So now that I finally got this blog up and running, we’re moving apartments and I am told to expect downtime on the order of 5 to 7 days, beginning tomorrow. So, if you don’t hear from me for a bit, it’s because SBC is a bunch of buffoons and it takes them that long to flip switch A to ‘off’ and then flip switch B to ‘on.’
It is a great nuisance. I can’t find anyone in this house to talk to. And I am full of interesting information. I feel like the latest edition of something or other.-Lord Goring, An Ideal Husband, by Oscar Wilde
We started Move 2005 this weekend. Up early on Saturday, over to the new apartment to sign and initial and initial and sign and initial and initial. We read through the entire lease, which included such gems as ‘how to use a dishwasher’ (hint: don’t use hand soap) and ‘no rocks in the garbage disposal.’ The lease-writing process must go something like this:
After signing away the next 12 months of our lives, we went to Taco Bell. I have found that the first meal in a new apartment is a momentous occasion, and a large burrito is always a good start.
So, armed with our cheap lunch, we unlocked the door and, despite our earlier assurances to each other to eat before looking, we looked before eating.
We love our new place. It’s big, it’s open, it’s got great storage, it has lots of plugs, it has a washer/dryer set, and it’s generally just kick-ass. Our unit has older cupboards than the model we saw, but that’s fine; our unit was $100 less a month.
So we ate and then began unloading the boxes stuffed to the gills with our precious and not-so-precious possessions. It takes a move to really make you realize how much crap you own, and how many boxes it takes to house all of it. I would never have guessed that we own enough frilly pillows to fill four boxes, but we do. Or that we have enough board games to fill five boxes. Or three boxes of video game consoles and games. And we haven’t even started on the kitchen yet, which is a room full of cupboards full of things that I need to move.
It was during this move (and the subsequent carfulls) that I got a call about which I cannot tell you. (Ooh, foreshadowing).
While I unloaded load after load of boxes, Sonja set to work using the aforementioned washer/dryer set. She is in love with those appliances. If I was not present at the move, she would not have noticed. If I had gotten pinned under a box laden with role playing books and yelped out as my frail physique was crushed under the weight of various GURPS supplements, she would have been blissfully unaware as she populated the washer with our unmentionables.
So, Sonja likes the laundry facilities.
It was supposed to rain this weekend, but instead we got some beautiful Southern California weather that made for a spectacular move-in experience. It wasn’t too hot, but it was nice and sunny and gave the feel that all was well with the world. A slight breeze whipped up whenever we took a break, cooling us down and tossing that new-carpet smell through the rooms of our new place. And when Sunday night drew to a close, we took a walk around the lake on-property and reveled in the utter silence of the place; this is not a college dorm or a stand in for same; this is where we live, and we love it.
This post sent from Mars!
MarsEdit doesn’t seem to autoconfigure for Wordpress. It should be able to load the page, look for the Generator, and figure out that it’s a Wordpress blog. Then it should fill in the XML-RPC URL, which is at a standard location, and put something into the ‘Blog ID’, about which I know nothing except that MarsEdit won’t refresh until something is there.
That said, once I did a bit of googling I found how to insert the XML-RPC URL (I wouldn’t have had a clue otherwise), and MarsEdit informed me that I needed a Blog ID before I could refresh. Not amazing, but nice enough.
Refreshing the blog got my recent entries as well as all of my categories (aka tags), so that was nice and automagic.
My next task was getting the preview looking good, and that was simple enough because I’m familiar with the HTML for this site, having written the PHP/XHTML/CSS that drives it. But for a novice digging into the tags would be daunting. It might be possible to auto-create the preview template after the first post, by retrieving the HTML that the blog posts, searching for the stuff you know about (title, weblog name, etc) and then replacing. It gets more complicated when you’re dealing with the entry itself, as the blog engine might have modified that in some way (if you use Textile or Markdown especially).
So, all in all, I’m impressed and I’ll take it for the 30 day spin I’ve got it for, and see how things go. I hope they go well.
