Posted by Tim
Sun, 06 May 2007 01:35:01 GMT
No, I'm not personally going to jail. A good friend of mine posed the question, "what would you go to jail for?" When I originally asked myself this question, I had a hard time answering. There are things in this world that really bother me, and one of the things that bothers me the most is my complacency in dealing with things that bother me. Rationalizations abound. In short, I couldn't answer, at least not right away.
I hang out in the #typo channel on Freenode because I run Typo. Today there was a discussion among two people about homelessness and a new law that is in place in Orlando, FL. It is now against the law to feed more than 25 people in downtown Orlando parks. Charitable organizations can get permits to feed people, but only two per year per organization will be issued. Why the fuss? Business owners were complaining. For a country where so many citizens call themselves Christians, it seems horribly cold hearted to outlaw feeding people in need. Isn't that one of the things we are told to do? Matthew 25:35-40 seems about right.
The programmer hanging out in #typo apparently had the same idea. He started a little website called "Jesus Was Homeless" to help spread awareness of the new law and hopefully start a backlash.
There has been at least one arrest resulting in a misdemeanor charge. Would you accept a misdemeanor on your record if it were for feeding people? That seems like a worthy cause to me.
More information:
Do you live in Kansas City? Get out in the streets with the Uplift organization, or make a donation to Harvesters. They accept monthly giving via check or credit card.
Posted in Food, Life | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by Tim
Wed, 11 Apr 2007 01:35:59 GMT
Kate has always wanted a second dog, but every time we found one we liked, there was a reason to not adopt. We were browsing Animal Haven a few weeks ago and came across a dog named Harley. He was very calm for being in the middle of a hectic shelter, and affectionate as well. We liked him, but we couldn't adopt him on the spot without first introducing Tango.
We bought all of the requisite supplies on Wednesday of that week. Saturday we took Tango over to my parents house and left her in the back yard. We went and spent some time with Harley, enjoyed him very much, and went back to get Tango for an introduction. A little over an hour later we were taking them both home, except that Harley was now called Mingus.
After an initial adjustment period where Mingus spent most of his time crated, he is now a full member of the family. He sleeps well, and that means a lot to us. :-)
Thank you to Mom and Dad for letting us stash Tango at your house while we introduced ourselves to Mingus, and thank you to Jacquie for helping us out with Tango while we filled out the paperwork for Mingus.
Posted in Life, Tango | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by Tim
Fri, 10 Nov 2006 07:21:00 GMT
I posted new photos on my Flickr account. It's been a long time since I've done that, and there are some wedding photos on there. None from the wedding of Kate and I together. I suppose that's the downfall of only having the photos from our own camera. If you have photos from the wedding or related events, please post links in a comment!
I forgot all about this photo. Kate's mom took it while she was visiting. We were walking off a giant meal of chubby burritos and tacos.
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Posted by Tim
Tue, 12 Sep 2006 07:15:00 GMT
Kate and I get married in a little more than a month. That’s pretty crazy, considering how few of our plans are actually nailed down. The important stuff is pretty well taken care of, but I’m sure we will be under a deluge of little things as October 14th edges ever closer.
One of the things that we need to do is assemble playlists for both the cocktail/dinner portion and the dancing portion of the reception.
At dance practice tonight we cha-cha’ed to some really cool latin hip hop. That’s latin as in Latin America, but don’t tempt me, Gregorian chant hip hop may be cool too…
Here’s the thing, I don’t know where to start looking for cool latin hip hop. Any suggestions? Any suggestions from other musical genres? Grandma will be sad if we don’t play the Hokey Pokey, so that’s under control. :-)
Posted in Music, Life | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Tim
Fri, 01 Sep 2006 05:27:00 GMT
Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. I heard that a lot growing up. It was my dad's default response when I would complain about an early bed time. So many people who write about personal growth and productivity focus on the power of rising early. By getting a head start on the day, a person gets one or more quiet hours to focus on mentally intensive work before their friends and family are even out of bed. That's how the theory goes, at least.
I am most productive late into the evening. I sit down between 9:00 and 10:00 PM on an average working night, and I usually work until at least 1:00 with only brief biology breaks. Lately I've pushed the bedtime back to an average of 2:00AM, with the worst case being a 4:00AM night in which I was stuffing wedding invitations. Once I start requiring excessive use of the backspace key, I know it is time to go to bed.
Ben Franklin made the "early to bed, early to rise" phrase popular in his Poor Richard's Almanac. This is just a theory, but perhaps technology has antiquated that advice. Remember, Ben didn't have many modern conveniences like electric lights.
I appreciate the early riser argument about how quiet the morning is, but trust me, things are just as quiet at the late extreme of the day. The personal development mavens will shout "you don't understand, you have more mental energy in the morning!" Sure, maybe they do. Even at my day job, I don't reach my peak productivity until 2:00PM. I have tried to get into early rising routines, but eventually I grew tired (literally) of fighting my natural sleep patterns. During those experiments I was dramatically more grumpy and less productive.
Go get a lamp, I have some midnight oil to burn.
Posted in Life, Entrepreneurship | no comments
Posted by Tim
Sat, 19 Aug 2006 06:37:00 GMT
Kate and I talked to the pastor at church last night, and that means we officially have a date and time for our wedding. Not a moment too soon -- we're getting down to the wire. Invitations need to go out soon. They probably should have gone out last week, but why split hairs?
I'm the one with the laser printer, so it was up to me to print labels. I have mail merged using Office before, but I don't have Office installed on my Apple. I'm sure I probably could have figured out mail merge to generate labels using NeoOffice, but I just didn't really feel like it. Why should I when I had ReportLab at my disposal?
