February 23, 2002

1:00pm

Today is a good day for doing laundry. A load of jeans last night, a load of towels, a load of underthings, a load of light-colored t-shirts, a load of dress shirts, a load of dark t-shirts, a load of knits and other polo-type shirts, and then somewhere in there I need to shower and prepare for church tonight. I'm cantoring one of the mass parts. And playing bass guitar.

At work it has been one full week of active programming using the Extreme Programming method. What an interesting time it was, learning the mechanics of Java programming and the integrated development environment we are using.

I spent most of the first four days working on my one task, estimated at 1 ideal engineering day, and finished in about 13 hours. I don't feel bad about that, as about 3 hours of that was spent learning how to type Java without creating an error on every line, and the rest in discussion , design, and partnering with the other programmers. Friday I spent nearly all day programming with my boss - it went well, even if we didn't get his task done due to revisions in some of the previous stories.

I've installed all of the Java tools we use at home. And had my first crash in a few months, caused (no doubt) by Music Match Jukebox playing my MP3s of some new CDs I just received. I've got to ugprade it to the latest release soon.

February 21, 2002

11:30pm

Tonight's Olympics (Women's Figure Skating finals) were excellent. I had tears in my eyes when young Sarah Hughes (sp) won the Gold ... she definitely was the best performing skater there.

February 13, 2002

8:00am

Good news from the internet front: my subdivision really is getting Charter Pipeline cable modems. The newsletter, which arrived in last night's mail, announced it. This puts a kibosh on my window of opportunity to set up high speed wireless internet access throughout my neighborhood. Sigh. Well, at least this way there's no financial risk.

February 12, 2002

11:00pm

Tonight I watched PAY IT FORWARD on HBO/TiVo. What a depressingly happy movie. The end, even though I knew what happened, was still a shock.

This link is a well done summary of the state of the world. Fair warning, it's as depressing as the movie was.

In retrospect I am one of those people who is too afraid to make a change to get away from the comfortable routine of daily life. I dunno what changes I'll make, but .. for sure I would have said "work can get along without me for a day" and gone to the burial. Sigh.

7:30am

Today a friend buries her dad's brother. I really wish I could be there, but the press of work continues and I don't see any way to be there to support her in person, 2 hours away, and not let my co-workers down. Sometimes life just sucks.

This story came across the newsgroup misc.taxes.moderated on Sunday:

From: Dick Adams
Subject: The Rat Race

My problem with the race isn't the race itself, but that the rats are winning.

The irony of the rat race explained....

A boat docked in a tiny Mexican village. An American tourist complimented the Mexican fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took him to catch them.

"Not very long," answered the Mexican.

"Well, then, why didn't you stay out longer and catch more?" asked the American.

The Mexican explained that his small catch was sufficient to meet his needs and those of his family.

The American asked, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?"

"I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, and take a siesta with my wife. In the evenings, I go into the village to see my friends, have a few drinks, play the guitar, and sing a few songs...I have a full life."

The American interrupted, "I have an MBA from Harvard and I can help you! You should start by fishing longer every day. You can then sell the extra fish you catch. With the extra revenue, you can buy a bigger boat. With the extra money the larger boat will bring, you can buy a second one and a third one and so on until you have an entire fleet of trawlers. Instead of selling your fish to a middle man, you can negotiate directly with the processing plants and maybe even open your own plant. You can then leave this little village and move to Mexico City, Los Angeles, or even New York City! From there you can direct your huge enterprise."

"How long would that take?" asked the Mexican.

"Twenty, perhaps twenty-five years," replied the American.

"And after that?"

"After that is when it gets really interesting," answered the American, laughing. "When your business gets really big, you can start selling stocks and make millions!"

"Millions? Really? And after that?"

"After that you'll be able to retire, live in a tiny village near the coast, sleep late, play with your children, catch a few fish, take siestas with your wife, and spend your evenings drinking and enjoying your friends."

February 10, 2002

11:30pm

It's been one heck of a week. Very draining, but also rewarding. We're adopting Wiki's for documentation and storyboarding purposes, and I've been buried in enhancing features for the OpenWiki platform, aside from actually trying to DO extremeProgramming. The developer of OpenWiki asked for my modularization friday evening and I sent it to him within minutes -- a very nice feeling to be asked for that sort of thing. :)

February 1, 2002

11:35pm

Yesterday was my 36th Birthday.

In many ways it was just another day. I woke up, I worked, I got my paycheck (last day of the month), I came home, I played bridge with my brother Tim.

In others ways it was quite different. I got a surprise gift from my parents: a beautiful umbrella plant with a happy birthday balloon, and various Happy Birthday wishes for Russ and I, we share a birth Day.

And today was awesome... my boss David & his fiance Annie found me the PERFECT gifts. Two books that are in excellent condition for their age: a 1st edition biography of Pope John 23rd, and a picture book (with glued-in plate photographs) of the European churches and their artwork. Most excellent, and it was all I could do to keep them from seeing my eyes get wet.

I'm having fun learning the basics of the X technologies: XHTML, XSL, XSLT, and XML - especially in relation to OpenWiki's method of using them to separate business logic from presentation logic. Unfortunately it fails in one key area for creating maintainable web sites with multiple Wiki areas: customizing the resulting output with business-logic supplied values. Oh well.