Take your pick, or What does it all mean?

These two post showed up in my news reader today.

Post One.

Post Two.

Post Two led me to this:

I hope you find what you're looking for this Christmas.

Space, man.

I've got a few contracts that end on 12/31 that I should be wrapping up. And, I'm led to believe Christmas is next week and I've got a bit (ahem) more to do for that.

So, what do I do? I investigate what's using the most space on my hard drive.

The biggest file, in the upper left corner is my VMWare Windows image. The greenish bar to its right is Ubuntu.

The middle section in the top are client database files.

The right most corner is media (i.e., music and movies). Only three movies, can you guess which file blocks?

The green bar running horizontally about half way down is the photo library - presented as a single 'file' in Leopard.

The purplish file in the lower right is the sleepimage.

Please keep shiny objects away from me. I apparently have a hard time focusing.

Others Writing, so I don't have to

John Gruber, on one of the endless articles predicting Apple's at the end of the road.

http://daringfireball.net/2007/12/fastcompany

This is so tiresome. (the Fast Company article, not Gruber's response.)

Just for the record, I'm hopeful that Apple has vigorous, compelling competition. Hopefully it'll make them better.

Also, I'm playing with Google Reader as a news feed. If you want to follow along with the posts I find interesting, you can do so here: Lee's Shared Items

Time to get the Christmas Tree Up

(Found Here)

Exactly

Yes, this is my last post about the great jack in the road story from 2007

Took the car in to the dealer this morning. The airbag light issue was unrelated, per them. And covered under my extended warranty. Total cost to respond to the jack-off-the-trailer episdoe was a few bucks. About 6 clips that held various cables, etc., in the undercarriage had to be replaced. Also got a new battery, also covered under warranty, also unrelated. Props to Honda; I was at a dealer, I didn't have to provide any proof that I had the extended warranty. Easy Peasy.

And, yes, it would have made better sense to take the money I spent on the extended warranty and put it in Apple stock. But being able to dodge a $900 bill today was worth ever penny I spent then.

The 20% solution

Right before I left the day job I talked to the Engineering Manager about what I'd do if I were king of the forest. One of the things I referenced was the Google 20%. Basically, as I understand it, Google folk get to spend 20% of their time on personal projects. I have no idea what the constraint is, I assume you can't develop petunia growing technology, but if it's in the information arena, I assume you could do it.

I proposed to the EM that my fellow engineers were a bright bunch, knew the application they were working on very well and would love to fix the most glaring holes, or maybe add some nice new feature. The powers-that-be would have no obligation to use what the drones came up with, but how cool would be to encourage staff to think creatively about the problem in front of them.

Fast forward four months, and Google releases a chart api.



If you're doing any kind of reporting you can now add charting - free and easy. It's absolutely beautiful. I've got uses for it right now.

And it was developed in someone's 20% time.

Jacked Up.

I'm driving home from an appt. in San Jose, in the rain, and the tractor/trailer in front of me decides to lose a jack stand. Or at least half a jack stand. It's like the black piece in the picture to the right. Only bigger.

The stand needs a home, so it nestles into the undercarriage of my car.  It's 4:50, so traffic is moving kind of slow, so lets say I'm going 50 mph. Jamming a piece of steel into my undercarriage. Loud scraping noise. Really loud scraping noise.

Fortunately the cars behind me see the distress and slow down enough that I can pull over.

The thing is stuck in the middle of my undercarriage, dead in the middle of my front tires; pretty much even with them. I.e. I can't reach it.  I decide the thing to do is jack the car up so I can get far enough under to pull the the thing out.

Did I mention it was raining? Did I mention I had to pee? Did I mention I was alongside a US interstate during rush hour?

After 20 minutes of wiggling and beating on the (now) damn thing I got it out.

The only apparent damage is that my airbag warning light is permanently on. I'm off to the dealership in the morning, fearing what replacing/repairing that will cost.

When I get  home, I notice in this blog entry:  A ladder, a sofa, box tops, kitchen cabinet door - things I’ve seen on our freeways. Yea, no kidding.