Jeremey's Weblog

Cali Photos

So I've been falling down on the job, I think... I'm approaching having taken 1000 photos in California, and I've posted only a very few here. Most of them are snapshots, of course, and so not very interesting or compelling. And then at least half are of the boys. But anyway... I'll be trying to post more of them.

And apologies to everyone to whom the colors look funny or washed out. I'm "tailoring" them for the Windows gamma and also embedding the color profile, so they should look about right on Windows and on anything which obeys color profiles, namely Safari. So they probably won't look so hot in non-Safari browsers on the Mac, but otherwise should be good.

This is the ocean (bay) side of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Trunks

From my walk in Henry Cowell State Park... click on the image for a larger version (much better).

MIDI Banjo

I predict that the instrument of the future will be the MIDI banjo. Gabriel (three years) has a "music table", a plastic, primary-color-clad device occupying around two and a quarter square feet of real estate. This morning as I was reading, it spontaneously burst into song in nothing less than glorious MIDI banjo. Earl Scruggs never had it this good.

Among the Giants

I went walking in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park yesterday... the trees are just amazing. The forest is lush and green, the trees are beyond enormous, and it's very quiet. It really feels like another world (except for the tour group!). The tour group had its purpose, though, because you get some sense of how big and tall the trees are. You may notice that the stand of trees in the distance is devoid of branches... that's because the branches are significantly higher up.

My First Dashboard Widget

I've written my first dashboard widget... awww, isn't it cute? (say yes)

It's a simple tea timer that counts down for five minutes and makes the computer speak "Your tea is done" when done. Coming soon: Preferences! Choice of tea type! Bells and Whistles!

FWIW, Dashboard is really awesome. If you want to learn more, here's a link to Apple's developer docs on writing Dashboard widgets (and there are more links from there to the references, etc.). Widgets are written in HTML, CSS, and Javascript... so if you can hack together a functioning web page, widget development may be in your future.

Vegas, Baby!

Well I've been in Vegas at Interop since Tuesday evening, at the Mandalay Bay. When I got here they upgraded my room for some reason, so I got a corner suite. I paced off the main room, it's easily 45x16 (but cut by some angled windows). And it has two master bedrooms, one on either end. Sweet. Big screen TV (but nothing on, of course).

America West plays trivia on the TVs during their flights (especially the short ones where no movie would fit, I guess), so I learned that 10 of the top 10 largest hotels in the world are in Vegas. I believe the Mandalay Bay is the largest.

Interop was interesting. I'm always two people, especially at this kind of thing. There's the me that would rather go play music on the beach or go photograph the mountains or do something real, and that part thinks that all the pomp & circumstance that goes into this stuff is just burning money for the fun of it. The other me, the me that lives in the software industry because the first me can't pay the bills (or for the guitar, the camera, the trip, etc.), found it pretty useful. I didn't learn much in terms of education, but that wasn't the goal. I learned a LOT about the market our product is in, and gained some larger-picture vision about where it should go. Every senior engineer/developer/hacker type should go to these things. Otherwise they develop tunnel vision and that drives their code.

Oh, and I got a bouncy ball with flashing blue LEDs and a stuffed whale. That was the best part. Gabriel gets the whale. :)

Double-lane Drive Throughs

So this is curious... there's a McDonald's in one of the smallish central valley towns (in Cali) that has a double-lane drive through, and they make a big deal of it (lots of signs and all). However, it's only double-lane up to the point at which you order. So there are two lines of cars ordering, but they merge to pay and pick up food. Can anyone explain why this is useful?

Seems to me that it doesn't alleviate any bottlenecks. The bottleneck at fast food places is almost always the food preparation, not the speed at which cars move through the line. If you had an amazingly good food prep crew, then maybe you'd benefit by having a complete double-lane drive through. But having two lanes which feed into one just seems silly.

And now I've devoted far more time and thought to this than it's really worth.