Letter Never Sent

As a QA tester, this blog post at O’Reilly’s Radar is interesting:

Remarking on new companies like Spikesource and SourceLabs, he said: “It seems to me that the tester rather than the coder is becoming the new hero of the open source community.”

I think he’s onto something.

Hmm… if both designers and testers are the new heroes, is this further evidence of my oft-argued “open source paradigm shift”, where open source is leading to the commodification of many forms of infrastructure software, making testing and integration more important as an industry competency. Meanwhile, the new web applications “up the stack” are driven by a whole new class of “infoware design patterns”.

The decentralized nature of Open Source demands a need for rigorous, process-based testing of software before businesses can be expected to adopt it as part of their infrastructure.

1. A Brief Review: The Automatic Millionaire
2. The Organizer’s Toolbox: Budgeting Checklist
3. Oil: A Bubble, Not a Spike?
4. How Tech Is Repaving Wall Street
5. Smart Money: Liquidity Theory Points to a Bull Market

While reconnecting the utilities during my last move I thought it might be worthwhile to investigate the possibility of using VoIP (Voice Over IP) for my telephone and fax lines. I looked at a few of the most popular providers like Vonage and Packet8 before I decided to just keep service with my current provider since it is necessary to go through a lengthy 20-day process just to get the current number transferred to a VoIP provider I had no experience with. It did get me thinking about the advantages of using the computer to help manage calls, messages, and contacts.

A while back there was a lot of buzz about the developers of Kazaa (the popular peer-to-peer file sharing app) cashing out to go to work on a peer-to-peer distributed telephony project called, Skype. After the initial buzz I never checked in to test it out until now.

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Since everyone on our production team is in crunch right now, the management arranged for some complimentary chair massages yesterday. It was my first such experience, but I doubt it’s something I would ever arrange for myself. The sensory experience for me was completely momentary, which lessens my opinion of its value. Do they have people who specialize in popping backs, or is that what chiropractors do? That’s what I could go for more than a chair massage, a good back popping.

This is great news, Slate: Americans Pay Off Credit Card Debt!:

But all is not tulips and nectar over at MBNA, the largest independent issuer of credit cards. Yesterday it reported a poor quarter and ratcheted down earnings expectations for the year. Its stock sank to a two-year low. Credit card giant Capital One Financial had a better quarter, but its stock has been slumping lately, too. Bad news for the credit card companies may be better news for us. There are signs at both companies that consumers may be responding to higher rates by doing something almost completely unexpected and practically un-American: paying down credit card debt.

The zero key on my cellphone has been broken for a while, and you would be surprised at how much you need that particular number when dialing. So, I’ve been looking at phone reviews and what options I have for getting a new one. I’d like to have speakerphone and bluetooth, for example. Anyway, I heard the awesome news that Nokia is releasing an iPod-killing, mp3-playing phone as part of their new phone line-up. The Nokia N91 looks to be a winner.

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The past few weeks I’ve been busier than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I try to make a lot of lists and at least get through at least 7 items a day. I’m also starting to crunch for E3, which means we’ll be working twelve hour days until the end of May. That’s good because I’ll need all the scratch I can get before I leave to work for myself full-time.

Busier than…

1. a one-armed paperhanger with a case of the hives.
2. a one-eyed cat watching nine rat holes.
3. a one-legged man in a butt kickin’ contest.
4. a one-toothed man in a corn-on-the-cob eating contest.
5. a mosquito at a nudist colony.
6. a one-armed paper hanger.
7. a cross-eyed air traffic controller.
8. a set of jumper cables at a country funeral.
9. a cat with puppies.
10. a weatherman in a tornado.
11. a desert cobra at a mongoose convention.
12. a termite in a saw mill.
13. a dog scratching fleas.
14. a one-armed-pimp in a bitch-slapping contest
15. a one-armed trombone player.
16. a rooster in a henhouse.

When you have opportunities to do things you might not normally do, it might help to consider why you feel uninterested or uncomfortable doing them. Would you benefit from pushing your personal envelope by doing things you might not normally do?

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Have you ever needed to send someone information from a program you know they don’t have installed? A lot of times you could just print something out and send a hard-copy, but there’s also a better way. I came across the free program called Primo PDF that installs a virtual printer on your machine that can output anything you could print into a PDF form. For example, if you had Microsoft Money 2005, it has the ability to create and print out invoices, but no way to save the invoices
in any other format than text. Why not just print the invoice to PDF and email it to your customer exactly as it appears? This has come in handy a lot.

We have one of these adorable little Tufted Titmouses (Titmice?) banging into the window here at work several times a day. He looks ticked off. For a while we called him Jon Shelus after a guy who works here, since whenever the bird would appear Jon was nowhere in sight.

Here’s some information on why they do it:

Birds are hurling themselves against windows, hammering on drainpipes and pecking on glass. But don’t let it get to you — it won’t last much longer, says a wildlife biologist in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences.

“At the beginning of the breeding season, birds are establishing territories,” says Margaret Brittingham, associate professor of wildlife resources. “They’re singing, displaying and telling all of the other males of their species to keep out.”

When a bird sees his reflection in a window, he thinks it’s an intruder, she says. So he ‘displays’ to try to get the intruder to leave. “Of course the ‘intruder’ displays back, and the bird gets madder and madder until he starts pecking on the glass.”

It’s cute when you think about it.