BKeeney Briefs

A couple of weeks back I started a new series called Dread Empire’s Fall:  The Praxis by Walter Jon Williams.  I sometimes dread starting a new series so I never buy more than the first book just in case it’s not to my liking.  I loved it and wanted to start the next book in the series NOW!

But alas, since it was a Sunday evening after the book stored closed I started thinking about the new electronic books.  In the past I pooh-poohed them for a variety of reasons but it starts to make sense.  I hate moving books and my wife hates my ‘library’ the consumes a large portion of storage.  Rarely do I re-read a book, or if I do it’s a decade later.  In today’s conservation kick it makes sense not to cut down trees if I don’t have to.  Perhaps the biggest reason that sold me is that the ebooks are a couple of dollars cheaper so you read enough and it’ll eventually pay for itself.

So I did some research on my options by calling my cousin.  Everyone needs to have a cousin like mine.  He KNOWS gadgets.  So not only did his wife have a Kindle, but he had a Sony e-Reader and he had an opinion (he always does).  He swore by the e-Reader and he swore AT the Kindle for their interfaces.  Then he said to go check out the authors I wanted to read on both the Sony site and the Kindle site and see which one was better.  For me, Sony won.

So now I have a Sony e-Reader.  It’s not the newest model (same cousin sold his existing one for a new one with a bit better display and interface) but it does the job well.  I’m impressed.  Very impressed and I don’t say that very often.

It takes a little while to get used to the delay on the E-INK screen but after a while you live with it.  The book I’m currently reading has large white text on black background chapter headers and switching to the next page always leaves an afterimage of the block, but again it’s not a big deal.

The e-Reader lets you switch from vertical to horizontal reading and also lets you adjust the size of the typeface.  After playing with the settings I prefer vertical at a large size.  You can view the screen at all angles and there’s not much glare to contend with.

The controls are minimal.  There’s a size button that let’s you change the size of the text on the screen, two separate sets of dedicated page up/down buttons that don’t seem to be in the right spot for me, a mark page button, a menu joystick and allows you to navigate on the screen and a set of 1 through 0 buttons that let you quickly navigate items on the menu’s.  The controls are a little sluggish but I don’t know if it’s from the screen or an underpowered processor.

Compared to the Kindle, the e-Reader seems sparse on the controls, but I think a book reader SHOULD be simple.  You’re replacing a paperback, not a laptop.

The Sony e-Reader plays MP3’s.  I have an iPhone and don’t travel much anymore so this isn’t a selling point and I honestly have no idea on how well it works.

The Sony unit requires a computer to transfer books unlike the Kindle that can do this wirelessly.  Again, since I don’t travel and when I do I generally have my laptop.

What is a problem however is the stupid Windows only software.  Come on, Sony!  Wake up and smell those Mac users you’re pissing off by forcing us to boot up into Parallels or VMWare.  The Windows only software works well enough for me to purchase, download and transfer books but I don’t have to like doing it that way.  (Sony, call me, I’m a developer.)  Books are transferred via a USB cable which is also how you recharge the unit.

I also found http://www.webscription.net/.  There you can find an excellent selection of science fiction authors with a large selection of free books.  Did I say free?

If you read a lot I’d recommend it.  If you travel a lot I’d recommend it.  If you read and travel a lot then you should definitely look into it.  I would have saved a lot of money in airports if I had had this device.

Comments?

I listen to music all day long while I’m working. It’s a habit (good or bad) that I developed in college while studying for hours on end and have kept up since. Heck, I became a DJ at the college radio station (WOUI – pumping out an amazing 10,000 milliWatts!) to listen to a lot of different music and did a study marathon one finals week because it was the ‘quietest’ place on campus. I love music and it’s one of the reasons why I have such a large music collection and why I fell in love with iTunes and my first iPod.
So even though I have 31 days of continuous music in my iTunes library I’m always looking for something new to listen to.  Rock, alternative, pop, blues, jazz, R & B, classical and even the occasional country song can often be heard in my office.  I think I found an excellent new source of music that thinks the way I do and is an excellent example of a good web app.

