And it finally came, the white stuff. Our first accumulation of snow. I don't mind the white, it's pretty and I can fly RC planes off it. I certainly take the white stuff over the dead and ugly stuff. Without the snow, a north winter can be gloomy and quite depressing. Cover it in fresh white powder and it transforms.
...the above photo was the morning after. Being in a warm house and awaking to the white blanket is serene if there's no wind. This snow was wet and very sticky, and clings to everything in clumps. With camera in hand, here's a miscellaneous stick/tree/thing across the road.
Some days are simply better than others. Today was a great day, exciting things turned up in the mail. Since moving away from homeland Australia, I've missed the decadent things with a passion... the things that you shouldn't eat every day, but they're just so good. I certainly feel this way now that I've had to be without them for so long.
But the other day, Amber was watching some Teeve and there was a foodNetwork spiel about some Australians who opened an eatery in Manhattan that cater to other Australians: meat pies, sausage rolls... you know, the good stuff. This made me so terribly homesick for a genuine Australian feed. We got to searching around the web an found an Australian product importer, and while I was undecided about practicality and pricing, my head was cleared of any budget wrong-doing when this arrived...
...hell yes!
I had a goofy grin and was kind of shaking when I was opening the box. We had ordered a short list of genuine-goodness confectionery and beverage. Summer Rolls, Tim-tams, Aero Bars, chocolate dipped Scotch Finger Biscuits, Polly Waffle's, Top-deck cadbury's block, and 24 bottles of Bundaberg Ginger Beer!
That ginger beer is divine: it has no equal. Although I need to ration off these supplies, I downed two ginger beers and a couple of the summer rolls... and they've never tasted so good. The rationing of the goodness-supplies will be taxing, but once a week I'll get to have some real product from the mother country. The situation wouldn't be half as bad as it is, if it wasn't for the confectionery in the US being so bland by comparison (which I find a little strange given the size of the consumer market).
...and maybe it's just that I raised with this. All I can say is that in the argument for nature vs nurture, there's no substitute for being brought up right!
Cats manage to enrich your life in very cryptic and curious ways, and the scientific research of having four of them and the possible compounding of effects is going well. Towards finishing on work for the day, Maxine was sleeping behind the laptop (it's all about the warm air from the laptop cooling vents). On closing my laptop after a full days work yesterday Max thought that my nice Vaio was something to claim. Camera was handy, and of the pics taken, this is my clear favorite...
...how they regard us is pretty clear.
Every now and then I go through some nights of insomnia, not due to caffeine or some other self torture, but because of ideas. If I get an idea where the the compounding satellite ideas enforce the excitement, I can be awake for hours. Typically, the worst nights are either from model aircraft or from potential business ideas.
Thinking about planes is typically a run-on of design aspects that would eventually form to make the plane. If it's to be a biplane, then it's about wing mounting structures, the inter-plane struts (the rods keeping the wings apart out near the wing tips), the flying wires... etc etc. The process of designing 'things' has always had the ability to get me excited; the complex intermingling of various design needs and requirements can become drug like (let alone the actual flying of the thing in the case of planes).
Last night was about a business idea. Now I've had an idea for a running enterprise based on the ASP model for some time (since 1998 actually), but this was a new one based on an old idea that I've also had for some time. What's potentially more exciting about this idea over the previous is that it would be orders of magnitude easier to make. This made the insomnia last night kind of strange as I was now considering a new idea over the top of my 'old faithful' idea. The thoughts however were quite exciting none the less, as it seems that little ideas and attitudes that I've had for quite some time seemed to dove-tail into the new concept quite nicely.
I'd go on to say what the idea is, but it's simple to make in its basic form so the risk of copying is high. To be coy about it all, I could just say that it's attitude is based on a mantra that I truly appreciate to the core of who I am... "you can't fight city hall, but you can crap on the steps and run like buggery"
...which isn't even my quote. It was given to me by way of a friend in high school (one 'Lawrence Tucker'... haven't heard of him in quite some time. Which brings up an "old friendships" topic that I have internal rants about too), don't know if he acquired it from somewhere else or made it up. He was a very smart fellow, creative in his own way, but also had an awesome knack of finding the awesomely funny and off beat humor in things... to this day I appreciate that he handed me Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers to read. I'm no "reader" by any stretch of the imagination, but I ate this up like someone who eats something very very tasty while being very very hungry (or the equivalent there of). A remarkably funny and inspiring tome for those that need an injection of lateral thinking and british humor. I attribute a fundamental shift in my personal character to the reading this book. The character change may just have been a "stage of development" deal, but I've always felt the shift as being very connected, at least a tipping point.
