Month: September 2007

Watusi Redux

So I offered to help my pops throw together a poster that he is presenting at a conference in October. It’s his master’s thesis work and he’s noticeably nervous about the whole ordeal. I’ve put together an assfull of posters both for myself and for others at the previous jobby job so it’s not a huge deal. Bold yet neutral colors. Delineate segments without walling section off. No font smaller than 18pt (preferrably 24pt). Yadda yadda yadda.

And while I’m not a graphic designer by any stretch of the imagination, I have always had a curiosity about typography and read about it in my spare time. So no skin off my back. After a few iterations, I’ve got something I’m okay with and the pops is pleased it would seem. Hopefully it’ll give the guy some added confidence.

But my bone to pick is as follows—and there is always a bone to pick, no? No bones makes for a saggy blog. Anyway, so he works for an unmentioned federal agency that deals with cereal grains and the like. This is fine and good. But WTF is up with their technical requirements? Seriously. I had no idea—and again, I’ve been doing this sort of thing for a while, albeit in a one-off manner—that PowerPoint is the preferred poster file format. Seriously. Not Illustrator / Photoshop / whatever-the-heck Gimp uses / SVG / LaTeXT or even PDF. No. They require their posters be done in ppt.

They’re friggin’ scientists! They ought to know better. The file format isn’t designed for this kind of use. It generates big (not massive at least) files and is prone to corruption, freezes, crashing, raping your daughter. My work rendered as PPT == 14.7 MB. The same rendered in PDF == just over 900Kb.

Unbelievable. Which, when you get down to it, totally is believable. I hear about graduate students writing their thesis in Word. I’ve seen relational databases erected in Excel. I’ve seen web pages served as JPG or PDF. There is one project that I was forced into linking to the web site at work that was a set of HTML pages done as PPT. They were so excited because they could click text in one slide and it would flip to some other arbitrary slide in their presentation. Seriously.

I know, technology prima donna and all that. Yes. I am guilty. But, and I really hate to type this out…

what.the.fuck?

I don’t pull the boat with my Prius. I don’t use a spark plug as a standard blade screwdriver. I don’t mow the yard with a weed whacker. And I don’t mess around with Jim. There are tasks and there are tools that might get the task done as well as tools that are designed to complete that task. Use the designed tools and you will be a happier person.

That, and I won’t have to type this rant again.

MAPSU

MAPSU Banner

I think I found out what my mother has been doing in her spare time lately. Honestly, she was a pretty authoritarian grassroots supporter. I stopped peeing at home because of her ruthless enforcement. Well, that and I started wiping up any stray bits after each violation of the rules.

Nothing better than a naughty pee!

I Do The Watusi

The more I write these posts, the more I realize that they all seem to come with some bad ’80s earwig. The SWMBO’s brother is moving in with us for a bit and what runs through my mind? Howie Mandell. It’s like my attachment to novelty and found music has grown to be about seven feet tall and sports fangs and claws. Either that or it has become a giant shark with a laser cannon surgically mounted to its head.

What?! Where was I?

Oh, yeah, the As-Good-As-Brother-In-Law is moving in for a bit. Which is cool. I’ll have plenty of opportunity to hone my xBox hockey skills if nothing else. But there’s this weird soundtrack running at low volume in the back of my head and it’s just the refrain from that damned Howie Mandell song…

what can you do?
I do the watusi

And that, gentle reader, is what is going to cause me to climb with my trusty sniper’s rifle to the top of the bell tower here on campus. Of course, with my fear of heights I’ll probably make it about ten feet up and then turn around and go home.

I mean I sit here and picture a sillier me (scary!) walking around aimlessly. From my vantage point, the guy is just walking around. Occasionally he stops and shrugs his shoulders and then does a few watusi steps. I don’t know why. All I *do* know is that I’m probably going to be crossing the street to put as much distance as I can between myself and this sillier me if forced to pass him by.

Oh, and I’m waiting for my new install of the Europa edition of Eclipse to install all the nifty extensions I carried on my old standard Eclipse install. I should really figure out a better workflow than to rely on the Aptana synchronize to remote server when moving code to the production environment.

FrogPad

Is is so wrong to want one? Because, even though I know they’re releasing a new version in late winter/early spring that addresses the symbol access issues faced by programmers and that it would likely reduce my typing speed, it just reeks of cool. Besides, it is theoretically better for preventing RSIs and also allows you to keep one hand on the mouse—theoretically making gains on not having to shift your mouse hand back and forth. Believe me, I’m heavily invested in talking myself in to one of these.