One last note: I decided to add a new ‘Software Review’ category for this post, and others that I’m sure will follow. MarsEdit has no obvious capability to add categories, but that might be WordPress’ problem and not MarsEdit. So I went into the Web Interface for WordPress and added it, and then refreshed the blog in MarsEdit. My still-open post window didn’t update. I saved to Drafts, closed, and opened it again, and there my new category was. So MarsEdit could be a little smarter about populating the categories in the options drawer.
So as I mentioned before, I’m in Denver this week going to a few customer sites.
My luggage, however, is not in Denver, and the clothes contained therein are not going to customer sites with me.
The flight from SNA to PHX was fine, if a little bumpy on the landing. I make it a point to never check luggage because it just slows me down, and I hate waiting for the silly conveyor belt to bring my baggage to me when I could have had it with me all along. Also, I am keenly aware that I have the worst luck in the world regarding things that are important to me and other people handling them. When I was in college, not a single semester went by without the administration losing something of mine. I’m going to have an issue with babysitters; they will undoubtedly lose my children.
I got onto the Denver flight early with my “one plus one” carry-ons; my backpack stowed beneath the seat and my duffle bag in the overhead compartment.
A word about overhead compartments. They are all the same size, or roughly the same size at least. And yet, almost every bag that is manufactured in this dimension is exactly one inch too large to fit into an overhead compartment lengthwise, and so must be put in sideways. The dufflebag I carry with me is cheap–another reason I don’t check it–but it will nicely snuggle into an overhead compartment lengthwise in between two gargantuan rollerbags that were designed by people with minds one inch too short.
My bag went up into the overhead between two rollerbags, one of which was obviously too long to fit in lengthwise but was smugly sitting there, protruding into the aisle. Now, luggage is not normally smug, but this black bag exuded a particular air of egotism because it was tied into the compartment with steel cord, and locked in securely. Yes, dear reader, locked in. I thought that that was odd, but nevertheless I was in the front of the plane and this was the only space left, so in my duffle went.
When the flurry of preflight activity slid from Act I: Passengers to Act II: Attendants, the overheads were closed, starting at the back and moving forward. When they found my little bag and it’s insane cousin, they decided that my bag was the one that had to go. Obviously they couldn’t take the other bag; it was locked in so nicely. So off my bag went, and they gave me a ticket over my protests.
As I said, my bag was cheap. The contents of said bag, however, were not. From most replaceable to least, I had packed the charger for my cell phone, my shoes (I wear sandals to the airport so that I don’t have to take them off), all of my company shirts, and some t-shirts for after work (including one from England). Oh, and a company laptop. Yeah.
When we got to the other side I had that feeling you get when you know that you’ve forgotten something, but you can’t quite remember what it is. And when the conveyor did it’s little dance and stopped short of the encore where it delivered up my duffle, I remembered what it was: I hate America West because they are the worst airline in the world.
So I talked to the baggage claim person, gave him my information and got the necessary paperwork. It turns out that the Airline classifies luggage as ‘delayed’ until it hasn’t arrived for five days. At that point, it becomes ‘lost.’ This little bit of orwellism brought to you by the letters A and W.
The problem then became that we arrived at our hotel at almost 8 and we had to be at a meeting at 8am the next morning. I couldn’t very well wear the shorts and t-shirt that I had on, so we went to 16th street mall, which was just a block from our hotel, and arrived at each store as they locked their doors in our faces.
We found some official-looking types by a train stop and asked them what might still be open, and they very helpfully told us where a K-Mart was, and how to take the train to get there (They were employees of the train company). They even offered to let us ride for free. Thumbs up to the RTA guys in Denver.
So we waited for the train to come by to get us to K-Mart. No train. Waiting. No train. Chuck, the RTA supervisor, decided that we had waited enough and offered to drive us over in his RTA van. Huge thumbs up for Chuck.
So we went through K-Mart finding appropriate clothes to wear, and then handing over $90 to pay for it all. Then we headed back to 16th street, ate, and went to the hotel to crash.
So here’s conundrum number one: my baggage, if you will recall, was not yet lost but merely delayed, so my buying clothes is supposedly on my dime. But the reason I had to buy the clothes was because the airline delayed my luggage. So shouldn’t it be on their dime?
As I was writing this, I got a call from the baggage claim that my luggage had just arrived. So the airline didn’t even lose my bags afterall, they did just delay them. But I still shelled out $90 because of it. Who’s $90 did I give to the K-Mart cashier last night?