That's right, rather than spend time figuring out an office tool, I just wrote a program to generate a PDF suitable for printing labels. Want to know the best part? I think it took less time that way... 25 minutes. Sadly, I'm almost positive that getting margins and columns right in NeoOffice would have taken longer since I'm such a novice user of that application. Python is such an easy, productive programming language.
Bonus: this got me thinking. Why can't people manage guest lists online and then easily print out things like mailing and return labels? Does such a service exist? Where?
And what if you could marry up your guest list with mimash.com? Wouldn't that be cool to see the geographic distribution of your guests?
So much to do, and so much fun.
Posted in Code, Life | no comments
Posted by Tim
Wed, 12 Jul 2006 06:26:00 GMT
Most everyone knew a kid growing up that could draw. I mean,
really draw. Draw so well that you felt like a three year old with an extra large, extra blunt crayon in comparison. Jason, my cousin, was that kid for me. He could so naturally draw ninjas, or turtles, or Ninja Turtlesthat I would get frustrated and give up. But while I would give up to play Nintendo, he just kept drawing. And because he kept drawing, he kept getting better.
Some people think I'm a really competent computer programmer. Thanks, Dad! Self deprecation aside, here's my secret: I am unabashedly optimistic, and I love the act and results of programming. I get restless when I can't code for days at a time. When I started an internship back in 2000 my skills included HTML, basic C/C++, and StarCraft. A few months in to the job, they asked if I knew Java. "Sure!" was my optimistic reply. I knew that Java looked a whole lot like the C++ and JavaScript that I already knew... how hard could it be? What couldn't I learn after a few evenings with Java in a Nutshell?
Lesson learned, there's a lot of nuance to the language. This was only my second full blown programming language, and I had a lot of computer science fundamentals left to learn. Ends up that I hadn't even grasped the basic concepts of object oriented programming, even though there was that one chapter that we skimmed on the subject in CS211. You know, when Dr. George didn't take over the lab monitors to keep us from surfing the net. After those few evenings with Java in a Nutshell, I was writing web applications inJava that read like C programs, complete with inline HTML. It was awesome. Since then I've accidentally crashed application servers and brought down networks with my code. Great, great times! I like to thank my network engineers and system administrators often for their forgiving nature.
Six years later, and I have two more languages firmly under my belt, plus a much deeper understanding of Java that will no longer fit in a nutshell. Once again, it was optimism that pushed me toward growth and learning. One weekend in 2001 I decided that Java wasnot sufficiently geeky, and I needed to learn Python. Five years later and I'm still writing Python, although I cringe when I see what I wrote in the beginning. One and a half years ago I learned about Ruby on Rails, and again, over a weekend I was hooked. My first Rails applications had dumb design decisions baked in. So do my most recent Rails applications, but the decisions are getting less dumb all the time.
Right now I am planning an application with a friend. Our feature list is long, and while many of the features are useful, the list of truly required features is short. So why are we adding things like Jabber and IRC integration into our pet project? Because we've never done those things before, and we're optimistic that it'll be cake managing those integrations.
Everything skillful that we do is learned. EVERYTHING. Talent helps, but talent will only get someone so far. Jason wasn't born with a pencil and eraser in hand, and I wasn't born typing at a Commodore 64. Practice and experience mold our abilities, so unless we are willing to flail about and fail as we experience and practice something new we will never progress to the top end of thelearning curve.
Go out there and break something, preferably your pride, on your path of growth. It is natural and necessary.
Posted in Code, Life, Entrepreneurship | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by Tim
Tue, 13 Jun 2006 05:27:00 GMT
So tonight my reading list ganged up on me to repeat a theme not once but three times.
And so I write a blog post about how I need to do the things that need doing and build the things that need building. I don’t think the point quite got to me. ;-) Actually it did, I’m just all tapped out of creativity for the evening.
Posted in Life, Entrepreneurship | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by Tim
Mon, 12 Jun 2006 02:35:00 GMT
I’m reading a new book, To Be of Use by Dave Smith, and at the beginning of chapter five is the following quote.
It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?...
It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living; how to make getting a living not merely honest and honorable, but altogehter inviting and glorious; for if getting a living is not so, then living is not…
—Henry David Thoreau
I am devoting a large amount of energy to finding and executing work that matters, work that improves things, and not just work that pays the bills. How much time on your timesheet adds value to yourself, your organization, and others? My current answer: not enough, but please ask again in six months.
I’ll write more about the book once I am finished. In the meantime, what books are you reading?
Posted in Books, Life, Entrepreneurship | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Tim
Mon, 22 May 2006 02:21:00 GMT
As much as it pains me to say this, Mom may have been right about bedtimes. She always made us go to bed at the same time every night claiming that we needed our rest to be our best. I know that sounds catchy, but she never put it in such a clever way. Her message was a hybrid between explaining sleep science and the good old "I told you so" method.
I have a lot of really interesting computer work on my plate right now, as well as a lot of dancing, reading, and dog walking to get done. As a result I’ve been pushing myself to wake up earlier and go to sleep later than normal. Two weeks ago I managed to pull off 1:00AM+ bedtimes with 6:00AM wake up times. This week I didn’t fare nearly so well, and by Friday afternoon I was quite a grouch.
An epiphany came when my catch up nap was interrupted for the last time. There are more interesting activities out there than any one person can ever expect to do, and if I am to have any hope of completing my fair share or more, I really need to be well rested. Who wants to be around a grouch? I didn’t even like being around myself on Friday. With this in mind I decided that I would take a page from Mom’s play book and institute both a bedtime and wake up time for myself. These times are flexible for when life happens, but I am going to not let arbitrary self imposed deadlines walk all over my body’s need for rejuvenation.
Figuring out what works best for me may take a while, but I’m going to start with sleep between 11:00PM and 6:00AM. I think this will really work out wonderfully if only I get myself to bed on time.
Posted in Life
