Talking to the Wall

Saw this movie last night (see title), it was pretty good. It was kinda depressing and hope-inspiring at the same time. Really though, overall, I suppose it was depressing. Trying to fight these huge stores is nigh impossible. Especially since even if they don't come to your home town, the internet is already there. You can mail-order just about anything you can imagine. Really what keeping these people out amounts to is depressing the buying power of the poor and technologically backward.

I suppose it's more of a problem of globalization than anything. As long as companies can find cheaper labor, they'll move their production facilities there. What we really need is some sort of even playing field across the globe, with people earning similar wages worldwide for similar work. I don't think it's something that can be solved by politicians either, with their tariff wars and trade negotiations. I think the only thing that could possibly solve this problem is a general reconfiguration of the way people think and live.

Seeing how this is pretty much close to impossible, I'm going to remain depressed about the state of the global economy.

Although instantaneous global teleportation would make a huge change.. I think that's the true solution to globalization - remove the travel barriers (and language too, I guess). Information already travels instantaneously, and you can see how much things have changed since that's come about. It's half of what's caused this globalization crisis.

hate.. computers..

So I spent way too much time last night trying to fix my inlaws' computer. In the process I managed to break my desktop. I'm pretty pissed and annoyed overall. I hope blug can help us out with some testers / spare parts or something. I'm probably going to have to buy a new CPU for our computer. Maybe an ATX power supply tester too. We'll see. :P

This is nuts..

It's really amazing how much nature can change things. People always think they have everything under control, then BAM! Nature strikes and reminds us who's boss.

burnt day

I don't know why, but today was a total burnout. I did manage to finish the promotions engine though, so yay. I'm not looking forward to bitching at the Blug member tonight, but it will be nice to leave the house :)

Sometimes looking at other people's lists of accomplishments motivates me. Other times it really depresses me thinking I could never catch up. Today was the latter.

Current Events

Trying to organize the Berkshire Linux Expo is really hard when members don't get off their butts and work. I'm pretty upset about one lug member's failure to send the notes he took on to the list, like I ensured he knew was important during the meeting. Due to his failure to cooperate, we've now lost 2 valuable advertising weeks, and might have to push back the Expo. Moreover, far too much hinges on this one member's follow through. He controls access to the building, and (as of last week) he is supposed to give one of the two vital presentations.

Certainly he won't be secretary again. He's consistently failed to perform his duties as required. I'm going to see how things work out tonight as to wether or not he'll still do the presentation.

Finally got my server back on line, now with new hardware and a working serial cable connection! Also, powercycling now dosen't leave the machine in an 'off' state, so it should be safe to leave there. Knock on wood though.

Work is going ok, trying to finish this new store by the end of the week, but the longish weekend in MD has thrown me off track. As of now, I need to finish the promotions engine, then do the standard actions to fill in the jsp pages. After that, I'll get into testing. Hopefully that will go well (more knocking), then I'll release it to dev. Matt can then test, then (again, assuming things work) we'll finally publish the damn thing. I'll be able to move onto more exciting things! woo! and we'll have a working, maintainable, non-crashing store! yay.
Next (big thing) up on work agenda is learning actionscript. I'm looking forward to this, and I have a pretty neat idea of a project to get up to speed with - there was this game we played last week at game group that I think would be simple enough to implement. Its original title was '42' but we subsequently renamed it 'mondrian' and then 'gerrymander'. You'll see why if I ever put it together :).

Anyway, enough procrastinating. Better hunker down back to work.

First Post

So, this is my first post to this new blog. I figured it's be a good idea to put one up, as much to remind myself what I'm thinking as to allow anyone else a peek inside my skull.

What to expect? who knows! I guess we'll see. Past usage rates for blogs / journals / what have you have been pretty low, but maybe this one will be different! ha right ;)