Double-whiskey, Coke no ice

The Hold Steady has roots in Minnesota, which is pretty cool.

I've sampled a few of their albums and generally one or two songs on each album is really good, but the rest are junk (IMHO, of course).

(Title comes from the song "Constructive Summer")

We Said Goodnight to Broadway, Giving It Our Best Regards

Very soon, it seems, I'll be working on development for delta.com. My manager is down in ATL today talking with some of our counterparts, er, colleagues, and it seems they're a little short-staffed.

This makes me a little sad. We put so much time into the redesign of nwa.com, and received a lot of accolades within the company and from the outside (customers, competitors, etc.). But day by day, it's slowly slipping away... :(

Two Links Diverged, and I, I Clicked Them Both

Coffee grounds as a new source of fuel? Yep, it's true:
http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/2009/01/04/coffee-beans-as-the-next-great-auto-fuel/

Excess is out, frugality is in:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jan/04/us-economy-thrift-barack-obama

Screw Microsoft

Check out this post over at Ryan Rampersad's blog:

http://ryan.ifupdown.com/2008/11/19/save-the-developers-is-gone/

It seems Microsoft couldn't take a little heat from the developer community about the horrible Internet Explorer browser. So, they either bought out the website/domain name or threatened the website owner.

The old SaveTheDevelopers.org site now redirects to a download page for IE. And what's worse is that they're suggesting users download a beta copy of IE8 from that page. Regardless of Google's perpetual beta projects, applications in beta status are not meant for mass consumption.

Screw Microsoft.

Encouragement FAIL

Uh, are you kidding me?

I just received an invitation spam from HSBC Direct. Apparently, they want me to open a $25,000 or more CD with a craptacular 3.10% APY, and to encourage me to do it in the next six days, they're going to reward me with an extra $75. I know, a whole $75!

Let's do a simple calculation: $75 / $25,000 = 0.003. So, on a 3.10% APY CD, they're going to give me a three-tenths of a percent bonus for letting them use my $25k for the next six months.

FAIL.

Edited to correct my decimal place error.

Spending Other People's Time

I screwed up today.

In the grand scheme of things, it wasn't a big deal, but my screw-up cost someone else time. And time is money, frustration, distraction from other tasks, and all of that.

Someone from another work area needed some help and wanted to use some code I had already written. So we debugged the application to figure out what was needed and then I provided the appropriate code to plug into their application. The work on their end should have taken five minutes or so. But the developer just came back to me saying he was having problems, so I went to help him debug his application. As it turns out, I forgot to paste in a necessary function when I emailed the code earlier today. So he spent about an hour trying things in code he was unfamiliar with, wondering if there were other problems, and generally wasting time. His time.

It's a lesson in completeness and attention to detail.

Hong Kong

Just returned from a short visit to Hong Kong with my brother. Each time I go back, I'm amazed at how much can be squeezed into such a small area (7m people in an area 25% the size of NYC). I know it's not the most densely-populated place on Earth, but at times it feels like it.

The weather was gorgeous and the food and sights were worth the price of admission, as always. I love how nearly everything you need can be found within a block or two from wherever you're at. And the public transit is just great; I think the Hong Kong MTR is kept cleaner than the Singapore subway system, and that's saying something.

Definitely a place to keep coming back to.