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By coscooper
A movie, —really!
Air-conditioning, wherefore art thou? Ours is a big grey lump sitting stoically on the side of the house, silently waiting to spread it’s goodness throughout our interior. However, the truth is, having the house cooled down is NOT the real reason it should be on. Colorado summers aren’t that bad, A/C is for wimps. Noise abatement is my one argument for turning the beast on.
Sleeping with the windows open is a challenge, even for small town living. Longmont is only about 80,000 folks, give or take. For such a family oriented, small metropolis, you’d think with all those kids and retired folks, everyone would be settled in for the evening early, but nooooo, they sure don’t follow the rules of the campground. Settle down after 9pm. Instead, it “seeeeems” the general population likes to crank up to a roar by testing their varied street vehicles, motorcycles, thumping boom boxes or sports car. If they are home, sitting on decks yammering until the wee hours of the morning must be the other memo I didn’t get. Our towns “cruising” laws don’t seem to really work and miss manors book on common courtesy must not have made it’s way around our neighborhood.
Lying with warm skin on top of cool sheets really isn’t that bad. Colorado nights cool off quickly making it bearable, usually down right chilly the next morning. So the real issue is the noise. Unfortunately, we know every dog in our neighborhood by name, though we’ve never seen them personally. Our little slice of town seems to be made up of home bodies who like to sit on their deck until late talking in low murmurs like Charlie Browns teacher or those Sims from the popular game just loud enough for sleepus, interuptus.
Some emergency provider didn’t discover his GPS last night, or it must have been on the fritz as sirens wailed endlessly tapering off into the distance, then seemingly headed back into our audible circle, turned into yet another direction bouncing around town trying to find their mark. After multiple attempts, they must have stumbled upon the emergency.
Town officials at some council meeting way back in the stone age voted a law into action that requires train engineers to announce their embedding approach even if blinking lights flash or long red and white arms are spread across the road. Engineers who wonder into Longmont seem to take the timing literally, blasting their warning horns for hours on end as they meander through town. Five crossings later, they’ve made their point.
Cost be damn, I’m lobbying for the A/C to be ramped up, not because it’s hot, but because our town doesn’t follow the campground rules. Settle down after 9pm.
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By coscooper
Job hunting is almost a full time job, but the tasks are tedious and frankly boring. I mean, if you were asked by your current employer to search through a myriad of job sites, poke through every company web site you’d like to work with looking for that perfect job description hoping that they magically posted a new option, writing compelling, relevant cover letters and going through every variation of a job application, you’d tell your boss you were nuts, right? Well, that pretty much sums up my mornings, among other things.
When people ask how it’s going or what’s your status, I tell them I’m still “underemployed”, meaning, I work, but not enough to pay the bills. Besides reaching out to my network, following up on leads and the dreaded seek and apply work, I also do other things to stay busy. While it’s not a stigma anymore to be “underemployed” for a period of time, it does look good that you’re busy filling in your time with related work rather than catching up on the latest soap-opera or catching all those “new career” commercials. (Okay, I watch a little daytime TV, but not much.)
Besides the job hunt, I find myself writing a lot more than before. I bang out more blog posts, like this, and I pump out a number of articles for various online venues like Examiner, eHow and several others. Elance also has some freelance optional work, but it’s hard to land projects with all the “off-shore” contractors. Along side the article freelancing, I’ve been really catching up on those two novel projects I’ve worked on and off the past few years. In fact, I’m finished with one, High Lies, it’s now on the back burner, I’m letting it settle out of my brain. I’ll pick it up in a few weeks to review my handy work and decide if it’s worth selling to an agent or not. Jodi says that being a novelist is my retirement plan, we’ll see.
In my spare time, I also come up with every business idea I can think, Pro-Services company, news website, IT Project Management company, several software ideas for the iPad, to name a few. I hearken back to the early days of Jeff Bezos and J.K. Rowling thinking that if something pops into my mind for a good business plan or a great book, maybe that will work out. Pipe dreams to be sure, but I’m busy, underemployed really.
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By coscooper
Web site building is technical work and something that comes easy to me. However, I’ve noticed a trend amongst clients.
“Make me a web site, have all of the content magically show up and have it do exactly what I want all with very little input or work from me.”
