Rhonabwy

Yes!

Ah, I've been waiting for this!

Google now has Safari support for their Maps application. (Courtesy of MacWorld)

It's peep season

This evening has been "errand evening" - doing all the things that needed doin' and catching up. We swung out to Ballard after the home stuff was all done, intent on finding a bite to eat and Karen was hoping to persuade me to patiently wait at Jo-Anne's while she hunted up a box.

Well, Jo-Anne's didn't have an good boxes, dinner was lovely (India Bistro), and the lack of reasonable boxes led us to Fred Meyer.

Yes, this is where the story breaks down, and the hero (that's me) falls to the dark side.

We went for a $3 box.

So why is it that not only did we end up spending $80 there, but I spent over 75% of that?!?! I didn't even want to buy anything there!

Ah well. I've four new books to read now, and we have a toaster again (it's rather silly to be without a toaster for that long - at least given how much we enjoy having toast), and best of all:

I GOT PEEPS!!!

(not $80 worth, but enough to satisfy)

coffee shop recruiting

Karen and I spent a lovely evening chilling at the starbucks at Queen Anne and Boston, chatting about whatever and generally relaxing. One of the topics was "are you sure the Macintosh market share is really that low?"

Walking around coffee shops in Seattle is sort of an ad for Apple laptops. They're freakin' all over the place, and tonight they were outnumbering the windows laptops. Karen's been paying attention to market share because of her web design class, where knowing your market is not only smart - it's critical because of the really wacked out compatibility problems that exist between the browsers.

And it was while we were discussing that topic that we switched comfy chairs since someone had just left, and I noticed that one of the apple laptops in the place had a book with a yellowish cover with a green horizontal stripe on it. So I went over and chatted with the guy.

I missed his last name, but his first was Andrew. His background was in the GTK+ linux coding world, and he was just breaking into the Objective-C game. Relatively new out of college, based on our conversation, and trying it out because a couple of friends of his had described programming GUI's with Objective-C as "the shit". I mostly went over to pimp the XCoders group, which he seemed interested in. Hopefully we'll see him in a couple of weeks at our next meeting. The funny thing was, as we got to talking, he was asking about where he could read code, find good examples, etc.

I pointed him at Cocoalicious, Adium, and Fire all for interesting bits of open source code to read. The really humorous thing was that he whipped out a quick handy little editor to scribble these notes down on : VoodooPad. I'd already introduced myself, so my vanity made me tell him to open up the credits window, and pointed out my name. (Sorry Gus - he was using the "Lite" version...)

So it was a fun evening, out doing a little ad-hoc XCoder coffee shop recruiting.

UnitKit, growl, and XML

James has been wild-hacking on the UnitKit codebase this weekend, making all sorts of really cool progress. In fact, if you haven't taken a look - go check out his "sneaky peak".

My own little addition is getting some output in XML format, which is quietly tucked away in there. It's not nearly as dramatic as the move to notifications (which was great), or the really cool Growl notification mechanism, but I hope it'll be useful. I still need to finish up generating some XSLT so that there's a reasonable build report - both to write out some HTML for anyone's use and some to use specifically with CruiseControl - the reason I added the XML bits in the first place.

friday rolling to an end

What started out as absurd got really down and dirty this afternoon. Lots of little technical came out of the woodwork, and I've spent most of today battling them (with lots of help). Some of it was just frustrating, but with a little distance and reflection, quite of bit of it was a really good learning experience too. Not one I intended to really have, but hey - you don't always get to choose those.

Now I'm chillin and taking in the evening, doing a little light reading and thinking about hitting the sack.

Friday the absurd

It's friday the absurd. Or at least that's how it seems to be playing out based on the morning.

I just finished doing the dishes, and I'm reminded that my strange morning at this high tech company included listening to a barista at a nearby coffee shop talk about dopamine, potentially controlled drugs, age-retardation, and UFO's.

So how much more interesting can you get?

