Worksology: Latest blog entries

Essentials, 2009

Joshua Works — Thu, 14 May 2009 21:30:00 -0600

Late last year there was a meme, likely started by Mark Pilgrim’s Essentials, 2008 post, on the indispensable software people use. Through a series of posts, I discovered a handful of terrific desktop & web applications that I’d never heard of before. Since then, I’ve been wanting to write a similar post, taking it a small step further and share some favorite Mac & web apps, a few prized gadgets & accessories, and even a few of my preferences for organizing my desktop.

Desktop organization

Mac OS X Dock

Yesterday, I came across Grace Smith’s post describing Khoi Vinh’s dock and I was rather surprised at just how cluttered and unmanaged it was. Khoi says he’s not so disciplined about keeping his Dock orderly, “because I use Quicksilver so heavily that most times I don’t even need the Dock.” I’m not a Quicksilver user (I’ve tried it; I just find Spotlight and my normal processes to be sufficient), but I still think there’s a lot of value in keeping your Dock tidy, manageable and attractive. That’s my Dock on the left, how it looks 90% of the time.

Like John Gruber, I’m a Dock-on-the-side man, finding vertical real estate far more valuable than horizontal. I keep my Dock icons rather tiny - just a few clicks above their smallest setting and I have magnification turned on, again just slightly larger than normal, to give a slight advantage when clicking them.

Even with the Dock on the side, you have a choice about where it’s pinned. By default, the Dock is pinned to the middle of the screen; in my case, centered vertically. I find it makes much more sense to keep it pinned to the top of the screen, though. This keeps the permanent Dock icons fixed in position; when the Dock is centered, adding even a single icon will offset all the others by several pixels. Spatial memory is a big factor in desktop efficiency, and keeping the Dock pinned to the top is a big part of that for me.

To pin your Dock to the top position, just open up Terminal and enter these commands:

defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string start killall Dock

The Dock, to me, is sacred territory and only a handful of apps deserve the right to that valuable real estate. I especially appreciate when an application gives me the choice to remove its Dock icon while it’s running. This is a little problematic in current versions of OS X as an application cannot have a menu bar when it’s not in the Dock. Hopefully this will be fixed in the future, and if so, I think we’ll see a lot more apps adopting preferences to remove their Dock icon.

System Menu Bar

Generally, when you remove the Dock icon from an app, you’ll do so because you have another way to access that application, and that other way is generally from the system menu bar. Here is my system menu bar:

Most of these apps don’t deserve Dock icons, either because they are accessed much less frequently (Dropbox, LittleSnapper, Time Machine) or because they’re only used to indicate their current status (Tweetie, Airport, Volume).

Active Screen Corners

Here’s how I have my screen corners configured: either of the top corners triggers Exposé; bottom-left shows my Desktop, and bottom-right starts my screensaver and locks my computer as I get up to leave.

On the Desktop

The following are some of my favorite apps for Mac.

Safari

I was a diehard Firefox user for a couple of years, but Safari’s text rendering, speed, and general elegance have converted me. I use Safari nearly 100% of the time, the rare exception is when I’m testing for cross-browser compatibility. And with Safari 4’s updates to the Web Inspector, I really haven’t been missing the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar at all.

Textmate

Without a doubt, the best text editor for Mac. I do all of my web development — HTML, Django templates, Python & CSS — entirely in Textmate, supported by its great “Bundle” system. Bundles are packages of functions, shortcuts, syntax highlighting, and some really clever autocompletion independently developed for loads of languages and methodologies. I use the Cobalt color scheme with Monaco 9pt type.

1Password

I created my first passwords in 1995, age 14. Most were derived from a combination of my interests at the time, primarily Dave Matthews Band & the movie Hackers. One of those passwords has stuck with me for the past 14 years and I’m still using it for 90% of my web authentication. This is a problem.

Enter 1Password. This app lets me store all sorts of sensitive information — passwords, obviously, but also my family’s Social Security numbers, credit card & contact information, even my frequent flyer information; pretty much anything I want encrypted & protected, but still easily accessible. 1Password integrates with all the major browsers, automatically logging me into websites & applications, filling out forms with the credit card/identity of my choice, and saving me lots of redundant typing. And since 1Password does all the remembering for me, I can let it generate very strong, hyper-secure passwords for all my services. All I have to remember is my one password (get it?), a many-charactered doozie that I have no worry is secure. There’s also an iPhone app that lets you take all your encrypted data with you.

If you’re a Mac user and are at all worried about the strength of your passwords, you may want to give 1Password a shot at generating and remembering your passwords for you.

LittleSnapper

I love LittleSnapper! It takes something as simple as screen capturing (hell, that’s built right into OS X), and adds a handful of simple, unobtrusive features that make it one of my most prized applications. Naturally, it handles screen capturing perfectly well. You can snap entire screens, windows, or selected areas, but you can also grab entire websites from Safari. It remembers URLs and automatically names the files based on the title of the webpage you captured. It features a built-in browser with DOM-snapping, tagging, titling, ratings, and lots of non-destructive annotation tools (you can add arrows, callouts, blurs, highlights, etc). You can organize all your snaps in folders and create rule-based “smart collections” (like only my “5★ Portfolio” snaps, or only “Inspiration” snaps tagged “web design”). Lastly, with a single click you can share your snaps on Flickr or on LittleSnapper’s own web service, QuickSnapper.

The Hit List

This simple app aims to manage the chaos of your modern life with to-do lists. I haven’t read David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” (I’ll get around to it one of these days), but once I do, The Hit List is going to be the perfect application to help me get it done. I’m currently using THL to manage a handful of project “wishlists”, random feature ideas that I’d likely forget if I didn’t have a place to put them. I have dreams of using this app to its fullest some day, entering every single to-do for every project I have, both digital and tangible, and letting it direct my life for a while, but I’m not sure when I’ll find the time for that.

Dropbox

Again, here’s an application that does one simple thing, but does it so well it’s become completely indispensable to me. Dropbox is basically a folder on your Mac that behaves exactly like any other folder, but with one distinction: anything you put in it gets uploaded to the Dropbox web service and subsequently downloaded to any other machines you’ve installed Dropbox on. It’s unbelievably fast and accurate, and it’s smart enough to only update those things that’ve changed (this is especially important when you’re syncing large application libraries). I use Dropbox in three main ways:

For personal documents that I want available on both my desktop and laptop without worrying about versioning or emailing files back & forth to myself. I do the same for a few web development files, but those usually graduate to version control pretty straightaway.
As a temporary file-sharing tool. Not long ago, I used services like senduit to upload files and then mail links around to those that needed access. Now I have a publicly available Dropbox folder that accomplishes the same things by just saving/dragging files to that folder.
The most valuable way I use Dropbox is to sync application data. I use many of the same applications on each of my computers, and it would be miserable to sync those applications manually. Thanks to Dropbox, I don’t have to. For example, I keep my 1Password keychain in my Dropbox; anytime I add a password on one computer, within seconds, it’s available on the second. The same is true for other applications: my LittleSnapper gallery is automatically sync’d between computers, as are my The Hit List todos. (I should note that it’s a little trickier for THL, which seems to retain some edits in memory; the only reliable way I’ve found is to make sure that I explicitly save after each edit.)

