Blahgorrhea

I’m always somewhat disappointed in these technology conference/summit things. I go in with the expectation that someone much smarter and much more successful than I will have at least one piece of fantastic wisdom that will enlighten me. Invariably I am disappointed, and it is not because the speakers are not much smarter than me (they are) or much more successful (they are). It is because they have learned the same things in their experiences as I have, and honestly, most of it is all common sense. [Continue reading…]

Years ago a friend pegged me as “different” — independent opinions, strange tastes, odd hobbies. He thought I went so far as to relish in being different — that I enjoyed it and embraced it, deliberately accentuating those characteristics of mine most different from the people I associated with. I was reminded of that comment tonight when another friend of mine noticed my wallet and asked, “What is that thing?” [Continue reading…]

I have a lot working against me at work. Aside from being in a new environment with new people, I am trying to be a productive member of the team while working on an application built on a host of new technologies and frameworks. I love that I get to learn new technologies, but I get the sense that I am going about it all wrong, hacking away at new code in a copy-and-paste manner, instead of learning the technology and applying it as I see fit. I don’t feel like I’m learning the way I’m working now — or maybe I’m learning just enough to get by. Makes me feel like a fraud. [Continue reading…]

The old adage goes, “if you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself.” Being the maniacally demanding perfectionist that I am, that is not an unusual sentiment for me. This time, my attention turned to feed readers. For some reason I decided I actually needed to start keeping up with what is happening in the world — or at least what is happening in the world that I might be interested in knowing about. As it happens, that doesn’t mean “news” at all, in the traditional sense; it is more like technology, music, food, random things. Since I have a lot of friends who blog, I decided that I could use them as a filter so that I wouldn’t have to read everything myself. And I picked a few other news sources that I felt would have interesting articles but not totally overwhelm me. [Continue reading…]

This whole “Web 2.0″ thing has got a bunch of people throwing up a bunch of sites really fast. Some of the sites are really good and useful and cool; while others are bad and useless and ugly. What strikes me about most of these sites is that in their haste to pop up on the web-o-sphere, they have forgotten some basic principles of web applications, of which the most notable to me is password security. Upon registration, almost all of these sites send you a confirmation email that includes your password in plain text. Yes, I am a bit paranoid, but think about it: most people use the same password for every site on the web. So even though your site might just be storing a list of RSS feeds that a person reads, you may have just emailed out the person’s password to their online bank account. I can only imagine that these sites are not storing the passwords encrypted in their databases. Makes you wonder what else they aren’t storing encrypted, or what they are doing with your email address.

Let’s get back to the basics, before we jump off the deep end again, ok?

It is quite possible these days for a company to fire its IT staff and move all internal applications to web apps offered by other companies. It is especially easy to do this at start-ups that don’t even have IT staffs to fire. My boss at my new job decided to go this route as well, claiming we’d be “eating our own dog food” as well as saving on IT costs. Our list of web apps includes Gmail, Kiko, JotSpot and Backpack. I was more than willing to give this approach a shot, but then I realized its drawbacks. [Continue reading…]

In “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” Robert Pirsig talks about the effect of grades on student behavior, attitude and performance. He tells a story of a college rhetoric professor who experimented with withholding grades for a semester. The experiment ended with great results, with all students eventually “scoring” where they normally would have but actually learning in the process. He gives a hypothetical example of a student in a normal system who works only for grades and becomes distracted by the “carrot” so that he does not learn at all, and a student in a gradeless system who drops out with a lack of motivation but then ends up returning to school later in life with an intense desire to learn, eventually “performing” better than he would have in the graded system. [Continue reading…]

I’ve been back from Japan for a couple days now, and I haven’t had a good restful sleep yet, so I am clearly jet lagged. I don’t miss Japan; I’m quite happy to be back in the comfort of my own home, not taking trains or deciphering photos of food. But there are some things from Japan I would not mind keeping. Most of them relate to how civilized a culture the Japanese have. And there are some things that the Japanese can totally keep for themselves, most of which relate to some odd rigid formality of their culture. [Continue reading…]

I am definitely getting the hang of things being in a foreign land, but I am so happy that Jen is here to experience it all with me. The worst part of being alone was that I could not share the new things with her. I was unable to fully appreciate what I was experiencing without her to share it with. We are now in a temple in the mountain town of Koya-san. The monks open their temples to visitors, prepare two meals and include them in prayers in the morning. We just finished our enormous vegetarian meal with all sorts of strange tofu-based foods. Jen didn’t eat all that much because she didn’t like the mushy consistency of the tofu, but I had a ball trying all the new things. The dessert was a thick gelatin flavored of orange. It did not melt in your mouth the way Jell-o does, and you could cut it with a knife. I had fun playing with it as I ate. [Continue reading…]

I arrived in Osaka by shinkansen, the famous Japanese bullet train, which I suppose was quite fast. I got frustrated quickly trying to navigate yet another station (Shin-Osaka) and realizing that I needed to take a subway to get to the hotel. There seemed to be even fewer English signs than in Tokyo. I stopped at the tourist help desk for help, but I still needed to ask a couple more people for help doing things like purchasing subway tickets. I suppose I should feel proud of myself for having done as much as I have in such a foreign land, but instead I am just frustrated. [Continue reading…]