Expecting Rain

Someone asked to see the new chair, so here it is!

I've listened to Finetune for the past 2 months enjoying their Finetune Desktop. Prior to this I've listened to Pandora using PandoraBoy.

Over the past couple weeks I've become a bit unsatisfied with Finetune's selection. Today I switched back to Pandora. I've realized that Pandora is better able to match the music it plays to my taste. I've wondered if they do a better job recognizing similar music or if they just have me pegged. Either way, I'm pretty pleased with the change.

Both services are wonderful, and both are different. I plan on using them together, but imagine I'll primarily have Pandora running. If only they had the same design team that Finetune has...

I've worked for the same company for 7 years. I write software meaning that I'm sitting down for the majority of my work experience. During this time I've had one chair. It was a nice chair, but nothing exceptional. Today I got a new chair, it is exceptional. It is amazing how much of a change a new ergonomic chair makes. I'm pretty pleased.

Well, it has been quite sometime since I last posted. I'm actually currently waiting for Eclipse to perform its updates. It is running particularly slow today.

Having a long layoff from posting is usually the result of one of two things:

1. Nothing exciting has happened, so no need to post


2. Quite a few exciting things have happened, no time to post

Fortunately for me, things have been quite exciting. I've had the opportunity to dabble in a few new technologies available to the Software Development world and have thoroughly enjoyed it.

Eclipse just finished, I'll write more about those technologies as soon as I get time and feel that I've got an educated opinion about them.

It has been since 2005 since I've attended EclipseCon. I leave Monday morning at 5:30am to catch a flight and head down. I'm pretty excited. I plan on attending Google's Web Tools tutorial on Monday, then hitting various talks during the conference.

Wow, after my resolution to do better posting, it has almost been a whole month since my last one.

Things are going well, I'm tremendously excited about a few things I've been working on. I've rolled out two simple internal applications using the YAHOO! User Interface Library (YUI). I'm very impressed with this library. Typically the most time consuming portion of web development is working out the UI particularly when targeting multiple browsers. YUI has taken all of the grunt work out of the equation leaving you to making your application perform.

I've also spent a bit of time looking into a technology that really excites me -- Apollo. Apollo is the creation of Adobe Labs with the goal of joining web apps with desktop apps. The product looks pretty promising. I won't go into details, but details are available on the Apollo page. When they release the developer's version I may have to pull a late nighter and see what I can do.

Jon Udell posted an article a few months ago about data lock-in. I read it and agreed completely with the information shared. Since then, I've released a piece of software that has effectively locked it's data away from the way the users want it.

The software in question is a task management solution that is used in the company I work for. I provided easy, documented api's for getting to the data. Unfortunately, my primary users aren't able to utilize these as they aren't the least bit technically savvy. However, due to my api's, the data isn't truly locked-in. Myself or anyone else interested in perusing the documentation can access it just fine. I have since created some reports using the said api's and have retrieved the data in a manner that is more acceptable to the users.

So while I effectively locked my data in, I didn't technically. Where I really missed the boat was in my planning stage as I neglected to discover the true reports the users need. What is worse is that technically locked-in or not, the main users perceive that it was locked in, and perception may as well be fact as far as they are concerned.

I've added a few new links to my right hand links and blogs sections. Check them out. I'll try to keep it updated with sites I go to often or resources I find particularly useful.

Well, this is old news, but I thought I'd better update my blog about it as well. I'm a very big fan of Jon Udell's writing. I think his topics and entries are well written, well thought out, and relevant to me and my thinking. He used to be employed by InfoWorld, but is switching to Microsoft. While I'm not thrilled by this change, I wish him the best and hope his articles remain true to what he has became.

I'm updating my sidebar on this blog to show his old blog archive as well as this new one.

Here is a link to his new blog: http://blog.jonudell.net/

Wow, it is very difficult to come back from vacation. I've been off for 13 days. The hardest part is filtering through all of my email. I must admit, it was a nice vacation, however, it is good to get into a schedule again.