trainedmonkey
plus ça change
the new york times has an article about how the fast pace of innovation is creating mini-generations.
while the story focuses on the users of all these technologies, the part of it that is of more immediate interest to me is the makers, since i’m one of them. the craft of making computers do what you want is progressing at least as fast as their uses.
new languages, new techniques, new environments. there are people who stand aside and laugh at the reinvention they see, but i would not count myself among them. there are people in the thick of it that think the current new thing is the one that will change everything. i am not one of them, either. there are people who get caught up in an eddy, where what was once the new thing has become their only thing. they are the next generation’s cobol programmer.
i think i am becoming one of them. i don’t think i mind. i don’t code in my free time any longer. i am moving on in other ways. my value as a programmer is not in knowing the newest things.
I didn't get a Snuggie of my own, so I'm claiming the bottom part of @jimw's.
graffiti on the steps of st. vibiana cathedral. #dtla
the christmas tree at city hall is big. the wires holding it up don't look good. #dtla
shorter short urls for twitter
twitter’s 140 character limit seems even tighter when you include a link in what you’re saying. there is a bevy of services to shorten urls, such as bit.ly. speaking of the broader world-wide web he pioneered, tim berners-lee said he laments including “//” in addresses, but i think we could go even further for twitter, dropping even the 'http' part for your basic links. think of all of that extra wit you could cram into your tweets if you could just reference :xrl.us/bgfqeo and reclaim six more characters to work with.
(a side note: it is funny to watch as the url shortening services start spitting out longer and longer urls.)
a very dorky sunday
today i upgraded the (virtual) machine that hosts this site and some others to karmic koala. in the process, i discovered that linode’s user-mode linux kernel is not up-to-date enough for that, so i had to migrate to one of their xen hosts (totally painless, and probably long overdue).
i also wrote the beginnings of an endpoint for tweetie 2’s new support for a custom image server, which explains the earlier picture of wonton. a custom url shortener will be next to come.
oh, and i made banana bread.
this is just a picture of @213dog napping.
today’s birthday
You’re not concerned with what everyone else is doing. You’ll go where the inspiration leads and be successful because you were true to yourself. January brings a lucky new job. Vows will be exchanged in February. Aries and Leo people adore you. Your lucky numbers are 6, 34, 29, 11 and 59.— from the los angeles times
sometimes you leave money on the table
some people can’t seem to wrap their heads around the idea that an event like the red bull soapbox race isn’t a free pass for the nearby businesses to rake in money, much like the downtown art walk isn’t.
i have probably been guilty of making similar statements about other people’s businesses before, and will be in the future. but it is good to remember that leaving money on the table is often reasonable and justifiable.
the art walk experience
loftseven, a relative newcomer to the downtown art walk has announced they will no longer be participating because of vandalism and crowd control issues. bert green fine art closes at 6pm on art walk nights. (notable because the gallery is right on 5th and main, considered by many to be the hub of the art walk, and bert founded the art walk.) we no longer stay open late on art walk because of the issues with dealing with the crowd.
but the downtown art park seems to be going strong, and there seem to be spaces willing to host no end of one-day gallery shows while they wait for the right permanent tenant.
and you can’t walk a block with running across at least one gourmet food truck. (ah, for the heady days when little radio and tom gilmore tried to chase off the fabled kogi bbq truck before they were quite so fabled.)
i’m not sure what my point is. perhaps just that the art walk experience is an evolving one, and it isn’t for every business.
