Month: October 2003

This is a job interview I should be considering – play with legos for a living. When I was a kid I was lucky enough (thanks mom and dad!) to have lots and lots of legos. “Cleaning my room” usually entailed, as the first step, organizing the legos that were scattered all over the floor (by function, irrelevant of color – shades of what I know see as function being more important to me than style).

Not sure if I’d be able to do it all day long, now. But hell, it’s got to be better than working here. Actually at the moment, I’m figuratively putting the legos in little piles – transcribing web page notes from paper to comments on the associated web pages. So maybe it’s not that far off. But the part where I’m explaining to the emergency network contractor people, why I don’t understand not want to understand the intricacies of Exchange mail server, that’s more like the cleaning the room part that I never got to.

But I would love to be able to have a business card that said I was a “Master Builder”.

One of the things I constantly struggle with, on computers, is where to put my data. I’m constantly arranging and rearranging files, moving them from the server to the laptop, from the palmtop to the server, etc. And scanning photos and putting them somewhere. Then there’s the stuff that’s stuck in some program, sometimes proprietary. Email, my Quicken files.

But under the assumption that I may want these files again someday, say in a few years – how do I be sure I can find and open them? A text file is still the default software storage method; maybe eventually xml will replace that for a lot of formatted data.

Another thing is, backups. I don’t need to back up the same data over and over again, and in fact the more often I do the less I really know where it went. Can I delete stuff that’s backed up? No, that’s what “archives” are for – but if I create an archive then forget to delete it?

Then there’s hardware. There’s whole big discussions about the longevity of CDs, floppies, hard drives, other media. I mainly keep and back up stuff on hard drives, and archive it on CDs, for the moment. I’ve got a DAT tape from some backup a long time ago that I don’t know why I bother to keep; and there are floppy backups all over my computer room I should just throw away. And someday the CDs will be obsolete, but I’ll need a mechanism to read them onto whatever the newest media is. Least common denominator, most cross-compatible is the way to go here; that’s why I haven’t bothered with DVDs because of the diversity of standards for data storage. At least I know if it’s on a CD or my hard drive, I can read it now.

I’ve got a whole lot of stuff to write here, but can’t get my thoughts organizized. Suspect it’s just an overdose of caffiene again.

I want to talk about:
-Cellphone user interfaces
-TIVO
-Interface stagnation
-lUser cretins
-Popups
…and some other stuff.

But at the moment – I’m…
-Checking email constantly.
-Still glowing from the fun weekend I had.
-Looking forward to a date tonight!
-Looking forward to another party this weekend.
-Surfing the usual morning sites: slashdot, memepool, macsurfer, boingboing.
-Too lazy to put links to the previous items, I’m sure you can figure them out if you’re motivated.
-Using Dreamweaver to create a progress list for TGC.
-Trying to determine how to turn the progress list into a database.
-Feeling a bit guilty about spending all my time on parties and dates and never going to see my parents.
-Cursing ASP, Windows, Microsoft, Bill Gates, the day he was born, AND the horse he rode in on.
-Trying to determine if the $100 firewall for the office, will be better than nothing and will make do till we can afford the $1000 one with $2000 of configuration – not to mention backups.
-Still suckin’ down the caffiene – in this case the inexplicable 59 cent, 42 ounce Mickey D Diet Coke
-I asked you not to mention backups!
-Trying to remember if I need to put break lines in here, or if it will do it automagically.
-Thinking when the Rover wears out, or before, maybe I need a Volkswagen – either a 5-10 year old vanagon camper, or a Tuareg. Love that name. (Googling for it) http://wwwusers.imaginet.fr/~yusuf/introduction.html
-Listening to random MP3s at just high enough volume to annoy people walking by my office, I hope.
-Contemplating the big stack of books here on the desk waiting to data dump: Website design, Dreamweaver, CSS.
-Considering a ‘preview’ button for this blog.
-Figuring out how to turn my iSight into a webcam
-Thinking we should actually have a holiday on Bill Gates’ birthday so we could actually curse the day he was born.