I’m talking about TheSixtyOne at www.thesixtyone.com.  It’s sort of Digg for music.  Using a simple system, people can ‘bump’ music they like that’s been uploaded by musicians to the site.  The drawback is that it costs you points to bump a song so it’s not in your best interests to bump everything.  You, in turn, earn points for songs that other people bump and for listening to more songs.

All songs are streamed to your computer in their entirety – not like iTunes where you get a 30 second clip – and there is no limit to the number of times you can listen to a song.  You can add songs to your own playlist and follow other people on the site and view the music that they’ve been listening to and bumping.  All in all it’s a very fun site.

The site was created as a ‘music discovery game’ by two USC students who have long since quit their jobs.  They’ve done an excellent job of it, in my opinion.  You can navigate the site without having your music stream interrupted.  There are numerous places like comments and bump lists that smoothly expand and collapse without stopping the music.  It’s very easy to navigate the site and discover music.  It’s very easy to browse by music category, new music, best music (music bumped the most) and follow and subscribe to other people’s activity.

An example of why you might want to subscribe to someone else’s activity is if you find yourself always bumping music that was already bumped by someone else you might want to follow them on a regular basis.  It’s sort of like the Amazon book rating service of ‘those who bought this book also bought this…”  It’s very handy and convenient and naturally you get more points if people subscribe to your activity.

I should point out that some tracks are available for download and some are available for purchase through the Amazon MP3 store.  The iTunes store will sometimes have the artists but I’ve found that it’s somewhat spotty.  Regardless, I’ve found that The Sixty One is fun if you like listening to ‘undiscovered’ music and artists are uploading new music every day.

Some of the music is incredibly bad and I wonder if the ‘artists’ upload music on a dare or a whim.  Others, though, are impressive in the quality and depth of their sound and it makes you wonder how many wonderful musicians never ‘made it’ because they couldn’t get their music to the masses.  I was already not listening to the radio because of commercials and repetition.  I don’t every see myself listening to commercial radio again.

Oh, and if you’re so inclined, I’m at thesixtyone.com/griffin.  Griffin?  That’s a story for a different day. 

I know there are some other sites out there that do similar things.  What are they?  Other thoughts?

It’s been quite a project.  I was first brought in to write reports using Crystal Reports and do miscellaneous things in their VB6 project.  Back then, we were still waiting on a lot of the things to get coded so they had me work on preferences.  Then user security.  Then MapPoint integration.  Then flat file imports.  Then payroll.  Wait.  Did I say payroll?  Did I know anything about payroll?  Nope.  Not a thing.  I now know way more than I’d like to about payroll in the United States.

I finished coding payroll and we were STILL waiting on our resident ‘genius’ (an MBA with Microsoft certifications up the ying yang) who still didn’t have the general journal done after months worth of promising it was ‘just about done.’  I was tasked with getting budgets up and running and account balances were taking forever (15+ minutes to get 300 account balances).  Because our self imposed release was quickly approaching we couldn’t wait anymore so I created the General Journal tables and code to deal with populating it based on all our various accounting transactions.  Now, 300 account balances take just a fraction of a second (as it should).

We released it to the public and we won some awards.  And then we discovered why using Microsoft Access/Jet as an accounting database was a horrible idea.  Database corruptions were commonplace because client networks were so bad that Jet couldn’t fix itself.  We start stashing copies of the database ‘just because’ and gave warnings that users should compact and repair their database on a regular basis.  It was at that point the owner allowed me to look into using SQL Server instead of Access.  Did I know anything about SQL Server and VB6?  Barely.

Going from almost zero knowledge, we got SQL Server up and running in about six months (while still releasing new features).  Since we had long since figured out how to minimize corrupted databases (but never completely eliminated the problem) the client naturally decided that SQL Server wasn’t important to his long term growth.  So SQL Server was (mostly) abandoned.

Along the way we refactored payroll to speed it up by a factor of 10.  We rewrote sales tax to accommodate the crazy schemes the politicians come up with to get money.  We were able to convert QuickBooks into our package with roughly 99% historical accuracy.  We investigated many things to see how long and how hard it would be to implement such as report designers and integrated charting and even releasing to foreign countries.  We rewrote large sections of code and changed out controls in Visual Basic that were better than the existing controls.

