Weekend update
Sep. 22nd, 2003 09:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsAll-Company Meetings
So, after all the usual pre-meeting angsting, it's a rah-rah, we're-on-our-way, you're-doing-your-part meeting with all the excitement and thrills of a Metro bus ride. The good news is that we've got great business coming up; the bad news is that to make that business happens, they want four extra days out of us so the release date can be moved up a week. Translation: "You're working weekends, right?."
On the other hand, there was one moment of triumph during the meeting. During the first year of development, I locked horns repeatedly with our program manager that the user interface, which was my responsibility, had to be dead simple, bloody obvious, and reassuring. The user had to be able to approach the box and at a glance know it was working. My mantra was, "Nobody care about the color of a hammer. They just want to know if it can drive nails." Well, one of the salesgeeks said that "sysadmins found it dead simple, obvious, and informative." "Designed with sysadmins in mind" and "If you can't use this thing you're an idiot" were two of the quotes. Yay! Go me!
Talk like a pirate
Being the ridiculously geeky person I sometimes can be, instead of participating in National Talk Like A Pirate day, I wrote a GNU talkfilter that takes any body of text and re-writes it as if it were being read aloud by a pirate. It's not quite up to release quality yet, but when it's done, it'll plug into any program that takes any of the other talkfilters, such as as chef, pansy, or l33t.
SWEN
Over the last 72 hours I have logged over 5,580 attempts by the SWEN virus to get into my Linux box. Of those, approximately 189 succeeded in getting past the gatekeeper daemon. Not one of them made it any further because I vet my email, dammit, before giving it even a chance of living outside individual sandboxen.
Will every one of you running Windows please get a flamin' clue, already?
Foolscap
Omaha and Kouryou-chan and I hurtled to Foolscap, where we were immediately hauled off to a rather ordinary dinner with some friends. I spent three days at Foolscap and I'm afraid that there's not much to write about. I spent most of it catching up on my reading. I spent a great deal of it with two, sometimes three, very beautiful girls who wanted to play interminable rounds of Candyland, but fortunately most of the time they were happy to hang out with each other and leave the grownups alone. I attended all of two panels-- such is the life of a con-going parent. I spent less than ten bucks at the dealer's room. I ate way too much food. I mostly missed Greg Bear, but having read hardly anything by him I don't know that that was such a big loss.
Oh, that's not to say it wasn't fun. I like hanging out with other people, in moderate doses, and there was much geekery, mostly gaming and writing geekery, to be done. I played several rounds of Brawl and Boggle, enjoying them immensely. We used WordNet for Boggle and learned new vocabulary. There were a number of panels I wanted to hit but didn't get a chance to do so. Ah, well.
It's funny, though: Omaha and I were high-output all weekend. When sleep time came around, we all crashed hard. Not even the weekends when we do massive gardening, earthmoving and the like, do we usually sleep so well.
Bad Elf!
I skipped the pool today. I overslept and had to choose between hitting the gym and being late for work, or not. I also didn't have the dues ready like I did last week... it was all too much to contemplate. So I just did my stretches as usual. I'll go in Wednesday (They're not open Tue/Thu). In general, my wrists have been doing very well the past week. They hardly bothered me at all this weekend, although admittedly I didn't write very much. They're not bothering me at all as I write this missive.
So, after all the usual pre-meeting angsting, it's a rah-rah, we're-on-our-way, you're-doing-your-part meeting with all the excitement and thrills of a Metro bus ride. The good news is that we've got great business coming up; the bad news is that to make that business happens, they want four extra days out of us so the release date can be moved up a week. Translation: "You're working weekends, right?."
On the other hand, there was one moment of triumph during the meeting. During the first year of development, I locked horns repeatedly with our program manager that the user interface, which was my responsibility, had to be dead simple, bloody obvious, and reassuring. The user had to be able to approach the box and at a glance know it was working. My mantra was, "Nobody care about the color of a hammer. They just want to know if it can drive nails." Well, one of the salesgeeks said that "sysadmins found it dead simple, obvious, and informative." "Designed with sysadmins in mind" and "If you can't use this thing you're an idiot" were two of the quotes. Yay! Go me!
Talk like a pirate
Being the ridiculously geeky person I sometimes can be, instead of participating in National Talk Like A Pirate day, I wrote a GNU talkfilter that takes any body of text and re-writes it as if it were being read aloud by a pirate. It's not quite up to release quality yet, but when it's done, it'll plug into any program that takes any of the other talkfilters, such as as chef, pansy, or l33t.
SWEN
Over the last 72 hours I have logged over 5,580 attempts by the SWEN virus to get into my Linux box. Of those, approximately 189 succeeded in getting past the gatekeeper daemon. Not one of them made it any further because I vet my email, dammit, before giving it even a chance of living outside individual sandboxen.
Will every one of you running Windows please get a flamin' clue, already?
Foolscap
Omaha and Kouryou-chan and I hurtled to Foolscap, where we were immediately hauled off to a rather ordinary dinner with some friends. I spent three days at Foolscap and I'm afraid that there's not much to write about. I spent most of it catching up on my reading. I spent a great deal of it with two, sometimes three, very beautiful girls who wanted to play interminable rounds of Candyland, but fortunately most of the time they were happy to hang out with each other and leave the grownups alone. I attended all of two panels-- such is the life of a con-going parent. I spent less than ten bucks at the dealer's room. I ate way too much food. I mostly missed Greg Bear, but having read hardly anything by him I don't know that that was such a big loss.
Oh, that's not to say it wasn't fun. I like hanging out with other people, in moderate doses, and there was much geekery, mostly gaming and writing geekery, to be done. I played several rounds of Brawl and Boggle, enjoying them immensely. We used WordNet for Boggle and learned new vocabulary. There were a number of panels I wanted to hit but didn't get a chance to do so. Ah, well.
It's funny, though: Omaha and I were high-output all weekend. When sleep time came around, we all crashed hard. Not even the weekends when we do massive gardening, earthmoving and the like, do we usually sleep so well.
Bad Elf!
I skipped the pool today. I overslept and had to choose between hitting the gym and being late for work, or not. I also didn't have the dues ready like I did last week... it was all too much to contemplate. So I just did my stretches as usual. I'll go in Wednesday (They're not open Tue/Thu). In general, my wrists have been doing very well the past week. They hardly bothered me at all this weekend, although admittedly I didn't write very much. They're not bothering me at all as I write this missive.
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shame shame elf
Date: 2003-09-23 04:22 am (UTC)your not the only one i skipped all my exercises im suposed to be walking for 2 miles 3x a week but hehe i havent in almost a month
Linux question
Date: 2003-09-24 05:39 am (UTC)