in everyday life. Basically, the point is to make hard but doable goals, take concrete steps toward those goals, and track your progress. Doing this puts you into a flow state of optimal experience, giving you the high you feel when you finish a long bike ride, complete a hard puzzle, finish making a woodworking project, things like that. There's a lot more to it but the thing I've taken from it is a new approach to getting my weight under control.

Like a lot of people I’ve struggled with my weight and with food issues. I have a hard time eating one donut, or one piece of candy. I eat 3 donuts and a dozen pieces of candy when they’re around. And in our office, candy and donuts always seem to be around. I’ve struggled with this addictive type behavior but I think I’ve found a good way to use Flow to get past that. Instead of looking at passing up the candy jar as depriving myself of candy, I intend to look at it as taking a concrete step toward my goal of losing weight. When I work out, that’s a step toward the goal. When I go to karate class, that’s another step. I haven’t figured out a good way of tracking this yet but so far I’ve been able to avoid the giant bowl of Hershey’s Kisses (which is in the middle of the path from my desk to the water cooler!) for a few days, making sure to note to myself that I’m making progress toward my goal each time. Flow is one of those books I’ll probably end up buying and reading over again, a pretty rare thing for me. He has a couple of other books on the subject that I might read as well. But even if I don’t, this new approach to dieting has me pretty jazzed. It might be just the thing to help. We’ll see.

Tags: grommes, diet, flow, mihaly+csikszentmihalyi, food

113940110763297134

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 05:18:27 +0000

**links for 2006-02-08**

[Selenium IDE: Selenium IDE](http://www.openqa.org/selenium-ide/)

Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium tests. It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests.

(tags: [selenium](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/selenium) [qa](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/qa) [testing](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/testing))
*
[Digital Web Magazine - Seven Accessibility Mistakes (Part 2)](http://www.digital-web.com/articles/seven_accessibility_mistakes_part_2/)

(tags: [accessibility](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/accessibility) [web+design](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web+design))
*
[Writing cross-browser CSS | 456 Berea Street](http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200602/writing_crossbrowser_css/)

(tags: [css](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/css) [web](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web) [browser](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/browser))
*
[Max Kiesler - Decrease Load Time and Increase ROI in Web 2.0 and AJAX Sites](http://www.maxkiesler.com/index.php/weblog/comments/decrease_load_time_and_increase_roi_in_web_20_and_ajax_sites/)

(tags: [web](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web) [compression](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/compression) [apache](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/apache))
*
[Painless backups using rdiff-backup : Page 2](http://arstechnica.com/articles/columns/linux/linux-20060202.ars/2)

(tags: [sysadmin](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/sysadmin) [backup](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/backup))
*
[Design Melt Down](http://www.designmeltdown.com/)

Design elements, trends, & problems in web design.

(tags: [web+design](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web+design) [examples](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/examples) [problems](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/problems))
*
[Rubbermaid 300 Gallon Stock Tank — World's Cheapest Quick 'n Dirty Soaking Tub](http://www.bookofjoe.com/2005/08/rubbermaid_300_.html)

The tank measures 69"W x 63.25"L x 25"H and holds 300 gallons (1135.6 L).The best price I found online was $165

(tags: [aquarium](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/aquarium) [pond](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/pond) [rubbermaid](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/rubbermaid) [pool](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/pool))
*
[Eric Pascarello dissects Ajax security vulnerabilities](http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/qna/0,289202,sid26_gci1164745,00.html)

(tags: [ajax](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/ajax) [security](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/security) [web](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web) [code](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/code))

PROBLEM SOLVING

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 14:51:32 +0000

[The New Yorker: Fact](http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060213fa_fact) > An efficiency apartment in Denver averages $376 a month, or just over forty-five hundred a year, which means that you can house and care for a chronically homeless person for at most fifteen thousand dollars, or about a third of what he or she would cost on the street. A brilliant article by Malcolm Gladwell about finding ways of actually solving social problems instead of just managing them. The problem is that the solutions, proven as they are, rub up against some ingrained prejudices. The idea that paying for an apartment to get hardcore homeless people off the street is much more efficient and costs much less runs contrary to the idea we have that we shouldn't be "rewarding" people for being homeless. This is the same logic we have in dealing with welfare or social security. It fits in with our moral prejudice to say we shouldn't give people money just to sit at home but it benefits everyone more to keep people off the street and out of poverty. Gladwell does a great job with this type of article and I encourage eveyone to read it.

Tags: grommes, gladwell, malcolm+gladwell, new+yorker, homelessness

113931486789954203

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 05:21:07 +0000

**links for 2006-02-07**

[The Baby Hammock - Maya Wrap Slings, Morning Sickness, Clean Shopper, Children's Toys, Cloth Diapers, Whisper Wear Breast Pump](http://www.thebabyhammock.com/sacknseat.htm)

(tags: [baby](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/baby) [seat](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/seat))
*
[Kettler Futura High Chair - Now in Stock and Free Shipping!](http://www.babyride.com/4833-0000.html)

(tags: [baby](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/baby) [high+chair](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/high+chair))
*
[Residential Wood Framed Floors and Aquarium Weights](http://www.african-cichlid.com/Structure.htm)

So here is the long winded explanation from some one (me) that has been working as a structural engineer since 1976.

(tags: [aquarium](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/aquarium) [home](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/home))
*
[Calculations for the Aquarium Weights](http://www.african-cichlid.com/Weight.htm)

Weight of water is 8.34 pounds per gallon. (Assuming pure H2O at sea level)

(tags: [aquarium](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/aquarium) [home](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/home) [weight](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/weight))
*
[Five Simple Steps to Typesetting on the web: Dashes](http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five_simple_steps_to_typesetting_on_the_web_dashes/)

(tags: [typography](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/typography) [tutorial](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tutorial))
*
[Virtual Threads: Tuning Apache, part 1](http://virtualthreads.blogspot.com/2006/01/tuning-apache-part-1.html)

(tags: [apache](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/apache) [sysadmin](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/sysadmin) [web+server](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web+server))
*
[BrainJar.com: CSS Positioning](http://www.brainjar.com/css/positioning/default.asp)

(tags: [css](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/css) [positioning](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/positioning) [tutorial](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tutorial) [box+model](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/box+model))
*
[CSS and round corners: Boxes with curves](http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/css/css-round-corners-boxes.shtml)

(tags: [css](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/css) [rounded+corners](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/rounded+corners))
*
[Naked IT » Blog Archive » 2.0 Culture](http://mittermayr.wordpress.com/2006/02/03/20-culture/)

(tags: [web2.0](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web2.0))
*
[DIY Live » DIY Archive » Electronics Tutorial](http://www.diylive.net/index.php/2006/02/04/electronics-tutorial/)

(tags: [electronics](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/electronics) [diy](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/diy) [links](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/links))
*
[ecosneak shoes](http://shoeswithsouls.com/ProductInfo.aspx?productID=ECOSNEAKS+(MEN)+BK)

(tags: [shoes](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/shoes) [shopping](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/shopping))
*
[slayeroffice | articles | alternatives to innerHTML](http://slayeroffice.com/articles/innerHTML_alternatives/)

(tags: [ajax](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/ajax) [dom](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/dom) [javascript](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/javascript))

THE ENVIRONMENT

Mon, 06 Feb 2006 11:50:25 +0000

[24 year old Bush political appointee tells NASA to push "intelligent design by a creator" - and by the way, we're all dead](http://americablog.blogspot.com/2006/02/24-year-old-bush-political-appointee.html)

John Aravois of AMERICAblog tends to be a tad shrill but this recent post is great. In it he lists just a few of the frightening and disgusting stories about the environment and the Bush administration’s war on science. He starts out with a recent story of how a Republican appointee wants NASA scientists to make sure to put “theory” after all mentions of the Big Bang. This has all the hallmarks of official Republican policy so no points for saying it was just some kid who wasn’t ordered to do so. The incorrect use of “theory” is a Right-wing codeword that they’ve been trying to get people to believe means that the science isn’t agreed upon, which is exactly the opposite of what it really means in a scientific context. Using it here fits nicely with their usual anti-science bullshit. The Big Bang has been accepted wisdom among scientists for decades and has in the last few years become as close to a law as this type of thing can be. If we let NASA become just one more organ of Right-wing propoganda we’re all screwed.

Tags: grommes, science, rightwing, americablog, nasa, big+bang, climate+change

113905563638353072

Sat, 04 Feb 2006 05:20:36 +0000

**links for 2006-02-04**

[Construction Tips](http://www.ke6us.com/construction_tips.htm)

Everybody has their own way of doing things. Here are a few of my favorite construction methods.

(tags: [diy](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/diy) [building](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/building) [electronics](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/electronics))
*
[Specialty Bottle - Glass & Plastic Bottles Jars Vials Tins Other Containers](http://www.specialtybottle.com/)

(tags: [bottles](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/bottles) [tins](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tins) [jars](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/jars))
*
[Designing for the subtlety of Ajax, by Jeffrey Veen](http://www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000739.html)

(tags: [ajax](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/ajax) [design](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/design) [web](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web))
*
[Mason HQ: Mason configuration parameters (version 1.32)](http://masonhq.com/docs/manual/Params.html#error_mode)

Apache name: MasonErrorModeIndicates how errors are returned to the caller. The choices are fatal, meaning die with the error, and output, meaning output the error just like regular output.

(tags: [mason](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/mason) [unreads](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/unreads) [errors](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/errors))

113896933726296273

Fri, 03 Feb 2006 05:22:17 +0000

**links for 2006-02-03**

[JengaJam.com >> A Revolutionary Way To Fold Your Shirts (WMV, 1.5mb)](http://www.jengajam.com/r/shirt-folding)

(tags: [tshirt](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tshirt) [folding](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/folding) [laundry](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/laundry))
*
[Cardboard Tshirt folding jig](http://www.all-tribes.info/hotstuffs/index.php?2006/01/20/1-first-post)

(tags: [tshirt](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tshirt) [folding](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/folding) [laundry](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/laundry) [video](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/video) [diy](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/diy))
*
[alexander kirk » Blog Archive » 10 Realistic Steps to a Faster Web Site](http://alexander.kirk.at/2006/02/02/10-steps-to-a-faster-web-site/)

(tags: [optimization](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/optimization) [web](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web))
*
[Mason HQ: Mason Developer's Manual (version 1.32)](http://www.masonhq.com/docs/manual/Devel.html#data_caching)

(tags: [unreads](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/unreads) [mason](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/mason) [caching](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/caching) [web](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web))
*
[Java Servlet and JSP performance tips](http://www.javaperformancetuning.com/tips/j2ee_srvlt.shtml)

(tags: [java](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/java) [web](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web) [perf](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/perf))
*
[Hacking Apache HTTP Server at Yahoo!](http://public.yahoo.com/~radwin/talks/yapache-apachecon2005.htm)

(tags: [apache](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/apache) [hacking](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/hacking) [yahoo](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/yahoo) [web+server](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web+server))
*
[Knitting Weblog: In the Saddle](http://www.action-hero.net/blog/2006/01/in-saddle.html)

(tags: [knitting](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/knitting) [diy](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/diy) [bed+saddle](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/bed+saddle))

113888295493951565

Thu, 02 Feb 2006 05:22:34 +0000

**links for 2006-02-02**

[Developing Ajax Applications That Preserve Standard Browser Functionality](http://dev2dev.bea.com/pub/a/2006/01/ajax-back-button.html)

(tags: [ajax](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/ajax) [browser](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/browser) [back+button](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/back+button))
*
[Make a circle out of squares?](http://www.instructables.com/ex/i/D86F7A48E3CA10289254001143E7E506/?ALLSTEPS)

Build a square wooden frame with nails all around. Tie string round the nails and repeat until all nails are used. You should be left with a cool circle shape and a nice piece of art for very little cost

(tags: [art](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/art) [diy](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/diy))
*
[Streetcards - GapingVoid](http://gapingvoid.streetcards.com/streetcards_pz2.php?uploading=0&card_id=1456)

My soon-to-be business cards.

(tags: [business](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/business) [business+cards](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/business+cards) [hugh+mcleod](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/hugh+mcleod))
*
[Fold Development Blog: AJAX : Handling multiple XMLHttpRequests with JavaScript](http://foldblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/ajax-handling-multiple-xmlhttprequests.html)

(tags: [ajax](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/ajax) [javascript](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/javascript) [xmlhttprequest](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/xmlhttprequest))
*
[Mike Chambers: Encapsulating Ajax XMLHTTPRequest Calls within JavaScript classes](http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mesh/archives/2006/01/encapsulating_a.cfm)

(tags: [ajax](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/ajax) [xmlhttprequest](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/xmlhttprequest) [javascript](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/javascript))
*
[Return of Design - EuroManx](http://returnofdesign.com/showcolors.php?scheme=21)

Euromanx

(tags: [unreads](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/unreads) [color+scheme](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/color+scheme))
*
[Steel dolphin Creative - Color Scheme tool](http://www.steeldolphin.com/color_scheme.html)

(tags: [unreads](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/unreads) [web](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web) [color+scheme](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/color+scheme))

BLOGGING

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 10:55:56 +0000

This is interesting. The other day I happened upon a [blog post by Amr Awadallah](http://www.awadallah.com/blog/2006/01/12/google-will-miss-2005-q4-quarter-revenue-estimates/) about how he thought Google was going to miss their revenue estimates for the 4th quarter. Usually I could care less about this (and Google still made almost $2 billion dollars so it's not exactly a loss for them) but what was interesting was that Mr. Awadallah says nowhere on his blog that he works for Yahoo, a big Google competitor and a company that seems to have a bit of an inferiority complex about Google. He's [really](http://www.awadallah.com/blog/2005/12/17/6/), [really](http://www.awadallah.com/blog/2005/10/21/10/) [anti-Google](http://www.awadallah.com/blog/2005/09/16/13/) from various posts on his blog so I thought he should be giving his audience a hint that he's not exactly un-biased. I posted a comment to that effect on his blog and it shows up as being posted for me which means it didn't get lost presumably but it doesn't show up everybody else. I can only assume that he approves all comments (a common technique for eliminating spam comments) but hasn't approved mine for whatever reason. I'm not saying he hasn't approved it because I called him on something or anything like that but this is really fishy to me. Here's the comment I made: > Hi Amr. I found your blog linked to from Caterina Fake’s. In reading some of your postings I find it unsettling that you have such a vehement dislike of Google but fail to really say anywhere that you work at Yahoo. I wouldn’t have known except that Ms. Fake mentioned it in her post. Not that you can’t talk about whatever you want to on your personal blog but when so much of your posting is bashing a competitor it seems reasonable to give your audience some note of where you’re coming from in your assessments of Google. Pretty nice and straight-forward I'd say. And it doesn't even merit a comment by him. Now I'm sure he's busy and it's not like I'm anybody but just plain ignoring a comment like that and not putting it on the post to allow others to see it isn't right. If he thinks I'm wrong, tell me that. Don't just ignore it. Nobody reads my blog really so I don't anticipate anything coming of this post but it gives me a bad taste in my mouth. Blogs are supposed to be about transparency and discussion. If you're posting things like this guy does about a competitor, you should let people know that you're not an uninterested 3rd party, even if you're blog is a personal one.

Tags: grommes, yahoo, google, amr+awadallah, blogging, discussion, transparency

113879666445022072

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 05:24:24 +0000

**links for 2006-02-01**

[A List Apart: Articles: In Search of the Holy Grail](http://www.alistapart.com/articles/holygrail)

Three columns. One fixed-width sidebar for your navigation, another for, say, your Google Ads or your Flickr photos—and, as in a fancy truffle, a liquid center for the real substance.

(tags: [web+design](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web+design) [layout](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/layout) [three+column](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/three+column))
*
[Building a Drag-and-Drop Shopping Cart with AJAX @ SYS-CON BRASIL](http://br.sys-con.com/read/172585.htm)

For this article, we'll create a shopping car that allows us to add items by dragging and dropping them onto an icon of a shopping cart. We'll add AJAX functionality, allowing us to update our shopping cart without redrawing the entire screen.

(tags: [ajax](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/ajax) [shopping+cart](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/shopping+cart) [dragdrop](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/dragdrop))
*
[Particletree · A Guide to Starting Your Business](http://particletree.com/features/a-guide-to-starting-your-business/)

(tags: [business](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/business) [howto](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/howto) [article](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/article))

113871014696238504

Tue, 31 Jan 2006 05:22:26 +0000

**links for 2006-01-31**

[QuirksBlog: The AJAX response: XML, HTML, or JSON?](http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2005/12/the_ajax_respon.html)

(tags: [ajax](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/ajax) [xml](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/xml) [code](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/code))

113862398257069450

Mon, 30 Jan 2006 05:26:22 +0000

**links for 2006-01-30**

[Build Your Own Cat Tree](http://www.pandecats.com/x/building_a_cat_tree.htm)

(tags: [cat](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/cat) [diy](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/diy) [cat+tree](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/cat+tree))
*
[Wireless Networking in the Developing World](http://wndw.net/)

By applying [wireless internet] technology in areas that are badly in need of critical communications infrastructure, more people can be brought online than ever before, in less time, for very little cost.

(tags: [wireless](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/wireless) [developing+world](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/developing+world) [pdf](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/pdf) [book](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/book))

113845092659510558

Sat, 28 Jan 2006 05:22:06 +0000

**links for 2006-01-28**

[Treehugger: Recipe of the Week: Ginger Cookies](http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/01/post_12.php)

(tags: [cooking](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/cooking) [recipe](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/recipe) [cookies](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/cookies))
*
[wg:Bubble Tooltips](http://web-graphics.com/mtarchive/001717.php)

(tags: [css](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/css) [tooltips](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tooltips))
*
[AJAX/DHTML Tutorial: Should I Render My UI On The Server or the Client?](http://codinginparadise.org/weblog/2006/01/ajaxdhtml-tutorial-should-i-render-my.html)

(tags: [ajax](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/ajax) [html](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/html) [web](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web) [thick+client](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/thick+client) [thin+client](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/thin+client))
*
[Ajaxian » Sun Developer Channel: 15 minute video on Ajax](http://ajaxian.com/archives/sun-developer-channel-15-minute-video-on-ajax)

Sun invited some its own team, and some outside of town to put together a fun little video on Ajax.

(tags: [ajax](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/ajax) [video](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/video))

DISCRIMINATION

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 14:33:20 +0000

[Boing Boing: World of Warcraft: Don't tell anyone you're queer](http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/27/world_of_warcraft_do.html) > players who have advertised their guilds as "GBLT-friendly" have lately been warned off by Blizzard moderators, who cite a rule against sexual discrimination in censoring the players. When pressed for explanations, they offer the genuinely bizarre excuse that if queer players are allowed to tell other players about their sexual orientation, that it might arouse discriminatory or unkind remarks from those players, and that would violate the anti-discrimination rules of the game. This is just ridiculous. So people who want to advertise their groups as being friendly to certain people aren't allowed to because some idiots might taunt the members? I would assume that WoW has an age limit and doesn't allow kindergarten age children on their game so why are all players being treated as children who can't either control their bigotry or be called names? I guess the real question is why doesn't Blizzard have a way of dealing with people who actually discriminate or taunt other players? They know what's going on in the game at all times. If somebody calls me a name because I'm a member of a certain group I should be able to tell an admin and the admin should be able to look at the logs and see what the other person said. Then that person should be kicked from the game immediately. Since the threat of physical violence and jail is removed in an online environment, there needs to be another way of keeping bigoted cowards in line and not let them define the acceptable behavior for the group.

This reminds me of what I read about the recent riots in France. Apparently the French position on multi-culturalism is to ignore differences between everyone. That sounds good in theory but in practice what it really does is erase the culture of people who aren’t the mainstream group. So you have people who have had all expressions of their cultural individuality suppressed in favor of the majority. This obviously causes some problems in the long run. If these online games keep pretending that real world differences don’t exist, it’s just going to piss those people off and they’ll find somewhere else to spend their time and money. As these games grow in stature and importance, the ones that find good ways of dealing with the idiots will be the ones that thrive.

Tags: grommes, games, discrimination, glbt, bigotry, warcraft

DEMOCRATS

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 11:44:09 +0000

[Molly Ivins - Not. Backing. Hillary.](http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=20250) > What kind of courage does it take, for mercy's sake? The majority of the American people (55 percent) think the war in Iraq is a mistake and that we should get out. The majority (65 percent) of the American people want single-payer health care and are willing to pay more taxes to get it. The majority (86 percent) of the American people favor raising the minimum wage. The majority of the American people (60 percent) favor repealing Bush's tax cuts, or at least those that go only to the rich. The majority (66 percent) wants to reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending, but by reducing Pentagon spending or raising taxes. > > The majority (77 percent) thinks we should do "whatever it takes" to protect the environment. The majority (87 percent) thinks big oil companies are gouging consumers and would support a windfall profits tax. That is the center, you fools. WHO ARE YOU AFRAID OF? I like Molly Ivins. One of the perpetual problems of the Democratic party is the members' inability to stand for their beliefs. Too many Democrats think that everybody is sympathetic to Republican ideas so they run after, trying to make sure everybody knows they support those ideas too. Nuts to that. We need Democrats who are proud of the name. People who aren't trying to be just Left enough of Right so they don't alienate either side of things. The Right is running this country into the ground. We need more intelligent, pragmatic people on the Left who don't cow-tow to anybody and who can stand up and say they are really a Democrat, not just Not-A-Republican.

Tags: grommes, politics, molly+ivins, democrats

113836475705530073

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 05:25:57 +0000

**links for 2006-01-27**

[Mike Chambers: Removing HTML Element children with JavaScript](http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mesh/archives/2006/01/removing_html_e.cfm)

(tags: [javascript](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/javascript) [error](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/error))
*
[Lego orrery pictures](http://homepage.mac.com/aklego/PhotoAlbum4.html)

This is an orrery I made to help explain to my children why we have so much light in the summer and not nearly enough in the winter (we live in Alaska)

(tags: [lego](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/lego) [science](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/science) [diy](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/diy) [kids](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/kids))
*
[All things unicycling](http://www.xs4all.nl/~klaasbil/uniindex.htm)

(tags: [unicycle](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/unicycle) [bike+riding](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/bike+riding) [tutorial](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tutorial) [links](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/links))
*
[Snert . Com - Software - mod_throttle/3.1.2 for Apache 1.3](http://www.snert.com/Software/mod_throttle/)

This Apache module is intended to reduce the load on your server & bandwidth generated by popular virtual hosts, directories, locations, or users according to supported polices (see below) that decide when to delay or refuse requests.

(tags: [apache](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/apache) [sysadmin](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/sysadmin) [web](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web) [unreads](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/unreads))

THE PRESIDENT

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 11:03:00 +0000

[Fafblog! Q & A: Our Omnipotent President](http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/q-our-omnipotent-president-q.html) > Q. Things sure have changed since the innocent days of mutually assured destruction! But is it legal for the president to ignore the law? > > A. Maybe not according to plain ol stupid ol regular law, but we're at war! You don't go to war with regular laws, which are made outta red tape and bureaucracy and Neville Chamberlain. You go to war with great big strapping War Laws made outta tanks and cold hard steel and the American Fightin Man and WAR, KABOOOOOOM! HAHAHAHA

Tags: grommes, politics, spying, law, president+bush

PARENTING

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 07:48:25 +0000

[Welcome to MY world: Top ten reasons Geeks make good fathers](http://spaces.msn.com/members/imhelendt/Blog/cns%211pLLf-75vbkScDmJSvitLgBA%21490.entry) > 9\. SMART IS COOL. Having a Geek for a father instills the message into your children that smart is cool. They idolize Daddy. Hopefully, they'll want to grow up to be just like him.

Except for #3 (Geeks are good at Math), this fits me pretty well. Of course I think the kids will be teaching me a thing or a million about technology in the coming years, it’s good to have a head start. I’d hate to be one of those parents who just can’t for the life of them understand why kids want to do Instant Messaging or have a cell phone at age 8. It’s going to happen, you better be ready for it.

Tags: grommes, kids, parenting, geeks

113827843581155802

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 05:27:15 +0000

**links for 2006-01-26**

[Slashdot | SCSI vs. SATA In a File Server?](http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/24/2332240&from=rss)

(tags: [scsi](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/scsi) [sata](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/sata) [hard+drives](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/hard+drives) [server](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/server) [unreads](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/unreads))
*
[HomePage: Linux HA](http://www.linux-ha.org/)

(tags: [linux](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/linux) [sysadmin](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/sysadmin) [high+availability](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/high+availability) [clustering](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/clustering))
*
[A Homemade Solar Water Heater](http://www.motherearthnews.com/library/1979_September_October/A_Homemade_Solar_Water_Heater)

(tags: [diy](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/diy) [solar](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/solar) [water](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/water))
*
[Ajaxian » FireBug: “It’s not your Grandma’s Javascript Console.”](http://ajaxian.com/archives/firebug-its-not-your-grandmas-javascript-console)

FireBug is a new tool for Firefox that aids with debugging Javascript, DHTML, and Ajax. It is like a combination of the Javascript Console, DOM Inspector, and a command line Javascript interpreter.

(tags: [javascript](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/javascript) [ajax](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/ajax) [firefox](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/firefox))
*
[SkimCSS - Skim Everything (CSS) Cascading Style Sheet Related!](http://www.skimcss.com/skimlist)

(tags: [css](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/css) [examples](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/examples) [links](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/links))
*
[Linux.com | CLI Magic: OpenSSH + Bash](http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/01/12/1937210)

My tools consist of two everyday programs: OpenSSH and the GNU Bourne-Again Shell (bash). No other tool, whether console-based or GUI, has been so consistently useful to me as these two programs.

(tags: [ssh](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/ssh) [bash](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/bash) [howto](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/howto) [examples](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/examples))
*
[Diagonal Wrapping](http://www.shimojima.co.jp/English/wrapping/wrap01.htm)

This is the standard procedure for formal gifts.

(tags: [wrapping](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/wrapping) [gifts](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/gifts) [howto](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/howto))
*
[Using AJAX to Improve the Bandwidth Performance of Web Applications](http://webperformanceinc.com/library/reports/AjaxBandwidth/index.html)

(tags: [ajax](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/ajax) [performance](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/performance) [web](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web))
*
[SkimCSS - Semi-transparent Hovering Popups using CSS and Javascript](http://www.skimcss.com/skimview/Semi-transparent_Hovering_Popups_using_CSS_and_Javascript/110/)

A great article on how to create a semi-transparent hovering effect when a user hovers over a link. It works in IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari.

(tags: [css](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/css) [examples](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/examples) [tooltips](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tooltips))
*
[AjaxMyTop: MySQL Monitor](http://ajaxian.com/archives/779)

We’ve seen in-browser SQL, a database administrator, and even a database designer. Now there’s a database monitor…AjaxMyTop shows active MySQL connections.

(tags: [ajax](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/ajax) [mysql](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/mysql) [sysadmin](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/sysadmin))

PATRIOTISM

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 13:41:00 +0000

[insomnia: Future American lawyers to be proud of.](http://insomnia.livejournal.com/652389.html?nc=2&style=mine) > Alberto Gonzales spoke before law students at Georgetown today, justifying illegal, unauthorized surveilance of US citizens, but during the course of his speech the students in class did something pretty ballsy and brave. They got up from their seats and turned their backs to him. > "When you're a law student, they tell you if say that if you can't argue the law, argue the facts. They also tell you if you can't argue the facts, argue the law. If you can't argue either, apparently, the solution is to go on a public relations offensive and make it a political issue... to say over and over again "it's lawful", and to think that the American people will somehow come to believe this if we say it often enough. > > In light of this, I'm proud of the very civil civil disobedience that was shown here today." > - David Cole, Georgetown University Law Professor ![](http://www.boingboing.net/images/1644-gonzales_protesters.jpg)

This is great. A large part of the reason Republicans are always attacking universities is that they’re one of the last bastions of radicalism left in this country. These students and professors are true Americans in ways that the Right and the Bush administration will never apparently understand.

Tags: grommes, politics, spying, law, georgetown, civil+disobedience

113819174762445311

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 05:22:27 +0000

**links for 2006-01-25**

[Thumb Thing Book Holder](http://www.abcstuff.com/items/BH007.html)

This unique book holder fits on the thumb like a ring and spreads the pages of the book open. Perfect for reading while while holding the book in one hand!

(tags: [reading](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/reading) [cool+tools](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/cool+tools) [books](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/books))
*
[DBI Recipes](http://gmax.oltrelinux.com/dbirecipes.html)

(tags: [dbi](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/dbi) [recipes](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/recipes) [perl](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/perl))

113810552923246440

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 05:25:29 +0000

**links for 2006-01-24**

[MonsterFishKeepers - Building My 50,000 Gallon Monster Mega Tank](http://www.monsterfishkeepers.com/forums/showthread.php?s=11274b7c4259e4cc4bca2139f1bbad86&t=8952)

My large tank is L shaped. The long part of the L is 36 feet, the short part of the L is 27 feet. The front to back of the long part of the L is 18 feet, the front to back of the short part of the L is 15 feet. The tank water is 9 feet deep.

(tags: [aquarium](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/aquarium) [fish](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/fish) [diy](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/diy))
*
[HowToBuildALoft - ElephantStaircase](http://www.elephantstaircase.com/wiki/index.php?title=HowToBuildALoft "HowToBuildALoft")

This idea is mainly geared towards college kids building a loft for their dorm room so that they can better utilize limited space, but we hope it inspires you to do more.

(tags: [diy](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/diy) [building](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/building) [wood](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/wood))
*
[Are Professors too Liberal?](http://hnn.us/articles/1038.html)

[Horowitz's] argument is bogus in almost every way imaginable. His premise, that a balance of political party affiliation is necessary or desirable in major sectors of American life, would lead to an almost totalitarian quota system.

(tags: [politics](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/politics) [liberal](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/liberal) [conservative](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/conservative) [juan+cole](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/juan+cole) [school](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/school))
*
[Issac Asimov's The Last Question](http://adin.dyndns.org/adin/TheLastQ.htm)

In fifty years [Asimov] averaged a new magazine article, short story, or book every two weeks, and most of that on a manual typewriter. Asimov thought that The Last Question, first copyrighted in 1956, was his best short story ever.

(tags: [asimov](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/asimov) [sciencefiction](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/sciencefiction) [story](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/story))
*
[iStockphoto.com : Articles - Know Your Type](http://www.istockphoto.com/article_view.php?ID=153)

Practicing good typography is at the core to good design.

(tags: [typography](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/typography) [web+design](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/web+design) [design](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/design))
*
[BLDGBLOG: "The city as an avatar of itself"](http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/city-as-avatar-of-itself.html)

"It's often hard to convince people that Olivo Barbieri's aerial photographs are real," Metropolis writes.

(tags: [photography](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/photography) [buildings](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/buildings) [city](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/city))
*
[Bash Reference Manual:](http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html)

This text is a brief description of the features that are present in the Bash shell.

(tags: [bash](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/bash) [tutorial](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tutorial) [manual](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/manual))
*
[How to make dorodango](http://www.kyokyo-u.ac.jp/youkyou/4/english4.htm)

Shining mud ball

(tags: [diy](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/diy) [art](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/art))
*
[Mastering Ajax, Part 2: Make asynchronous requests with JavaScript and Ajax](http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-ajaxintro2/?ca=dgr-lnxw07AJAX-Request)

In this article, I will zoom in from that 10,000-foot view and focus on specific Ajax details.

(tags: [ajax](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/ajax) [tutorial](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tutorial) [ibm](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/ibm))
*
[Sacco report on Iraq](http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2006/01/20/fullsacco1.pdf)

(tags: [comics](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/comics) [iraq](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/iraq))
*
[Transracial Writing for the Sincere](http://www.speculations.com/transrace.htm)

(tags: [writing](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/writing) [race](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/race))

113793267797414301

Sun, 22 Jan 2006 05:24:37 +0000

**links for 2006-01-22**

[Karl Hartig: Data Visualization](http://www.karlhartig.com/chart/chart.html)

(tags: [data](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/data) [visualization](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/visualization) [charts](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/charts))

113784639610859594

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 05:26:36 +0000

**links for 2006-01-21**

[Net::Blogger - an OOP-ish interface for accessing a weblog via the Blogger XML-RPC API. - search.cpan.org](http://search.cpan.org/~claco/Net-Blogger-1.01/lib/Net/Blogger.pm)

(tags: [blogger](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/blogger) [perl](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/perl) [api](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/api))
*
[Contents of Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble - by Lester R. Brown - Earth Policy Institute - Entering a New World - Restoring the Earth](http://www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB2/Contents.htm)

(tags: [environment](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/environment) [book](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/book) [planet](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/planet) [earth](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/earth) [design](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/design))
*
[Slashdot | SSH Tunnels How-to?](http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/19/2218226)

(tags: [ssh](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/ssh) [ssh+tunnels](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/ssh+tunnels) [howto](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/howto) [links](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/links))
*
[SANS - Internet Storm Center - Cooperative Cyber Threat Monitor And Alert System](http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?date=2005-07-26)

(tags: [security](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/security))
*
[Breaking Firewalls with OpenSSH and PuTTY](http://souptonuts.sourceforge.net/sshtips.htm)

(tags: [ssh](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/ssh) [tips](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tips) [tricks](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tricks) [howto](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/howto))
*
[How do I take notes on big books? | Ask MetaFilter](http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/31113)

(tags: [unreads](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/unreads) [books](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/books) [reading](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/reading) [tips](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/tips))
*
[jQuery: New Wave Javascript](http://jquery.com/)

(tags: [javascript](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/javascript) [language](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/language) [code](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/code))
*
[Tracing An Email](http://www.onimoto.com/index.php?post=50)

(tags: [email](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/email) [howto](http://del.icio.us/mattgrommes/howto))

FUTURE FILM

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 14:38:43 +0000

[The Catalogue](http://www.cinematicfilm.com/the%20catalogue.html) by chris oakley

This is the best science fiction short film I’ve watched in a long time. Now, it’s not typically what you’d think of when you think science fiction. Or film, actually. There’s no actors, no dialogue. Just a film of what happens in the mall of the future when your data is accumulated in databases and sold to the highest bidder. It’s only a few minutes and it’s mesmorizing. Watch it.

