Opinion

• Feb 15 2013 - I am a technology tourist (or first impressions of Dart) ... So this week I met with someone who was very excited about working with Google Dart, a web programming language aimed at being a better JavaScript running both on the server and ultimately the client where the VM could run in browsers (only chromium for now). When Google first announced Dart in September '11 I thought "cool, too bad it will never work" and basically dismissed the project as doomed since it would presumably face too much pressure from competitors and open standards.
• Sep 15 2010 - I just quit my job.... ... Ha! No I didn’t. But starting on the premise that I had and I had already saved a bunch of cash and decided to finally become my own boss, what would I do first? For me this is hypothetical, but for my good friend who’s about to make the leap out of full time employment to self employment it is very very real. And so I will live vicariously and imagine what I’d do.
• Jun 30 2010 - curiosity killed the addictive gamer in me ... I can see it now. Homeless, slightly demented and jabbering about inane details of imaginary characters. This will be my life in six months from now after suffering through a debilitating addiction.  An addiction to the ridiculous time suck that is world of warcraft (aka world of walking). I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I have now played through the 10 day free trial (damn you free trial!) and have paid to play for another month.
• May 30 2010 - Flying at the right altitude - advice to a slightly younger me ... No posts in five months! Almost exactly the same time I’ve been in a new position at work. Disturbing trends, this completely predates just the last six months…. I’ve moved from being a team lead to being the head of our R&D group. I now have as many teams (7) as I did people to think about, and a whole new world of politics, strategy and planning. With a group of this size HR issues seem to be at least a weekly occurrence and I am now fully and completely on the manager’s schedule.
• Dec 14 2009 - google chrome software updates make everything else feel broken ... I am growing more and more annoyed at the Apple’s and the Adobe’s of the world who are constantly interrupting my work to tell me that there are updates waiting for me to install. Why do I have to manage this? Yes I know that I can go in there and tweak the settings so that I don’t get annoyed… but why should I even have to do that? I would need to do that across every user account on every machine I use on a regular basis!
• Dec 5 2009 - build it (so it's easy) and they will come (make the right decision) ... One of the biggest lessons I think I’ve learned over the past few years is that you have to be very careful with what you make easy to do in a software system. When you are working within a preexisting system, it is very hard to work effectively outside the bounds of that system. Whether you are limited by time constraints, peer pressure, political decisions or just pure technical inertia, those early/legacy decisions in a system will have long reaching impacts on the decisions of those who follow.
• Aug 7 2009 - the rise and fall of myspace (and twitter) ... This is a great post on how myspace rose and fall and how the same thing applies to Twitter (and I’d imagine Facebook as well) Some really good thoughts. Getting popular before you have your mission can forever trap you into that identity vacuum where popularity is everything. http://codybrown.name/2009/08/06/myspace-is-to-facebook-as-twitter-is-to-______/ A good read, and the level of blogging I’d like to work towards (more pictures!).
• Jul 23 2009 - manager schedule vs maker schedule ... Popular comp-sci essayist and lisp hacker extraordinaire Paul Graham recently posted this article on the difference between a manager’s schedule and a maker’s schedule. This is really inline with my own views on this issue and really sums up a big problem we have where I work with meetings being scheduled with the makers and the impact that has. We’ve had tons of discussions around the cost of mental context switching, but even that’s an understatement of the problem… Great work, it’s always helpful hearing echoes of these types of thoughts beyond my own everyday sphere.
• May 11 2009 - taking a step back/up/sideways (thebrain) ... Around 2003, 2004 I had a bit of a mild obsession with organizing my life into digital form, creating as many mappings as I could from my everyday existence into some kind of digital form. This of course included ideas and thoughts, writings and paintings, music and movies, friends and bits of information about those friends etc. This amass of data have gone from one disjointed medium to another (.txt files in folders, emails, blog posts, napkins) without ever really achieving any chohesiveness or real improvement in my ability to actually synthesize or act on all that information.
• May 6 2009 - Transcendent Man! ... I read the singularity is near last year and really enjoyed it, despite a few misgivings for Kurzweil’s ego and some dubious use of statistics. One of the things I found myself really intrigued by was Kurweil himself and this movie looks like a fun look at the man and his ideas. Do I believe him? Part of me wants to, definitely. The ultimate end-game of the singularity is fascinating and wondrous, but I actually found some of the more intermediate steps in his projections to be more fascinating.
