31 May 2005
Not really chores, but I’ve been meaning to get back into the running and working out game. I’ve been travelling so much lately that its been difficult to eat properly, let alone maintain a consistent gym schedule.
So i’m going to head out for my second run of the day.
When I get back I’m going to go sit on my balcony and read a few blogs. It’s actually a funny story, Glenn, a buddy from work, asked me recently if I had a balcony and if I was sitting out there enjoying the nice weather with the wireless connection. I must admit that I’ve rarely sat on my balcony in the 3 or 4 years I’ve lived here. That’s going to change tonight, I’ve cleaned off my chair and am going out there tonight rain or shine. Glenn, you hearing this.
After I finish getting caught up on the blogs of interest, I think I might even make an attempt at bringing my resume up to date. I’ve never really had a reason to keep a resume current, and although I’m employed, I figure I might as well make an attempt.
I must admit that the summer weather is motivating. I don’t know what it is about fall and winter but its terribly demotivating. I find myself just crashing on the couch and sleeping. But now that its spring/early summer, I’ve started reading again, going to blog more, and try to make life more interesting in general. I now have a reason to leave work at 4:00 (lets not forget that I still carry a laptop so its difficult to truly get away from it, its not my personality to completely turn off work when I leave the office).
I’ll see how successful I am.
30 May 2005
I’ve decided to go out on a limb here and make the switch from MovableType to WordPress. Not really a slight against MovableType, but I’ve been meaning to upgrade my blogging software for sometime and liked the theme support available with WordPress.
The migration was rather straight forward. My hosting company, 1&1, provided everything I needed to make the switch. MovableType made it easy to export my existing blog posts & comments and WordPress provided support out of the box for importing the data. I’ve noticed there are some odd paragraph breaks that have occured as an artifact of the export & import, I’m not about to manually go through and fix all them so my web readers will have to live with it.
I did actually experiment with a bunch of different themes, but came back to stock Kubrick with a replaced header image. I like the looks of it and who knows, might stick with it for awhile. The built-in theme support makes it trivial to tweak the blogs look and feel.
Lastly, I installed the flickrRSS plug-in which allowed me to easier place thumbnail photographs in my sidebar. So far I’m happy with the functionality provided by WordPress. I will be experimenting with the anti-spam tools because I’m being hit with an ever increasing amount of comment spam. It’s gotten to the point where I actually have gotten into the habit of disabling comments.
The only other thing of note I did this evening was install a Personal edition of Confluence. Confluence, the professional J2EE wiki, is a knowledge management tool designed to make it easy for a team to share information with each other, and with the world. I thought I’d give Confluence a try since they just came out a perpetually free personal license. We use JIRA at work for bug tracking and have had nothing but praise for it. Before Confluence, I’d been using the ruby instiki. It was a relatively lightweight wiki that worked well on my laptop. I’ve installed Confluence on my linux server so I may still have use for instiki for simple note taking on this portable.
That’s it, that’s all.
28 May 2005
Just happened across this blog post where the question is posed:
“can the rate the market pays per hour to developers be a measure of technology’s complexity?”
My take on this is, yes and no. Obviously the more complicated and in-depth the technology (or at least the application of it) is, the more any consultant
in his right mind is going to demand.
He talks about the complexities of EJB, now I disagree that EJB itself is a particularily challenging technology, its more the components and inter-relati
onships of the entire J2EE framework that are difficult to apply correctly.
With regards to JDO consultants being able to charge more, I imagine this is solely because there are not enough JDO consultants to satisfy the demand. If
it ever were to displace the traditional EJB model of enterprise development, you may see the consultant fee’s reversed with a lack of core J2EE/EJB exper
ts and a large base of JDO consultants.
In general, the more obscure the technology, the more you’ll end up paying in consulting fees.
Just my 2 cents before I jump on a plane.