mike.mainguy

Ira Glass (of "This American Life" fame) has a 4 part VLOG on storytelling . I really enjoy listening to Ira when I have the opportunity and he has had some compelling stories. My personal revelation is that I should look more to people I respect and study them. As someone who never formally studied creative writing or storytelling, it was interesting that the mechanics of building a story outlined by Ira were more natural and easy to follow than the myriad of rules found in various English composition books I've read. I believe this the difference between trying to define a simple set of rules on how to master the mechanics of doing something as opposed to learning to bend your mend into the shape of a master of the art. A further revelation is that I realize that I am very often reading books about subjects written by people who aren't necessarily skillful or even successful at that particular subject. As an example, when reading about some very successful writ...

I just stumbled across a great article about the difficult transition from a startup into a more sustainable business. The elves leave middle earth I'm currently working in a place that is going through this change in the IT organization. Right now, we have a mixed team of heros and good performers. A key problem I'm having is that one of the managers is having a tremendously difficult time even fathoming the difference between these two modes. As a former hero coder, he spends his time fiddling around with code and inventing new "cool" requirements and almost zero time even thinking about how to keep the team performing. This has the predictable side effect of the team faltering and thrashing while this person sits around and bemoans how slow and confused the team is. Where I'm going is that if you're going to decide to change modes, you need to make sure you have a management team that is able to function in that mode. If it's necessary to move folk...

I set out to upgrade my older laptop to ubuntu 9.10 and I knew was going to have problems. Historically, the video card in this thing was a royal pain in the butt and just never seemed to work quite right. I loaded the OS, logged in, and was rewarded with a jumpy/twitchy user experience. I started researching and found a thread about some tweaks a few folks made to make things better. It turns out this didn't work for me, but a minor tweak to the tweak fixed me up. Notably, I downloaded the radeonhd driver from synaptic, changed the xorg.conf (created above) to use radeonhd instead of radeon, then removed the bit that seems to have been autodetected by X11 for thier hardware. This seems to have fixed my problem (for now). In addition, I can run the compiz visual effects (yeah expo). Here is my config: Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "X.org Configured" Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0 InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer...

I've been writing software for quite some time ( first computer ) and have seen a lot of strange stuff.One thing I realized is that there are fundamentally two types of bad programmers. #1 bad programmers that gets better. #2 bad programmer that don't. I can tell you I'm a #1: I routinely do things that are not optimal and "could have been done a better way", but don't beat myself up about. It is what it is and as long as the code "gets the job done", I'm OK with that. In addition, I'm OK with developers writing occasionally bad (wrong/suboptimal) stuff because I believe most folks can learn and get better. To this end, I found this amusing Bad Code Offsets But occasionally I run across a #2: There are people who do things in broken and difficult manners and no amount of exposure to "better ways of doing things" will yield fruit. These folks, once they find "a way", it becomes magically "the only way" and...

I just read some news about If microsoft, Linux, and OSX were cafe's I'm wondering... would people pay a few bucks to hang out with some linux (Ubuntu?) folks to help them fix their windows boxes so they run well? I know a lot of people who don't care which OS their running as long as things "work" and don't break. The latest few ubuntu releases sure seem like good candidates, I wonder if you just charged a cover charge to "non technical folks" and used that money to pay the rent as well as diet coke for the "technical folks" if you could make a business out of this. They techno weenies can run around being the gurus and helping folks out and the other folks can get super customized machines. Could even maybe even set up virtual windows machines on them so quicken and other non-wine software works. Interesting idea, not sure I have the business chops to make it happen. I know we've been running linux here for almost 2 years and the ...

I was just rereading a few posts from many moons ago (yeah, like 6 years) and realized that my employer at the time was postpending a crazy addendum to every one of my email messages. I really wonder how many people read this thing and exactly how legally applicable it is since the messages are now archived all over the dang internet. As an example from 2003: http://www.servlets.com/archive/servlet/ReadMsg?msgId=411933&listName=taglibs-user Perhaps this thread from a few months before that caused the company to start applying the extra stuff to the message: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/struts-user/200312.mbox/%3CC29830220D2FA74BA88CB5C62C946B32C0AF03@uskihsvpex05.kih.kmart.com%3E !Doh!

In honor of veteran's day I thought I post a "war story" to illustrate point. As a buck sergeant in the US Army many moons ago (1995), I was deployed to Hungary in support of IFOR to enforce the military portion of the Dayton agreement. At some point, I was forward deployed with a team mate to go to all of the personnel service detachments and set up their digital communication links back to germany (and subsequently the US). While standing around on the tarmac in preparation to get on a plane heading to Tuzla, a few of the other soldiers grabbed their ammo and packed it into the middle of their 'A' bag. I thought nothing of it, but the guy I was with walked over and asked what they where doing. It turns out the Air Force did not want us flying with ammo and they wanted us to give their ammo to them. These other soldiers (old school combat arms guys) where NOT about to give their ammo to some tech sergeant who may or may not remember to give it back, so they ...