• Mar 25 2009 - silverlight 3 - after the high ... I failed to convince my manager at work that sending me and a few members of my team to MIX was a worthwhile expense in this economy. So instead I spent a couple days this sprint with http://live.visitmix.com/ on one screen and visual studio in the other. I have to say, Microsoft did an amazing job with MIX in terms of getting me excited and having me “tuned in”. If you are at all interested in web development on the Microsoft stack and  haven’t checked out the keynote I’d recommend it.
• Feb 18 2009 - decision making : flip a coin then check your gut ... I once heard an interesting anecdote about how to make a difficult decision between two paths. When you find yourself spinning, alternating between one choice and then the other, it can be helpful to simply assign each choice “heads” or “tails” and flip a coin. When you reveal what side the coin landed on pay attention to your emotional reaction… are you relieved or are you disappointed?  Try it sometime, it really can work.
• Jan 31 2009 - QWERTY Myth and the entrenchment of Flash ... This is a great article about the myth of how the best technology doesn’t necessarily win. Granted, sometimes the best technology does not win, but there is a persistent and pervasive sense that the populous often chooses the “VHS” over the far superior alternative. The article addresses the VHS vs Beta debate directly as well as the victory over Dvorak by QWERTY. To encourage you to read the original I won’t reveal the clever arguments made.
• Nov 11 2008 - Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter ... A good friend of mine Sarah believes that the moon landings were a hoax. Despite being a huge science geek , a fan of NASA and a member of the planetary society she subscribes to the idea that man has not in fact walked on the moon, and the entire thing was a lie perpetrated in an effort to win the political war with the USSR. Or something along those lines. Somehow this deeply disturbs me.
• Jun 26 2008 - Bill C61 notes ... So I have a great personal distrust and disgust in the way copyright law has continually degraded and been abused by large corporations over the past 30 or 40 years . (Thanks Mickey!) I cringe at the idea of the RIAA sueing people to protect their broken business model and laugh my ass off when bands like Metallica (2) and Kiss make total asses of themselves while those artists that are still relevant embrace new ways of engaging their fans.
• Jun 14 2008 - Dynamic vs Static... no wait make that DBC! ... I need to blog this basically to toss it in my archive. There have been some interesting posts on the religious debate of static vs dynamic languages. I don’t know why I always get drawn into these lines of thought, but I do. (in fact I just added a “versus” label) I say drawn in because my underlying philosophy in all of these things is to choose the right tool for the job and leave it at that.
• Jun 7 2008 - Do I really need to embrace C++? ... My internal debate rages on… I have some C++ courses in the pipeline so I will definitely learn more than the basic understanding/grasp I have now… Still though. Currently I associate C++ proponents with old-school attitudes on the need for absolute control and a fear of newer levels of abstraction that are allowing increasing complex and large projects. Garbage collection, the .NET framework etc, are all grouped together into a category of tools that only “weak” programmers need.
• Apr 12 2008 - Terrible ad campaign (seal hunt) ... So when I started this blog I wanted to make a point of not posting one angry rant after another. Essentially trying to follow the sage advice of bloggers like Scott Hansleman who says amongst other advice to: “stick to a topic”, “avoid politics”, “don’t blog bile” … Well I’ll break all those rules now by pointing out my extreme distaste for a series of ads being run by the international fund for animal welfare (IFAW).
• Mar 30 2008 - University Bureaucracy ... Depending on how I choose to count I am now dealing with my fifth or sixth post-secondary institution in my odyssey to finish my computer science degree. One thing that all of the schools I’ve dealt with have had in common is a slow and inflexible bureaucracy. Of course as a younger man I blamed a lot of my own failings on what I perceived then to be a completely fucked up system (University of Manitoba) that was screwing me over.
• Mar 27 2008 - I have some reading to do! ... http://listverse.com/literature/top-15-science-fiction-book-series I came across this list of the best 15 science fiction series ever written. The reason I love seeing this is 1) it contains a bunch of science fiction series I’ve already read and thought very highly of and 2) contains some series I’ve never even heard of, which of course is exciting since it means I have some reading to do. For all I know the guy who wrote the list is totally unqualified and preying on people’s ego by throwing familiar items on a list with a bunch of obscure ones, but I’m gonna go with it.