Tags: grommes, science+fiction, scifi, movie, film, future

FREY

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 14:48:27 +0000

This is probably the last James Frey thing I'll publish here. From The Onion, a great way to wrap this whole boondoggle up.

40ad0c7249316&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss) > In an extraordinary reversal of her strident defense of the author whose book she catapulted to the top of the best-seller list, Oprah Winfrey said today she believed that the author James Frey "betrayed millions of readers" by making up elements of his life in his best-selling memoir, "A Million Little Pieces." > > She added that she believed "I made a mistake" when she said that the truth of the book mattered less than its story of redemption.

Good for her. It was a mistake. It’s pretty rare these days for a public figure to just say straight out that they were wrong.

Tags: grommes, frey, james+frey, oprah, truthm/2006/01/11/books/11cnd-frey.html?ex=1294635600&en=d4a334283c692fe4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss)) talks about the debate I’d hoped this incident would lead to, whether memoir and non-fiction should be fictionalized. I agree with the side that says memoir should not contain fiction. Just because an autobiography is based on the writer’s recollection doesn’t mean that they have full license to make up the whole story. If someone misremembers or can’t recall exact conversations, that’s fine. But to go out of your way to invent whole relevant sections of the story is just wrong. It’s not that James Frey misremembered being in jail and befriending another inmate who was paid by a cop to beat him up, he invented the entire thing. And the worst thing is, he invented it badly. It’s a lame story. I haven’t read the book but just the idea of it should have set off alarm bells. The guy gets beat up by another inmate (who was paid to do so by a cop he had insulted), then befriends the guy and spends his sentence reading the classics of literature to his illiterate new bestest buddy. Come on. Give me a break.

It doesn’t seem like this will end Frey’s writing career or anything, which is good. He messed up, got caught, now we need to move on. The real test will be if his next “memoir” is published in the fiction or non-fiction section. That’s the true test and it’s really a test of his publisher’s honesty more than anything else.

Tags: grommes, writing, frey, james+frey, oprah, ny+times

IRAQ

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 09:47:55 +0000

[Global Guerrillas: JOURNAL: Aerial IEDs and Open Source Innovation](http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2006/01/journal_aerial_.html) > Insurgents, who place these aerial IEDs along known flight paths, trigger them when American helicopters come along at the typical altitude of just above the rooftops. The devices shoot 50 feet into the air, and a proximity fuze touches off a warhead that sprays metal fragments, said Brig. Gen. Edward Sinclair, commander of the Army’s Aviation Center at Fort Rucker, Ala.

More bad news about how the guerilla fighters in Iraq are learning and using increasingly sophisticated tactics against our troops. They’re bringing in experienced fighters from around the world who know about these things and teaching the native Iraqis the tricks of the trade. If we don’t change the way we’re doing things over there the situation is only going to get worse as this knowledge spreads around. Once you know how to do something you can always build on that to take it to next step of sophistication. Unfortunately I have no faith that the Bush administration will push for any real changes so hopefully the Pentagon will push back and start making the inevitable transition to a peace-waging force instead of subjecting our war trained troops to this god-awful mess.

tem up to what other countries have enjoyed for 50 years. One of the most telling statistics in this article is that the biggest concern for most Iraqis is electricity, not terrorists. Giving people more electricity is probably the best way to put a damper on terrorist activity right now. It should have been our top concern immediately after taking over. Once enough people start relying on their air conditioners and refridgerators they’ll be less lenient with others blowing up the power plants and shooting at the people keeping the juice flowing.

Tags: grommes, iraq, electricity, terrorists, terrorism, ieee

TRUTH

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 12:12:00 +0000

[Bending the Truth in a Million Little Ways - New York Times](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/books/17kaku.html?ex=1295154000&en=47df88cb1f429ebd&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss) > We live in a relativistic culture where television "reality shows" are staged or stage-managed, where spin sessions and spin doctors are an accepted part of politics, where academics argue that history depends on who is writing the history, where an aide to President Bush, dismissing reporters who live in the "reality-based community," can assert that "we're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." This is a great NY Times article about what the James Frey situation says about our society. It's something I've been talking and thinking about for awhile, the erosion of truth. The Republican right, and the Bush administration especially, as well as corporate America have been on a mission to make sure nobody really knows anything, as evidenced by the quote above. They openly mock scientists, pay other scientists to lie and create fake controversy, "spin" everything, put know-nothings in positions of power and then crow about it, anything they can do to push people towards not believing anything. The point is to get people to think that anything they are told is the true is the truth. It's the ultimate power-grab, the ability to define what is true and real.

At the end of the book 1984, the main character is tortured and is made to say he sees 5 lights when they are really only 4. Most people see this as the ultimate breaking of the character but it’s meant as something else entirely. If you accept that there are 5 lights because you are told so by those in power it gives them the ability to define your reality. If you are made to believe, contrary to your own eyes, that there are 5 lights because the government says so, you will believe anything. This is the goal of this anti-truth agenda. They want you to believe that what they say is true because they say so, not because it really is true. The President keeps saying everything is going great in Iraq not because it is going great but because if he says it enough, people will believe it just because he says it. Something like 22% of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11, a completely fabricated story. They believe it because the people in power feel no compunction to tell the truth as it is, only the truth as they would like it to be. This is a very dangerous situation. Cases like the Frey incident only highlight the growing grey area. Those that would like to use and expand the grey area must be resisted at every step.

Tags: grommes, truth, frey, james+frey, bush, right+wing

GOOGLE

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 09:24:00 +0000

[ACM Queue - A Conversation with Phil Smoot - An engineer at Hotmail discusses the challenges of keeping one of the Web’s largest and oldest Internet services running 24/7.](http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=353) > In the landscape of today’s megaservices, Hotmail just might be Mount Everest. One of the oldest free Web e-mail services, Hotmail relies on more than 10,000 servers spread around the globe to process billions of e-mail transactions per day. What’s interesting is that despite this enormous amount of traffic, Hotmail relies on less than 100 system administrators to manage it all.While I'm pretty sure that Google is many times larger than Hotmail, it's still incredibly impressive to run 10K servers. Reading this rather geeky article (the ACM is the Association for Computing Machinery, which I actually founded the NM Tech chapter of a few years ago) makes me appreciate how cool it would be to work in an environment like this. Google would be my absolute dream job in terms of working with huge server farms and the stuff you can learn in that environment. I've been doing mostly QA for about 2 years now after running an ISP for 5 years and I keep coming back to network administration as the thing that really excites me. I keep thinking of how I can build up my upcoming website if it becomes super popular and it hasn't even launched yet. That's why I'd love to work with Google. The world's largest distributed server farm, multiple applications running across it, by all accounts a group of the smartest people in the business; boy would that be fun and interesting. If anybody happens to be reading this from Google, I'd drop everything and come work with you guys in a heartbeat. I don't know if I'm smart enough yet but I'd jump in and learn what I needed to quick.

I’ve been trying to get my current job to think in terms of building out like Google does, using cheap servers and farming out pieces of computation to many servers rather than running a few big boxes. We’re not at the point yet here that we absolutely need that kind of scale but it’ll come I think, and that will be fun. One of our vendor’s system falls down all the time and I keep telling our guys “We don’t want to be the one being made fun of like we make fun of them.” I’ve found I like QA and being involved in coding but this network/sysadmin stuff is really what gets my brain juices flowing.

Tags: grommes, google, hotmail, networks, server+farms

KAWASAKI

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 11:55:47 +0000

One of my favorite business people, Guy Kawasaki, has started his new [blog](http://blog.guykawasaki.com/) off with a bang. Here are some good quotes from his recent post: [Hindsights](http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/01/hindsights.html). > The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the unlived life is not worth examining > If you are going to fail, you might as well fail at a difficult task.

Tags: grommes, quotes, inspiration, guy+kawasaki

THUNDERBIRD

Thu, 12 Jan 2006 11:55:00 +0000

If you use Thunderbird for email (and you should) you need to first [upgrade to version 1.5](http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/). Then you need to go [download this Extension](http://www.andrewlucking.com/archives/category/remember-mismatched-domains/) to get rid of the idiotic 'Domain Mismatch' error that by default in the new version you can't get rid of.

Tags: grommes, thunderbird, email

WORDS

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 10:20:00 +0000

[USATODAY.com - Linguists vote 'truthiness' word of 2005](http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-01-07-word-of-the-year_x.htm?csp=34) > A panel of linguists has decided the word that best reflects 2005 is "truthiness," defined as the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts. Boy, if this doesn't describe most right-wing Republicans' view of the world, I don't know what does. Every aspect of right-wing policy reflects the words of Adam Savage from Mythbusters: "I reject your reality and substitute my own."

Tags: grommes, politics, republicans, mythbusters, words

WRITING

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 15:47:00 +0000

[A Million Little Lies](http://www.thesmokinggun.com/jamesfrey/0104061jamesfrey1.html) is a remarkable article about the apparent lies that make up James Frey's celebrated autobiography A Million Little Pieces. It makes an incredibly strong case that the book that has made Frey an international best-seller and literary rockstar is almost completely made up.

If this book is fiction, and unless the Smoking Gun article is fictional the book should certainly be reclassified, then what does that mean for James Frey? His status as a sort of tough-guy self-help guru for addicts would surely go away but as far as the writing goes, what would it mean? From the small excerpts I’ve read of his work, it doesn’t seem very good as fiction but as autobiography it certainly has a unique style. Does autobiography always have to be completely true? I don’t know. Plenty of people have written faux-biographical novels, even starring characters with the author’s name. And most autobiography is certainly a little embellished but completely made up is a different animal.

It seems to me like James Frey was too normal for his own tastes and the somewhat generic quality of his life led him to construct an elaborate alternate fantasy life. Everybody does this at some point, usually in high school. The difference is that Frey wrote his down and called it autobiography. Where the real James Frey had a drunken college run-in with police and was promptly bailed out, the “James Frey” of A Million Little Pieces hit a cop with his car, had a standoff with the officers and proceded to heckle and berate the cops before being sentenced to 3 months of hard time. It’s easy to see how somebody whose boring upper middle-class life didn’t match up to the grand stories he told people to impress them.

If this article were published in a magazine like Esquire, it would be all over the media. Since it’s on the Smoking Gun website, I wonder how much play it will get. They’ve done just an awesome job of looking into this and I hope people check it out. I’d love to see a discussion on just how much fiction you can put into an autobiography before it becomes a novel and a lie. I’m also curious to see how people like Oprah, who have put Frey on a huge pedestal, react to the fact that the life they were inspired by only exists in one man’s head.

Tags: grommes, writing, james+frey, frey, oprah, smoking+gun

fiction is for nerds. Next time you have a thought, even a fleeting one, about whether a book you’ve written or are reading is a certain sub-genre or another, put the book down and go outside. Take a deep breath, ask yourself if the book is worth reading/writing and go back to it. That’s all there is to it.

WEB

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 12:25:00 +0000

We use [Salesforce.com](http://www.salesforce.com) at my work quite a bit and I usually find it a model of how to run a modern web services company. Unfortunately, they seem to have more server problems than I'd like to see in a company with as much money as they have. They just rolled out their new [$50 million data center](http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5838810.html) and here's what I get while in the process of using the site today: > Server Too Busy > > The salesforce.com servers are temporarily unable to respond to your request. We apologize for the inconvenience. Thank you for your patience, and please try again in a few moments.Oops. This is on top of a "rare database bug" (as they described it) which took the site down for most of a full day just a few weeks ago. I know running a big data center (or two data centers now with the new one) isn't easy but sheesh, what does 50 million dollars buy these days? I hope when/if my website I'm building gets to the size of Salesforce I have a team of geeks up to the challenge. I'm sure Salesforce has quite a team and if they're having these problems, I'm worried.

.com/tag/grommes), [firefox](http://technorati.com/tag/firefox), [mozilla](http://technorati.com/tag/mozilla)

NARNIA

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 12:15:32 +0000

I meant to post this earlier (like a week ago when it was sent to me, oops) but there were some technical difficulties with the blog server, plus I was insanely sick a couple of days last week.

But anyway, I want to point Narnia fans to Narnia Confidential, a new wiki set up for fans of the books. I love wikis for this type of thing. If you don’t know, a wiki is a website that can be edited by the readers of the site. This wiki lets fans of the books compile basically an encyclopedia of information about the books, the movies, the world of Narnia, etc. There are some problems with wikis, the main one being that jerks can edit things out and add junk but as long as a community is built up around the site that usually doesn’t screw things up too badly. They’ve got a lot of good info on the site so I would recommend it if you’re looking for more Narnia info. And if you have something to add, please do!

tags: grommes, narnia, wikis

e to be. Reading the books in chronological order completely ruins that surprise, as well as the other ones that are very important to the series. The Lion... is clearly the introductory book to the series, showing Narnia for the first time to the Pevensie children and to the reader. It introduces Aslan, the most important character to the whole series. The new "first" book, The Magician's Nephew, is supposed to be a flashback and only works when you know about Aslan and care about the world of Narnia.

I could go on about it endlessly but if you’ve become interested in Narnia because of the movie (which is of course The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe) I would very strenuously suggest you read them in their proper publication order of:

You will enjoy the books much, much more this way. Here are a couple of good links on the two orders: http://www.aslan.demon.co.uk/narnia.htm, and http://www.dummies.com/WileyCDA/DummiesArticle/id-3205.html.

tags: grommes, narnia, books

oks are being pushed to the forefront with the release of the movie. That's the best outcome for a book-to-movie conversion, in my mind. They two will always be separate experiences and separate stories but if the attention gets more kids to read the books, awesome. Plus if the extra talk means more money for the movie, they might eventually decide to make the movie of [Voyage of the Dawn Treader](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0064471071/mattorama) and we'll all be in for a treat!

tags: grommes, narnia, religion, christianity

ORGAN PRINTING

Mon, 05 Dec 2005 10:15:12 +0000

[Wired News has an article about so-called 'organ printing'](http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,69701,00.html), where they use what is effectively a printer and a sheet of gel to print sheets of cells to make new organs. This, needless to say, rocks. The best part about it, this: > Prestwich guessed initial human organ printing may be five or 10 years away. Not a decade or more, not twenty to thirty years, **5 to 10 years**. The fact that people are using such short timeframes for incredibly cool and useful technology as this is just mind-boggling.

I’m in the middle of The Singularity Is Near, a book by Ray Kurzweil, one of the most technologically optimistic people on Earth, and some of this timeframes seem a little too optimistic sometimes but wow, things like this really just show how close this stuff is. Biotech is going to be for the next 20 years how the computer industry has been for the last 20. And the cool thing is, the computer industry is also going to be the computer industry of the next 20 years. It’s a good time to be alive.

tags: grommes, science, future, biotech

FIREFOX

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 14:48:20 +0000

If you've upgraded to Firefox 1.5 (and you should have!), go to Tools->Extensions and look for updates to your extensions. A lot of them have release 1.5 compatibility patches. After you've upgraded all the ones that could be upgraded, remove the ones that are still marked in Red. I had a couple still installed and even though they were disabled one of them was causing weird HTML problems. As soon as I uninstalled them, all the issues went away.

Also, if you use the Javascript console I recommend installing Console². The new Console includes CSS errors and if you visit many pages your console will very quickly fill up with stuff you don’t care about. Console² allows filtering of the Error Console so it’s usable again.

tags: grommes, firefox, web+browsers

GIFTS

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 10:20:00 +0000

My family is always asking what to get me for gifts since I'm sure they're tired of getting me books, which is the primary thing I ask for each year and also the primary thing that populates my [Amazon wishlist](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/registry/27AOAZICLWPP4/). For them, here's a list I'll be updating with some cool, somewhat cheap things I'm looking at.

Good soldering iron (this one’s recommended by MAKE magazine)
Subscription to MAKE magazine (use code CMAKE for the best price)
Watchmen: Absolute Edition (yeah, it’s a book but what a book it is!)
Brother PT-65 labeler
Complete Calvin & Hobbes
Complete Far Side (More books but come on! These things are beautiful!)
Sin City: Recut, Extended, Unrated DVD(the new 2 disc set)
The Legend: Johnny Cash(the 4 disc set)
To be updated!

tags: grommes, christmas, gifts

TSHIRTS

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 12:44:00 +0000

If you know me, you'll know that I love tshirts. Here's one from [Threadless](http://www.threadless.com/?streetteam=mattgrommes) that I just had to have. Plus, it's on sale. $10! [![](http://www.threadless.com/product/356/minizoom.jpg)](http://threadless.com/product/356/Lost_A_Wheel?streetteam=mattgrommes) It's timely, nerdy, and somewhat obscure. Can't get any better than that.

Here’s one I just bought the other day and is my favorite shirt at the moment.

I like it because it works as just a funny image and you can also see it as a look at Darth Vader’s home life.

And here’s one I wish I could buy but Kim would probably change the locks if I wore it around the kids. The best part is the name “Stabby McKnife“.

tags: grommes, tshirts, threadless

BELIEF

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 12:47:23 +0000

[This is an excellent essay by Penn Jilette](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5015557), of Penn & Teller fame. It's about how it's easier and better to live life by believing there is no God. Even if you don't think that, read it and see what he has to say.

tags: grommes, god, atheism

SITE

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 11:59:19 +0000

You might be surprised to see some Google ads on the right side of the page. I've done this basically as a test for a new thing I'm doing. I don't know if I'll keep it up for any length of time, I just wanted to try the system out.

tags: grommes, ads, advertising

id these types of issues, I suggest [subscribing to my RSS/Atom feed at Bloglines.com](http://www.bloglines.com/sub//feed.xml). It's a great service. And if you have something you have to say, feel free to [email me](mailto:matt@mattorama.net).

EBAY

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 14:50:14 +0000

Well, at least [somebody is listening to me](/2005/02/tech.html): [Ebay drops charges for developer network.](http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=25FF7DB5-0D2F-40F4-9207-2303567DB983)

ps. Yeah, right. If any of the 3 people who read my website had anything to do with this decision I’ll dance a jig. Good on them though, this is a step in the right direction. I’ll have to see how I can mix some ebay services into my new web project.

tags: grommes, ebay, web services

BUILDING

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 09:36:00 +0000

![Finished Shed](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/30/60081514_96c95beaae.jpg?v=0) [It's done](http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattgrommes/60081514/), originally uploaded by [MattGrommes](http://www.flickr.com/people/mattgrommes/).

It’s amazing what you can do with a hammer, a circular saw, and a metric butt-load of nails.

I built this shed over a few weekends using plans from the ultracool WikiHow. I’m finally going to be able to clean out my garage enough to get some work done in there.

IDIOT AMERICA

Thu, 10 Nov 2005 14:50:55 +0000

[This is an excellent article](http://templeofpolemic.proboards42.com/index.cgi?board=theo&action=print&thread=1130126466) on something that has been weighing on me recently, especially in reading the new book "The Republican War of Science." One of the most insidious threats to our country is the Republican desire to discredit science and learning. It's been going on for a long time but the Bush administration and the increasingly powerful Religious Right have really put their shoulder to the wheel recently. I've been reading about the fights over creationism but not commenting because franly it just pisses me off too much. The idea that any idea is worth discussing or teaching to children, which is at the heart of this essay, is just plain stupid.

Science is not a democracy, everybody doesn’t get to vote. Some things are correct, and some are not. Period. We must fight against teaching children that truth and fact are always in doubt. This is the goal of the Right-wing attacks on science, make no mistake. They want to make sure nobody takes any idea as unassailable fact because that fact might hurt the pocketbook of industry or be incompatible with some voting block’s ideals. It’s much more than just teaching that evolution is “just a theory” (leaving aside the fact that this just exposes complete ignorance of the definition of theory), it’s about making sure nobody really believes that polluting industries should be responsible for the damage they cause. It’s about making sure the government is paralyzed in protecting citizens because nobody can say definitively that something will be bad. Whenever somebody says that loosening standards is for your own good or for the good of your children, be on guard. You can be sure that no matter how inocuous it may seem, any time someone wants to redefine a word here or “expose children to more than one side of an argument” there, the purpose is to weaken their belief in science and make them more suseptible to the suggestion that nobody is an expert at anything and nothing is a real fact. Fight it whenever and whereever it pops up.

tags: grommes, science, evolution, right-wing

WORK

Mon, 31 Oct 2005 11:15:43 +0000

I haven't been posting much because we're near the end of a big crunch period at work. We're about to release the next version of our product, a pretty much total rewrite. I'm coming up on my 1 year anniversary here and it's amazing how much we've gelled as a team. We're in a real groove of **code, test, code, test**, etc. and things are hitting on all cylinders. We've done a huge amount of work on this release and when we move to the new system we'll be in such a good place it's really exciting. The system is so much more robust, our development process is very streamlined, it's very cool.

I’m almost done with the shed I’ve been building (pictures in the Flickr bar to the left) and I’ll be going back to working on my website project soon. More about that here soon as well. I just noticed that Digg.com got $2.8 million dollars in venture funding which makes me very excited. Whether or not we’re heading into another bubble it’s probably too soon to tell but I don’t think so. I do think we’re seeing the return of huge money to startups, some of which I hope goes in my direction next year. :)

tags: grommes

at the email linked below.e crap and the business takes advantage of everyone to their own benefit, people start to think why shouldn't they do that too? _"Why shouldn't I steal this thing? Those giant companies on the news steal from everybody and nothing happens to them."_ One of the big reasons the fast food industry is the industry most robbed by it's own employees is that the entire business structure of a company like McDonalds is designed to treat people like a commodity and thus, like expendable trash. Treat people right and you'll attract people who like being treated right. People who have self-worth are more valuable to any organization because they have ideas they will share. Even if it's just an idea to sell more fries, someone who you treat right will help you sell more fries. Someone you treat like a button-pushing monkey will not. And even if treating someone right in some small way doesn't benefit you directly, it makes you a better person and that's just as good. Kim and I make Allison say please and thank you even to us because it makes her a better person, not because it impresses other parents.

Second, not everybody has the same ideas about work. If you have a way you like to work, make sure others know that. I like to multi-task; to have a few browser tabs open, 2 different projects, etc. This lets me flip back and forth between things I’m doing if one is in a waiting state or I just need a break from one thing. This works fine for me, I get things done this way. Other people might not have the same opinion about it. Make sure that the way you like to work is okay with your bosses. And believe me, even if they don’t say anything about it, they have opinions and might think something completely different about it. A lot of managers and business owners think they own your brain from the minute you walk in the door and if your way of working makes them think you are being an independent person during work hours, you could have trouble. And if your way of working doesn’t jive with the company you’re with and you can’t get comfortable doing something else, find somewhere else to work. Immediately. That leads to the next realization.

Always trust your instincts. If you smell a rat when you meet a person or feel weird about a company, trust that. Yes you could be wrong and your first impression might be mistaken but usually not. Our brains are nothing but pattern-matching systems and if your brain starts making matches to experiences that give you a funny feeling about something, even if you can’t say exactly what it is, trust it. Our little pattern-matching computers have millions of years of evolution behind them and most likely doing something you feel weirdly about will come back and bite you in the ass.

SOFTWARE

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 11:54:46 +0000

I really like most of what Joel Spolsky of [Joel On Software](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/) has to say but something from [his current essay](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/SetYourPriorities.html) really stuck out at me. > By the time we were ready to start development, we had enough ideas for improvement to occupy 1700 programmers for a few decades. Unfortunately, all we have is three programmers, and we wanted to be shipping next fall, so there had to be some prioritization. The scary part of that for me is the "shipping next fall" thing. YIKES. I cannot imagine working on something for a year before sending it out the door. Working on my current web-based project and seeing the cool stuff people are doing with web apps and constant development makes the idea of working on something for a full year, then pressing it onto a CD and shipping it seem both scary as hell and completely insane. I know Joel has his reasons for not wanting to do web-based products but criminey, it seems to weird to make your people work on something **for a year** before customers get to see it and pick at it.

I’m planning on launching a semi-private beta of my site around the first of the new year with a fairly complete system. But it won’t be perfectly complete, by design. I’ll be adding and tweaking things constantly. Customers (assuming I get any, which I think I will) will hopefully give me ideas, I’ll have new ideas, things will need to get fixed or improved or discarded, etc. I can make changes to the code on the fly. Shipping a piece of software on a CD is like scribing it into stone plates to me now, I can’t get my mind around it. Joel seems to be doing really well with his FogBugz product but man, the “lock yourself away from customers, work on something for a year, scribe it into stone plates, send it to people, repeat” school of software just seems so dead to me, like Dell announcing they going to ship the latest and greatest in vacuum tube computers.

tags: grommes, software, joel spolsky

PHONEYS

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 14:25:17 +0000

[This is a great article in Mother Jones](http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2005/09/the_presidency_shines.html) on the one thing the Bush Administration does very, very, well: **show business**.> It may be true that, for a week or more, this administration couldn't get a bottle of water to a diabetic grandmother, but when something was actually at stake -- what reporters far and wide referred to as the "[rebuilding](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/15/AR2005091502552_pf.html)" not of New Orleans but of a presidency, or simply of the presidential "[image](http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-assess16sep16,0,1051266.story?coll=la-home-headlines)" -- efficiency, coordination, and togetherness were the by-words of the day.They do public relations and staged events better than anybody. P.R. is built into their DNA it seems. They just appointed a PR flack to go to Arab countries and try to bolster our image. And they think this is a perfectly valid and normal thing to do. They are "Always On Message" (to steal a phrase from [Larry Young](http://www.ait-planetlar.com)) no matter how inhuman, how idiotic, or how just blatantly offensive it might be. Even if you're a die-hard Bush fan, come on, this is insane.

tags: grommes, bush, politics

QUOTES

Sat, 17 Sep 2005 15:15:57 +0000

Here's a couple of quotes from the remarkable book I'm reading right now, Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse. Mostly I want to preserve them for myself. > To be prepared against surprise is to be _trained_. To be prepared for surprise is to be _educated_. > Only by free self-concealment can persons believe that they obey the law because the law is powerful; in fact, the law is powerful for persons only because they obey it. We do not proceed through a traffic intersection _because_ the signal changes, but _when_ it changes. And one that's especially relevant to today's society: > Conflict with other societies is, in fact, an effective way for a society to restrain its own culture. Powerful societies do not silence their poietai [original thinkers, artists, etc.] in order that they may go to war; they go to war as a way of silencing their poietai. tags: [grommes](http://technorati.com/tag/grommes), [books](http://technorati.com/tag/books),[quotes](http://technorati.com/tag/quotes)

BRILLIANCE

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 08:06:03 +0000

Turning anti-abortion protestors into profit: [Planned Parenthood Pledge-A-Picket!](http://www.ppsp.org/PledgePicket-index.asp) Whoever thought of this deserves an award. From the page: > Every time protesters gather outside of our Locust Street health center, our patients face verbal attacks from them. They see graphic signs meant to confuse and intimidate. They are sometimes blocked from entering the building and occasionally they are videotaped. They are offered anti-choice propaganda and free rides to the closest "crisis pregnancy center." > > Here's how it works: You decide on the amount you would like to pledge for each protester (minimum 10 cents). When protesters show up on our sidewalks, Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania will count and record their number each day from October 1 through November 30, 2005\. We will place a signoutside the health center that tracks pledges and makes protesters fully aware that their actions are benefiting PPSP.

via Warren
tags: grommes, abortion,pro-choice

ME

Sat, 10 Sep 2005 09:07:12 +0000

[![General Robotic Organism Manufactured for Mathematics and Efficient Sabotage](http://www.cyborgname.com/webimages/handyvac-GROMMES.png)](http://www.cyborgname.com)

SCIENCE

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 16:47:45 +0000

We've been having a mini-discussion here in Albuquerque about the local city of Rio Rancho deciding to take a step toward including Intelligent Design in their school curiculum. Of course, as they do, the ID people haven't tried to actually include ID in the classroom as such. Instead, they've tried to weaken support for evolution in the classroom as a precursor to putting ID in later. Our newspaper (the [Albuquerque Journal](http://www.abqjournal.com)) seems to be on the side of the ID people since probably 75% of the letters they publish are pro-ID or anti-evolution (the same thing really since ID has literally nothing going for it so their only way forward is trying to knock evolution, the same tactic they tried for years when they had the courage of their convictions and called it creationism). To contribute to the side of science and logic I sent the following letter in to the Journal.

The recent letters on the Rio Rancho Intelligent Design issue show one thing for sure, science and reason have already been dealt a blow by the ID crowd and they haven’t even been successful in getting their doctrine into the schools. The fact that people still think that evolution is in any way a controversial topic shows a real failure for science education in this country.

It also shows the power of the word games ID proponents play. Once you notice the game, you can’t help but see it every time in everything they say. The game goes like this: First you say something about evolution that is clearly wrong or is based on a misunderstanding. Then when a scientist corrects the incorrect statement you say “Look, we have a disagreement! This shows there’s some controversy!” Combine this game with the frankly dismal state of science education and it’s clear why perfectly reasonable people are hoodwinked by the ID “debate” when there is no real debate to be had.

tags: grommes, evolution,intelligent+design

IDENTITY

Sat, 03 Sep 2005 18:29:48 +0000

This post will probably be a bit geeky so be warned.

I had an idea after reading this post by Mary Hodder on her blog. It’s about managing identity on the internet, a topic that has been getting a lot of talk recently. The problem with a lot of these ideas is that they’re top-down and require quite an infrastructure in most cases. Or, they let one company be in charge. This is clearly not in the spirit of the modern internet.

My idea is based on the RADIUS community model. When I go to SiteX, I’m presented with a Distributed ID (DID) login box (Distributed ID is undoubtedly already taken as a name, I just use it because that’s how I think of it). I put in my email address (or something like it, as I’ll get to later) and SiteX says ‘ok, your DID name is matt@mattorama.net‘ at which point it looks in the DNS for mattorama.net and determines the server I’ve appointed as my DID server. Email works the same way, I have an MX record which tells every website where to send my email. It then sends my DID name and password to that server and the server looks up my DID and returns the personal information I’ve filled in for that DID. Say for that DID I’ve put in my name, email, and website only. SiteX takes that information and uses that for my account on their site. I don’t have to fill it all out again. If they require more info than I’ve given, they can ask for it and either require or hope I fill it in. If I want to have many DIDs with different info on each, I can do that. matt@mattorama.net would be my limited info, fullmatt@mattorama.net would be my full info for billing or whatnot. fakematt@mattorama.net would be a fake name I’d use for pointless login sites like newspapers.

The benefit is many-fold. First, it works like many other existing internet services. MX records in DNS, RADIUS, and mail servers are all old tech so I’m not reinventing traversing any new ground idea-wise. The server is small and could become a staple like smtp servers. I’d do as open source so nobody controlled it and a bunch of implementations could grow, again like smtp servers. RADIUS servers use flat text files which are easy for small ISPs or individuals, or database servers for bigger sites (like Yahoo which just got in some hot water with making Flickr people switch to Yahoo IDs. With this system, they could manage both sets of IDs just as easily as just the Yahoo ID) ISPs could use it as an sales tool. ‘We give you 5 DIDs with your account or you can buy 5 more for $X a month!’ The user manages the DIDs through a website or other ISP administration tool. No one authority is in the middle. This is better for security since there’s no big database to hack and steal everybody’s identity. Undoubtedly there’s some technical issues to overcome since I just thought of this like 15 minutes ago but the idea is simple enough and like I say I’m not breaking any new ground. RADIUS has been doing this for years.

I have so little free time that I doubt I’ll get to implementing this any time soon. I think I’ll do it as part of my website I’m building (core functionality is almost done so I’ll be putting into a stealth beta test mode soon!) to get at least one implementation out there. It’s an easy idea though so if anybody’s reading who has some feedback or wants to spread this idea around or actually do an implementation, please do. Also, if you happen to be doing a digital lifestyle aggregation system (ahem, Marc Canter) and have some feedback for this idea, I’d love to hear.

tags: grommes, identity links, identity discussions

SCUM

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 10:51:55 +0000

Everyone who is looting pointless crap like clothes and jewelery from stores in New Orleans should be caught and executed. It's one thing to steal food to keep you alive because there's no one there to sell it to you. It's another just to take things because nobody's watching. Those people are the lowest scum and I hope the pictures taken by various news organizations are used to catch them when things calm down. To take advantage of people at a time like this shows that you have forfeited your right to exist.

tags: grommes, katrina links, katrina discussions

FRIENDS

Mon, 29 Aug 2005 11:23:55 +0000

I was looking around on google for my friends from high school, spurred on by my upcoming 10 year anninversary I mentioned below. In the course of looking I found that one of my 2 best friends growing up died in 2001 from an infection he got shooting heroin. The first thing I think is 'Well you obviously weren't too great of a friend if you're only finding this out 4 years later' which is true. I don't think I was a very good friend. I hadn't had any contact with him for 10+ years now. When I moved after my sophmore year, I didn't write one letter or call any of my friends. People I grew up with since 3rd grade in some cases. These guys were like my brothers. I don't know why I never kept in touch, thinking back on it. I think it made me too sad or I was embarrased. Now I just feel like an asshole. I know I probably couldn't have helped him out but god damn, I wish I had tried. Who knows what might have happened.

I hesitate to put his name up here in public but it’s hard finding only a couple of references to his death on the net and no contact info for anybody. So if you knew Jesse Raftery from Santee, CA (near San Diego) and you happen to find this, please email me. I’d like to know how his life went after I left California.

