November 10th, 2008 Rusty
Hey San Francisco Coffee Roasting Company, you have the best coffee
That is a genuine compliment from the bottom of my heart. Your coffee ROCKS! Your mocha rules the land of beans. Even your soy milk stands alone (how DO you froth it like that and make it taste just like the good stuff?)
Hey SFCRC, please fix your North location
On N. Highland Ave. in Atlanta, there are two SFCRC locations. One south of Ponce and the other north. The south one is nice but its further from my house. For some reason, I like the north atmosphere better. The north location would have me there twice as often, spending twice my money, if the following were remedied:
- the stench from the coffee roaster in the basement completely ruins any chance of enjoying the outside air. It smells like burning grease. (not a problem inside)
- there are only two power outlets in the whole place. Rumor has it the owner has stated he doesn’t want people with laptops there. Really?
- the wireless is spotty. I can actually live with that but I thought I’d mention it. For a while it was down. I’d recommend you check your sales records during those couple weeks. Seriously. I’ll bet its telling. Don’t forget, it took us a couple weeks to determine that it was fixed. I’d measure that last 7 days where the wireless was not available compared to 7 days at least three weeks past when you restored service.
Again, the BEST coffee. I love the place. I BUY ALL MY BEANS THERE. At least I do when I can work. Sorry, trying to remain positive but my day has been less productive than it could have been and now I am wrapping up. So… great job on the beans and the brew, man. Now stop hating on laptop totin’ yuppie scum and let us give you MORE of our money.
Install some outlets (near the floor under the tables, that would rock) and fix that wreaking stack of smoking stench coming from your basement.
Posted in Blogging | No Comments »
September 10th, 2008 Rusty
Gotta do what you gotta do
While there are several posts online recommending complete disregard for jury summons, I don’t have stones for that. I also have a propensity for getting in trouble when others breeze right on by. If, on ten occasions, I am pacing with nine other people speeding, the cops will pull me over, ten out of ten times. Additionally, I believe there are few things as inefficient as state government and I really don’t want to contribute negatively to the overall system. Finally, If I find myself on a jury someday, I would want someone like myself to be available for that selection even though I detest having to be a part of something so inefficient and poorly executed. At its core, its this jury of peers that makes our government "of the people" and I would find it immoral to shuck this responsibility. Of course, I still hope to never be summoned again.
Pain Avoidance
Getting There
The address is 185 Central Ave.
Get a ride, Avoid Traffic
If you can get a ride, I recommend it. Marta constitutes as a ride. If you are driving, avoid the Interstate. My Google Maps got me close. You’ll see quite a lot of people entering a building on the West side of Central Ave just north of Mitchel St.
Arrive Early, Avoid Lines
Get there early. When I arrived, there were hundred of people standing in a coiling line. Its like airport security except you can leave your shoes and belt on and there are a lot more armed police there to take you down if you get out of line.
I can only assume that 20 minutes would have saved me a lot of standing and being barked at by the officers greeting the assembly.
Once upstairs, there is another line to wait in. You’ll be checked in and can proceed to your seat.
Getting Connected
If you brought a laptop, as I did, there are tables. There is "free public wifi" but my mac couldn’t connect to that. However, there is also another strong, non-secured signal. I had no problem getting connected.
Power is at a premium. If you sit at a large table, there are a couple of outlets. Bring a compact power splitter (surge protector) and you’ll be a hero.
Settled In
Ok, so getting there and getting to a seat was not a lot of fun. I felt very bad for the people sitting on the floor and standing through announcements and "the video". However, everyone was so very polite and respectful that I almost felt privileged to be there. In this forum, every person is genuinely appreciated and no one makes any claims that the system isn’t flawed. In fact, they joke about it. They make you realize that the flaws are, in fact, the strength of our system. Its that malleability in our government that empowers change. On the other hand, change is definitely needed in the juror recruitment process. It is inexcusable to call over 400 people into a room with fewer uncomfortable chairs than jurors and then make them all sit there, all day, while highly compensated lawyers abuse their role as legal representation and disregard the cost of unpreparedness both to the court and the individuals who should be at work, school or with their children rather than doing absolutely nothing all day.
