Director of Unspecified Services

The checkout line at my local grocery store depresses me. Not because I’m forced to wait in line, that’s fine. It’s the magazine covers that get me. Vapid, silly headlines on covers filled with half-dressed women who look unnaturally perfect proclaiming ridiculous ways to either look like them or get them into bed.

The Kindle and other book readers have demonstrated how cool e-ink technology is. And now, e-ink displays are showing up on magazine covers. Can you imagine what the checkout experience will be if (when) this catches on? I’m not looking forward to that.

The entire internet is boring me to tears today.

(Yes I know, I could’ve just Twittered this. Fuck Twitter.)

I love Jon Stewart. This video is everywhere, but on the slim chance you haven’t seen it…

So there’s this new Dell Mini 9 thing, another tiny, net-centric laptop. Neat! Tell me more! Sorry I asked. Found the following video of one of guys on the product team introducing me to this exciting new product.

Well Mr. Pitstick, Senior Manager of Global whatever, when introducing a new product, using video no less, it might be a good idea to actually show it to me.

I swear he just holds in casually in his hand for like 5 minutes while droning on and on about Usage Cases, Value Propositions, Componentry and whatever. Bored to tears.

If you’ve not been reading Roger Ebert’s blog, you should. He writes well, writes passionately, and best of all, writes about things I’m interested in.

In his latest post, What’s your favorite movie, he asks himself that very question. His answer? La Dolce Vita. Great, great choice, but his reason for choosing it is less about the film than it is about himself. That seems fair.

Mine? If I had to answer right now, I’d say Dr. Strangelove. Too bad Anita Ekberg isn’t in it though.

Zim would chase a tennis ball all day. He always outlasts me even though he’s doing the hard part. What a beautiful day it was today. Here are a couple of quick vids shot with the Flip. Great fun.

The better part of a day, wasted. That’s how much time I’ve spent over the past couple of weeks unintentionally watching terrible movies. I say unintentionally because they should have been good movies. They weren’t. This is different than watching a movie you know is awful, just to kill time while ironing or reading feeds. I do that even more frequently, but that isn’t wasting time, it’s spending time.

I’ll list the crappy ones here so you won’t suffer the same fate.

Hancock

I’m pretty much done with Will Smith. Between the forgettable I Am Legend and Hancock there’s not much left to like. Hancock should’ve been great. Cool ideas wasted with more drama than necessary. It tried to be every movie ever made - all at once. Even the astonishingly beautiful Charlize Theron couldn’t save it.

Savage Grace

Based on a true story: An awful, boring, completely uninteresting story. The movie doesn’t help.

11:14

Good enough to almost like. Clever, but ultimately it seemed like nothing more than a gimmick leading nowhere.

I think Hillary Swank should find a new agent. It was kind of nice to see Patrick Swayze again, though. And what’s with the string of severed penises lately?

Smart People

New rule, if it stars Sarah Jessica Parker, avoid it. Think of Smart People as a not-pregnant Juno (yes, it’s Ellen Page) with parents just as smart and cocky as she. Except not funny. Are all smart people really assholes? All of them? The best reason to watch it is Thomas Haden Church, who I can’t get enough of.

Bank Job

I have to admit not finishing this one. It was turning out to be the same heist movie we’ve seen a hundred times. Jason Statham wasn’t going to save it.

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I bet I could live in one of these tiny houses. Strong wireless and a good view would be required. Especially the wireless.

I used to be a programmer.

For years I’d sit at some computer or another hacking away at whatever was interesting or required at the time. It’s all I did. I may not have been a Rock Star™ or Ninja™, but I built stuff that worked and that clients liked. A lot of it.

When development was all I did, there were things that were critically important to me. Languages. Frameworks. Source control. Those sorts of things.

But these days I don’t do much development. At Fusionary we have plenty of developers and builders who are smarter, faster and more clever than I’ve ever been. My job now is to make sure projects get done, using the appropriate tools, on time and on budget.

I have a lot to learn.

