Gnubbs Blog

This past Friday I had what I would describe as the second worst beer I have ever had.  Steel Reserve 211.  How could I resist it at the liquor store — $1.19 for a 24 oz can of 8.1% beer.  I had to try it.  It was terrible.  Truely terrible.  Second worst beer ever.

This beer is just a tad worse than Schlitz.  Schlitz is bad, but has kinda a clean disgusting taste.  This stuff is like the worst beer in the world, with a kinda furry disgusting taste.

For the record, since I am sure that you are wondering at this point, the worst beer in the world is Old Chub Scottish Ale.  Terrible.  Profoundly terrible.  Really beyond description.  At least Schlitz and Steel Reserve are cheap — Old Chub is $8 a six pack.  Thats fucked up.

Man, it sucks that I don’t have more stories that start like that.  I have been working way too many hours lately so the best I could come up with for today was a link to a great essay.

This was a typical Richard Feynman explanation. On the one hand, it infuriated the experts who had worked on the problem because it neglected to even mention all of the clever problems that they had solved. On the other hand, it delighted the listeners since they could walk away from it with a real understanding of the phenomenon and how it was connected to physical reality.

- Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine

One of my favorite places to go to lunch is a Mexican joint called Efrain’s II. It is delicious and dirt cheap. An added bonus is that one of the nicest auto detailers in Boulder is in the same parking lot. So, on nice days there is usually a nice car or two out front. This past friday there were two — a Maserati Quatroporte and an Audi R8.

This was the first R8 that I have seen, and I have to say that in person the car is very sexy. From the photos, I didn’t think that I liked the blade behind the doors. This car was gold and the blade was left carbon fiber. It looked great. (Gold? Yeah, I know that the Audi site doesn’t list gold as a color option. Apparently if you can afford an R8, you can also afford a paint job.)

Was the R8 the best looking car I have seen at Bing’s?  Not by a long shot.

For a long time I was steadily marching towards using pretty much all online apps. I was happy with the move. Whether I was at my work PC or home PC, I always had my data and tools handy.

However, since getting my MacBook that trend has been starting to reverse. Here are some examples:

- Gtalk to iChat: I still use gtalk at work because they block regular connections to chat services. However the embedded chat in gmail still works. Given the choice though, the interface for iChat is just so, so much nicer than gtalk.

- Gmail to Mail.app: Well, I still use gmail. My primary interface is now Mail.app through IMAP. I like gmail, and it’s interface is great for a web app. Again, though, the interface for Mail.app is just so nice. The downside is that conversations in gmail are so nice, and search is flawless. So, I have not made this jump for sure. I probably am still using Gmail 50% of the time, and Mail.app the rest.

- Google Reader to Vienna: I just made this jump over the past couple of days. I needed to do a complete tear down and reorg of my blogs. There was a bunch of cruft to get rid of, new blogs to add, and some restructuring to do. I started doing this in Google Reader, but it was just a pain. Now that I have started using Vienna, I have to say I really like it. Browsing posts is much, much easier and faster.

I am curious to see if I stick to these conversions over the next couple of months.

I just discovered that Denver International Airport has free WiFi. Generally, my biggest complaints with airports is that they want $22 for me to access the internet for 45 minutes. Good move on DIAs part.

The down sides are that it is very very slow, blocks way too many pages (BoingBoing for example), and that it injects some add at the top of all webpages. Oh well. Beggers can’t be choosers.

On another note, I have a question for that guy over there on the cell phone. What is the point of putting it on speaker and annoying everyone in the airport if you have to hold it up to your ear to hear it anyways?

Most of the time when I see that someone put lambo doors on their car, I quietly heckle them. Or loudly heckle them and rev my engine at their civic.

There is an exception. There are cars out there where I think it is awesome. Namely, Lamborghinis. Especially if it is a Countach. I had a poster of a black one on my wall as a kid and it was rad.

Today I went for a cruise in that car. It was as awesome as I had hoped. Chicks dug me just because I was riding in that car. I totally looked like a drug dealer from a 1980’s movie. It was rad. It had a cassette deck in it. Rad!

If you are not an engineer or car guy, that is all that will interest you. Thanks for reading.

As an engineer or car guy, you will appreciate what I am about to share. My friend did not go out and buy himself a Lamborghini. About six years ago he bought a kit that included reproduction body panels of a mid 1980’s Countach. He built the rest (with some authentic Italian parts for good measure).

