Category: Technology

I’m convinced I’ll have a job in technology till the day I die. At the rate things are going, maybe it won’t be coding, but I’ll bet my last dollar it’s in maintenance.

I spent, oh, 20 minutes at lunch trying to fix my blower; it’s a 2 stroke engine with a fan that generates massive air blowing power. It is used by me to blow mowed grass off my driveway, my back porch, and I can even invert it to vacuum up grass since my mower is bagless (came with house, not much I can do). After 2 weeks of no lawn mowing, with 1 foot high under the tree, the covenant police we’re chomping at the bit to get me on a “mowed grass in lawn” violation. Thankfully, someone at the corner entrance into my cowpasture-turned-suburbia neihborhood hasn’t sold their house in like over a year, gave up and left, and tend to their yard every month, if that; decoy saves the day again.

Can’t say I blame ’em; if I were looking to purchase a house, and noticed a yard unkempt, I too would develop a judgement that said yard owner was a slob, and would keep to his un-sightly habits, and make it hard for me to sell my house, and continue the horrid cycle of seller insecurity. Still, the teenager in me wants to tennis-racket their mailbox if they even touch mine with another frikin’ flyer; it’s bad enough I have to Tabasco sauce my eyes just to stay awake on my roof to catch that rogue junk-mail paper delivery boy in the sites of my sniper rifle. Haven’t caught him (her?) yet either… have about 3 sheriffs in my neihborhood, and don’t want to cause a ruckus, ya’ know. Speaking of ruckus’, I wonder if they caught that 6ft wiry, white male who keeps breaking into houses naked? …and you thought I was weird sitting on my roof with hot sauce and a gun?

Anyway, yeah, 20 minutes, gave up, hit the Subway and aquired more food than I could utilize. After the last Subversion check-in, I surveyed my surroundings, and figured I’d give it a go again. So, I start unscrewing every screw I can find. Frikin’ crackhead engineers; either I do not have an appreciation for the finer points of screw head vs. phillips head vs. alan wrench head… or my former adjective usage was well placed, if not an abused conjunction. Thankfully, her majesty recognized my testosterone yearning awhile back, and satiated me with a drill set. It had every type, and with enough sizes to disassemble Johnny-5. STEFFANEEE… neeeed INPUT!

It kept getting uncomfortable too; I tried to make rows, even fantasized about construction paper & chalk outlines… but gave up, and made a bolt haiku on the ground at my garage door, wide open. I obviously need to throw some stuff away; I kept getting people offering me money for boat shelves I have out front, and I had to politely decline their purchase, as this was not a yard sale, I was merely “working in my garage” as guys are like… supposed to do and stuff. The weird looks were a tad uncomfortable (sorry, out of lemonaide, nothing to offer), but southern hospitality prevailed.

The same, morbid urge one gets to look at an accident on the highway somehow wrapped it’s black tendrils around my motivation, and pushed me onwards. I knew my blower was screwed; there was no turning back now. I couldn’t code in Flex; too burnt out. I had to move this grass, and the thought of manual labor was laughable… HA! I had to justify 60k worth of degrees somehow (obviously that wasn’t in economics, because that price guess wasn’t even close). So, I’d look at the… uh… “standing plate bar insert” thing as I detached it; as if it were some alien parasite piece of detached flesh (formerly attached, whole, to the ship), and the aliens had left, we had worked through the religious issues of the aliens coming, and the government assured us our tax dollars did NOT pay for that incursion, and so I after the stay-puff guyz in the suits confirmed there were no alien diseases on said parasite, I continued to disect it since the aliens weren’t really gray’s, and disecting your planetary neihbors is just rude; we in the south keep to ourselves.

