Well, the title pretty much says it :)
I've discovered an important fact! DVD's and Video games are the perfect Christmas gift. "Why" you ask? I'll tell you. Because they're easy to wrap!
To this point in my career as a parent I have not yet had to pay a babysitter. We have always had grandparents and friends who are very eager at any chance watch our daughter. But I was thinking today, what if that weren't the case? Where would we go for a babysitter? It occurred to me that our existing daycare would be an ideal resource for that kind of information. The daycare could hire and vet 'sitters', or even teachers, and provide a good consistent place where a parent can find short-term child care in the evenings.
There are several advantages to this idea. The child goes to an environment built for the purpose, rather than someone's home that may not be as child-friendly. It's also a more familiar place for children that already attend there during they day, and may even allow the possibility of a parent not having to pick up the child until after the evening's event. It allows the daycare to make more use of their facility, thus distributing that overhead among a larger group of people and therefore possibly lowering costs to families. It also changes the ratio between the number of children and the number of adults needed to watch them, again possibly lowering costs to families.
FoxTrot as we know it is no more.
It was a good run. I liked the comic because it was one of the few places I've ever seen real computer code published to the mainstream. I can't find it now, but one strip has Jason write a quick loop in C to print an "I will not ..." message to the chalkboard 500 times. A lot of non-programmers saw that.
The real interesting thing about that strip is because of the context they also understood it. If that had been shown on a computer screen in an open visual studio window I believe that many of the same people would not have had a clue how to read it, even though the context presented on the computer is arguably much more helpful. It just supports my theory that many otherwise smart people switch their brains off when they sit down at a computer.
And I thought Visual Studio 2003 felt old! Today I installed Visual Studio 6 (circa 1998). This software is old enough that I actually threw away my personal copy back in September. Unfortunately, I think I'll be spending a lot of time here in the future. It is being phased out, but it's not easy to replace the amount of code they have built here when it has wound itself so tightly into the business. But oh, it will happen. It will happen.
So I'm at my new job. One of the changes is that I'm in a cube instead of an office, and therefore can't play music out loud. There are a number of people here who use headphones, and I will join their ranks as soon as I remember to bring a set in.
In the meantime I have an iPaq with a very small speaker that I can turn way down. I mean way down, because my neighbors are all part of the team that does phone follow-up for the billing department. I discovered that I can improve the experience somewhat by turning the volume up just a tad and placing the speaker against my body, so that it is muffled back to the original, safe level. Much of the muffled sound travels through the body, and therefore my personal experience of the sound is much improved.
In fact, I think if I could make just a few simple improvements, this experience would be better than regular headphones. Design a speaker that hangs around your neck and lays against your chest, with a casing designed to mesh well with your clothes so that more of the sound passes through the body, and I think I could turn up the volume just a little more for even better sound and more comfortable wearing. This will also nullify the effect of headphones that result in not hearing anything else around you. I understand that for many people that is the whole point of playing music, but not me. I enjoy music for it's own sake. It helps me think. And I want to be able to partipate in an audible way in my environment.
So in summary-- I want a small speaker that hangs around your neck and lays flat against your chest (hmm, may need separate men's and women's models ;) ) that will have some logic built in to automatically keep the external volume at an acceptable level for the workplace while delivering maximum sound to the wearer, without the isolation effect and discomfort of headphones.
I thought this was an appropriate follow up title to the previous post :D. Anyway, it was interesting. Not. I spent most of the day in a training room watching meaningless slides about the employee handbook. I had lunch at a restaurant with the new team. Tomorrow I should get the team orientation. By the end of the week the boss wants me working on an actual project, which is fine by me.
It's the end of era. Today, after more than two years, is my last day here. Monday I start a new job. Believe it or not I'm actually doing some real work today. Mostly, though, I'm doing clean up stuff so that my replacement comes in to an office and can actually find things. I wore jeans today. What are they gonna do- fire me? In doing so, I discovered that the really nice thing about jeans isn't so much that the jeans are comfortable. I'm used to khakis and slacks now. It's the the sneakers are comfortable. I also get to go home a little early today. I have certain tasks that must be finished, including a visit to a customer site, that will take up most of the day, but any time I have extra I get to keep.
We've been using Visual Studio 2005 here at the office for about a year. Amazingly I still have my old Visual Studio 2003 on the machine. I have a feeling that my replacement will opt to rebuild this computer, given the amount of time it's been and the amount of extraneous software I've accumulated doing various functions.
Today, for the first time in months, I had a need to use Visual Studio 2003. I had to compare the 2005 implementation of a specific feature (String.Split()- that's an article in itself) with the 2003 implementation. It's been ages since I've even opened up the old program. I was surprised at how 'old' it felt. I didn't think UI conventions had changed all that much since the 2003 version, but apparently I was wrong.
The really funny thing is that I didn't notice these differences nearly so much when I first installed 2005. I knew it looked different, but not very different. I knew it was slower, but not very much so. It's only now, a year later, that I go back and realize I'd really hate to have to work in 2003 again. I've come to rely on all the little niceties that 2005 provides.
It's kind of like going back to a previous version of windows. When I first moved to Windows XP, I was quite happy using Windows 2000 when needed. I even preferred the old start menu. Now I feel handicapped using the old system. Little things that you didn't even notice at first become show stoppers. One example is that XP Pro includes remote desktop capabilities by default. It wasn't broadly advertised or marketed, but it's turned out to be indispensable to me.
This brings me to Vista. I'm wondering- what features in Vista will I think are indispensable a year or two after I get it? Certainly not Aero or the flashy 3D-task-switch thing. Perhaps the new Search? Only time will tell.
Apparently my interview went very well. I've got an offer for $50K to start Dec 11.
