Rhonabwy

Okay, I know I shouldn’t - but I can’t resist. I just love seeing job postings like this one: Release Manager.

Now I’ve been a release manager (and a lot of other things), and while that particular position is really pretty broad, the description on this one is hilarious. (the rules on the post forbid it’s reposting - so it’s only good for a few days I’d guess)

Really, they don’t know what the hell they’re looking for. Either that, or I’d guess that there’s some major internal conflicts between dev, test, and QA (if it exists) that haven’t been resolved. I mean, come on - since when is a release manager responsible for doing master documentation updates, project purchase plans, and oversight for the operations and development training and review? At this breadth, I think they’re looking for a development manager…

But then there’s the kicker : experience with exchange, security, SQL server, active directory, and prefer MCSE or MCSD Certification? Uhm, hm.

Good luck guys - I hope you find someone!

Well, I finally did it. Upgraded from the Motorola TDMA phone that I’ve had for ages into the world of GPRS, Sim cards, equally poor reception at my house, and a very odd mini camera.

So now I’m the owner of one of those sleek lookin’ Motorola RAZR phones. Cingular has some sort of special deal for a black version, and since we stayed with Cingular, I went ahead and got that one. Turns out the new gig has a nice deal/discount on some of this stuff, so it seemed to be the right time to upgrade.

While we were at it, Karen’s picked up a cell phone too. Her first one, and she’s not too sure of it. We got her a Nokia 6102, and she’s talking to her dad right now. One of the nice features is calls between the two phones over the cingular network are free - and we figure we’ll mostly be calling each other.

Guess I’ll have to go read the manual on that thing now…

We finally finished out season 2 of Battlestar Galatica. They certainly aren’t taking the same route as the show in the 70’s. I do admit, I’m looking forward to this October when season 3 starts airing - should be interesting!

(yeah, Ryan - I’m not sure where the hell they’re going with it…)

Yesterday was “Pi Day” - heh, ok. I never think of that, except when I read it on someone’s blog or something. But I always pay attention to the Ides of March.

Larry Okamura would probably find it amusing that I always think of the 15th of March over any other days. And yeah, I know St. Patty’s day is just around the corner, but that never sank it with me either. I think because I was tormented for not wearing green the right day too many times. Now I just ignore the darn thing. It’s not like I need an excuse to drink beer - and I prefer the dark kind, not green beer, anyway. (Ok - so the periodic Hefeweizen is pretty tasty too)

Uhm. Yeah.

Ceasar is Dead! Long Live Ceasar!

2050 years ago…

I went to the dentist this morning - something I have (unadvisedly) been basically blowing off for nearly two years. They were happy to see me, and I really like them - you know, it’s just the usual dentist (er, do I have to?) sort of thing.

The cleaning went well, everything was rolling along, and then Dr. Jensen swung by for the exam part. Turns out I needed a filling replaced, and that I had a cavity. At least that explains why food kept getting trapped behind that tooth…. but instead of scheduling up another appointment (where I could sort of nerve myself up for it), he threw me a curveball: “Do you have to get right back to work? I’ve got an opening due to a cancellation, and we could just get this taken care of right now. Take maybe a half hour…”

So much for working up my nerve. Of course I did it - so now I’ve a slightly aching jaw (those anesthetic shots always leave a sort of weird ache for the rest of the day), a new filling, and a replaced filling. At least its all taken care of!

And of course they had their parting shot - “How about six months for the next visit, hey?”

Wow. The midwest certainly took a pretty significant beating!

We got a call from the family in Columbia, and they survived with relatively minimal damange it sounds like. Although in this case, relatively minimal means a baseball sized piece of hail ripped through their skylight, and more of that size (and smaller) pounded the snot out of their siding, tearing holes all along it. I had never seen hail and damage of that level in CoMo when I lived there, and Karen told me that somewhere there were wind speeds reported up to 206 mph! Cripes! That’s hurricane dustructive force speeds!

Fortunately it sounds like there were relatively few deaths from this nasty critter of a storm, but a lot of north CoMo took a pretty significant beating.

Sure, I thought… I’ll just go downtown with Karen and grab a coffee at the little cafe in Barnes and Noble and browse around. I’d been SO good recently, not buying anything from the bookstores, resisting all possible temptations.

Today I fell off the wagon. Karen got out of there without the books she wanted to buy, and I walked out with 3. How does that happen? Darnit.

So what’d I get? The first is Python: Essential Refernce which a friend got recently, and I decided would be a great addition to my bookshelf. The third edition has been updated for Python version 2.4. I still mostly use my Python Cookbook from OReilly and the interactive mode (now with IPython actually), but sometimes just having a good reference manual is priceless. While I do love OReilly books, this one beats any OReilly one out there for a good up-to-date reference.

