You can contact me at erictrue@spazquest.org. Junk mail is accepted if the subject line is absurd enough to make me laugh.

Apparently, someone read this and took me up on the offer, because my spam has been improving of late --

• Two Geeks are making $100,000 per year with a ROBOT


• We congratulate! You our client!


• If only we could vote for Ronald again


• Work it out I did, making my little calculator run for several days from its wall charger, while it calculated some of those coefficients.


• To: erictrue You're a moron (Yes, I checked, it was spam :)


• You better not call me an IDIOT or a jerk


• To: erictrue Switzerland To Be Devoured By Black Hole


• {spamit_subject}


• Dear erictrue@spazquest.org June 00% 0FF

I was ready to jump at that 00% OFF promotion, but they neglected to provide a link or other contact info. Sadness.

Labels: humor

Labels: games

(One of many thought-provoking text adventures by Spatch.)

And so you were taken from this place to another place, where you had absolutely no damn idea what it is you're supposed to be doing. It's OK, you'll be all right. Just don't pick up the phone
booth, or else you'll die.

PICK UP THE PHONE BOOTH AND DIE
a NyQuil nightmare by R. Noyes
Release 619 / Serial number 960409 / Inform v1502 Library 5/12
Standard interpreter 1.0

The Town Square
You are standing in the middle of a pretty town square in the center of a nondescript New England town. Like most any other nondescript New England towns, there's not much to see or do here, but
maybe you'll find something amusing and enjoyable to do.

A shiny metal phone booth sits in the center of the square.

>get booth
You grunt with all your might and heave the phone booth onto your shoulders. For a moment or two it looks as if you're not going to be able to lift it, but heroically you finally lift it high in
the air! Seconds later, however, you topple underneath the weight, and the booth crushes you fatally. Geez! Didn't I tell you not to pick up the phone booth?! Isn't the name of this very game
"Pick Up The Phone Booth and Die"?! Man, you're dense. No big loss to humanity, I tell ya.


*** You have died ***


In that game you scored 0 out of a possible 100, in 1 turn, giving you the rank of total and utter loser, squished to death by a damn phone booth.

Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, give the FULL score for that game or QUIT?
>

(Note: this post was written in February 2007 -- which shows how far behind I am...)

Labels: games, humor

This book is an honest-to-goodness worthy sequel to Alice in Wonderland. And it even has a plot!!!

"These vehicles are horseless carriages."
"How do you know that the carriages are horseless?" asked Alice.
"Because they haven't got any real horses drawing them."
"I didn't know that real horses could draw. Can they also paint?"
"Alice! You must know what I mean!" Celia cried. "A horseless carriage is what the people of the future call a carriage that isn't being pulled by a horse."
"Is that similar to a pianoless lampshade?" asked Alice.
"Whatever's a pianoless lampshade?" asked Celia.
"Why, it's a lampshade that isn't being played by a piano, of course."
"Alice! I'm getting rather tired of your loopiness!" Celia replied.

(Not to be confused with The Annotated Alice by Martin Gardner.)

Labels: books

We just finished with Target Multi-Occasion Lists. That was interesting because I got to work with the Yahoo User Interface library (YUI). What fascinated me the most is how many browser bugs haven't been abstracted away yet. We ran into a lot of issues with the way IE manipulates z-index of elements, especially in quirks mode. But it's still been interesting.

Labels: amazon, javascript

Listen if you dare ... my 3-minute comedy set went okay but I really pandered by creating a 2-dimensional self-parody.

Labels: audio, comedy

This is why I love being off the media "grid": I didn't even know about the Academy Awards until after the ceremony. People arguing the merits of movies I've never seen, actors I wouldn't recognize, and prom dresses I wouldn't be caught dead wearing.[1] Thanks but I'll make do without it.

<-- This is Sheelee, my former fiancee. We got engaged in January 2004. We were excited and happy.