And if you’re the person who got him on that shit, I hope you die a horrible and agonizing death and no one mourns for you. If I ever meet you you better run away.

tags: grommes, death, jesse raftery

SCHOOL

Fri, 26 Aug 2005 09:49:48 +0000

So I go to Feedster the other day to try out their blog search and as I always do, I put in my name for the search. What comes up? [This page](http://santanaclassof96.blogspot.com/), a blog about the 10 year reunion of my first high school, Santana High in Santee, CA. I've been wondering about that reunion because I only went there for 2 years but all the friends I grew up with since the 3rd grade went there. Unfortunately I see some of my people on the list of 'Missing Classmates' but hopefully that will change. Now I just need to find some info about my other high school reunion. I love the internets.

tags: grommes, school, high+school

SPACE

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 11:43:01 +0000

[This is an awesome article in Wired](http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,68529,00.html) about how the Russian space agency is using old components and tourists to fund their program. If they can find some people to pay $100 million, they'll get to go into space and around the Moon. Then landings are next, if they can pay for them. Instead of waiting for new breakthroughs and technology that's 15 years away like NASA, they're doing it with what they've got and proving it can work.

Of course who knows what would happen if some American millionaire is killed by an accident on one of these Russian space flights. We’re not exactly the most rational people recently so I couldn’t even guess what kind of reaction we’d have.

tags: grommes, space, nasa, russia

BLOGS

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 16:58:00 +0000

I was reading an article in the NY Times by the guys who wrote Freakonomics and at the bottom of the article I see this: ![](http://s3.media.squarespace.com/production/1529026/18137065/images/nytimes_oldarticles.jpg) These 'Related Articles' links are all 1 1/2 years old. And this article is about drugs, something that I'm sure they should have reported on in the last 18 months. This illustrates something cool about blogs. If I do a search on Technorati on crack, or drugs, I'm pretty confident that I'll find something written in the last 18 months. More than likely I'll find something written yesterday. Now it could just be that this 'Related Articles' box just sucks but how do I know? All I see is that the only other thing the NY Times has on drugs is from 2-1-2004.

To see an illustration of this, click on the Technorati tags below to see more blogs about the same topics.

Technorati Tags: grommes, drugs, blogs, media

CREATIVITY

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 11:20:01 +0000

[Here's a review of the cheapest HDTV camcorder around.](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/11/technology/circuits/11pogue.html?ex=1281412800&en=79f19fcc24ef67a5&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss) The cool thing, besides the price ($1750), that apparently it's a really good camera to boot. This is cool for many reasons. The fact that you can now make a movie in high-definition for less than $2000 is extremely exciting. Now, I could care less about watching somebody's birthday in HD. What I care about is that a group of people can get together, make an HD movie (or a series of short films) and release them on the internet for essentially nothing. I've been thinking it would be very cool for a group of people to get together and make a series of short movies and release them once a month or something. The movies would be a sort of portfolio of their work. A writer, a director, some actors. Shoot the thing guerilla style, getting only neccessary permits and such, no effects or only ones that can be done on a PC or Mac. Just getting it out there would be a big deal. A guy who made a fan Batman movie a year or 2 ago is now a name, people know who he is. People like to see that you can get things done on a schedule. Putting out a 15 minute section of a serial movie every 2 weeks for 6 months would show a lot of skill and you'd have made a 3 hour movie at the end. Imagine going to a deal with a movie or TV person and saying "You saw what I could do with no money, imagine what I could do with some of your cash?" Instead of saying "Hey, I know your only exposure to my work is my school project film but can I have some money?" I'm probably overly idealistic and ignorant of the movie process but one of my favorite quotes is "The biggest things have been done by those who didn't know they were impossible." Nobody's going to convince me it's impossible until I've done my best and it didn't work.

Technorati Tags: grommes, movies, diy, hdtv

BOOKS

Tue, 02 Aug 2005 16:31:00 +0000

Man, I'm trying to listen to the audiobook of The Butlerian Jihad, one of the Dune prequel books and I'm having a hard time with it. On the one hand, the book is **horrible**. I'm talking "Oh my god, my ears! GAH!" bad. It's like they ripped off some first-semester creative writing student's bad fan fiction and because it's Dune and it's Frank Herbert's son, nobody dared edit it. It's this kind of science fiction that turns me off of the genre for months or years at a time. There's actually a line to the effect of "They were drawn to kiss each other as if pulled by a magnetic field."

The bad part is that I love the original Dune books so I’m very interested in seeing how things played out before the first book. This thing is so weighed down by damnable scifi cliches and crap though that it’s hard to think they took very much from Frank Herbert’s notes, no matter how much they say they’re being faithful. I seriously doubt I’ll be able to get through this first of the 3 prequels so I might just have to read about what happened on the web.

The main book I’m reading right now (Deadhouse Gates) is kind of the opposite. It’s the sequel to a book (Gardens of the Moon) that had every single hallmark of being generic Extruded Fantasy Product but in the end turned out better than I expected. Gardens was no masterpiece but it was compelling enough to remind me of the fun I had reading all the Dragonlance books when I was a kid, but combined with a very adult sensibility. If I enjoy Deadhouse Gates I’ll probably continue reading the series (up to book 5 in England I believe, out of a projected 10 books!). It’s been a long time since I thought I’d read a 10 book fantasy series. Between this and my love of the His Dark Materials series, I’ll have to hand in my “Fantasy? Bah!” club card. And that’s before I say anything about my plan to read all the Harry Potter books in order once it gets closer to the release of the 7th book.

Technorati Tags: grommes, books, fantasy, science fiction

ze in connecting 6 dissparate short stories than one narrative whole. Hints were dropped at a reincarnation connection but that didn't go anywhere. When the hitman Smoke asked Louisa Rey she if she always felt this way before death, I was sure that wouldn't be left untouched but in the end, I didn't get any connection. Maybe I missed something but I don't think so. This didn't dilute the power of the book but with a stronger thread I think it could have something great, rather than just a really good book.ys it probably didn't, that we're to the point where a book really has little chance of coming along and making substantive changes to society as The Jungle did when it came out and first exposed the horrors of the meat packing industry a hundred years ago. I hope I'm wrong, that people did pay attention because this issue needs attention. We spend so much time and money looking at horrors across the world when people are suffering just the same in our own backyard. People are always up in arms about child labor in eastern Asia but what about illegal immigrants brought here and made to work in much more horrible conditions? Is that unworthy of our attention? The fast food industry has destroyed many,many more lives with it's fast, unsafe, and unsanitary system than Nike and it's shoe factories ever have. Yes, kids sewing shoes for a dime a day is horrible but it's not worse than making a teenager spray down a moving, blood-covered conveyor belt with chlorine gas and then firing that person when they get sick from the inadequate breathing protection. The cost in human lives and dignity is not worth saving a nickel on a hamburger and yes, a nickel is all it would cost.

FAMILY

Tue, 26 Jul 2005 15:53:06 +0000

[![](http://photos22.flickr.com/28837250_0d2e61b188.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattgrommes/28837250/ "photo sharing") [Samuel Pearce Krantz Grommes](http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattgrommes/28837250/).

Samuel Pearce Krantz Grommes.

Born 7-24-05 at 8:06am.
9lbs 7oz.
22 1/2 inches long.

SECURITY

Fri, 22 Jul 2005 10:15:32 +0000

Gah. You know, I realize terrorism is scary but for pete's sake, let's not all lose our minds. NY cops are now going to start searching random people's bags on the subway. All in the name of "stopping terrorists." [This post by Bruce Schneier](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/07/searching_bags.html) is, as usual, a good and sober commentary on the issue. He and the commentors below the post make some excellent points.

Beyond all the other problems with this scheme, none of which are small, people are missing one important fact about terror bombings. The point of a bombing on a subway is not to blow up the subway, it’s to kill people. If I have a bag with a bomb in it and a cop stops me right at the entrance to the subway, why wouldn’t I just blow the bomb right there? There will be lots of people around because a cop randomly searching people will cause a backup and a crowd just by being there. Plus I get the benefit of closing down the entrance to the subway for an unknown period while they repair any damage. And if I get through, which is the far more likely senario, I still get to blow up the bomb wherever I want.

Once again this is a pointless measure that puts us one more step down the road toward a police state.

Technorati Tags: grommes, terrorism, security

HISTORY

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 14:14:45 +0000

Wow, I've known about [The Wayback Machine](http://web.archive.org/web/) for a long time but never thought it would have my old website in it. Well, it does. [Here's a view of my old personal site](http://web.archive.org/web/19981202021419/www.nmt.edu/~mattg/) (not a blog, an actual old-school personal website) from New Mexico Tech, circa 1998\. This isn't the first site I had up or even the first version of that particular site but it's the first one they have. Not all of the images are there so some of the (at the time) fancy stuff doesn't work but it's mostly intact. Awesome.

Technorati Tags: grommes, webpage, history

TERROR

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 10:36:06 +0000

[More bombings in London today.](http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/07/21/london.tube/index.html) These ones didn't seem to be very successful, though, thankfully. After 9/11 I always said that if the terrorists were really smart about terror, they wouldn't have crashed all the planes in one day. They would have one (maybe two to hit both World Trade Center towers) and then waited, then struck again, and again. The best way to cause real terror and affect a society is extended, small campaigns. Look at Israel. They have bombings there almost weekly it seems. Hitting somebody once doesn't cause terror. It might cause anger or fear, but terror is a different beast.

A more benign example is movies. The Exorcist is a movie of terror. It’s slow, crawling, shadowing horror. Something like Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not a terror movie. It’s a scare movie. The 9/11 attacks were horrible, but they didn’t cause long-lasting terror in people, except maybe in NY. Bombings in random places killing dozens week after week would cause terror because it’s unknown. You wouldn’t know where to go to be safe. The damage to the economy if people started staying home en masse would be terrible, for sure. Of course the next step would be bombing random homes so that even that ultimate sanctuary isn’t safe. But who knows if these people are thinking long-term. Who knows if these aren’t just copycats?

Technorati Tags: grommes, terrorism

MORALS

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 07:10:09 +0000

[This is a great article by Hal Crowther](http://indyweek.com/durham/2005-06-08/hal.html) about the irony-free and morals-free Bush administration. One of the best, most hard-hitting, articles I've seen recently. It touches on the administration, John Bolton, the press, and the relentless attack on the poor and middle class. Great, great, stuff and not one of the typical shrill attack pieces that pretend to be authoritative but just end up sounding whiny. Crother has his act together.

Thanks to Doc Searls for the link.

MEDIA

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 22:09:49 +0000

If you want to see the future of media, [check this out](http://www.mobuzztv.com/shows/179.html). I don't know who this is (yet) but I'm sure it wasn't made by a corporation or an old-school news media entity. This is the power of cheap, powerful tools. With a digital camcorder, a web server, and in this case some Flash these people put out a very powerful, very real video commentary. Welcome to the 21st century.

STUPID

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 15:08:16 +0000

[Dell is stupid.](http://doc.weblogs.com/2005/07/13#shootTheMessages)

That link is Doc Searls’s note (although the link text above is my wording, not his) about how Dell shut down its Customer Support Forum because people were using it to bitch about Dell’s apparently horrible customer service of late. The point of his post is that while they have shut down their forum, the move is sort of a fingers-in-the-ears-yelling-blah-blah-blah move because people have many other forums in which to complain about Dell. Instead of dealing with the issues or at least trying to contain the blast radius of people’s complaints, they’ve drawn attention to it and spread the fire all over the internet.Eventually people will learn but until then, it’s very frustrating to deal with these clueless companies. I always build my own computers because I know the only idiot that’s going to piss me off in that case is me.

My only dealing with Dell support was when a server went up in smoke here at work (literally) and they told us our Gold service contract only got us a 2-week turnaround on a new server. After speaking to multiple people about it, being told nothing could be done, and us getting us good and pissed off, a new server arrived in 3 days.

MOVIES

Sat, 09 Jul 2005 12:05:43 +0000

> [As Ian Mohr writes, last year studios waited about four and a half months before bringing out a movie on DVD. That number has been decreasing since, and "one studio chief predicts it could dwindle to just two months, or even fewer for box-office flops."](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/09/business/media/09offline.ready.html?ex=1278561600&en=fd6c6539a72ff4a9&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss) All I can say is: **Please do this**. Of course, it will mean the death of stupid movie theaters but that's fine. Theaters need to realize that they need to sell a premium product, rather than thinking that their product (watching a movie in the theater) is the best thing around by default. Theaters are too expensive (it cost almost $20 for me, Kim, and Allison to go to **a matinee** last weekend!), and the big thing is that they don't care if you have a good movie experience. I've never seen somebody kicked out of the theater for anything, even after complaints were made. If they put out movies on DVD a month after theatrical release, people will stop going to the theaters unless they can get good service, a better experience, better food, something that sets it apart. The theater is dead, long live the theater.

e that terrible first Christmas after it was released when I literally could not go into a bookstore without hearing at least one person go on and on about the book. Now that the movie has come out and it's also crap (but how could it not be really?) it turns out that the only people unafraid to knock the thing are the movie critics. Good for them.

CIVILIZATION

Fri, 08 Jul 2005 11:07:51 +0000

I was listening to a [talk Stewart Brand did](http://seminars.longnow.org/) for the [Long Now Foundation](http://www.longnow.org/) and I had an idea about cities and civilization. I don't know if it's new or not but it's interesting. Basically, civilization is about information storage and cities are storage devices. The reason nomadic tribes don't have much civilization is that they have nowhere to store information except their own heads. All the old oral stories and traditions are information storage. When you settle down and have a house, you can store more information. You can keep books, scrolls, whatever, but you can also just have information like what kind of a house do you have, what art do you put up, things like that. Do all the members have individual houses or does everybody live in a giant house? That's important information. The more information you can store, the more civilization you can have. Once you have enough people and a town, you can have libraries and schools, massive information storage. A city is the center of civilization because of the amount of information stored per area. A skyscraper can store many times as much information as a single house in the same land area. How this will change when we can store all human knowledge in a chip the size of a fingernail (it's coming, don't doubt it), I have no idea. I think as long as we have enough bandwidth, I think it'll make all areas possible centers of civilization because anyone, anywhere will be able to share in the effects that right now only cities bring. So if you're sad about the death of the rural area, just wait, people will move back as soon as the bandwidth moves out there and bring access to the information.

Jarod Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel (soon to be a must-watch PBS miniseries) tells about why some cultures dominated others and it almost all comes down to geography. Here’s how I think that fits in with my theory. Diamond says that certain cultures got agriculture because of their geography. This allowed them to settle down, make houses, and start storing information in mass quantities. More people, more agriculture, more information, more civilization. It’s a cycle. With more information, you can make more information. People start putting ideas together, making discoveries, inventing things. Agriculture leads to settling, which starts the information storage cycle.

One of the things Stewart Brand talked about is manufactured housing in England. His idea was you just put up the houses and as long as you don’t have covenants or rules about what people can do with their houses (like we have so much of here), you’ll get real culture and not just a bunch of cookie-cutter houses. People bring their information, their culture, and transform the area. If people aren’t allowed to bring their culture because the convenants and neighborhood associations want everything the same, you get less information storage and the area just stays an ugly real estate development, not a place for people to live in.

Like I say, I don’t know if it’s obvious or not but I’ve been thinking about it.

LIFE

Thu, 07 Jul 2005 12:40:15 +0000

I just turned 27 and for various reasons I've been thinking about how to go about making a life. I never used to think about the future, other than in an abstract way. I never thought about my own future. I was with some people recently who are older than me, around 35 I think. I started wondering what they had actually done with their lives. I think they'd say they've done a lot but I don't see it. All I see are people whose lives are (maybe) half over and who have done nothing other than work and have some hobbies, some relationships, buy some stuff. Then I saw a lady I used to work with working the checkout at Walgreens and I'm sure she's in her late 50s, if not older. What I've realized in thinking about life is that I don't want to go out like that. I never used to consider going out and doing something, I always pretty much went with the flow, did whatever came along that fit my preferences, not my goals because I didn't have any. I've already done something I'm proud of, that is build SpinnNet up from a small modem-only ISP to a good sized DSL, wireless, etc. company wit many times more customers. Plus we've got Allison, who will undoubtedly be way smarter than me and go on to do a lot with the world she'll grow up in. I've recently started working on a website I think could be very cool and a comic book publisher I want to work with is having a Talent Search so I've been working on getting some scripts to them. I don't want to go with the flow on my life any more. I don't want to wonder what I've done at 35\. I want to make something of my family's life so Allison and the new baby have more than just parents who work all day. My parents are working on building their own house on their own land, that's something important. The next century is going to have more change in it than the past millenium, I can feel it. My kids are going to grow up in a world as radically different from the one my parents grew up in as my parent's world was different from George Washington's. Kim is always talking about not just running in the rat race and living paycheck to paycheck and I always agreed but in an 'Ok, now what' kind of way. I'm on board now though, we're going to start pushing toward that, whatever I can do.

CYCLING

Tue, 05 Jul 2005 16:04:54 +0000

I finally got my new road bike out of lay-away over the weekend. In short, it rocks. It's a [Giant OCR3](http://www.sykkel.com/giant/racer/Giant%20OCR3.jpg), sort of their upper-low-end bike. I got it on sale for $500, a good price for a road bike that isn't just junk but still enough to make me feel a little bad about spending that much money. The cost helps motivate me to actually use it to lose weight and get healthier though. It's has some nice components, although being totally new to having a nice bike I don't know much about them. My other bike is a mountain bike I got from my friend James who upgraded to a $1200 model. He probably had $1000 in it before he gave it to me, making it one hell of a gift. I owe him Chilacas burritos for life. I took it out for a 28 mile ride along the beautiful Bosque trail and it was great. I got going up to almost 20mph immediately, even into the wind. James and my other friend Walter are big mountain bikers but I like to put my headphones on and just zip along. I do like the trails but I'm enough out of shape that I worry too much about falling, which in New Mexico means falling into cactus if you're not lucky. I'll get there though. Our new house is 5 minutes from the foothills of the Sandia mountains so I can get out there and ride some nice, somewhat easy trails to build my stamina.

INTERNET

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 10:30:13 +0000

Microsoft just announced that they'll be supporting RSS in the next version of Windows (called Longhorn) and everybody's all excited about it and acting like Microsoft is finally listening to the community. Um, sorry but no. Maybe they're listening to the community but they pretty much have to at this point. The problem is that they're being giving such huge props for announcing that in **2 years** (the projected ship date for Longhorn is _at least_ 2007) their product will support something that is becoming a standard now, in 2005\. Way to go, team MS! **Welcome to obsolesence!**

TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 13:05:38 +0000

Blogger added some weird tags to all the posts for some unknown reason which caused a lot of problems with my layout. Sorry if the site looked broken to you but I've found a workaround and I'll be back to posting normally. Well, as normally as I ever do. I just turned 27 so I have a long post in mind related to that.

SCIFI

Tue, 31 May 2005 12:32:45 +0000

A couple of science fiction related things I've been thinking about recently.

I saw Star Wars: Episode 3 last week and my overall feeling is the same as Episode 1. There’s a really good movie in there somewhere but George Lucas refuses to get somebody to help him get it out. He’s too obsessed with Spectacle! and too infatuated with his own dumbass sense of humor (if you missed the Wookie doing the old Tarzan yell as he swings on a vine, the movie was that much better for you). And the less said about his dialogue, the better. You’d think that a lightsaber fight between Obi-Wan and a four-armed cyborg would be awesome but he’s got to interupt it for a Spectacular Chase Scene!. Yoda and Palpatine, two of the greatest Force warriors around should also be awesome, right? Nope. It turns into Throwing Things At Yoda for pete’s sake. I won’t go into the plot holes because frankly, who cares why Obi-Wan doesn’t remember Leia despite being present at her birth? Not me. But as a movie, there’s good stuff in there. After Anakin turns really evil, the movie was actually good. I liked it after that for the most part. When Lucas had other people writing and directing with him on the other movies, we got Empire Strikes Back. Now we just get a story buried in Spectacle! and weighed down with truly painful dialogue and wooden acting the likes of which I haven’t seen since, oh, the “romantic” scenes of Attack Of The Clones. If you like Star Wars and want something worth remembering, go watch the Clone Wars cartoons that Cartoon Network did. Now that’s Star Wars. At least now it’s over and maybe people can go think of something actually new to show us.

There’s a new “movement” in SF called ‘Mundane SF’, which seems like a name they chose after trying to think of the worst possible thing to prefix onto science fiction. Their whole point is that SF “should” be more down-to-earth and less fantastic. They have a manifesto, of course, which says they won’t be using faster-than-light travel or aliens or anything else that isn’t mundane. What they forget is that these things are tools and like all tools, there’s a time and a place for them. Saying you won’t ever write a story using aliens is like saying you won’t use a screwdriver to fix your car. It doesn’t matter if your story uses aliens. What matters is that the story is good. Maybe if you’re one of the sf-hating SF writers like Margaret Atwood or the SF-dismissing SF-writers like David Mitchell you want to distance yourself from things like aliens or FTL travel but if all you want to do is write good stories, you use all the tools in your toolbox, when appropriate. I’ve written about this geek tendency to need to classify everything into little niches before and it continues to popup and annoy me. Just write the stories.

I just finished an old Bruce Sterling book called Holy Fire and man, he was on his game back then. I like Sterling, in both his crazed futurist mode and his new design-professor mode but one thing I’ve noticed about him recently is that as he goes more into the design/green professor mode, he seems to be losing his imagination. As he goes more “real world” and less Shaper/Mechanist, he turns more and more against the imaginative aspects of science fiction. He’s lost the religion, I’d say. And like a people who lose their religion, instead of turning away from it he’s turned against it. His speeches about things like the Singularity are riddled with the kind of unimaginative and dismissive thinking that I think would turn the stomach of the guy who wrote the Schismatrix stuff. I like where he’s going since he’s a real thinking futurist and his recent work with biomimetics and personal fab is where I want to be as well but it’s disheartening to hear what appears to be the atrophy of a world-class imagination.

WRITER

Fri, 27 May 2005 10:02:02 +0000

From a [great interview with Umberto Eco](http://portal.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml;sessionid=WDZVUADH1GJ2FQFIQMGSM54AVCBQWJVC?xml=/arts/2005/05/24/boeco22.xml&sSheet=/arts/2005/05/22/bomain.html), one of my favorite writers. > Does he worry, though, that some people buy his books in order to impress their friends, but never actually read them? > > 'If some people are so weak that they buy my books because they are piled high in bookshops, and then do not understand them, that is not my fault. If people buy my books for vanity, I consider it a tax on idiocy.' hahaha.

TREK

Sun, 01 May 2005 17:56:00 +0000

I just finished watching the first of the two 'Evil Universe' episodes of Enterprise (or as I like to call it the 'Goatee Universe') and a curious thing occured to me. Does it strike anyone else as disturbing that the Trek writers' 'Evil Universe' is also apparently the 'Sexy Universe'? Both T'Pol and Sato's 'Evil' characters wear a midrif baring uniform, 'Evil Sato' is also 'Slutty Sato', and Vulcans (and thus T'Pol) are slaves to the humans. Since Trek writers tend to subsume their own impulses in what they think will please the fans, I can't tell if they think sexy, sexual women are evil or if they think the fans think that. Of course there's always the possibility they just wanted to see Jolene Blalock with long hair and her model's belly showing. Either way it leaves a foul taste in my mouth, even beyond the one I get from the episode being fairly crappy.

I read an interview with one of the producers of Enterprise and his feeling is that nobody watched Enterprise because people were too overwhelmed by all the Trek on the air. Apparently he’s never heard of the 84 different Law & Order and CSI shows on 24 hours a day. No, dumbass, the reason nobody watched Enterprise or Voyager or Star Trek: Nemesis was that you’ve run the franchise into the ground. I agree with those who say they should let Trek rest for awhile, just long enough for him to give over control to somebody with a creative, original bone in their body. Star Trek: TNG got a lot better when Roddenberry died (as much respect as I had for him, he and his vision became an anchor on the creative life of the Trek universe), and now we have to wait for these new chuckleheads to go away for it to come back from the dead.

he ship disappear and expose everyone to vacuum, etc. Real danger. But no, the leash had to be kept on the writers.

Now comes the 4th season and they get somebody else to run the show. The new guy has done a really good job I’d have to say. Starting out by wrapping up what was supposed to be the over-arching story of the entire show, the Temporal Cold War, in 2 episodes by blowing something up wasn’t the best way to handle that and the nine-millionth retelling of the ‘Ancient aliens learn humanity’ story was terrible but other than that, I liked it. Unfortunately, they basically told the new guy ‘The Titanic has broken in half and is mostly underwater, want to be the captain?’ There was little chance of anything turning the show around by that point.

The reason the ‘holodeck novel’ rumor smacks of truth is that the people in charge of Trek are capable of it. But if it’s true, they deserve the wraith of every Trekkie in existance and to never work in any creative medium again. Doing that to the people who have watched you bumble your way through one of pop culture’s most beloved franchises and turn it into a laughingstock would be the ultimate insult. It’s hard to think of that as anything but a middle finger to your fans. To steal a joke from Warren Ellis, they might as well just go ahead and replace that episode with a black screen and the message ‘FUCK YOU FOR WATCHING. -THE MANAGEMENT’.

But even if it’s not true, Trek is going into cryogenic sleep for at least a few years. Hopefully long enough for somebody with a creative bone in their body to take over. I’m available, by the way. :)

MYTHTV

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 14:53:00 +0000

I've had a couple of requests for the specs on my MythTV box after my last post. I wanted to write about it at some point anyway so thanks for the reminder, loyal readers!

Like a lot of geeks who build their own computers, I have a ton of parts laying around. For this project though, I wanted to be able to record HDTV eventually which takes a fair bit of horsepower so the only things I was able to scavenge were the network card and soundcard. I bought almost everything from Newegg.com, the only online store I shop at anymore. I ended up getting a bunch of mailin rebates so my total cost landed somewhere around $600.

If you’re not doing High Def you can get away with a lot less powerful hardware. The Hauppage card does most of the heavy lifting for TV watching and recording in it’s hardware so your CPU only has to do a few other tasks like marking commercials so you can skip them automatically. Support for the new Hauppage 150 card is coming along very quickly in MythTV so you can save some money there also. The picture on the 150 isn’t as sharp though so that’s a consideration.

Gigabyte AMD motherboard with 5 PCI slots.
AMD XP 2700+
512meg RAM
300 gig Seagate harddrive
Hauppage WinTV 250 MPEG2 TV encoder card
Cooler Master Cavalier 2 case (with fancy analog sound needle!)
Netgear 10/100 ethernet card
Soundblaster Live! Value soundcard
IR Blaster for cable box control from http://www.irblaster.info

I also needed various cables, most of which I had laying around except for the DVI cable to hook into my HDTV. I got that at a local store PC Magic, for $20 rather than the crazy $80-$100 that the bigger CompUSA/Circuit City stores want for the same wire. You can get them online for $20 or so too, don’t pay more.

The only remaining part I need is the PCHDTV card from pchdtv.com. They make an over-the-air HD reciever card specifically for Linux. It’s $180 which is why I’ve held off so far.

I’m super happy with MythTV but I wouldn’t be so happy if I hadn’t found Jarod Wilson’s guide at http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/. He’s a Myth developer and his guide is incredibly helpful. For a first-time MythTV user, I would say you’d be crazy not to follow his guide or try the KnoppMyth project. I haven’t used it but apparently it works like a champ.

The other thing I would add to your box once you get it going is the Bittorrent program Azureus with the RSS plugin. I’ll leave the reasons why you’d want that as an exercise for the reader and our friend google. :)

Good luck and feel free to email if you have questions.

TIVO

Tue, 12 Apr 2005 09:59:00 +0000

I loved my Tivo, loved it. Like all Tivo it users it seems, I was a huge evangelist for their company and product. If you're observant, you'll notice that I said 'loved', as in past tense. I cancelled my Tivo subscription today, and will exclusively use my beautiful MythTV box from now on.

I never upgraded to the Series 2 box because even though the feature-set was cool, I knew right off the bat they wouldn’t be able to do the things they needed to for me to be interested. They’re in so tight with the media industry that they have to disable or not include the best features for their customers, like me being able to download video off the net and watch it on my Tivo. Or send a show to a friend who missed it. These are perfectly valid and legal but the media people don’t like it so they won’t do it. This is exactly the wrong way to look at things.

Instead of partnering with the media companies and bending over for them, Tivo should have partnered with their users. They should have trusted their users enough, having built up an insane amount of goodwill over the years, that they would have helped the company out even if the media industries tried to sue. Tivo has more than enough “non-infringing uses” for this type of thing that it’s not even clear the media companies would be able to go to court. But even if they did go to court, they should have trusted their users. A bunch of nerds raised $4 million dollars to “save” Star Trek: Enterprise, for pete’s sake, like people wouldn’t have donated to Tivo to help them tell the media industry off in court? People who don’t even have Tivos would have donated to any legal fight to define user’s rights to do what they wish their media. What Tivo, and most other electronics companies, forget is that there are more of us than there are of them. The increase in revenue from providing these very useful, cool, and easy-to-describe services surely would have not only prevented their precarious financial state, they would have provided a financial reason for the company to support the new initiatives. Some people have a hard time seeing the benefit of a Tivo over a VCR but being able to send shows over the net or download videos is something that everyone would “get”. But no, they’re just now getting around to their extremely limited TivoToGo service and programming API so it’s too late. I can do all the things I want with my MythTV box and not have to feel like I’m personally bending over for the media companies by supporting a company that has abandoned me for them.

I saw a great tshirt on BoingBoing today: “YOUR FAILED BUSINESS MODEL IS NOT MY PROBLEM”. Damn right. Until the media industry wakes up and provides me a way to pay for the shows I want to watch and download them, I’m going to continue to download them and not pay. I will not be held hostage to their outmoded business model. It’s too bad Tivo never recognized the power of their userbase. I hope they do someday. I’d love to help them kick the asses of the media companies.

WALMART

Tue, 29 Mar 2005 16:29:00 +0000

This is a letter I've been sending to every Walmart email address I can find in hopes of getting an answer from somebody. I can't even start talking about it beyond this because I'll just start ranting and cursing. I'm usually hesitant to post personal stuff about other people here but I'm trying every avenue to get somebody from Walmart to see this. So here's the letter, if you happen to know somebody higher up in Walmart who might listen, please pass it on to them.

Subject: Appalling treatment of a loyal Walmart customer

My aunt was in store #151 in McAlester, OK a week ago and at some point during the 2+ hours she was in the store a $3 bracelet she was intending to purchase fell into her purse. When she went to pay for her other items, the security people at the store stopped her and had the police called to have her arrested for shoplifting. The police declined to arrest her because she requires an oxygen tank and is in a wheelchair. Apparently the store security berated her in front of the store before the police let her go and fined her $150 plus some charge Walmart has for calling the police. The final insult was that she was told she is banned from going into Walmart again, which is one of her great pleasures in life. My aunt is in ill health and almost had a stroke from the increase in her blood-pressure during the event and she also had a severe panic attack. She jumps every time the phone rings thinking Walmart is sending the police after her and doesn’t like to leave the house since the incident.

I can understand your security people have to be hard on shoplifters. But I think your stores probably have enough actual theft going on that they would know the difference between a sick woman who accidently had something fall into her purse and a real criminal. The way she was treated is absolutely insane. I hope it was the actions of an over-zealous security officer rather than Walmart policy. I will be contacting everyone I can find at Walmart until I get my aunt an apology for the treatment she has suffered. I can only hope that someone will recognize the over reaction of this store’s employees and attempt to make amends for it. An apology and assurance that she can once again visit your store is all it would take. Please email me at matt@mattorama.net for her contact information. Thank you.

BRAINS

Fri, 25 Mar 2005 12:10:00 +0000

No, this isn't a post about zombies. :) I'm a sort-of armchair neuroscientist. I love studying the brain. Because of that, I've been looking forward to Jeff Hawkins's new book '[On Intelligence](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805074562/mattorama)' about his theories on the larger overall workings of the brain. I was surprised in reading the book that his theories seem to mesh with what I've always thought about the brain works. The big addition he made to my personal theories (along with adding a huge amount of technical details) is that the patterns are also used to predict the future. When you're walking, your brain is not only telling your muscles how to move based on previous walking patterns, it's predicting how your body and the world is going to react based on those same patterns. If you've ever missed a step on the stairs, you've experienced this. Your brain predicted one thing and prepared you for that but you experienced something different.

Like I said, it meshed really well with how I’ve always looked at things and has caused me to reexamine a lot of things I previously explored such as AI. As a computer scientist, Mr. Hawkins’s natural focus is on how we can make machines that use this pattern-prediction framework to think the way we do. He goes beyond the old ideas of having a human-like AI and moves to real applications like a weather predicting brain. His idea is to build a pattern-prediction system and then feed it data from say, weather satellites, instead of eyes and ears and the like. Then the machine would learn to make patterns and predict the weather the way we predict what we’re going to see in a room even before we turn on the lights. This would allow the machine to see deeper patterns in the weather without having to be a human-like being. A fascinating idea and one I’m hoping to learn more about in the coming years. Hawkins has formed a company called Numenta to build products from these ideas and I’m going to be watching them closely. This is the guy who built the original PalmPilot and my beloved Visor handheld so he’s not to be ignored. If I knew enough to work with him and his partners, I would jump at the chance. I really believe it’ll turn out to be ground-breaking work.

MUSIC

Sat, 05 Mar 2005 20:25:18 +0000

I was tempted to file this under STUPID. It's a tossup. I bought the new Kings Of Leon album today (it rocks) and found that it was encumbered by some very stupid "copy protection" software called Media Max. It's meant to keep those mean old pirates from copying the disc and spreading it around to cheap Kings Of Leon fans on the internets. Of course it doesn't work and just causes people like me a hassle. It's very easy to disable ([click here for how](http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~jhalderm/cd3/)), meaning that real pirates who are copying and selling the discs will just disable it. Other people who just want to rip the disc to MP3 to listen to it on their ipod (me) or mythtv home theater (me again) either won't be able to do it or will be subject to an unneeded hassle. When I buy CDs, all I ever do is fire up Exact Audio Copy and rip it to MP3\. Then I listen to the MP3s and usually never see the physical disc again. I'm not pirating, not distributing, not doing anything illegal or wrong. But the music industry chooses to subject me to a hassle for absolutely no reason. Like I said, the real pirates are just going to [disable the stupid copy protection](http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~jhalderm/cd3/) or more likely use a real CD duplicator that doesn't care about the crappy DRM they used. Some day they'll stop treating their customers like criminals but it's not coming soon enough. I'm tempted to go return the stupid disc now that I have it ripped and buy a tshirt directly from the band to make up the lost money.

