Matt Legend Gemmell – What have you tried?

If you’re a developer and you’re about to ask another developer a technical question (on a forum, via email, on a chat channel, or in person), you’d better be ready to answer the question ‘What have you tried?’

If everyone would listen to Matt before posting, we'd have a tremendous improvement in the pool of developers.

An opinion on Gay Marriage Rights « The Little Cog

Sounds like I'm not alone.

Let's Play

Apple Has Learned The Importance of Play. We Should Too.

I have to agree.

Once again Ze nails it

children's songs for adults:

Laura wrote and wanted a song to remind her to chill out when she got anxious. I asked people to send me vocals so that I could have a chorus behind me...(special thanks to everyone that sent in audio)here's the result :: wear headphones, it ain't mixed so great

(Via ze's page :: zefrank.com.)

Jalkut on MS Ads

Microsoft Ads Are Genius: "The very fact that Microsoft can dance at all will be enough to sell them as belle of the ball to most who look on."

(Via Red Sweater Blog.)

Gruber on Apple vs. MS

★ Memoranda: "Apple and Microsoft, as ever, offer a study in contrasts. Take, for example, two recent company-wide memos from CEOs Steve Jobs and Steve Ballmer."

(Via Daring Fireball.)

My Hipster & Process

I've become a big fan of my Hipster PDA. I had the original Palm Pilot, back when there was only one model and so no choice. Over the years, Palms died and I bought new ones. I went through five. When the last one died, I stopped and thought about what I used my Palm for. I realized that a 40¢ pack of 3x5 index cards and a binder clip could do the same job. Not long after, I ran across the Hipster PDA on 43folders. I started using the DIY Hipster with 3x5 cards. It's been fantastic. Eventually, I added Fiendish Master Plan (fmp) to my arsenal, along with a Quicksilver trigger for adding tasks to fiend.txt. Then, I wanted an easy way to print my fiendish contexts as 3x5 cards, so I wrote carder. Now, I use the Quicksilver trigger to add lines like this:

^agenda chainsaw @Mike
^agenda gloves @Mike
^agenda Return Megaforce @Bill
^agenda rope @Mike
^agenda plastic sheeting @Mike

The first tag (^agenda) gets used by fmp to move the task into the right context file (agenda.txt). The task itself is "Return Megaforce." And the last tag (@Bill) is used by carder to categorize items on the context card that prints. This ends up with a card that looks like this:

                          2008-07-23 Agenda
===========================================
-------------------------------------- Bill
[] Return Megaforce
-------------------------------------- Mike
[] chainsaw
[] gloves
[] rope
[] plastic sheeting 
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
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[] ________________________________________

Hipster Organization

I have four sections in my Hipster PDA: context lists, later lists, blank preprints, and true blanks.

Context Lists

My current contexts are: home, call, errand, office, web, macbook, and imac. I use different kinds of category tags in different contexts. In the agenda context, the category is the person I need to be with for the agenda to apply. It used to be that I had contexts per person for these tasks, but that resulted in a dozen cards with one or two items each. Compiling them under an agenda context with the person as the category has been a huge improvement. For the errand context, the categories are specific store names (or unfiled/no category if it doesn't really matter where I get it). The web context usually has categories for music, sites, specific work projects, and personal. The macbook and imac contexts are transient. There are a couple of things I need to do on those specific machines, not just any computer, so I have those two contexts with two tasks each. When I finally do those things, the contexts will be dropped.

Later Lists

These are lists that seem similar to the context lists, and in fact are managed with carder and fmp just like the context lists. But their contexts are more vague: basement, someday-maybe, to-read, wishlist-audio, wishlist-print, wishlist-video, and a card of phone numbers I need but don't rate adding to my phone such as the contractor working on the new roof. The big difference between these and the context cards is that these lists tend to remain static for long periods of time. There will be a trickle of additions, but things tend to come off the lists only once in great while. Wish lists tend to shrink around birthdays and Christmas. To-read shrinks as I get around to reading that book I've always meant to. Basement shrinks as I complete elements of the basement remodeling. Someday-maybe will shrink when I finally start working on that novel I said I'd write in high school. And I'll take the contractor's number off the list when he finishes the roof. It's the time-scale that makes these fundamentally different from the first set of lists, which change many times a day. These are access much less frequently, and so I've finally moved them into a separate section, thereby keeping them from getting mixed in with the fast crowd.

