Work

…tick, tick, tick… For various reasons, this is a bad time to be starting a new project, but I had been planning to do this for quite a while. I’ve written a little about work and software development here, but The Phantom City never seemed to be the most appropriate place. So, for those ideas, I present The Clockwork Mind! I really need to get back into writing more, and hopefully one blog will inspire the other. On most subjects, I’ll be here. On programming, software development, and management, I’ll be over there. ...

Seriously? I just ran across this little requirement in signing up for a service that I’m now nervous about using: Username: 3+ lowercase letters and numbers, starting with a letter. Password: 8+ Alpha Numeric characters & must include - 1 uppercase, 1 lowercase, and a number. Special Characters are not accepted! No special characters?!? I haven’t been this annoyed since I figured out my database IDE couldn’t handle a schema password with an @ in the name. ...

You know, now I’m feeling better about the fact that I didn’t get that job with them. I suspect Motricity is going to be laying off some good people in Durham to do “what’s best for the investors.” Anyway, it opens up a great office space for some other company in the American Tobacco campus. The interior of that building is nice and new.

Hey, I work across the hall from this guy! He’s got a window, but since he’s published I won’t begrudge him that. ;) The article is a good tutorial on the CFEclipse plugin for the Eclipse IDE, which I use for ColdFusion coding at work. (Eclipse and I have come to a pause in our struggle and are trying to normalize relations to avoid future conflict.) I had been ignoring the snippet feature for a while, since I didn’t see a lot of time savings with it, but Jim’s article convinced me to use it again. ...

I’m reading an article about a framework in ColdFusion designed to handle object dependencies, and the author relates everything to making a car – A car object needs an engine and transmission – to make things clear. That’s a metaphor with a long history, but I don’t build cars. I handle users, reports, forms…mentally translating from cars to those kinds of collections of data doesn’t really put me ahead at this point. Too bad we have the Factory pattern name; I think it just encourages it. :| ...

The subject line of an email I just received (not spam): loaner mouse for photo shoot Yes, that would be a live lab mouse. It’s always the little things that surprise you when you move to a new job. :)

Nothing quite brings that lesson home than watching your production web server go down just before you’re about to leave for the day, all because a message from you to the hosting reseller inquiring about hard drive capacity was translated by the hosting provider as “Take the hard drives out of that server.” :|

In an attention economy, reputation can take you a long way. In this case, it takes Atoosa Rubinstein, former editor of Seventeen, to an investors meeting to talk about videos of her cat. Perhaps someday I’ll be famous enough to propose cat videos as a business project. Or maybe I’ll keep it simple and just get a cat. :) Link courtesy of Gawker. Update: Doesn’t Alpha Kitty Atoosa sound like a good name for an anime? ...

Good mashup. Link courtesy of TV Squad.

Steve Yegge writes about the Google Way. Interesting stuff. At Google, projects launch because it’s the least-energy state for the system. Link courtesy of Joel on Software