Kind of the same way I’ve been heavily invested in talking myself into a new MacPro workstation weighing in at ~$3K.

The irony (am I using this correctly, Alanis?) being that I really cannot afford either but the monthly contribution to my continued existence from my employer is due to arrive at the end of this week and is already burning a hole in my pocket. Also that they’re both due for a significant upgrade in the near term. Also that they’re both relatively useless upgrades from my current computing environment. Well, okay, the dual dual-core MacPro will beat the 450Mhz P3 into such a formless, bloody pulp without even breaking a sweat that the difference between the two CPUs seems entirely ridiculous. No, it’s beyond ridiculous. Ludicrous. The vast difference makes the upgrade seem a little too extravagant to be justified.

The point? Did I have a point other than to link to the current apple (pun!) of my geeky eye in an effort to make it seem more attainable? Is there any other point required? Inquiring minds want to know.

Rerelevant?

Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, makes a stab a relevance. Then takes a poke at some yet unmeasured portion of his readership. I thought Dilbert got old pretty quick and even voted against hiring someone in part because this person kept reciting Dilbert comic strips as evidence of his good humor during a job interview. Yet, suddenly, I am not so great a Scott Adams hater as I once was.

The Dilbert strip can still blow a pony though. Just isn’t funny any more. Not even sure it ever was.

My Kleenix Overfloweth…

The ragweed / whatever-the-heck-it-is that is making me sneeze and snot on everything, both vertical and horizontal, absolutely needs to stop. Mowed the yard yesterday and got about three minutes into the second bag o’ grass (heh) before the uncontrollable sneezing set in. Thought I was going to blow a gasket. Went inside and grabbed the fake-a-dryl which got me through mowing at least. I started moving the mulch/compost pile neé Brian’s dumping ground into reasonable piles of like materials. Then Elz comes around the corner with some water and talks me into going to the dog park instead. Not a lot of talking needed to happen mind you.

So we get in the Egglet and wrangle the dogs into back seat and strike out for NW Omaha. I swear we’re about three blocks into the drive and Elz is all, “let’s just go around the block and head home.” The goal, apparently, was to keep me from swinging an ax—that which gave me a 14 day stiff neck of biblical proportions.

Instead of the dog park, then, we head off to get frozen custard for ourselves and, in a moment of weakness on my part, for the dogs too. The Toaster knows how to eat off a spoon and was able to get through his custard with nary a drip or spatter. Dr. Salt, on the other hand, was a hurricane of sloppy eating. Dribbles all over the sidewalk and his beard is entirely matted now. Looks even scruffier than usual, which is hard to do.

So then we head home, which is where this story is going ultimately. No sooner do I get in the door than the antihistamines went in to full effect. It was like I was operating under seven to ten feet of cotton balls soaked in ether. I’ve never been so hammered by those things before in my life.

Which scares me. Because I had to take one this morning just to start to feel like I could get to work. I can’t imagine how non-productive I’ll be in about two hours…

En Vogue

Way back in the day I spent many a night in a nightclub necking with some goth chick who, in all likelihood, was probably too young. Then again, I didn’t know enough German to ask and she didn’t know enough English to get that point across anyway. Not that it all matters because what this is so far is window dressing.

Window dressing because all I can think of as I sit here to start typing all blog-like after so many years of false starts and code and real life falling apartness is that stupid song from En Vogue that played incessantly at Le Metropol. You know, the one that hammers “Back to life, back to reality” into your brain over and over so that it becomes one of the more obstinate earwigs in my life.

And, so, yeah. I’m pushing out toward the top end of my thirties and I’m on the upswing after some weird-ass shit going down and all I can do is recite En Vogue lyrics in my head. This is despite the good funk rolling out of the speakers, the two dogs who are fighting over a squeaky toy at my feet (try getting a dog past the ex), and a beautiful woman sitting at the desk beside mine. She Sims while I code.

Yeeaarrrgghh! It’s damn difficult to account for the past few years in a single entry and still sound upbeat. Either there’s a whole lot of saccharine platitudes or there’s a morose, brooding man crying into his beer. Believe me, life is too good for me right now to get in to that. So, this all being the case, I’ll just have to bring y’all up to speed as we go along. Welcome back, campers.

I’m off to get a beer and then I’ll return to play around with WP’s templates a bit. Get anyone anything while I’m up?