Blank Preprints

I have about five copies of the DIY Hipster to-do list here. I can pull one out to add a context to the first section if I need to add one when I'm not in a position to do it through fmp, say when I'm at my daughter's softball game.

True Blanks

These are just plain blank 3x5 cards. Sometimes lined, sometimes unlined. Usually a mix depending on what I picked up last time I was at the store. Usually five to ten cards here. A year from now I'll probably be doing this differently. In the past, my hipster has included many other preprinted cards, such as yearly, monthly, and weekly calendars. I found I didn't use them enough to justify carrying them around. YMMV.

Neil Gaiman on why he defends the CBLDF & 1st Amendment

Um. Tabalicious. Tabapocalypse. Taberrific.: "If you're offended by something, you talk about it. You make your own cartoons. You out-argue your opponents. You don't stop them talking, or cartooning. That's wrong. Because if you can do that to them, someone else can do that to you. "

(Via Neil Gaiman's Journal.)

Lucky to be a Programmer : Gustavo Duarte

Lucky to be a Programmer : Gustavo Duarte:

Few things are better than spending time in a creative haze, consumed by ideas, watching your work come to life, going to bed eager to wake up quickly and go try things out. I am not suggesting that excessive hours are needed or even advisable; a sane schedule is a must except for occasional binges. The point is that programming is an intense creative pleasure, a perfect mixture of puzzles, writing, and craftsmanship."

I couldn't agree more.

Peter Merholz Interviews Michael B. Johnson of Pixar

Peter Merholz Interviews Michael B. Johnson of Pixar: "

Michael B. Johnson, on Pixar’s practice of creating a complete prototype of every film before starting work on the actual movie:

We’d much rather fail with a bunch of sketches that we did (relatively) quickly and cheaply, than once we’ve modeled, rigged, shaded, animated, and lit the film. ‘Fail fast,’ that’s the mantra. With a team of 10-20 people (director, story artists, editorial staff, production designer and artists, and skeleton production management) you can make, remake, and remake again a movie that once it hits 3D will take an order of magnitude more people to execute. The complexity of the task does not ramp up linearly.

Johnson leads Pixar’s internal software tools team — his annual lunchtime talks at WWDC fill to standing-room only.

'★'

"

(Via Daring Fireball.)

Venture Altruist

One of my favorite ideas in Accelerando: a venture altruist.

This genius goes around telling people better ways to do things, making everyone else rich, for no fee. As a result, he gets comp-ed pretty much anywhere for anything.

Stewart Butterfield’s Resignation Letter to Yahoo

Stewart Butterfield’s Resignation Letter to Yahoo: "

I'm with Gruber. This is a fantastic letter.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

Ooh, a Cthulhu funny!

they must need bears - Overheard at WisCon:

R'lyehan tourist phrasebook:

Help. I am being devoured by your octopus.

My species does not breathe water.

No thank you. I do not wish a fungus.

I'm sorry, no. I have claustrophobia.

You seem to have a frog in your throat.
You seem to have a frog in your soup.
You seem to have a frog in your pants.

Would you like a lemon drop?

Peter Williams - REST vs WS-* War

Such a beautiful turn of phrase:

…I think it [will] survive in a way far more like the way Cobol is still around today: as a zombie, unkillable and ready to eat the brain of anyone who wanders too close the legacy systems.

Nice Find Ze

a nice moment: " Central Washington offers the ultimate act of sportsmanship "

(Via ze's page :: zefrank.com.)

