As I look back on my blog, I see a bunch of weeds and neglect. It's been an interesting past week at work. Things have come crashing down on our heads because of management. I feel like I am living a Dilbert comic right now, in part because when we finally got the requirements for our products out of our management, it turns out that there is no way in hell that we could actually sell them (just the products, not the management as well, unfortunately). Now, I could be wrong about part of that because the requirements could become something else today, but then they could be something else on Friday for that matter. Flavor du jour requirements. Lovely.
I'm not bitter, despite the fact that I clearly have better business sense at 24, having been out of college now for less than two years, than people who have been in the industry now for over twenty years. This only reaffirms my belief that age only creates wisdom in those predisposed to wisdom, and only compounds foolishness in those prone to foolishness. And people wonder why I give no automatic extra respect for those much older than I am, until they prove that they are in fact more mature and wise than I am.
Last week I got an 8GB iPod Touch from Amazon. I cashed in $150 worth of rewards points from MyPoints to get the thing down to about $166. For those that don't pay attention to such things, it is a lobotimized iPhone, not your average iPod. In other words, I can listen to music and surf the web on it at the same time because it runs a slimmed down version of MacOS X. So, naturally, I have left my computer converting dozens of DVDs that I have into MPEG4 movies that can be put on my iPod. All you need to do this is download a good DVD ripper like DVD Decrypter or DVDShrink, and download a copy of Handbrake. Rip the DVD to your hard drive, open it in the Handbrake GUI, and in the menus at the top, look for the presets, and select one of the presets for iPod videos in order to convert a DVD that way. Takes about 1.5-2 hours to convert a ripped DVD. I never said that it wouldn't take time...
So, between the iPod, planning how to code for it when the SDK comes out in February, and dealing with on-the-job bovine excrement, I have been derelict. However, after reading this, and seeing this comment on my blog post about scaling back and outright abolishing of certain college programs, I am compelled to write once more...
**UPDATE**: Nothing like getting sucked into four hours straight of meetings to make you feel too drained to write a long blog post, which you said you would...
It could be worse.... Just think. Your office could be filled with yellow jackets, hot lava, poli-sci majors, 40 year old single cat women, or sharks! That would be worse. Think about it. Just taking a minute out of my fun day of trying to figure out what's busted in tomcat, to remind you to think happy thoughts - somewhere out there is a poor guy, who shares a shark infested office with a bunch of 40 year old cat women who majored in poli-sci, who have hot lava flowing from them, and are followed by a swarm of yellow jackets everywhere they go. I am trying to think happy thoughts... Oh and the latest here. Forget Netbeans, we found a bug that is sooooo bad, we can't use it anymore. Stupid path overrides! Who hard codes paths into things?! Ugh. Stupid developers. Esh. Anyway, just trying to spread the joy where ever I go. :)
Actually, I think the worst would be a poli-sci major riding on a shark's back, eating and regulating everything in its path.
I remember those days (and not kindly) ... We used to have a meeting (with the accounting department) where we would prioritize their projects. In short, each manager got to have two #1s. Yes, that was a compromise because having only 1 top priority was not enough. But in accounting, there was a VP and 12 managers - and the VP refused to prioritize among his managers' projects. So we had 5 programmers on our team who among themselves shared 26 #1 priorities.
It's no wonder we had to change the names of our users (from 'user' to 'client' to 'customer' and back to 'user') every 18 months.
Heh. Makes me really glad I'm a one-man office on a purchased database front end.
HAPPY, HAPPY, JOY, JOY!
Similar to Rachel, I like to spread... erm... the "joy" too!
WW (I know, I'm too lazy to log in :)
Yep Triton, that is definitely worse! It could also be worse if those women were women's studies majors. Ok, I think my work here is done. :D
This only reaffirms my belief that age only creates wisdom in those predisposed to wisdom, and only compounds foolishness in those prone to foolishness.
Well-said.