Joel Hainley

I was in a liquor store this morning on my way to work. ( getting a water..it was damned hot this morning ), and got into line behind a woman/girl and her ~ 18 month old son. She was buying a small gatorade ( a lot of HFCS in that crap ), and a small bottle of water, and she asked for a lottery scratch off ticket, whatever those are called. ( i’ve bought six of them in my lifetime, the sixth one resulted in $100 payout, so i quit playing while I was ahead )

Anyways, she’s got her gatorade, water, scratcher thing. The cashier gives her the total somewhere under $4. She hands him an American Express card, he runs the card. Declined. She says ok i’ll be right back, and grabs the kid and leaves. Apoo and I make our exchange for the water and I hit the door to get to work, and air conditioning, as i’m walking across the parking lot, I see our friend from inside the door digging under her floor mats in her car counting change. GEEZUS!

If you can’t put $4 on you AMEX you need to stop and think about what that means, not go digging under your floor mats.

I’ve been reading the Pickaxe book for the last few evenings. Just a chapter a night, so far i’m liking a lot of what I’m seeing in ruby. The syntactical shortcuts, and sugar, is really nice. I also like irb it reminds me of working in clisp. I am looking forward to rolling up my sleeves and spending some time with it.

Using ruby/rails on simply alerts will require me to recode some of the stuff i’ve already completed, i’m hopeful that it won’t be for naught. Ruby/rails is supposed to excel at the things that I need it to do on this project.

If ruby/rails ends up being the toolset it is reputed to be, I will probably resurrect the labor logic project and finish it up using ruby. I’d really like to have another coder on this project, working on it with an artist never worked out for me, but I think with another developer we could bang it out pretty quickly.

I’ve gone back and forth on this product a lot, but i’m starting to believe that google’s recent efforts will offer a lot of credibility to the approach i have taken on this. I have been convinced that clients would be comfortable with their data being hosted by the application developer if it meant that backups were performed, new features/bug fixes appeared without painful upgrade cycles etc. Google and their ever growing cadre of web-based applications is making this an easier and easier sell.

I had some contract work to get finished up this weekend but damned if I couldn’t get my brain to cooperate on saturday. I tried to work for a while, couldn’t get a rhythm going, so I jumped online for some poker, and that wasn’t really interesting either. I went back and tried to work again..getting nowhere. So I finally gave up and grabbed a novel and read till 3am.

Sunday morning, I got up and got to work first thing in the morning, no problems getting into the zone to do some work, took a break for lunch and worked till about 11pm, completing the project. This morning I got up, made a few client requested tweaks and sent in my invoice. Contract fulfilled…project done…wooohoo!!!!

So saturday was a complete bust, but sunday more than made up for it. Overall I guess I can’t complain.

Friday night I went out riding with a buddy, hitting some of my favorite bars out on the delta. That was a good time, we made it to the Riverboat for a couple of pints of Newcastle then out through stockton and over to Union Point for a couple of coors then headed home. The weather was perfect for riding, and we even got to see some fireworks going off in Brentwood on our way home.

Tonight I have to get back to some of my other work that I have sitting out there waiting for me and, and I also owe some people an email about some coding they need some help with as part of a sweat-equity deal. That could turn out to be a lot of fun. I understand from the guy that put us in touch with each other that they are looking to be using Ruby/Rails for this project.

Simply Alerts is slowly coming back to the front of my task list as well. I have the perl backend done, and am just trying to workout the details of the administrative/customer UI. Once this is all done i’m going to be setting up a server and launching this product for real. Andrew has expressed some interest in learning Ruby/Rails and has bought the book, installed linux, and started learning, so there’s a good chance he’ll be helping me with some development, as well as learning the ropes of how the whole system works so that someone can watch it for me when I go on vacation.

Well that’s about all i’ve got to say at the moment..time to get back to work…

I haven’t done a lot of reading this year, I read a LOT last year, 46 books for the year, but this year so far i’m around 10 books for the year. Part of the reason for the large number of books last year was that I was riding bart to SF every day so i had LOTS of time on my hands. I’m now working in Concord and i’ve started riding my bike to work so there’s not a lot of time to read on the commute.

I had a few Dean Koontz books sitting around that I hadn’t read yet, so i started reading those. After he started writing his Christopher Snow series i swore i wouldn’t read another book of his until he finished that series, at this point i”m not sure he’s ever going to finish that series so I’ve sorta given up on it. Unfortunately I’ve picked up book 1 of his new series Frankenstein the second book in the series is already published, but i’ll probably end up waiting forever for book 3 of these as well. Who knows.

Aside from that, the Frankenstein book is really good, i’ve enjoyed what i’ve read so far. I know it was cowritten with Kevin Anderson, but I have to think that the writing that is done from the point of view of an autistic is pure Koontz. He’s adept at delivering stories from the point of view of a wide range of observers. Anyways, worth the read if you enjoy koontz. I read Velocity as well, it was a quick read ( no pun intended ), well written, although I thought some parts were a little flat.

The other book i’ve been reading is Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, a guy from the junto picked the book for this month’s read and it’s been really interesting. There’s a lot more to comics than meets the eye when you really get down close and look at them. It’s been a very fun read. When I was younger I used to collect comics not a lot but a couple, so it was sorta nostalgic to read the book. I went down to the local shop and picked up a handful of comics with characters that I recognized and read through them. It was fun. I had forgotten how much fun they can be. It is funny to watch people’s reaction when you mention comic books though. The funnier thing to me is that much of what people consider cutting edge cinematograhy these days is a direct translation of stuff that has been done in comics for years. I would hazard to say that comics are certainly a far more intellectual pursuit than watching television, at least you have to actively participate when reading comics. Yet, people who don’t read, but do watch an excess of television, will be the first in line to criticize comic books, very odd.

On Saturday, Amy and I got up, ran some errands, then hopped on the harley and headed out towards Pine Grove to see a good friend of mine. His daughter was having her second birthday, and most of his family would be showing up. He has 5 brothers and sisters so when they have a gathering even if just the immediate family shows up with their spouses it’s a frenzy. ( to use a term made famous by a man who goes by the handle p-dawg ). I’ve hung out with almost every one of his siblings at some point or another, and have known the collective family since i was around 12 years old, so it’s always a lot of fun when we can all get together.

We headed out the back roads through pittsburg/antioch and as we were approaching Hwy 160 the traffic over the Antioch bridge was backed up quite a ways..looking more like a parking lot than a highway. We had no desire to sit in traffic, so we just went out Hwy 4, stopped at Union Point for a beer and to people watch for a bit, then back on the bike until we hit Pine Grove.

Every time I go to the foothills i’m immediately amazed at all of the gorgeous land for sale, and the prices of the land and homes up there. Then I realize that it’d be hard for someone like me to find work up there, so it squashes any aspirations I may have of moving to the hills. Although it is a fantasy i enjoy indulging, the foothills, the mountains, the high desert along 395 somewhere, all of those places call out to me when i’m there. The quiet, the solitude, the simplicity of life. Then i remember i have to make a living and the fantasy i’ve built up starts to form fissures and slowly slips back into the sea of reality. Oh well.

Someday, if I keep working my ass off maybe I will be able to build up enough clients, investments/products/etc to be able to escape the bay area rat race and get up into the Sierras. At the very least, that’s the thought that gets me up in the morning and keeps me going on some days.