You’re a programmer for a big corporation that makes, oh, I don’t know, aluminum cans, and there’s nothing quite available off the shelf which does the exact kind of aluminum can processing that they need, so they have these in-house programmers, or they hire companies like Accenture and IBM to send them overpriced programmers, to write this software. And there are two reasons this is so frightening: one, because it’s not a very fulfilling career if you’re a programmer, for a list of reasons which I’ll enumerate in a moment, but two, it’s frightening because this is what probably 80% of programming jobs are like, and if you’re not very, very careful when you graduate, you might find yourself working on in-house software, by accident, and let me tell you, it can drain the life out of you.... It costs so much money to hire these programmers—typically a company like Accenture or IBM would charge $300 an hour for the services of some recent Yale PoliSci grad who took a 6 week course in dot net programming, and who is earning $47,000 a year and hoping that it’ll provide enough experience to get into business school—anyway, it costs so much to hire these programmers that you’re not going to allowed to build things with Ruby on Rails no matter how cool Ruby is and no matter how spiffy the Ajax is going to be.
Read Moremonday
you know, today i'd really like something to go right. it's been a day of people who want special accommodations, things breaking, other people's crises needing fixing, and general asshattery. the answer right now to all your questions is NO, i will not do X for you.
Read Moreorganizing
how is it that i can have: a moleskine storyboard book (for quickly sketching out ideas in meetings) a moleskine notes book (for goals) a moleskine sketchbook (for notes and pictures and whatnot) a treo 650 (for SMS messages, trying to browse the web and failing, which only talks to iCal, and sneers at work's entourage and exchange server.... iCal (a calendar i can stand to look at, and is the only thing the treo will negotiate with) mail.app (for personal mail and encrypted mail) entourage (for work mail and meeting reminders, and exporting those to iCal) studiometry (for freelance and studio work) tracks (a web-based to-do list) a powerbook (for personal things and work things work forgets that i actually need a laptop to pull off) a G5 (for work) and still be disorganized?... and now, back to dealing with the latest work bout of annual amnesia, where people forget all about the end of the calendar year and get to tell me that although they took months to do something, could i please turn my end of the project around overnight?
Read Morein which my house is overtaken by morning glories
i've been put on the BRAT diet (banana, rice, applesauce, and toast), which i've had to modify, as i'm allergic to bananas. but saying you're on the RAT diet gets you funny looks, so i thought about renaming it the TARG diet (g for gatorade), which has the added bonus of scoring more geek points. however, the novelty of being home in daylight has made me notice this odd shape in my living room window: which on closer inspection, looks like this: the vine's come through the closed window, and has started to climb the drape.
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