I’ve seriously curtailed my buying of big label CDs in recent years specifically because of their idiocy. I’ve bought more independent CDs in the last month than I have bought label CDs in a year. I used to buy a CD a week, not any more. Now I buy from guys like Brad who includes MP3s on his discs and wants you to give them out to people because he knows that more listeners == more money. I’ve also bought CDs from Winston (the site they use let me just buy the MP3s and download them, DRM free), Manda & The Marbles, and Slim. All of those I found because they gave various podcasts the right to play their music. Go find some artists who appreciate their fans and labels that don’t thing applying pointless hassles to paying customers.

The dumbest thing about it, I fired up my favorite bittorrent search site and guess what, 2 copies of the new album ready to be downloaded. Idiots.

ody else.

VACATION

Fri, 04 Mar 2005 10:15:00 +0000

Just returned from our family vacation at what they're now calling The Disneyland Resort. I used to go to Disneyland all the time when I was growing up in San Diego but I hadn't been but once since they added the new California Adventure park and the Downtown Disney outdoor mall. Both are awesome. We stayed at the also-new Paradise Pier hotel (I would love to stay the Grand Californian mission-style hotel but it would have almost doubled our trip cost). Our package included a 4 day "Park Hopper" pass so we could go in to both parks anytime we wanted, which is the way to go if you visit the Resort. Being able to go in the morning right when they open and take advantage of no lines and then go back to the hotel and sleep and go back in the evening is infinitely easier than trying to do everything in one day like we used to when I was little.

The only bad part was that they’re still getting ready for the 50th Bithday of the park so it seemed like half the things we wanted to do were closed. No Space Mountain, no Splash Mountain, no Playhouse Disney show Allison wanted to see, etc. I wish they would have told us that up front.

One of my favorite moments was the teenagers behind me filming their ride on Big Thunder Mountain (formerly my favorite coaster at the park). They held their video camera and commented the whole time, which was fun to listen to. Then at the end I hear the kid go ‘AAAHHHHH!’ and ‘AAAAAHHHHHH!’ out of nowhere and he tells his friend “I did two aaahhhs there at the end so we could edit them in if we want.” Beautiful. I love that these guys are making movies at home like that. I wish I could find it if they put it up on the net.

My other favorite moment was my new favorite coaster, Screaming, in California Adventure. It’s all done with electromagnets so it’s totally silent. It’s got huge drops, a loop, and background music. My only complaint is that the restraint kept me from putting my arms all the way up. Still, no hands the whole time. Yee-hah.

All my pics from the adventure will soon be up on Flickr in my ‘Disneyland 2005’ set.

HUNTER

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 11:22:00 +0000

[Hunter Thompson killed himself.](http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~53~2723492,00.html) This makes me very sad. I have a hard time imagining what would drive somebody to ever kill themselves but in this case I have an even more difficult time with it. I wouldn't be surprised if drugs are involved but you never know.

When I first read ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ it totally blew me away. It still has my favorite opening line of any book: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” I always hear that in Johnny Depp’s impersonation of the man from the movie and it sets the stage for the book perfectly. I bought a copy of the book from the famous City Lights bookstore on my first trip to San Francisco and it came with a couple of other essays he’d written. Reading them I couldn’t help but think ‘Why is nobody else doing journalism like this?’ He was a crazy motherfucker and I’ll miss hearing and reading him.

That reminds me that I never ended up buying the special edition ‘Fear and Loathing’ DVD. I think I’ll rectify that today.

Update: Here’s what Warren Ellis had to say about the man and his death. I tend to agree about suicides.

TECH

Fri, 11 Feb 2005 16:10:00 +0000

Yesterday I was thinking and posting about sites with an API like Flickr, del.icio.us, and Google. If you don't know, an API is an interface to data. Flickr's API lets you post pictures using your own tools without having to go through their site, for example. APIs let you develop what Tim O'Reilly calls the third type of application, data applications. Data apps are applications that take advantage of data. Amazon isn't the biggest book store because they have the best software applications, they're the biggest because they used the data in important ways. It's much more useful to go to Amazon.com to look at a book than Barnesandnoble.com because you'll find 10 times as many reviews and pointers to other books and other useful things they've done with their data that B&N hasn't done. The reason you see Amazon search boxes and tools all over the place is that Amazon has a really good API.

Getting back to the point, I was thinking about APIs and I realized that I don’t know anything about an ebay API. I didn’t think there was one, in fact. It turns out there is one but it’s stupid. Well, maybe it’s not stupid but ebay is because you have to pay to use it. It costs $100 (at least) to get to use their API. This is a monumental mistep. By trying to “recoup costs” (their phrase) on the use of their infrastructure by the API they’ve completely cut themselves off from any network effects that sites like Flickr take advantage of. If you let people into your system, they’ll do cool stuff that gets you more attention and more revenue. I want to write a plugin for MythTV that displays a message on screen if an auction you’re watching is ending soon. I think that’s a pretty cool idea and would probably make me more likely to use ebay but I can’t do it because it’s not worth $100. Maybe if I did tons of ebay business I would think about it. But probably not. But what I can do is write a Flickr plugin because they let me into their data. If an auction site comes along and lets people hook into their data, they’ll expand the range of applications people can use their site for and immediately gain a lot of mindshare.

But I like ebay so I hope they realize that things like abusers are a small problem in comparison to the benefits of letting bloggers put ‘Here are the 10 newest auctions related to my content’ boxes on their sites. Or letting somebody write a ‘Hey, your auction is ending in 10 minutes’ test message generator. Or an ‘Ebay Zeitgeist’ app that shows Flickr pictures related to the 100 newest auctions with ‘cat’ in the title. Etc., etc., etc. A geek can dream.

LINKS

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 13:46:35 +0000

I've added a link to my [del.icio.us](http://del.icio.us) page on the left. [del.icio.us](http://del.icio.us) is a weird concept. It's basically a public bookmark system. You bookmark links on their site and then tag the link with whatever words you think are pertinant. Then when someone searches for a tag such as 'firefox' they get all the links various people have tagged with firefox. It can lead to some interesting finds. I suggest exploring it for awhile, you'll find something interesting. I plan on using it much as Warren Ellis does, as a sort of outboard brain to remember stuff I want to look at later one a different machine. I'll have a post about that concept later, it's the end of the PC era.

I can’t yet see a secondary app for the data though. Most of the new stuff I think is interesting in the new “Web 2.0”, as people are calling it, is apps that connect other apps. I wrote a proof-of-concept script a few weeks ago where I use bloglines to give me RSS feeds then I snag the pagerank data from google to sort them by popularity. That turns out to be less than super-useful because Google’s pagerank is only 1-10 so you end up getting a bunch of 7s and only a few pages go above or below the median. But the concept is sound. I used data from two sites to make a whole new app. I can see a ton of useful things to do with the data Flickr provides (when camera put gps coordinates in the picture metadata the usefulness will go up exponentially) and I’ll probably code one or two up soon to see if they pan out. I’ll have to think on del.icio.us though, at the moment it just seems too random to do anything new with.

Since I use perl and perl is awesome, there’s almost always a very easy to use module on CPAN to access the APIs for these sites. That means I code up something quickly to see if it will work without having to spend days writing my own API stuff.

TV

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 15:41:36 +0000

An article in the NY Times the other day about MythTV got me thinking about a phrase I'm sure I heard before but never paid attention to: "TV pirates". One of the authors of the article used it as a way to attack people for downloading TV shows, something I've done quite a bit. I do it because I never thought of it as piracy. TV shows are broadcast for free over the airwaves, somebody records it, strips out the commercials and uploads it a site for download. I've used it, for example, to download an episode of Lost I missed when it scrolled off my Tivo while I was away. I can understand the TV people not wanting someone to strip out the commercials but as far as I can understand it, there shouldn't be any such thing as TV piracy since it's free in the first place. And I already don't watch commercials thanks to the fast-forward button (which isn't illegal) so what exactly is the illegal part of downloading shows off the net?

Now, downloading shows from HBO or Showtime, that’s a different thing because you’re paying for them and they don’t have commercials. But regular over-the-air TV? I know that the lawyers for the TV people would like it to be illegal to do anything but sit in your chair at their appointed time and absorb their commercials but lawyers and corporations want everything they don’t control made illegal so they don’t count.

So what exactly is a “TV pirate?”

PODCASTS

Sat, 22 Jan 2005 16:42:00 +0000

As I said in a recent post, I've been listening to a lot of podcasts recently. I had been using what seems like the semi-official podcast client called [ipodder](http://www.ipodder.org). Not any more. I've found a new and improved-in-all-ways podcast client I'm going to be recommending to anyone who will listen. It's called [Doppler Radio](http://www.dopplerradio.net/) and it **rocks**. Compared to DR, ipodder seems like a proof of concept app whipped up to show the basics of podcasting. DR supports cool stuff like multi-threaded downloads so it downloads more than 1 podcast at a time, and things I would consider basic functionality that ipodder lacks like the ability to abort downloads if you've alread listened to something. It also has the genius feature of syncing your podcast RSS feeds with your account on [Bloglines](http://bloglines.com), the online RSS feed aggregator. So instead of putting a feed into ipodder and having no way of exporting the feed list (or even copying the URL to paste it somewhere else!) I can put all my feeds into Bloglines and it'll read the list and download any podcasts included.

In a nutshell, there’s no reason to use ipodder and put up with its quirks and incompleteness. Switch to Doppler Radio. If you’re using ipodder now, you’ll thank me later.

CHRISTMAS

Mon, 13 Dec 2004 11:49:58 +0000

My new found desire to work out my politcal thoughts on this weblog has been derailed by lack of time and the new job so posting will be light until after the holidays. Until then, here's a christmas wish list for my family members who may be interested. :)

the 3 special edition Lord of the Rings DVD sets
Hauppage WinTV 350
200+ gig Seagate harddrive
Athlon XP 2500 (or higher :)) CPU and motherboard
Giant OCR 3 bike
Bill Hicks live DVD
Wifi Toys book

I’ve also always got the Amazon wishlist if anybody’s interested.

MONEY

Mon, 22 Nov 2004 08:14:11 +0000

We're not even officially into the new "All Republican, All The Time" government the election brought us and they're already [allocating money for a **presidential yacht**](http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004/11/presidential-yacht.html). Nice. If this were something foisted on the public by the Democrats (remember when the Dems were the 'spend, spend, spend' party? Ah, the good old days...) the Republican Idea Machine would be all over it. Everyone in America would have heard about it from at least 10 different right-wing "independent" sources by a week out. As it is, since the democrats have proven largely inneffective in getting messages like this out, we probably won't hear anything. That's a problem, obviously, because this is important. Yes, it might be just a little money but look at it this way. The administration has been cutting money for college grants to poor people, cutting money to children's medical and care programs (for mostly poor people), cutting money for proper bullet-proof vests for soldiers in Iraq for pete's sake and now they're saying "Hey, here's a few dollars for a new yacht." Nuts to that. This perfect for a Progressive Idea Machine. This needs to be out there. We need to be mocking and jeering them relentlessly for doing this.

DIFFERENCES

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 10:21:29 +0000

One of the main problems a lot of progressives had (and have had for quite a while now) is the Democractic party's seemingly official stance of "Republican Lite" or "We're not them". The Democrats saw what Bill Clinton did, embrace a lot of positions nearer to the middle of the political spectrum, and have completely misunderstood why he did that. Instead of understanding that people really aren't "left" or "right" for the most part, they have beliefs in different areas all over the map, they've tried to totally blur the lines between the two major parties so they can lure people away from the right on maybe a few issues and get them to vote Democratic. As I think the 2004 election showed, that's not going to work. Instead of saying "Hey, those guys suck, vote for us," progressives need to force the Democratic party to say "Hey, here's where we can be better for you." And with the modern Republican party, I don't think that's too hard to do.

When I talk about the Republicans, I’m not talking about the majority of right-thinking Republican voters. I’m talking about the administration and the people in charge of the party who have swung farther to the right than most people would like if they thought about it. What we need to do is highlight that and the differences between them and us (us meaning the Democratic party in terms of elections but really I mean progressives).

The big idealogical difference between modern Republicans and progressives is that Republicans are all about money and progressives are about people. Look at Bush’s campaign platform. Once you get rid of the religion and bigotry based agendas (which you’re not going to get people to move on, ever), it comes down to money. Their issues were tax breaks, forcing you to move your social security money to the stock market, government spending, tax breaks, reducing corporate oversight/red tape (code for increasing corporate profits), etc. Of course people care about money, it’s important. But even if you ignore the fact that none of these issues really benefit anyone but the top 10% and corporations, this is a pretty dry platform. Our issues need to point this out and play up how we are for people. Their issue is paying less for medicine, our issue needs to be maintaining quality of life for the elderly. They go for the pocketbook, we aim for the heart. All the while pointing out clearly even though all they talk about is money, they don’t want it to go to us. The fact that almost all of tax cuts pushed through by Bush went to the top 30% or so should have been trumpted around the country by the Democrats and they ignored it. There were vague accusations but the time for vaguery is done. We need to show people in numbers and in stories how we are different. They are giving us all the rope we need to hang them, we just need the guts to tie the knot.

FLEEING THE SCENE

Thu, 11 Nov 2004 11:34:14 +0000

I started writing this as a response to a comment in my original political thread a few days back but rambled on enough that I didn't want to waste it on a comment. :) So, here it is.

No, I’m not prepared to say ‘Well, this country fucked up so off to Canada!’ The point of the process we have here is not to give up but to fight to move things back. The best result for the right-wing groups in the country if those annoying liberal thinkers would all just leave and let them do whatever they want. But I like it here and I want to stay and fight them however I can. It might be a long process but if you look at it from a right-wing perspective, their machine took 30 years to get to the point it’s at now with their golden dream child running things and their agenda at the top of everyone’s mind. Yes, they have the chance to screw things up for a good long time if they get control of the Supreme Court and keep driving the economy into the ground but we need to play the long game too and it’s impossible to do that if we all bail at the first sign of trouble, even if that sign seems like the train going all the way off the tracks.

Or, we can have a lot of fun sticking around just to make life harder for them. There’s nothing better than riling up a conservative. My wife’s mom actually told me to shut up the other day when discussing politics, which I have to say I count that as a kind of victory honestly.

CURSING

Tue, 09 Nov 2004 10:48:08 +0000

Here's something to warm your heart in these times of uncertainty and strife. [Winston Churchill's 104 year old cursing parrot](http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/content_objectid=13832640_method=full_siteid=50143_headline=-F----THE-NAZIS--SAYS-CHURCHILL-S-PARROT-name_page.html). > Peter Oram bought her for his pet shop after Churchill died in 1965\. But he was forced to move her into his home after she kept swearing at children. And if that doesn't warm the cockles of your heart, here's [a post-election message from Get Your War On creator David Rees](http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/home.html).

THE FUTURE

Tue, 12 Oct 2004 10:50:51 +0000

> Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr at the Tissue Culture & Art Project are attempting to grow a semi-living jacket in an effort to create "victimless leather." Hoping to highlight the possibility of wearing leather without killing an animal, the duo is presently focused on growing living tissue into a leather-like material and having it mature in the form of a miniature, stitchless, coat-like shape. Welcome to the 21st Century. [This Wired article](http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65248,00.html) is about a couple of guys who are on the weirdo bleeding edge. They're growing a jacket out of living cells. If you think this is weird, you might as well go live on an island in the south pacific because this is only the tip of the iceberg. A lot of people have heard about the potential of growing new organs using stem cells or something else and that will definitely happen (of course if we don't get someone with a brain into the White House it'll be a ways off) but this weird stuff is where the real ground-level societal changes will be made.

People in the US made fun of the Japanese putting screen savers on their cell phones. That’s missing the point, I’ve always thought. The point isn’t that their cell phones needed screen savers (your computer doesn’t even need a screen saver any more), the point is that their technology is advanced enough that you can start thinking about ways to waste it. Once something is powerful enough to support frivolousness, it’s ready to change the world. A phone that can have a pointless screen saver on it can do new and semi-important things like play games, send email, take pictures, etc. Getting to the point where we can grow designer clothing, as pointless an activity as I can think of, means more than saving the lives of cows. Once the technology of cell growth supports the pointless, we’ll have a whole new way of looking at the world. What will vegetarians do when our meat is grown in a vat? Will people with missing or malformed limbs rush to replace them or will they go the route of some deaf people and declare that their disability is really a life choice? Will Olympic athletes replace their heart with a Lance Armstrong model? Now One-Third Larger! Will people want tails? Anyone who has ever seen the proto-body modification people with their split tongues, piercings and other essential useless racing stripes will know that as soon as we have pointless cell growth technology you’ll see wings, tails, horns and more that I can’t even think of.

Now this living jacket might not go anywhere, the science is pretty young. But the point remains. Pay attention to the people using something new to do the frivolous. It may not be as important or worthwhile as the people saving lives but in the end, the people whose lives are saved will be using the frivolous to change the world.

WAR

Tue, 05 Oct 2004 10:40:40 +0000

When did we decide we were at war with Iraq? Didn't we go to Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein? Isn't he gone now? What are we doing there now?

No matter what you think of the non-existant connection between Iraq and 9/11, the reason we went there was to get rid of Saddam Hussein. He’s gone. Who let the military decide we were then going to go to war against the Iraqi people? They think they’re fighting some force of soldiers. They’re not, they’re fighting people who are pissed off that the US is acting like an occupying force in their country. The problem is exaserbated by the fact that we seem to only be causing havoc over there. People are dying in attacks against our troops and in attacks by our troops. We need to stop thinking of Iraq like Vietnam. We need to stop thinking of Iraq even as a war. It’s not a war. We say we’re there to help them but then we say we need more troops and more money to fight. STOP FIGHTING THE IRAQIS. THEY ARE NOT OUR ENEMY.

The military is locked into the war mindset. They shoot at us, we get more troops and shoot back. How about this: Take half the troops out. That way there are logically less targets for them to shoot at and less of our presence in the region for them to be pissed at. Then, after half the troops are gone, take a billion or two dollars of the hundreds we’re spending on the care and wellbeing of those troops and start helping the people. Resupply and restaff hospitals. There are hundreds of military trained doctors and nurses sitting around doing nothing in Iraq. Let those people do their jobs. Let them help people. Someone whose daughter or son’s life was just saved by a US doctor is much less likely to shoot at us. Take another couple of billion and rebuild schools. Stop thinking like a military occupying force and start thinking like people out to help. Iraq is now a major humanitarian aid program. Let other countries help, they’ll be glad to for the good publicity if nothing else.

Take away the reasons some Iraqis have for hating us and they’ll stop. Instead of giving billions in contracts to US companies, make the contracts contingent on hiring and training Iraqis to do the job within some reasonable timeframe. Instead of importing US based Haliburton employees, make them turn the operation over to Iraqis within 5 years. Hell, keep the Iraqi company owned by Haliburton even. Just make sure the jobs are going to Iraqis and the money going into their economy.

Whatever you think of the reasons we went into Iraq, we’re there. We blew up the country and we need to help them rebuild it. We can’t just leave. The only way to turn Iraq into a breeding ground for US-hating militants faster than keeping our military there is to leave and abandon the country to chaos. We have the money to help if we get out of the War In Iraq mindset, all we need is the heart to make it happen.

Then once we’ve learned our lesson over there, maybe we can use that heart to make the same changes in our own country.

COMPUTERS

Sat, 02 Oct 2004 13:47:49 +0000

The solution to my latest computer problems can be summed in three words: **Die Maxtor Die**. The last Maxtor hard drive I will ever buy is in the process of dying and of course, my paltry 1 year warranty ran out 1 month ago. Of course the Maxtor drive this one replaced died the week after its warranty ran out. No more. Seagate recently changed its warranty policy to 5 years. I see this both as confidence in their technology and a strong commitment to their customers. The best thing is that their drives don't cost any more than Maxtor's failure prone pieces of junk. The new one was a Compusa special for 160GB drive for $60 after a $50 mailin rebate. Even without the mailin the drive wouldn't have been any more for the extra warranty. Long live Seagate.

WEIRD SONGS

Mon, 27 Sep 2004 10:59:40 +0000

Due to some unavoidable and unfortunate problems my ISP was having for the past few weeks, it's been hard to update the website. I'm making up for it today though, with probably my favorite (well, in the Top 5 at least) Weird Song. It's a cover of Soundgarden's ["Rusty Cage" by Johnny Cash](http://s3.media.squarespace.com/production/1529026/18137065/Johnny+Cash+-+Rusty+Cage.mp3.mp3). Mr. Cash's last few albums were widely acclaimed cover albums and resulted in some of the finest songs I've ever heard (Cash's version of Nine Inch Nails's "Hurt" is also one of the best cover songs of all time). This version of Rusty Cage is somehow all Cash while not getting rid of the hard Soundgarden sound. In two words: It rocks.

BOOK REVIEW

Fri, 03 Sep 2004 10:33:56 +0000

[Perdido Street Station by China Mieville](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345459407/mattorama)

I read quite a few books and I read pretty fast but the last book I absolutely didn’t want to put down was American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I read that one on a weekend car trip and was thinking every hour about how I could pick it up and read more of it. I had the same reaction to Perdido Street Station. I couldn’t wait to pick it up and keep reading. It surprised me just how much of a fantasy book this was, I had always considered it science-fiction just by what I heard about it. The thing about this type of fantasy is that it’s very grounded in a science-fiction style world. There’s magic, but it’s run by clockwork machines and is a part of the world, like electricity.

The only problems I had were where Mieville comes right up on something super imaginative (the cactacae, living cactus people) but then stops himself (they have breasts and bones just like a human). There are a ton of sentient species on the world of Bas-Lag but they’re all fairly human. He tries to give them strange abilities (watercraeft) or laws (choice-theft) but when it comes down to it, they’re basically just humans who look like birds. I have a pretty low tolerance for failure of imagination in SF books (which is why I never wrote a review of the craptacular I, Robot movie) so it’s probably just me.

The thing I really liked about PSS is that it felt like it was written in one long rush of imagination, which I’m sure it wasn’t. I like the feel of a book that seems like the author was caught up in the crazy world he was creating and just threw things around to see what worked. It doesn’t all work but most of it does. And of what does work, there are chunks of mind-blistering originality, both of prose and of ideas. I bought Mieville’s followup to PSS, The Scar, on sale sometime back but never read it for wanting to read PSS first. Now that I’ve read PSS, I had to discipline myself to read a library book before going on to The Scar. Finishing a book and salivating about getting to move on to the next one is a rare pleasure and one I thank China Mieville for providing with Perdido Street Station.

COMICS

Mon, 23 Aug 2004 17:44:26 +0000

Things like [this thread](http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/pulse.cgi?http%3A//www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi%3Fubb%3Dget_topic%26f%3D36%26t%3D002664) and [this response thread](http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=39&t=000082) fill me with such boiling vitriol that I usually don't comment for fear of seeming like I'm foaming at the mouth over here. The thread in question asked it's mostly superhero reading audience "Why don't you read independent comics?" and the answers range from laughably ignorant to well, less laughably ignorant. People actually ask questions like 'Does a comic have to be in black & white to be an independent?" and of course there's the ever-present device I like to call the "I have a black friend" Defense of people saying they read both "mainstream" superhero and indie books so as to seem like asking the question is an insult to their character. Of course these people never give examples of anything they read so it's hard to say if it's typical superhero-fan defensiveness or the truth.

Not to knock the guy who obviously put a lot into his response to the question in the second thread but, please. Give me a break. His first 2 paragraphs make me want to punch him in the throat. His answer boils down to “They don’t give me what I want in a comic” which he goes to say is basically fluffy happy stories where he doesn’t have to think too much and where he can regain his hope for the world and blah, blah, blah. If you don’t have the stomach to read the responses to the original thread, this guy’s response is all of them rolled into one. After bundling all comics that don’t come from Marvel and DC into the same independent bag, he loads it with stones and drops it into the river. Commense foaming at the mouth.

To all superhero readers who use the word “indy” to refer to everything without the comforting little M or DC in the corner, stop it. You make yourself look like a complete witless moron when you say everything in the back 300 pages of the Previews catalog is the same. Bone does not have the same attitude and sensibilities as Courtney Crumrin. Queen & Country is not a exercise in navel-gazing. Blankets does not have poor art because Craig Thompson didn’t fill in every vein and eye-gouging nipple. Repeat after me: “All comics not published by Marvel or DC are not the same. They do not share anything except a Mt. Fuji sized hurdle in the way of their sales because my superhero comics are taking up all the space in the shops.”

There is nothing you can say to justify not reading something because it’s not from Marvel or DC. Nothing. I don’t care what your definition of independent is. I don’t care that you didn’t like Strangers in Paradise. Neither do I. Saying it’s okay that all you like is superhero comics is not standing up for your rights as a reader, it’s brain-dead ignorance. That’s all. Is it okay to read superhero comics, yep. Is it okay not to read “indy” comics, nope. Because those are not two groups of things. Superhero comics is one thing, spy comics are another. Romance comics are another. Independent comics are All of the Above. Disregarding a group of people for some largely arbitrary reason is called racism, disregarding a group of books for arbitrary reasons like publishing company or distribution is called stupidity.

Grrr. I said it was going to be boiling vitriol. You were warned.

THINGS

Mon, 16 Aug 2004 19:31:31 +0000

[Bruce Sterling's speech from the 04 SIGGRAPH](http://www.boingboing.net/images/blobjects.htm) is the first speech of Bruce's I've read in a few months that didn't make me completely infuriated with him. In it he talks about something I've been interested in ever since I listened to the interview that Massive Change Radio did with William McDonough, Cradle-to-Cradle design. Sterling doesn't call what he's talking about C-t-C but it's what he's talking about. Cradle-to-Cradle is the idea that everything you make should be able to be disassembled and reused for other products, or at least destroyed in such a way that it doesn't hurt anything. The idea is that you use the roof of a car factory to produce solar power, you build the car so that all the parts can be taken apart again and used in a new car (or other product) and that the environment isn't made worse by the use of harmful chemicals, etc. It's one of those 'duh' ideas that you'd think people would think about in their daily lives but they just don't, especially corporations whose sole interest is the bottom line. The interesting thing about McDonough's work is that he's helped companies actually help their bottom line by using C-t-C thinking. This is the important part and something that Sterling doesn't touch on. Or rather, he has a different focus. Rather than showing companies that by helping the environment they can make more money, Sterling is talking to geeks about how we don't have to be so stupid about manufacturing anymore. We are smart enough to be smart, basically. It's a good idea and an excellent speech. I recommend reading it.

Thanks to boingboing for the link.

PROGRESS

Fri, 13 Aug 2004 15:52:17 +0000

In order to spur myself on and keep track of where I've been, I'm starting two new progress indicators on the site. One is a map of how far I've ridden my bike, which is a map over to the left. The other is a daily writing update log where I put down what I've written that day. This is mostly to keep myself from slacking.

ART

Mon, 09 Aug 2004 12:06:41 +0000

[DANNYBOT: A Movie](http://www.dannybot.com/mpg.html "DANNYBOT") Like I've always said, the internet is the greatest vehicle ever invented for allowing creative weirdos to bless us with the products of their brainmeat.

HONEYMOON:

Tue, 20 Jul 2004 23:54:31 +0000

[![](http://www.flickr.com/photos/98183.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photo.gne?id=98183 "photo sharing") [mattkimbridge](http://www.flickr.com/photo.gne?id=98183), originally uploaded by [MattGrommes](http://www.flickr.com/people/mattgrommes/).

Here’s a picture of me and Kim on the boat tour under the Golden Gate bridge and around Alcatraz. For more pics we’ve taken on the honeymoon, go to my Flickr site.

WEDDING MUSIC

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 11:53:07 +0000

Here's a list of songs I asked the DJ for the wedding to add to his frankly horrifying list of songs they like to play. Since when is anything by Jay Z appropriate for a wedding? And really, disco? It's 2004, playing any music from Saturday Night Fever in public (yes, even ironically hipsters!) should be a hanging offense. Not to say these are all classics of wedding tradition but I like them all for one reason or another:

Led Zeppelin - Going to California
Led Zeppelin - Thats the way
Jethro Tull - Aqualung
Tom Petty - Here comes my girl
Tom Petty - Into the great wide open
Social Distortion - She’s a knockout
Bob Dylan - Shelter from the storm
Bob Dylan - Boots of Spanish Leather
Bob Dylan - Tombstone Blues
Stone Temple Pilots - Still remains
U2 - One
Lonestar - Amazed
Sting - Fields of Gold
The Verve - Lucky Man
Grant Lee Buffalo - Truly Truly
Guns ‘N Roses - Sweet Child ‘o mine
Nina Gordon - Tonight & The rest of my life
Jewel - You were meant for me

WEDDING:

Tue, 13 Jul 2004 10:24:01 +0000

[![](http://www.flickr.com/photos/74789.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photo.gne?id=74789 "photo sharing")

Welcome to the 21st Century. Titanium wedding rings beautifully designed by Statman Designs. Gold? How yesterday.
originally uploaded by MattGrommes.

AUDIOBOOKS

Mon, 12 Jul 2004 17:06:22 +0000

Ok, so here's a question. Despite being a somewhat newly converted devotee of audiobooks, I've never bought one. Every audiobook I've ever listened to has been rented or borrowed from the library. My question is: **Is there a difference between renting/borrowing and downloading the audiobook from the internet**? I wouldn't have paid for it in either case and in both cases it has been bought once before, either by the person who uploaded it to the net or by the library/rental store.

108940718152060561

Fri, 09 Jul 2004 15:06:21 +0000

![1089468195picture1.jpg](http://s3.media.squarespace.com/production/1529026/18137065/images/1089468195picture1.jpg)

Things are coming together nicely.

This message was sent from a T-Mobile wireless phone.

108889780469480383

Sat, 03 Jul 2004 17:36:44 +0000

![1088958849picture6.jpg](http://s3.media.squarespace.com/production/1529026/18137065/images/1088958849picture6.jpg)

Ally in her flowergirl dress.

This message was sent from a T-Mobile wireless phone.

108687785129513525

Thu, 10 Jun 2004 08:30:51 +0000

![1086938983picture4.jpg](http://s3.media.squarespace.com/production/1529026/18137065/images/1086938983picture4.jpg)

The next generation.

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108663712334997295

Mon, 07 Jun 2004 13:38:43 +0000

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On the Rio Grande bike trail

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108640260437957095

Fri, 04 Jun 2004 20:30:04 +0000

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Watching the Isotopes.

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HOME

Tue, 01 Jun 2004 13:22:51 +0000

I saw a commercial yesterday for a series of concerts put on for Habitat For Humanity and it got me thinking about a problem I've always had with HFH, all the effort they put in doesn't go far enough. If somehow you're not aware of HFH, they get volunteers to build homes for people who can't afford a new home. The lucky family has to help build the place and pay back some of the cost, I believe. It's a very feel good thing for the people involved and for the few families that get houses out of the deal, it's great. What I want though, is for them to go at the problem on a much larger scale. I want HFH to build cities.

Continually pushing the “dream” of owning your own little house on it’s own plot of land only means you’re pushing the dominance of the suburb, without a doubt one of the major causes of environmental destruction we’ve come up with as a species. What Habitat For Humanity should be doing, instead of doling out 1 house at a time, even 1 neighborhood at a time as they do in some places, is renovating existing large buildings into apartment style homes. There are tons of empty “big box” buildings sitting there doing nothing when Wal-Mart consolidates 5 stores into one mega store, or when some grocery store goes out of business. These could be converted into very nice sized apartments for half a dozen families, or more in the case of some of these caverns sitting empty all over the landscape. There’s nothing inherently wrong with an apartment over a house unless you’re obsessed with having a yard and if you’re getting a house from HFH you shouldn’t be too picky. Building high density housing structures not only better utilizes the existing infrastructure, it prevents the city from spreading out needlessly. People here in Albuquerque especially are obsessed with moving farther and farther out “because the houses are so cheap” without thinking about the extra cost in driving, in maintaining more gas/electric/water infrastructure, etc. Meanwhile, there are literally dozens of mammoth buildings sitting empty on huge parking lots.

Part of this idea would probably involve changing zoning codes for these buildings but that’s not a bad thing either. Mixing housing and commercial buildings is one of the best things you can do for a city. Nobody wants to live next to a power plant but few poor families would complain about living next to a Best Buy or a Krispy Kreme in exchange for low mortgage payments and a place of their own. All it takes it a little redefinition of the dream of a home.

FUTURE

Fri, 28 May 2004 10:14:49 +0000

I've been listening to the MP3 downloads from [Massive Change](http://www.massivechange.com) Radio recently and it's been very enlightening. The one today though, illustrates a problem I've been thinking about a lot, having the courage to do what you say in science.

The interview is with Janine Benyus who wrote a book about biomimicry. Biomimetics has the potential to be one of those developments that comes from nowhere and really revolutionizes things. Everyone is paying attention to genetic engineering and nanotech but biomimicry (the copying of biological processes to do things we currently do with force and machines) is a discipline that can use both of those sciences to really do interesting things. Ms. Benyus talks about copying the process that an abalone shell uses to make super-hard shells to create ceramic type materials rather than using massive pressures and ovens to make ceramics like we do now. I agree wholeheartedly with this. The arrogance created by our successes in manufacturing and industrialization has led us away from copying nature but we have the tools and know-how to go back in that direction. The problem is that she doesn’t have the courage of her convictions, so to speak.

