Please see The Squid and the Whale. Jeff Daniel’s performance is truly great. This movie is about what happens to kids (and their parents) during divorce. It will make you laugh, but only because it’s better than the alternative. And you’ll get to hear Metamorphosis described as “Kafka-esque”. It’s painful, adult, true, and a terrible sort of funny.
If you ever find yourself doubting that maintaining your integrity is the right move, you should see Good Night, and Good Luck. It’s a stylish, smart, grown-up movie that you’ll enjoy. So it seems Mr. Clooney can direct too.
Do you drive your big, selfish, me-first S.U.V. because you think it’s safer? If so, Malcom Gladwell thinks you’re wrong.
S.U.V.s are unsafe because they make their drivers feel safe. That feeling of safety isn’t the solution; it’s the problem.
There’s an interesting chart in there with deaths per million cars for a number of vehicles. It’s interesting to see how poorly the S.U.V.s fared.
I’ve been writing scripts the past couple of days for synching things up between a few servers. I’ve wasted too much time already with 2 issues:
When using rsync anywhere near mounted Windows shares, always include the option -modify-window=1. This will prevent rsync from trying to copy nearly every file each time. It has something to do with the differences in how Windows stores modification times.
The latest OS X update to Tiger broke the –delete option. Target deletion simply doesn’t work any more. As a workaround, I’ve installed the DarwinPorts version instead. Then I moved the broken binary out of the way and symlinked the ports version in its place. Something like this (assuming you already have DarwinPorts)…
`
sudo port install rsync
sudo mv /usr/local/bin/rsync /usr/local/bin/rsync-tiger
sudo ln -s /opt/local/bin/rsync /usr/local/bin/rsync
`
With Annie Proulx’s whiny little rant about the Oscar’s, I need no further reason to skip Brokeback Mountain. I’m now officially glad that it lost. The grapes, they sour quickly, and all at once.
I was so happy to read Mark Morford’s piece titled I am Done with Violence.
“Violence no longer informs me. It no longer has the power to teach. It is a one-note song I’ve heard so many times it has lost its power to stun or impress or delve deep. It now merely tears at the fabric of the soul, punches holes in the anima, scrapes its knuckles on the pavement of hate, and you can shrug and roll your eyes and go watch “The Hills Have Eyes” or “Saw II” or even play some hi-res shockingly ultraviolent video game and enjoy the brutal escapism and wallow in the bloodshed while pretending it’s not slowly, quietly blackening your world view like a smoker sucking down another carton of Marlboro Reds, but deep down, where the meanings are, I think maybe, just maybe, you might be seriously mistaken.”
I hope his attitude marks a quiet movement of some sort. Please?
Tracking time on projects is hard. No, that’s not true, it’s easy to do, it’s hard to do consistently and accurately. Holding to my never-wavering belief that software can solve all of life’s problems, I’ve tried 6 or 8 time tracking apps. Each of them failed in its own way.
So I’ve gone back to the most reliable and easy to use time tracking tool available - paper. I track my time by 15 minute intervals, so the form I use looks like this…
I just write the project’s name on the left and fill in each 15 minute block as I think of it. End of day, just add it up. It works pretty well for me. If you want to try it yourself, download timesheet.pdf and give it a whirl.
It’s just an optical illusion. Isn’t it?
Tracy has a fresh new look over at Sistercat. You don’t have to be a cat person to enjoy it. It would be inappropriate of me to comment further.
37signals gets a lot of flack in blog comments and elsewhere from people who probably aren’t as good, and likely have serious self-esteem issues. I disagree with the haters in all cases. The 37signals folks almost always say exactly what I meant, only better and to a much larger audience. A fun thing they’ve begun doing on their Signals vs. Noise weblog is to post some of the highlights of recent Campfire conversations. It’s another good idea I’ll probably copy here.
And speaking of copying…
One of the Campfire items mentioned was a reaction by Jamis Buck to someone suggesting that developing Basecamp was easy…
A forum poster wrote, “We might just use one of our coders and designer to make a clone of this project manager to be used on our own servers. It would just save us the hassle.” Jamis: “hahahayah, just whip out basecamp in an afternoonhow hard could it be?”
When Basecamp first lauched I was immediately in love. It was just so damn simple! We were using an Issue Management System I wrote in ColdFusion back in 1997 and it was showing its age. Before signing up, I wanted to take it for a few laps. Overall, Basecamp was perfect. There were, however, some critical (for us) features missing or implemented in a way I didn’t care for (File uploads, inline image display and notifications, to name a few). So, I set about to culling the best ideas from Basecamp and writing my own version of it for internal use. This was on a Friday evening. Monday morning I had built 80% of the existing Basecamp feature set, and added inline attachments, configurable permissions, better To-dos and a nifty email notification system - in three days and in PHP no less! (Let’s pretend for a moment that I didn’t spend the next week or two tweaking and debugging. I did say 80% right?)
Was I able to do this because programming is easy? Nope, it’s hard - at least doing it well is hard. Was it because I’m a programming genius? Nope, I’ve seen Jamis’ code and he’s a far far better programmer than I’ll ever be. The reason I could do it is that 37signals had done the truly hard part - designing the damn thing. I don’t mean visual design, but interaction design. The way they planned features and implemented the majority of them was (and is) brilliant. What they knew to leave out was even more so.
I’ve learned a lot from those guys, but I think maybe I’ll just subscribe to their products from now on and be done with it.