Actually, the dishes were something that made a lovely break. I wish, in fact, that we had an oven here in the office. I'd love to have an oven here. It's really the small things that can make an office really cool. In this case, we have a kitchen with a set of dishes (nice, simple china) and flatware. Not the el-cheapo stuff, but actually sort of a nicely outfitted kitchen. So if we have pizza or something, we're eating it off of real plates...

The downside of that benefit is that someone has to periodically do the dishes. And we have a dishwasher here, so it's not all that bad. I needed a short break, so emptying the dishwasher and cleaning up the counter seemed like a good thing to do. Certainly got me doing something else with my hands while my brain took a repast for a few minutes.

I'm still not sure what the whole dopamine thing at the coffee shop was about though.

nibdiff... i wish

Michael talks about wishing he had a tool called nibdiff - and I'm so there with him. I absolutely love the Objective-C API's and the Interface Builder, wiring up and freeze drying all the objects to make things rip-snappy fast and easy to develop. But the downside of it all is communication.

I asked about this some at the last WWDC, and the generic answer I received was "well, there's nibtool..." but you know what the bitch of that is? You can get a representation of the nibs in the strange dictionary-ish ascii sort of way that it prints out, but you can't recreate a NIB from that output. At least not with nibtool - which ends up meaning that you can see what's different between two nibs, but actually making a choice between the two of them? Well, you're screwed.

XMLHttpRequest

Gus posted some really intriguing bits of javascript associated with XMLHttpRequest this evening.

Seems to be just the thing to spew in additional data for a dynamic web interface, and it's getting a fair bit of press, as well as some nice publications about it. Anyway, some pretty nifty stuff.

Good turnout tonight at the Xcoder group

Wow - a nice turnout tonight. We had 23 folks here tonight, pretty cool! And it looks like we've even got a full fledged SIG as a part of dBug. heh - guess I need to renew my membership.

more...

I scrawled the first bit from the meeting itself, now being held the second and fourth thursdays of the month at the dBug resource center. I wasn't really excited about the move either way, except for the fact that we now have some very nice additional resources. But the reality is it's a whole lot better at dBug than the Apple store on a couple of fronts.

First, it's easier for me to get to. UVillage meant a drive and travail to get to the other side of Highway 5, through the University District, at a universally busy time of day - right after work. That meant giving enough time to get there (usually fourty-five minutes to an hour), and that in turn meant sprinting out of work at 5pm, which is darned annoying. At the dBug resource center, it's straight up Aurora Ave for me, which is way, way easier.

Second, it's now in a closed room with power, wifi, tables, and chairs that can be moved around and reoriented as the situation demands. And that has got to be the real gem of the whole thing. Now we can sit down, whip out the laptops, investigate code, or have a hands on presentation without all the hassle that was associated with presenting as a 3rd party at the Apple Store. They were really awesome there, but it's just not well set up for an interactive sort of thing.

So now there's some fees associated there? Yeah, well - I think it's worth it. $60 for the year to use the space - really, you're not going to find better unless it's your own basement.

Save Orphaned Works

Do you know where the line is drawn on current copyright stances? Do you really? Maybe you ought to take another look...

Vacation

After delaying Karen (and me) on a vacation for a good six months from our last promised vacation, we have nailed down plans for a trip! Nope - not Oregon, not a hike, nothing like that - this time we're heading to Hawaii!

The Big Island to be specific, staying over on the Kona side. We both wanted to snorkel, take it easy, and see lava. That seems to pretty much have it all. It's a while yet until we go, but we've got everything booked and we're both really excited. We even burned some frequent flyer miles to get a first class ticket heading out there. Pretty cool, huh?

Oh yeah, and you bet I'm going to enjoy the coffee!

Finding jobs on craigslist

I keep an eye on Craigslist, because I think it's a pretty darn good indicator to what's available out in the job market. One the sections I watch is the software jobs listings for Seattle, which was actually quite amusing in addition to being informative.

So if you look back to the 21st of this month, it appears that Motorola has lost the entirety of their braintrust. I mean, really - three positions listed like: Software Architect Position With Motorola, Technical Lead/Chief Programmer Position With Motorola, and Senior Software Engineer With Motorola - Full time. Either that, or someone doesn't know how to use the listings... Add on to it positions for test automation engineers, other software devs, and you got to wonder if they are opening a new branch, or something else...