This client ideology is both frustrating and can lead to lengthy deployments. Every client so far has some notion that if they “pay” me to build a web site that I will magically understand everything they want and to somehow come up with the exact message and content that makes sense.
Truth is, it just doesn’t happen that way. I’m a technician, not a mind-reader, nor do I fully understand every detail and nuance of my clients business. While I do get things rather quickly and do grasp the high level overview of a given business, I am by no means an expert. So, I have to rely on the client to actually communicate and review the site(s) for content and appropriateness.
Well, this tends to drag-on and by extension, makes the process really drag on. Therefore, I DO NOT do it full time. If I built sites full time, my family and I would die of starvation.
Enough ranting… I have to finish another site for a “family member”…
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By coscooper
Every day, I log into one of my several computers (both Mac and Windows) and the first window or windoid that is there greeting me is the “There are new updates ready”. Plus, to add insult to injury, every application I launch displays a message that a new version is ready.
Good grief. If things start going south on one of my laptops, I’ll never be able to trouble shoot and figure out where the culprit is.
So, WTF do you do when this happens nearly every day?
- Accept the download and hail-merry it. (Which is what I do too often)
- Never accept the download and keep running with Windows95
- Plan on just allowing it to only update your system on Friday night. (That way you have the entire weekend to recover and rebuild if necessary.)
- Research each request and make an informed decision. (What we all should do, but, then 8 hours later you’d never get any real work done.)
- Change the settings in the control panel to just update at say 3am in the morning, reboot and plead ignorant bliss when on the phone with tech support.
Or a combination of all of the above. Which, is basically what I do. I decide how much pain I’m interested that day, how much time I have and how dumb I want to play when calling support.
Have fun out there…. it’s the wild-wild west of code!
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By coscooper
We were on the brink of a new chapter.
Our development team, QA, Support, Deployment etc… that is only 35 strong here in Colorado was about to become “Project Managers”. Unfortunately we answer to a higher power in Baltimore and was on the brink of moving our main “grunt” development “over-there”. That was the story anyway, we’ll keep the creativity here and communicate the daily drudge to an out-source off-shore.
Well, that was two weeks ago and last friday those powers made a reversal announcement. Our VP who’s originally from “India” fought hard to keep the work here and well, won. At least we have a years repreive. Deep down I know there’s intellegence and competence over-seas, but feel that our 10 years of effort would suffer in the end and eventually would be dissolved had we continued with the plan.
However, while our engineers may be over-paid, some-times appear lazy, keep odd hours and generally dispise process and planning are still THE MOST CREATIVE at solving problems and when the chips are down and deadlines are looming, they step-up and solve problems. The process working with development engineers can be grueling, nerve racking and some times down-right frustrating, but they get it done.
I was concerned the original plan was doomed for so many of the reasons I’ve read about in every tech rag. Everyone wants process documented and standardized to predictability, but truth is, it’s not part of the fabric of the US spirit. We’re mavericks and seat-of-pants folks regardless of how much “process” we try to put in place. I’ve been doing consulting and deployments for years and while I attempt to put in predictability, I prefer the “make-it-up-as-I-go-along” process. I’m also a bit of an entreprenuer caught in a corporate life. I’ve been thinking alot about both the private business process and how I can harness that ideal while staying where I am. I recently read several blogs related to this ideal of Intraprenuer and think that it’s often over-looked.
I’m all for the success of other countries and frankly with a more global economy, I wish them well, but I agree on creativity, design and spirit. Americans solve problems through these maverick efforts and to dissolve such efforts is a travesty.
I think so many in management have lost site of some of the most important traits in American and have concentrated so much on the bottom-line, while important, get caught up in the latest “trend” and think it’s going to be a saving solution.
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By coscooper
Well, I was interested in the 911 conspiracy information until a friend of mine made a very astute observation. While theory and discussion is interesting and makes for good political fodder, it requires a lot of scrutiny to validate and not take at face value. While many of the points are interesting, the truth is, there are many theories that are not substantiated. After doing a little research, it was interesting to see all of the various theories besides this one, “That the Government did it.”
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By coscooper
One of my employees sent me a link to a documentary recently that I found to be a bit disturbing. I’ll admit, since September 11th, 2001, I’ve accepted without question most of what I saw, was and have been under the opinion that terrorists flew planes into various locations killing innocent people and performing acts of terrorism.