The first thing I learned since not being a programmer was that the critically important things — aren’t. For example…

Frameworks

I love Rails. Once I started learning Ruby nothing else mattered. We shipped our first production ecommerce site built with Rails before Rails 1.0 was even released. And this was after 40% of it had already been built using PHP. It turns out to have been a good decision. I’m not sure I’d make the same one today.

I firmly believe that happy programmers are more productive. What I no longer believe is that there is One True Language/Framework that makes all programmers happy. We just launched a couple of sites built with CodeIgniter and the guys working on it had a ball. It was built quickly, professionally and with no whining about namespaces or inconsistent method names or anything. They just built it. The only thing I noticed was that it was easy to deploy and just worked when doing so. I did miss migrations, but other than that it made no difference to me. That was a surprise. You can build great apps using any framework/language. And don’t give me that crap about the poor PHP or .NET guys not knowing what they’re missing. They do, and they don’t. That surprised me too.

Agile Development

Agile development methods work. Or so I’m told. As a developer, they make perfect sense. User Stories, short iterations, code reviews, etc all work great and I understand the value. The problem isn’t in working Agile, it’s selling Agile then living with it. I have yet to run into a client who doesn’t understand the concepts. They seem to love it. I just can’t seem to figure how to execute once they disappear from the process, only to return every week or two with input on things we’ve already implemented without them. And without someone acting as a Proxy for the client who knows exactly what we’re building, it’s back to educated guesses and biweekly demo meetings.

I imagine that I’ll get better at all of this, but right now I’m finding the transition from programmer to manager to be more challenging that I expected. I’ll buy some books, make some mistakes, and keep you posted.

The release of Tinderbox 4.5 brings prettier maps, faster agents and new visualation options along with a boatload of incremental improvements. I’ve jotted down a few notes.

[click to continue…]

I felt so dirty as I wandered into Best Buy to grab a copy of Vista. There was really no way around it, since I sometimes need to test web stuff in IE, manage a few SQL Server databases and of course play the occasional game.

The Vista install process on my MBP via VMWare went easily enough, so I was feeling cocky. What about this Media Center streaming to XBox thing I’ve heard so much about? After 2 horrible hours of dismissing unnecessary Vista dialogs, the XBox still could neither see nor be seen by Vista running in a VM.

And then, a random search mentioned Connect360 by Nullriver Software. Five minutes and $20 later I was streaming my iTunes, iPhoto and (legal of course) DVD rips directly to the XBox - Windows not required.

How is it that Macs frequently do Windows stuff even better than Microsoft?

This of course means that I’ll have to keep the XBox even though I seldom play games. Yay! And this fall, with Netflix coming to the XBox I’ll sell my Roku Netflix player and quite possibly get rid of the AppleTV while I’m at it. Maybe.

Update 31 August 2008 Based on comments, I’ve actually settled on Rivet. It maintains folder structure and streams my Aperture library.

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Every six months or so I decide it’s time to switch blogging engines. The last time it happened I switched from Movable Type to ExpressionEngine. I switched then because I’d heard good things about EE and wanted to try it out somewhere.

This time, I’m going from ExpressionEngine to Wordpress. Why? Because Wordpress does pretty much everything anyone needs for a singe author weblog.

I don’t want to design my site. Wordpress has a zillion or so themes available that I can easily try any time. If I get bored with one, I can easily switch to any other with no fuss.

There are also a huge number of plugins available. If I want to try incorporating some new service like Friendfeed there’s usually a plugin or two already written for it.

ExpressionEngine is about the best thing there is for a large-ish site with custom design requirements and plenty of content to manage. For a simple blog with one guy writing a post or two each week. Wordpress leaves very little to be desired.

I’ve been feeling a bit wonky for a week or so. Tonight It got uncomfortable enough to consider asking a doctor or two to about it. The Internet said I had several symptoms of a heart attack so better safe than sorry, eh?

So here I am. Wired up to monitors, oxygen tube up my nose for the past 4 hours. EKG looked fine. Bloodwork pending. Just had an ultrasound to check my gall bladder I think.

This is one of those better-safe-than-sorry things but I still feel mighty silly.

The cool thing is that I can write this on my iphone while I wait for them to let me go home

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Back to Wordpress. Posting from the iPhone with their app. This is much easier.