Hm, it’s been a busy couple o’ months. Post-home-purchase, I’ve been occupied with work, as we ramp up additional engineers, projects, and ambitions for this new year.
The experience of working for a real startup – to be more precise, a startup still in its infancy – has been enlightening, though not without stress and mental fatigue. My previous stints at Factset and Tagged were substantially different; these companies were well-established and enjoyed maturity in engineers and processes, something that I find myself in the midst of shaping at LOLapps.
Metal Gear Solid 4 is a ridiculously good game.
Even by itself, it’s an awesome experience just previously unseen in video games. Global conflict has become the sole economic pillar. You play as Old Snake, a grizzled battlefield veteran with one final mission: assassinate the leader of the world’s private military corporations (i.e., mercenaries), who happens to be your genetic twin brother. Nuclear deterrence, nano-machines technology, genetic manipulation, and world superpower conspiracies, they all weave into an alternate universe with events drawn from the annals of modern history.
Forget the princess in the other castle.
Engineers suck at communication.
Really, for all the smart people who can read a core dump and juggle twenty pieces of information in their head while debugging driver code, the ability to talk to the common user (bah, who needs users?) is surprisingly rare. Sure, engineers can, for the most part, communicate with each other with usual lingo and acronym symphony, but “dumbing it down” to the understanding of a normal person seems to almost be beneath some developers.
Yea, it’s not a criticism unique to the software world; every hobby or industry has its own terms and linguistic barriers of entry which, if put into song, resemble an international music festival.
Note: The following is a rant provoked by some truly douchebag neighbors I’ve been living next to for the past year. Not that any of this will change seemingly ingrained behavior, but It is pleasantly therapeutic.
Ever stop to wonder how considerate you are to the people around you – strangers and acquaintances alike – and what kind of an opinion they have of you?
I think of consideration as a kindness scale. One end is total selflessness: making others happy is the goal and others’ well-being is the priority. Totally opposite is complete selfishness: being aware and taking advantage of situations, disregarding feelings and opinions others may have.
Essentially, doormats and douchebags. The rest of us are (hopefully) somewhere in between. I’m guessing that, much like driving ability, we see our own personalities as the perfect balance between d&d.
Oh hm, I haven’t updated in a while. Work’s been keeping me busy, and when I get off – usually late – I’m prone to lying around, watching an episode or two of Scrubs, and general vegging in front of the TV.
‘cept nowadays, Pan is no longer with me (yea, I posthumusly named her).
The story’s not that interesting; I posted once or twice, half-heartedly, on Craigslist just to see whether anybody was interested in the older, slightly scratched up girl and gauging the price buyers were willing to pay. Craigslist, of course, is full of cheapskates, and I did get a good amount of insultingly low offers, but ultimately someone with genuine interest in the set and had the means of transporting it (giant pickup will do the trick) took her away.
So now I’m really just staring at a wall.
Wow, IE6 is even more annoying than I remember.
Oh, you know: Internet Explorer 6 is that one browser Microsoft released with Windows XP, easily the most popular browser in the world and also probably the least secure, target of phishing scams and spammy toolbar add-ons, providing only the bare minimal features of the modern browser.
Did you know that on the web development side, it’s somehow possible that working with IE is even worse? Its bugs are well documented; IE ignores all the effort put into standardizing browser rendering behavior and happily follows its own rules, thanklessly adding countless hours of development time to any website hoping to display competently on the (sadly) most popular browser in the world.
To add insult to injury, those of us who have upgraded to Windows Vista and wish to mold our creations on Microsoft’s (supposedly) latest-and-greatest platform have absolutely no way to run IE6 on the operating system. The current workaround is to download a full image of Windows XP and load an entire virtual machine so we can run…IE6.
All this is just a long way of saying that my site does not display properly in the dreaded browser (the right toolbar get shoved to the next element, i.e., the bottom of the page) and after spending an hour I am no closer to figuring out how to deal with the annoying bug.
The moral of the story: don’t use Internet Explorer.
