I need a razor and a goatee!

Listening to (and glancing at) Neal Stephenson's very interesting talk at the National Book Festival here. Thinking about shaving my head and growing a cool Stephenson goatee.

Sundance Films

Check out this link. Some good, some bad. Fairly painless registration required.

Pottery Barn Nightmare

The Pottery Barn magazine shows up in our mailbox every month. Every month my wife opens it up to the page with a bookshelf that looks like a dollhouse. It's $400.00 dollars and both of us know that's a ridiculous amount to pay for, as I call it, "Boards nailed together and painted." So after months of me saying, "I could build that for a lot less!" without having the slightest bit of experience in woodworking, I finally got around to trying it.

I spent $60.00 at Home Depot for wood (MDF, it's like the salami of wood) and some supplies. Then I got it all home and started sawing the living crap out of it. I decided that a well thought out and documented design up front would only hamper my creative freedom with this project, so I played it by ear. I haphazardly cut chunks of MDF off and took wild guesses about angles and dimensions. I used a lot of glue and a lot of screws and not one nail (I don't see what keeps the nail in a hole? Seems like it could just slide right out, but a screw at least requires some twisting.)

So, I'm almost done with the construction of this bookshelf. It looks almost like the real thing. I'm very impressed (and surprised) with myself... So far! I'll post a step by step of this thing when it's done.

All I can say so far... I know why they charge $400.00 for the thing!

11 Trillion?

Where does President Bush get his 11 Trillion dollar Social Security shortfall estimate from? Are we young workers going to get shafted when it comes to Social Security unless changes are made? Well, let's look at the real numbers, see this article (complete with references, imagine that?) It's not as bad as you are being led to believe.

Chasing Nuts

My daughter often remembers things people say to her and uses those things later in conversation. Occasionally, similar words intervene... The other day, she said, "Am I chasing you nuts Daddy?" with hilarious (albeit embarrassing) consequences.

The Bob Vila DIY Programming Method

In my experience, there are two kinds of developers: Those who do everything themselves, and those who don't. There's a certain logic (no pun intended) in writing all the code by oneself. You understand EVERYTHING, to the very core of what it is that you are writing. A Programmer does not have to learn any pesky APIs or figure out how to integrate an existing project into theirs. And I suppose there's a certain mystique in knowing that you wrote a regular expression parser all by yourself.

On the other hand, programmers who realize the value of leveraging the hoards of existing free software can finish a project with less people, in less time, and often the result is more stable, more robust, more scalable, and (business wise) CHEAPER. The experience of thousands of programmers is on your side. Existing software is upgraded, fixed, sped up, battened down, and battle tested. All of this benefits your project (drum roll please) for FREE.

I've seen programmers of the first degree several times in the wild. Often it's an ego problem. I once worked for a company that wrote their own web server because Apache was "just too insecure". So, they wrote their own server that was single threaded and infested with potential buffer overflows. This server operates on boxes running in datacenters throughout the world, and fortunately (for the companies that bought these machines), most are behind firewalls. All of this because someone *thought* they could do it better themselves. Someday, the façade will come crashing down all around them. Hopefully, you'll be standing on someone else's shoulders watching.

Done?

The book is done. This is a big milestone for me, the culmination of something that I said I could do, I started doing it, and I actually did it. It's been fun, rough, disheartening, and enlightening, an amalgamation of emotions.

Will it be published? Probably not. Will anyone read it? Well, I've read it, does that count? Is it really finished? Not if anyone likes it enough to tell me what's wrong with it.

MacWorld... More than just Jobs?

I've never been to a MacWorld and I don't own a Mac (I aspire to someday), but I'm always glued to my monitor on MacWorld Day. Here's a good look at what else was on show there besides the Steve Jobs Keynote, see Alan Graham's blog.