Tag Archives: Photos

Flowers For The Spouse of an Over Time Worker

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Flowers For Ron?

Jonna started a new job a few months ago as a QA Analyst. She has been working tons of overtime over the past few months due to a new site launch. When we got back from the Bristol Renaissance Fair yesterday evening, we found these on the door step. My first reaction was “I wonder who is sending Jonna flowers?” They were actually for me, from her company – thanking me for my patience during the time she put in and the sacrifices I made for their launch.

I made fun of it at first – mainly because if anyone has sacrificed anything through our marriage, its Jonna. For most of our marriage I’ve been the one working all of the time and she hasn’t really gotten anything out of it. When she took the job, it was kind of just an expectation that there would be overtime on my part, coming from almost 20 years in IT (the last 7 in internet based applications with that 99.9% uptime rule). I also spend a lot of non-work time reading to keep up to speed on new developments and learning different languages just to keep current. To be honest, I didn’t think it was anything out of the ordinary for the role she was in.

I guess this just goes to show you that some companies actually do think about the ramifications that overtime has on employees families. After my initial time making fun of the fact that I actually got flowers, I started thinking about what a cool thing it is for a company to acknowledge an employees spouse in this way.

See? You learn something new every day!

New Things To Learn!

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Learning Objective C

One of the really nice things about switching platforms is the plethora of new things one now has the capability to learn that you might not have found a reason to learn before.

I’m a stickler on having something practical to do when learning something. If I don’t have a real thing to shoot for when learning a language, its pretty much a guarantee that I won’t be able to learn it.

The conversion to the Mac platform, the availability of the development tools through the Apple Developer site, and some time spent reading iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business has given me a lot of motivation to dig down and learn Objective C.

Free tools have been around for Objective C programming for quite a long time. The GCC compiler has supported Objective C as far back as I could remember. But frankly, I saw no reason to learn it when I had all of these scripting languages available and most of my Unix work has been either web based, or command line driven tools.

However, the last three or four weeks sitting with the Mac and working within the Mac UI has gotten my curiousity peaked on this odd little language that really gets no visibility until a few guys from NeXT choose it as the basis of their development tools. I really want first hand experience to understand why the guys at NeXT chose this language as the basis of their platform.

Now, I’ve done a lot of C and C++ programming in the past, so one might think that learning Objective C would be no big deal. I have to tell you, I’m struggling a bit. One thing I do think is pretty cool is the dynamic nature of the language. To me, it seems very Python / Ruby – ish in that respect. However, its a lot to learn and I’m really going to have to spend some quality time with some books to get familiar with the concepts. Its very different than C++.

I’ve got three books on order from Amazon: Programming in Objective-C, Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, 2nd Edition, and Building Cocoa Applications : A Step by Step Guide. Unfortunately, I received #2 before #1, and #1 is definitely the book I need first.

I think its pretty cool that I have the excuse to learn something completely different. The past four weeks on a new platform has been interesting to me. Its really like starting all over again with a whole new world available to me — which is what attracted me to this field in the first place.

Objective C Resources

Happy Birthday

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Ron's Birthday Cake

I had to work on Friday night, so Jonna and Kelsi came in to hang out with me. They brought this cool cake in with them, along with enough cup cakes to feed an army. When it all comes down to it, Friday was a pretty decent birthday for me. Who can really complain when you have Spidey on your cake at 38? Who says I’m getting old?

17 Year Old Creates Flickr Competitor

Aside

From Slashdot: “Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch has an article up on a new Flickr competitor called Zooomr. The interesting thing about all of this that it was developed in only three months by a 17 year old and to top it all off, the site is currently localized in 16 languages”. The site is “experiencing high volumes” since appearing on Slashdot and is being moved to a larger data center. I’m looking forward to seeing it.