Posted in Blogging | 1 Comment »
September 10th, 2008 Rusty
I have may directions I could go with this. I could talk about an experience I just had with an individual who I had a disagreement with. I could generalize the concept and talk about how most of us believe narcissist are the stereo-typical, upturned nose character who is fully aware of their superiority complex. Instead, I’ll personalize it and share what I’ve learned in hopes that someone might identify and grow from it.
Hello Narcissist
I used to have a very hard time with relationships. My usual M.O. was to fall victim to some oppression, then to become a pesky antagonist to the oppressor, then I’d suddenly find myself saving the day and I would briefly be the hero. Of course, I’d then find myself persecuted for over-achieving and I would, once again, be oppressed…
For this cycle to succeed, I needed triangles. I needed someone to hate on and someone to confide in. I needed an ally and an enemy. I usually found myself, conveniently, between two existing foes.
All of this was made clear to me when I sought therapy to deal with relationship issues that I couldn’t make sense of. It astounded me how quickly the psychologist was able to identify patterns in my past that were so logical and so repetitive. She was able to tell me more about my family and growing up then I was able to tell her. Of course, she is a practicing Ph.D. psychologist for 22 years teaches at GSU and Emory University School of Medicine has worked with the Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University. Experience matters.
What she did, rather than tell me what was up, was give me a book. Trapped in the Mirror.
In this book, many painful scenarios are illustrated in which one individual behaves in a way that is passive-aggressive and emotionally abusive to the other. In reading the review on Amazon, you’ll find those who feel the book is spiteful and depressing and those who feel the book is enlightening. I fell into the latter group. I couldn’t finish the book. It was too familiar, too emotionally challenging to relate so well to these relationships. What I did read was enough to establish a pattern of behavior that I could now identify and explain.
Not your momma’s narcissist
When considering narcissism, most of us think of the person who walks in the room and acts like they own the place, talks down to everyone around them, and behaves like Napoleon returning home from successful conquest. The truth is that most people afflicted with this condition manifest it by "organizing their lives around denial of negative feelings about themselves" rather than demonstrating superiority. The truth is that most narcissists will outwardly appear to be very humble. They will speak of self sacrifice and the greater good. In the process, however, they will blind themselves to any consideration for their actions and how they affect those around them. They get so good at it that they become incapable of observing themselves or the perspective of others. Its as if they could stab you in the face and then absolutely believe it wasn’t them who did it.
To break the cycle or be consumed by it
Earlier I said that I was a narcissist. I’m actually more of a recovering narcissist. Once you are aware of the condition, you have the capacity to break the cycle. You have to work hard to put yourself in other people’s shoes. You have to accept burdens that you’d rather discard in order to prevent history repeating itself. You have to learn to recognize triangles and dissolve them fast.
Today I tried to handle something by directly addressing a problem that I thought could be resolved with a simple communication of my perspective. Narcissist behavior number one. I then brought another individual into the conversation to validate my position. That was both narcissism and triangle making. Finally, the whole thing dismantled and a snowball of dysfunction began to form.
The only ting left for me to do is ride out the storm. I find comfort in the fact that I can realize this was completely my fault and I made several judgement errors.
I watch my son grow and I see in him glimpses of myself and of my brother and I wish so badly to have a richer relationship with him when he is my age then I have with my parents. I believe I can create that reality but I have to constantly remind myself that I am predisposed to repeat history and every step I take must be a deliberate one that is not shrouded by my own, narrow, personal perspective.