The interviewer asked her about a Canadian company who is doing really pioneering transgenic work on getting goats to produce spider silk for use as “BioSteel” they call it. This is an amazing development. Both Ms. Benyus and the interviewer, however, call it freakish and Benyus, at least, seems very against it. She wants to take the “recipe” for spider silk and find a way to make it ourselves. My issue with that is why go to the trouble? She talks about how the natural world has had 4 billion years of R&D to come up with spider silk and that’s why we should use it but she doesn’t want us to use the factories developed by nature as well. If the animals can already do it better than we can, why not let them do the heavy lifting? “Because having goats produce spider silk is gross” is not an answer. Almost all insulin used by diabetics today (and for the past 30 years almost) is produced by genetically modified bacteria. Is that gross? People need insulin and we have a way of producing it easily. The old way was slaughtering millions of animals to extract the insulin from their carcasses. The bacteria way is better, even though you might not relish the thought of injecting something that came from a seething vat of bacteria into your arm.

We have to have the courage to do things the better way. Someone might feel weird about putting spider genes into goats until the light and cheap bullet-proof vest made from the silk saves their live or the life of someone they care about. Then it’s just a material and damn where it came from. If we’re going to copy nature, and we absolutely should, we need to realize that we can also improve upon the system. Nature is not an R&D lab. There is no one directing the research done. The reason goats don’t produce spider silk is that they have no need for it in the field. Spiders have a need for it, so it developed over time. There’s nothing inherent to nature that says goats should not produce strong silk proteins, they just haven’t needed it in the past. Now (maybe just as an interim step, who knows) we need them to produce spider silk proteins. We need cows to produce more vitamin packed milk. We need wheat that grows in places it couldn’t grow before. These are needs we have and we have a way to do it. We just have to have the courage to do it.

108543585061860178

Mon, 24 May 2004 15:57:30 +0000

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On the bike path to work.

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108540889039172243

Mon, 24 May 2004 08:28:10 +0000

![picture.jpg](http://s3.media.squarespace.com/production/1529026/18137065/images/picture.jpg)

Thank god for this instruction sheet.

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108370543980866509

Tue, 04 May 2004 15:17:19 +0000

COMICS: The big news of the past week or so in comics has been the admission by writer Micah Ian Wright that he's been lying for years about his past as an Army Ranger. As someone who hung out quite regularly in Micah's forum and talked with him more than a few times, this surprised the hell out of me at first but I'm not going to go as far as some others have in condemning him.

I, as is the case with most people talking about this “scandal,” only knew Micah online and maybe from con and signing appearances. This really does mean we didn’t know him in the sense we usually use that word. We knew the persona he chose to project for his working life. It’s unfortunate that he chose to play up this lie to the extent that he did and I’m really not sure why he chose to do so. Maybe he thought his political views would only be accepted if he had some former standing or experience to build on, I don’ t know. He’s the only one who can answer that and I hope he figures it out for himself.

The real thing that gets me about this is people’s attitude about his truthfulness in his life and how that affects his work. The answer to that is that it doesn’t affect his work one little bit. He’s a fiction writer and in a very real way, a professional liar. He didn’t write any memoirs about his life. He’s not in the business of selling his personal story as the truth. He’s a fiction writer. What he says about his personal life cannot affect his work at all. It’s unfortunate that this will undoubtedly damage his burgening career but really the two aspects of his life are totally unrelated. I enjoyed his Stormwatch: TA at first and although the character of the Vigilante (or whatever his forthcoming Superman-universe book is called) does not appeal to me, his name is on my list of writers to look out for. I hope DC does the right thing and keeps him on the book and I hope he gets other work. If he decides to stay in comics and take the abuse that the gruge-holding comics fandom will heap on him, I hope he gets work. I hope he takes the advice of fellow creator Kurt Busiek and puts his head down, keeps on working and moves past this whole thing. This will of course be a black mark on his people’s rememberance of his career but I certainly hope he doesn’t allow it to overshadow everything else he’s done and is capable of.

And I really hope people will just stop harping on it. Move on, there are other things to talk about.

108326085731134271

Thu, 29 Apr 2004 11:47:37 +0000

COMICS: Every day almost it seems as though the comics industry is heading for a very profound split, the kind I've talked about before where the direct market comic shops continue to be just superhero centered and irrelevant to the larger culture and the rest of the world gets their non-superhero comics from elsewhere. Here are this week's pointers toward the schism.

DC announced that they are bringing back Hal Jordan as Green Lantern. For those who don’t follow Green Lantern (which includes me really but I can’t help but pay attention to this story because it’s emblematic of exactly the type of wrong-headed nostalgic crap that superhero comics are known for) Hal Jordan is the fanboy’s One True Green Lantern who was given a rare chance to actually change and become something different about a decade ago. His home town was destroyed and in a fit of rage at being unable to change this, he went crazy and I believe killed all the other Green Lanterns. He became a very powerful villian who was eventually stopped and killed. Then he became the new Spectre character and was given a chance to help others for redemption. For a superhero comic, this was change akin to the asteroid that helped kill off the dinosaurs. And of course, fans of the dinosaurs were none too happy. The new Green Lantern, a young modern mammal, was almost universally reviled by the people who wanted their lumbering giants back and some of the fans more in need of medication actually raised money for ads asking DC to put everything back how it was and pretend nothing had actually changed. And so, after a decade of trying to resist the insecent pull back toward the past, DC has relented and announced that they are bringing Hal back. Of course, they assure us, nothing will really be the same but I think anybody who has spent any time around superhero comics knows that’s really not going to be the case. This, on top of Marvel’s attempts to undo anything new and interesting with the X-Men comics now that pesky forward-thinker Grant Morrison is gone, is just one more push toward the complete insularity and irrelevancy of the superhero market.

The pointer in the other direction, away from corporate trademark service and toward creative freedom and artistic relevance, comes from the always great Permanent Damage column by Steven Grant. Mr. Grant points out a great response from Steve Gerber, creator of Howard The Duck, to a fan who wants to write the duck. I’m going to reprint it here because I want to have an archive of it for myself.

One thing I really don’t understand. Haven’t you “always wanted” to write your own character? What’s so damn special about the duck? That he comes prepackaged? That you have someone else’s creativity to leach on? Shouldn’t you be trying to write something that’s special to you, not me?

This may sound harsh, folks, but if any of you really want to be writers – &@$* THE DUCK AND THE SPIDER IT RODE IN ON! HAVE AN ORIGINAL THOUGHT FOR ONCE!

It’s not so hard. Hell, if I did it, anyone can.

And, in the end, you’ll find it’s more rewarding to yank your own crank than somebody else’s.

This may be your last opportunity to “get it,” people. Chances are, no creator in the comics industry will ever be this straightforward with you again… Stop and think for a moment where comics would be right now if Siegel & Shuster, Will Eisner, Jack Cole, Stan Lee, Gardner Fox, Steve Ditko, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, etc., had only wanted to write and draw the stuff they grew up with. No Superman. No Spirit. No Plastic Man. No Marvel Universe. No Justice Society or League – you get the idea.

You’d still be reading “Maggie & Jiggs”, “Gasoline Alley”, and “Flash Gordon”. Because no one would have invented anything.

All the stuff you love would never have been created.

The point of non-corporate writing and art, even – no, especially – if it has to exist in a corporate context – is to create something new. Was it Gauguin who said that “art is revolution”? Hey. No revolution, no Green Lantern.

Which, incidentally, is pretty much where we’re at in comics right now.”
Those last two bits are the crux of the issue right there. Comics wouldn’t be where they are today without reinvention and revolution but the problem is that the majority of comics people, fans and creators and companies, all want everything to stay the same. The schism is going to come when it’s possible to leave those people behind and still do comics. I think we’re coming to that point very quickly and the surprise is that everyone will be much happier when it happens. The superhero fans won’t have people talking shit about their dumbass desire to see Hal Jordan in the GL costume again and people like me and companies like Oni will actually be able to buy and sell comics they want without having to compete with Captain Spandex and the Nostalgia Squad. I can’t wait.

108274744949213569

Fri, 23 Apr 2004 13:10:49 +0000

COMICS: [Matt Fraction](http://www.mattfraction.com) has a [great chart he made of comics sales](http://www.mattfraction.com/archives/000578.php) from last month that everyone should look at. In his words "_That's the skijump of fucked, right there._"

Basically the chart shows that a lot of people bought the #1 comic sold in comics shops and then nobody else bought anything other than that. More than half of the Top 300 books sold are being seen by less people than go to a single concert by a marginally popular band. If you sold a comic to everyone attending a single Dave Matthews Band concert you’d be in the Top 100 in terms of sales. If you sold a comic to everyone attending a professional football game you’d be in the Top 25. That’s not a healthy sales curve for any industry.

108264882243691895

Thu, 22 Apr 2004 09:47:02 +0000

BOOKS: I've been on a history kick with my audiobooks recently, mostly from getting them all via the library rather than renting them. I just finished a "biography" of the equation E=mc^2 which everyone knows and nobody really understands outside of physics students and physics fans like me. Not that I really understand it, mind you, but I'm a phyiscs fan. I'll definately have to listen to the book again when I can really concentrate on it. I listened to good chunks of it while at work and while I can listen and do some of my work at the same time, with a book like this it doesn't help comprehension. I did get a lot out of it though, such as an excellent description of the nature of light as a process, not an object. If you're a phyiscs fan, I recommend it.

I just checked out a new book about the craziness surrounding the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, which for a word person like myself is one of the Holy Grail’s that I hope someday to be able to afford. I’ll listen to that one soon, it sounds interesting.

I haven’t started Beowulf as of this writing but I’m looking forward to it, mostly. I saw mostly because I can’t determine if it’s the whole book or not. The back of the CD says ‘Unabridged selections’ which to me means they cut parts out and those parts are unabridged. Not exactly what I’m looking for. But then Amazon says [UNABRIDGED] very clearly so I’m confused. The 2.5 hour length of the reading is my biggest indication that it isn’t in fact the whole book. We’ll see.

I also just finished reading ‘Mind Wide Open,’ a brain book by the guy who wrote Emergence, a book about emergent behavior that I really recommend. I’m a fan of both topics and while Emergence didn’t tell me much I didn’t already know, Mide Wide Open was filled with interesting stuff. The new brain scanning technology such as the fMRI scan that can show your brain actually working rather than just static pictures makes me agog at the possibilities.

Tried to read Palomar a few weeks ago and I’m probably going to be kicked out of comics for saying this but I just couldn’t get into it. Not that it isn’t a supreme achievement and if the slice-of-life, small town story is your thing definately get it. The library edition I read was a giant beautiful hardcover that if I were a Love & Rockets fan I would covet as if it were gold. I’m just not in the mood for that type of story right now and couldn’t make myself go through more than the first half. Someday when I’m in less of a science/ideas/fast-moving story mood I’ll definately check it out again.

The constant shifting of my reading “moods” is the reason I have 3 or 4 very interesting looking biographies sitting on my To Be Read shelf. At the time I bought them I had probably read a couple of biographies and then I moved on to something else. I always come back around though so I’ll get to them. Someday.

108188066906068269

Tue, 13 Apr 2004 12:24:29 +0000

COMICS: [Augie De Blieck](http://www.comicbookresources.com/columns/?column=6) has a **great** column up about Marvel comics new Icon line of creator-owned books and what it means for the comic book industry. It's the most "this industry (including its fans) is completely broken" essay I've seen from Augie and the look works on him.

My favorite part of the article is the ‘Blame The Readers’ section because in the end, that’s who it all comes down to. No matter how much effort retailers put into pushing a great book like Powers, if the readers are going to ignore it for unfathomable reasons, it’s not going to sell. I have a feeling that Augie’s audience is mostly superhero fans and I really hope they read this section of the article at least. The idea that sales of Powers are going to go up because Bendis moves the book from Image to Marvel is abso-fucking-lutely insane, to steal a phrase. I don’t pay that much attention to the music industry but I have a hard time believing people would say “I’ll buy 50-Cent’s new album if he moves over to X Record Label” but comics readers say “I won’t buy Powers because it has an Image logo on it even though I read everything else Brian Bendis writes.” It’s impossible to have a rational business when your customers make totally irrational decisions. There is no way to defend that position. None. If you have an attempt, please use the Comments link below. I’d love to hear it.

In the end though, I’m glad this happened. It probably means more money for Bendis which is good for him. Any time a talented writer has a chance to make a few more bucks in comics I’m all for it. However much it points out how hopelessly stupid the comics industry is it also means that more people will be exposed to and read a great comic. I hope what also comes out of this is that a lot of corporate superhero comics fans are exposed to the idea that creator ownership is good. There are far too many Marvel and DC readers who think all creator owned books are navel-gazing suckfests and seeing a book like Powers under the beloved M logo will help refute that. It also points out one of the many benefits of creator ownership. If you don’t like your current deal, take your book and go elsewhere. When a popular writer of a corporate book sours on the owner of a book he/she writes their only option is to leave that book, which in most cases pleases neither the writer or the fan.

But, in any case, I’ll still be reading Powers and so should you. If you weren’t reading it before because of the big I in the corner you’ll punch yourself when you find out how good the book is. And you’ll deserve it.

108154104713988238

Fri, 09 Apr 2004 14:04:07 +0000

DESIGN: ![](http://www.goodexperience.com/broken/i/04/03/NotAnEntrance-t.jpg) I just stumbled upon a new favorite website: [This Is Broken](http://www.thisisbroken.com). It's a blog devoted to pointing out things that are broken for some reason or another. Arrows that point the wrong way, buttons on elevators that are confusing, confusing signs, etc. I'm into design and making things work properly so this is exactly my type of website. My friends and family are I'm sure sick of me going on about things like doors with pull handles that you have to push on to open, hard-to-reach buttons and levers on household items, etc. With this site, now I can take my compulsion to talk about this stuff to a whole new audience. Thank you Internet!

108144395587168049

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 11:05:55 +0000

COMICS: Wow, that sucked. I said yesterday that I hadn't read anything by Chuck Austen. Well, that's been remedied as of today and oh, how I wish it hadn't. I told my comic shop guy to stop pulling New X-Men for me as of Grant Morrison's last issue but he didn't and I figured I'd try it out to see what the deal was with everyone hating Austen's work. Good lord.

It’s one thing to replace one semi-talented writer with another semi- or less- talented writer, as Marvel does seemingly every month. It’s another to follow up a groundbreaking and seminal run by one of the best writers in comics with a complete hack. It’s like driving on a smooth, brand new freeway and crossing over a bridge onto a pothole riddled dirt road. First, I don’t think Austen even read Morrison’s run to see what he had done with the title. He’s made Emma Frost, the first villain-turned-(almost)hero that I actually believed as a character, into some other random wailing woman. She actually has the line “What about the children!” for god’s sake.

Then there’s a search through the mansion’s basement to find Cassandra Nova which directly contradicts what Morrison did with the character (it’s not completely spelled out directly that Ernst is Cassandra re-educated in the alien shapeshifter Stuff’s body, granted, but he doesn’t even address it which makes it again seem like he hadn’t even read the book or asked anyone about her whereabouts). In true “Return to Old Superhero Cliches” fashion the search leads into the discovery of Random Violent Robot and a fight. During the fight, I almost had the idea that Austen actually did understand one of the places Morrison took the New X-Men which is and end to all the old expected superhero crap like explaining what you’re doing during a fight. The Beast begins explaining to Cyclops (who Austen must believe has a healing factor of some kind because Random Violent Robot smashes his head through at least two concrete walls) what he’s trying to do to the robot and Cyclops replies that he doesn’t need the play-by-play. If Morrison’s Cyclops had said this line I would have be sure Morrison knew why he was saying it, as a nod to the old ways which are now over. Just as he had Wolverine say he was glad they got rid of the spandex costumes at the beginning of his run. Austen, however, obviously does not understand what this line should mean since Beast goes on to keep explaining. He uses it as just another superhero fight throwaway joke and completely misses any chance to keep the book on the high road it was on before.

The only man in the world brave enough to review every X-Men comic cluttering the shelves, Paul O’Brien, has labeled Marvel’s new three-steps-backward “reload” of the X-Men titles “Everything Old Is Old Again” and from what I’ve seen, once again the man is on the spot. It’s as if Marvel got one too many letters from old-school X-Men fans who couldn’t understand Morrison’s run on the book and they’ve decided that while his run was nice and critics seemed to like it, that now it’s over and they can go back to the same non-threatening spandex fight scenes the old fans want to see.

As much as I like Joss Whedon’s work on Buffy and Firefly, I don’t imagine being able to stomach more than a couple of issues of his seemingly back to 1980s Astonishing X-Men, even given art by John Cassaday. Since the X-Men were one of the two books that got me into comics in the first place (the other was Batman) I have a soft spot in my heart for them but I won’t spend money on a book that look out from its lofty perch and decides that rather than fly higher from there it wants to climb back down to the ground where it’s safe.

108135762037421405

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 11:07:00 +0000

COMICS: Hmm, I wonder why superhero comics are laughed at and ignored by mainstream audiences? Could it be things like [this](http://newsarama.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=11489)? Have we gone back in time to the early 90s and nobody told me? There are so many things wrong with this book from this barely disguised press release that it's hard to know even where to start. I can't comment on the author, Chuck Austen, because I've never been interested in anything he's written (but others whose opinions I respect, like [Paul O'Brien](http://www.thexaxis.com/), have nothing good to say which is enough for me) but the startling lack of originality in every aspect of the book, from the story to the art to the character designs, just makes me shake my head in embarrasment. I mean, come on. The leader of the team is called 'Warrior Princess' and she's not even wearing enough material to completely cover one of her grotesequely oversized breasts. If you're going to go out and create your own new comic, what is the point of creating something so intensely hackneyed and unimaginative? I see nothing different here than all of the comics I've seen with Chuck Austen's name on them alongside the Marvel or DC logo.

But, in keeping with what I was saying yesterday about the change-averse superhero comics audience, the first comments to the story are “This looks GREAT!” and “King Pharaoh. And he’s wearing an Egyptian headdress. That’s so sweet.”

Good for you Chuck Austen, you’re giving your existing audience exactly what they want and not scaring anyone by attempting something new. Congratulations. You’re part of what is going to kill superhero comics.

Link found on Thought Balloons.

108118753570259155

Mon, 05 Apr 2004 11:52:15 +0000

COMICS: [This post by Sean Collins](http://http://www.alltooflat.com/about/personal/sean/?BlogNum=742) reminds me of something very funny. In it, Sean continues a discussion he's apparently been having about the perrenially fun topic of superhero comics dominating Direct Market comics shops. The point he makes is that since DM comic book stores are, and always have been, superhero focused that non-superhero comics won't sell there. He's right, of course. What's funny to me about this is how closely this follows what Warren Ellis has been saying recently. As much as people like to bash Warren, the general thinking among those few people who bother to think about comics tends to hew pretty closely to his ideas. Whether people actually do listen to Warren despite their own protestations (not that Sean himself has any thoughts about Warren Ellis, he's just the one who made me think about this) or whether nobody listens to Warren but he's always ahead of the curve is for somebody else to figure out.

What Warren has been saying, and what I’ve been agreeing with for quite a while, is that the fight for opening up the DM for non-superhero comics is pretty much a lost cause. The people running the shops (barring people like James Sime who actually care about making money, not talking about Green Lantern with their buddies), the people doing almost all the shopping, and the companies selling most of the product in the DM are all adamantly against anything new and against anything that isn’t superhero making any inroads. When faced with a brick wall of such gigantic preportions, you can either chip your way through it bit by bit or you can walk around it. Manga has not only helped open up a new road around the brick wall of the DM for non-superhero comics, it has paved, painted and lit it. It’s now up to publishers to get on the road and finally move toward the future.

The recent discussions of this topic always leads me to think about the book from a few years ago called The Innovator’s Dilemma (I’ve made this point before so excuse me if you’ve heard this). One of the points of that book is that the road to ruin for a lot of companies has been following exactly what their customers want. The problem of Giving Them What They Want is that you get too comfortable with your current customers and make no effort to look into anything new. Then when something new comes along, your competition (who either aren’t large enough to have the large existing customer base in place that you have or are new to the industry) sees the new thing as a new way to get customers, gets a lot of new customers who didn’t want what you were supplying and you eventually whither and die as your customer dwindle or move to the new thing. The parallels with the DM are pretty clear if you think of super-hero shops as one entity (which I’m comfortable doing since you can walk into 90% of the comics shops in the US and know what they’re going to have the same as if they all had the same franchise name above the door). Superhero-focused comic shops have a large and generally change-adverse audience that is keeping it alive, albeit barely. These customers by-and-large do not like non-superhero comics so those shops have no reason to stock them. This suits both parties just fine. The shops keep their audience and the audience keeps the product it likes. Now comes bookstores and an increasing number of mainstream stores that stock non-superhero comics for people who didn’t read comics before. This is the crucial element. People buying manga and non-superhero comics didn’t frequent superhero shops before so these new shops aren’t taking customers away from the superhero stores so their impact is largely ignored by those shops. Hence the wishful thinking of a lot of people in the DM of ignoring manga or thinking it’s a fad. The problem for the DM is the same for all businesses where new technologies or products come along, most people end up wanting the new thing, no matter how you repackage, rethink, give away, or promote the old thing. The old audience just becomes life-support, keeping you going in the short term only until there’s not enough life left even for the machines to puff up.

To bring this monster of a post back around to the original point, the DM is a sinking ship and if you look at history, it’s almost inevitable that it be this way. The new mainstream comic shops and stores are where non-superhero comics need to be, not in the DM.

108023348926786283

Thu, 25 Mar 2004 09:51:29 +0000

SITE: I'm playing around with the CSS files that build the look of the site so if you see anything funny or broken, hopefully it'll go away soon. :) As always, I build and read the site in [Mozilla](http://www.mozilla.org) so if you're using IE, things might be strange until I get around to testing and fixing the CSS to fit IE's broken CSS support.

107937113925992471

Mon, 15 Mar 2004 10:18:59 +0000

BOOK REVIEW: [Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385721676/mattorama) [![](http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0385721676.01._PE20_PI_SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg)](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385721676/mattorama) This is one of those books that shows a lot about your beliefs in your reaction to it. The main ideabase of the book comes from the future of genetic engineering. It starts out with small things like "racunks" or racoons crossed with skunks, minus the smell. It ends with, well I won't spoil it, but needless to say some people will find the Crakers an improvement and some won't. You'll have to read the book to see what I mean. I have the feeling that a lot of the stuff that Atwood found horrifying about genetic engineering (the "chickie-nobs") I have completely the opposite reaction to. That's what I mean about your reaction to the book saying something about your beliefs, especially in the "playing God" discussion.

The creation of the world after the perfection of genetic splicing and engineering is very well done and very compelling and I comend Margaret Atwood on her achievement. The other thing that I hope gets people’s attention in the book is the power of the corporation aspect of the book. I trust corporations to create profit maximizing things like the chickie-nobs but I will never trust a corporation to make decisions about the future path of humanity, like they do in this book. If people don’t pay attention though, that’s what’s going to happen. Genetic engineering is a very powerful technology and despite some technophobes best efforts it’s going to come soon. The power to muck with humanity on a large scale is something that requires transparency of operation to be used safely. We have to pay attention, even if we don’t like the technology.

As much as I liked the world and the science, the book does have more than it’s share of problems. The characters could use a little more life to them for instance. Jimmy/Snowman is a fine character, I have no problem with him. Oryx and her story take up too much of the book and frankly, she’s interesting but not terribly well fleshed out. Crake is, as many science-fiction characters are, exactly what he needs to be for the plot. Not to say he isn’t consistent, he definately is. But he’s also more than a little unrealistic. He’s one of those “perfect at everything” characters who is smarter than everyone, cooler than everyone, etc. Crake is the genius of genetic tinkering but he also happens to be a genius computer hacker to boot. The hacker part is a little much. Would it have killed Atwood to make Jimmy the hacker and give him at least a little something over Crake? I don’t think so and it would have added some much needed depth to the character in the form of at least one thing he’s not perfect at. There is a lot of unneeded stuff in here, like pretty much all of Oryx’s backstory. I also found the final ending of Snowman’s story to be completely unsatisfying. It felt like Atwood knew she had finsihed the “real” story of what happened to the world and then couldn’t figure out a good way to end the actual book.

Overall I liked the book, despite its flaws. As I said, the vision of the future is very compelling and thought-provoking. If you have any interest in what a possible future for the world post-genetic engineering could look like, I would recommend this book to you. The audiobook, read by actor Campbell Scott, is great. Scott has a mastery of different voices that I would have never expected based on his movie roles. I don’t think the world will end up anything like the one portrayed in Oryx & Crake but something like it is coming and I think Margaret Atwood’s vision is going to be thought of as very prescient in the years to come.

107896030546471063

Wed, 10 Mar 2004 16:11:45 +0000

POLITICS: I haven't used this weblog for politics in the past, for various reasons, but with the election coming up I can't help myself. Today's entry isn't going to be specifically about the election but it is about the ever present political topic of the war in Iraq. I was prompted by this entry on Sean Collins' weblog about a speech that Tony Blair gave about England's involvement in the war as well as various comments being made recently about Bush and his involvement that I'm sure everyone's aware of.

One of the things I’m sure the Bush administration will be pushing in the coming months, besides hiding behind 9/11 I mean, is that we were right to go into Iraq and free the citizens of that embattled country. Unlike a lot of self-proclaimed liberals I agree with that statement, but not with Bush. We should have gone into Iraq and should have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, that I agree with. We should have also done it 10 years ago under Bush Sr. but he reneged on our commitments there, causing the deaths of many of our so-called friends in Iraq with our absence. So yes, I believe getting rid of Saddam was the Right Thing to do but what I cannot forgive is the way we went about it. Bush and his administration lied, there is very little dispute about that. They hid information, believed and distributed only selectively what they had to to bolster their case, and much else. Beyond the lying, even beyond the inexcusable behavior of using the deaths of 9/11 to get an excuse to do something you’ve been planning for years, the worst thing about the way the war was conducted was that the Bush Administration deprived the people of the US the opportunity to have a discussion about our place in the world of the 21st century.

If Bush had been honest about Iraq, we could have had a very valuable discussion about our role in the world. Coming out and telling people he had decided that we were going to go into Iraq and get rid of Saddam because it was the right thing to do and because Hussein had proved himself a monster over and over again with his own people would have made us face the dilemma of being the biggest kid on the playground. Are we going to use our size and strength to protect the other kids or not? It’s an important question, one that needs to be looked at. People might not have agreed with him as wholeheartedly as they did when they wrapped the Terrorism label around it but it would have been a lot more honest. Instead, they used the War On Terror as an excuse, made up evidence of harm that could possibly come to US citizens and effectively said they don’t care what was done to Iraqi citizens in the past, all that was important was possible danger to us. The message that when all Saddam was doing was gassing and maiming his own people he was fine, but as soon as we thought he might look our we had to step in is not the way to coexist in the world.

We are a superpower in a century that will probably become defined by micropowers, small groups with power conferred on them by technology and money. Either we can use our powers to help build a new world of safety for all or we can blunder around trying only to protect our own interests. We need to have this discussion or when it comes down to it, we will have no input into the world we’re living in. It’s clear we cannot count on Bush and his administration to have the vision needed in this new time in history.

107879012030787407

Mon, 08 Mar 2004 16:55:20 +0000

LIFE: If you're one of the 3 fans of this site who aren't my immediate family, you may have noticed that I haven't exactly been Mr. Weblog recently. This is due to the fact that I have a new job, as a Quality Assurance / Test Engineer for [Leader Technologies](http://www.leadertech.com), a company that makes those 'Please Register Your Products' applications and webpages you see when you buy hardware and software. It's a very cool job and a neat company to work for. I've done what I think is a pretty good job so far, finding a few things that would have been bad had they gone out the door. I'm working a lot more during my workday (and getting home later too, unfortunately) than I was for the past few months at the previous job so that means less blogging. I'm resolving to be better about it though, much to my surprise people actually like and read this site so I want to keep it going as best as I can. I'll have some posts on the upcoming wedding soon both here and on the wedding blog as well as posts about what I've been reading recently. Unfortunately for my readers who come here from comics related websites, the list of reading material doesn't include many comics for various reasons, my lack of interest in the comics community recently not being the least of them.

So here’s to my new job and hopefully to a renewed Matt O’ Rama once I get more into a groove here at Leader.

107721001131619586

Thu, 19 Feb 2004 10:00:11 +0000

ART: I've decided that I'm going to learn more about art (and music, but one thing at a time) and I need help. I spent a few minutes looking over the art textbooks at [the local university's](http://www.unm.edu) bookstore and I found a few titles but I'd rather not waste $60 - $100 on textbooks that are overpriced and bad, like so many college textbooks are. So I'm hoping people with much more background in art than I have can give me some suggestions on titles to read to get a sort of non-university art course. I'm looking for explanations of different periods, different styles, the major contributors to those periods/styles, all the stuff I imagine you get from a good art history / art appreciation course. If you have some suggestions for me, please post them in the comments or [email me](mailto:art@mattorama.net). I'll post the list of suggestions for future searchers. Thanks in advance.

107712481673214388

Wed, 18 Feb 2004 10:20:16 +0000

BOOK REVIEW: [A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0739302949/mattorama) [![](http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0767908171.01._PE20_PI_SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg)](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0767908171/mattorama) Boy, my streak of getting really, really good audiobooks continues unabated and I'm enjoying the hell out of it. I'm a big science geek and science-history is one of my favorite subjects. I love the little stories and coincidences that led to some of the most important discoveries and inventions in history. The TV show Connections is one of my favorites series of all time for this very reason. So many things we take for granted wouldn't be here if things had happened just a tiny bit differently and if you look at it, Earth and all the life on it is no exception.

Bryson starts this book on that note, that we are all exceptionally lucky to be here. He then continues on to what really does amount to a short history of almost everything in science and how we discovered the world. He covers cosmology, physics, chemistry, geology, biology, and human evolution all the while not losing sight of the people who made it all happen.

Even if you’re not a “science person” I recommend this book. Bryson does a great job of explaining some very difficult subjects but as I said, it’s all really about the people. Did you know that the guy who put lead into gasoline also came up with using CFCs in aerosol products, thus giving us two of the most environmentally destructive products of the last century? I didn’t, before I read this book. There are a million little stories in the history of science and Bryson does a great job of highlighting some of them here. Between this book and his Dictionary of Troublesome Words, he’s quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. I’m going to end up buying this book for my shelf just so I can have it to reference and give out to people, which for me is one of the highest compliments I can give a book.

107621116579947350

Sat, 07 Feb 2004 20:32:45 +0000

BOOK REVIEW: [The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1931561648/mattorama) I just keep getting lucky with these audio books. So far, 3 of the best and most affecting books I've read in a long time have been audiobooks. I'm not sure how popular this book is so I'll explain it if you haven't heard of it. It's the story of a man with 'chrono displacement syndrome' who travels, against his will, around in time. He jumps from wherever he is back (and sometimes forward) in time, ending up naked and hungry in various places and times of his life. It's also about his wife, obviously, and their strange relationship. Strange not only because he's always leaving her to travel in time but she meets version of him from his future meaning she knows things about her that he hasn't done yet and he knows all about her because he's been jumping back to meet her since she was 6.

The main thing I know about this book is that if it were being marketed as a straight science fiction book, nobody would have read it. It certainly wouldn’t have been in the Today Show book club. But instead, it’s been marketed as a romance and it’s being read by millions of people who wouldn’t go near the sci-fi section of a bookstore unless it’s to go through it to get to the restroom. That says more about the ghetto-ization of bookstores and book tastes than it does about this book although I think it were sold directly to a sci-fi audience it would meet with a lot of nitpicky criticism. I can only hope that this being sold as a romance means that more people will take away the sense that science-fiction is more than just aliens and Star Trek.

As a science-fiction reader though, I do have some issues with the time travel in the book. If I may be allowed to indulge my more geeky side for a moment, I have some questions maybe someone can help me with. You can skip this paragraph if you don’t care. My first issue is the old problem with time travel I like to call the Terminator Paradox. In Terminator 2, it’s explained that the machine that created the Terminators (Skynet) was created based on the Terminator technology that was found after the first one was destroyed in it’s past. The problem is, how did it get created in the first place? Skynet had to have been created in order to send the Terminator back which supplied the chip to create it. It doesn’t work. The same with some of this book. The time traveller, Henry, teaches his younger self to steal wallets and says he remembers the older him teaching him how to do it. He had to have learned how to do it the first time before he knew how when he went back and taught himself. The knowledge has to enter the loop at some point. These types of paradoxes aren’t explained other than to say things like “Cause and effect are a little mixed up for me” and “It’s all a little circular”. A minor point but it’s one paradox of time travel in books that I’ve never seen explained very well. (To get even geekier for a moment, I would accept that by going back and teaching yourself something, you’ve changed the timeline so you wouldn’t remember the first time through but as you’re teaching yourself, the old memories would still be partially in place. That would be an interesting idea to explore, the systematic erasure and simultaneous creation of new “replacement” memories of an event. I’ve never seen it done though.) The other issue I had was with the fact that Henry never travels outside his own lifetime or to places he hasn’t been to, except the meadow outside Claire’s house as a child. It’s never explicitly explained that he only goes within his own lifetime and only to places he’s been before but you have to infer that is the case based on where and when he goes. You’d think if he went back to the Civil War or to the time of the dinosaurs that he’d mention it but he never does. He only goes back to places he knows and often to the same place over and over. The only time that’s not the case is the meadow where he meets Claire, his “future” wife. He never says that he’s been there before but he goes back there over and over. The only reason he has to go there is to meet Claire and it’s never explained that his love for her was preordained or whatnot and that’s what drew him there. WIthout going to the meadow there’s no book though so I’ll give that a pass.

As I said, this was a book written for people who don’t read science fiction and on that front it succeeds beautifully. Outside of the very good job Niffenegger does at explaining and intricacies of a relationship between two people who see future and past versions of each other all the time, it’s a very well done romance. The relationship between Henry and Claire is incredibly believable and lovely to watch. More importantly, this book made me think more about really appreciating the moments of my life. It’s also made me want to learn a lot more about art and music I haven’t ever made a point of studying so I can help educate my daughter about them. I read fast enough that I don’t feel I need to get a lot out of most books to make it worth the effort so when I find one that makes me think and change how I move about the world, I appreciate it a lot. I will remember this book for a long time to come.

