Holly, Paul, and Will swung through the area on their whirlwind tour of those parts of the country that are not New Orleans. It was great to see them, and for once someone took pictures of me! Wow what a country. The full details of the trip can be found on their blog Cold Spaghetti.
The Washington Post has a great piece by Dick Meyer, which describes the “nuclear” debate on judicial nominees as a symptom of systemic disease which is slowly killing the character of the senate.
The Senate has managed to conduct the business of confirming or rejecting federal judges with relative efficiency and only occasional controversy for some 200 years. That the Senate is now going nuclear (to use its own vocabulary) over this legislative chore is a symptom of a rather serious illness in the upper body.
I agree with his arguments, especially with the assertion that this Senate has not passed any legislation that will be remembered positively ten years from now.
The temperature is sixty-six degrees, the sky is bright blue with an errant cloud or two. A perfect day to go home early from work. Unfortunately I went home early to recover from a sinus infection, and not to catch a round of golf. I attempted to get some work done this morning, but after staring at the login screen for an hour I packed up and headed home.
After a nap i had the energy to upload some recent photos into the Simple PHP Gallery I have been working on. Today I put up the pictures from the E&Y scavenger hunt, and the state of my master bedroom as of two weeks ago. Let me know what you think of the layout. I need Mike to change a couple of permissions for me and I will be ready to move over to this as my main photo repository.
The Pew Research Center has defined nine groups to describe U.S. voters.
I got pigeon-holed as a liberal, which I am not quite happy about. I would agree that I am a social liberal, but on monetary and budget issues I feel that I am a conservative. I wonder what category I would be assigned to if I was not strongly independent.
Find out where you fall. A write up entitled Beyond Red vs. Blue is also available.
If any of you go through the effort to take the quiz, please post the results. I would be interested if anyone finds their category an adequate description of their political views.
Having escaped the predatory vendors in the combined exhibition and break area for the last time, I have six hours of travel time to contemplate my first professional conference experience. My goal in attending the Digital ID World was to learn about the current and emerging trends in the user provisioning industry. This combined with the name of the major accounting firm emblazoned on my badge made conversations with most of the vendors excruciating. Most of these conversations started with me inquiring “How is your product different from product Y?”
This quickly progressed to the rep asking “What can we do to entice your company to sell our product?”
I now realize that presenting the rep with a problem statement (how can your product help me solve Z?) would have solicited more of the information I was interested in learning. Vendors are looking for a problem they can assist in solving; approaching them without a problem put both of us in unfamiliar territory.
I enjoyed myself at the conference despite not knowing anyone else attending, and a pounding headache that lasted throughout the week. Apparently, I am allergic to San Francisco or perhaps the Bay Area in general. I stayed on Nob Hill at the Stanford Court by Renaissance nine blocks up California St. from the conference in the Hyatt Regency. It was a blast commuting on the cable car. I had a chance for a brief trip around downtown San Francisco on Monday, and it was a surreal experience to visit the Fisherman’s Wharf due to all of the time I have spent vicariously experiencing the area with the Tony Hawk Pro Skater line of video games. I found the Sea Lions, but no tourists needed to be rescued.
I will try to write something respectable about the content of the sessions I attended while I am on the way home.
I am heading to the Digital ID World Conference in San Francisco next week. If anyone else is in that part of the world let me know.
If you are reading this your DNS has updated and you are seeing the new and improved (again) web site. If you are not reading this your DNS is slow and broken.
Well it is the start of another month, and therefore time to start planning for another move! This move should be a bit easier as I am changing servers, but keeping the same domain name and software. Piranha-Fury has outgrown its current tank and will be moving to a faster server, and I get to ride Mike’s coat-tails onto a 2.8 GHz Xeon box. The new system looks great, and will give me the ability to administrate my own IP address including adding sub domains as needed.
Hopefully the move will also allow us to get GD compiled into PHP to further my work on integrating Simple PHP Gallery into my site as a replacement for the current photo album approach.
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