Posted in Blogging | No Comments »
September 5th, 2008 Rusty
I’ve been on google chrome for 1 day(s) now.  The whole office has pretty much switched.  Its amazingly fast.  In fact, my post about SugarCRM slowness can now be amended to state that SugarCRM with Google Chrome is awesome!Its unbelievable what a remarkable difference  this new browser makes on a site that was completely unusable before.Considering that Salesforce.com would have cost us appx $400/mo for our small shop, I am quite pleased with the way two free apps came together to save us alot of jinga.We’re also using Google Apps for Domains so Google is now on both sides of our CRM.  wow, scary.   Â
Tags: Google, SugarCRM
Posted in Blogging | No Comments »
September 2nd, 2008 Rusty
A good friend of mine has been an Obama supporter since before he was in the news. I can tell you that Obama has been "the news" ever since. We, via a partnership with the news analytics experts, track news volume. Obama being talked about 3 times the volume of his competitor is just same old, same old. Its remarkable, but its normal for him. I normally don’t say much about politics because I dislike them all so much, I choose to disengage.
Obama is a great leader
When I saw him speak for the first time, I was definitely impressed. In fact, I was inspired. I feel as though he has the capacity to make a difference in this world and will certainly be a driving force in our near and not so distant future. However, is he qualified to lead or country? I know, its been asked and the McCain camp is beating it to death. Well, is he?
What has he actually legislated and what success can he present as proof of his candidacy? I finally found reference to his tax plans. He will raise taxes. He’ll leave lower income people pretty much alone. They are having a hard enough time. Those people who are managing to grow and produce, they get a stick in the nuts.
The top tax bracket would go up to 39%. So, make $100,000. Before you see it, Uncle Sam takes $40,000, leaving you with $60K. That’s an awful lot of the pie. For a family of 5, it breaks down to 0.12 remaining for each member of the family with 0.40 pouring down the IRS gullet.
There’s the numbers. Should we keep squeezing or does it look like the problem is perhaps in the utilization of these funds?
So let’s say I invest my .12 of my own earnings in an effort to grow a retirement fund so I don’t have to work until I keel over. Let’s say I manage to put something away and grow it by investing in our nation’s economy. Obama wishes to raise capital gains, any profit made over a greater than 2 year period (ie: long term investment, aka: retirement) to 28%. So, after already being taxed on what I earned, I get taxed again for being smart and investing. That’s stinks. How much longer do I have to work to make up for that?
McCain will be a lot more of the same
Yes, McCain wants to continue with some of the directions that the last office took with regards to Iraq, taxes, the economy. Is that so bad? …really? I know the war has been a big cluster-f#@% but our economy, though weak and in much more danger compared with 5 years ago, is still doing pretty darn well. I say that because I’ve been hearing that a recession, and sometimes even depression, is immanent - for five years! The media proposes that everything is near disaster but then they listen to what Rock stars have to say in between bong hits so consider the whole picture. I don’t personally know anyone who has lost their primary residence due to foreclosure. I know a lot of people who bought way more house than they could afford, including myself. Still there. Many expect it to rebound soon. I do know people who have lost their jobs but they found new ones right away. The European economy isn’t exactly trouncing us so I tend to look globally when there are global issues at hand.
McCain wants to make tax breaks permanent. He wants to leave other things alone. This will likely cause our deficit to continue to grow. Of course, we measure our deficit by a bunch of 19th century voodoo that is no longer any more appropriate than measuring the length of a mile by the instep of some dead British king. So, are we in economic turmoil? Some, yes. Should we respond by taking all the money that productive Americans earn ad give it to government agencies who still operate under the "do whatever I want" patriot act? I know, Obama will protect us from those mean agencies. He’s our hero. Great. But I haven’t met him and I would rather not appoint a government employee to handle my money for the better of the whole over my interests in educating my kids and retiring with enough to keep me eating while my heart is still beating.
Long Term Consideration
I am no expert in finance. I am no expert in politics. I couldn’t tell you a thing about law (except a few ways you should try not to break it).
However, I’ve learned that you should follow the example of those you respect and those whom have proven success and avoid the mistakes of those who deserve no less love but haven’t figured it out. I am not going to listen to the opinion of some techno blogger (me) about whether I should vote for Obama because "I like him". I will, however, be very careful to find someone older than me whom I would like to emulate and try to figure out what they have learned and apply that to my own situation. As much as I like Obama and what he stands for, I prefer to make my own decisions with my money and I disagree with Michelle that ""The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more."