So yeah, piece by piece, I removed things. Halfway through, I hit Google and apparently found a clue via RC-car sites. Is it me, or is there a common trend in tutorial sites, for any discipline, coming off as patronizing? Condescending? Feels like it. Anyway, yeah, pully or something. It just so happens the pull cord was, WHERE? At the core… the cold, hard, steel center behind tons of complex machinery. I get uncomfortable enough opening my Alienware to remove the dust, so this was just wrong. Upon reaching the center, the cord was wrapped upon itself, a kite wind gone astray, a fishing lure with heavy weight being dropped into sea horribly wrong; tension, man, TENSION! Ease it in, control it.

I thought the engine was locked since I pretty much had hay bales in my yard, and had to gather said yard trimmings in a pile. What to do with them afterwards? No no… this is primal time, must work, the process will wrestle itself out, it always does. Mid-yard blow (I was doing laps; my new iPod-mini raving me till dawn), even over the din of an 808, I could hear the blower trying to tell me something. Another pitch shift and I definately knew something was wrong. I was hot, the sun was relentless, and as a geek (yes, I still had some protective tan left) in the sun, well… the only radiation that should be hitting my face is from a Viewsonic, not from a ball of gas you can’t even put into her majesty’s Element. If I can survive this, SO can you. Damn empathy… strikes at the worst times. Shakespeare had it easy; good people are TOO EASY to mess with. Thus, as soon as I turned off my blower to give it a breather, it breathed it’s last. I couldn’t pull the cord to start it again, not matter what button, or dial I modified & tweaked.

Upon re-assembly, I was confident I had actually fixed my first piece of hardware. And why not? Shouldn’t the skillset of modifying code personify onto hardware, and lament the same degree of success?

All was for naught. 3 hours later, I still couldn’t pull the cord. But MAN, that thing is pretty slick in terms of how it’s put together. If a Java guy wrote it, I’d be able to use one screwdriver, and be able to get to all of the screws with my drill… but it wouldn’t have been as cheap.

So, grabbing the rake before my inner fire unleashed hellish frustration upon my garage of boat shelves, and … God, what the hell IS in there anyway? Her majesty’s walking out with a painting & a charcoal drawing? I swear to God that is going BACK in that room of stuff holding if it’s not on some wall by tomorrow night!

About 5 minutes, I realized my muscles needed proper audio stimulation via the iPod or the pace would be about as consistent in it’s livery as picante sauce made in New York city handed to Montana Joe and his merry men. Dark breaks, and some old school Pantera later, I had ported and entire weeks worth of “yard” into some wanna-be pond in my backyard. Why did I buy a house with a yard again? Oh yeah, so I can put the front-yard’s leftovers in the back, right, right.

…almost done, and it hit me; technology breaks. Seriously, all the frikin time. Yes yes, I’m reaching the point of this post, quite right. How many hours a day do you spend “fixing” things? Fixing bugs, cleaning spam, rebooting Outlook, restarting Tomcat, ALT+F4 out of a crashed game, replacing a haddrive, re-typing an email with tact… the list goes ON! Hell, my dad when I was a kid worked on his boat 24-7; that’s the main reason I keep telling her majesty no when she asks for us to buy one. In a typical 3 week period of around the clock grease-monkey insanity, we’d maybe go water skiing once… and maybe fishing twice… in a month. He enjoyed it, I spose.

I started realizing the fine line between “bugs” and “workarounds” and “lack of knowlege”, and realized the same thing applies to technology. If a blower breaks because you overheated it, is that a faulty blower, faulty user, or lack of good documentation?

That’s not the real question; the real question is, why do some people win those robot contests. A lot of the underdogs have better chances (underdogs being underfunded school systems… oh wait, they all are… well, the lowest of the low). They come with the mindset of “keep it simple”. The more complex a system is, the exponential amount (did I get it right Patrick?) of errors that system can produce. Thus, the more technology gets ingrained in our culture, the more points it can break, and the more need for either self-ability to fix it, or new jobs.