Dropbox is an application I wouldn’t want to live without; best of all, it’s free with 2GB of space.

iTunes

I switched from Winamp to iTunes in 2003. Today I have 24,981 items (68.7 days) in iTunes, almost entirely composed of complete albums, with fairly complete metadata (one of these days!). Even with such a large library, iTunes is responsive, manages my music flawlessly, and I have zero complaints (a few feature requests, but no complaints). I don’t really do playlists, but I keep a handful of smart playlists to organize by ratings (one for each star rating, and then 3-5★ and 4-5★) and by dates added (“Added today”, “Past 2 weeks”, “Past 6 months”). Here is a graph of the distribution of my song ratings:

Terminal

For all your command line needs, Terminal is wonderful, especially now that it supports tabbed windows. I use a customized color scheme that matches Textmate’s Cobalt theme and Monaco in 10pt.

Photoshop

I use CS3 and still don’t like how long it takes to load. But once it’s running, no other photo editor comes close.

Growl

Even if you don’t explicitly download Growl, it’s going to show up on your computer eventually. Growl is a notification tool that lets you know when something happens on behalf of other applications: new tweets, new emails, new RSS items, updated files, etc. It’s as close to a required application as you’ll find. I use the Music Video style on Huge at 50% opacity.

Adium

Another must-have app, Adium is instant messaging for your Mac, handling protocols from Jabber to AIM to ICQ and with an abundance of customization options so it can be exactly how you like it. I use the Decay 2.0 Contact List style with dark grays. For message windows, I use minimal_mod, Black vs. Green, with Lucida Grande set at 10pt.

Colloquy

I don’t do much IRC, except for the occasional pop-in to the #django channel. When I do, Colloquy is my preferred client.

Tweetie

My current favorite Twitter client for Mac is Tweetie (Previously, Bluebird, Eventbox, Twitterific). Tweetie sports a beautiful, highly-usable interface that none of the others approach. Free, if you don’t mind the occasional Fusion Ad; otherwise, $20.

ExpanDrive

ExpanDrive’s an app so unobtrusive I nearly forgot to include it. ExpandDrive lets you mount FTP, SFTP, and Amazon S3 servers as regular drives on your Mac, letting you read/write, drag files in & out, just like you’d do with a USB drive, and everything just works. I have several server paths set to mount on login, making my website files just as accessible as any other file on my computer. Brilliant.

Reader Notifier

I installed this tiny app so I could set Google Reader as my preferred default RSS reader in Safari, which works perfectly. The Preferences panel is a little wonky, particularly that all the checkboxes start with “Don’t” and the notification icons are lame. Still, this is required if you use Safari and Google Reader.

Character Palette

Built into OS X, you can access the Character Palette by checking the “Show input menu in menu bar” option under System Preferences → International → Input Menu. I like having it in my menu bar so I can quickly insert the correct characters (like the é in Exposé above, or the arrows in the previous sentence). It’s Björk, not Bjork.

On the Server

Webfaction

Hands down the best host I’ve used to date (and I’ve used a lot). Their control panel’s great (could use a facelift, which I hear is coming). All the functionality in the Control Panel is available through a Python API, which could be helpful for a variety of things, like creating a mailbox for a new webapp user. They have all the necessary one-click installers, including Django trunk & the latest releases, usually hours, if not minutes, after they’re released. Webfaction’s support is always responsive, knowledgeable and helpful. They’ve had a few hiccups with unexpected downtime lately, but I still look upon them favorably and hope the best for their future.

Django

If you know anything about my work life, this shouldn’t be much of a surprise: I’m a die-hard Django fan. I’m convinced there’s no web app Django can’t build, and do it quicker & cleaner, too. I would have a very hard time considering any job that wouldn’t let me use Django for development. It’s definitely the one skill I’m currently trying hardest to master, which is made easier by the core committers’ insistence on high standards, and an open-source community not only willing, but eager, to share their code.

Apache/mod_wsgi

This is how I run Django apps on Webfaction; again, they make it dead-simple to set up.

Git

I’ve only recently made a concerted effort to learn Git, the distributed version control system, but GitHub had me at hello. I love their concept of “social coding” and have had more fun than I would have expected, just looking through other users’ code, watching as their projects evolve, and forking their projects to toy with things. Git itself is fine, but it’s something like GitHub that really shows you the benefits of the Git implementation. And version controlling your own version (fork) is something so absurdly obvious, I can’t believe I’ve been missing it for so long.

I still use SVN, of course, but mostly for grabbing projects from Google Code, and certainly not as my preferred version control system.

In the cloud

Twitter

Many mini updates. I held off joining for too long, but I’m an advocate, for sure. I could live without it, but I wouldn’t want to.

Flickr

Flickr rules. Right now, my photostream is largely dominated by pictures of Jack, but I’m in the process of naming, tagging, and geolocating several thousand, mostly travel, photos from the early 2000s, and I’ll be releasing those as I work through them.

Mint

I still have a hard time believing Mint is completely free. It’s such a beautiful and fully-featured service, it ranks right up there (or beyond) some of the subscription-based finance sites. Mint integrates directly with most banks, downloading your transaction history and automatically categorizing most of those into relevant categories. You can track pretty much everything related to your personal financial health — cash, credit cards, loans, home/property value, etc. You can create budgets for particular categories and be notified as you approach their limits. There’s also a Mint iPhone app.

Harvest

There is a lot of competition among time-tracking/invoicing web apps, but after researching & evaluating the best of the best, I chose to go with Harvest. It’s not the most powerful or even the easiest-to-use, but it’s evident it’s built by some talented folk, I like the overall design, and they’re clearly improving it and adding new features all the time. There’s an iPhone app, a Dashboard widget for tracking time, and a developer’s API, so hopefully new tools will be coming. The invoices are gorgeous and you can even accept payment through Paypal, if that’s your thing.