Neil Gaiman: C.S Lewis and Mithras

Neil Gaiman - Neil Gaiman's Journal: balancing acts and Mithras:

Really enjoyed an article on C.S. Lewis in The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/critics/content/articles/051121crat_atlarge) -- partly, I think, because it articulated something that started to puzzle me when I was writing 'The Problem of Susan':

Yet a central point of the Gospel story is that Jesus is not the lion of the faith but the lamb of God, while his other symbolic animal is, specifically, the lowly and bedraggled donkey. The moral force of the Christian story is that the lions are all on the other side. If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible—a donkey who re-emerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation—now, that would be a Christian allegory. A powerful lion, starting life at the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth.

Get Infected for Free

Scott's gotten his publisher to make the PDF of Infected available as a free download. So go to Amazon and buy it, then download the PDF 'cause you can't stand waiting for UPS.

JC played my promo!

I was all set to pimp this episode of the UltraCreatives anyway. It's a great episode and I want to promote J.C. and Scott. This let's me do both at the same time. Then I get to the end of the episode and, sacred cow![pardon my strange Sigler reference], there's my promo! Cool.

UltraCreatives | 7th Son: J.C. Hutchins' Podcast Novel Trilogy: "UltraCreatives Interview #8: Scott Sigler"

How It All Ends, Part 2

All of the shows are posted. You can find all of them except the WMV version in iTunes. And here are all of the direct links:

Show Links

RSS

MP4 AppleTV iPod WMV

iTunes

MP4 AppleTV iPod

Windows Media Player

MP4 AppleTV iPod WMV

Winamp

MP4 AppleTV iPod WMV

Real Player

MP4 AppleTV iPod WMV

Wil Wheaton on Barack Obama

my con sars. let me show you it.: "Thing the second: Barack Obama's speech 'A More Perfect Union' yesterday is one of the most inspiring and wonderful political speeches I've ever heard. He wrote it himself, too. Not a consultant, not a speech writer. He did it. That's phenomenal. He talked to us like we were grown-ups, and addressed something Americans have needed to deal with for decades. It brought tears to my eyes, inspired me, and reaffirmed why I'm so proud to support him."

(Via WIL WHEATON dot NET: Where is my mind?.)

Podcast

I'll be remastering the podcasts I can to address the wildly varying mic levels. I'm still trying to decide what to do about episodes 1-21, for which I lost the masters. Should I let sleeping dogs lie, or re-record them? If I re-record them, should I go for an accurate copy, or just a new recording with the same playlist, or something else I haven't thought of yet?

MacBook Air

I think the MacBook Air is a placeholder product. It's cool enough in its own right to justify its existence, but it was made to get the market used to new ideas, and a subsequent product will capitalize on those ideas.

How It All Ends

Now available in Podcast form: How It All Ends (MP4)
How It All Ends (AppleTV)
More to come soon (iPod, WMV, AVI), but I wanted to get this posted.

Podcast Evolution

I've added a del.icio.us account for the podcast: http://del.icio.us/secondfloorlounge. You can use the for:secondfloorlounge tag in del.icio.us to send me links to new music.

For now, I'm still sticking to the Podsafe Music Network (PMN) as the only source of music played on the show. I'm considering broadening the field, and am open to suggestions from anyone listening.

I've got voice mail for the show at (206) 202-3308, e-mail and web site always linked in the show notes, and now del.icio.us.

Immigration Part 2

There was a bit I heard on NPR today (OK, it was on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me) where a resident of the southwestern US responded to a question about the issue of illegal immigrants. His position was that the first priority is to secure the borders before dealing with the illegals currently in the country. His phrasing was that we "need to stop the bleeding" before we can address other issues.

My take is almost the opposite of his. To continue his wound analogy, I think we need to first remove the foreign matter before suturing the wound. I don't think we can practically secure the border when the perception is that once you make it across, you're home free. I think it will be much easier to stem the tide when the prospects for illegals is not as rosy.

I do want to emphasize again that I am not against immigrants in any way. Only illegal immigrants. I am perfectly happy with as many immigrants coming in as we feel we can handle. I just want them to come in through the proper channels.