That statement indicates that we foster a culture where we redistribute wealth from great to small in a framework that favors balance and indiscriminate equity. Unfortunately, economics is anything but. A person who invents and builds a remarkable thing should not have to hand over the gains they made so that those who have not risen above can have the same wealth and benefits. No one should have to endure sickness or hunger and everyone should have access to education. We don’t all need iPods and designer jeans. What happens if you remove reward for effort an risk / benefit? Apathy.
History in the Making
I just felt compelled to speak my thoughts on why it is so important to check the government before handing over more control, more money and more of our collective pie. With limited information, I make careful, deliberate decisions. I want you to keep your job. I want you to put your kids through the college of their choice. I don’t want your employer to cut staff after the tax plans "change, change, change" only to benefit the budget of inefficient and ineffective government organizations. We’re all pissed off about some of the things that the Bush administration has been responsible for but we had only one attack on American soil (though it was unbelievable, tragic and massive in scale). We’ve been able to keep other countries in check who thought, briefly, that this was a good tie to test the line. While my family will make half as much as our last generation counterparts made, we still have a chance to make a future for our children that does not include leaving their education and health up to the government. Remember the cost/benefit of everything we do. Raising taxes provides a benefit of more money in government but at what cost? Communist healthcare provides equitable medical benefits to all but at what cost?
I invite rebuttal and please point me to the appropriate resources so I can make an educated decision as I go to the polls. I was very much in favor of Obama in the beginning. But as this unfolds, I worry about how the message has not evolved. I worry about the "feel good politics" and promises that sound like they may be just more empty promises from a man with no really performance to demonstrate. I spent a number of years claiming that I would be a rock star and many people believed me, including myself. I might still record an album and I might even sell some copies but I am now wiser because I have experience behind me. Idealism has its place: in the hearts and minds of our children. We have no idea what they can accomplish. However, there is a good reason we don’t let our children make decisions until they grow up.
Posted in Blogging | 1 Comment »
September 2nd, 2008 Rusty
Programmers these days despise nothing so much as repeating themselves. If you solved a problem once, its expected that you’ll not have trouble solving it again. In fact, you’ll likely find something better! ..and good programmers have tests in place to prevent the error from recurring.
I was trying to solve the problem of Asp.Net Mvc throwing controller errors as a 500 application error rather than throwing "404 Not Found" when a url points to a non existent route or file path. When I Googled it, some clever hacker had proposed a solution that results in more appropriate behavior. I was going to follow that fellers other posts to see what else they’d contributed. It was me, 4 months ago. I just don’t remember posting that and clearly didn’t apply it to my own project.
…I’m getting old.
Posted in Blogging | No Comments »
July 12th, 2008 Rusty
I tend to be a creature of habit. For example, I LOVE the Coby hamburger at Food 101 in The Virginia Highlands (1397 North Highland Ave, Atlanta, GA 30306). Whenever I eat there, I get the hamburger. They have awesome crab cakes and just about everything is fantastic but I always get the burger.
I do the same thing with other aspects of my life. Every now and then, however, I discover something that makes me regretful that I hadn’t tried it earlier (more on that later). I use Windows LiveWriter to blog. Its awesome, really. However, I have to fire it up. If my VMWare Vista isn’t running, I have to launch that. If it was suspended, that takes a minute.
I’m writing this post using ScribeFire. ScribeFire is a FireFox extension that is tightly integrated into your active browser window. You get alot of context at your fingertips that will save time when creating links to resources outside your blob (or even in your blog). It appears to have social bookmarks built in as well. I also added the del.icio.us bookmark add-in from Yahoo because it looks pretty feature-rich. Navigating to Del.icio.us turns out to be the barricade between me and my social network savvy self. With all the machine refreshes I’ve had lately, and the sheer number of computers I use every day, I am sharply beginning to realize the value of centralized, shared bookmarks.