Ack.

Awright, now I'm annoyed. I'd written this great little entry about how we're looking for a Java developer too, went to go make some commentary about how often QA Lead positions show up on craigslist in Seattle, and ran into the Snowdogs site, which requires flash. Ok - I'll download and install flash. But I didn't save me bleedin' entry, and the flash player helpfully closed all my browsers so it could install.

Blech.

And Snowdogs is still bitchin about the installer not being there. Damned if I'm going to go look at them anymore.

Hunter S Thompson

Caught on the news this evening that Hunter S. Thompson decided to leave the world of the living. I'm not terribly surprised that he would commit suicide - at least by his writings - but I'm saddened by the loss.

The whole drug culture thing isn't a core of what I am, but the expression of it certainly lives all around us, and his works detailed it out very keenly for me.

looking for a C# developer and a technical writer

I know I said I wasn't going to blog about work. And technically, this isn't "about work", it's "for work".

We're looking for a sharp and knowledgable C# developer - you can check out the job listing at CraigsList for the gory details. And one that isn't posted out there, but I thought some of the blogging folks might be interested... We are looking for a good technical writer.

If you're interested, or know someone who is, send them my way. It's a fantastic company, and we're looking to bring on just a few folks - keeping the team small, flexible, crisp, and really sharp.

thinking about wordpress

It's not like a need to, but I'm thinking about switching over to using WordPress as the driving force behind my blog. It's been a long while since I updated anything to do with my site - my design, my home page (ugh!), and while it's still completely functional, the continuing battle with comment spam is really freakin' annoying.

There's just a big pile o' stuff to think about updating. Tara moved to WordPress a while back, and has been very complimentary about it. Clearly, Ryan thinks it doesn't suck. And since he's running it, there's no reason I shouldn't be...

God, some sort of freakish "keeping up with the jones' thing"...

bright and sunny sunday

Woke up late this morning, getting a wonderful sleep in to recharge and recollect everything together. As I headed out to work for a short bit, the day was incredibly brisk and clear. A beautiful day. I took the camera, but didn't end up finding anything really amazing in terms of landscape to shoot.

I did spot this sort of neat view of a flowering tree on the way to the bus.

On the way home, I did snap a picture of John, who was completely unsuspecting as I pulled out the camera and took a pic while he was checking out a bus schedule. I'll skip posting that one.

Here's a little bit of Post Alley, down near Columbia St.

and a block away, at First and Marion

Oh - and I'm trying an experiment - I've made each of the pictures links to Google Maps to where they were taken. I just wish Google Maps would hurry up and drop in Safari support...

Speaking of which, they were dropping some truly monstrous pieces of machinery into the street at 3rd and Pike - I think they were air conditioning units of some kind. They'd blocked off the entire block, had cranes out there, the whole works. I imagine bus schedules were all borked because of that one today.

Double chocolate brownies

Got home this evening and had a great dinner: Double Chocolate Brownies, made from scratch. Oh yeah, and a glass of milk. I guess, to be fair, that glass of milk is what passed for dinner, and I freely mixed dinner with desert.

It's been a pretty good day, a little long. I'm half frazzled from thinking too much about work, and I'm in a strange state where I find it really hard not to think about it. Like I just can't focus on anything very well, unless there's some potential relationship to a technology or solution that's needed at work. I suspect I need to put some focus into some side projects or something - something unrelated to the day job - just to track my brain into different areas and give everything a rest.

On that note, James checked in some changes to the UnitKit framework today, so it's time to take a gander and see what the state of the union is there. The core of how it's working for notifications is getting all updated in a really elegant solution. I need to track that down into XML output, and then get the ball rolling again with making it really smooth to work with CruiseControl.

Guinness and Beef stew

It's surprisingly easier and lower stress for me working late at night when I can take a route 4 bus home. I guess it's just the ease with which I can get to my house from the bus stop (not very far away at all). Catching a route 2 or 13 means I'm walking a number of blocks before home arrives. I didn't think of it being all that much, but when you're tattered out from the day, it really makes a difference.

