wikipedia photo

This weekend I flew to Seattle for an hour. My flight left Minneapolis at 9:55 pm and I was back home at 6:00 am the next morning. To mark the occasion I purchased a genuine Seattle ballpoint pen for $2.99 in the only gift store open in the airport. I made this 2,650 mile, 8 hour, overnight journey to keep my elite status with Northwest (soon to be Delta) Airlines. I needed to fly 2500 miles before the end of the year, and Seattle was the cheapest flight I could find.

I was too tired to do any real work, and too awake to sleep, so I mostly thought about why I’d make such a crazy trip.
What I came up with first is a list of real annoyances that disappear when you are a “preferred” flier. » Continue reading “flying to seattle for an hour”

a story of frustration and redemption

In the last two days I feel like I’ve been through both the worst and best sides of being a software developer.

frustration:
Yesterday started off as a day of possibilities. Another day to build really great stuff that I’m proud of and hopefully helps a few people out. Instead it was riddled with a host of issues on my own laptop including a hosed Ruby 1.8.7 upgrade, Readline compile failures, $PATH issues, a crashing IDE and a general feeling of crankiness. A lot of people, including myself, have talked about how exciting it is to code, especially in Ruby. How the philosophy is so different, and it is. But I couldn’t help but get the feeling that software development in general is still in its infancy — that some things that should be simple are not. It feels like we are still hand-cranking the Model-T to get it started. We’ve come a long way and are helping a lot of people, but we’ve got a long way to go before we are driving an all-electric Mini Cooper.
» Continue reading “shoes to the rescue”