Catch a tiger by it's tail... [via Lambda]

  9:06:30 PM    

I was interrupted by a question during a bonding period where my daughter and I, each armed with a laptop, were pursuing our separate interests together.  At this particular point in time it seems that she had encountered an unexpected pop-up dialog.  As I saw a learning opportunity, I asked her to read it to me.  When she got to the word "battery", I asked her to stop and tell me what she thought she should do.  She immediately sought out the power cord.

It seems that we are breading a generation of people who's conditioned response to every dialog box is to either select the default choice or to call tech support.

My approach to problem solving, on the other hand, is much better characterized by the phrase "ooh!, what does this button do?".

  8:55:12 PM    

Had lunch today with Joe Gregorio and Mark Pilgrim.  Both are local (RTP, NC) bloggers.  They had met before, I was the new person to this trio.  In addition to blogging, we all were software developer.  Other connections emerged.  Joe is developing SOAP applications on embedded systems, and was interested in my Apache SOAP and Axis work.  Mark teaches Java web server topics, and uses Jakarta technologies (primarily Tomcat and Ant).

Major topics of conversation was both the up and down sides of being "internationally famous", and techniques for building non-brittle interfaces.  If there are other bloggers in the RTP area... perhaps we should get together for lunch some time in April?

  4:47:09 PM