Facebook

I don’t really use Facebook that much, but I like it. I think Facebook’s done (is doing) some amazing things in shrinking the space between us all, and I think their long-term goals are enviable and exciting. They face such intense scrutiny & criticism with every move they make, I hope they continue pressing forward.

Google Reader

My favorite RSS reader. Always available, from anywhere, with a rich supply of news and information tailored just as I like it. My favorite feeds are Daring Fireball, kottke.org, Davenetics, and 1001 Rules for my Unborn Son. Oh, and of course worksology.com.

Delicious

I save bookmarks here, occasionally, for all to enjoy.

Readernaut

Nathan Borror’s super awesome social reading site. Track your progress in the books you’re reading, saving notes, comments, and passages as you go. Readernaut is an expertly-designed, beautifully-crafted and much-needed web application. If you read books, go get your free account.

ESPN’s Streak for the Cash

I’m absolutely terrible at predicting sports outcomes (barely over 50%), but I love playing Streak. It provides that little extra investment in a game, someone to root for, and you could even make some real cash while playing.

Hardware I Use

iPod Classic

My 160GB pride & joy, it holds all 25,000 of my tracks with room to spare. It hasn’t been terribly long since I would spent buckets of money on Case Logic CD cases, three big ones in my backseat spilling CDs all over the place. Some days I still cannot believe how portable an infinite amount of music can be.

Flip Mino

Okay, I love the Flip Mino, but I’m convinced it’s the newest product I own that will be obsolete the soonest. I already have a new digital camera (below) that records better (HD) video, and I’m not alone in assuming the next generation iPhone will have video-recording abilities as well. Still, it’s tiny, pocketable, and the opposite of intimidating, and so is perfect for recording our kids on the go. At least for now.

Leica D-Lux 4

What a frickin’ beautiful camera this is. After using a Canon Digital Rebel for several years, I was ready to return to a tiny point & shoot that I’d be comfortable carrying anywhere & everywhere. I’m still learning things about this one, but it’s been fun so far and, like I’ve already said, records HD video. Very happy with this. Need a tripod.

Drobo

The robot that backs up all my shiz. I dropped in a couple high-capacity hard drives about a month ago and now it’s home to my entire home directory (and a Time Machine backup of that home directory), providing redundancy and, thus, protection from hardware failure. I couldn’t be happier with the Drobo’s performance so far, and I do feel an added sense of ease when considering the vulnerability of my bits.

Accessories I Carry

Makr wallet

I carried a small DNKY “money clip” similar this for 7 years, starting in high school, and it was the best accessory I’d ever owned to that point. It basically fell apart after those 7 years, accelerated by a year abroad, getting stretched out by all sorts of foreign currency. Since then, I’ve used a bigger, thicker J Fold wallet my wife got for me. I just received my wallet from Makr Carry Goods this week, after eagerly anticipating their new collection for several months.

I carry my wallet in my front pocket, mostly because I can’t stand to sit on one, but also because I grew into the habit over those 7 years with the small DKNY one. This new wallet is gorgeous & soft, feels great in my front pocket, and I’m excited to carry it for at least the next decade.

Bang & Olufsen Earphones

I bought a pair of the original B&O; earphones way back in 2000, just as I was leaving for Ireland, and used those non-stop for 5 years until they finally wore out. With B&O;’s fairness replacement program, I was able to get an updated (8-years-improved) pair for less than their cost, and once again, I’m in love. They’re light-weight, fit snug & comfortable, and the sound is brilliant. Hope to have these for ages.

Freitag Clark bag

[Will add photo soon] Made from used truck tarpaulins & seat belts, each Freitag bag is completely unique. My lovely wife got me mine for our 2nd wedding anniversary. It’s one of my favorite things ever.

Conclusion

And with that, I’m exhausted. What are your favorite apps, both online & offline? What accessories or gadgets must you have with you at all times? Do you have any particular system configurations you couldn’t live without?

Doing good deeds

Joshua Works — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 13:00:00 -0600

Growing up in the small town of Humboldt, KS, there was this little welding shop. It was just a two-man operation, there in the late 80s, building trailer hitches for ranchers and farmers. The hitch they made was something different, the first real innovation in that industry. Over the past 20 years, that business has grown to employ hundreds of people, to lead their industry, and to enjoy some of the lowest turnover and highest employee satisfaction rates anywhere.

One of those cofounders and the owner & CEO is my dad, Joe Works. He’s a humble & caring man and when it comes to being acknowledged for the good he does, he tends towards humility, no want for personal recognition.

But in this economic environment, times are hard. Especially in the automotive industry: truck sales have plummeted; the RV industry ground to a halt due to high fuel prices; the price of steel doubled last year. Times are hard indeed. Today, the shop can’t afford to run their production lines more than a couple of days each week. But despite all this, despite this lasting for months, the company has yet to lay off any employees.

Here’s what they’ve done instead:

B&W has volunteered company employees to do a huge number of community improvement projects:

building a new baseball field,
repairing existing baseball facilities like painting dugouts and fixing fences & batting cages,
doing work at each of Humboldt’s many churches, including installing new gutters and handrails,
cleaning up Humboldt’s parks, repairing tennis & basketball courts, building new horseshoe pits, and installing grills,
re-roofing community shelters,
landscaping and building new welcome signs at the edge of town,
building new bike racks for the local elementary school,
and more, continuing today.

What’s more, B&W has also implemented an “Employee Appreciation Program”, whereby each employee can plan a home project day that allows them to stay home and coordinate three other employees to accomplish some much needed home project. These have included residing their homes, trimming trees, doing yard work, fixing fences, and so forth. It has, apparently, been a great success.

During President Obama’s latest speech to the nation, he recognized a Miami banker who shared his $60 million bonus with over 400 of his current & former workers. What an impressive thing to do, I thought, but it also made me recognize the good that a smaller business owner can do, not only for their business and their employees, but for their communities. And I’m very proud of my dad for being just that kind of guy, and for doing the good work he’s done.

I also just found out last night that NBC Nightly News is coming to Humboldt tomorrow to tape my Dad, B&W, and the community for their recurring “Random Acts of Kindness” segment. I don’t know any details about when it will air, but as soon as I find out, I will update this entry and post something to my Twitter account. Please watch, if you can.

My brother Tony has posted a Flickr photoset of pictures of B&W’s Community Projects. Check it out.

Update:
Here’s the segment, as it aired:

On the redesign

Joshua Works — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 17:00:00 -0600

Worksology is back! You’ve missed me, yes?