While I still expect to use Windows LiveWriter to blog in general, providing quick access and integration with browsing is a crucial efficiency enhacement that I wish Safari had. I’ve been a Safari fan for a while now but I may start using FireFox on my mac now that FireBug is compatible with FF 3.0.
I couldn’t program as efficiently as I do without FireBug. Period. I expect my blogging will increase due to ScribeFire. While I sometimes get too busy to see what tools are emerging, failing to do so costs me and everyone around me time and money. Being diligent in purposefully discovering new options for old behaviors is a very valuable exercise. For example, I found that adding Food 101 Truffled Honey Mustard to their Coby burger is terminally delicious.
Posted in Blogging, Programming | No Comments »
June 20th, 2008 Rusty
My new beta site went down this morning. The whole server is non-responsive but it certainly appears that the beta site was the cause. I checked the log files and Google was going ape shit. I thought it was unwise to link to it in my previous post. I actually thought, "Google is going to sniff this out and index our Beta site. Then I’ll have to 301 beta." But I followed that thought with, "at least I can uncover performance issues while time is on my side." Sometimes I hate being right :>(
Posted in Blogging | 1 Comment »
May 22nd, 2008 Rusty
..try, try again? Nah! Try once. However, after a few tries, walk away. Go to the park. Spend time with your kid(s). Ironically, when yo get back, it just might work!
I slammed my head against the wall trying to figure out what, exactly, needed to implement IConvertable. I was executing a SubSonic query that was pretty straight forward. It used a guid as the key. Nothing special. But it wouldn’t work. Debugging was killing me because my sitemap is a little slow to gen now. So I spent a few hours trying to multi-thread my sitemap gen only to realize that I use it in global.asax so I need it completely ready on start-up. Crap! I dumped that plan and then copies the db locally. After the 2 gig zip, ftp and restore, I was back to debugging the error. I finally went for a bike ride.
I returned to fire up vs.net and continue where I left off and its fixed. That’s a pisser…
The alternative title for this post is: how many ADD kids does it take to debug an interface exception? I don’t know, wanna ride bikes?
Posted in Blogging | 1 Comment »
April 30th, 2008 Rusty
Free: grant freedom to; free from confinement;
Free: dislodge: remove or force out from a position; "The dentist dislodged the piece of food that had been stuck under my gums";
Free: able to act at will; not hampered; not under compulsion or restraint;
Free: complimentary: costing nothing; "complimentary tickets"; "free admission"
I wanted to mention a tool that makes my list of top ten productivity enhancements and tools that make you wonder what you did before them. This one is called FreeMind.
FreeMind
Mind mapping software is something I have read about but not really gotten excited about until now. I had, in the past, produced mind map diagrams on paper and whiteboard with success. However, I thought software would be cumbersome and inefficient at the task. Not so!
MindJet Mind Manager is absolutely fantastic. My boss turned me onto it and we used it to generate our initial website semantics. We were using it for various other purposes and ready to purchase additional licenses. Since the expenditure was going to get a little ugly (though we valued to the tool enough to accept the cost), competitive analysis was in order. I found FreeMind while looking for a way to export MindJet MindManager files. I will point out to anyone doing the same thing that the MindJet files are nothing more than zip files with a mmap extension. The underlying data is in xml. I wasted a lot of time looking for documentation for how to use the com api and VBScript to access the same data. However, along the way, I discovered an open source product that works just as well for my purposes.
FreeMind allows you to work very quickly through ideation. If you are struggling with a complex task, fire up FreeMind and start a new doc. Write > tab > write > Enter > tab > Write > Enter > Write > Enter. This will bring you to an hierarchically structured relationship diagram that takes what is on our mind into a simple drawing.
I used it just now to decide on a Controller naming convention for my MVC meets CMS web application where a duplicative navigation structure may be collapsed into a single controller. Once I had the map, the name presented itself.
Here’s an example of what mind map might look like.
Try it! Its free, you can run it if you have the JVM (which you do), and it is a simple install. I’m running he mac version while my peers have the Windows flavor flav…
Posted in Blogging, Programming | 1 Comment »