Chassis? A nice tubular chassis that he fabricated. It uses a small block Chevy V8 and a modern Getreg 5 speed out of a Pontiac. Shifter mechanism? A cable system that he built himself (which shifts nicer than my Subaru…) HVAC System? An original Lambo control in the cabin, interfaced to a control computer and HVAC system he built. Fuel Injection? Again, his own design. Door hinges that you can buy for every make of car in the world these days? Another piece of his craftsmanship. And they work flawlessly. Fit of the doors is excellent, and they have the best positive mechanical feel when the shut.

It is amazing to talk to him about all of the things he did for this car. With the exception of the engine, transmission, and body panels, he fabricated the entire car. It is truly amazing.

Is it as nice as a real Lamborghini? I have no idea, no one has let me play with their original. Would I have guessed that it is home built? Absolutely not. It is incredibly well executed. I always knew that he was good with a wrench, but my respect for him as a mechanic grew immeasurably today.

Impressive.

Today I was walking through the halls at my office, asking people if they played any games, when I heard something very foreign to me. One of my co-workers made the statement “It’s not my job to do that.” It struck me as very strange, and something that I don’t think that I have ever said.

Pretty much every job description I have ever seen has a clause that reads something like “…and perform other duties as needed.” This leads me to take a very broad view of what my job is. My job is to help our customers and increase company value for our shareholders.

If something needs to get done at work, it usually falls into that very broad job description. I would never utter “It’s not my job to do that.” I can’t even imagine saying that to someone at work. When someone asks me for help with something outside my normal job responsibilities, my responses fall into one of three categories:

• “Sure, I would be happy to help” - Any task that is easy and fast for me to do will generally get that response. An example would be the other day when one of our designers wanted to make a video from a power point presentation. I didn’t know how to do it but figured it wouldn’t take me long to figure out. She is a great graphic designer, but didn’t have any idea where to start. 20 minutes later we had what she needed.
• “I would be happy to help, but have to talk to my boss about putting it on my schedule.” - These are for tasks that I can help with, but require a bigger investment of my time. I have been asked to create a wiki-like information management system for our mechanical engineers. I have been asked to write perl based management scripts for our production systems. I get asked to help out with web based tools for other groups a lot. It is probably because our IT group is unresponsive and I am a programming resource outside that group. Generally my boss is happy to have me help, but these things need to be scheduled based on overall priorities.
• “Hmm… I have no idea how to help with that, but you should talk to…” - Worse case scenario is that they have come to the wrong person for the job. In those cases, I think about the other people in the business that I chat with around the water cooler and try and point them in the right direction.

With these answers, even if I can’t actually help out, the person walks away thinking that I was helpful. That is vital to my job. A lot of people here can think of times I have helped them out of a bind, and so when I need help they are usually quick to lend a hand.

I am currently writing some new tools for my boss. Basically just a bunch of tools that look at data in a DB and generate pretty graphs for him. You know how bosses like graphs. He asked me to automate a bunch of reporting that is done manually right now, and that is where I am starting.

Basically these reports are running against our online schedule tracking tool for our support folks. All of the data is in a SQL db, so life is good. Looking at the data got me thinking though. If we can get the number of people we have answering the phones for everyday over the past year, what good is that? Not much. What would be valuable is if we looked at the number of people on the phones versus hold times. That is data we could use. It would allow us to pick a hold time that is acceptable and staff to support that time. That would be gaining power from our data.

Unfortunately, our call tracking software doesn’t write it’s info to a standard DB. It is only available through some custom report generating tools they wrote. That might be fine for some companies, but for us if the data isn’t available to other software you might as well not track it.

This is closely in line with a post on Productivity 501: Integration is more important than features. I couldn’t agree more. Going forward, if a piece of software does not provide some sort of API to access the data it uses to generate reports, I am not going to support buying it. As simple as that.

If it isn’t available through an API, don’t waste resources collecting it. It doesn’t actually exist.

It seems like every week that goes by I find a new tool for my mac that warrants inclusion into the menu bar. It is still manageable, but I suspect that some day it may grow out of control.

From left to right, we have:

Quicksilver - no introduction needed
InstantShot! - free, great to use screen capture software
Growl - notifications. I thought this would be stupid until I started using it.
Marco Polo - location awareness. Use it to set different settings for work/home use
Blue Phone Elite - Great integration software for my Moto Razr (worst phone ever btw)
TextExpander - Great tool if you write HTML. Quickly insert snippets into any application.

Thanks to LifeHacker for pointing out basically every one of these apps to me. (Except Blue Phone Elite - thanks Britton at work.)

Today is my birthday. I am turning the ripe old age of 28. To celebrate, I left work today at about 11:30am, went for a couple of hour hike, and am currently drinking PBR number two.

Stephanie and I are going someplace for dinner, but otherwise I am keeping things quiet.