This redesign has taken more than three years to come to fruition. In the meantime, the site has been either completely broken or nothing more than a cold “on hiatus” message. In fairness, I’ve been busy: getting engaged & married, settling into a new house, and having a darling little boy. I do regret completely abandoning my blog; there are plenty of things I wish I’d have written about (and I still might), but the wait for this particular design was mostly necessary. First of all, most of the tools that made this redesign possible simply didn’t exist three years ago. Certainly some of the CSS techniques this design uses were not available in 2005. And secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I’m feeling much more confident in making the kind of long-term design choices I think my personal website demands.

But alas! After all this time, here we are, back together again. Lovely.

I do want to jot down some notes about this design, some of its unique features, and the tools that made it possible. So if you’re interested, read on & let me know what you think in the comments.

Inspiration & design

The design is clearly influenced by mid-century Swiss design, particularly the posters of Josef Müller-Brockmann. Wilson Miner’s lovely redesign drew inspiration from a similar source (he points to this excellent collection of posters on Flickr), and I’ve been motivated by Wilson’s pure interpretation. Each of the pages on his site are beautiful, poster-worthy even, and it’s driven me to make this site print-to-PDF as nicely as possible.

One thing I particularly admire about the Opernhaus Zürich posters linked above is how each one got a very different treatment from the next. The overall framework remains rigid and relatively unchanged, but the details for each event were handled individually, case-by-case, especially in terms of layout and use of color. I’m excited to pay a humble homage to this by changing up the homepage with each blog post, and also by tweaking the overall color scheme for appropriate occasions. I also plan to leverage this flexibility by skinning certain sections of the site (I’m talking about my travelogues) with their own particular theme. So if you’re not in love with the inaugural homepage, I’ll be switching it up sometime soon. And on & on again.

The entire site is set in Helvetica. I spent many, many hours one night switching between two versions of the site; one employing a beautiful serif for body text, the other with the Helvetica you see here. I’m confident I made the right decision: this just feels right. I’m also aware of some issues with using Helvetica high in the CSS font stack, but I really couldn’t compromise when the site looks so damn good in Safari/Mac. I will look into tuning other browsers/OSs accordingly, but not until I get my hands on some initial browser stats.

Organization & navigation

Worksology is basically a collection of all the things that I create on the web — Journal entries, Twitter updates, Flickr photos & videos, Delicious bookmarks (and I’m excited to grow this list: Readernaut books, Netflix rentals, etc). The navigation attempts to organize these things in a few ways, primarily by date in the site’s tumblelog-style Chronologue, but also by tags & by location. Of course you can also browse individual item types, like photos or statuses.

One thing to notice about this design is the NES-style D-pad in the upper-right corner of each page. This provides contextual navigation in any relevant direction: right for the next page/date/item in sequence, left for the previous one; up for a jump up the site’s hierarchy, eventually reaching the homepage; and down, usually reserved for jumping to the comments section on the same page. What’s more, the ~~arrow keys~~ W, A, S, & D keys on your keyboard act as shortcuts for these links that will allow you to navigate more quickly. This is especially useful when paging through a series of photos, entries, or paginated listing pages without having to find the right link on the page. For example, if you just want to browse through my photos, hit the main photos page, scroll down the page, and then use the D-key (right, or next) to jump to the next page. Rinse & repeat. This is available on almost all pages.

Update: My good friend Jon Faustman pointed out that using the W, A, S, and D keys is a common substitution for using the arrow keys, with fewer alternate uses, so I’ve modified the keyboard shortcuts to use the WASD keys instead. They, of course, are not applied when text fields have focus. Thanks Jon!

Tools

I definitely need to mention Jeff Croft’s Savoy, a sweet little suite of around two dozen Django applications, which runs this site. Jeff’s been kind enough to let me beta test Savoy ¹, and although I’ve had to modify a number of things, it’s definitely an impressive piece of work. I know Jeff wants to mature some parts of Savoy before releasing it, but as it stands, it’s an amazingly helpful set of tools. With Jeff’s permission, I will write a more detailed post about Savoy sometime soon — subscribe to the feed so you won’t miss that.

Also, I’d be remiss not to mention Nathan Smith’s clever 960 Grid System which controls the grid layout here and likely in many of my future projects.

This design makes extensive use of border-radius, RGBA colors, and a bit of webkit-transition. If you use Safari/Mac (certainly the best browser currently available), you’ll get the full & proper experience. If not, the site renders decently in most other browsers. For more complete information about this site, the tools that I use, and the full hosting stack, check out the colophon.

I’d love to hear what you think in the comments. It’s good to be back.

If you’re especially perceptive, it shouldn’t be terribly hard to find some structural/content similarities between this site, jeffcroft.com, Tom Watson’s tincorporated.com, and any of the other sites currently powered by Savoy. The differences between them, though, is probably more compelling, and a testament to the flexibility of Savoy (and Django). ↩

On Austin Cuisine

Joshua Works — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 19:33:16 -0600

We’ve been eating sooooo good here in Austin.

On Sunday, for lunch, we ate at a little South American restaurant, Dona Emilias, just across the street from our hotel, where they were serving a Sunday brunch. Amazing. Best meal ever. Stewed pulled pork. Some crazy rice thing. Lox. Sausages. French toast. I say ordinary words, but what they were were FAR from ordinary. They were incredible.

But the problem was that we sat outside and Jessa got pooped on.

Twice.

By birds, I mean.

Then for dinner, we went to a local Mexican place called Manuel’s and had “Austin’s Best Margaritas”, which I later found out were NOT Austin’s best margaritas, nor were their tostadas Austin’s best tostadas, but they were pretty dang good. Jessa had tacos, and they looked tasty as well.

For lunch on Monday, we ate at PF Chang’s with 5 other friends, and shared some dishes. A girl from New Zealand and I shared Sweet & Sour Chicken and Honey Shrimp, both of which were grand. Jessa and Pat, the kilted fellow from a couple posts ago, shared some lettuce wrap things, and a vegetable coconut curry dish.

Monday’s “dinner” was a variety of finger-food at a Blogger-sponsored party at the Club Deville, including mini lox, cream cheese and dill sandwiches, sushi, fancy deviled eggs, stuffed prunes, fresh fruit, huge friggin shrimp, chocolate cake, lemon bars, and more. And by “and more” I mean an open bar with Austin’s legitimate best margaritas.

On to Tuesday!

Dave Lowe, Scott Jungling, a fellow from the University of Virginia, and Jessa & I lucked into a cheesesteak restaurant with a Texas spin called Texadelphia. Most of the cheesesteak sandwiches were typical, but with the green peppers replaced by jalapenos. They also served chicken cheesesteaks, spicy fries, and chips and salsa.