107583128585637093

Tue, 03 Feb 2004 11:01:25 +0000

WRITING: [This is one of those things](http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html#004641) that all new writers need to read, more than once. It's a very well done look at the way a lot of people take rejection letters for their writing personally. I've received the exact letter used as the first example here and it blows my mind how people can assign such sinister motives to such a small thing. The way I look at it, if I get a rejection letter it just means that I can then work a little more on the story and send it out again. Of course you hope that someday you'll stop getting rejected and start getting paid for your work but you cannot look at these form letters as anything other than an impersonal business communication. I would rather get a rejection letter than nothing at all, which seems to be the main response for publishers in my two chosen fields of comics and science-fiction. If you have any regard for your self-esteem and want to be a writer, you need to see that rejection letters are not in any way related to your personality, your worth as a human being, or anything other than the financial (and to a lesser extent, artistic) sensibilities of the person who read your manuscript. There's about as much point in thinking that a rejection letter is a personal attack as thinking that your car broke down because it didn't like you.

107561171862090148

Sat, 31 Jan 2004 22:01:58 +0000

FRIENDS: I've been doing a lot of research about so-called Friend Of A Friend systems lately. The main ones; Friendster, Live Journal (a sort of hybrid weblog/FOAF from what I can see), and the one that has spawned the most talk recently, Orkut, all seem to have a lot of problems and don't seem to work that well. The have huge amounts of users though, which means the idea is one that people like. These sites are one of those internet things I just don't see myself getting into. I was never much into chat rooms or instant messaging (even though before I'd heard of ICQ I was thinking over how to implement instant messaging. If I hadn't seen an early beta of ICQ I probably would have written my own client and might have ended up inventing IM). I'm not social, so these types of applications just don't appeal to me (no matter how much grief I get from people for having been on the internet for so long and not being a chat room or MUD user).

The reason for all my research is that I have an idea for a social network system based on finding knowledgeable people. It used to be that if you had pretty much any question you could ask on an appropriate Usenet newsgroup and somebody would know the answer. That’s a lot less true now. It’s pretty much all Google now. I very rarely ask questions on newsgroups because A) there’s too much crap and B) I can probably find it with Google. But sometimes you can’t find a good answer, only a question. That’s what got me thinking about using social networks to be able to find people with an answer. It’s partially based on the main idea of Global Frequency and the reputation system of Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom. If that means anything to you. I hope to have time to work out at least a beta that I can get other people to help me work on. It’s going to be more than just a website and even if I don’t have time to code it myself, I’m going to detail the spec and see if I can’t get some people to work on it. It’s a good idea I think. Of course being that I know only a bit about the FOAF/social network “scene” this could be another instance of me “inventing” something which has already been thought of and implemented outside of my sphere of interest. I haven’t found anything like it yet though. If you’re a venture capitalist and want to hear more in exchange for money, please feel free to email me. :)

107548959127676736

Fri, 30 Jan 2004 12:06:31 +0000

THINKING: Thanks to [Warren](http://www.diepunyhumans.com) for this: [An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth](http://www.brucemaudesign.com/manifesto.html). I just printed this out and put it up on the wall next to my computer. If you're at all interested in creativity, this is something you have to read. Finding new ways of pushing yourself creatively is not just something that artists should do. Everyone should endevour at all times to be as creative as possible. Most people abandon creativity when they "grow up," get jobs, have kids, etc. This is the time when you should be running forward, not standing still. I encourage you to print this out, tape it up somewhere and read at least part of it every day. Challenge yourself. Don't just get by. Do something new. Your mind should be racing at all times. People ask writers "where do you get your ideas" all the time. You should be having so many ideas all day long that you have to stop and write them down as they pour out of your head. It doesn't matter if the ideas are a story to write, an image to paint, a special scrapbook page to make, a comic book to publish, a new path to ride your bike, a new way to do some process you've been doing at work for years, whatever. Make 2004 **The Year Of The Idea**. Grow.

107531570432994854

Wed, 28 Jan 2004 11:48:24 +0000

FUTURE: [Welcome to the future ladies and gents.](http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=585&e=1&u=/nm/20040127/sc_nm/arms_denmark_landmines_dc) Scientists in Denmark have developed genetically modified flowers that change color in the presence of land-mines.> Within three to six weeks from being sowed over land mine infested areas the small plant, a Thale Cress, will turn a warning red whenever close to a land mine. It'll be things like this that define the future. There are already people working on projects like plants that eat toxic waste and cotton with built in resistance to wrinkles. Something like wrinkle resistant cotton doesn't seem like much but it's like when I read about screen-savers on cell phones. You know you have a handle on a piece of technology when you start doing small, seemingly pointless things with it. A screen saver on a cell phone is pretty pointless but the idea that you have a phone with the screen and processor enough to even do that is big.

Building plants in a lab to solve very difficult problems like land-mine detection is a sign that we’ve entered a new period in history. We’re building living things to help us achieve our goals. Next up is engineering improvements in ourselves. I can’t wait.

107522886340610950

Tue, 27 Jan 2004 11:41:03 +0000

BOOKS: I've decided to combine my personal pledge to read everything on my To Be Read Shelf with this '[50 Book Challenge](http://www.realityfuel.org/boards/index.php?showtopic=30)' from Reality Fuel. Since I'm confident that I could never remember how many books I read at the end of the year I've added a new box to the weblog as a running list of all the books I read this year. There's a seperate list for audiobooks and I'm not going to include most comics or graphic novels (too short) or computer books (usually don't read the whole thing straight through) or books I just skim through (The Dictionary of Troublesome Words). I'm also going to try to do weblog entries for all of them, as per the 50 Book Challenge. Good luck to me. If you're going to do your own list, please put your URL in the comments so I can check it out. There's no better way to find new books to read than from other readers.

Link courtesy of Bookslut.

107513831558784738

Mon, 26 Jan 2004 10:31:55 +0000

WRITING: [This editorial](http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,1100797,00.html) in The Guardian could really help me with a semi romantic comedy script I'm writing so I don't want to lose the link.

107508877647447224

Sun, 25 Jan 2004 20:46:16 +0000

FUTURE Thanks to one of the free gifts I recieved after becoming a subscriber to Salon.com, I'm again a subscriber to Wired magazine after a few years absence. I stopped subscribing when they were purchased by Conde Nast and became more of a high fashion magazine than a high tech one. Now, they seem to be back to their old form, minus the odd color choices they used to make for page layouts and a few hundred pages. I'm glad they're back in the "future ideas" and gadgets business though, as recently I've found myself sorely in need of a connection to the future.

Albuquerque (and New Mexico in general, really) is not, to put in mildly, a forward looking place. Almost everything about it points to the past. The dominant style of architecture here is based on the millenia old adobe style invented by the local indian tribes. People here don’t even try to do anything new with adobe, they either use it to build houses that any tribe member from 3000 years ago would be at home in or, even worse, they use modern materials to copy the look of the 3000 adobe home. Architecture is, of course, an asthetic choice that each person has to make on their own but here it always strikes me as another symptom of this city’s absorption with the past.

I grew up outside San Diego and even though I was born in Boise, Idaho I will always think of myself as a Californian. Even when I was a kid growing up in what amounts to a small town in Southern California I knew things were happening. People were doing stuff that meant something, things that were going forward. I miss that. In Albuquerque I feel like I’m looking in the window on the future, not really participating in it. No matter how much I read or do I’m still outside looking in. We’re hoping to move back to California next year and I cannot imagine how freeing it will be to my mind and personality to be back where people are concerned with moving forward. Here I can’t help but feel that if I let up on the mental accelerator pedal for even a minute I’ll slip and be living in an adobe looking house reading basically the same stories in the newspaper every week. Being in a place where I could do more than read about the future is immensely important to me.

So I figure that the subscription to Wired is either going to be one of my lifelines to people who are moving the culture forward and I’ll treasure it, or it’s going to kill me. There are two conferences advertised that I would give non-pointy teeth to attend but I have little actual hope of being able to go to. Both the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and Wired’s own NEXTFEST are I’m sure going to be filled with the people and ideas that would get my mind whiring for months afterward. If I were published I could probably tell myself that attending would be great for my work but since I have yet to make money from writing, that would just be an excuse to spend money I dont have on two great vacations. From Albuquerque, a trip to either conference would be a short, expensive plane ride or long, cheap drive away, on top of the fees for attending. So I’m left with once again looking in the window and reading about the conferences as opposed to attending. This is what I meant by killing me. At least if I didn’t know about the conferences I wouldn’t long to go so much.

107488798130653370

Fri, 23 Jan 2004 12:59:41 +0000

COMICS: I've got a bunch of tradepaperbacks and graphic novels up on Ebay at the moment in an effort to both clean house and raise some money to fund my comics publishing goals. I have a bunch of different kinds of stuff up there; from Metabarons to X-Men to Powers to Batman.

Click Here To Check It Out. Thanks!

107471411004429904

Wed, 21 Jan 2004 12:41:50 +0000

BOOKS: My quest to read everything on my To Be Read Shelf had an important milestone yesterday, I actually passed up borrowing a new book I want to read from the Library in favor of reading something from The Shelf. I found the book [The Watch by Dennis Danvers](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0380806452/mattorama) and I actually left it on the shelf and on my Books list on my Visor. I can't remember where I saw the book or what made me put it on the list but it looks interesting. Sort of a time-travel anarchy story.

I also finished The First Five Pages from the library and decided that buying The Dictionary of Concise Writing would be much more effective than trying to read it on loan. I’ll definately have to buy it though, along with another book by the same author, The Dimwit’s Dictionary, because just reading the first part has really opened my eyes to a new way of editing my work. I think it will be very helpful.

107427399735423609

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 10:26:37 +0000

WORDS: The About Last Night weblog has [a great essay by regular columnist Our Girl in Chicago today](http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/archives20040111.shtml#66505) about the creation of Word Wars, a movie about competitve Scrabble and the people who play. She also talks about Spellbound, a movie I really want to see, which is about the kids participating in the National Spelling Bee and also mentions [Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00003CX9Z/mattorama) which is one of my top 5 favorite documentaries of all time, and I've seen **a lot** of documentaries. One of these days I'm going to rent Spellbound and I'm really hoping one of the small theaters in town gets Word Wars. I have serious doubts about the later but hope springs eternal. The new [Madstone](http://www.madstonetheaters.com/) theater here even got [Stone Reader](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00012YIE6/mattorama) (which was great if a little slow in places) which I never would have expected to see in the theaters.

107419411634518764

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 12:15:16 +0000

COMICS: Once again, [Dirk Deppey lays the smack down](http://www.tcj.com/journalista/zarch200401B.html#news4) on the pro-superhero, pro-Direct Market forces in comics. Responding to Stuart Moore's response to Dirk's response to Stuart's column (damn, weblog attributions and explanations are **hard**), Dirk goes after the idea that superhero/_X_ books (superhero/crime, superhero/detective, etc.) are the Way Forward for the Direct Market. Moore tries to make the point that more creators should throw away the idea of making non-superhero comics for the Direct Market and go for superhero/ books (superhero/crime, superhero/mystery, etc.) because nobody will read your non-superhero book.

First, as a writer I have a problem with anybody telling me that I should be writing one type of story or another. If I want to write Terrorism Stories (the example Moore gives in his essay) that’s what I want to write. I don’t want to have to dilute and really, insult, my story by adding The Flash for pete’s sake. If I write Terrorism Stories minus the ridiculous Flash character and the Direct Market won’t buy it (which they wouldn’t) I’ll sell the story somewhere else (which is what’s happening). All adding superheroes to everything in the DM does is further marginalize the DM. People who want to read Terrorism Stories wouldn’t want The Flash and wouldn’t read it if it did have The Flash. Superheroes are, to the world outside the Direct Market, an old-fashioned, ridiculous, and childlike storytelling device in most cases. This doesn’t mean that all superheroes are for kids but it does mean that most adults won’t read them. Does anyone think it’s an accident that Smallville is about Clark Kent and not Superman? The episode of Smallville that shows Superman in his tights and cape is going to either be the last or second-to-last episode, depending on whether it’s a dramatic choice or a ratings one. It’s hard for a lot of people in comics to believe but most people do not want to read about superheroes. The Way Forward for the Direct Market is not superhero/mystery, it’s mystery.

Warren Ellis recently recently sent out a note on his mailing list simply saying that maybe comic book shops are just for superheroes and I think he’s right. Fighting for the Direct Market is pretty pointless since it doesn’t seem to want to be saved. If things keep going forward like they are, you’ll be able to buy your single issue superhero comics are the local comic book shop (if there is one) but the vast majority of comics are going to be sold in bookstores. And most of them are not going to contain any trace of superheroes. Really, in the long term I don’t think it matters what the DM does with superheroes because they’re the only ones who are going to be messing with them. Nobody else cares. Fighting for space on the deck of a sinking ship is not exactly the most productive way to spend your energy from the point of view of the people on the life rafts but apparently nobody’s told most Direct Market proponents that. The only reason to argue about the content of comics sold in comic book shops is sentimental attachment to comic shops. Really, it all comes down to this: The shops that want to get off the boat and into the life rafts will adapt and carry other stuff besides superheroes and the ones that just keep trying to change around the superhero genre won’t and they’ll drown.

107411092422930913

Wed, 14 Jan 2004 13:08:44 +0000

WRITING: Elmore Leonard has always been one of my favorite authors. [Here is an essay he wrote about writing practices](http://www.elmoreleonard.com/index.lasso?template=excerpt&id=86) that I'm mostly putting here so I'll remember where to find it. It also introduces me to a great new word, hooptedoodle.

107410216201516133

Wed, 14 Jan 2004 10:42:42 +0000

BOOKS: [Distraction by Bruce Sterling](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553576399/mattorama) ![](http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0553576399.01._PE20_PI_SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg) I'm not sure I have much to say about this book. I liked it, mostly for Sterling's always imaginative view of the future. In this book, America is basically broken and the characters are trying to feel their way through. It's all very political and feels real. That's the only problem I had with it, I'm not too into imaginary politics. If I want to read about crazy politics, I'll read the news. I really started getting into the book at the end, when the politics part ends and the science-fiction takes over. All in all I liked it but it's a pretty thick book so it'll probably take awhile to sink in completely. I've got a few more Sterling books on the To Be Read Shelf so I'll have more of a comparison once I finish those. I'm really looking forward to Schismatrix Plus which seems like what Sterling was writing when he was in the more cyberpunk mode that I find interesting.

I’m most of the way through The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time which is turning out to be another Life Of Pi, which is to say it’s a book I knew nothing about but is completely blowing me away. The audiobook I listened to before this was Anne Rice’s Blackwood Farm (no link because I don’t want you to buy it) and within 5 minutes of listening to The Curious Incident I knew it was going to be on a whole higher plane of quality than that thing. I’m not even done with it but I will already wholeheartedly recommend it.

I just started The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester which is one of those classic science fiction books I just never got around to reading before. My memory pretty much guarantees that as soon as I go into a bookstore I’ll forget the list of books I wanted to buy so I was glad to find this and Man Plus by Frederick Pohl last time I went to my favorite used store, Page One Too.

I keep looking at my To Be Read Shelf and questioning my sanity at buying that many books and not reading them. There’s 40+ books on that shelf as of right now and I’m making a rare New Year Resolution to read all of them by the close of 2004. I’m not one of those people who just likes having books around, I have to read them eventually. Of course being an incurable book hoarder doesn’t help with my desire to read everything I buy that doesn’t turn out to be total crap. Having them all on shelf will help me seperate ones I bought pre-Resolution and ones I’ll no doubt buy from here on in so that’ll help. Good luck to me.

107379514942346983

Sat, 10 Jan 2004 21:25:49 +0000

LIFE: I'm officially jobless as of today, for the first time in quite awhile. I left my job as System/Network Admin at [Spinn.Net](http://www.spinn.net), an ISP here in Albuquerque. I pretty much built the whole place so it's weird to not be going back there but it's for the best. I was pretty sick of my job there at the end and it had sucked away a lot of my love of computers. Being the only one who was on call 24x7 and had to make sure nothing broke because the business pretty much rested on it is tough. I learned almost everything I know there though so it was a very valuable 5 years.

The really strange thing I’ve experienced is the return of the excitement I used to have with messing around on my Linux boxes. Just since I’ve been preparing to leave I’ve gotten one of my old servers back up and installed Fedora, a new Linux based on RedHat. It’s very nice. I’ve also installed BackupPC, a cool free backup software I found that lets me back up my laptop, windows machines, linux machines, everything. I’m also messing around with the Squid proxy/cache software and I’ve got in mind a cool project to build a turnkey wireless hotspot out of free software (NoCat and Squid are the two big ones I’m planning on messing with). It’s nice to be excited about messing with computers again rather than dreading have to fix anything.

Now I just need to find a job. I was hoping I could find a position doing Perl programming but that’s a pretty limited market, especially in Albuquerque. I’ve got two Perl leads though, one that pays about twice what I was making at SpinnNet, so I hope one of those works out. If not I have enough networking knowledge that I can probably find a job doing that. I never bothered with any certifications so even though I know the stuff, some people are stuck on having the piece of paper, which makes things hard. I’m not opposed to getting a low-level tech job if it comes down to it. I could easily be a computer repair guy at CompUSA if needed so I’m not too worried. It would be nice to just be a guy who punches a clock and has little responsibility. :) In any case I’ve got two more paychecks coming so I’ve got a little time.

107367237065024903

Fri, 09 Jan 2004 11:19:30 +0000

COMICS: Matt Maxwell over at Broken Frontier has [a good column up about caption boxes in comics](http://www.brokenfrontier.com/columns/fullbleed/fullbleed.htm), of all things. Caption boxes are something I've been thinking about also, trying to work out the best way to use them or not in my writing. Warren Ellis has talked about not using captions in his comics. Don't quote me but I believe he has said he did away with captions because he feels they slow the work down, which I can see. The main problem I have with the current trend of getting rid of captions is that you lose a very important aspect of fiction, narrative voice. The voice, attitudes, believablity, etc., of the narrator is a very, very important part of prose fiction and it's something that a lot of comics lack. Most comics just tell the story flat, you don't have a narrator at all. And I don't know that a narrator would help most comics, since the stories are pretty flat to start with. Not to say that it's stories are flat at all but I don't know if having a narrator in say, Queen & Country, would benefit the story any but without one it's hard to judge (of course Greg Rucka is writing a Q&C novel which will almost certainly have a narrator to deal with so we'll see what the difference is). Matt Maxwell is right, a narrator in comics who isn't just explaining the images is hard but I think more writers need to at least look at the benefits.

My favorite examples of the benefits of a narrator are A Clockwork Orange and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Alex, the narrator of A Clockwork Orange makes that book. Without him, it would just be a story about a bad kid who gets caught by the government and reformed. His voice and attitudes about what are going on are what the story a classic. The invention of the ‘nadsat’ or the slang language that Alex and the other teens in the book use is enough to get Anthony Burgess a place on my pantheon of authors. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is maybe a better example of the difference not having a narrator makes because the book has a narrator (Chief Bromden) and the movie doesn’t. They tell essentially the same story but the removal of the Chief as the narrative voice in the movie takes away quite a bit of the power of the book. In the book, the Chief is clearly mentally ill and it colors everything he says. He has paranoid delusions about machines in the walls and of The Combine, a conspiracy of everyone in power that is dedicated to keeping people stupid. The movie takes all of that away and you get the flat story of McMurphy, a born rule-breaker who comes to the hospital and fights with the head nurse. None of the nuance of the book is left because it was all in how the Chief saw McMurphy. In the book he’s a man who has been able to keep away from The Combine and that’s what gives him his power. In the movie he’s just a fighter who doesn’t like authority.

It’s hard to describe really so if you have any interest in this topic at all I would recommend reading the book of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and then watching the movie. Pay attention to how the Chief’s illness provides another important layer on top of the story and how that’s missing in the movie. This is the difference I see between comics with and without a real narrator. Captions are the way you can provide a narrator in comics so I wouldn’t be quick to dismiss them.

107359579608258318

Thu, 08 Jan 2004 14:03:16 +0000

BOOK REVIEW: [Blackwood Farm by Anne Rice](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345443683/mattorama) [![](http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0553714171.01._PE20_PI_SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg)](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553714171/mattorama) I have no shame in admitting that I used to read, and very much enjoy, Anne Rice's books (I also read Tom Clancy books for awhile in my late teen years as long as I'm getting embarrasing reading habits out in the open). Unlike most of her readers, I always liked her Mayfair witch books a lot more than the vampire books. The last Mayfair book ended on a real cliffhanger so for years I waited for her to move away from the vampires, which had gotten horribly repetitive and in dire need of a strong editor to trim the fat (right when she got a huge book contract coincedentally), and finish up the witch story. A few years ago I read that Anne Rice had said she wasn't going to write any more witch books, which pissed me off I have to say. After not paying any attention to her books for a few years I happened to find out that her two newest books are the continuation of both the Mayfair saga and the vampire books. Yay! I said. Then I read [Blackwood Farm](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345443683/mattorama) (or rather, listened to it as an audiobook). Yikes! I said.

If I didn’t have a unread shelf the length of both my arms, I would reread one of the old Rice books I enjoyed so much (I read The Witching Hour in almost one sitting, a feat for such a huge book) to see if it is as bad as this new one and I didn’t know any better. I feel about this book the same way I did when I finally accepted the fact that The Simpsons had gone downhill in quality so severely. Now I see what everybody has always said about Anne Rice’s books. It hurts me to think about how terrible this book was. The characters are annoying, even Lestat. The whole book is basically backstory and I would have skipped half of it if I had been reading the book and not listening to it. And just to rub salt in the wound, the cliffhanger from the last Mayfair witch book is basically blown off and the character shows up to be the lame love interest of the narrator. Bleh. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that this book was really written by a bad Anne Rice fan-fiction writer and she just put her name on it. Every stereotypical item on a Bad Anne Rice-style Slash Fiction checklist is here, even a hermaphrodite vampire and gay sex with a ghost (which I just realized turns out to be incest as well) for god’s sake.

Anne Rice fans have probably already read this book so there’s no helping them but if you haven’t decided about it, please run away from this book. If you want to read some good Anne Rice books, read the Mayfair books and even some of the vampire books (I don’t remember the titles but the ones from the third one to Memnoch the Devil were great). Then after you’ve read those, stop. Don’t even look at any of the “vampire biography” books from the past few years. What makes me the most angry about how damn lame this book was is that the sequel is supposed to wrap up everything for both the vampires and the witches. I can’t stand that my literary completist nature means that I’ll probably read the sequel just to get the end of the story and I’ll probably be suffering every minute of the way.

107358551294265234

Thu, 08 Jan 2004 11:11:52 +0000

PRANKS: I love a good prank. I'm not talking about the mean-spirited crap that passes for pranks on TV shows like the new Candid Camera or Scare Tactics, I mean things like [this](http://www.theolympian.com/home/news/20040107/southsound/8191.shtml). This guy's friends wrapped everything in his apartment with aluminum foil while he was away. I mean everything. His books, CD, spare change, even the toilet paper was wrapped in foil and rolled back up. This is awe-inspiring in its creativity and sheer detail. His foil-wrapped appliances still work and they left "Penn & Teller's Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends" as the sole unwrapped book, for pete's sake.

107344732772682756

Tue, 06 Jan 2004 20:48:47 +0000

SPACE: As you should know, the Mars lander Spirit is now on Mars and [sending back pictures](http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/targetFamily/Mars). Nova had a great show a few days ago about building the landers that I really liked. It was a great look at all the work and science that goes into a huge endeavor like this.

One thing the show pointed out to me, unintentionally, was the problem with the NASA/government science way of building projects like this. The engineers from the JPL were very proud of the fact that they built every single part of the landers themselves. To me, this is a colossal waste of money and engineering. If you build everything yourself, you have to test everything yourself and then test everything in conjunction with everything else. Buying parts from people who already know how to build motors or parachutes means that they can use their expertise in that area to get you a product that works. And they’ll do it for a lot less money probably. Of course that deprives you of the right to say you did everything yourself, which for a lot of scientists is not something they are willing to give up.

As big of a fan of this project as I am, I wish they were doing things quite a bit differently. Instead of building 2 very expensive, very overbuilt robots I would love to see NASA go for the “Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control” plan espoused by MIT robotics wizard (and Roomba vacuum inventor) Rod Brooks. Brooks’s idea was instead of building 2 irreplaceable $5 million robots (for example), you build 100 $100,000 robots. Then you can use a less over-engineered landing strategy and spread those guys over the surface of the planet. Even if you lose 25 or even 50% of the robots, you’ve still got 50+ robots roaming around. Even if each one is only 1/10th as powerful in terms of science ability, you have many times more overall scientific capacity, and its spread out over a greater area. Since we’re just at the beginnings of scientific exploration on Mars, it makes more sense to do a shotgun approach to exploration than the laser-like focus of the current system. When we have initial data and we’ve used cheap robots to find better landing strategies, we can send the super-powerful robots and really get into the hardcore science.

Even off-the-shelf robotic components are very powerful and although they might not be engineered to JPL specs, I would venture to say you could build a far more than adequate robot with pre-made industrial components. Switching from the usual monolithic top-down system of the current NASA to a more distributed approach would be a pretty big paradigm shift so I’m not holding my breath. It’s something to think about though. If you happen to know any NASA bigwigs, pass along the idea. :)

107307560443434191

Fri, 02 Jan 2004 13:33:24 +0000

COMICS: I have to be what seems like the one and only comics weblogger to stand up for David Mack's recent run on Daredevil (#51-55). Brian Bendis has been doing some work on that book recently that matches up to everything I've read of the character from the Holy Revered Godfather of Daredevil, Frank Miller. The end of Bendis's most recent arc had Daredevil soundly defeating the Kingpin, tearing off his mask, and announcing himself as the new Kingpin of Hell's Kitchen. That's a natural stopping point and if Bendis had just continued with the next issue it would have much less emotional impact. The preview Marvel released for the start of Bendis's run shows that the book has skipped forward a year and Matt Murdock is firmly entrenched as the new Kingpin, albeit without the crime part of that title. Giving us a break from the Matt Murdock/Kingpin story and doing this pretty unrelated story in the mean time is a great editorial decision. Mack's story focuses on the personal journey of a character called Echo that I'd never heard of (not having read any Daredevil before Bendis and Maleev took over) and uses a very different art style. The journey she takes is very believable and beyond a Wolverine that seems a tad tacked-on (but still mostly works in context of both character's backgrounds) I very much enjoyed getting to know this character on a deeper level.

Beyond people not understanding the need for a break in the main story between what are essentially two very different chapters, Mack’s art seems to be the main sticking point. What people miss, I think, is that the story essentially takes place entirely in Echo’s head. Mack uses a very odd panel placement and fills the page with dreamlike images of sign language, small dialogue asides, and images seemingly drawn by Echo as a child. It’s undeniably beautiful painted work but the seeming randomness of the images is throwing people for a loop. I don’t know if people are just more used to normal, grid style comic art than I am or what but this fit the story perfectly in my mind. Since it takes place in her head, standard art would be very out of place (as it is with most comic book stories that take place internally to a character instead of externally). It’s a big risk for Bendis to hand over “his” title to this different of a story and for Marvel to allow this story into one of it’s most popular titles and I applaud them for it.

I think once people see the Mack story in context of the main Murdock/Kingpin story it will make more sense but for me, it’s perfect. Sometimes you need the calm to appreciate the ferocity of the storm.

107307286494370549

Fri, 02 Jan 2004 12:47:44 +0000

WORDS: A group of linguists at Lake Superior State University has released it's list of so-called banished words for 2004\. [The press release](http://www.salon.com/books/wire/2003/12/31/banned_words/index.html) has the story but no link to the list for some reason. Thanks to Google I found it though: [http://www.lssu.edu/banished](http://www.lssu.edu/banished). While I have problems with their inclusion of some words/phrases, I hope people follow this list and get rid of at least _metrosexual_ and _bling-bling_, two of the dumbest and most overused words of 2003\. Beyond the general problems I have with the word metrosexual, which perports to describe men who like shopping for shoes, wearing makeup, and overdoing their grooming with another word besides _effeminate_, meaningless media words should not enter the general vocabulary of the populace. The only two places where I can see this word applying are LA and New York (not surprisingly, the two big media towns). Unless you live in one of those cities I would venture to say you do not know any metrosexuals. Don't even get me started on _bling-bling_.

The ones I don’t agree with are LOL, smoking gun, and shots rang out except in terms of overuse and in the case of LOL, use anywhere but in email and instant messaging. In electronic written communication, LOL is a very valuable way of showing important body language that you can’t show in the written word. Smoking gun and shots rang out may be cliches, but they did not originate in Iraq as the list seems to say. And shots do ring if you’re using the definition of ring that says ** To give forth a clear resonant sound** or To be filled with sound so they’re wrong on those. Maybe if I watched the news I’d understand the over-use of these phrases but they’re useful so I won’t be getting rid of them.

All in all, I’m glad to see people at least giving thought to the words they use. I was given the Dictionary of Troublesome Words for Christmas and even just skimming through it I’ve gotten a lot more aware of the completely incorrect ways people tend to use a lot of words and phrases. Words are important but people tend to look upon those who try to speak correctly as fussy or picky and dismiss them. Oh well, I say. Words have meanings and our tendency to misuse them and pass it off as unimportant bugs me to no end.

107289926447874225

Wed, 31 Dec 2003 12:34:24 +0000

YEAREND: Well, well, it's the last day of the year. The new year is pretty much the biggest sign of change most people have in their lives. Having a waypoint that allows you to see definatively that times are changing and your days are going by is very useful. Most people use January 1 to make "resolutions" that are a joke even as they make them. I can't say that I've not made resolutions that I've forgotten weeks later but I usually don't even make them. I do use the opportunity to look ahead though and see what I want to do the coming year. This year is going to be rather more eventful than most so I have a lot to look forward to.

I have way too horrible of a memory to do any kind of comprehensive Best Of list. I’d be adding stuff I forgot to it for weeks. If you’re really interested, I’ve been putting most things I liked on this weblog so skim through the archives. One of my goals for next year is to work on my memory so hopefully by a year from now I’ll be a more proper weblogger and have my list together.

Here’s hoping for a new year ful of change and surprise for everyone.

107281295402548508

Tue, 30 Dec 2003 12:35:54 +0000

BOOK REVIEW: [Singularity Sky by Charles Stross](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0441010725/mattorama) [![](http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0441010725.01._PE20_PI_SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg)](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0441010725/mattorama) Bottom line: This is the kind of science fiction I want to write, which is pretty much my highest compliment. I used to read tons of science fiction, nothing but for long stretches. Then I grew up and realized that most science fiction sucked. I look back on the time spent reading anything by Piers Anthony and know I'm going to be wishing I had those hours back when I'm older. Writers like Charlie Stross are the reason I know most SF sucks, he just does it so well. He fills this somewhat slim book with more ideas than any 10 other books from the section his work inhabits at the bookstore. The main idea of the story, semi-sentient information gathering alien system called the Festival comes to a backward farming planet and begins granting wishes in the form of advanced technology in exchange for stories and information, is only the seedbed for the larger exploration of the societally backward planetary system and what happens when the revolution you hoped to lead finally comes and it doesn't need you.

As a lifelong reader of science fiction and as a futuristic thinker myself, I hate that most SF is just as backward-looking as Fantasy. Part of the problem with recent SF work is that we’ve come to a point in science where a lot of what made science fiction new has been done and what’s coming is almost impossible to imagine, which I’ll get to in a second. Space exploration can still be exciting but most new space stuff has been infected with the Star Trek Syndrome, as I call it, where everyone is boring and has no flaws, and the status quo rules. People just don’t look to space exploration as exciting in real life so that translates to the SF work that people do. Real life science is changing so fast that it leaves even science fiction people in the dust. The result is the rise of ‘Fantasy with robots and aliens’ and ‘Space Opera’, two facets of SF that seem to be dominating the landscape. Even Neal Stephenson, who was at the forefront of real technological future SF with The Diamond Age and Snow Crash has gone backward with Quicksilver and to a lesser extent Cryptonomicon.

The issue is The Singularity. This is Vernor Vinge’s idea that technological progress proceeds at an exponential rate until there is a complete break with what came before. The End Of History, as people call it. This comes with the creation of a human-level AI that quickly proceeds past human-level, the invention of Upload technology that will allow us to live in computer systems and artifical bodies, something of that nature that we can’t imagine. The problem with writing futuristic work in the time before a Singularity is that you can’t see beyond it. Everything is different, so much so that all we can hope for is the fire up our imaginations to the point where we can begin to think in new ways. One of the main goals of science fiction as I see it is to prepare us for the future. You can’t hope to cope with the future if you’ve never been innoculated with new ideas. Singularity Sky is one of the first post-Singularity novels I’ve read that takes the idea seriously and examines it, allowing us to open our minds to the vast possibilities. Stross doesn’t shy away from it like so many others. He uses the Festival’s coming to show the speed of the change that comes with a technological Singularity and what happens to people in the aftermath. He also shows a culture trying desperately to hang on to old ways and the futility of doing that in the face of such rapid change.

There are problems with the book, mostly in terms of character development, but the rush of ideas glossed over that for me. This is only Mr. Stross’s second book, I believe, the first being a collection of short stories called Toast: And Other Rusted Futures, that is high on my Must Read list. Charles Stross is a name that you will hopefully hear a lot more from in the coming years. His imagination is up there with the best and brightest and with his work as an accelerant my mind can’t help but burn with new ideas. I hope more science fiction writers see this book and decide to move forward to meet him.

107280283376946990

Tue, 30 Dec 2003 09:47:13 +0000

BOOKS: When I read the headline of [this story](http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/a/2003/12/30/national0837EST0495.DTL), I thought immediately of myself in 50 years.

