Author: Shelley Powers

Categories
Weblogging

February 8 2002

Monsieur Of-the-court, I doth my hat and I salute you, sir!

Update Sorry, Shelley’s creative spelling again — it’s doff. Doff my hat. Thanks Meryl.

-earlier-

New sunglasses and nifty new plastic maps bought and stowed. Pleasantly surprised at the prices for glasses at Site for Sore Eyes. Normally I’m unpleasantly surprised by the prices in San Francisco. Also bought book for reading along the way. Any guesses as to what I got? Hmm? You’re an educated lot — you can figure it out.

I’m letting Mr. Of-the-court off the hook with the joke. The thing with jokes is that you have to cook em just right. Too soon, and you’ve got chicken sushi; too late and you got yesterday’s barbie’d chooch.

-earlier-

I’m not the only “voice” of weblogging — check out Gary’s soft, handsome vocal creation.

-earlier-

Lot’s to do today to get ready for the trip, including a visit to my favorite store, the Travel Shop. I love this store, which gives you a good indication how much I like to travel. This trip is long overdue.

Do you think that I’ve embarrassed Jonathon enough with my Plutonian list? Or do you think I should let the Sun King designation hang for a bit? Personally, my inclination is to let it hang for a while, milk it for all its worth.

Justin, is this the Rock City you were referring to?

 

Categories
Stuff

Moth to flame

When I was looking for a reference to something else, I accidentally stumbled on to this page. Such a pretty poem, and the background music suits, as does the use of DHTML.

Note: Music will play when the page loads. And it is very sentimental.

I just wanted to share this with you all because it’s nice.

Categories
Places

Bean Town

Yes, I am packing, but catching up with emails and weblog visits first.

Rogi asked why Boston is called Bean Town. Well, sit down dears, I have a story to tell.

In the golden old days of New England when they would burn you as a witch for working on the sabbath (or was it the dunking wheel?), anyway, all the women in the community would make these pots of beans to be left at the Bakers. During services, which lasted all day, the beans would bake. At night they would have these beans with the traditional brown bread that still accompanies these tasty legumes.

The beans, mixed with molasses, became a favorite primarily because Boston was awash, as they say, in this dark, syrup (treacle to you from other continents) — a main trade commodity, unfortunately associated with slavery. These beans were such a favorite with Bostonians (probably because they’re cheap, and Bostonians are nothing if not frugal), they were called Boston Baked Beans. Hence, Bean Town.

More at About New England.

To make this an even stickier story, there was the molasses flood in 1919 that killed 21 people, a dozen horses, and one cat.

Categories
Just Shelley

Independent developer’s struggle

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Found this one at Scripting News also:

Charles Cooper wrote on the independent developer’s struggle from being overwhelmed by the big companies such as Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle.

He asks the question, “As for the remaining independents still fighting the good fight?”

There has been, is, and will always be big companies. One time, even Microsoft was nothing more than a couple of college kids. Dorky college kids. The key issue that I’m most concerned about and that Cooper discusses is the standards organizations tied-at-the-hip attitude about the big players. If anything bothers me, that bothers me.

What to do?

Look around you. If you build something good, people will use it. If you build something new, people will be interested. If you open doors, generate interfaces, and make something lighter, faster, more workable and exciting—you won’t be ignored forever. You’ll see the prize at the end of the techie rainbow.

If you just schlep along subsisting on BigCo crumbs, all you’ll ever see is their ass in your face.

Categories
Technology

Scripting vs Compiled languages

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Oh this from DotNetCentric was excellent.

There is no war between scripting and compiled languages — both are here to stay. What we need to do is look at how we can get the two to interoperate. Is WSDL the way? Maybe. And maybe we need to look at other approaches, ones that will be effective from both sides of the typing fence.

As with open and closed source, the scripting and the compiled language environments must learn to co-exist with each other, or we’ll never have the interface we need to be able to safely practice chaos within our own domains.

(Link found via Scripting News)