Oh lord, and then came dinner. We’ve been craving big city sushi ever since we went to Las Vegas and didn’t get any. So before we left Austin, we were sure as heck gonna get some! We went to Kyoto, a place on Capitol Street that the hotel’s concierge recommended. Somehow we made it during “Sushi Happy Hour” and got to sit in the raised, bamboo-floored dining room, where you have to remove your shoes and sit on the floor. The sushi was incredible — tender and delicious — and the wasabi was intense! Best of all, though, we made it out (stuffed!) for just $20.

On Four Seasons

Joshua Works — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 19:19:05 -0600

Besides the expected niceties of the Four Seasons Hotel, like superior customer service, luxurious bathrobes & linens, and a classic, cozy decor, there are a few things I never expected. First of all, they clean our room twice each day: once in the morning to do the standard room-reset, but also once each evening when they turn down the bed, close the window shades, and turn the radio to a classical music station. They also fill up our ice bucket each evening, so we can have a tall glass of ice water without wandering all the way down the hall to fetch ice in your pajamas, which is a pain in the ass, as you know.

They also pay very specific attention to personal belongings when cleaning: they wound up the cord to my cell phone charger; lined up the free magazines we got from SXSW, and folded our extra clothes and laid them across the chair.

This week, the Four Seasons is playing host to a morning radio show, who’s interviewing a variety of musicians and letting them play in a rather intimate setting. This morning Kris Kristopherson, who we saw out jogging the other morning, was playing “Me and Bobby McGee” as we left.

On Austin, part 1

Joshua Works — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 09:18:06 -0600

Smooth arrival in Austin. First impressions (i.e., the cabbie ride from the airport to the hotel) suggests that people here eat a lot of tacos and have a lot of car problems. Every block along the highway into town had an automotive shop of some kind, a used car dealership, or a handful of taco vendor carts.

But it’s a completely different world here at the hotel — the Four Seasons — where they treat us with smiles and pleasantries at every possible moment. We’ve got a beautiful view of the lake from our room, with its running track, docks, and lots of green grass for relaxing in. On our first walk around the track, we saw a sweaty Kris Kristopherson out jogging.

We went to the Austin Convention Center, just across the street, and got our SXSW badges and a huge bag of fliers and advertisements and magazines for us to throw away.

The first official event of the festival was a “Friday Night Mix at Six”, a local bar that’s co-owned by Lance Armstrong. Even though we didn’t see Lance, we sure saw a lot of other people we “know”, be it from Kansas or virtually.

Chip Diffendaffer, from the University of Denver, had sent both Jessa & I an email a week or so earlier to tell us about a meet-up he was planning with all the University folk that attend the festival. Not sure why, but we sorta assumed that “University folk” meant a bunch of established baby-boomer old folk. That impression doesn’t really come from any actual empirical experience, nor from our understanding about the kinds of people that attend this festival, so it was just a bad assumption. Chip and his friend Ross were some cool young guys — just like us — and we decided to hang out with them for a while, out to the evening’s event.

A gregarious, kilted local man, Pat Ramsey, joined us and filled us in on lots of local landmarks.

Six had an open bar until eight. We got there in time to get one drink and mingle with the likes of Jim Coudal, Jeff Croft, Wilson Miner, James Asher, Mark Trammell, and many others, all of whom have websites I could link to but I’m too lazy.

By 8:30, it felt like 11, so we headed back the hotel, changed into our pajamas, and the hit the town looking for some supper. Jessa was getting cranky from hunger and sore feet, so we finally gave in to the always-delicious Jimmy Johns, despite our interest in finding something “local”.

On to Austin

Joshua Works — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 13:43:46 -0600

Tomorrow morning, Jessa & I are on our way to Austin Texas for a week of everything-geek at the SXSW Interactive festival. It’s our opportunity to brush shoulders with some of the web’s most recognizable celwebrities. Oh, and our state’s very own.

It’s a godsend that both Jess and I are in related fields (web development & design, respectively), and were both approved to go to this conference independently. Not that there won’t be some serious education going on (see the panels I’m attending below), but we’re definitely looking forward to a relaxing getaway in a hip town. Did I mention we’re staying at the Four Seasons?

I’m most excited about putting some real faces with the names I’ve grown so familiar with in all of my web browsing/reading. There’re probably 50 familiar names sitting in on panels and keynotes, as well as a bunch more just doing the attendees thing with the rest of us. I hope we get the chance to do some networking and make some connections for future years at the conference.

Oh, and we’re excited for sushi. And nuclear tacos as well.

After each day’s panels, there are some fab evening events hosted by notable companies: Google, Adobe, frog design, and the Yahoo! smorgasboard, each with their own (complimentary) culinary and entertainment delights.

Jealous yet?

Well check out these panels that I’ll be sitting in on:

Saturday, March 11

10:00 am: Traditional Design and New Technology
11:30 am: How to Be A Web Design Superhero
11:30 am: Ajax: What Do I Need to Know?
2:00 pm: Jim Coudal & Jason Fried Opening Remarks
3:30 pm: How to Bluff Your Way in DOM Scripting
5:00 pm: Tantek Celik Presentation: Creating Building Blocks for Independents

Sunday, March 12

10:00 pm: What’s Hot in Web Applications
11:30 pm: The Future of Education in a Digitally Convergent World
2:00 pm: Keynote Conversation: Heather Armstrong / Jason Kottke
3:30 pm: Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
5:00 pm: Holistic Web Design: Finding the Creative Balance in Multi-Disciplined Teams

Monday, March 13

10:00 am: CSS Problem Solving
11:30 am: Microformats: Evolving the Web
2:00 pm: Craig Newmark Keynote Interview
3:30 pm: WTF: WaSP Task Force Panel
5:00 pm: Design Eye for the List Guy

Tuesday, March 14

10:00 am: How to Convince Your Company to Embrace Web Standards
11:30 am: Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps
2:00 pm: Burnie Burns Keynote
3:30 pm: Dogma Free Design
5:00 pm: Bruce Sterling Presentation: The State of the World

My only regret is that I haven’t put in more time in getting my website up-to-speed. I started this redesign project about a year ago, and at the time I thought it would take a few months, but Jessa’s proven to be a worthy distraction and I’ve let things like this slip far too behind on me. It’d be nice to refer people I meet here, but with it in this constant disarray, nyeh eh.

Anyway, since the world’s most prolific bloggers will be descending on Austin over the next several days, I’m going to be prepared to blog a few times, since, eh… it’ll be the thing to do.

