I had a trip out to Tokyo last week and found this when I returned:
What happened? Does California think it’s spring time or something? Maybe I brought back some of the cherry blossom festival with me? While you’re at it, take a look at my new favorite trip pic from Tokyo:
There’s a few more where that came from. Click through to the photos area of the site for more of that kind of thing.
Looks like I now have a way to highlight pictures from my Gallery based photo gallery setup without having two copies of the images hanging around and eating up space. Yay php hackers!
An interesting phenomenon is occurring in my music library and I wonder if I’m alone in this behavior. I find that if I make smart playlists in my music and media player of the moment, then vote on the songs that appear in that playlist, then begin to weed out the songs I don’t really like all that much, that I am in fact listening to only about 10% or so of my total music library.
This gets me wondering: is the majority of music that I (and others) have actually crap or is there just no good way to relate the songs I like to the ones I haven’t heard or found yet? I am working on a project dealing with this very issue at work at the moment, but I am fiddling around with my library on my own time. I wonder if others have the same sorts of experience with their libraries?
In a burst of creative energy I decided to do some clean-up work around the old web site today, fixing broken modules, freshening CSS code, and the like. I occasionally try to fix the forever broken IE PNG bug known as the gray bar on this web site. In a futile attempt, I went to my trusty Google Desktop Search bar (highly recommended if you don’t have it) and typed in “IE6 PNG bug” and got back this juicy nugget:
Now, given where I work and the places I have worked I am the last one to cast stones, but the gist of the post works out like this:
We got to 95+% market share and we stopped listening to our customers, our partners, and our developers.
If you don’t believe me, click the link and go read it yourself. This is “How to Ignore Your Customer: 101.” As a 10 year product management professional I can’t tell you how sick this makes me. Stating this sort of thing to the world is tantamount to saying that you have absolutely no business being in the PM role and that customers are merely a bootstrap to getting a comfy office chair. Maybe I’m an odd bird, but if I’m not sticking my neck out for what the customer needs and wants during the product release cycle to the point where my job could be in danger, I feel that I’m not doing my job.
Maybe its time I round up some more PM’s and find out what they think.
Having worked with Microsoft in the past, I know this isn’t SOP for them, but maybe I don’t understand the circumstances for deciding to mothball IE development for so many years.
I have finished updating this site to the latest version of WordPress, version 1.5 as of this writing. A few bumps came along for the ride, since it asks you to delete you old directory (after backup!) and then pull back in only the parts you need. It seemed a little cranky after install, but I’m slowly dropping things back in as I find them busted.
It seems a bit faster than before and the templates promise to be much easier. We shall see what new features appear as I learn more about this release.
You can get it here: WP 1.5
After years of trying to fight the good fight I’m looking for another job again. It isn’t by choice, but my official search has begun in earnest this week. There are some opportunties within the company, but I will look outside as well. It bites that this decsision to look wasn’t a voluntary one, but it has to be done nonetheless.
If I could learn to be dispassionate about what I do I’m sure things would go smoother for me. Until then, I need to find something else that drives me to get up and do the daily grind. I hope that I can find that soon, else the bills really start to pile up!
