It’s coming in about a week. I’m looking forward to it, but it’s getting to the point where I’m not sure what I’m looking forward to more - seeing the movie, or this thread finally dying.
I realize that linking to it is only going to bump up the page rank and lead to even more “insightful” comments, but oh well.
As a result of a delayed communication yesterday in coordinating the movie arrangements, Nathan and/or Dan brought up the question of why I don’t check my e-mail more frequently than I do, so I thought I’d briefly explain it here.
When I am working, I like to devote my full concentration to the project I am working on. Designing and writing complex software takes quite a bit of concentration, and I find that once you get into the groove of doing it, you are much more productive. I think that this is probably true for any type of work that involves a lot of thinking about anything that is complex. I also find that it takes a bit of time to get into that mindset, and if you are interrupted in order to do something else, it can sometimes take a bit of time to ramp back up to that level of productivity.
As a result, I usually do not check e-mail at all during the day (or at least while I’m working). I’ll usually (but not always) check it before I get started in the morning, and then rarely check it again during the day. Furthermore, I do not answer my phone while I am working, unless it is Martha. Anyone else can leave a voicemail and I will deal with it when I have a chance.
This is the whole point of voicemail, to allow you to deal with incoming calls on your time schedule, not the caller’s. Same thing with e-mail - it was never designed to be an instant back-an-forth communication tool. If you want that kind of real-time communication, that is what IRC and IM clients were invented for. Needless to say, I almost never run any IM clients, and certainly never while I’m working.
Hope that clears things up for anyone who may have been confused by my communication policies / practices. Please let me know your thoughts, either on my habits or outlining your own.
I’m looking for some recommendations on online feed readers, since Google Reader isn’t all that great after all. If anyone (like Dan) can get me into the Feedlounge trial from Alex that would be cool, but I’m also just looking for general recommendations of any others out there that are already released. I’ve tried Bloglines a long time ago, but I’m sure it’s changed some since then.
To be realistic, I don’t really know whether any of the readers here use them or have tried them besides Dan, so this is probably mostly a question I could have just emailed to him, but I thought I’d open it up for everyone to comment.
Just wanted to do a quick post about the new spam system I am using: Spam Karma 2. It’s been a while since I looked around at spam plugins, but it was getting pretty bad for a while, and since I haven’t had much time to work on the blog dev stuff that I want to, I decided to try out this one that I had seen recommended in various places.
I’m still tweaking the settings and working everything out, but it seems pretty good right now, and it is catching 100% of the spam at the moment (which the WPBlacklist plugin I was using before was obviously missing). Spam Karma has a lot of interesting details about it which I’ll perhaps expand upon later, but what I like about it most is that it combines mulitple strategies for detecting whether a particular comment is spam, and assigns “karma” points (positive or negative) to a given comment depending on how it fares against all the different filters.
One of the many options it’s using is doing something like I was doing with my original spam plugin that I wrote myself: putting encrypted data in the form that is then checked on the server when the comment is posted, to verify that it was posted from the form that the user just loaded. Obviously they do this differently than I did, so my tagboard was not compatible with this approach, and this is why all the tags were getting moderated after I turned it back on. Until I fix it, I’m just going to leave the tagboard disabled (I never really liked tagboards too much anyway).
Another interesting aspect of it is that Dan tried to submit several tags which were getting blocked because of the issue mentioned above, but then after a number of failed comment attempts (by the same person/IP within a given window of time) it automatically added his IP and his domain (from the URL field) to the blacklist, so that even when he tried to comment in a normal post he couldn’t. I thought that was pretty cool.
of Tythyl is now available for your listening pleasure. Nathan and I couldn’t make it for the recording this week, but Dan and Jason did a good job of bearing the burden on their own.
Download it at tythyl.com
…software development doesn’t work out for me, my new backup plan is to be a tournament poker player.
We went up to Chumash casino today for a poker tournament and I ended up making the final table, and taking fifth place overall (after making some dumb mistakes).
Everyone had a pretty good time; Dan got 28th place, so he made money too, and he actually came away with more because he went and played the other tables after he got out.
Thanks to Dan for the link to this interesting article comparing the inner workings of Apple and MS.
Here are some quotes that I thought were interesting:
** Culture ** Very similar, actually. Both companies are filled with smart, fun people who love their work…
Apple is secretive… very secretive. Unless explicitely told otherwise, nothing leaves your group. Everything is on a need-to-know basis - you can’t even tell other Apple employees. If I wanted to find out information about, say, iPod, I would check the rumors sites. Didn’t have any chance of getting information out of my iPod friends. At Microsoft, though, you’re pretty much free to say whatever you want to whoever you want… especially within the company.
Steve Jobs is god (this is a fact at Apple and doesn’t express my own feelings ;-)). You shall not disobey the Steve. Bill Gates is just some guy…
Dan posted the first episode (more of a test run than a full show) of our podcast yesterday. He did a great job on the editing (it was originally about a 1.5 hour conversation) - there was a lot of stuff to cut out. Next time it will probably have a lot more content, since this one we kind of just decided to do spur of the moment (that afternoon).
The song (by Nathan) was excellent.
Now I just need to work on not saying “uh” so much. I noticed I did that a lot in the beginning part (maybe because I was distracted with something else at the time) but it cleared up after that; just need to be mindful of that in the future.
Let us know what you think. You can register and then leave a comment here.
I don’t have time to do a lengthy review on this right now, but I liked it. Dan and I saw it Friday night and then I took the kids the next day. (Side note: $10.25 for just me for the Friday night show, versus $12.50 for me and the 3 kids on Saturday at the Santa Paula theater).
Short summary: if you didn’t like many of the other recent comic movies, you probably won’t like this, but if you did you may. Has a lot of the same general audience feel as Spider-man 1, but probably without as much popular appeal (and a lot less marketing). The casting was actually very good (I was worried about a couple of them), with the possible exception of Dr. Doom. There were (as always) significant differences from the original stories, but none that wrecked the story.