The other thing that can make a difference for working late into an evening is having a good dinner - which I did. I'd been meaning to try out the Guinness and Beef stew at the Owl N' Thistle, and so I did. Wish I'd taken a book with me, because the service wasn't rip-fast, but it was a good break and I probably needed it.

So most of the evening was actually digging around in the bowels of Windows Server 2003. I expect I would have been a lot further along, but I had an unexpected 3 hours of "the build is deciding to get a little uppity" and "so how much do you think you know about compiling .NET code and using Visual Studio .NET 2003". It was, as you might expect, a learning experience. It's been over a year since I was last buried in the CLR, delayed signing, signed code, references to signed code, registering services, etc. So it's coming back, although sometimes it's in a round about fashion.

There were a couple of things I'd hoped to get done this evening that didn't make the cut - some linux configuration and initial playing with WWW::Mechanize (yes, in Perl) to see what all it can do for me. I had insomnia a bit last night, so I read up a huge amount on it - and it looks really intriguing. I'd sort of thought about sticking with Python, and there's a nice library I'm tracking there that does the same kind of thing - just the Perl stuff is farther along, and I'm interested in using the libraries - not helping develop them right now. I'll save the development efforts for Objective-C testing code. heh - there's also a Ruby library or three that's intriguing as well. Of course, that means I learn a new language to do it... so I'm leaning away from that.

lunch at the market

Today I left the Pioneer Square area for lunch. Instead I needed to go to Office Depot to pick up some stuff, so I used that as an excuse to grab a bite to eat at the market.

Now there's a place at the market that I've been hunting for ages, and I finally found it again. It's amazing how easy it is to loose track of those little nooks and cranies - and it turns out that this place I've been looking for was in plain sight. It's a little asian cubby-hole of a stall, and they serve (periodically, which made it more difficult to find) these really great spring rolls. They're tucked back in right near Post Alley, behind and to the left of a little fish market. So lunch was a couple of spring rolls and some wontons. yum!

Of course, finishing up I had to get a couple of those monster cookies to take back with me. There's several rather incredible bakeries established down there.

Come to think of it, it's probably are darn good thing that I don't often get there for lunch - or I'd eat way more than I ever should.

weblogger meetup

I hadn't been to one in ages, so tonight I was determined to try and make it to the Seattle Weblogger Meetup, and I'm really glad I did.

Ran into a number of the "old timers", and a bunch of new folks as well. I even took a few pictures, but they're on the camera in the dining room, and the cats have already pinned me on the couch.

A number of the folks I chatted with were either between jobs or looking around, trying to figure out how to break in this this kind of gig or that. Hard to say, and I'm afraid I didn't have any brilliant insight. I ended up getting a lift home from Stace, who was looking for someone to walk her to her car - a few blocks down the road. I left a little more suddenly than I'd planned, but if someone wants to be walked to their car, I feel like that's an important thing not to be dismissive about.

It was fun to catch up with Samantha (GET YOUR PASSPORT NOW!), Manuel, Jeff, and Anita. Oh - and I met Chris Pirillo, who apparently moved up to Seattle a few months back. I'd read his lockergnome stuff for a while, but I had no idea he was an Iowa boy from way back. Hmm.

Basically, It's all about Tiger

Basically, It's all about Tiger - so read the email on the Cocoa-Dev mailing list today announcing WWDC 2005.

I don't think I'll be making it to this one, although I'm sure I'd both enjoy it and get a lot from it. This year, I think we'll spend our pennies a little differently, and I'll save up for next year going to play. In the past, it's been upgrade the computer vs. go to WWDC. This year, really, I'm not sure I'm going to do either.

The iBook is still chugging along wonderfully (knock on wood), and I love working with it. The desktop at home is getting a bit clunky, but it's still an excellent desktop and I've no real reason to kick everything up a notch to something new. There's also just gettin' it cause it's cool, but I think I'm going to hold out a bit and just wait and see what's on the horizon. Surely something will demand my every detail attention, but I'm going to try and hold out.

two updates from Gus!

