One of the biggest problems I see around me is the self-centered-ness of people. People are incredibly rude, but it isn’t because they don’t care about other people, rather they are so self-centered that it doesn’t even occur to them that there are other people. Do any of the following signs describe you?
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I’m stuck in a sort of limbo at the moment: I know that I’m going to be unemployed, but it is still a little too far off to start actively interviewing and chasing jobs. For now all I can do is polish the resume, keep an eye on the job market in general (as depressing as that may be), and finish up the projects at my current job. [click to continue reading…]
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Based on Amazon’s announcement, it looked like with the Kindle 2 they fixed most of the flaws that kept me from getting the original, so I finally took the plunge and bought one. I honestly expected that I’d find annoyances and would not want to use it as a primary way of reading, but that the ability to fit a whole slew of books in the side pocket of my backpack would out-weigh those annoyances when traveling, sitting in the coffee shop, etc. I was wrong.
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A book I’m reading made me curious about powwow, the folk “magic” of the Pennsylvania Dutch, and reading about powwow got me thinking again about the effect that our belief can have on our environments and ourselves.
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As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m spending some time working through a stack of books to brush up on the programming skills I haven’t used in a while and learn some of the things I haven’t had an opportunity to use before.
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) has been around for a while, but I’ve been doing more architecting than programming the last couple years so I haven’t had a chance to really use it. What I’ve seen has interested me (contract-first design, better separation & testability than .asmx web services, etc.), so I picked up Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation Step by Step
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When people ask (or when I need a good excuse) I tell them that I am a single parent. I’ve decided that isn’t quite accurate, though.
The term “single parent” implies quite a few things: that I can’t hand off parenting duties to somebody else when I need some alone time, that I can’t stop for a drink after work because there’s nobody at home with my daughter, that if she’s sick I need to take the day off work because there’s nobody else to stay with her. It means that I’m always the one doing the disciplining, the one driving her to school events and friends’ houses, the one making sure she gets out of bed in the morning.
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I strongly believe in the concept of “paying forward” and try to always use a part of what I’ve been lucky enough to receive to make a difference for someone else. I could, of course, fill out the form at work each year and send part of my salary off to a large charitable organization, but personally (selfishly, perhaps) I’d rather know where my money is going and know that it is actually making a difference.
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Even though I work with .net code every day, it is almost always the same type of code. This means that although there are some facets of .net coding that I know top to bottom, there are other areas that I never work in and have forgotten what little I knew about them. Since I’ll be unemployed come July, I figure I should use the time until then to brush up on those areas to get ready for looking for a new job. I’m going to tackle this by first refreshing my broader knowledge and then digging into the areas where I really need deeper knowledge.
I haven’t paid much attention to the MS Press Step by Step books before, because I’ve usually been looking to really dig into a topic and those books seemed a little too broad and shallow. For the purpose of brushing up on the full spectrum of topics, though, they fit the bill quite well.
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I tend to deal primarily with cash during the day as I pick up coffee, go to lunch, pay for parking, etc. In order to keep an eye on where my money is going I need to track these cash expenses, but many of them don’t provide receipts (and I really don’t want to have to carry a pocketful of receipts or sit and enter them into the computer in the evening).
Besides, this is the kind of thing the iPhone is for, right? So I grabbed several expense-tracking apps and tried them out. Unfortunately, what I found was that they were all geared more toward someone trying to track and report on business expenses, which meant that they were a bit too “heavy” for my needs. Ideally, I wanted to be able to tap “coffee”, enter “$3,00″ and be done with it, and be able to see my total expenses at a glance. [click to continue reading…]
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One of the issues I’ve had in trying to adopt the principles / practices of GTD is the problem of not having what I need with me. I’ve learned all about how to “manage action” in Outlook, which is fine when I’m at work but it leaves me hanging when I’m on my personal computer at the coffee shop. I’ve tried using Gmail to track my projects and tasks, so I can get to them from any computer, but that ends up being a bit clunky on my iPhone when I’m out and about.
A couple months ago I stumbled over Nozbe (http://www.nozbe.com), and have really gotten to like it. It is simple and intuitive, so it helps instead of getting in the way. It is web-based, so I can get to it from any computer. And it has an iPhone-specific interface that is very well done, so I’m able to access (and add) tasks when I’m away from my computers.
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