Now that I'm firmly off the topic of my own post it seems that I need a coffee: it's been a slow start this morning.
...that the hero that originated the file attachment felt that he should change the file extension for the purposes of emailing. So it wasn't an outlook express email file after all, but a packaged help file with the extension changed.
Well, I still blame Microsoft for creating the general climate of absurdity...
...and all the other problems they've caused me today.
The world is slowly becoming able to have people supported in information technology without the poison of Microsoft products... but every now and then, I'm reminded that Microsoft has managed to pull the wool over many eyes and forces those trying to live a clean existence to imbibe in the horrible software that Microsoft produces.
I've happily been using Linux as my desktop productivity since roughly the fake turn of the millennium (2000). The experience has become smoother and more enjoyable as the years progress. Now you really can use a computer without the horrible injection of that nasty Seattle IT dept. Except, that is, when you're imposed upon by one of the infected blind mice. What also sucks about most scenarios is that you're typically talking the few percentage points where you're unlucky... but you go S.O.L. anyway because you're not flailing around in the same pool of mess that is Windows environments.
Most open software tries very hard to make tools available so that you can interact with the poison in a way you don't have to be infected, and they do a very good job of it. Even the projects that allow you to run pseudo-poison (software written for windows) without the root of evil (actually running windows); Photoshop is almost as good as a native application on linux with the latest Wine. However, I still get an email where someone attached a previous email as an attachment. The web based software didn't like it. Most email formats are text based, but this is binary based (even though all emails are sent as low range ASCII text over the wire, some moron of a software developer thought that binary was best. yay!) so a basic text editor wasn't going to work. Thunderbird's email importer couldn't get a handle on it... sooooooo...
...over to the laptop that I've kept on Windows so I can run IE for web testing (more "yay!") and installed Outlook. It said that it didn't want to run potentially harmful content (Microsoft's broken attempts at genuine security. yay!) and wasn't going to play. I look into things, and it's an Outlook Express file. Every windows comes even more poisoned by the presence of outlook express, so I fire that up to take a look... after a huge wizard process that I finally convince that I really don't want to set up a mail account... I try to open/import the mail file and even this P.O.S. doesn't want a bar of it. So now I've lost much time, and no closer to reading the email attachment.
My original rant on this topic was going to be about being forced to use a windows box to gain access to a VPN when there are so many more open ways to get it done these days... but not being able to open something that is sent and shared over the wire as a plain to read text file, and should in fact be a plain to read text file proved much more fertile ranting ground.
The world really is worse for the wear because Microsoft's poison was spread around so pervasively.
It sucks, it really does.
It seems that more and more software these days continues to "go big" in order to realise some strange form of self satisfaction. I assume that it's self satisfaction because they push themselves away from many customers, especially small-time user needs. Many small tools seemingly grow to sizes much larger than what a lot of customers need. My specific frustration is ERD tools, and diagramming tools in general. There seems to be a complete lack of 80/20 operation at all, they're all massive, and far more expensive than a tool would be if it just suited your current needs.
- A UML tool that didn't organise everything in gargantuan proprietary project files
- A UML tool that doesn't do round trip engineering
- An ERD tool that wasn't integrated with UML tools that did round trip engineering
- Tools that even if they did all this fancy stuff, got it all out of the way so you could simply do the thing you really needed to do.
Why can't one get a UML tool that will allow you to make diagrams, save each diagram in a separate file (so that you can check it into SVN and others can modify it without merge problems of people working on other diagrams... all in a way that doesn't need some massively huge "team" plugin for the software itself!), and do it all in a professional and succinct result?... it's absurd that the "go big" attitude of most software is so popular. The big features are complex and they charge more for it. They leave the target customer space they had before (because now the product is also more expensive), and leave all the people behind flailing like starving fish for things that used to be.
Not too many software companies resist this. One company that I know has changed their attitude, NewTek. They're the makers of the legendary 3D animation and effects package called Lightwave3D. Long story of awesomeness aside, they're still adding to the software, making it better all the time, new features... but it's now well under half the price it used to be. How can awesomely complex software like lightwave get better and cheaper (what LW does is far more complex than UML modeling), when most software goes big and pushes out the customers they used to have?...
There's just not enough NewTek's out there. Not enough companies remaining in the same space to look after the customers they originally got addicted to their products in the first place. Too many companies bite the hands that fed them during the incubation stages.
Sometimes, I think that certain products are better off not expanding...©2007 Arron Bates* (*the keyboard monkey)