We Are In Motion

Joshua Works — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 11:02:39 -0600

We are in motion, and no day illustrates that better than today. We’re leaving for Las Vegas today. We did it the same time last year, and for the same reasons. But last night was not a normal night of anxiety over whether I packed all the right things and whether I knew the route and whether we’d actually make it on time. This time I’ve had much more to worry about.

It’s most easily explained by just saying this: Today, I’m buying a new car.

But it’s been tremendously more difficult, much more so than you might even expect from such a weighty decision. Everything’s down to the wire: waiting on a certain check to clear the bank so I have cash for a down payment (not sure that’s happened yet); shopping and buying new insurance (after finding their office ‘closed’ today, I finally found their new office & picked it up effortlessly); securing financing. Here’s where it gets messy.

They assumed my 24-year-old self would have at least the bare minimum of credit history to secure a loan through their preferred bank. Wrong. So in the last 15 minutes of the business day yesterday, I had the daunting task of tracking down one of my parents (who are in LV already at SEMA), and get a SSN. I barely squeaked it in, but they called me back soon after to let me know that, oops, they’d have to be here in person anyway, so that won’t work. So then it was a race to track down three personal references, a copy of my diploma, and a phone number for the KSU registrar, in order to get approved for VW’s Recent Grad financing program. A last option.

So last night was actually fraught with thoughts of whether I’m actually going to be able to get my new car before we have to take off to LV. At this point, 11:11 a.m., I still have an appointment to pick it up at 1p.m. (we’re leaving at 3p.m.), but no confirmation that I’ve secured the financing to do so.

Meanwhile, Bryan is driving to KC to pick up his friend Amanda who’s joining us on our roadtrip. He should be back any minute, just in time for two afternoon meetings which ultimately stacked our departure at around three this afternoon.

That leaves me with forty five minutes to hear whether I’ve actually gotten a new car today, and then make the trip to Topeka to pick it up. The alternative is just to saddle up my current car, and see how it handles the drive. It’s got a mad case of the ‘aging car jitters’ and I really didn’t want to push it across the Rockies unless I put some new tires on it, so if the new car deal falls through, we’ll just have to see how well it skis.

Surely the most interesting part of this post are the details about the new vehicle: It’s not actually new, but a 2004 will be the most-recently-manufactured car I’ll have owned. It’s just an upgrade to a newer Passat that I just cannot deny fits me like a glove. There are a half dozen other vehicles that I can picture myself in, but none have that thing (doo wop) to get me interested enough.

It’s loaded with leather and all the amenities you can imagine, including an eight-cylinder engine that you’ll just die to drive if I ever give you the chance. Color? Not exactly sure. I was there in Topeka and saw it face to face. It was simply called ‘blue’ then, but in the light-dark realm, I’m now at a complete loss. My memory is giving out. I recall that it had a tinge of green and was “grayish” but that, again, hasn’t helped me find any pictures on the internet that are definitely ‘it’.

I’m down to 36 minutes to hear whether I need to make the trip to Topeka and back, and my fingernails are officially gone. I’ll post pictures if this deal ever happens.

Update Just got word from the car salesman that everything’s peachy; I’ve been approved, the car’s detailed, tank’s filled and ready for delivery. So I would hit the road immediately, but that I’m waiting on a call back from Commerce Bank on whether that certain check has cleared yet. If so, everything’s gumdrops and candy lace, but if not… I’d have no idea what to do. I could take my chances and write a check and hope they clear in the right order; I could ask the dealership whether I could post-date my down payment a couple days (I don’t suspect a car dealership would go for that sorta thing), I could make the dearship finance a larger portion of the cost (ouch!), or I could call the whole thing off (which would tear me to peices). Praying I don’t have to decide…

Update 2 Nevermind; the check cleared and the hold is being dropped. Hooray.

A Difficult Birth

Joshua Works — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 00:51:38 -0600

Astride this terrible gap in my most recent web development project, aka Project Rework, where my website will slowly go from looking like total crap to something more beautiful, I’m pretty much (exactly) absent from blogging.

But today I decided it was about time that I put some notables down for the database to gobble up and save for eternity. Some happenings of recent:

Today Bryan and I signed a new lease. For the past three years we’ve lived in the same place, mostly just comfortable to deal with the status quo and not have to put all the effort into moving (moving, mail forwarding, transfering utilities, finding a place). But three years was plenty. We’ve both got full-time, well-paying jobs and there’s no reason to live in the ghetto student housing and deal with all of its niceties any longer.

So we’ve upgraded to Georgetown Apartment Homes, a place DESIGNED for young professionals such as ourselves. I think they’ve got a few units set aside for students, but they’ve got a 20 & over policy and, regardless, probably price themselves out of most of the student interest. We went in over lunch today, had a look around, talked over availability and signed a lease on the spot. Our unit, their nicest, faces inward to a beautiful green courtyard and pool, has tall vaulted ceilings, a wood-burning fireplace, two bedrooms with connected baths, and lots of storage. Oh yeah, and an ice maker. Thank god.

We’re excited. Even though lately there was some talk about whether this was the time for us to separate, get our own places (probably because I’ve been spending much less time around home, always out doing something with Jessa), we’re very much excited about making the transition to luxury living conditions. And that will obviously require another roadtrip to IKEA later this summer.

We move in on the 28th, which gives us about 3 days overlap in leases, plenty of time to move across town.
My job is going very well. I’m as busy as I can stand in my current situation (I’ll get to this in a minute), but it’s good work and I’ll get everything sorted out soon enough. I’m working on hiring a student or two to help out with my work, and so hopefully I can find the right couple of people to join my team.

I’m a little rattled lately because I’ve had to move out of my beautiful, large office (with a view!) and downstairs into the room known as “the cave” because it was windowless up until last month. I’m supposed to be getting a proper office very soon — once the wall we’ve ordered gets built and installed and the furniture I’ve hand-selected gets delivered, but until then I’m stuck in a brightly-fluorescent-lit room with five students at a teensy desk that barely holds my monitor & laptop at the same time. To make it worse (oh you’ll love this), I’ve got a bunch of new toys still in their boxes right behind said tiny desk. Get this: TWO, I repeat TWO 20” Apple Displays, a HP color printer, a new wireless keyboard/mouse combo, and, of course, my new Powerbook laptop. Most of it is just sitting there until I get my furniture and actually have room to put it all up. But once I do, my god it’s going to be beautiful and I’m going to get so much work done.
Jessa & I are still doing great. Like I mentioned before, we spend almost all of our time together, facilitated by the fact that we work in the same building. Our weekends for the next two months are all but completely booked up with family functions: a graduation party for me & Tony, a Wollen trip to Colorado, her sister’s bachelorette party, shower, and wedding (3 separate weekends), and a PBR trip. We’ve been busy past weekends too, visiting family in Humboldt and Kansas City, playing with baby Eli (such an adorable! boy) and a bunch of other things I’m not remembering about because I haven’t been keeping a proper journal lately. =(

Cody loves Taco Bell. It’s the cutest thing in the world, and I love it.