Then things started to die ... It was a long-distance relationship, and I was unemployed at the time, unemployable. I won't go into all the reasons why things didn't work out; frankly, I don't want to think about them. I couldn't decide what to do, and finally decided not to decide.

Now that I have a job, some of the more practical reasons for avoiding the issue have gone away. She's a very attractive girl with a conspiratorial smile and an insane sense of humor. At one point I really believed that I understood relationships well enough to figure this out, and understood myself well enough to stop dodging the issues that held me back from committing to someone else. But I don't, and I won't. It's a real defeat for me to say that. But it's easier than dragging her along making her think there's a possibility that something might change.

My mom called yesterday morning to ask how I was. Has it been raining where you are? Yes, I told her, it had been sprinkling for the last few days. My boss has been working from home and it just dawned on me to read the news and see what the situation was really like. As usual, I was oblivious to the fact that people were experiencing disruptions and property damage just miles away from where I live. Flooding, that's the word they used. Aha.

Brain, brain, go away
Come again some other day

Now it can be told.

For the last 5 months I've been working with the development team on the new Timex website. We launched on Tuesday afternoon [EDIT: October 24, 2006] at 4:00 pm Pacific time, and it was kind of cool being in the "war room" listening to people report in on the speakerphone as the DNS entries propagated quickly across the net. "It's picked up on Guardster already." "E.U., I can see the site." "Arizona here, looks good." Kinda like WarGames.[1]

Ironically, amusingly, the only people who had trouble seeing the site initially were Timex back in Middlebury, Connecticut. I didn't stick around long enough to find out how long it took for the changes to reach their corner of the world. Being a front-end guy, there wasn't much for me to do after they flipped the switch and went live (it's not as though their drop-down menus were going to suddenly blow up).

Anyway. I'm relieved, and happy with the end product. Obviously a lot of people deserve credit for the successful launch, but it's nice to know that I've made my mark on the world.[2]

EDIT (20061220): If you don't believe me, look at my comments in the CSS.

Labels: amazon

I've changed my mind about the CSS on our site. It was explained to me that the move to CSS was such a major paradigm shift for our organization that everyone is to be congratulated on how well it turned out. I know the devs were basically starting from scratch and they all have a good working knowledge of CSS now. They, in a word, rock.

There, that feels better, now doesn't it? :-)

EDIT (20061110): To clarify: we were using CSS before, certainly; but large portions of the markup are now tableless and pure CSS.

Labels: amazon, css

So my dad, he sez, how's it goin? And I'm like hmmm.
Haven't updated the weblog in a while. We are launching a merchant site in about 2 weeks, so we're doing all the typical last-minute bug fixes. Everyone seems to like my work, which is still somewhat of a shock. (Talented programmers seem to think they're either at the top or bottom of the heap, and I'm not arrogant enough to choose the top ;-)
(Thanks to Dad for the post title.)

Labels: amazon

So why wasn't Sinistar [for Atari 400/800] released? Around the time Sinistar was being completed (mid 1984), the video game market was crumbling fast and many games were canceled. Apparently marketing decided that the game wasn't going to make enough money and canceled the project... without telling the programmers! Jeff and his team continued to work on the project for almost two months after it was canceled, due to lack of communication between marketing and the programming department. Incidents like this were not uncommon, and just goes to show how badly out of touch the managers were at the time of Atari's collapse. [AtariProtos.com]

That game was hard, too. With the adrenaline flowing through your veins as you scrambled to evade the warrior ships, the voice of Sinistar -- preparing his attack -- was enough to scare you out of your wits. (I can personally attest to this :) Being overtaken by a taunting, screaming, giant space head is just plain unsettling; when it happens while a random six-year-old is tugging at your pant leg pleading for game tokens, death is swift and certain.

Labels: amazon

I promised to deliver some unspecified "changes" to the global CSS by tomorrow morning. The graphic designer (Customer Experience lead) is going to review the site over the next few days -- she's leaving the company and we can't stall her any longer. We need to fix some "stuff" related mostly to font sizes.