I hope to God that it was the airline’s money, because I don’t have $90 to spend on clothes that I didn’t really need. But there was probably some agreement somewhere where I told the airline that they could delay my luggage for up to five days, and so I’m probably screwed.
And people always envision traveling for work to be fun…
I just took a look at the site design through IE/Win and it makes me cry.
Not only is the transparency effect ruined–I expected that– but the sidebar completely disappears. I don’t know where it goes, but it goes elsewhere.
Really, people: get Firefox..
To get the backgrounds for this site, start with a normal image (bg_dark.jpg) and run this:
convert bg_dark.jpg -modulate 50,30 -level 0%,60%,0.6 -fill gray -colorize 80% bg_light.jpg
This is brought to you by the only useful ImageMagick tutorial on the entire Internet:
IM v6 Examples.
Why is this a good tutorial, as opposed to the millions of other IM tutorials out there?
First off, it has Pictures. It seems obvious to me that a tutorial on how to use an image manipulation utility would have pictures. But if you go to ImageMagick’s website, you can find their explanation of what the tools do, which has no pictures at all. And although they don’t call that page a tutorial, that’s the documentation that exists on their site.
Second, the pictures tell you what they’re trying to accomplish, and how they go about doing that, and–this is the important part–why that works. I know a little bit about colorspaces, and gamma correction, and white-point modification, but I don’t really know about them. The guy who wrote that site does. And he tells the reader so that the reader, in addition to finding the single command-line that they are trying to find, gains an understanding of the system that they are using and how they might be able to leverage that system in the future.
A good tutorial teaches you twice; it shows you how to do what it is you want to do, and it embeds in your brain the fundamentals upon which that action is built. If you gloss over the why, the how is meaningless. You see this all over the place, but I’m going to pick on W3Schools because they seem to be in the top three results from every CSS search I do on Google, but every time I go there I end up going to the W3 site anyway, because the W3Schools site doesn’t include the why, only the how. They don’t ever tell you the tricks behind the magic, and so you learn by rote, which is the worst way to learn that there is.
The real kicker with W3Schools is that in the vast majority of cases, they don’t even point you to the w3.org site, or any site that might be of greater use.
Now, a huge caveat to this entire post: I live by what I call the ‘Linux Principal’, which is to say that one must constantly remind oneself that not everyone is just like me. Other people learn, think, and believe differently than I do. It might be that some people out there learn best by memorizing lists of CSS properties and XSLT formatting tags, but I don’t. It might be that some people can grok all of ImageMagick by reading that the -texture <filename> argument works by reading name of texture to tile onto the image background., but I don’t. I’m open to the possibility that everyone out there is really supersmarter than myself and gets this without effort.
But I doubt it.
Rudy was one of my good friends at ParaSoft. He’s about my age, and was a fellow Sales Engineer with an itch to do development. I don’t know if he knew going in how development-sparse the position was (I was told it’d be half time; it’s more like 10% dev, 90% sales), but he left for a development position earlier this year, prompting our already-undermanned department to do a little scramble to keep everyone happy.
I was sad to see Rudy go, but I knew that he wanted something else; something more. We had been discussing it quite a lot since we had both interviewed for the same position, and the interviewer had let it slip that there was another ParaSoft Sales Engineer interested in the same position. It didn’t take us long to figure out who.
I got a call from Rudy last week and we had a little chat about what was new, what was going on. At the end of the call, Rudy asked if I was still looking, and I am, although it’s an incognito search. I told him so, and he offered to set me up with an interview at Affiliated Computer Systems, where he works now. I was excited and grateful; it would be awesome to work with Rudy again, and I would get to do development work, and I would have a 15 minute commute instead of the hour and a half I spend on the road during my commute now.
I had an interview with ACS on Wednesday. We had a seminar in Irvine and it ended at 3. I hopped in my car and got to Santa Ana almost an hour before my 4:30 appointment. I read Time for a while and then they called me in.
The technical interview was fine; no problems at all. Swing? Sure. J2EE? Why not. JavaBeans? Uh.. yeah.