The goodstuff is out!

FlySketch has been released, and VoodooPad get's an update to version 2.02!

(I really like the embedded manual too. Nice work Gus! It looks terrific!)

Valentine's Day Oven

The big present for us this Valentine's day is we bought ourselves a new oven. The old oven was still technically functional, but we've never had a brand new oven. And now we do!

It's an amana - smooth top, nice big oven - all the usual good stuff. Karen's really looking forward to having a solid glass top that's easy to clean, and it's nice just to have a new appliance in the kitchen. And hey - we got it at an excellent price this past weekend too!

(Thanks for the tip Nate!)

I'm ready for warmer weather

I usually don't mind the cool damp of seatlle winters (now going into spring), but I'm definately ready for warmer weather now. I ontinue to fight this weird cold thing - it kicked back up late friday as a sore throat and runny nose, and I spent a fair bit of time on Saturday, and again today, sleeping and taking it easy - complaining about my runny nose, and generally not feeling so hot.

All the little things I'd intended to get done this weekend haven't gotten done. At least I got a bunch of stuff installed on the laptop for work, but I'd hoped to get through a bit more.

Oh - and I've found to my frustration that if you don't make a connection to an active directory server fairly quickly after booting up, you don't get credentials at all, even after activating a VPN connection. Damned annoying. And I don't know enough about Windows to figure out how to do something like "kinit heckj@missouri.edu"... or the local equivilant. Eh. At least I have a VPN for this one - bouncing through SSH tunnels is sometimes easier, but in the windows world it's definately harder.

So all in all it's a quite valentine's day here at the household. Karen's fiddling with garden planning, the cats are lounging about or getting into trouble (they seem indifferent to which state they're in), and I'm trying to take it easy and heal so that I can break this cycle of cold-like symptoms which are driving me batto.

Must be some iSync badness happening...

There must be a little iSync badness happening. I've received two contacts from a post I placed up on my blog about an iSync error back in November. I'm guessing the two folks found me via Google - one wrote me directly, the other posted a comment in my blog entry.

So whatever is happening, iSync is getting whacked out and giving bad error messages. Or at least I consider this a poor error message:

Assertion Failed!
Expression: fdoRet != fdo_e_database
File: Source/SyncEngine/FDODriver.cpp
Line: 411
INTERNAL ERROR: unhandled error (Assertion failure: File Source/SyncEngine/FDODriver.cpp, Line 411: fdoRet != fdo_e_database).

One fellow resolved it by uninstalling and reinstalling iSync. I resolved it by disabling my local cache, rebooting, and resetting it. The bug I opened with Apple (3861927) was closed - but apparently resolving the lousy error message wasn't in it - or I just haven't seen an update that includes a more sane error handling.

My guess is they couldn't reproduce the problem - I expect it's reasonably obscure.

Install night

This time I'm writing from my work laptop, at home. It's a monster Dell Inspiron 8600 - and by monster I'm refering to the physical size of the thing. I've become all used to those little 12" iBooks and powerbooks, and this thing just seems comparitively huge.

Mostly this evening has been installing all that crap that I want to have on the local box, but didn't have the time to install at work. The latest J2SE JDK, NUnit, CruiseControl.NET, resource kits of various flavors, subversion, cvs, python, SPE...

in short, a whole pile of open-source goodness.

Owl & Thistle

I'd been meaning to check it out - the Owl and Thistle, located in an excessively convenient spot: 50 paces from the front of the building in which I work.

The guys at work had a little get together there today, so of course I joined them. I got seven loads of shit from a couple of them about having a blog - I guess that's just a bit too trendy or somethin' for em. :-) Heh, we'll see if they really read it now.

It was a good time at the pub. I wish it wasn't so smoky, because I'd love to take Karen there, but I can't say it'll keep me away.

miscellaneous morning things

A number of things came across my mind this morning that I wanted to write out here.

