Tag: Uncategorized

My sister and I spent the weekend with my parents and an aunt to watch the Christmas shows at Sight and Sound Theatre, in Strasburg, Pennsylvania.  We were fortunate enough to see both Miracle of Christmas and Voices of Christmas.  Both shows are Christian-themed musicals with live animals and very impressive set design.  The Millenium Theatre, where Miracle of Christmas was staged, is large enough to have front and side stages.  There was plenty of action to both sides, and the show also used the center aisles to move people and animals in and out.  They even had the actors playing angels on wires, flying them around at heights of what must have been at least 30 feet for some scenes.  I really enjoyed both shows.

The latest podcast of Hanselminutes mentioned a custom search engine focused on .NET topics. It’s using Google Custom Search, and at least for a search term like MSMQ, the searchdotnet.com results look a bit different than regular Google results. The creator of the site, Dan Appleman, has authored a number of books on Microsoft technologies (primarily .NET and VB). He seems to be going for a “quality vs. quantity” approach with the sites he includes as sources (which makes sense for this sort of niche search engine).

While I wait for Google to fix their desktop search bug, I’m using Lookout (version 1.2.0.1924) to search Outlook.  I was under the distinct impression that Lookout got killed after Microsoft bought the vendor (Lookout Software),  especially when I read this post on Channel 9.

It looks like the helpdesk people at work squirreled away an old installation of it, because Googling for it brought back nothing but Windows Desktop Search links.

I was at the San Jose Airport waiting on a flight to Los Angeles when this earthquake hit.  It didn’t register with me that an earthquake was happening until a few seconds went by and I saw the walls and ceiling moving more and more.  Everyone in the terminal (including me) dashed toward the nearest doorway or arch they could find.  It was quite a scary experience, and one I hope never to repeat.

I spent a few hours this afternoon making chocolate at the Cacao Anasa kitchen.  My friend Peter invited me to the third of these events since I’m in town for a conference.  If it’s possible to have more fun in a kitchen, I’m not sure how.  We made (and ate) truffles, cookies, chocolate bars, chocolate soup, and a bunch of chocolate-flavored drinks (spicy hot chocolate, and an assortment of stronger beverages).

Now that I’ve had freshly-made chocolate from my own hands, I’m sure I’ll be a lot more picky about what I buy.
The CEO/owner of Cacao Anasa, Anthony Ferguson, gave us a great education on the making of chocolate (and some of the health benefits).  Before today, I would never have known that chocolate is actually tempered, not unlike steel.  His biography is even more impressive than the great chocolate.

While I haven’t made much headway on my other four resolutions for 2007, I just accomplished the fifth one–a two-week vacation. From September 5-19, I visited Seattle, Vancouver (BC), and Portland. Two weeks was definitely the right amount of time to decompress from work and its typical concerns.

Of the three cities I visited, Vancouver impressed me the most. It’s the only city I’ve ever visited with a public transit system that can take you from the heart of downtown to the base of a mountain (Grouse Mountain). Stanley Park is a two-in-one attraction because it’s home to the Vancouver Aquarium too. Harbour Centre (in downtown Vancouver) has a Space Needle-like observation deck stuck on top of it that gives you a 360-degree view of the city.  Vancouver was easily the most expensive of the three cities where I stayed.  Some Canadians must be doing quite well financially, because there appeared to be an abundance of late-model Porsches on the streets.

Seattle was the first city I’d visited that had wi-fi on its public buses.  It also proved to be as hilly as San Francisco.  I got to enjoy plenty of great seafood there, though I didn’t see any flying fish at Pike Place Market.  Seattle was also more of a college football town than I expected.  There were fans everywhere in Washington State Cougars and Washington Huskies gear.  There were also a lot of orange-shirted fans from Idaho (the Huskies opponent the weekend I was in Seattle).  The most interesting thing about the Space Needle was the exhibit inside where you could view time lapse photos of Seattle over a 24-hour period taken from cameras mounted on top.  The monorail was underwhelming, but I was quite entertained by the Experience Music Project and the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame.  People in Seattle have a great sense of humor.

The only really “touristy” things I did in Portland were check out Vista House and some of the waterfalls in the Columbia River Gorge.   There’s a lot of forest and great hiking out there.  The only thing missing was sunny weather (which Seattle and Vancouver had no shortage of).

One thing I wish I’d done in at least one of the cities was some cycling.  Each one of them seemed quite bike friendly.

Now that I’ve spent a couple weeks in the Pacific Northwest, I can see why people are ditching California to move north.

I found this post on “street programmers” and computer scientists quite interesting because I manage a staff where the former outnumbers the latter significantly. In this environment, his conclusion that the street programmer is better than the CS graduate is wrong. The staff that have formal training consistently deliver higher-quality results when compared to the street programmers. The code they produce is easier to maintain and better-tested.

Mark Tarver’s definition of street programmer is the exception, not the rule, when it comes to people who write software for a living. It doesn’t include the people who got into this line of work because of Internet bubble; people who did it because they saw dollar signs rather than out of a genuine interest. I believe the person who self-teaches well is quite rare indeed.

I can’t dispute Tarver’s points about the state of computer science education. Far too many of them have been confirmed by friends of mine who are in Ph.D programs now. He’s certainly right about the conservatism of CS courses too. I still remember learning Pascal in the early 90s as part of my CS curriculum.

Even with the shortcomings of today’s computer science departments, the degree still serves as a useful filter when trying to decide if an interview with someone is likely to be time well spent.  I’ve also encountered enough good programmers in my time with degrees in math or physics that I’d certainly hire them if they interview well enough.