107273102985339308

Mon, 29 Dec 2003 13:50:29 +0000

LIFE: Just got back from the longest vacation I've ever taken, a week in Flaggstaff, AZ with my family for Christmas. A grand time was had by all and beyond the train home being 6 hours late picking us up due to a mud-slide in California, completely drama and complication free. If you're going to be in Flaggstaff, I wholeheartedly recommend staying at the Little America Inn. It's a great place on a huge forest plot and doesn't cost any more than your standard Motel 6 or whatnot. Also, used bookstore lovers should definately stop at Bookman's, one of the best used book stores I've ever been in. I picked up 5 new books there (including Foucoult's Pendulum for my aunt who just got done reading The Da Vinci Code for her book club). As a result of that shopping spree and a lot of extra reading time, I'll have a couple of new book reviews coming soon (the awe-inspiring _Singularity Sky_ by Charlie Stross, _Bird by Bird_ by Anne Lamont, and maybe _Gun, With Occasional Music_ by Jonathon Lethem if I finish it by tommorow).

107187887414643893

Fri, 19 Dec 2003 17:07:54 +0000

STUPIDITY: [![](http://asmallvictory.net/archives/petafur1-thumb.jpg)](http://asmallvictory.net/archives/005548.html) This is apparently a new comic put out by the lovely folks at PETA to protest wearing fur. They're giving it to kids as they walk by with parents who are wearing fur coats. Now, I don't think violence solves very much but if somebody handed this bullshit to my daughter the best they could hope for was that I would only take the rest of the comics and throw them in the trash. It's one thing to bother adults with your concerns about animals but giving this to kids is reprehensible. If the PETA leadership had any balls they would disavow this type of extremist activity, unless they support it in which case they need to be public about it. This is not an isolated incident and this type of activity is only making people think the group is irrational and ignorable, like all extremists and wackos. Abusing kids like this only hurts your cause. The only way people are going to listen and think about what you've said is if you're rational about it.

Once again, if you don’t like something, don’t do it. Take responsibility for yourself and let others do the same. Discuss your differences, don’t resort to ugly guerilla tactics. I think fur coats are gaudy and pretentious but I’m not going to do anything but snicker at people wearing them because it’s their right. They aren’t hurting me and unless the mink or the rabbit went on the endangered species list recently, they aren’t hurting the planet either. The choice to wear a coat made from an animal is yours and yours alone. The instant you throw paint on someone’s coat or hand a kid one of these booklets is the instant you give up your right to not have people fuck with you for no reason. From that point on if the world were fair people would be able to key your car if they disagreed with the paint color, egg your house if they think it’s ugly, etc.

Thanks to the artblog for pointing this one out (no permalinks).

107187628926696685

Fri, 19 Dec 2003 16:24:49 +0000

COMICS: God Bless Graeme at the [Fanboy Rampage](http://fanboyrampage.blogspot.com/) weblog for going through the worst depths of internet comics fandom to find message board threads such as [these](http://fanboyrampage.blogspot.com/2003_12_01_fanboyrampage_archive.html#107184306392875945) [recent](http://fanboyrampage.blogspot.com/2003_12_01_fanboyrampage_archive.html#107159619742552350) [ones](http://fanboyrampage.blogspot.com/2003_12_01_fanboyrampage_archive.html#107184891075846149): > I just finished rereading The Dark Phoenix Saga and noticed these inconsistencies.4 continuity errors in the 20 year old X-Men storyline snipped out for sanity's sake. > "I agree 100% with what [[Rob Liefeld] said about [Alan] Moore](http://www.millarworld.biz/index.php?showtopic=8739&view=findpost&p=409462). Moore is one of the biggest rip off artist in the industry. What started with Watchmen continued on with Supreme and ABC and I doubt it will ever stop. > > "Moore should try coming up with really original characters intead of ones based on what other people have done."hahahahahahahaha. Spoken as someone whose only foray out of the safe confines of his room in his mom's house has been to the Marvel/DC shelves at the comic shop. > 1) Cut half the X-comics. 2) Eliminate Ultimate titles. 3) Mandatory Marvel Method for core books. And that's just the first day." > > "Eliminate the Ultimate line? Are you nuts? That's a moneymaker." > > "If the burden of continuity has become too great, ignore continuity! But REWRITING everything flies in the face of common sense: the only reason Spiderman still exists to be screwed with is that HE WORKS THE WAY HE IS--well enough to last 40 years. If you need to 're-imagine' something, re-imagine something that never made a blip. Re-imagine Codename Spitfire."Marvel Method? Cut the best-selling Ultimate books? Spiderman works the way he is? Man, oh man. Although these ideas came from a thread about how you would run Marvel Comics so the original poster was just asking for trouble. There's another thread on Micah's forum about how you would run DC if you swing that way.

107177020019079814

Thu, 18 Dec 2003 10:56:40 +0000

LIFE: The American Family Association is currently [running a poll on whether people support legalization of gay marriage](http://www.afa.net/petitions/marriagepoll.asp). Since the AFA is an extreme religious group, I don't doubt they will have plenty of people click on 'I oppose gay marriage'. If you do support the rights of people to marry whoever they damn well please and want to keep groups like the AFA out of your love life, please go to the site and vote. They say they're going to present the results to Congress. Color me cynical but I doubt the results will go anywhere but the shredder if they don't agree with the group's agenda.

107176793124549865

Thu, 18 Dec 2003 10:18:51 +0000

BOOKS: Note to Dan Brown fans: If you've read [The Da Vinci Code](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385504209/mattorama) and are dying to tell somebody how great it is, please read [Foucault's Pendulum](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345368754/mattorama) first. If you still think [Da Vinci Code](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385504209/mattorama) is a great book, please do tell your friends. But please, experience [Foucault's Pendulum](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345368754/mattorama) first. When I read [The Da Vinci Code](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385504209/mattorama) I had no idea it was some sort of phenomenon and am now flabergasted by the fact that it's on every best seller list. I heard 2 different people talking about it in Borders the other day as if it were the greatest thing ever. If you haven't read it, do as Chuck D commands and _Don't believe the hype_. Read [Foucault's Pendulum](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345368754/mattorama) instead, you'll be glad you did.

107169241041674938

Wed, 17 Dec 2003 13:20:10 +0000

COMICS: I'll never understand people's facination with redoing old stuff rather than coming up with new things. [Darwyn Cooke has a huge new work coming out called The New Frontier](http://newsarama.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7312) which recounts the 50s era of superheroes in the DC universe. I have no idea if this book will be good or not. I'm sure old school DC fans (which, let's face it, is most DC fans looking at the books they publish in their main line) will love it. It's 384 pages so it has enough girth to impress just about anybody and I'm sure will end up on many Best Of lists for 2004\. The problem is, why? Besides the money, which I'm sure will be very good, what posseses someone with the obvious talents of Mr. Cooke to spend 384 pages telling basically the same story that has been told literally hundreds of times before? I know he has a new "spin" on it, otherwise they probably wouldn't let him have this many pages to work with. A new spin though, is really just a new paint color on a old car. Or, to steal a less charitable phrase, putting makeup on a corpse. Besides oddities like the shot-for-shot remake of Psycho from a few years ago (which completely failed at the box office if I remember correctly), no one in Hollywood is looking at doing the 18th remake of Casablanca. Nobody is writing about how good Avery Brooks's performance as Fred Sanford is the best they've seen in years. A hell of a lot more people grew up watching Lucille Ball than gre up reading Green Lantern and nobody wants to see a new version of I Love Lucy with Lucy 'updated to modern times'. I understand that US comic book readers are by and large nostalgia fetishists; with nothing but basically the same characters to read for the last 40 years it's hardly suprising that the majority of readers left are the ones who grew up on those characters. What I don't understand is why creative people (leaving aside the money issue) would want to spend their time and creativity putting the shock paddles to old concepts in hopes of putting their own "spin" on it. If Darwyn Cooke had gone to DC and said he had a new, original project he wanted to do with the same page count and set in the same time period with his own characters, would they have said no? I don't know the answer to that, obviously, but I doubt they would have unless his original concept was too terrible.

Are creators locked into the rehashing of old concepts because of the publishers or readers? I don’t think it’s the readers (outside of the few hundred thousand existing stuck-in-neutral superhero readers, that is) because readers are embracing crazed original ideas in the form of manga like no tommorow. Are the publishers the ones who are fixated on retelling old stories? They have to keep their copyrights alive, that’s a given. But that’s accomplished with the monthly books. Does DC really think they need to put out new versions of Superman’s origin story over and over again or is the creators wanting to “spin” it?

I know DC at least has a handle on original material, most of the Big Two books I read are original concepts and most of them are coming from DC. Marvel is a lost cause as far as original concepts are concerned. They’re too deeply intrenched in the ‘revamp and sell to Hollywood’ business model to delve too deeply into new concepts (once you have people creating for you instead of rehashing, they’re going to want to get paid for those concepts and Marvel doesn’t want to share licencing revenue - witness the brick-by-brick destruction of Epic).

It’s an interesting question, to me anyway as this little discussion with myself will testify. As a writer who would like to write comics and has no interesting in moving from corporate concept to corporate concept the way so many other creators seem happy to do, I’m always looking at this idea. In addition to having a hard time believing that genuinely creative people are happy working as cogs in a never-ending corporate machine to the exclusion of their own original ideas, I’m trying to get a handle on where the blockage is exactly so I can incorporate that into my career plans. I firmly believe the future of comics is with a mainstream audience in bookstores and that’s where I’m focused right now. The problem with that from a career perspective is the lack of money involved outside the DC/Marvel hegemony. I’ll probably be self-publishing at least one book in 2004 and I hope to work with so-called independent publishers like Oni but as far as I’ve seen, those venues do not a career make and I don’t want writing to be sidework for my ‘real’ job that pays my bills. My dream setup would be a Warren Ellis style deal at DC where (until recently) he was signed exclusively with them to create original works. Not only because the money would be nice but I respect DC’s track record on original concepts. They’ve got the core nostalgia line of books like Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, etc., but they’ve also got Vertigo and Wildstorm putting out really good (mostly) original concepts, even if some of them are dressed up as old books like Wildcats 3.0 and The Losers. Since I have yet to be published, however, I doubt any DC editors will be giving me any chances much less contracts. Anybody at DC who want to see samples of my work are free to email me though. :) You’ll be seeing my name in print soon in any case.

Not sure if this makes much sense. My sympathies if you’ve read through this whole thing and you’re not me. I’m sure I’ll be posting more on this topic though as I work through my feelings on the matter though so be aware.

My thanks to Peter Siegel for the Sanford & Son analogy.

107160538704038282

Tue, 16 Dec 2003 13:09:47 +0000

BOOKS: [The New York Times has an article here](http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/16/science/16KIDS.html) about science books for children ([click](http://www.majcher.com/nytview.html) if you're alergic to free registrations). Speaking as a geek with a daughter, this is a great trend. Nothing will kill the love of learning like Science Class in elementary school unless you have a teacher who loves science. Most science classes for young kids are taught by the math teacher or the teacher who knew who Darwin was and as a result of this and the coma-inducing writing of most elementary science books the only thing kids learn in these classes is that science sucks and only extras from The Revenge of the Nerds know anything about the world. Of course parents who grew up knowing nothing about science and our strange cultural thing of disdaining intelligence doesn't help. Kids need to understand that intelligence is not a handicap and science is not a subject in school, it's the world around them. Everything in their lives is science. Asking questions about things is science.

A lot of people are under the impression that kids are too stupid to understand science. This is just wrong. One of my coworkers has two boys no older than 12 and after only 15 minutes of explaining it to them, they probably understood more about brain function than their parents. And my coworker just couldn’t get the fact that I wasn’t wasting my time explaining why our brains have wrinkles, how memories are formed, etc. As long as you use words they can understand and don’t start out with the assumption that they won’t understand, kids have an amazing capacity to understand even advanced concepts. So-called ‘pop science’ books have become very popular in recent years with scientists writing books such as The Elegant Universe that explain very advanced concepts such as string theory to lay adults. Applying the ‘pop science’ idea to kids books is something we should all get behind.

David Macaulay, one of the authors mentioned in the article, was probably one of the most influential authors of my childhood. His books Cathedral and Castle (which I borrowed from my 6th grade teacher and accidently never returned, oops) were amazing to me even in 6th grade. The illustrations and explinations of the construction and design of these two huge structures I’m sure contributed heavily to my love and appreciation of architecture. The Way Things Work is another great book by Macaulay (who should be given an award for his contribution to society as far as I’m concerned) that uses humor and art to explain the world.

Anything parents and teachers can do to keep the love of learning alive in their children should be helped and applauded. Kids ask a million questions about the world for a reason, they’re curious. Instead of telling them to shut up and stop bothering people they should be rewarded for their behavior. If they ask a question you don’t know the answer to, great! Use the opportunity to find out together. This being the gift giving season, kids are going to get a hundred pointless toys they’ll use and probably toss in the closet. Instead of bowing to commercial pressures and buying the latest retarded Bratz doll for a kid, buy them a good illustrated science book and read it with them. Everyone can use a little learning.

107153602640807835

Mon, 15 Dec 2003 17:53:46 +0000

COMICS: John Jakala's "[Manga Stack of Intimidation](http://grotesqueanatomy.blogspot.com/2003_10_01_grotesqueanatomy_archive.html#106757055760182000)" has become one of the big reasons people are using when they want to try to explain why manga are kicking western comics' asses in sales. I always thought that comparison was a bit off and now someone else has done the work I'm too lazy to do. The [Keromaru](http://keromaru.blogspot.com/) weblog has posted a new [series of Intimidation Stacks](http://keromaru.blogspot.com/2003_12_01_keromaru_archive.html#107040060406921116) that are a bit more fair (not fair as in "Don't pick on my comics you mean manga fan!" Fair as in comparing apples to apples). The problem with comparing Shonen Jump to monthly western comics is that Shonen Jump is reprinted material, as far as I know, as is most manga we see in the US. The cost to create a brand-new monthly comic is much higher than the cost to have someone re-dialogue an already produced book that has already made its production costs back many times over. Manga is sold in Japan to a culture that devours the books by the millions and the manga companies reap the benefits of that cultural acceptance. If X-Men sold millions of copies I would imagine it would be easier to lower the price on the trade paperbacks to be more in line with manga. Economies of scale create wonderful benefits for companies in every industry, comics included.

There’s a lot to be said for manga versus the western comics industry, which unfortunately is really the superhero comics industry (one of the things that favors manga, not incidentally) but just comparing the sizes of the books doesn’t really address the issues any more than comparing the sizes of apple to oranges. The sizes of the two fruits are not where the difference lies.

107116857314696643

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 11:49:33 +0000

COMICS: I'm not going to wade into the 'My superhero comic cover can beat up your superhero comic cover' argument making it's way around various comics weblogs since I think arguing about art is just about the most pointless thing someone can do with their life. There's absolutely no way to even pretend to have any objective arguments about it so it all comes down to 'I like what I like.' Rational adults should be able to leave it at that.

With that said, I do want to point out some really nice comic book covers I like, because there are so few of them. Most straight superhero comic covers are so bland as to make no impression on me, just like most science fiction book covers. Here are a couple of books whose covers I really like.

These are two covers to Grant Morrison’s The Filth that I really like. The minimalistic sort of industrial look to some of the images really stands out amongst a sea of muscles and capes. If the series is ever collected I really hope they at least reprint the covers in the book. A note on how they came up with this look would make my day as well.

Wildcats 3.0 is one of my favorite books of 2003 and definately has the most imaginative covers of any superhero book (even though it’s more of a corporate intrigue book the superhero parts of it are so ingrained as to make it silly not to call it at least nominally a superhero title). The ‘Build Your Own Grifter’ cover is one of my favorites of all time.

The Losers is another great book of 2003 and this cover has stuck in my mind since I first saw a preview image of it. For a guy with one name, Jock sure can draw. :)

What I like about the covers to Fables is that they always reflect what’s going on in the book but only until you read it. This looks like random images until you read the issue and see how it fits together.

Dave Johnson is one of the kings of covers, as far as I’m concerned. His work on 100 Bullets has been some of my favorite stuff in recent memory. I would love one of those big posters of all the 100B covers.

This is by no means a complete list, I have too horrible of a memory for that. What I do notice putting together this list is how it’s all DC books. I’ll have to look over the recent Daredevil covers and post the couple of those I’ve liked. For the most visible part of a comic before someone buys it, Marvel sure doesn’t put a lot of effort or thought into its book’s covers.

107099766062382770

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 12:21:00 +0000

BOOK REVIEW: [The Da Vinci Code](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385504209/mattorama) I just finished listening to the audiobook of this and my opinions on it haven't changed much since I started it. I can tell why this book is popular, it hits a lot of notes that people like to read about; conspiracies, the Church, the Holy Grail, puzzles, riddles, ancient societies, etc. I had a couple of problems with it though.

The first is that the writing and dialogue are not subtle, ever. The first time the two main characters meet I just kept waiting for them to just start kissing passionately, even though they’re at a murder scene. Even though you might not know exactly how you’re going to get there, the end result of the book is pretty much in sight the whole time. My other main problem is that the puzzles and riddles are way too clever. And not clever in the ‘You fooled me, clever author‘ sense, clever in the ‘I can’t believe what a clever author I am‘ sense. Everything in the book fits together; the characters all have weird connections to each other. The characters have connections to things that help them solve the puzzles. The bad guys have connections to each other and to the object everyone is chasing. It’s like a house of cards, if one of the characters hadn’t done exactly what they did or said exactly what they said, the whole thing would have fallen apart. The “reveal” of the identity of the main bad guy is where I lost it. When you reveal a secret identity as someone who’s already in the story the reader should go ‘Oh, that makes sense.’ In this one, not only did I think it immediately didn’t make sense, the author spent the next 5 minutes having the character tell me why it really does makes sense. I should be able to do that on my own, thanks. If you’re interested in this type of book, I would recommend reading Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. It covers a lot of the same conspiracy, ancient order, Knights Templar ground but is like comparing a planet to an apple in comparison to this book.

I also had an issue with the voices used. The book takes place in Paris and London so there are a lot of different accents. The voice actor doing the book is very good with accents but it’s a little bit too much. At the end the characters go to Scotland; as soon as I heard the actor describe a character as having a ‘thick brogue’ I thought ‘Oh no’ and I was then assaulted with that character’s accent. A little bit of accent goes a very long way with an audiobook.

If anyone’s been paying attention to the Books sidebar you’ll notice that I’ve replaced Quicksilver with The Complete Book of Scriptwriting by J. Michael Straczynski with no Review for Quicksilver. The reason for that is that I had to put aside Quicksilver without finishing it, which I hate to do. The book is just too damn slow. It’s been awhile since I read Cryptonomicon (for which Quicksilver is the first of a prequel trilogy) and even though it’s a thick book I don’t remember it being slow. The first part of Quicksilver is the part I thought I would like better since it’s about Isaac Newton and a bunch of other scientists during the beginnings of real science in England. Unfortunately it was just so slow and mannered with very little happening that I couldn’t wait for the chapters set years later on a ship bound for England from America. I like books that hit me with ideas, good writing or dialogue to study, or just make me think. Unfortunately Stephenson has adopted such a labored prose style for this book that I have a hard time getting into it. An Instance of the Fingerpost is a good comparison to Quicksilver in time period (and not much else) but it doesn’t get bogged down and ponderous. If I could just sit and read that book to the exclusion of everything else, I might think differently about it but I can’t do that. When I read a book I’m also probably reading at least one magazine, my weekly comic books, and a ton of stuff on the web in between so if nothing happens in 3 or 4 sessions of reading my main book I lose interest in it quick. When I’ve read a couple of other faster things and get back into Quicksilver I’ll try making it my only reading for awhile and see if I can get more into it. I’ll have a full report when I finish it.

107091030260864325

Mon, 08 Dec 2003 12:05:02 +0000

TECH: Since my desired method of teaching rude people about the manners of cell phone usage, punching them in the face, is unlikely to catch on with the public, I'm glad to see the rise of [cell-phone jammers](http://slate.msn.com/id/2092059/). To paraphrase Homer Simpson, "Technology; the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems." I don't think that putting jammers everywhere is a real solution because someone will just come out with a jammer-jammer and we'll be into one of the things technology does best, an arms race. What I do think jammers will do is spark a debate on cell-phone usage. Once their usage trickles down to the local news and the public starts hearing more about these devices it will give people a real reason to talk about cell manners, it won't just be whining. Of course I'm sure a lot of people will just want them banned and we'll be back to being forced to punch people in the face but I do think a dialogue will help. If nothing else, it will give manufacturers a financial reason to think of a technological solution to the problem.

The solution I thought of is to require all cell manufacturers to have a Silent Mode for their phone which is activated by a signal given off by a device that movie theaters, restaurants, etc., can buy. That way a theater can have a sign up that tells people their phones will be in Silent Mode while inside. If someone has an old phone then the theater reserves the right to refuse service and kick them out if their phone rings or if they answer it inside the theater. I forget exactly what the turnover rate for new phones is in the US but I think it’s pretty high. It wouldn’t take very long for this feature to become a standard, especially if it becomes the alternative to the signal being jammed altogether.

Link courtesy of Gizmodo.

107066454630260643

Fri, 05 Dec 2003 15:49:06 +0000

ART: [The Cleveland Scene has a great article](http://www.clevescene.com/issues/2003-11-26/feature.html/1/index.html) on the whereabouts of Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin & Hobbes. It's a wide ranging article; covering Watterson's dislike of merchandising, the end of Calvin & Hobbes, what Watterson is doing now, and the author's (halfhearted) attempt to find the man himself.

I was just a dumb kid when the Golden Age of comic strips was happening (as referred to in this article anyway) so I never got into Doonesbury or Outland in any real way. I remember laughing at Bill The Cat but that’s about it. What I do remember though, is Far Side and Calvin & Hobbes. Those two strips were really my first experience in having an emotional connection to a work of art. Even though as a kid I didn’t understand every Far Side, I could easily laugh at the gag strips (“Luposlipophobia” is still one of my favorites). I always laughed and felt a deep connection to Calvin though. I don’t know if a huge Complete Far Side style collection is feasible with Calvin & Hobbes but I would pay huge sums to get that sort of definitive set.

One of the discussions I’m always interested in with Calvin & Hobbes is about Bill Watterson’s refusal to merchandise his characters. People really don’t understand why someone would refuse to sell their creations. Everyone points to Jim Davis for an example of someone who gets 18-wheelers of cash delivered to his house monthly because he’s sold Garfield to everyone who wanted to put the fat cat on a piece of merchandise. The problem with that is Garfield, even if the strip somehow came up with something original to say, couldn’t say it for fear of “the franchise.” If Jim Davis wanted to stop putting out Garfield today (and since he doesn’t even draw the strip that would be a dumb decision in anything but artistic terms) he would probably be buried in lawsuits by Monday. He’s making a lot of money off that character but a lot of other people are also making money off of it so in a lot of ways he’s a slave to them. Bill Watterson had as much control over his strip and his characters as anyone in comics and never ceded any of it to make a buck. He got to make the strip he wanted to make. I would love to have a Hobbes plush toy for my daughter but at the same time I have the utmost respect for someone who decided to say no to our consumerist culture and decided not to sell his creations. At a time when brands are worshipped as if they mean something and idiots worldwide are naming their kids Adidas, Porsche, and Courvoisier, passing up what would have been an enormous fortune for principals is something to be very much admired. I probably won’t ever get the chance to meet Bill Watterson, and as a private person I understand his wish to remain hidden, but I would like to just for the chance to shake his hand and thank him very much.

Link courtesy of Bookslut.

107049028936413327

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 15:24:49 +0000

BOOKS: [This article](http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/149979_huck26.html) is yet another instance of somebody trying to get Huckleberry Finn banned from a school. I guess it's too much to hope that people figure out that when you disagree with a book, that does not mean that you should try to keep everyone else from reading it. How about teaching your kids not to be afraid of words, rather than lashing out at any book containing words you don't like. Yes, certain words are offensive to some people, deal with it. The answer is more education, not less. Do these people think that by banning a book containing words they don't like that those words will go away? All it means is that people won't have the tools needed to deal with those words. Rather than banning Huck Finn because the characters are correct to the setting of the book and use words we find offensive, teachers should be using that as part of the lesson. It's part of history. Mark Twain didn't invent hick characters calling black people calling niggers, it's a part of our history, as shameful as it may be, and it shouldn't be ignored any more than we should stop teaching about the Holocaust because it was a supremely painful event in our history as a race. Ignoring history is the best way to do the things we didn't like the first time over again.

Education is the only way to eradicate racism, the only way. People who find Huck Finn offensive should be the first ones trying to get an effective lesson plan in place to help teachers deal with the offensive parts of the book. This mother should have asked the teacher to let her come into the classroom and talk to the kids about why she found the language offensive and why they shouldn’t use those words. She went to the trouble of meeting with everyone in the school district to try and get her will imposed on all the other students in the school. She could have funneled 1/10th that amount of energy into educating her daughter and her class and been a lot more beneficial to everyone involved.

One of my favorite quotes on the dangers of banning things you find offensive is from Lenny Bruce: “If you take away the ablity of people to say ‘fuck’, you also take away their ability to say ‘fuck the government.’” If you don’t like the word ‘fuck’ don’t use it. But don’t take it away from me.

Link courtesy of another weblog, but I can’t remember which one. Sorry to whoever it is. If I find it, I’ll post.

107039776620286397

Tue, 02 Dec 2003 13:42:46 +0000

COMICS: [This interview](http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=36&t=001597) is one more reason I think that Grant Morrison is by far the most interesting person in comics. Beyond being a great writer, he's just a hell of an great subject for an interview. This is obviously an email interview but even given the limitations of that (no followup, much more formal answers than a personal interview) and the somewhat generic nature of some of the questions Grant fills the page with very intriguing and well thought out answers. I always find it strange how comic book creators who obviously have vivid and well-oiled imaginations turn into complete bores when confronted with an interviewer. One of the reasons I look up to Grant Morrison as a writer is that he always finds a way to get his ideas out there in interviews as well as in his work. He obviously thinks a lot about the process of writing and coming up with good ideas and he's going somewhere with his writing. He's not just putting finger to keyboard to get a paycheck, he wants to express himself and move people forward out of the ruts it's so easy to get into in the comic book industry. Fellow comics writer Mark Millar has obviously taken a lot of inspiration for his "interview persona" from Grant (I believe they're friends and worked together so with a personality as big as Grant's I don't fault Millar for that) but I don't think he's nearly as successful at it as Grant. When Grant talks about his view of the world and the reasons for his work being the way it is, I believe him. When Mark Millar talks about reasons for his work it comes off as hucksterism, not an actual belief. Even if it is all a put-on, it's a good enough one for me that I don't care.

One thing that always bugs me about a lot of comic book readers when talking about Grant Morrison is how they go on and on about how weird and hard to understand he is. Yes, he has weird ideas. He has ideas and isn’t afraid to express them, some of them are bound to be weird. He thinks about them though and explains them so I think part of the problem people have is that they think beforehand that he’s going to be “too weird” for them so they start out with a bias. I won’t even go into the people who read his superhero work and then complain about his other work as being “that weird Vertigo shit” or whatever they say. Those people should rot. I’m talking about people who have been given the impression by others that he’s hard to understand so any time he goes out of the normal boring range of interview answers that most other comic book creators stick to it’s automatically labelled as “too weird.” There’s something wrong with a person who believes that any idea is “too weird” to try to understand. Even if you don’t agree with Grant’s idea that the world (including us) is a single giant organism about to undergo a severe metamorphosis, it’s something interesting to contemplate. Give him a chance. You don’t have to have read the entire Invisibles saga to understand Grant Morrison. You don’t have to be into magic and have seen extra-dimensional aliens to read his work.

Read the interview and I defy you not to have at least a little respect for someone willing to put his brain out there for all to see.

107031158814267378

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 13:46:28 +0000

ART: Terry Teachout has a [great post on About Last Night](http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/archives20031130.shtml#61866) on Frank Lloyd Wright in general and his visit to Fallingwater in particular.

I’ve never seen Fallingwater in person, unfortunately for me, but I have studied quite a few pictures of it (I recommend the book Frank Lloyd Wright: A Visual Encyclopedia if you want pictures of his work) and I cannot think it would be anything but completely inspiring to live in that house. Most people come home from work, go inside and watch TV, eat dinner, whatever, without really giving any thought to their home itself. Living in a house like Fallingwater (or any Wright house really) you can’t help but take notice of your home and be uplifted by it. It’s not just a place to keep your stuff, to take a line from George Carlin, it’s an experience and helps you appreciate your life. I feel badly for people who don’t understand architecture, who can’t see what the difference between coming home to a standard tract house and a place of form and beauty would be. Your home should be a place you want to be, not just a place to keep stuff and sleep.

A lot of people make a big deal out of the “problems” with Wright’s houses; you can’t hang art on the walls, his furniture is sometimes hard to sit in, etc. These people are missing the point, I think. Nobody complains about a painter using unwieldy canvas sizes or strange color combinations because it’s hard to fit with your house. If you don’t like how a piece of art would fit in your house, it’s not for you. Find something else. If you want to hang a bunch of pictures on your walls and want to ignore the line of the wall and the form of the house as the architect intended it, don’t live in a Wright house. There are plenty of other beautiful houses with acres of blank wall space to fill up with art. Yes, Frank Lloyd Wright was an egomaniac who wanted things his way or else. Yes, some of his homes have structural problems (he was a pioneer of the cantilever and overestimated it’s weight-bearing abilities) but you’d be hard pressed to find any home from 50+ years ago that doesn’t have problems, especially ones utilizing new techniques and materials. That doesn’t detract from the work. “Read the book you are reading” to quote a recent Believer article. No one’s forcing anyone else to love Wright’s work, no matter how much wannabe intelligencia-martyrs protest otherwise. If you don’t like it, find something you do like.

I, for one, count it among my goals in life to at least visit as many Frank Lloyd Wright buildings as I can. My visit to Taliesin West was one of the most profoundly moving events of my life, probably the closest thing I’ve had to a religious experience. Taliesin West is not even the most beautiful thing Wright ever built but it’s absolutely breathtaking. The Robie House, Hollyhock House, the Unitarian Temple, I cannot understand how someone could not be moved by those buildings.

107030935628122192

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 13:09:16 +0000

LIFE: I'm terrible about taking pictures and even worse about letting anyone see them so in the spirit of getting over bad habits, here are a few pictures of my daughter, Allison, taken over the last month or so. Click the small image for a larger version.

[![](http://s3.media.squarespace.com/production/1529026/18137065/images/running-small.jpg)](http://s3.media.squarespace.com/production/1529026/18137065/images/running-big.jpg)	[![](http://s3.media.squarespace.com/production/1529026/18137065/images/fall-small.jpg)](http://s3.media.squarespace.com/production/1529026/18137065/images/fall-big.jpg)
[![](http://s3.media.squarespace.com/production/1529026/18137065/images/halloween-small.jpg)](http://s3.media.squarespace.com/production/1529026/18137065/images/halloween-big.jpg)	[![](http://s3.media.squarespace.com/production/1529026/18137065/images/toybox-small.jpg)](http://s3.media.squarespace.com/production/1529026/18137065/images/toybox-big.jpg)

And no, I have no idea how I had any genetic part to play in a daughter that cute. :)

107006450019009228

Fri, 28 Nov 2003 17:08:20 +0000

COMICS: Much to the surprise of many, including retailers who had seen it for sale in the Previews catalog, Marvel Comics [announced on Wednesday](http://newsarama.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=6876) that they would be cancelling one of the only titles published under its now all-but-defunct Epic imprint, an adult crime story called Gun Theory. The surprise wasn't that Marvel was cancelling the series, they seem to be in the process of killing Epic completely, but that they were cancelling a 4 issue series after only 2 issues had been sold and that it was the only creator-owned series published by Epic which was announced as a home for creator-owned work. The actual creator-owned status of the book is in question as well, as it turns out. Apparently the indicia of the book assigns all copyright to Marvel but the author of the story says he owns the series and Marvel only had publishing rights. If the two creators did, in fact, sell their copyright to Marvel, it's really too bad for them because they have no recourse, no way to take the series somewhere else to publish it. If Marvel has only the publishing rights, they can get those back and take it somewhere else. Nobody's made a statement about it beyond the one linked above so everybody has to wait to see what will happen. I for one hope they retained ownership of the thing and can take it somewhere else. I read the first issue and didn't care too much for it (I felt it was waaay too decompressed storytelling-wise and some of the dialogue seemed a little forced) but I hate to see any creator screwed over like that so I hope they get the chance to finish out the story and get their due money-wise. This is one of the many benefits of owning your work. [Brian Wood](http://www.brianwood.com/) published [Channel Zero ](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0967684749/mattorama)with Image but (if I recall correctly) they didn't even publish the whole series due to low sales. Then he took the series to [AiT/PlanetLar](http://www.aitplanetlar.com), published it as a trade paperback collection and he still gets royalty checks from it years later. If he had settled for doing the book as a work-for-hire for somebody else and they'd cancelled it, his only recourse would have been to whine about it, which is what a lot of creators end up doing when the publisher screws them in some fashion. The writer Steven Grant had a great quote on this subject (it's vulgar so stop reading if you don't like that sort of thing): "If you're going to be their pussy, don't cry when you get fucked." Amen.

107004891355462298

Fri, 28 Nov 2003 12:48:33 +0000

MUSIC: I've been listening to the new Strokes album [Room on Fire](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000C9ZLD/mattorama) and I like it other than one small problem, it's only 30 minutes long. I love the thing but at $12 on sale I'd like at least as much entertainment as I would get out of a hour-long TV show or a $12 graphic novel. The Kings of Leon album [Youth and Young Manhood](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00009YFP8/mattorama) is about 45 minutes and that's about right. Of course I'd like as much music as possible and would hate to see any band put crap songs on an album just to fill time but 30 minutes? I'm already commited to buying it since I downloaded the whole thing in MP3 but the songs are good enough that I want more of them.