First, the whole idea that urban dogs are always small is not only a myth, but a downright lie intended to put you in a frame of mind such that you can't cope with the fact that you've just run into three dogs in a row (on the same block) that are A) bigger than you and B) very friendly. Today was the day to meet three new friends - a great dane puppy of about 10 months (black and white dane - and yes, at 10 months he was bigger than me) and two newfoundlands shambling along and far more interested in people than walking. Actually, it's really cool that I got to meet those dogs - Seattle is a very dog friendly town, a quality which I think makes it extremely livable.

I saw next to a fairly large woman who spent the entire trip into the core of Seattle attempting to splash her face with makeup. Now, I can't imagine that putting on makeup while riding in a Route 2 Express would be either terribly easy or terribly effective, but she was persistent. The only downside is that her elbow jabbed beautifully into my lowest rib each time she brought her arm down, which she seemed to be doing quite frequently. You'd almost think that she didn't want me sitting there next to her. Ah well.

The last bit for the day is I tried out a new coffee shop - Cherry Street Coffee House, which is a block and some from the office, and actually well situated on the way to work. They've a lovely roast and make a fine breve. The barista was pretty talented in his pouring too - I saw two trees of various designs and I got a heart. Pretty cool.

Vonage

Saw this interesting Vonage ad plastered to the bus I rode into work today:

All you need is broadband and a deep need to stick it to the man.

What an interesting classificiation - your cell phone company is hereby officially deemed "The Man". I had another classificiation for it. Guess I was wrong. :-)

26% and dropping

my battery power on the iBook this evening, that is.

I've been spending most of the evening with Karen, who's been suffering a bit from a nasty headache. I did pick up Thai for her on the way home (there's a little thai joint across the street from the office that was pretty darned inexpensive). The Phad Kee Mao looked more like phad thai noodles instead of those nice wide ones, but Karen said it tasted pretty good.

I'm loving working down near pioneer square, although I need to actually GET OUT of the office for lunch and look around more. The place is chock full of interesting little nooks and corners. In particular, one place that I'm avoiding for fear that I'll like it a little too much is the Owl and Thistle, which is incredibly close...

Maybe I'll lure Karen down there for dinner one night to try that Guiness Beef stew...

Well, Karen's headed off to bed and I've read my little eyeballs out for the day. My brains all full, time to let it rest a bit.

down to 23% - guess it's time for the power adapter, huh?

WOW! Google Maps!

Man, I thought all the map things online were pretty much the same, but then Google does a hell of a job of whacking out a new implementation that really blows the socks off you!

Here - check out this awesome linkage to Ototo Sushi, up here on Queen Anne.

Some of the really impressive bits:

1) the street level view is REALLY detailed
2) yeah, it's a stupid little thing, but that drop shadow effect is AWESOME!
3) With the Ototo link above, it lists other places and shops nearby
4) the navigator for moving north, south, east, west - all that, is just incredibly smooth!

Kudos!

oh my, the commute!

Well, I underestimated how long it would take to get home this evening, so I'm afraid I kept our guest waiting for dinner until nearly 7:30pm tonight. Whoops! I took the route 2 express down to work this morning, and made it there really fast (maybe 25 minutes). So I figured it would take about the same going home - which was a completely outrageous and rather idiot assumption on my part.

I missed whatever 6:20pm-ish routes were nearby and ended up waiting until the 6:40-something route 4 to head on up into Queen Anne. That worked out pretty well for meeting Nick and Karen at Ototo Sushi for dinner, but it was still longer than I expected. I'll have to watch the time a little more carefully as I get used to the bus routes home.

Got a lot of good stuff done, although I'm not making much progress on the reading I'd hoped to do this evening because my eyes are completely fuzzed out from the day.

On the "way cool" news of the day, I received permission from Steven Kramer to repost some of this code into the UnitKit project that I'm working on. The implementation of Apple's code to escape a string with embedded HTML/XML entities is really borked, so he'd written a great little NSString category to use instead. I used it from him verbatim, and wrote up the unit tests to wrap the whole thing and sent that back to him, just in case he gets into using UnitKit as a testing framework in the future.

a peek at XCode 2.0

The latest "sneak peak at Tiger" article is available - Working with XCode 2.0. I presume it's James' work (many, if not all, of the Tiger overview series articles are)... er, duh - yeah, it is.