The non-technical interview was nothing. Almost literally. They knew that Rudy liked me, and they liked Rudy. They looked over my application, said okay, and told me they’d call me soon.
I got the call Thursday, and I have another interview with another technical guy on Monday. I need to brush up on JavaBeans a little, but I’m hopeful and I think the chances are good. Keep me in your thoughts.
The problem with Sonja being gone is that I can’t just drop $150 to pick up a family pack (after rebate). Core Data is a siren; it calls to me…
Here is an Eclipse tutorial that I wrote for work. This is the WSDJ version; there’s an upcoming Visual Studio version that’s similar.
Here’s a picture of my cats.
The grey cat is Gandalf the Grey. He is a mischievous little bugger who likes to get into anything he can and eat it. But then sometimes he’ll decide he needs to be pet and he’ll be all purrs and rubs.
The black cat is Persephone. She is a curious little gal who wants to find the highest spot in the entire house. When she gets tired, she’ll come and lie on my face and purr louder than the TV.
Sonja (my Wife) is in Hawaii this week on a mission trip with the church youth group that she helps out with. They’re on Molokai– where 80% of the population lives under the poverty line– painting churches and installing running water.
So we have a month to move, which is kind of nice but kind of dangerous.
Sonja returns Sunday night. I’m leaving for Colorado Monday morning and don’t get back until late Wednesday. We’re moving into a new apartment starting Saturday. We planned this well.
Actually, it’s not as bad as that seems (The moving, that is: the missing my wife still sucks). The place we’re moving into had a deal going on where they cut $150/mo off of our rent for the 12 months of the lease if we moved in during April, which was a month earlier than we had initially wanted to move. But because of the deal, we actually pay less over the 13 months than if we would have waited for a month and moved in in May. So we have a month to move, which is kind of nice but kind of dangerous. I can see us moving almost everything, and “getting to the rest of it later,” only to have “later” become the final hours of our current lease.
So what I’ve been doing today (aside from fiddling with WordPress and typing these entries) is a little bit of pre-packing. I’ve boxed up an entire bookshelf of books as well as some extra bedding and a few of the kitchen supplies we never use, thus guaranteeing that we will need to reference each of those books, cushion ourselves with extra pillows, and blend things.
Sonja doesn’t know I’ve done any of this. This will hopefully be an “oh-you’re a wonderful husband” moment but could turn out to be a “why did you start the fun without me” thing. I’ll try to convince her that istwasn’t all that fun.
A more surefire OYAWHM is the fact that I’ve taken the drudgery upon myself and called the gas, electric, and U-Haul people and taken care of all of that.
So come Saturday, we can move in to the new place and drop all the heavy book boxes on the lighter pillow boxes, plug in the blender and have a nice drink.
Hello, everybody.
My name is Seth A. Roby and I wish that I could develop Macintosh software for a living. But I don’t.
Instead, I work as a Sales Engineer at ParaSoft, a company that sells keen testing tools, which I genuinely believe are smart and necessary, but they aren’t exciting. I spend my time telling people that they need to buy from us because the tools are smart and necessary, even if they aren’t exciting.
Sometimes Oftentimes I feel trapped at my job. It pays well, and I get to go places and work with Fortune 500 companies, but it’s not what I want to do; I want to develop. I had a talk with the CEO once after he got wind that my resume was on Monster, and he told me that he thought I should stay in Sales, because:
I agree on both counts. But the money isn’t enough, and I’ll never be an architect if I never do some code monkeying.
What scares me is that the money is almost enough. It’s just on the threshold of being a fetter to this job that I don’t particularly care for, and I can see myself becoming trapped because of the cash. That’s just about the last position that I want to be in.
So I’m looking for a way out.
What I’d love to do is Macintosh development. What I’d settle for doing is Web or Java development. But the last word in all those titles is ‘Development’, and whenever I go on interviews they are all impressed by my Computer Science major, but my English major always seems to get me shuffled into Sales positions (like at ParaSoft) or–worse–HelpDesk positions. Neither of these is the path I want to take forward; they are paths tangental and perpendicular to the future I’m trying to get onto.
So, if you want to follow along with me as I try to find the appropriate detour, feel free. Welcome to my new blog.