because not enough websites start with the letter “Z”
Posted in Uncategorized, life on Apr 30th, 2008
Recently I have been dealing with a particularly egregious form of spam - technical recruiter emails. One company in particular, Talentberg, stands out for its lack of professionalism and ignorance. They absolutely refuse to prune their mailing list, even when repeated requests are made. And they attempt to justify their actions through an intimidating, if false, [...]
Posted in nerdliness on Apr 29th, 2008
In Random Is As Random Does, I talked about how I configured some smart playlists in iTunes to provide a better random sample of the music I most wanted to hear from my MP3 collection. Basically I created smart playlists for the least played tracks, the least recently played tracks, the most played tracks, the [...]
Posted in nerdliness on Apr 28th, 2008
I currently support four public facing sites that use Wordpress as the back-end content management system (CMS). I also have a Wordpress test platform on my laptop, where I tinker with several different themes, that supports another four sites. So, I’ve got eight different Wordpress installations to update each time a new release is made [...]
Posted in life on Apr 27th, 2008
In his seminal book, Object-Oriented Technology: A Manager’s Guide, the author, David A. Tayor, describes polymorphism as
Hiding alternative procedures behind a common interface.
The word, polymorphism, is a Greek term meaning “many forms.” A common example of this in the programming world is a routine that calculates state sales tax. The calling process is unaware of [...]
Posted in life on Apr 24th, 2008
Many years ago, Pizza Hut had a series of television commercials featuring famous people talking about the whole pizza experience. Rita Moreno did one, as did Herbie Hancock. Herbie’s was great. He talked about how was to get a pizza and share it. ”Sure! Have a slice.” That part that has stayed with me until [...]
Posted in life, nerdliness on Apr 21st, 2008
Zanshin.net is just a speck of lint under a finger nail on the long arm of the Internet. As a weblog it gets few visitors, and even fewer comments. While the domain has existed for over 11 years now, the site has been formatted as a blog only since December 1999. I have no accurate, [...]
This weekend was the first truly mild weather we’ve had this year, and Sibylle was determined to get the plants back outside for the season. Saturday morning we started by moving the hibiscus, the geranium, and the fig tree back outside. We then spent some time preparing the flower beds along the south side of [...]
Posted in Uncategorized, life on Apr 18th, 2008
There are any number of differences between working as a consultant and working as an employee. And there are some similarities. Today I ran across an unexpected similarity. The company I work for now, as an employee, has undergone significant growth in the past couple of years and they are going through all the growing [...]
Posted in life, nerdliness on Apr 15th, 2008
For the first time in several years, I am free of my cell phone contract. When I moved to Kansas in 2004, my cell phone was nearing the end of its two-year obligation. Without realizing the consequences (and without being told about them) I called Cingular and changed my phone number to the new area [...]
Posted in Uncategorized, life on Apr 14th, 2008
After thirty-one years of getting paper paychecks or pay stubs, tomorrow will mark the first occasion of my receiving an electronic pay statement. My employer, in an effort to avoid paying the increased mass mailing postage rate, has decided to stop mailing associates, who use direct deposit, pay stubs. Over the course of a year [...]
