Time Machine III: Still Waiting For My Million-Dollar-Idea

While discussing some of this 'way back when' with a engineering buddy the other day, we came to the topic of 'Why haven't we made our millions yet?". This question was raised as we were reflecting back on our careers, choices we've made, and the friends we've watched go from rags to riches.

Will it ever be our turn?

It turned out to be a very well balanced discussion as my buddy and I started our professional careers at approximately the same time. However we went very different routes. He was college educated, and found himself a secure job as a codemonkey for an oppressive corporation. I was a self-educated, high school dropout and decided to go indie (self-unemployed). Both of us work our butts off. Both of us have attempted to release software on our own, several attempts, neither had anything that really took off. I have now placed my indie efforts on hold and am employed for an oppressive corporation. The conclusion of the discussion was:

You'll never gain the freedom and recognition you desire from an oppressive corporation. If you want to be an engineering rock star, you gotta be indie.

This conclusion was mostly my sentiments based on experience in both indie and now corporate environments. However, 'Going Indie' is by far the best example of "easier said then done" that I can think of. Being indie means you have superhero-like abilities for self-motivation, stress management, handling business paperwork, and dealing one-on-one with customers (usually the angry ones). The business management was the biggest challenge for me, I'm an engineer, I hate paperwork.

I really respect those who have successfully conquered challenges.

The moral of the story: Indie is a wonderful place to be. However I warn you now, the road to indie is the path less traveled, it's not something you can just glide into. It's an eroded dirt road that you have to pave by hand using nothing but blood, sweat, and code.

I'd wish you luck, but then you'd probably actually succeed and I'll still be here waiting for mine.

Time Machine II: If I Installed That Mouse Odometer...

...way back in the day, I'd be overdue for an oil change.

seriously.

Time Machine: Introduction

No, not Apple's breakthrough automatic backup solution. I'm talking about 1.21 gigawatts of online nostalgia, a trip down memory lane. This article does have prerequisite on age. Some of the reference made may very well predate your existence. I am starting this timeline at my introduction to computer telecommunication. I was involved in computers for some time before this, but modems and such were not widely available yet (plus my mom wouldn't buy me one).

How many of you were online before the Internet was widely available? I'm talking local BBSes, AOL, CompuServe, and Tymnet/X.25. Ever got online from C64 or TRS-80 on a B&W television. Have you ever saved email to a cassette tape? There were my early days. My first email address was: 1:275/22.11. If the format of that address is not familiar to you it comes from a network called FidoNet.

"Back in the day", FidoNet was the only WAN that was readily accessible from the public. It used a host<->host routing system not unlike what is used in today's Internet, the big difference was that each message that a host had to route required the host to dial-in to the remote host using POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) with a modem. Unfortunately, most BBS hosts were run by working-class individuals who usually had at most only 2 or 3 dial-in lines and were always busy. You could be redialing for hours before making a successful connection (and 300 or 1200bps). Needless to say, but FidoNet message took forever to get delivered, days and sometimes weeks.

There were great times. Everyone you met online was just as excited and passionate as you were about this new telecommunication phenomenon. Everywhere you ventured there was a great possibility that you were discovering new territory. The entire world was beginning to jack-in, public wide-area networking in it's infancy creating a whole universe of unexplored, exciting adventures.


...on the next episode of Time Machine; commercial online services (AOL, CompuServe)

404 Done Right

Quite often I just surf randomly around wikipedia, just gathering input, building my brain, and raising my level of awareness of the events taking place in the "real world", a place I rarely visit.

During today's surf I managed to end up at the page for Toast (the CD recording software). The history of Toast is of particular interest to me because I have been a loyal user since it's inception and am now personal acquaintance and friend of many of it's developers.

On this page is a link to a particular company's website. Unfortunately, the link is no longer valid and you're redirected to the famous '404 Page Not Found' screen. Unfortunate? Not in this case! The text of the page reads:

"We're sorry. The page you were trying to view is no longer here. We hate this as much as you do, so we'd like to offer you a coupon for 10% off your next order to make things right again." [followed by a personal coupon code]

10% off!? A discount on your products because you broke your website and caused me great pain and suffering? You admit your fault and wish to offer me compensation? You are truly a great and honorable organization.

When imbeciles "write" code...

I've recently discovered a rather catastrophic issue with a tool I use for code management...errr, backup, allow me to provide some context.

The first version of this tool, we'll call it ToolA, was fairly decent and did the job it was built to do. Unfortunately, the future development and support of ToolA was reassigned to a bunch of non-engineers, primarily HTML dolts.

These in-duh-viduals "re-factored" ToolA into what we'll refer to as ToolB by basically modifying the UI and user interaction so that it so complicated and and nonintuitive that it's physically painful to use....and of course an entire company is now forced to use it. bah!

Anyway, back to my issue. Cancel != Delete. I spent about 3 weeks writing some code, committed it to our system using ToolB as required. Great, no problem there. The problem comes about a week later (today) when I goto make a change. I login, bring up my project and begin my edit session...*ring* *ring*...doh! impromptu meeting I am required to run to. I click the 'Cancel' button to end my edit session and run to my meeting, planning on continuing my project change later.

Well, in ToolB, Cancel apparently means Delete. *poof* My entire project is gone, like really gone. all records removed, pages deleted, and code deleted from source control, really deleted, no recovery possible, not even old versions. 3 weeks of work gone.

Someone is going to get tortured for this.

DrunkenBatman Is Not A Racist

Normally, cruel and unusual treatment of others is entertaining to me. However recently people who were not even attending the C4 conference are bouncing off the wall over a slide which was used by DrunkenBatman (Example). This is all very slanderous toward DB. If you were not attending the conference STFU now or else.... Mr. Jalkut has a good write-up on his blog that I agree gives the true story.

C4[1] Inspiration

I'm currently attending C4[1], a gathering of the better half of in-duh-viduals, in Chicago. Daniel Jalkut, the author of the wonderful MarsEdit software I am using to create this post just finished his semi-inspirational presentation. One of his pieces of advice was "If you don't have a blog, give up". Obviously, I don't give up until I've conquered, so welcome to my new blog. Unfortunately one thing he didn't mention about this blogging phenomenon is that it requires writing. How primitive. bah.