Going off of the example, when fast food finally does replace humans (has 50% up in Richmond, Virginia at a gas station. You use a kiosk to order food; you choose breakfast or dinner, sides, toppings, and condiments. A human hands you the package; do they need to? Naw, I worked at Wendys, a fast food chain here in the states created by a really nice guy named Dave, and I know making a sandwhich isn’t hard at all. Hell, Terminators’ cousin makes my Honda. Damn big paranthesis, gotta stop the insanity now… :: grunt :: UGH ). Anyway, they can’t remove people entirely; MacDonalds I think is like the #1 or #2 private company employer in the United States. You can replace the obnoxious countenance of cashiers with a PSD beveled button interface, but you can’t remove the lobbylists from capitol hill (don’t know politics, just guessing they have lobbyists for jobs there; remember reading some insanity that programmers can’t get jobs and they lobby congress to stop visa’s or something whack). Too many jobs would get replaced by machines.

BUT, anyway, when we do, and those people are replaced, those machines WILL break. Even Kroger & Publix, grocery stores here in the south of the states, have automated checkout lines which have at least 1 dude watching to ensure you don’t steal, you don’t illegally buy beer or cigs underage, and also to fix the machines when they break. Does God watch me until I break?

That being the case, what if I break it down? Naw, just kidding, what I meant was, that being the case, even if Rational Rose becomes a behometh, and starts coding EVERYTHING for you, you’d still need a human to configure XML files (hell, Java & Flash guyz do that now), make sure machines are up and running. The cycle’d continue, and going off of that sleep attack post, we’re all gonna be a bunch of f00king Scotties, albeit not Scottish (I’m 33% Irish), with a bunch of IT Managers going, “I need more power, sucka!” or “Fix this in 1 hour less than you time estimate!”.

Maybe it was the kids joy riding in the pimped out Civic whilst I raked my yard. The iPod didn’t compensate; I felt old; an adult, doing yard work… with a rake… outdoors at a house I own. I had to justify my future in software somehow, mabye this post was it, maybe it wasn’t. I just felt frustrated that we live in a world where there are not just 1, but 3 pills for everything, you can surivive at a gas station when zombie’s attack, and I can talk to anyone in the world who’s jacked in… and I can’t even use a machine to blow some grass away for more than 20 minutes.

Someday, Half-Life 2 will NOT have a loading bar. That’ll be the day my blower never breaks… or if it does, it’s because whatever fixes it broke, and the dude responsible for fixing that robot was busy doing something else.

Bloody full moon.

MSN won’t connect, and AIM plays TCP/IP hopscotch. I unhook my ethernet cable from my POS Linksys router, and connect directly to my DSL modem, thus ensuring Linksys doesn’t pull a chinese gov’t, so I can now see and use the entire internet.

I do weird things when I get frustrated. Typically, emotions cloud my debugging capability. You fail to break up problems into manageable variables, confirm each has some, none, or major impact on the problem at hand.

So, I installed downloaded and Trillian because I got sick of AIM working, but not MSN… and then having to tell AIM to stop trying to knock on heaven’s door.

Cool, I never again use AIM or MSN; 1 program, manages the crud I don’t want to deal with, and allows me to communicate with others. Do I care about the context? No. Do I lose features? None that I care about. I can still instant message, I can still chat, I can still audio/video conference.

I dig Coke more than Pepsi, I dig Clarks more than Dr. Martin, I dig Macromedia more than Adobe. Yes, functionality & features play a part in all 3 mediums; but a major player is branding. Coke is a local brand, and as much as I dislike this state, I’m still loyal to home. I feel bad Delta’s stock is dying a slow, horrible death, and their negative company workings will hurt Atlanta since Hartsfield airport is 0wnz3d by them… but I dig Delta over A&A for that very reason; they are a local brand. I dig Clarks over Dr. Martin because I’m no longer a grungy teenager. Does that mean grungy people wear Dr. Martins? No, but their brand is associated with alty’s carrying post-X-gen icon metal lunch boxes with died hair, jamming to Mother Love Bone on their iPod. Granted, I use more of Macromedia’s products, but their branding has remained stronger over a longer period of time than Adobe’s. Many of us developers only have a cool looking desktop because Studio MX lines are taskbar’s quicklaunch tray.

