Safe from the Losing Fight

Well, that didn’t take long.

The iWeb experiment is officially a failure.

It has a nice GUI and all, but it won’t let you do comments or anything remotely interesting.

Oh well.

[Note: This was the first post of my personal blog, Type 11 Error. The idea was have a blog that wasn’t restricted to professional endeavors. If you can’t bore them with code, bore them with your personal life, I always say.]

Its all Elaine’s fault, as usual. I was going about my merry way when she starts pestering me that I haven’t posted to my blog recently. That’s why this atrocity was born.

I actually have another blog, Safe from the Losing Fight, but I haven’t posted to it in a while. Its mainly about professional endeavors and thoughts, and I’d like to keep it that way. I haven’t updated it recently because of various NDAs and just simple lack of time. Since I’d like it to be professional the posts there take longer to compose and edit than the simple “what I had for breakfast this morning…” posts.

I’m starting this blog for several reasons:

1. I have a new toy to play with (i.e. iWeb. A hint to those with engineers in their lives: If want something done, buy the engineer a toy that does said job. They still might not finish the job, but at least they’ll be happy for a while. And really, isn’t that the point? To make your engineer happy?)
2. A place to log thoughts that aren’t necessarily professional, well composed, logical, or human.
3. For the proud llamas. You know who you are.

As you might note, with some dismay no doubt, the name of this blog is even geekier than that of my “professional” geek blog. I’m quite proud of that. It just goes to show I’m even more of a dork in my personal life than in my professional. I try not to disappoint.

[Note: This was the orginal post for my “professional” blog. It attempts to describe why I started a blog. It certainly wasn’t because I’m interesting.]

Or writing is hard, I should say. But “math is hard” is what one of my coworkers told me. I was trying to explain something technical (like how virtual memory works) when her eyes glazed over. I get that a lot. Anyway, she got some terms mixed up and said something like “so should I test the multiflange array for tacheon emissions?” Or something like that; I don’t really pay attention to the QA people. But her response to my laughter was “math is hard.”

Although math has never been all that hard for me, it did remind of what is. Writing. Being a software engineer I’m more used to communicating with computers in written form than humans. That means writing interesting specs or design documents or just communicating with coworkers is pretty difficult for me. Unfortunately submitting instructions via email to someone isn’t like writing a program to run on a computer. People don’t listen well and take exception to being called “buggy.”

Recently Joel Spolsky has been writing about the lack of good writing in the software engineering field. He’s asserted that good writing skills are essential to a software engineer’s career, and even compiled a book on what he considers to be good writing. Among his suggestions for engineers wanting to get better is something he calls “practice.” I decided to give that revolutionary idea a chance before Microsoft patents it.

So that’s the point. This is just practice. i.e. This is pre-alpha quality writing not meant to be used in a production environment. Use at your own risk, and keep all appendages inside the cart at all times.