Hey, it’s me, still not dead, still kicking around, you know, doing stuff. I’ve been working undercover as a productive employee or something, but actually I’m researching all kinds of fun stuff.
I’m hearing a lot about the shrinking job market for IT workers, especially for contract and outsource work. I don’t think this is because of a lack of money anymore, it’s just because businesses are getting tired of the pure crap that gets developed. The Internet provided a lot of power, but it didn’t make all of the old rules go away. I never know who reads this thing, so I’ll be brief – just because your browser based app is nice and zippy on your desktop, it doesn’t mean that it will work at all on, say, 3000 desktops simultaneously. Also, backwards compatibility still matters when you interface with a third party and you want to change your interface. Those were two simple examples, I won’t bother going further. Greed has really messed things up for the people who actually know what they’re doing. Oh well.
Conversation at work today – “let me get this straight – this new issue will stop our project from going out if we can’t resolve it, but that’s ok, because this new issue will prevent the subsystem we’re relying on from ever going out. Ok, lunch time.” The good news is that one of the two issues have been resolved. The bad news is that it’s not the one for my project.
Even if I’m stagnating at work lately, I had a brief promotion today – at the gym. The biggest guy there asked me to spot for him. He said his arm was a bit sore, and I guess lifting a bar with more weights on it than i could load up in an hour might do that. I’ve no idea why he picked me, as I was just finishing a set with about 10% as much weight on it, but hey, I was chosen. I don’t know if I’ll ever get chosen again, but in all fairness he didn’t die.
Sammy the new used Mac is now fully operational, thanks to the power of FedEx and some nice people somewhere in the States. It was touchy for a bit, but the Thrust homestead now has a whole whack more RAM. I haven’t noticed the speed difference yet, and I’ve only noticed two brief spinny coloured thingies. Life is good. Ok, as I wrote the rest of this I had three really big pauses, so I guess more research is needed…
The RAM wasn’t enough fun for one day – Buffy season two DVD is out, and yeah, I bought one on the way home. I’m not defending my enjoyment of the show, I’m just going to say that I love these “complete season on DVD” collections. For less than the price of two months of cable, I get 22 episodes of commercial free entertainment that I can watch whenever I want. Sweet.
Finally, not to sound cynical, but of all the ads on the Apple page that I found through Shawn’s links, which one do you think that people will look at first?