…none of that plays any factor in my instant messenging life. Yeah, I got AIM for my phone, but even though I still get a headache from typing “lol” on my phone whilst chatting, I bought it to communicate, not because it was the AOL brand.

Software brands work and I am influenced by them. Instant Messenging brands, however, don’t, for me at least. ICQ used to be a cool brand like back in ’98… about the same time I stopped using it, and started using AIM. At that point, it’s really been about who in my social structure uses what. I’m not sure if they have been influenced by brand, but I’m only influenced by their influence.

Trillian removes all of that influence, and IM program changing dynamic. …well, I guess I’m now akin to Trillian, because they made my life easier, and made me realize AIM, Yahoo, and MSN offer me nothing in the way of product branding nor feature set, so I reckon I am somewhat liking the Trillian brand; but I’ve heard of other global IM clones, so I’ll be sure to try them too.

I guess my loyalty comes to functionality first, brand 2nd… but I don’t feel there was any brand loyalty at all to AIM, MSN, or Yahoo.

One of my rules about blogging is not to blog when your emotional. Emotions cloud your judgment, and bypass perspective. Thus, blog posts become rants of nothing more than entertainment value to the occasional reader that has the inclination to read such things. My other rule, though, is if your still emotional about a topic after 10 minutes, and you’ve given it another few hours just in case it’s a simmer’er (something that actually builds, like plate tectonics pressure), you can wait for it to blow so you can later reflect. Reflection, even if written in discovery manner (like an audio learner when they ask you a question and answer it themselves and your left wondering why they asked you the question in the first place). Others seeing your discovery can potentially help them as well, or give perspective at least.

I’m still reflecting. It’s pretty weird, if you… well, actually me, take a step back, and recognize that the drama in my life is not recovering from a Tsunami, not worrying if my son or daughter is ok over there in Iraq, but dealing with a router firmware update. Pathetic, or point of reference? Those who belittle teenagers, saying that their hormone catalyzed emotions merely exemplify their self-importance on one of the most non-important part of their lives doing just that… belittling someone, being ignorant of their situation, and claiming to think that the reaction is not important.

Again, I quote what I read from an educated Sociologist in college, “Although people may react to situations that are not real, their reactions certainly are.”

Granted, in all fairness, those reactions in context of greater happenings, both recent and abroad may shave off or add weight the impact such happenings have on another’s digestion of the situation.

Why do I feel like I’m trying to justify my lamenting about my day because of my router upgrade debacle? Journalists don’t ask permission from their readers, do they? Well, anyway, I hope you came away with, “Jesse’s sorry he’s complaining about his router, but he feels he’s justified in it, and there may be some inkling of use in the description, so he feel’s it’s his duty to explain. He recognizes although his name is on his blog, it truly belongs to the readers.”

Without further ado…

Computer Scientists I’m sure are taught the nomenclature of the differences between a “patch” and an “upgrade”. I updated my firmware on my router, whichever one that is. I considered it an upgrade because it’s still a 1.x version, and all that’s changed is the minor version #. Talking to Spike about setting up my server so I can have Flex apps run on it, and the internet can actually hit my box behind my router; he was walking me through it.

Something in his email, the part about “is your firmware the latest”… it didn’t say to do anything. But, I felt it implied something. You can’t make someone do something, but I certainly felt compelled to go upgrade my router. I mean, hell, that’s the crux on which all of my work, professional and fun, runs. That might be important to keep in tip, top shape and secure, eh?

So, after I use their simple upgrade utility, all it saves is my username and password; all my connection data (Hi BellSouth, I’m really a computer, not a network… seriously), all my port forward settings, firewall switches… gone. The web interface is completely replaced by this insanely less intuitive interface (don’t give me that who moved my cheese bs, I do interface design for a living sucka!) with many options previously there removed and/or named something different, and I’m getting weird redraw issues in Firefox.

