Indie Mac developer Manton Reece has it right. This was exactly the motivation I needed to stop procrastinating and twiddling away my time that should have been dedicated to more productive pursuits. Time to fire up Xcode.
Last year at WWDC I had a near out of body experience. I related most of that here. To recap, I used some software that I work with at my day job (Landmark Digital Services) that I had shoehorned into an iPhone to identify a number of songs at an event at the Apple WWDC conference. To this day, I still consider it my 15 seconds of fame. I even have the audio someone in the audience captured of the event. A few months later, everyone with an iPhone would have access to this technology via the Shazam iPhone application (Shazam is a licensee of the Landmark Digital BlueArrow technology).
This year at WWDC, I was once again looking forward to Stump the Experts – the event that gave me my 15 seconds. I wasn’t planning on trying to identify any music this year. Everyone has the technology now, and I knew that if Fred Huxham and Mark “The Red” Harlan – the masterminds of this event were going to continue with the music identification tradition, it wouldn’t be recognizable by any published methods. I had my time in the sun. I was looking forward to meeting Mark again after his comments on this blog about the event last year. He even promised me a copy of his book on Texas Hold’em (which I’ll be reading on the plane ride back home).
I was a bit taken aback when at the beginning of Stump this year, I was invited onto the stage to sit with Apple Experts in front of a couple thousand people where the previous years events were retold and I was congratulated for “breaking” a part of the Stump. It was an amazing honor, and I thank Fred and Mark for extending my 15 seconds for a few more.
It amazes me how many times I’ve overheard people at the conference this year retelling the story of “that guy at the Stump”. Now that I spend more of my time managing developers and working with finance and business development, I have little opportunity to extend my geek cred with programming projects. Sure glad that I spent some of my spare time on that little skunkworks development project – it has definitely paid back in spades. It also reminds me why I started programming computers back on an Atari 800XL some thirty odd years ago – the thrill of creation and seeing a piece of code deliver its magic…
NOTE: If you happen to have any photos of the beginning of Stump this year, please let me know. I really would like to have a photograph of myself up on the stage!
I never really knew how bad Three Mile Island really was – and how close we were to something so much worse than Chernobyl (which I do know the frightening truth about). Here is an interesting take on the event with TMI’s thirty-year anniversary of the meltdown reminding us the seriousness of technology, quality control, and appropriate processes.
A few months back I started receiving Wired magazine pretty much of out of the blue. I’ve never ordered it. Maybe it’s some wayward gift from one of my many (i.e 0.5) followers. No matter, not to look a gift-horse in the mouth (what in the world does that cliché really mean), I read it. I even enjoyed it. Wired features thick glossy paper that feels good to the finger and features a production value that would seem more appropriate in the Chinese Olympics. Vibrant colors, fancy charts and graphs, beautiful women – I mean, it has it all. The articles are obviously nerd-relevant, making it even an interesting read. What nerd wouldn’t like an article on the latest gadgetry, lifting fingerprints from bullets, or the ultimate poker-playing bot?
I’ve noticed with regularity that I end my Wired reading sessions feeling somewhat dirty – almost like I had been perusing some plastic-wrapped pornographic skin-mag from the top-shelf of the local Kroger (which I would never do of course). Today, while breaking from my winter reading sprint, I decided to catch up on the two Wired magazines gathering dust on my desk.
It was while reading a sardonic reflection of a modern “Great Depression” where futuresque bums roam the streets with their Guitar Hero axes and find rest in trashed Aeron chairs that it hit me. Wired is written by a bunch of smug, arrogant asshats who think they are better than everyone else (no, I’m really *not* talking about myself here) – and cater to those who wish to feel better of themselves by reading said self-professed elitism of thought. I thought maybe this was purely a response to one very snobbish piece, but after reading the pretentious responses to some customer feedback and reading a number of other articles in the same light, my conclusions were confirmed. Even though the topics that Wired covers are (sometimes) relevant, and often portray views that I may (sometimes) agree with,they approach these topics in such a high-browed, arrogant manner that it’s almost impossible to be able to trust or feel good about anything you are reading.
In the end, real nerds don’t need thick paper, fancy graphics, and lots of conceited pomposity to be happy about ourselves. We already know how awesome we are! …and for whomever supplied the subscription – thanks, but next year I’ll take Horticulture. Plants tend not to be terribly haughty…
First book down on my Fortnight of Reading Fun. So which did I pick first? Well, I cheated a bit – I had already started Getting Things Done a couple months back on a trip to Philly and was already nearly halfway through.
I’m not a big fan of the self-help book genre – especially those of the “business executive” variety. Fortunately, I’ve heard so many personal positive accounts of the GTD craze that I figured I should at least take a gander – and I’m glad I did. Where many of these types of books just repackage common sense with a bunch of buzzwords and horribly overused clichés, David Allen seemed to avoid this hackneyed approach (although a few of the sidebars are pretty heavy in the tired-speech department) and presented a pretty excellent approach to personal organizational management.
For those who don’t know me well, I’m a typical OCD-crazed organizational freak. I like lists. I like spreadsheets. I like organization. What I found most interesting is that about 75% of the book are things which I’ve learned on my own accord over the last ten or twenty years through extensive refinement of what I found that worked. In other words, if David Allen had provided me this book when I got out of high school almost twenty years ago, I would have been way ahead of the game. Most importantly, this book has given me the final “pieces” of the puzzle that I believe will finally get me as close as humanly possible to organizational nirvana.
So, first book well recommended. While you will likely read a good bit of this and go “duh”, I think it’s comprehensive approach and the attention to details to “Getting Things Done” can be quite life-changing. Considering the number of web sites, software, classes and everything else emblazoned with the GTD meme, I guess I’m not the only one!
Thinking the Corporation is my next action item…
At least there is a little creativity out there… I think I’ve seen this place before.
With the recent hurricanes, presidential election and the economic “crisis”, there has been no shortage of news, doom and gloom to coat the airwaves and fill headlines and bylines. That’s why with some peculiarity that I found myself two weeks ago passing gas station after another that was shuttered with no fuel. When one station a few blocks from my house finally received a shipment, a line of over 150 cars formed with people being told that the wait was over two hours. I decided to get up early the following day, finding the line to be a more acceptable 20 or so cars. The attendant stated that they had about three hours of gas left. A half hour later, I had myself a tank full of gas. Last week, I found another station with fairly short lines to fill up my wife’s minivan. I was the last person that day to get gas from that station. They ran out… Needless to say, tempers were high, and folks weren’t terribly pleased with the situation. I got out of there before it got ugly.
I’ve never hidden the fact that I don’t have a college degree. I’ve attended college off and on for probably 6 years and 150 or so credit hours. I just never did it in any succinct and organized manner that resulted in a degree. This is primarily due to my macro-scale attention deficit disorder that makes it very difficult for me to spend that much time focused in one domain space.