the weblog of m.kelley

Brief Updates:

- Went to Atlanta last week for watch the DCI semi-finals. Ate some nice Cuban sandwiches from a little grocery store near Ga. Tech (Kool Korner). Visited some great little places and got to hang out with my best friend for the first time in years. I’ve known this guy for over half of my life….

- I also got to hang out with my other best friend, you know her/you love her, EvD..of the dearly departed site, Oblogation. She had one of the best ideas for a Powerpoint, basically cutting up musical bits to relate to the slides. “American Woman” as the music for the sexual harassment slide, Skynard’s “What’s Your Name” for new employee orientation…although my suggestion of Devo’s “Whip It” for the corporal punishment was quickly vetoed. We would download songs and just crack up about how this would work. It was honestly one of the best times I’ve had in a long time.

- I’m working more with AJAX technology….it’s really not bad. I have a few enhancements here, that when time finally allows, will be interesting to say the least. We’re using it heavily with both our new consumer site and our new portal….using it with Java and .NET and plain old HTML. I should point out that I am not a “real” programmer, I’ve picked up pieces along the way. I’m a little scared, but my boss has signed me up for a Java struts class, so maybe I’ll have more programming education coming my way.

Mozilla reaches 15% of browser market – ON ITS Spreadfirefox web site, Mozilla claims that Firefox has acquired about 15 per cent of the global usage share in the nearly 21 months since it was released. It has now passed the 200 million download mark.

I don’t know if I want to completely call “b.s” on this. But from my prospective, I’m seeing the Mozilla-based browsers coming in at about 4-6%. While all of my co-workers use Firefox or Flock, we’re still seeing a 95% saturation rate with IE.

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Ajaxian � Aptana: New Web IDE in Beta

Just wanted to pass this along. While I’m using the heck outta WebCipher, Aptana looks very good and is a nice little clone of HomeSite. I’m putting it through it’s paces currently and honestly looks like something I can really use.

It’s on all platforms that matter (Win,Lin,OSX) and could almost easily act as a replacement for Dreamweaver.

Churches Putting Town Out of Business – Los Angeles Times – They are not the words one expects to hear from a politician or a Southerner, and Leonard Scarcella is both: “Our city has an excessive number of churches.”

Scarcella is mayor of this Houston-area community, which has 51 churches and other religious institutions packed into its 7 square miles.

My solution : tax the churches.

Seriously. Want to have a house of worship, agree to pay property tax. If a religious establishment want to give back to their community, this would be one way to do so.

CNN.com – Vegan diet reverses diabetes symptoms, study finds – Jul 28, 2006 – People who ate a low-fat vegan diet, cutting out all meat and dairy, lowered their blood sugar more and lost more weight than people on a standard American Diabetes Association diet, researchers said this week.

This is something I’ve been considering for a while…maybe not going a full vegan route, but becoming more vegetarian as a way to help maintain my diabetes naturally as well as controlling some of my food allergies.

My philosophy is that one occasional egg won’t hurt, neither will a nice piece of tuna or a steak. Just not eating meat or dairy at every meal. I’ve recently started eating more fruit and veggies daily and cut back my french fry and sweets intake. I really don’t want to lose weight, just be healthy.

I had one of these weird moments, when I realized it had been months since I had a hamburger. I’ve been eating a lot of grilled chicken and meals at home and I honestly just haven’t missed eating fast food. I do eat out daily, either in our work cafeteria or just grabbing something at one of the many little places in downtown Chattanooga.

One of my largest issues with “switching” would be tofu. I’m all for meat substitute, but I just need to try tofu again. I didn’t like it when I dated a little lesbian girl back in 93 but I’m much more open-minded about food now. Might just be time to try again.

The two other issues are cheese and bread, both I love. I’ve been using more pita breads but I still like my occasional grilled cheese or cheese on most anything.

I’m not some nut-job, I know how cattle, pigs, and chickens are processed and yet I still can eat bacon with a happy face. This isn’t about animal rights or about your health, but my personal health. I do, however, think we eat way too much in restaurants but I’m not gonna stop you.

Eat what you want, life is too short for bad food.