Ugh. I’m going to be ignorant, and stereotype Linksys, and say that a big company was behind this change. Some Director somewhere wanted to have a “Cisco” branding refresh done on some of their products, and naturally the only way to force branding on IT administrators is to change their router interface (those that don’t work via command line or other remote utilities). If it’s anything like her majesty’s company (my own interpretation here, no one’s words specifically quoted), everyone’s a designer, and business cases are merely “I’ve read stuff for 30 hours this week therefore I’m justified when I throw bs at you, therefore justifying this project. If anyone challenges you, and you pull rank, and that doesn’t work, I’ll throw a stack of business analyst documents at their Outlook as a feint”.

Negative? You tell me; I upgrade my firmware in the innocent, dare I say naive (remember, he who dares, wins), mind that I’m making my router better and more secure by having the most up to date software on it. Now, my internet, email, instant messaging, SSH, and Subversion doesn’t work.

I swear, as soon as I get this damn BA degree done, screw my masters, I’m going back instead for a minor in Networking. I can’t imagine what IT administrators go through when they handle this stuff. I can clearly remember my feelings every time an admin screwed up wherever I worked, big company or small: complete, and utter frustration at the individual who f’d with my connectivity.

My first law at being hired at any company is make immediate, and good friends with the admins. Not only do they give you straight, un-emotional answers to your questions when you ask in crisis like the above, but also more accurate estimated times of when things will be fixed, why they broke (in tech talk), and what they are doing to fix it. That still gives you the right to judge them as an idiot, but at least your talking to a friend, and not a “co-worker”. Your friend is an idiot? No no, you missed the point; they “leveled” with you. You don’t always get that with employees, but if you make an honest effort to get to know, take to lunch, and sincerely care about how someone’s weekend was in regards to IT, your life is soooo much better.

In this case, I can see how easy it is to screw up a network. Considering I work at home, this is a big deal to me. I’m suddenly disconnected from the world, an isolated, and not as productive individual. I feel a lot better now if I were to ever start my own company and forking over serious bling to my IT admins. They know when it’s best to “leave it the hell alone” and “I’m here all weekend making sure this gets working”. I truly admire that. And I KNOW they know that the same people they typically help are sometimes apt to take situations out of context, and take the lack of network access out personally on the IT admin, which is completely unfair… but the situations I’ve seen occur, most take it in stride.

“Cool, so, Jesse, your a fu#($*)(W ing idiot, my shiot doesn’t work, why in the hell did you upgrade your firmware when your router has worked fine with the same firmware for the past year?”

“I made a bad decision.”

“Damn right you did… but the important thing here is did you learn from it?”

“Absolutely. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. Seriously… leave it the heck alone!”

“Good, always learn from your mistakes.”

So yeah, got internet, instant messaging, and email back up… the latter 2 by merely “waiting 5 minutes”, the first by release/renew, repeat x 100. SSH appears to have never been broken… but my SVN is f000|X3d beyond repair.

I reinstalled Tortoise SVN, and before I left for school, uninstalled and reinstalled Cygwin & friends. I guess tomorrow morning I’ll attempt once again to cache my SSH and hit my work’s Subversion repository.

:: reads above ::

Geez! It’s good thing I get paid for this. All I wanted to tell you was I upgraded the firmware on my router, and although it broke everything, I managed to get everything up again except for Subversion. I obviously know what concise is since I just consolidated an entire blog post of tons of paragraphs into 1 sentence. All about the application, baby.