I mentioned that we mostly abandoned SQL Server.  That’s not really true.  The one full-time developer on their staff and I kept developing as if we were using Access and SQL Server which was a great idea because eventually they sold copies of the product to some very big companies.  And naturally Access/Jet choked and died a miserable death in those high data environments.  Our forethought saved our collective bacon when we were able to switch them over to SQL Server with minimal effort.  Jet errors vanished nearly overnight.

As a company, my client won some local awards as a great place to work in the Kansas City metro area.  They treated me as an employee (for better and worse) which meant that I was invited to their Christmas parties and got dragged into profit sharing meetings.  I knew the employees as well as I’ve known anyone I’ve ever worked with.

But as with all projects, this one is now mature and stable.  Sure, we have a huge laundry list of things we’d like to change, but we’re no longer in that startup mode where every day is about coding something new or where every day is an emergency because we (or a customer) found an issue that has to be changed RIGHT NOW.  I feel as if the really exciting part of the project is over.

So when an opportunity came along to work on an even bigger project for a very large company I couldn’t pass it down.  So starting Monday, I start working on a big project for a Fortune 100 using agile development methodology.  It’s a big deal and it has some risk but the potential rewards are huge.  I get to learn about being part of ‘scrum’ and to be part of a team where we have code reviews and formalized coding standards.  These are, frankly, something I’ve wanted to implement for a long time.

Doing a quick check on Friday revealed that the accounting project has around 975,000 lines of code in 700 project items with 200 reports.  How many of those reports did I create?  Maybe 10.  How’s that as a switch-a-roo from when I started?  As I left the building on Friday I told the client (really my friend at this point) that I appreciated him letting me play in his sandbox for five and half years and that it’s not really goodbye.  I’m sure there’s some more things to build and another couple hundred thousand lines of code to write.

Having your own business isn’t easy.  In fact, it’s the hardest thing anyone could ever attempt because the work never ends.  If you’re not doing ‘real’ work, you’re thinking about it.  How do you find the next bit of work?  What’s my next article going to be?  What product should I work on?  The questions are endless.

Our industry, in particular, isn’t known for it’s healthy habits.  We spend way too many hours in front of computer monitor.  My wife half-joked at last years Real World conference that you could tell who the programmers were because they were all pasty-white.  And that’s not a slam on anyone because she’s a programmer too and has been for longer than me.

Last Fall I was working a lot of hours.  I was tired all the time and I just felt miserable.  I was turning down work which is always a bad sign.  I knew I had to do something.

The first thing I did was hire an employee.  Some of you probably feel that’s a bad idea but I found an awesome developer.  In fact, he’s better at a lot of stuff than I am which is great because as a company I can now pursue projects that he wants to do as well as those that I have a passion for.  It also means we (collectively) can help out on some open source REALbasic projects.  So now, two of us can do more than just one of me was doing.  That was my first step.

For my second step I started going to the gym again.  I’m no longer funding a service I don’t use.  I go every other day and do a combination of weights and aerobic activity.  I’ve lost 15 pounds and I have more energy than I’ve had in a while.  Perhaps the best part of the gym is that I go to the office and do better code in less time.  My thoughts are focused and I’m generally sure about what I’m doing.

For many years I studied Aikido (earned a brown belt) and one of the many things I learned in its teachings is that Mind and Body are one.  Where the mind goes the body will follow and the reverse is true.  Where the body goes the mind will follow.  So if you don’t exercise your body you don’t exercise your mind.  I loved Aikido until my knees gave out but the truth still holds – you need to exercise your whole body.

Whatever it is that you enjoy that is not centered around the computer – do it!  If that means pounding nails while helping build a house, do it!  I know several developers/business owners that do that for fun.  Join a gym.  Join a league.  Go take a yoga or Thai Chi class.  Take an adult education class at the local community college.

Just do something different.   Something that’s NOT computer related.  Give your mind something else to ponder about for a while.  You’ll be amazed at how much better  you feel and how much better your code is.

So what do you do to refresh yourself?