And while I'm babbling about Xcode, I might mention that I've started trying to use that "bookmark" feature that's built in. It snaps down to lines inside a file, and keeps a running tally of bookmarks that you can move around or delete as need be. Haven't quite fully worked it into my usual way of coding, but I'm giving it a shot.

Starting tomorrow

Starting tomorrow, I'll be embedding myself into DocuSign. Their website does a pretty fair job of explaining what they are - online, legally binding signatures through the web. It's a great technology, and it was pretty cool signing my offer letter with their components.

I stopped by their offices this past friday to meet some of the folks I hadn't previously met and get the initial paperwork stuff all taken care of. I wanted to be ready to roll when my feet hit the ground first thing tomorrow morning.

I fully expect that I'll be in "sponge mode" for the next two or three days, at a minimum - getting a handle on where things are, reading voraciously, and bringing myself up to speed. I've got a few jitters, as I mentioned earlier, but regardless of those I'm really excited to be joining up with these folk and helping them make an incredible success with their product.

So now that cat's out of the bag. I'm heading to DocuSign, and I daresay I hope you'll be hearing a lot more about our company in the near future. That probably won't be through my blog though - I'll stick to my usual MacOS X programming, technology geekery, and miscellaneous ranting here.

WiFi hotspot maps of Seattle

WiFiMaps.com has released printable WiFi hotspot maps for Seattle - as torrents, as they're pretty darn big files. Of course, I snagged them immediately, and the majority of the area they cover is downtown Seattle.

The ironic thing is that the hotspots are so damn thick, the maps and effectively useless, even with the neat little color coding on them. There's just far too many hotspots open for that map to even make much sense, other than to just show you the shear number of hotspots available.

Now where I used to work had wireless all over the place. We were constantly testing wireless network communications and components over that infrastructure. So when I saw one of those "open networks" on the list, I had to giggle to myself. The SSID "sealab" doesn't exist anymore - although I suppose it was technically an "open" network. Not that you could communicate with anything on it, or get to the Internet through it. Still, it was neat to see that they'd picked that up on the scans.

I was disappointed that the Queen Anne coverage was so sparse. Not sure what I expected, but I'd hoped for more there.

Still, neat maps in concept.

that continual drone

That continual drone in my head is following me everywhere I go. That sound that you get in the belly of a hollow aircraft just prior to jump. And tomorrow's the jump.

Er, that would be "first day at the new job" if you weren't following my bizarre paratrooper metaphor.

I've got a little of the jitters, doing a little fretting and worrying, all of which I know is completely normal. Spent the mightly superbowl Sunday actually watching football over at Nate and Leah's. It was a quiet afternoon doing that - about exactly what I needed. Munchies, some heavenly turkey-salad, and good company just chillin and watching Hi-Def TV. Nate and Leah are planning on going cold-turkey from TV in another week or so - either selling the piece they have, or putting it into storage while they're in "transit' to their place nearby. I say "transit", but really they're moving into a lovely place on Eastlake, probably for the better part of 4 or 5 months, as the place up here is getting renovated, and it's quite far from being reasonably habitable right now. Awesome views, but just not habitable. Yet.

The terrible plague of a week ago has devolved into a sinus something leftover, which lurked around this morning with a sinus headache for the better part of the morning. I've been doing a LOT of sleeping, which I suspect is helping a fair bit, and I'm taking the drugs, which I'm hoping is doing even more.

workshop fini

Well, the workshop is over and I've had a chance to chill out and grab a bite afterwards. It was a pretty good, albeit long, day.

We started a touch late: 12:30. Joe Jones started it all out with a great overview of "This is Objective-C" and scurried through all sorts of nooks and corners. A couple of breaks later, and he dove us into Foundation Tool development (command-line tools that are built using Objective-C and use the objective-c runtime).

We broke for "lunch" right around 3:30pm, and spent the next hour or so mixing it up, answering questions that were generated and unanswered from the earlier bits, and of course eating lunch. George kicked into his bit about 4:30, doing a quick "here's some websites", a variety of meandering organizational announcements, and then diving into a good "look how much you can do without writing any code" demonstration of the underlying objects available with the AppKit and associated frameworks.

