Not even a year after we integrated our "households" as a result of getting married, Rachel and I moved nearly everything with the help of friends and family over the weekend to a new townhouse down the street. The upgrade has netted us about an additional two hundred square feet and an attached garage, but talk about a pain in the ass! My legs are still sore from carrying all of that stuff up and down three flights of stairs at our current complex and some of it up one or two flights of stairs at our new townhouse. Maybe the high gas prices will help discourage employers from making their employees move, and thus we'll develop a culture that is more rooted. I can only hope because I hate moving.
I've been tossing around some ideas about Movable Type plugins, and came across this jQuery plugin while I was looking for some implementations of a dialog box written with jQuery. It allows you to load a dialog box similar to how the ones on Facebook work. Could come in handy, especially in modified form.
This article on defense contracting got kicked around and discussed about two weeks ago. I didn't really want to comment on it at the time, but boredom's gotten the better of me. Right out of college I worked on a defense contract. It was nothing big, and in fact was unclassified stuff (Google knows more about the project than I do, if that says anything).
My impression at the time, and reinforced even more so by hindsight, is that you cannot underestimate how much bureaucracy and idiocy goes into a lot of these contracts. One of the biggest problems with the way the government operates is that has no real pressure or mechanism to handle people making idiotic decisions about how the project is going to be run. As a contractor, you can easily find yourself being paid to march a project right off a cliff, and you can beg, scream, and even nearly take hostages, but you are powerless to force things to be done the right way.
One of the other big complaints that I've heard from others is the failure of the government in many cases to get maintenance built into the contract. Without that, once the contract is over, the developers are let go and now the government has no one on retainer to fix bugs. Thus, any serious problems cannot get fixed, and the system must be rewritten from scratch.
All of that said, I don't think I ever saw anyone this bad when I worked on that contract... (For those that don't get it, no one in their right mind ever allows anything resembling SQL to be passed from a form to a web server by a web browser)
Who did your church honor this holiday weekend? It's always rubbed me the wrong way when people combine patriotic sentiment and religiosity. Not because either of them is bad, but because they are two competing loyalties. The Battle Hymn of the Republic is indeed a trashy song in my opinion, and while one could make a quasi-calvinist argument about how the Union army was an instrument of God's wrath, I think we all know that that is not quite what the lyricist was getting at.
I've been tossing around some ideas about Movable Type plugins, and came across this jQuery plugin while I was looking for some implementations of a dialog box written with jQuery. It allows you to load a dialog box similar to how the ones on Facebook work. Could come in handy, especially in modified form.
This article on defense contracting got kicked around and discussed about two weeks ago. I didn't really want to comment on it at the time, but boredom's gotten the better of me. Right out of college I worked on a defense contract. It was nothing big, and in fact was unclassified stuff (Google knows more about the project than I do, if that says anything).
My impression at the time, and reinforced even more so by hindsight, is that you cannot underestimate how much bureaucracy and idiocy goes into a lot of these contracts. One of the biggest problems with the way the government operates is that has no real pressure or mechanism to handle people making idiotic decisions about how the project is going to be run. As a contractor, you can easily find yourself being paid to march a project right off a cliff, and you can beg, scream, and even nearly take hostages, but you are powerless to force things to be done the right way.
One of the other big complaints that I've heard from others is the failure of the government in many cases to get maintenance built into the contract. Without that, once the contract is over, the developers are let go and now the government has no one on retainer to fix bugs. Thus, any serious problems cannot get fixed, and the system must be rewritten from scratch.
All of that said, I don't think I ever saw anyone this bad when I worked on that contract... (For those that don't get it, no one in their right mind ever allows anything resembling SQL to be passed from a form to a web server by a web browser)
Who did your church honor this holiday weekend? It's always rubbed me the wrong way when people combine patriotic sentiment and religiosity. Not because either of them is bad, but because they are two competing loyalties. The Battle Hymn of the Republic is indeed a trashy song in my opinion, and while one could make a quasi-calvinist argument about how the Union army was an instrument of God's wrath, I think we all know that that is not quite what the lyricist was getting at.
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