Category Archives: Technology

You Really Want The Leftmost Button or Possibly No Button At All

Have you ever watched some­one repeat­edly do some­thing over and over again even though it didn’t do what he thought it did? Like in The Princess Bride when Vizzini kept say­ing things were incon­ceiv­able even though those very things had already in fact hap­pened and thus, could not by any def­i­n­i­tion of the word be …

June 4, 2008 – 5:32 pm | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Technology | Tagged | Comments (0)

The Importance of Being Interrupted

With apolo­gies to Oscar Wilde, I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts on try­ing to do men­tally dif­fi­cult things in small highly seg­mented blocks of time. Some agile devo­tees advo­cate a term called Rad­i­cal Col­lo­ca­tion which essen­tially boils down to stick­ing an entire team in a sin­gle room for the length of the project. …

February 28, 2008 – 10:44 pm | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Programming, Technology | Comments (3)

Would You Rather Be Slash or The Nameless G’N’R Drummer?

When I was in high school, I played soc­cer. I wasn’t overly tal­ented but I was still good because I worked hard, played smart and refused to be out­worked by any­one. I was the best defender on our team and one of the best in dis­trict because of all that. When I went to col­lege, …

December 10, 2007 – 9:13 am | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Abyss Diving, Technology | Comments (3)

Where’d My Writing Vibe Go?

Beats me but the last cou­ple of days have been off-kilter. For one thing, my sleep habits are wack­ing out, not sure why but I’ve been up at 3 the last three or four days includ­ing a 3 hour ses­sion this morn­ing that was actu­ally quite pro­duc­tive. On top of that, I haven’t seen much …

November 20, 2007 – 12:17 pm | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Technology | Comments (0)

PostgreSQL Advice

So in my ongo­ing trav­els down tech­no­log­i­cal rab­bit holes I’ve never vis­ited before, I’m learn­ing Post­greSQL which is an open source data­base with a lot of the power of SQL Server minus the fun licens­ing fees. If I ever run my own shop, I’d pre­fer not to pay the Microsoft Tax so it pays to …

November 14, 2007 – 7:18 pm | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Technology | Comments (0)

Linked Out

I am com­pletely unhip. This comes as no sur­prise to the two dear read­ers I have. I have never been what one might call an early adopter. I am an only child and thus, typ­i­cally averse to change and dis­or­der. There­fore, when I recently received mul­ti­ple invi­ta­tions to LinkedIn, I politely declined, par­tially out of …

November 6, 2007 – 9:06 am | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Societal Behavior, Technology | Comments (1)

When Interests Diverge

I ran across this inter­view with Joel Spol­sky today and while it’s all good, I found one part of it to be really eye-opening as it relates to my cur­rent job. That insight is that if, as a soft­ware devel­oper, you work for a com­pany that isn’t a soft­ware shop (I work for a com­pany …

August 29, 2007 – 7:29 am | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Technology, Work | Comments (0)

The Zune Disaster

You‘d think Microsoft would be able to throw all their resources at a prob­lem and at least come up with some­thing mediocre. Appar­ently, you‘d think wrong. This is just more proof that MS has lost their way as inno­va­tors and are just another colos­sus like IBM. Who makes the deci­sion at MS to make a …

November 26, 2006 – 6:52 pm | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Technology | Comments (3)