About 5:30 is when I kicked in, getting into the classic "currency converter". We made it through that all hands on, and got into the NSDocument side of the world about 6pm, knowing we had to break it out about 6:30. Well, we of course didn't make nearly as much headway there, and I was compressing a LOT of stuff that shouldn't have ever been reasonably compressed. Gave a little "this is how" with the NSTableView and it's associated dataSource. But the archiving part of the application didn't make it in there, even for the folks that wanted to kick all the way through with me and stayed until 7:45pm.

All in all, I was incredibly pleased with the workshop, although we'd pushed way too much into the day than could be reasonably accomplished. In the end, I think we gave the 23 attendees a great overview of what was at least out there, and a lack of fear of just diving in with a book to get more learning accomplished. We pushed Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X as the best book to get (arguable, although most people I know have favored it for the beginning) if they wanted to continue on past the workshop. I certainly hope they do...

20+ for today

Finished things up for the workshop tomorrow, and just checked my email. Looks like we're over 20 attendees for tomorrow's session. Guess I'll make a few more handouts then. I haven't a clue if we'll actually make it through this whole kit we've developed in six hours - I suspect getting through half of it may be reasonable.

But for now, time to sleep.

Last day at CoCo

Today was my last day at CoCo Communications. I was really happy that I was feeling well enough to go in, and lasted through the day pretty darn well. Even happier that I got a useful tidbit or two taken care of while I was there.

All in all, it was a really good last day. Lots of people unhappy to see me leaving, but happy that I had a new opportunity to explore too. They gave me this really cool card, which I've pinned up over my desk. I'm not surprised that I had a bunch of the engineering guys sign it, but it was really cool to see some signatures from the business guys that I only worked with in passing.

For the next few days, I'm jobless - which is rather odd. I don't think I'll notice it all that much though, as I expect I'll fiddle around tomorrow and the weekend mostly focused on the workshop this saturday, and then it'll be monday and time to start up with the new gig.

Ouch!

From the top of Google news:

Microsoft's New Search Engine Falls Flat

Wow, ouch!

16 for the workshop

Looks like we have 16 folks set up to play in the Intro to Cocoa Programming workshop. That ought to keep us pretty busy.

I've been behind (not surprisingly) at getting my second part of the tutorial bits together, so I expect I'll be working on those pieces tonight. Getting together something akin to an NSDocument based application loosely coupled to the currency converter thingy. Probably just as simple as knocking a bunch of currency converters into an array and having at. No sense making it any more complex than that, as the relevant parts of the tutorial are the API's around the NSDocument class and it's built in serialization components, not the guts of what the model will or won't do.

damnit, still sick

spent the day sleeping, although the fevers appear to have abated completely. I'm grousing a lot about this, because there was a hell of a lot I wanted to do this week, and instead I'm finding myself laid low. I'm spending my time either watching DVD's that I have stored up, or re-reading old science fiction.

Bread mold!

I'm back on my feet for a little while, the fever from this morning abated reasonably well and I visited the doctor. They have me on 500mg of penicillin, twice a day. I tested negative for strep throat, but they wanted to be sure and so signed me up for the 10 day regimen of immunity system assistance.

The only major downside of today was when I dumped my entire jamba juice over the side of the cough. Boy, did that suck. So I didn't get my "cold buster", but at least I did get to eat my bagel with lox. I figure I'll pick up another jamba juice this evening and get it into me that way.

virii

Well, some virus got into me yesterday and just blossomed, kicking my butt last night. At noon I had a sore throat and a little swelling of the lymph nodes in my throat. By 10pm that night I was running a fever, chills, all that really icky stuff. At 11pm it had peaked at 102F and I was in hideous shape. A super incredible friend came over and got some fluids and aspirin into me, and watched over me until the fever broke about 1am.

I've got an appointment with the Doc in 15 minutes or so, but I'm feeling significantly better. A little congestion, and a lagging sore throat, but the worst of the effects are past.

Jesus, what a way to end my last week at my job!