The other book I got was Don’t Make Me Think, which is a great basic introduction to usability - mostly focused on web usability. I bought the first edition years ago and gave it to the guy doing web development at the central IT group in MU (he needed it!) and had always sort of wished that I’d kept a copy for myself. More recently Karen had a copy from the library at the house, but she didn’t purchase one. I finally broke down and just got it myself. I just can’t trust her to buy my computer books for me, even under some school guise.

The third is just a guilty pleasure: AI for Game Developers. Not that I’m a game developer, but the whim of AI programming (i.e. problem solving and learning techniques) has continued to fascinate me over the years. It’s actually a fairly basic book, but I really liked the descriptive text and code snippets. Whenever I’m in a whim for reading, I usually go towards AI: A Modern Approach (I have the first edition) because of its breadth. It’s not as easy a read as the OReilly book though. God knows why I bought it - not like I needed it. Just caught up in the book buying frenzy I guess.

Oh - I did have a coffee though - so at least something came out as I expected it.

Reading through my RSS feeds this evening, I scanned across the entry There Is A Mass Market For Tablet Computers at Bagelturf. Not even sure who it is, except that whomever started writing about programming in Cocoa, so I put the feed into my reader.

BT theorizes that Apple is setting itself up for the future with its patents on tablet interfaces, some of which - I’ve got to admit - are pretty interesting. That the concept of “yeah there’s a market, it’s just not a GOOD market yet…”, pending a reduction in cost to create the components or just the social cycle of these kinds of goods on the market.

Maybe failure is a strong word… wait - yeah, it is. I meant it to be.

I followed (along with a huge number of other folks) the whiplash of tech hype for the project called Origami (good name, btw). And while I was primarily watching the teasers on that site, Engadget was doing an excellent job of walking up the details at CeBIT. They had an initial So what is Origami post that was so forthright and informative that I almost didn’t believe it (that’s saying something), but then the details really began to roll out, and by the actual Intel press release, it was almost a let down. Heh.

So the reason I think this is going to fail as it stands? The UI is broken for finger-based input. It’s a tablet PC - which is a cobbled UI that tried to take a pen use it as a mouse. That’s a whole different issue, as I found out with a tablet PC recently, and the vast majority of programs that I used just didn’t work worth a damn with the pen based interactions. Aside from the interesting keypad/touchpad tabletPC pack that the UMPC’s will have - I think that is still going to be a problem.

Think about it - how will you make the OS realize you intend your typing into a specific text field (i.e. get the focus). Tab on a keyboard? That’s how I do it quickly with a keyboard. Click on it with a mouse? Okay - lets translate that - poke at it with a finger?

The size of the UI targets was difficult for a pen, and I suspect its almost completely whacked for a touch screen mechanism.

I’m not saying it can’t ever work - just that there is precious little “good software” for this platform, and that the software really needs to anticipate and work with the new interaction mediums that users will bring to it with a device like this.

The best software I ever ran into on the straight-up tabletPC (as opposed to a UMPC, which I haven’t yet seen) is Microsoft’s OneNote. They had clearly thought about making the whole thing work with a pen in your hand, although even they had some “standard GUI widget problems” to my mind. Tabs were just too damn small - something that is an easy target with a mouse is way different kind of target with a pen. I can only imagine that it would get more difficult if you were just poking with your finger.

Of course, you can’t even get into this arena without at least paying a little homage to the now-gone Apple Newton. Just way the hell ahead of it’s time, it had some incredible technology packed under the covers. The handwriting recognition was the biggest hype, but I think really that it’s overall UI experience was the most impressive. Granted Palm sort of kicked it’s butt with the simpler and more focused Graffiti system - quicker to learn. But the breadth of functionality was heading in the right direction on Newton for a general function device.

More recently, there’s been a swath of interest in multi-touch interfaces based mostly on the amazing demonstration of technology that Jeff Han put together with FTIR touch. If a single finger pointing and pecked would warp the UI experience - take a look at that video and think how it will mess with the current mouse/pointer idiom. The input data only (multiple points and their interactions between each other) is a massive leap outward in potential. I have no idea is a UMPC is multi-touch capable, but that’s clearly a means of additional human-computer interaction that I expect will get explored in the near future.

Every now and then you can find of those guys that does the amazing chalk on pavement drawings. And then today I spotted this guy’s pictures on the Internet. Wow!

I wonder if we can get him to do some in Seattle some time…