This means I'll be working all night. Actually that sounds like fun. I've been pretty good about going to sleep and waking up. Sticking with a routine is not stimulating. Dave Brattain told me about the love-hate relationship that ADDers have with structure. We hate it, we hate being hemmed in, but structure is absolutely essential to succeed in life.

Seems like when confronted with a nebulous task, one not clearly delineated in my brain, the only way that works is to wait until the last minute. My theory is that when faced with a deadline, one is forced to make decisions about tradeoffs, etc. Bad idea because .... some of those tradeoffs come about because of waiting till the last minute :D

Labels: amazon, css

I'm having trouble doing effective code reviews. Our team does informal, glance-over reviews of code before check-in, which works when you're building on an established design, but I have trouble seeing how it works for scattered-out bits of code written by the seat of your pants.

As the CSS expert[1] on the team, it was my responsibility to create a cohesive CSS structure, and use code review to ensure that the devs were using it properly. The Right Thing would have been to identify common page elements up front so that the structure would be consistent everywhere and easy to use. (E.g., IDs versus classes, div vs p, hx vs span, borders vs hrs, padding vs brs, functional vs presentational class names, etc.)

But I've let that opportunity slip through my fingers. Partly due to factors beyond my control, the other devs had to proceed without the structure in place. So we have all these different ad hac[2] approaches to fixing this or that alignment problem on individual pages, all these random classes added to the CSS file. Let me emphasize that this is not the devs' fault! They have done very well under the circumstances. But to achieve the desired level of quality, they would have had to do bottom-up redesign of something outside their area of expertise. I just don't see how code reviews alone can provide adequate direction.

[I wanted to include an example here, but Blogger can't make up its mind how to process embedded HTML code -- whether to render my divs regardless of wrapping them in code tags; whether or not to expand my already spelled-out &s. (Argh, it did it again!)]

I'm very disappointed in myself, regardless of the causes. The CSS code has my imprimatur, has my name on it, and it's not what I would have wanted. To fix it, we'd have to refactor the CSS file and then have everyone go back into the markup, changing class names and structural decisions. That ain't gonna happen (unless we get permission to wind back the clock).

Anyway, back to the purported subject of this post. While looking for articles on code review in Agile methodologies, I happened upon this post which starts with a discussion of the male insistence on trying to navigate and drive simultaneously:

Thanks to these unexpected excursions, I have seen parts of the country side that I might otherwise have missed, but I have no idea where they were or how to get back there. [Hacknot: In Praise of Code Reviews]

The reluctance to stop and read the map is analogous to the reluctance to do code reviews:

This desire to minimize small, short-term pain even at the expense of significantly more pain in the long term is at the core of much self-defeating behavior.

I feel very lost indeed.

Well, after much reluctance, I have had an Ikea experience. Voluntarily and not at the behest of my mom. There was the same walking in circles and getting stuck behind slow-moving people that I remembered, but then I found the Work Area area -- and within, the Object of Desire. In this case the Object of Desire was a metal computer desk with a price tag under $40 US. His name is Krister (say hello, Krister). The main selling point: not only is there plenty of room for the monitor, but you can actually tilt it backward so that you're not craning your neck to look into the screen.

There's room for my knees underneath, which was an unexpected bonus. Another plus is the fact that my cat doesn't have enough room to jump up on the keyboard, so when he wants my attention, he just puts his claws in my leg. As though I were a scratching post. He does it as gently as he can, though.

It seemed odd that in the Seattle store there weren't lots of Swedes wandering around like there were in Palo Alto. Then again, I never made it to the cafeteria :P

I now have 4 pieces of furniture: the desk, the swivel chair, the wide bookshelf, and a piece of the old desk that the movers didn't break. It's the side shelf that went under the desktop and is pretty handy. Chances are good that I'll never put the other desk back together.