Now, I’m no usability wizard or anything, but even I know a steaming pile when I stumble onto one.
At least they’re working on Nvu as well. (Attention software people: I am available to name things on very short notice!)
Update: It burns!
Further: They must have been hacked or something. I mean, honestly.
I’d vote Greenspan in a second, I tell ya.
My Bell woes are well-documented. It’s never fun dealing with them, but there are few other choices for some of the services I want, like DSL.
Recently, they were upgrading DSL services, moving their 1.5 megabit customers up to 3 megabit for no charge, and we 3-meg customers up to a nice 4.5 megabits. I was quite looking forward to it.
First, they did the 1.5→3.0 upgrade, and apparently that didn’t work exceptionally well, so they reverted those customers to 1.5. Except, whoops, they took all the existing, premium-paying customers with them. What a crock.
After last night’s hockey-watching extravaganza, I had to get to bed pretty quickly, because this morning was my first trip rock climbing in well over a year. It went pretty well, and the previous irrational fear issue seems to be largely resolved. Lots of fun.
A mostly-lazy afternoon followed, in which I played video games, watched still-more hockey, made a nice dinner of grilled-beef-and-veggie sandwiches, and then made a fair bit of progress on monoconnect:
: old; mono --debug ../xpcom-dotnet.exe say this-is-sorta-cool
testimpl says: this-is-sorta-cool!
: old; mono --debug ../xpcom-dotnet.exe shout this-is-sorta-cool
testimpl shouts: this-is-sorta-cool!
(Meaning, roughly, that I can now invoke methods on XPCOM objects from C#, as long as they only take string parameters, and as long as I don’t need to do anything especially tricky to get my hands on those objects in the first place. Baby steps, baby steps.)
I hear tell that Nat and Erik of XImian fame are descending on my fair city tomorrow, so I should do some liver stretches before going to sleep, I suppose.
Today was my last day of work for CFS, and I spent most of last night up finishing off the last features I really wanted to see in this first cut of the web management tool, so I had a bit of a slack day. Turned off the bugzilla notifications, deleted my ssh keys from the company server, removed some autoconnect entries from my IRC config, sent the requisite “thanks+bye” mail, all the usual stuff.
I am in a ridiculously good mood.
At some point, Coop will really have a great manager, and this will clear up some of his misconceptions. I had a great time working with him, as I always do, and always knew I would. I hope, too, that he can continue to enjoy his time with CFS, and that they’ll take good care of him.
To celebrate, I suppose, my new unemployment, I sat on the couch reading fiction (link has spoilers), of all things, and drinking girl drinks — the kind with real vodka and sugar, though; you can keep your corn-syrup-malt-beverage nonsense down south, thanks. That led, of course, to a nap, and upon waking I watched some quality playoff hockey. If you were at the Calgary/Vancouver game, I will confess mortal, all-consuming jealousy. It was one of the finest hockey games I have seen in years, non-call on the Vancouver shove-and-shoot goal and everything.
And because I’m a geek, I did a little bit of hacking on a Mono/XPCOM bridge, which I’ve been meaning to do for some time:
: xpcom.net; mono --debug typeinfo.exe nsIComponentManager 4
nsIComponentManager#4:[0] UInt32 getClassObjectByContractID([In] [Pointer]String,[In] [Reference, Pointer]NSIdPtr,[RetVal, Out] [Pointer]InterfaceIs)
Relaxing is my business, and business is good.
There are no subscriptions. We don’t lack money, and we may attack you in the next issue. No one is safe.
We will print no letters to the editor. We will give no space to opposing points of view. They are wrong. The Underground Grammarian is at war and will give the enemy nothing but battle.
A friend of mine says that my writing reminds him of Mr Mitchell’s, which I find quite flattering, though I remain skeptical.
The monitor at home is starting to make these periodic colour-and-brightness shifts that lead me to believe that it’s on its way out. I’d like to buy one of these little babies — Zach, Phil and the boys at AnandTech really like theirs — but Tyla says I have to find a new job before I can do that.
She’s no fun at all.
“We’ve got to put it behind us,” Senators defenseman Wade Redden said. “We obviously don’t feel good about it, but it’s not like they really dominated us.”
On that note, bring on the playoffs!
< dria> we should so totally rule the world
< phik> if we'd just stop playing russian roulette with each others' careers
This Friday, as some of you are aware, is my last day with CFS. I’m not going into the whys and wherefores of the decision right now, if ever, but your guesses are probably not all that far off the mark. It was a very fun ride, and I learned a tremendous amount, which is basically the sum of my success conditions for a job; I wish the CFS crew nothing but the best, of course.
I am presently entangled in a mutual courtship with a large software vendor who is looking for a strong open source strategist and technologist to lead their nascent efforts in the whole “open desktop space”. None were available, apparently, so they’re talking to me.
Carmack is totally right about work expanding to fill the time available, and the fact that people will add more polish rather than just finish faster, given the tools to automate or accelerate a previously-lengthy task. Middleware helps by letting people skip or exponentially compress entire phases of game development, but there is basically no middleware that really takes the meaty part out of an art-production schedule, that I’ve seen. You can outsource to cheaper people (Eastern Europe is booming, I hear) and parallelize that way, but at the obvious cost of the risk that brings, and the perhaps-less-obvious cost of a fractured art style.
My proposed solution is generated content. (more…)