As far as the album goes, it’s really good. The rock stuff is right on and the slower songs are great as well, a testement to the lead singer. I’m a big fan of the return of rock music to the music industry and I’ve bought 3 or 4 new albums in the last month, way more than I usually buy. I really like the aforementioned Youth and Young Manhood a lot. It’s gotten the most play of anything on my computer at work recently except the bunch of Flaming Lips songs I downloaded (and plan on buying the CDs of because I have no idea why I never listened to much Flaming Lips in the past). I’ve only listened to Room on Fire a few times but it’s great. I also really like the album by Jet called Get Born. I can’t comment on the influences of these bands because I had absolutely horrible taste in music as a kid and never, ever listened to anything good so I don’t know who is stealing from who, what influences are most important to which band, all the stuff that people are arguing about with these new rock bands. I just like the music, just like I like listening to the original rock from the 60s and 70s. If you like rock music I would recommend all three of the albums I just mentioned. If you have any recommendations of stuff old or new along the lines of these bands, I’d love to hear about them. Post them in the comments section if you would be so kind.

106980789767349098

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 17:51:37 +0000

ART: [This weblog post](http://ynot.motime.com/1069735538#177051) is probably the most bizarre argument I've read in quite a while. The thing is all over the map as far as reasoning (I count 3 unrelated reasons for his beliefs) but basically the author's main idea (I think) is that artists do not "control" their work by default because they let other people look at it so they shouldn't try to control it at all.

…I think it’s a good and chastening thing for a creator to be reminded that he/she does not have anything like a god’s power over his/her creations–or, at the very least, if the creator is a god, he/she is more like a member of a (really overpopulated) pantheon. Zeus, for example, can try to make things come out his way, but he’s always got to worry about Hera or Poseidon’s interference. There ain’t no Yahwehs at the typewriter! A lot of “indie creators” don’t seem to realize that…

I’m not even really sure how to argue with that because it’s just such bullshit. Artists need to be told, should be made to understand, that they have no control over their work? What kind of adult wants to ‘chasten’ other adults for their artistic decisions? It seems like his problem with ‘indie creators’ is that they stubbornly refuse to sell their creations to the highest bidder so they need to be taught a lesson. I won’t even go into the legal reasons for controlling your work because Mr. Fiore doesn’t, although I think the legal/financial reasons are as strong as the artistic reasons. He doesn’t even really go into the artistic reasons, besides trying to say that art “by definition, [is] embedded within culture. That’s what makes it art!!! And once you plug into culture, you are no longer in control.“ I know I only went to college for computer science, not critical theory or art theory but this whole essay, this sentence included, is full of gibberish to me. I have a hard time faulting someone for using $5 words where a $1 word will do but this is just ridiculous.

It’s obvious that once someone reads your book or looks at your painting, the image is in their head and you can’t hope to control what they do with it. This is not, however, a reason to give up on controlling your work. In referencing Tony Isabella and Black Lightning Fiore makes it clear that he’s talking about real control, the physical say-so about what happens to your characters in the real world, not in someone’s head. For background, Tony Isabella created the character of Black Lightning as a work-for-hire creation for DC Comics and he’s now mad about what he sees as DC’s shabby treatment of the character. Fiore says that Isabella shouldn’t be arguing about the treatment of his creation because as soon as he created it and “plugged it into culture” he lost control. I don’t think Isabella should be complaining either, but it’s because he willing sold the rights to DC as a work-for-hire. If he had retained control over his work he wouldn’t be in this mess because presumably he wouldn’t have done something with the character he didn’t like, no matter how much David Fiore wants to believe he “[doesn’t] know what the hell they’re going to do next.” This is a completely different argument and one that’s a little too personal for my tastes. Writers let their characters run free as much as they choose to and it has absolutely nothing to do with controlling your work.

I’m not sure this makes much sense but the post in question is really all over the place and hard to read. He makes a basic point that I wanted to address though. I don’t think he’ll read this or respond but I would love to discuss this if only he would get past his love of College Smart Guy wording.

106978282784551487

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 10:53:47 +0000

BOOK REVIEW: [One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451163966/mattorama) A lot of people have seen Jack Nicholson's performance in this movie, one of his best, but not a lot of people are as familiar with the book which is a shame. The changes they made for the movie are very important and the book has quite a lot more to say, as usual. In the movie, McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) is the main character, the story revolves around him. In the book, the main character and narrator is the Chief who everyone thinks is deaf and mute so they let him get up close to their conversations, a very effective narrative technique. McMurphy is still the protagonist of the book, but you learn a lot about the Chief as well and he's definately now one of my favorite literary characters because of the added detail. One of my favorite parts of the book is how much more sympathetic of a character McMurphy is. It's been a while since I've seen the movie but the book-McMurphy really seems to care a lot about his fellow inmates, something I don't remember from the movie. It's rare for a tough-guy character to be given any emotion but Kesey did a really great job with him in the book. If you liked the movie, you owe it to yourself to read the book (or listen to it as I did, read on for more on that).

The first audiobook I listened to was Jonathan Franzen’s How to be Alone, a collection of his essays from various magazines. I got it free for subscribing to Salon.com (along with 3 magazine subscriptions and a book, a hell of a deal). I had no idea what to expect but I ended up loving the experience of listening to that book. In listening to a couple of other audiobooks, I’ve found that the person reading the book makes all the difference. I listened to Life of Pi and I couldn’t imagine reading the book after listening to the actor they had read it. I don’t know if he was Indian or not but he did a perfect accent that I couldn’t have replicated in my mind if I tried. It was a whole different experience and one I really enjoyed. I was sad when the book was over, not just because it was an amazing book but that I wouldn’t be listening to Pi speak any more. I really recommend listening to Life of Pi if you haven’t already read it. I felt almost the same way with Cuckoo’s Nest. The actor reading the book did an amazing job. Without overdoing the voices like some actors do, I could really tell the difference between all the characters just by how he performed each person. He didn’t even have to resort to the standard high-pitched women’s voices that some actors do to make the women stand out. I was very impressed.

What made me realize just how important the actor is to the audiobook experience is the new one I’m listening to, The Da Vinci Code. I would never had read this book if they hadn’t had it face-out on the shelf at Hastings to rent (only $2 a week!). The writing on the book isn’t particularly good (The first cringe inducing moment was when the bad guy said “My work here is done” after shooting someone. Yikes.) but I probably wouldn’t mind that if the actor doing the voices wasn’t so over-the-top with the characters. The book, so far at least, is set in France so everyone speaks in ‘zee stan-dard French, ac-cent’ and he does the high-pitched women’s voices so combined it’s a bit grating. I’ll finish it and have a more full review later but now I can see why it’s become popular but I’m not a big fan. I hope once the real action starts that it’ll get better.

106969868611825671

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 11:31:26 +0000

COMEDY: Kim and I went to see the [Comedy Central Live](http://www.comedycentral.com/cclive/) standup show last night with Lewis Black and Dave Attell. There were also two opening acts but don't let the fact that I can't remember their names lead you to believe that they weren't funny. Everybody had a good set but as I expected, Dave Attell was the only one who killed.

Lewis Black was obviously sick so i give him a pass even though he was off all night. His stuff has always been hit-and-miss with me anyway. I like his topical material like he does on the Daily Show, where most people know him from, but I’ve never been a big fan of his everyday-life stuff like the obvious and unfunny bit he did about bottled water. Since this was the Comedy Central show, I expected him to be in more of his Back In Black Daily Show mode but he did mostly stuff like the bottled water thing and his “candy corn tastes like crap” material. That’s one of my favorite bits of his which says a lot seeing as I love candy corn and as I said, I like his topical/political humor more.

Dave Attell, as I said, killed. My coworker said most of the material was off of his recent album but since I don’t have it, it was pretty fresh to me. If you’ve watched Insomniac but never heard any of his standup, buy an album or better yet see him in concert. He’s got a very perverted view of the world so if you’re a prude, you won’t like his show, just so you know. There’s really no way to describe his material, it’s all over the map. He does a lot of alcohol humor, a lot of very funny sex stuff, some bits about his midget best friend he calls Baby Shoes, and a lot of improvised stuff.

Overall the show was very good. It was in the Kiva auditorium which means no smoking, so no stinking of smoke for me, a rarity at most concerts. I sat next to an older lady who only ever laughed at the alcohol jokes and inexplicably, at Dave Attell’s masturbation material. I wasn’t paying too much attention to him but I don’t think her husband was laughing either. Maybe they got the tickets as a practical joke from someone. If the tickets weren’t close to $100 (damn Ticketmaster fees!) I would love to send my mom to a show like Dave Attell’s just to see what she’d think.

All in all, if you like standup comedy and have a chance to catch this show, do. Dave Attell by himself is worth the cost alone.

106944133238648722

Fri, 21 Nov 2003 12:02:12 +0000

COMICS: A lot of webloggers and columnists (starting [here](http://home.hiwaay.net/~tfharris/pulpculture/columns/031120.shtml), continuing [here](http://realtegan.blogspot.com/#106937623388980689), [here](http://johnnybacardi.blogspot.com/2003_11_16_johnnybacardi_archive.html#106938015914433189), and what led me to this piece, [here](http://www.alltooflat.com/about/personal/sean/?BlogNum=476)) have been rehashing the old argument about the Death of the Floppy/Pamphlet/Single comic book. The last link in the list, [Sean Collins's](http://www.alltooflat.com/about/personal/sean/?BlogNum=476), is the only one that really means anything in context of the world outside comics. The first couple of commentators give very 'comic book industry' answers as to why singles suck or don't suck. They mention things like 'they don't travel well/they do travel well' as well as the old chestnut of 'singles are too collectible to read'. Collectible? Is this cribbed from [Wizard](http://www.wizarduniverse.com/), circa 1995? This type of thinking is exactly what has led me to my thoughts on the life and death of the single issue comic versus the Graphic Novel or collected trade paperbacks that are gaining in popularity. By the way, like a lot of comics conversations recently, this is all pretty much what [Warren Ellis](http://www.warrenellis.com) and others were saying years ago.

I don’t think the single is going away anytime soon. I do think, however, that they will be even more of a niche market than they are today. A lot of people are going to be reading comics in the coming years but they will be doing it in bookstores (and mainstream book type stores such as Isotope and Comic Relief), not in comic shops. There’s just too much good material and comics are getting into too much of our pop culture consciousness to be ignored any longer but as sales and time have shown, nobody wants to read single comics except comic book fans. In a few years at most, singles and single-based comic shops will be like stamps. A lot of people collect stamps and there are stamp collector stores but they are not really relevant to anyone outside the philatelist community. I’m sure a lot of stamp collectors would love their hobby to be a lot more popular but it’s probably not going to happen, the same with single comics. Since I’m not exactly on the outside of the comic book fan community, I may not even have enough perspective to judge whether we are already at the point I’m talking about, but I think we’re close if nothing else. Sales of singles are miniscule, bookstores are gaining in popularity as places to buy comics (look at the mainstream success and reviews for Sandman: Endless Nights and Persepolis), manga is proving that young people want to read comics and they want to read them in book format.

I think right now manga is the Cool New Thing but like most Cool New Things once the New goes away, the Cool will follow. But the kids who read FLCL and Chobits now will still want to read comics and they will know to get them from bookstores. This exposure to comics is the same thing that happened to computers, kids grew up with them and they are now an indispensable part of life. With the built-in base of kids exposed to comics early and often, combined with the large and varied audience of bookstore patrons, comics in bookstores have a bright future, as books.

It could be that the niche market for singles won’t be enough to support the current companies. Marvel and DC may have to significantly scale down their single issue production, maybe even get out of that market altogether. But you’ll still be able to buy Batman, X-Men, etc., in book format unless they don’t recognize where the market is going and it kills them. I’m not worried about the future of my book buying habit but I do see a point where I have to wait awhile for new comics the way I have to wait for the new novels I like.

106936161012319594

Thu, 20 Nov 2003 13:53:30 +0000

LIFE: [This is a great piece](http://andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2003_11_16_dish_archive.html#106921643579521657) by conservative writer Andrew Sullivan about the ruling on gay marriages in Massachusetts. It's probably the best articulation of the reasons why saying gay people can't get married is ridiculous and offensive that I've ever read. It's long but this is one of the issues that's very simple but at the same time very misunderstood for a myriad of reasons. Just the other day I read [this series of blog entries](http://eve-tushnet.blogspot.com/2003_10_01_eve-tushnet_archive.html#106566708760214170) by Eve Tushnet outlining why she is against gay marriage that even if I didn't have a job I wouldn't have time to say exactly how wrongheaded it is but Mr. Sullivan's piece pretty much shoots down all of her arguments.

106935701342011255

Thu, 20 Nov 2003 12:36:53 +0000

SPACE: [Space.com article about the future of mining in space.](http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/space_resources_031114.html) I'm always overjoyed to see that people haven't given up looking into space for the future, like the government and the media seem to have done. The best way to do anything is to assume it's going to happen and work forward from there. Once you figure out what's going to happen when we get into space in large numbers, it gives more of an incentive for people to accomplish the 'getting there' part. I've said for awhile now that the best way to get people into space is to give somebody a financial reason for it. Science and exploration are, of course, the most noble goals for space exploration but putting the dollar signs in Boeing's eyes will probably get a reusable space vehicle much faster than going through NASA. Even when NASA works with Boeing on stuff the goal isn't specifically lots of money for Boeing, it's a ship for NASA. If you watched the show PBS did on the design of the new Joint Strike Fighter you'll see how fast people can work to come up with and implement new ideas when there are billions of dollars on the line. I think the government should have a design contest like the JSF contest where the prize to the best design is a long-term contract on all space delivery vehicles. With a few billion and a 10 year contract somebody like Boeing or Lockheed could have a reusable space delivery vehicle within 5 years. You know there are a dozen aerospace engineers with mostly workable space vehicle designs sitting in their desks. There are a ton of smart engineers who want to go into space, let's get them on it.

106926632441349791

Wed, 19 Nov 2003 11:25:24 +0000

COMICS: [Eli Flores at Broken Frontier](http://www.brokenfrontier.com/columns/femaleperspective/femaleperspective.htm) has an article on why there aren't more 'black/minority' characters in comics. It's a good article but focuses too much on the creators of the books rather than the fans. She also focuses on superhero comics, which is what I'll do.

The main reason that I see for white males being the majority of characters in comic stories is that white males are the majority of customers in comic stores. Comics have never sought to appeal to minorities in this country, all the way back to Superman/Batman up through Spiderman/Fantasic Four and even now. Most white superhero comic book buyers (which is most comic book buyers period, not counting manga) want to read stories about people like themselves with fantastic powers. A large part of buying superhero comics is wish-fulfillment and it’s hard for people to project themselves onto a character with a different skin color.

I don’t think there’s much hope in trying to get more black main characters into superhero comics, honestly. Pretty much the base of fans for superhero comics is set and not growing at any appreciable rate. That means the same set of mostly white male readers are going to be buying the books and they’ve shown they don’t want to read about black characters, except in supporting roles. Since the readers don’t support books with black main characters (see Black Panther, an exceptionally well written comic about a great black character) there’s no incentive for writers to write black characters.

If you’re thinking that publishers should push books starring black characters at the black members of the superhero reading public, look at the math. Black people make up about 12% of the population of the US. Even assuming that the superhero reading audience contains the same percentages (a very weak assumption) you’re looking at sales of maybe 10,000 copies, based on the usual 100,000+ copies of the top-selling superhero book. Unless there are other factors at work, that book wouldn’t last long.

Really the only way there are going to be more black main characters in comics is by pulling in more black readers and superhero books have never shown any ability to bring in new readers in large numbers. If books like Grrrl Scouts could get out into the mainstream and into hip-hop magazines and the like, that would bring in new readers which would give publishers and writers more incentinve to write black characters. If you want to see more non-white faces in comics, supporting non-superhero books is the way to go.

Thanks to Journalista for the link.

106919774353896314

Tue, 18 Nov 2003 16:22:23 +0000

BOOKS: Publishers Weekly has a list of the Best of 2003 out and checking out the '[SF/Fantasy/Horror](http://publishersweekly.reviewsnews.com/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA336207)' list (I always love how these 3 genres are grouped together in their own special ghetto whenever a list is made so right-thinking readers of Serious Literature don't accidently read something from one of them) I see not one, not two, but five examples of what I call Embarrasing Fantasy Title Syndrome. Now, I have no idea if these books are any good or not, given that they are the 'Best of' list of a major magazine I would say they're probably not crap, but the titles! Oh the titles! _ [Jarka Ruus: High Druid of Shannara](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345435737/mattorama) [Talon of the Silver Hawk: Conclave of Shadows Book One](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0380977087/mattorama) [The Lone Drow: The Hunter's Blades Trilogy, Book II](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0786930128/mattorama) [The White Dragon: In Fire Forged, Part One](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0812555481/mattorama) [Journey into the Void: Volume Three of the Sovereign Stone Trilogy](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0061051780/mattorama) _ There's not much to say really. These titles read like the names of Dungeons & Dragons campaigns made up by 15 year old dungeon masters who've only ever read Dungeons & Dragons books. As I said, this is not an indictment of the books themselves, or of the authors. But please, please, for the love of your readers who don't want to feel like they're reading D&D manuals, **pick better titles**!

106919008874769417

Tue, 18 Nov 2003 14:14:48 +0000

WRITING: It's [articles like this](http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/entertainment/books/articles/7609451) that scare the bejezzus out of me. It's a piece by David Sexton, the Literary Editor for the UK newspaper The Evening Standard about how most people who write novels shouldn't do it. It's completely true, especially this part:

In fact, almost everybody believes he or she might just be a good novelist, even if he or she hasn’t got round to trying it yet. <snip> It is very strange. Nobody would attempt to give a piano recital without having first learned to play the piano. People realise they cannot make a satisfactory chest of drawers, or even a serviceable cheeseboard, without having acquired some skill in carpentry. They know they are not competent as dentists or plumbers, if they have not had any experience or training. Yet they think that they can write a novel by some natural gift.

The problem as I see it is that there’s no way to know if you’re going to be a good novelist unless you do it. Then, after you’ve spent some good amount of time on writing your novel and you figure out it’s lame, you’ve just wasted a lot of precious time. I’m a believer in the idea that people who want to create art will create it no matter what but I also have bills to pay and want to pay them by writing. I’m not that weak-willed that a bad review or article like this will scare me away from writing but I can’t help but have at least a nugget of fear about my skills until I start selling my work and stuff like this doesn’t help. I can appreciate it as a reader (and a science-fiction reader especially), having read more than my fair share of horribly bad books by people who should be ordered by the law to never touch a keyboard again.

106918686733123701

Tue, 18 Nov 2003 13:21:07 +0000

COMICS: [Sean Collins](http://www.alltooflat.com/about/personal/sean/) recently posted [a message](http://www.tcj.com/messboard/ubb/Forum2/HTML/002248.html) to the Comics Journal message board and to his weblog that apparently stirred up some, um, feelings, in some people. I thought his request, to help him find out why he wasn't enjoying the comic Love & Rockets as much as his friends did, was pretty easy to understand and somewhat brave, especially since he posted in on the CJ message board, not exactly a bastion of politeness a lot of the time. People began responding with the usual hostility exhbited toward someone who is trying to get into something that others "discovered" a long time ago, as well as mocking him to asking people to help him like something. This is crap. I have read a lot of things in comics and elsewhere that other people seemed to love and that I didn't. Sometimes, I understand the work and understand why I don't like it and I move on. Sometimes though, I feel like I might be missing something and would like people to help point out why they like it and I didn't. Trying to understand a piece of art, whether it's a painting by Jackson Pollack that is hard to "get" right off the bat or a long-running comic book series like Love & Rockets, is a worthy endevour and should never, ever be greeted with anything less than enthusiasm by people who already love that artist/writer/etc. If someone asks that kind of question and you don't have anything constructive to say about it, hit the back button, shut up, whatever it takes to get you away from that conversation. Message boards seem to foster the idea that you **must** respond to everything, even if you have nothing to say. I don't know why that is, besides the usual reason for the crapiness of message boards, anonymity, but it's not a good habit to get into. Most rational people don't feel the need to call up Britney Spears and tell her they hate her music but they feel they have some duty to respond to message board threads even if it's just to say something sucks. It's too bad it really kills the signal-to-noise ratio of a board that could be very useful like [TCJ's](http://www.tcj.com/messboard/ubbcgi/Ultimate.cgi?action=intro&BypassCookie=true).

On the subject of Love & Rockets, the new collection Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories is getting insanely great reviews from everywhere I look so I have a strong feeling it will end up on my To Be Read shelf before too long. Palomar will be my first exposure to L&R (I know, for shame) so if you’ve read it and it’s your first as well, let me know what you thought.

106910093792301886

Mon, 17 Nov 2003 13:28:57 +0000

COMICS: This week marks the 50th birthday of the absolute genius of comics, Alan Moore. If you only know Mr. Moore's work through the movies made from it, that's like saying you know Shakespeare because you've seen the movies made of his work. A lot of people gush over Moore because they love his work and a lot more people gush because they think they're supposed to. I'm one of the ones who gush because I honestly love his work and he continually blows me away with his talent. He is one of the most original minds in comics and now that he's said he's retiring from comics I look forward to where he goes from here.

He’s also one of the few comics writers to get love for both superhero (Tom Strong, Supreme, Top Ten) and non-superhero (Watchmen, From Hell, V For Vendetta) work. It says a lot about the man when he’s written 2 of the 3 comics people use as Proof That Comics Can Be Good (the other being The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller, although obviously the list is much, much, longer). It also says a lot about comics, albeit negatively, that one man has put out most of the serious, and seriously good, works the medium has to offer. The fact that From Hell, Watchmen, and V For Vendetta were all written more than 10 years ago and still dwarf most everything that has come after them is a little disheartening. But that’s a whole other discussion.

Even though it’s a lot less well-known than From Hell and Watchmen, I think V for Vendetta is right up there with them. That book blows me away. Even with those 3 works under his belt, I have to say that one of my favorite Alan Moore works is his initial revamp of Swamp Thing. The first book of Swamp Thing (Saga of the Swamp Thing) should be the bar any writer wishing to revamp an old character has to jump over. The genius of the revamp is that he acknowledges everything that came before in the previous issues but then proceeds to tell us that the entire character has been a lie and he is really something much greater. The acknowledgement of the superhero book without dismissing it or laughing at it is something a lot of writers could do well to learn from. This, and the effectiveness of the creeping horror in the stories, makes Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing a must-read for any aspiring writer. There are very comics writers worth studying and Alan Moore is certainly the first on the list.

Happy Birthday Mr. Moore. Thanks for the great reading and I look forward to your upcoming work.

106909770038743414

Mon, 17 Nov 2003 12:35:00 +0000

COOL: The Dr. Seuss stamp has been unveiled by the USPS and I like it. I'm glad they went with an image that shows him and his creations. ![](http://arttech.about.com/library/graphics/dr_seuss_stamp_th2.jpg)

While I’m on the subject of Seuss, we’re on the Dr. Seuss book club through Scholastic and there are basically 3 types of books we get.

Thanks to Journalista for the stamp story.

106900558821952555

Sun, 16 Nov 2003 10:59:48 +0000

DIET: So far I've been doing a sort-of undisciplined Atkins diet for about 2 weeks. I say undisciplined because I'm not counting the exact numbers of carbs I've been eating, just trying to estimate and keep it around 20 for the **Induction** phase. So far it seems like it's really working. I've lost about 8 pounds, more than I've lost "eating right" for the past few months. I'm a member of the great website [eDiets.com](http://www.ediets.com) which makes finding proper meals (by far the hardest part of Atkins) very easy since they do it all for you. I see Atkins as a great diet for geeks and lazy people since the science seems to work out (at least to the extent that we understand the human body, which isn't a whole lot based on the reems of paper dedicated to contridictory eating advice) and for lazy people it's much easier to say 'Eat less of X' than it is to say 'Eat better'. Eating better is hard, especially if you're like me and don't care for most vegetables. Eating less carbs is easy, just look at the label. The popularity of Atkins and other low-carb diets is making it profitable for companies to make low and lower carb versions of foods so there's more stuff out there than you might think if you've never looked. Our local Albertsons has a whole section devoted to Atkins and low carb stuff, there's a shop in town that sells nothing but low-carb stuff, I even found low-carb ice cream and frozen deserts at Raley's the other day. It's easy, I can easily make a scientific/evolutionary case for it, and it seems to work. That's about all I ask for.

106894105323786844

Sat, 15 Nov 2003 17:04:13 +0000

ART: [ThinkGeek :: Moving Gear Clock](http://www.thinkgeek.com/cubegoodies/lights/601e/): I want this. I love industrial/mechanical art and this must be mine.

106884346625903169

Fri, 14 Nov 2003 13:57:46 +0000

BOOKS: The great [About Last Night](http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/) weblog has a [discussion](http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/archives20031109.shtml#60007) going about books v. ebooks that I'm sure will become more and more important in the years to come. I'm in an odd place in this discussion. On the one hand; I'm a voracious reader, I read everything and when I have nothing to read I read anything handy. My house has stacks of books everywhere, much to the chagrin of Kim. On the other hand; I'm a geek and a futurist. I love technology, I love advancments of all kinds. I love books but I can see a day when they're niche collectible items like tin toys. I think within my lifetime most people will buy books online and download them into a reader of some kind (which will make today's ebook readers look like horse-drawn carriages no doubt). But I will no doubt be the crazy old man with a robot body and artificial brain holed up in his orbiting helium filled library leafing through my copy of Don Quixote.

106884058678930321

Fri, 14 Nov 2003 13:09:46 +0000

LIFE: Much to the surprise of, well, me, I'm getting married. I say to my surprise for various reasons. First, I have almost no view of the future. I pretty much live by the 'take things as they come' model so I never once considered being married just as I never consider what would happen if I become President, or a famous writer. If it happens, it happens. Even when I was a kid and I'd imagine being a corporate ~~dictator~~ CEO with a globe spanning empire (I was young and since I never had money, I wanted a lot of it when I grew up) I only ever imagined having kids, not a wife. The second reason is that I never thought any girl would have me. I grew up overweight in San Diego (which will kill your self-esteem quick unless you're unthinkingly oblivious to peer pressure, as I have always been for some reason), I'm very private and very introverted, I like being alone, and as I've been told numerous times I "look mean". So I guess that means Kim is a bit crazy for wanting to be stuck with me for however many years. In any case, we're shooting for around the second week of August, 2004\. I'm hoping I can start selling some writing between now and then so I can save some money for a honeymoon. As it is, I'm not sure how we'll even pay for the wedding. It'll be an adventure, that's for sure. I think we'll make a good partnership though, we already created the best, smartest little girl in the world. Not that I'm biased.

106857389251335665

Tue, 11 Nov 2003 11:04:52 +0000

Saw **Matrix: Revolutions** over the weekend. It didn't live up to its potential but I thought if you combine Reloaded and Revolutions, it was one good 3 hour movie. Not great, but good. **The Matrix** will certainly go down in history as one of the greatest science-fiction movies but the other two will probably just be thought of as not-as-great, which is how sequels used to be thought of anyway. Here's my take on it, put here really for no reason other than to help make my thoughts on it more cohesive. I should say that I have no special knowledge so all of this could be totally wrong. I don't think so though, I didn't think it was too hard to piece a lot of this stuff together. A lot of people seem to be going out of their way to misunderstand things though so that's a problem with a lot of the reviews I've seen.

Smith/Bane - When the humans go into the Matrix, they’re basically uploading their brains into code in the system. Smith had the ability not just to copy his code over other program’s code, but to merge with it. Smith copied/merged with Bane and when Bane’s code was downloaded back into his brain, Smith’s code was with it and rewired Bane’s physical brain, hence the scarring and weird neural patterns the doctor saw.

Neo outside the Matrix - Neo had power over the machines in the Real World because part of him was still in the Matrix. They said as much when the doctor said Neo’s brain waves looked like he was jacked in but his body was obviously on the table. Why he could communicate with his Matrix-self is just one of those All Powerful Hero things that doesn’t really need to be explained more than ‘he has a connection to the Source’.

The Choice/The End - When Neo met the Architect, he was told to make a choice between A) Destroying Zion, choosing new people to make a new Zion and restarting the Matrix to get rid of the anomaly B) Going back into the Matrix, letting the anomaly run its course and destroy the Matrix, its inhabitants and most of the machines (The Architect: “There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept”). Because he had love for Trinity, the first One to do so, he chose B to save her rather than saving the human race. The anomaly was Smith, the Oracle said he was Neo’s opposite, the balance of the equation. Since Neo saved Trinity, she was able to pilot the ship and go with him to the Machine City and meet 1A (the machine leader). 1A knew Neo was the only way to defeat Smith without restarting the Matrix and having the same anomaly pop up again so it jacked Neo into the Matrix and in exchange, stopped the machines from killing Zion. Of course if Neo had failed, the machines probably would have killed everyone. The Oracle set it up so Smith would find her and absorb her, just as Smith said. When Neo was defeated, Smith thought that was the end because he couldn’t see past Neo’s next choice, to give up. Neo realized, with the help of the bit of the Oracle that came though and told him it was the end, that he had to sacrifice himself to save the Matrix. He let Smith merge with him, which gave 1A a conduit into Smith and all the other Smiths (they all knew everything the Oracle/Smith knew so they had to be connected). 1A destroyed the Smiths and in the process killed Neo. The machines fixed the destruction Smith had caused (the ‘deja vu’ with the cat on the sidewalk) and with the Smith code removed from the system, everyone woke up as themselves. The Oracle said they would probably see Neo again, continuing with the Messiah references throughout the movie. Presumably the rest of the story is that the humans in the Matrix are told of the true reality and those that want to leave, do. The continuation of the peace and the rebuilding of the world are for the next movies/games/whatever.

There are a lot of unanswered questions:
Was the Merovingian something special or just an old, powerful program? Some think he was a previous One but I wouldn’t think so. Why would the Architect let an old anomaly live into a new version of the Matrix when the old one was restarted specifically to try and fix the anomaly? I would guess he’s just an old, powerful machine program.

What was Seraph and why did the Merovingian call him ‘the prodigal son’? It seems that he was an old machine program, which is why he had gold code when Neo looked at him. I would imagine the Oracle and the Merovingian would have had gold code too if we had seen Neo’s POV. His relationship with the Merovingian is probably just one of those things thrown in to make the world more real to the audience. It might be explained in a later game/movie.

Why could Neo “see” Smith inside Bane in Flame Vision? No explination. Just one of those ‘connection to the Source’ things, even though Smith’s code wouldn’t have been connected to the Matrix inside of Bane unless he had Neo’s same power to be in both places at once.

I can’t help but think that a talented co-writer or editor couldn’t have tightened up the scripts for both movies and cleared a lot of things up. Pages like this shouldn’t really be needed but at the same time I don’t think it’s bad to leave some thing unexplained. They just left too much unclear here, it makes it harder for a lot of people to enjoy.

106805277353034330

Wed, 05 Nov 2003 10:19:33 +0000

Haven't added anything to this site in awhile. Very busy with Allison, Kim, work, and writing. I was awarded an Honorable Mention for my short story "Finding Girls in the 22nd Century Isn't Any Easier" in the 72nd Writer's Digest writing competition. Whoohoo for me! Now I just need to start selling stories and I'll be on my way.

I’m also starting a new weight loss regimen. I lost about 45 pounds a couple of years ago doing The Hacker’s Diet but gained it all back. It’s basically a ‘Eat less (a lot less), excersize more’ diet which works if you have the time and willpower to make it work. I don’t and I find it hard to eat what I was eating on that diet when I’m making dinner for a girlfriend and daughter in any case. The nice thing for me about THD is that it’s written by a geek for geeks and as such focuses on the science behind the diet. That’s one of the things I like about the Atkins ~~diet~~ lifestyle as well, it’s very science based. When I first heard about Atkins I thought it was gibberish but after reading more about it and seeing some other folks get good results on it, I’m going to try it out. I’m not sure if it’s an inaccurate scale or real weight loss but the first day of super-low carbs the scale said I lost 2 pounds. I’ll have to see if that’s accurate over the next couple of days. I’m going to use the EatWatch tool from The Hacker’s Diet to log my weight loss progress on my Visor and also on this page. Good luck to me.

105891895943322646

Tue, 22 Jul 2003 18:09:19 +0000

I just got back last night from San Diego where we had our vacation and also attended the San Diego Comic Con, also known as Nerd Prom: San Diego. We ended up only spending 2 or 3 hours out of 5 days at the Con due to spending the rest of our time doing regular vacation stuff. I refuse to spend all four days at the Nerd Prom because it just gets too sad to bear after a while and I don't want Kim and Allison to hate me for dragging them 1000 miles just for that loser-ific spectacle. I so wish comics could get rid of the Nerdboy stigma attached to them and then once the Con comes to town so do all the grown men dressed as Sailor Moon and dorks in trench coats and Flash tshirts fill every trolley car.

Part of the problem I think has to do with the Registration process for the con. And by Registration process I mean wait in line for 2 hours+ in the hot San Diego sun. Unless you pre-register online, which involves printing out the form and either mailing or faxing it in (hello! Come into the 90s people, you have a website. Use it!), you have to wait in line with literally thousands of other people to get in. The line when we showed up was over a mile long. A mile. Needless to say, we went and did other more fun things and came back later. Most people who aren’t crazy would just go home. This leaves pretty much just hardcore comic book fans as attendees, which sucks. A convention this big should have a way for people to come by because they heard about the con on the news the night before.

I’ll have lots of pictures of the Wild Animal Park up later. Since I’m the world’s most giant dumbhead (to steal a phrase) when it comes to remembering things, I only remembered to take the camera out with me once. grrrr.

105822043399413787

Mon, 14 Jul 2003 16:07:13 +0000

[![](http://s3.media.squarespace.com/production/1529026/18137065/images/allison_thumb.jpg)](http://s3.media.squarespace.com/production/1529026/18137065/images/allison.jpg) This is my daughter Allison, in a new outfit her grandma bought her for our upcoming vacation to San Diego. She's quite a ham and loves the camera, as you might be able to tell. :)