If you work a technical job with a salary, you’re already facing two great dilemmas. 1.) you work for a salary, and 2.) you work with technology, where the work is almost never done. I find myself caught in a trap often enough - I don’t do well if I don’t get adequate sleep nor if I don’t have adequate time to spend with my wife and kids. Yet I don’t do well at work unless I’m perfectly willing to burn the proverbial candle at both ends. Dealing with this struggle effectively requires a number of crucial habits and procedures which you do not violate no matter what.

Up tonight working on deploying a new version of our OTA software to a regional cellular provider who will remain anonymous. Since my wife is a troop leader and both my girls are Girl Scouts, I’m surrounded by crates and crates of cookies right now. I’m eating haystacks at the moment. I know they changed the name, but I’m calling them haystacks.

I wonder who makes these cookies? They sure are good. My dog got into a box of haystacks yesterday - ate a half a pack before we stopped him. That dog sure was acting strange afterwards.

I try to imagine I’m doing worthwhile work, like Richard Feynman at Los Alamos, when I’m working one of these windows. I wonder if the boys in the Manhattan Project ate Girl Scout cookies when they designed the first atom bomb. Not very likely.

I am a middle-aged software developer. I have metabolic syndrome, which is essentially pre-diabetes and pre-heart disease, according to my doctor. I have a lovely wife and two beautiful young daughters, so I have a lot to look forward to in my remaining years. I got a dog to encourage me to get out and get some exercise. According to this search, there’s a lot of evidence and commentary suggesting that dog-walking can benefit your health, so I walk my dog religiously.

The following two sites are at the top of my crucial reading list:

• Pro Git
• Learn You Some Erlang

I am a linux Systems Engineer and open-source software developer. There are many things I know about Unix. There are many things I don’t know about Unix. I intend to list all these things and hopefully move many from nix-unknown to nix-known. It should be fun!

I haven’t had a blog in a long time. Earlier, I had a horrible PHP + CSS + MySQL + Contract with the Devil page that I moved around from website host to website host whenever my contract was up for renewal - I always found a reason to leave. Now I’m on a lovely VPS on Linode and I love it.

I tried Jekyll before but had a bear getting it running - now I’m trying Octopress, a wrapper for Jekyll. It’s much easier to use. I’m getting used to it. Now, I get to use my favorite text editor (vim) to create my blog. What a concept!

cool! easy codesharing!

1

$ sudo make me a sandwich

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11

BufferedWriter out = null;
try {
    out = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(”filename”, true));
    out.write(”aString”);
} catch (IOException e) {
    // error processing code
} finally {
    if (out != null) {
        out.close();
    }
}