Gifted Slacker

I’ll have more to say about this in the future, but for me the essence of manhood was defined by Raymond Chandler.In his last and greatest adventure, Phillip Marlowe is parting with a woman who he is likely never going to see again, with some wistful regret on both their parts.

She asks, “How can a man who is so tough, be so gentle?”

He replies, “If I weren’t tough, I wouldn’t be alive. If I couldn’t be gentle, I wouldn’t deserve to be alive.”

From here. I think I’ll be getting a hold of some Chandler to read…

I don’t do much with bookmarks after I make them in del.icio.us. What I would like is software that would let me enter tags to watch, and then aggregate the bookmarks that  match that tag. I would then be able to select the category of bookmars (Popular, All, Mine) I want to track.

If I had this, I would do so much more with bookmarks from del.icio.us. It should be fairly simple to write an aggregator with Planet Python and serve it with web.py. Maybe I can get around to doing that at some point.

There might not be a dot-com-style tech bubble, but some people are acting like rock star-wannabe morons.

Guess what, guys. Nobody cares about your so called news. Nobody cares about your brain dead analysis. Nobody cares about your petty squabbles and territorial pissing.

Most of the companies you guys are writing about with so much enthusiasm will soon be dead, fall into some acquisitor’s gaping maw, or fall into obscurity as everyone realizes they weren’t worth talking about in the first place.

Note: I don’t have any issue with Loren Feldman. He’s hilarious despite rarely saying anything that goes beyond entertaining.

When there is great uncertainty in the world, is there a surge in the popularity of fantasy?

The cultural, moral, and ethical conflicts between me and school, especially this school, are unbearable. I’ll never be able to describe them to you so that you’ll really understand why I must quit.

No, no. Don’t feel bad for me, or judge me a quitter. Don’t worry that I’m depressed, for I’ve never been happier.

I’m here for a good, wonderful, magical reason. But I am in school for nothing at all, with very little to gain from it. This fact eats away at me on top of all the other conflicts.

Anyway. It always makes me feel better to have said, “I quit.” Whether I’ve actually done so or not.

The next person to evangelize PHP to me is getting kicked square in the nuts. If this process of evangelization includes denigrating my choice of programming language, then the offender will be kicked square in the nuts, not once, but twice!

Claiming that PHP “has a function” for everything you could possibly want to do is not a positive argument for the language. Pointing out that PHP comes with a library to do a particular task won’t make me believe that it does that job better than any other language.

This doesn’t mean that I refuse to use PHP. It means, rather, that I would prefer not to use PHP. For instance, using PHP makes the most sense for one of my school projects. So that’s what I’m using.

Please excuse the rant. I’m being exposed regularly to a PHP zealot.

Most people are talking about Web 2.0, 3.0, and the Semantic Web as the next big things. I think an undervalued concept is the live web. I’m not even sure that Searls highlights the idea as much as he should in this LinuxJournal column.

The future is not in monetized widgets, Beacon-style advertising platforms, Web 2.0/3.0 or the Semantic Web (though Semantic Web technologies might play a part in things). The future is in moving from a static web to a rich, highly interactive (on the order of a FPS) live web experience.

This woman has some serious super powers.

Geektastic

Are you a language-oriented programmer or a tool-oriented programmer? That’s the distinction that this post raises.

I don’t think it matters which side you lean toward. What matters is whether you know when and how to leverage the other perspective when necessary.

For example, I am not a strong web interface builder. (I can design them, but putting in the time with HTML, CSS, and Photoshop is not my cup of tea.) So for my latest project I am going to use the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) to build the front-end. This move goes against my strongly language-oriented grain.

I figure that if the project launches and subsequently draws a user-base that justifies more than one developer, then it will someone else’s job to get every last erg of good out of the front-end code. I just don’t have the competency in that are of development to do an exemplary job. I’m not ashamed to admit this and use a great tool to make up for my weakness.