Categories
Life

Days Past

In late 1991 I was laid off from AgData. At that time there were even fewer tech companies in the San Joaquin Valley than there are now so I packed a bag and drove up to Seattle. Kim’s Dad lived there at the time so I had a place to stay while looking for a job.

I found a contract job a few days after I arrived. Amaze, !nc had just released the Windows and Mac versions of The Farside Calendar. It was mid-November, the test and development staff were burned out and they needed help testing the DOS release of the calendar.

All of that backstory just to say I remember driving home each night, pulling out of the Kirkland business park where Amaze was headquartered, driving past a time temperature sign on Interstate 405 that read 38 degrees. It was always raining, always.

I was reminded of that time when I took our pup out this evening to do her thing. It was 35-degrees, it felt nice. Strange how my brain works.

Categories
Football

Da Bears need some Rex

ESPN Chicago: “Hire Rex Ryan. I can’t claim to know anything about general manager candidates, but after reading ‘Collision Low Crossers,’ a fantastic football book about a season with the Jets, I think Ryan would be perfect fit here. Yes, he has a connection with the Bears, going back to his father’s reign as defensive coordinator. But it’s about Rex, not the Bears. He can bring the personality this team desperately needs. I don’t know if he’ll be the savior, so to speak, but it would be a fun ride.”

Since I read Ryan and Trestman were fired today I’ve been hoping the Bears would hire Rex Ryan. Hiring Ryan won’t fix their woes at Quarterback, but it would bring some crazy personalty to the team, and the guy knows how to win, even if he had a horrible time in his last few seasons with the Jets. Hey, Quarterback trouble anyone?

The first thing the Bears need to do is go out and find a Quarterback. I was hopeful Jay Cutler could be the guy, but he’s never been able to elevate to an ‘A-class’ level. I was always a fan of Kyle Orton and had high hopes for him in Chicago. I wish they had kept him.

It looks like Washington may have a couple of Quarterbacks to deal in the off season. I think the Bears would do well to pick up Kirk Cousins.

Guess we’ll see how this plays out.

Categories
Apple

Apple Austin?

t-gaap: “Would Apple be better served by augmenting the Austin campus to the point of moving Apple’s headquarters to Texas?”

No.

They would experience a brain drain never before seen in our industry. People love working for Apple, but they also love California. Even though I’ve heard nothing but great things about Austin, it’s pretty hard to beat what we have here.

Not to mention Apple’s green initiatives align with California values. Texas? Not so much.

Categories
Life

My New Job

I’m happy to say I’ve landed a new full time iOS Development position with a great company; Agrian. They’re a smart and fun bunch focused on creating useful solutions for the Agricultural industry. We live in the great San Joaquin Valley of California, it’s the richest agricultural land in the world. At Agrian we’re “…dedicated to helping all participants in the agrifood industry to grow and harvest crops that are safe, profitable, and comply with a host of state and federal government regulations.” It’s all about making things better for farmers, which in turn, will benefit all of us.

Agrian understands web scale solutions and realizes it’s all about services. Mobile is one tiny cog in that machine and I’m happy to be a part of it.

On the technical side of things I’ll get to use all kinds of nifty stuff day-to-day. We are, of course, using a lot of Objective-C but there is a nice little mix of Swift in the code base, I’m sure that will increase as we move forward. We’re also using some very interesting frameworks. I hope to share more on those later.

The group of developers I’m working with are top notch, all of them. I hope I can live up to expectations.

Categories
Uncategorized

Twitter for Breaking News

Mediabistro: “Twitter is what we wanted it to be. It’s this realtime information network where everything in the world that happens on Twitter—important stuff breaks on Twitter and world leaders have conversations on Twitter.”

The article is about Instagram vs. Twitter active monthly users, but that bit about Twitter being a realtime information network is the important bit. Twitter has been that for many, many, years. All the talk recently is about Twitter screwing with the timeline so it’s more like Facebook. Doing that would take it from a stream of data to a stream with a dam at its head. It would no longer be Twitter.

Maybe Twitter should do some speciality versions of its stream that cater to an algorithm. I’d love to look at it from time to time. For everyday use I definitely prefer the full stream of data, unmodified, as it happens.

Categories
Sports

Nebraska Football

ESPN: “Pelini improved to 67-27 as Nebraska’s coach on Friday with a 37-34 overtime win at Iowa. The victory pushed Pelini’s win total past Tom Osborne for the most ever at the school in a coach’s first seven years.”

Good luck finding a coach to replace nine wins per season.