[Terminal 3] Unmentionable Cuisine by Daniel Maurer

For the restless person, eating unusual food– for instance a baby pigeon at New York City’s mecca of weird food, Congee Village– is the only way to experience the exciting and exotic while listening to his lunchmate complain about his job for the umpteenth time. Simple mastication becomes an escape and an adventure; an act of enlightenment and transgression; the culinary equivalent of foreign travel– a means of experiencing flavors that are at once comfortingly familiar yet wonderfully strange. Knowing the secret tastes of foods such as barbequed ovaries (or “balls on a string,” as they are called in Japan) makes you feel like someone whose lover does illicit and delightful things in bed (perhaps also with balls and a string)– you want to tell everyone about them, but when you do, you are met with a mixture of awe and revulsion.

I found this while trying to find more about the “mellified man” boingboing discussed. I can honestly say that more and more I learn about food, the more I want to become a vegetarian. The idea of eating honey coated remains from Arabia or ant eggs from Mexico, makes me wanna turn in my “foodie” badge. I mean, I’ll try anything once, but even I have my limits.

I’m not entirely sure if this was a blessing or a curse, but the bit major deadline for my first large project at work has had a suggestion to push the deadline two months later than initially needed.

While the programmers on my team have their stuff together, it’s those programmers who I don’t see on a daily basis or have no access to, that seems to worry me….honestly, it’s not the programs that worry me, it’s the content providers (the text) and my outside vendor.

We could really use the extra time so the vendor fucking up could be a “good thing”™ in the long run. Yes, I said it. I’m a project manager who is very glad his deadline won’t be met…mainly so we can give a better product instead of something who’s QA time was slowly being devowered by project scope.

I think there was a general “phew” about this change of date, mainly it meant that instead of just throwing skin/css changes over existing apps, we could actually take the time to rewrite them and make them a bit snazzier (ajax-ifying them, honestly, instead of using iframes or tables).

It also means that our “killer feature” won’t kill me in how the vendor completely dropped the ball, but instead be something I can be proud of instead of wanting to drive to an office and hit the bottoms of someone’s feet with a bamboo cane until they did what was asked.

Henry Ford Hospital – A Best Ranked Hospital in Detroit, Michigan

I’m looking around at healthcare websites again and thought this one looked very good and stood out among others in the hospital category.

Apple – Wireless Mighty Mouse (via Daring Fireball)

I purchased four of the original Mighty Mice when they came out and gave them to two of my best artists as well as keeping one for myself and my boss. The boss and a designer hated them, one artist loved it and I was really digging having an Apple mouse w/ a scroll.

I wound up adding those into p.o’s when we purchased new systems. I just hated that we couldn’t get a wireless mouse w/ a scroll from Apple.

(btw, I’m in a Mac-less house for the first time since ’99 and being on EvD’s Mac has just made me a little Mac-sick)

Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos meet “Ginger” – HBS Working Knowledge

After another pause, Tim moved on to the issue of service, determined to move ahead despite the punches coming at him. Within two sentences, Jobs was on him again. Tim put up his next slide, about the new plant, but again Jobs came at him with a flurry of half-insolent questions. Where are you building a plant? Why are you building a plant? Why are you manufacturing the machine yourselves?

Partly, explained Tim, because giving our code to someone else would be a great risk. Not a good reason, in Jobs’s view, because the code could easily be reverse-engineered. No it couldn’t, said Tim. Could, said Jobs. He added that Tim should be spending money and management time on other things, especially since there was no way he could convince any world-class manufacturing and procurement people to move to New Hampshire, for God’s sake, his tone implying that only slow-witted rubes could bear such a place. Dean lifted an eyebrow.

“We have an adequate staff”, said Tim defensively, but it sounded as weak as the adjective. Tim had lost control of the meeting. That was probably Doerr’s plan all along. Dean sat silently, offering no help or defense as Jobs rampaged through Tim’s presentation.

Let me say that I’m am entirely behind Jobs on this suggest, because he *did* build his own plant, when he started NeXT and it entirely kicked his ass and took his attention away from Management. He used it as a showroom, but arrogance of youth took his attention to flash instead of substance.

I know a lot of people don’t like Jobs for his attitude, but if you read through the article and not the snips on SVN, you’ll see he had a great vision for the Ginger. Listen to Jobs, because he’s thought about most things deeper than you…is the gist of what I’m getting from this article.