I was unaware, or at least never considered, any other theory or theories that it wasn’t terrorist until this email came into my inbox. Now, I will state, I typically do not subscribe to conspiracy theories or entertain them much. However, I do feel that they should be given at least a review with an open mind and either dismissed or evaluated further. While I do not subscribe to wacky theories, I do subscribe to the thought that “Where there’s smoke, there’s some kind of fire.”
So, I watched the entire video and found it to be a bit disturbing in regards to some of the “Facts”. Fortunately, the tone was not on the same level as Michael Moores diatribe, as it was more real documentary. It’s presented very matter of fact with the tone, here’s some facts, look them over and think for yourself. Prove or disprove them.
911 Loose Change Video
Watch it with an open mind and come to your own conclusions.
Shane
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By coscooper
Okay, so the majority of you who may stumble onto my personal blog may not ever have a chance to run or be involved in running a downhill ski race. Of course you may not have ever even had the oppurtunity to GO to a race, much less run or volunteer for one.
However, it can be a very interesting situation. I recently found myself being involved in the running of a race recently which entailed more than volunteering for a minor job. I was thrown into the thick of the details as the Race Administrator due to several serious events that happened to our “official” Race Administrator.
So, long story longer, I became the Assistant to a Race Administrator that was actually across the state. We did everything via phone and email. That was the easy part. The hard part was actually all of the dynamics related to everyone else. The race was a great day. However, we ended the day with several serious issues related to the timing and capture of each racers time. Weather and many other factors contributed to several miss-timed races. Okay, well actually, it was a lot of miss-timed races. So, the judges and timing officials had to work on the details of the race by going back to the detailed tapes that are captured on the timing equipment. While the official primary software package did not pick up the times, the back-up system captured every blip going across the finish eye.
Well, that situation by itself would make any Race Administrator gringe with fear and go running for the hills. However, that major snafu was not really the thing that frustrates and annoys me the most.
It’s the “group” of parents that add to the frustration. Basically, they take this way too seriously and do nothing but gripe and complain. Of course the group I’m referring to are those that typically do nothing or volunteer for nothing. They’re the worst. We recieved complaints about not having start lists printed for all of the parents, they grumbled about lunch, that we provided, we had complaints about athletes not in the right start order, times not posted or announced and the list goes on. Everyone’s ME monster comes out and then of course it’s worse with them living vicariously through their athlete as if their child/athlete will be attending the next Olympics. They all fail to actually statistically review their athletes chances. Slim to none! With about 100K plus ski racers in this country, only 1 or 2 every 4 to 8 years will ever get a chance to attend the Olympics. The odds are about as good as winning the lottery. There’s always that chance, but the focus shouldn’t be on being top finishers but having a great day and feeling like they accomplished something beyond the average kid their age. This alone should be the reason they get up on top of the hill and let loose. Oh, and having fun. That’s it, rant over.
These events are my sanity check on my own attitude towards my fellow earth bound neighbors and it always amazes me to continually get a reality check. Humanity never fails me.
-Shane
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By coscooper
You see it all the time. You hit what sounds like the site you’re looking for, only once you hit the link and the site pops up in your web browser, it looks like something from 1993. It looks like someone figured out how to use Paint they found in the Accessories directory and suddenly thought, ew, Im a graphic artist, cool! Next, they figured out how to copy/paste it into a word document, do a little fiddling with the copy and the picture, usually all centered copy, and then they must have saved all of the files in to an HTML format and posted them on a server.
Typically, these turn me off right away. In some cases, they may actually have some very useful information, but I just cant get past the horrid look and feel. Its like seeing that crappy car in the used car lot that has one corner hanging down low about to touch a tire, 1 red fender, white hood and a blue rear end. The sign says, strong reliable engine. Well, it may be, but theres no way on this green earth I would drive it or rely on it. Okay, I have to admit, back on the web page, there are rare occasions I’ll look around and read if it’s at least easy to get around AND the information is very helpful.
I HATE THESE KINDS OF SITES! In fact, if there was any way that a law could be passed that enacted legislation that disallowed such crap, I’d be in heaven. Then of course, the government would have to create the Web Site Design Police. Well, then again, I suppose they’d be a sub-division of the “Fashion Police”. 
Boycott such sites no matter what!
-Shane (JMHO)
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