Speaking of getting frustrated, I was reading a post JD linked too about AJAX and a few of the people who are frustrated with the naming of things already in existence, and leading to obscuring true definitions, etc. To their (AJAX word users’) credit, I’m all about contractions, any pragmatic developer is; they are more efficient at communicating; speaking in the Active Voice can only do so much. HTML + JavaScript + CSS vs. DTHML for example; what looks better on a book? What’s quicker to say to a friend? Does your friend know what HTML, JavaScript and CSS are? Do you? Do you both know DHTML is an acronym for it? Cool, save time, prevent errors, and use it! Communication is inherently a flawed process; using contractions and acronyms makes it easier and less prone to errors… except when I talk to that government worker (head of EMS/paramedics here in northern Georgia). He uses acronyms like their candy; every other sentence has some 3 letter organization he assumes I know who the heck they are merely by some adjective next to them in his sentence to provide context…

Anyway yeah, AJAX; you know what I’m talking about, right? 4 letters vs. HTTP+XML+HTML+XMLHttpRequest+JavaScript+CSS. The author in the article quoted some other dude, saying:

If the real name is too long (the name Ajax was apparently coined because “HTTP+XML+HTML+XMLHttpRequest+JavaScript+CSS” was too long) then just mention the important bits. For example, instead of REST, just “HTTP”; instead of DHTML just “HTML and script”, and instead of Ajax, “XML and script”.

The important bits? They are all equally important! If the team of technologies used together is common enough to place under a single phrase, acronym, or new name then by all means, use it to convey meaning of many different things through 1, single, portable term.

So yeah, this backend developer… Oh, oh.. I’m sorry, this .NET developer… well, wait, he’ll get pissed if I don’t mention he’s got some mean SQL Server statement skills up his sleeve. So yeah, this backend developer who does .NET and is good at SQL Server said he liked watching the A-Team.

…omg, like, knowing he was good at .NET and SQL really helped add context to that conversation. If I had said backend developer, couldn’t you have implied enough about said homeskillet’s background, and thus garnered, “Hrm… and server guy digs the A-team.” And you know, you have a mouth, you can ask a question for more details you know. “Does he do .NET? I always thought .NET guys didn’t dig the A-Team…?”

Wow, geez, you know what, you could of prevented and headed that question off at the pass SIMPLY if you had not used an acronym like “backend” vs. “.NET blah blah blah SQL blah blah”. …Hixie’s right, screw placeholders; they only work in programming anyway, and by God, those of us in the English speaking world, especially Americans, need to play literary Janitors. We need to ensure the maintenance of our language; it’s already foobarred fubared (darn, forgot the dual consonant after the vowel in past tense words) fubarred enough without people creating nicknames for things to consolidate terms for easier communication and understanding from the masses in an already information overloaded society.

Damn oxymoron’s… they just leak the sarcasm right out, don’t they, thus destroying the integrity they were supposed give the facade of, and thus have more impact. Whatever, if you made it this far, I’m sure you got the point.

Anyway, yeah, firmware upgrades suck and acronyms rock; don’t fix something that’s not broken, and don’t blame a society’s awakening & acceptance of new technology methodologies by using short nicknames for your insecurity of your slow-adopting technology.

I want to call bulls$(*t on this article… and it’s not CNN I have a problem with, it’s the inventor of the internet. Was reading this article on my phone during my break in class tonight, and was appalled. 2 seconds later, I immediately recognized that I had a few, sparse, quoted setences, taken out of context.

Taking quotes from people without taking the entire page they spoke removes much of the true meaning behind what they said. So, in all fairness, I’m aiming my bs-detector at the article, not at Mr. Tim Berners-Lee.

From the article:

Berners-Lee’s original vision of the Web was as a resource for collaboration. He said that so far it had been “a big disappointment” in this respect, although exceptions such as “wikis” — essentially interactive online note pads — showed its potential.

…uh… dude, 70% of the reason I’m where I am at today in my career is because of the collaborative power of the internet. Talk about some SERIOUSLY high expectations; that poor guy must have emotinoal scars from being drilled by investors when asking for venture capital for another multi-billion dollar particle accelerator.

I can definately identify from where he is coming from; many of my code creations I curse angrily as being failures, even though my clients gleefully praise how neat it is and pay me dough for services rendered. The nature of being, not necessarely a perfectionist, but wanting to have your creation match your vision exactly… it’s tough and a let down at times.