Oh, and this past Tuesday, July 5, we went (Jessa & I + Bryan & guest) to a big concert at $and$tone with some great bands, best of all: Cake. Gotta love them, for seriously. Also there: Straylight Run, Weezer, Story of the Year, Veda, and some other locals. Good times.
Otherwise things are going well. I’m coping well with the transition to not having a single free minute in the day. I’m up early in the morning and generally on the go til I crash around midnight. It’s making the progress on my personal website project go very slowly, but that was sorta the whole point of doing it this very exposed way. It’ll come together eventually, I’m sure.

Introducing… Ashlynn Works

Joshua Works — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 22:39:22 -0600

Ashlynn Denesse Works was born this weekend, somewhere around 7 p.m., the tenth day of June, The Year of our Lord Two Thousand and Five. She’s a precious little bundle — seven pounds, five ounces; and 20.5 inches long. Such a sweetheart.

Savannah Vacation

Joshua Works — Wed, 25 May 2005 15:20:07 -0600

Today Jessa & I are taking a vacation. We’re leaving this afternoon (though later than I’d hoped) towards our first stop in St. Louis. Because Savannah, our ultimate destination, is so far away (on the ocean!), we’re really not going to have time to do as much of the leisurely sightseeing that I generally like to do in my travels. If I had it my way, we’d stay up tonight with a walk around the Arch and then hit a museum or something tomorrow morning, but because we’re not visiting St. Louis, it’ll just be an early morning back on the road.

And so it’ll be for much of the trip, sans Savannah, I think. After St. Louis, we plan on camping out at a state park in Georgia, the High Falls State Park, before heading on to camp another night on Tybee Island, just beyond Savannah. The next two nights we have reservations at the Westin Savannah Harbor Resort which will allow us to take it easy and relax and just walk around Savannah’s parks and gardens and enjoy as much seafood and southern cookin’ as our bellies can stand.

Then the route back depends on if we’re dying to drive through the Great Smoky Mountains National Par or not. It’s either that or Nashville and it’s really a toss-up as far as I’m concerned.

So we’re off now — I’m not sure if I’ll be keeping a journal or not (dang, I really should be), but we’ll see. If so, check back here for that.

By the way, it’s a week after I interviewed for the full-time job at OME and I’ve heard nothing - absolutely nothing so far. And now I’m leaving on vacation & so hopefully I can just put it out of my mind until I get back.

Finally.

Joshua Works — Fri, 13 May 2005 01:00:55 -0600

I really don’t want to try to say anything profound to sum up my college experience cos I’m really not good at that sort of thing. I’d rather just sit here and wax nostalgically about Ireland and the dorms and commuting 2 hours each weekend to visit girlfriends back home, and running into people I vaguely recognize in the Union, in Aggieville, at Wal*mart, of endless summertime hoodapranks with Ess and Ell like Ya Prick! and Don’t Worry Can’t See a Thang!, and BINGO (and BAAAANGO!), and diverting traffic with sticky reflectors and arts and crafts and Mormon Glasses and yellow meat watermelons and WOW! hands and poppers times infinity and many more so unmentionable and mentionable (Neil Diamond, ehem), and personal health kicks waxing and waning in short order, and painting (terrible, terrible paintings), and of a growing neice and newer nephews, and of a growing DVD collection, and lack of books read, and lack of refunds on textbooks not read, nor even opened, and of late nights (& extremely late nights), and a summer of such early nights on the road in SC, Maine, Oregon and everywhichawhere, and count them one two three four five hard drives that eventually said “Operating System Not Found” — fuckers, and my first Guinness (indeed my first real beer), my first flip flops, and so many other firsts: some unmentionable, others slightly more mentionable, and that one time in Minnesota when I was so freakin happy to just be alive and awake that I ran barefoot down the middle of the empty highway for no longer than 20 seconds and absorbed all the life from the heavens in that short span, and bleaching my hair blonde (we all did that), and that time I seriously thought I needed anti-anxiety pills, and that time I actually TOOK mini-thins (we all did that), and oh my god, and oh. my. god. of the biggest crush of my life (and involving so many people in my obsession, including HER, thank god), and nervously EVERYthing about her… thinking, seeing, avoiding, “stalking”, talking, yikes… and concerts, so many damn fine musicians (remember Rufus and Eisley and DMB x 3 and Wakarusa and Nickel Creek and Jason Mraz and Ben Folds and G. Love and John Mayer and Guster and Maroon 5 and NEIL DIAMOND?) and my “Certified Mixologist” diploma, thanks to an expedited course of bartending school, and the subsequent drunken weekend when Tony & I realized there’s no damn such thing as a Chocolate Martini — just something that will make your puke taste a little bit nicer, and that time I ran all over campus at three in the morning and laid down and took a quick nap in the middle of the Old Stadium field, and being extremely underpaid for my genius for most of my college career, and all those verbose and only-slightly poorly-written essays in English I, II and III, and driving all the way to KC just for a mediocre haircut that I thought was much better than it really was only because the guy who cut my hair said “shit” and wore Diesel shoes, and my usual “seat” at the 50 yard line of every home football game, but not of the drunken assholes who spit their tobacco right where I wanted to sit during the band’s halftime show of a “Looney Toons” medley, and of Spring Breaks to Colorado to London to Florida to Greece, Italy, Iceland, and that there-and-back weekend to Chicago with Bryan, solely for a trip to Ikea, and that there-and-back weekend to Minneapolis with Tony, soley for a silver Passat with black leather seats and a sunroof, and of summer Sundays under Starlight for a season of Broadway, and beyond my return from Ireland, of pining for Ireland, and squinting my senses until I WAS Ireland and I still need to go back, and oh my god, that second ridiculous crush when I was smitten with those twins, but more so for the reaction of friends and novelty than any honest-to-god and VALID reason, but don’t let that stop me from feeling anxious about it, no, or bothering others with it, sorry guys, and that one time I thought I could be a Rhodes Scholar if I posted the four criteria they look for on little post-it notes around my apartment, but first you have to have some interest in writing huge friggin essays and finding references, of which I have neither, and oh: crossword puzzles!, if I thank you for but one thing K-State Collegian (obviously NOT that you covered my AMAZING and NEWSWORTHY feat of planting a sculpture on CAMPUS in the MIDDLE of the fucking NIGHT, thank you very much losers) it’s that you supplied me with adequate crossword puzzles to survive a handful of tedious lecture classes (like World Geography and MIS and Art History I (the first time)), and also beyond actual events and real-life anecdotes, just knowing that I’ve grown and learned so much, that I have a semblance of understanding statistics and how to spell ‘semblance’ and most other words for that matter (quiz me), and feeling more comfortable with my personal aesthetic less for DKNYs sake, but for JOSHs, and knowing that I can talk in front of larger and larger groups all the time without so much fear of blushing or stumbling over my words, though I still do that, but knowing that I have less reservations now anyway, and for the ultimate knowledge that there’s very little Taco Bell can’t fix, least of which: a hangover, and tho i’m not without some regrets like never starting my own student organization (was it to be a BINGO club or a silent film club or a Jack Kerouac club?), nor only making it to ONE K-State basketball game despite buying two SEASONS worth of tickets, nor going to more events at the Union by myself and meeting new people (with no hesitation or fear), and of always looking far too cute in that shirt, and those jeans, and damn boy!, but never really FEELING it, you know?, just knowing it, and that’s never quite the same as feeling it, and of getting the unique opportunities to meet famous people, really really famous people like Noam Chomsky and Al Franken and Cokie Roberts and Paul Harvey and Lewis Black and that guy who told us there were penises and vaginas hidden in commercial advertising EVERYWHERE, and finally of things going on far longer than ever anticipated like this nostalgia and also this college career. And finally, thanks to everyone that shared a minute in there. It’s amazing to think of how involved most of you were, starting from years ago, and how a lot of this nostalgia cuts into your life somewhere, not involved necessarily, but osmotically, at the least, so thanks and all, and I can’t wait to give you the hug you deserve for making this such a favorite part of my life.