“Wikis in general are great examples of how people want to be creative and not just suck in information,” he told the seminar, pointing to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as the most advanced development in this area.

Dude, the wiki that used to be at chattyfig.figleaf.com sucked! Not because of the content (found some juicy undocumented Flash 5 ActionScript in there), but the whole concept of chaotic control of everyone suddenly empowered to edit the same document… what a mess. Usability? F-that shi, yo!

I gained more knowledge, experience, and ideas from the collection minds of the over 3000+ people subscribed to Flashcoders for the past 5 years, and now I’m giving back to 5 times as many mailing lists, blogs, and community events… yeah, maybe I “sucked information” a lot of the time in the beginning, but I tried my best to give back when I could… now that’s all I do, because when I do ask questions, I’ve forgotten how to ask them, and thus they never get answered (since I’ll write a page, and people will go, “Where’s your question?”)… or I answer them myself.

I almost suffocated on my coffee when I read that quote; had the last 7 years been a dream? I pinched myself, and quickly confirmed that the creator of the internet was smoking some serious crack OR he was taken WAYYYY out of context…or both. I’m not accusing, just surmising. What else do you do with 10 minutes between learning about the Greeks kicking the shizz-nit out of the Persians (with the Spartans’ help, of course)?

And finally, my favorite:

“Everyone was supposed to be browsing the Web with their mobile phone, but the problem is that it has not happened,” Berners-Lee said, adding later this was not a question of weak demand.

“I’m reading this very story on my cellphone, you frikin’ goober!”

In all fairness, it takes me 900 milliseconds to type my website into a new tab in Firefox. It took me 1 minute, 30 seconds to type in my website on my phone (with http:// already filled out for me), and another 10 seconds for my phone to say it was out of memory.

No, I think a lot of the blame lies with providers. Who chooses the list of already typed in, and nicely organized links (via WAP or toned down HTML?) that I receive… not me, they just were “there” and I figured, “Cool, CNN news via my phone… this could come in handy!” But the pain to physically pull content vs. have it pushed to me… damn, I blame Cingular for that one.

When I first met Mike Downey Day 0 of MXDU, he was telling me of the insanity a Flash developer had to go through just to get a SWF app deployed on a phone.

No… again, either homeskillet was smoking crack, or mis-quoted. Naturally, I’m a geek, so I surf the internet on my phone, and even more subjective, I’m married to a web designer, so can’t dis ’em. Regardless, just because they’ve had XMLHTTPRequest (or whatever the heck it’s called) for the past 3 years, and haven’t had the luck of it catching on till Google hires a few bad asses to put the smack down again, kickin it RIA style with DHTML, still doesn’t mean they aren’t talented and quick learners. Hogwash. The web designers I KNOW still in the industry are awesome, smart, quick learners, and EXTREMELY versitile. There are bonds Johnny-Particle Watcher isn’t seeing here. He must never leave the lab… or CNN is being sick. I’d guess the latter… as long as they don’t take it personal and remove themselves from my phone; I need them every Tuesday and Thursday nights!

I bet if someone takes ole’ Packet-Meister, and shows him IRC, a random MMORPG forum, datecam.com, Breeze, sourceforge.net, csszengarden.com, and the winner of the Flash Lite contest on a cellphone… he’d go, “Fascinating” in some Spock like tone, invent Nuclear Fusion (or is it Fission?) and we’d jump to the Fusion Age, making the Information Age the quickest of the 8, although quickly justifying the dot-com bust timetable.

Regardless, at any rate, in addition too, and furthermore: Thanks for the internet Quantum-Bi..er, Mr. Berners-Lee!

CNN Dribble

Considering today is what today is, the internet for phones suck because they ain’t Scottish, and if it ain’t Scottish, it’s crap! Oh wait… St. Patty-Cake day is an Irish day… dammit. Well, consolation prize: I HAVE BEER AND TOMORROW OFF!!! Happy St. Patricks Day everyone! (yes, I have a wee thirty-three in meeee)