Almost, almost.

Joshua Works — Fri, 13 May 2005 00:58:46 -0600

Tonight I’m neglecting studying for the “last time.” (quotes are due to Tony’s insistence that I never say I’m done with school — least not at 24). Oh my god, I’m 24. And I’m done with school.

Well almost: tomorrow’s my final final exam and I haven’t started studying yet. I started my finals week with an exam on Wednesday, and the 3 hours I spent at the library immediately before it helped immeasurably. Then Billy and I sealed up my last group project (the world hunger one I mentioned earlier: we determined that the root cause of the world’s hunger problems lies in the fact that multinational corporations export any potential revenues the countries have so that even their Net National Product cannot cover the interest payments on their loans to the World Bank. Any and all undesirable effects associated or leading up to world hunger & malnutrition stem from this one fact — or so we concluded, heh. All of that for a couple guys who started the project as a joke, knowing absolutely nothing about it, and doing the whole thing in a matter of 5 or 6 hours.)

But tomorrow, after my Human Resources exam (and a few hours of reading and studying beforehand), I will wash myself of my undergraduate education with a couple summer beers (or too many?). Then, for the weekend, Jessa, Cody & I will join the REST of the Works gang in Humboldt for just a little fellowship. Every last one of us will be there, lemme list them: Dad Mom Beth Steve Seth Tony Kate Eli James Andrea Britnee Josh and Jessa and Cody will make 14, and a bit of fun, I’m sure. Nothing particular in the plans, just Humboldt’s graduation (because I’m forsaking mine, if only to get away from Manhattan during the busiest day of the year). Maybe that’s not a wise decision, but it’s mine and it’s made.

This, fellow and forthcoming students, is how college is done

Joshua Works — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 21:07:41 -0600

Today is the Wednesday before dead week — my last dead week ever. And with tonight’s efforts, I’m aiming to make it as dead as possible. Indeed, my entire semester has genuinely been a dead semester and I really haven’t pushed much effort into my scholastic responsibilities. I’m just tired of it and have been ready to get out and wash myself of college for the past four months. Just sick. Which is strange and sad too because I can remember pitying my friend Thomas when he was just so digusted with school and saying ‘good riddance’ to everything related to school and Mr. M. Chilton. I remember thinking that I’d never be so eager to get it over with; that I’d in fact be sad to close the door on such a fun and important part of my life.

But so it goes.

Tonight I found out how last week’s potentially disastrous exam went. All’s well. Even though I had produced almost no notes at all, and of what I had, hadn’t really studied them, I managed to pull off one of the better grades in the class (maybe it was the best?). Out of 130 points, and with a class average of 110, I got a 124, or a 95%. Fairly impressive considering that, well, just minutes before the exam was returned to us, I was thinking how bad it would be to get a C in the class, since I don’t have any of those on my transcript yet.

And so it goes.

Also, tonight I’m working my butt off to clean the slate in almost all of my other classes. Billy & I met directly after class to write a proposal for a Final Project (in lieu of a Final Exam) that we’ll have to do over the next two weeks. It’s basically a project to pick a conflict and use the Theory of Constraints’ tools we’ve learned about to find a win-win solution to it. Dr. Sheu prodded us to pick something complex enough that we can find many undesireable effects, etc. That is, not to choose something like: “I wanna go to the bars on Thursday but my girlfriend says ‘no’”. Our topic: World Hunger.

Seriously.

Then my Supply Chain Management group met for 20 minutes to divide up the slides for a presentation we’re giving tomorrow morning during class, and I’m in the middle of preparing some notes for my two slides.

Finally, I’m in the middle of writing a paper for my Human Resources class (another group project) that will nearly close out any lingering worries for my college career.

So all in all, it’s getting pretty close to being over. Just three weeks, some papers and a couple exams, and I’m loos’d of my role as a college student. And what a sad day that will be.

Makings of a Disaster

Joshua Works — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 12:48:58 -0600

Tonight I have one of the most intimidating exams of my college career. I’m surprisingly relaxed. Here’s the deal:

It’s for a class called “The Application of the Theory of Constraints” and tonight’s test represents the ONLY exam we’ll have in the class all semester. It’s also open-book, open-notes. And that’s probably why I’m relaxed, but probably not for very good reason. Open-book exams are notorious for being especially difficult. This one will probably be particularly difficult considering we don’t even have a textbook. We have a novel; a 280-page novel with all the fluff of a novel (spousal fights, descriptions of coffee) and so rooting out the appropriate answer to an essay question might prove to be too time-consuming.

The other thing that makes me nervous is that I have only taken 6 pages of notes all semester. If I had known our exam would allow them — then it’d probably be a different story.