Justin Lloyd's Thinkering

Somebody needs to think about this stuff...

Archives for 1996

Studying – Woodworking

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This month I am studying “Woodworking”

4th month of an in-person class with no formal class schedule. I am averaging about 20 hours per month in attendance and hands-on workshop time.

Ssh!

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I am of the opinion that our team meetings would go much faster if nobody actually said anything.

Single wire connection to a laptop

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Why do laptops need so many cables?

When I put my laptop on the desk I have to connect USB, power, network (if I want to access files on the server at high speed).

If I want an external keyboard, mouse or monitor, there’s even more cables.

Then there is firewire too.

Okay, so I know docking stations are available.

But they are generally expensive, cumbersome, inconvenient, specific to one particular make & model of laptop.

And you generally only ever have one of them, usually at the office.

So I’d need two or three for my laptop to suit my needs.

Why not integrate everything you need into the PSU, a mini docking station effectively, that connects to the laptop via a single cable?

You’d need to plug all of the cables in to the PSU. But a PSU is generally cheap, small, available from 3rd parties, not inconvenient to carry, does not take up much desk space when not being used.

I look forward to a day when a single serial cable, perhaps some future version of USB, can carry power, video, audio, network and external storage data traffic.

Come on Apple, get on that, would you?

Studying – Woodworking

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This month I am studying “Woodworking”

Update: Sliced my hand on a chisel. Not badly. Just gushed like a son of a bitch. Somebody had left a chisel on the bench amongst a pile of rags. I didn’t see it, reached over to grab the rag to wipe up some squeeze out glue. Sliced hand.

Bad at multi-tasking

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Somedays, when I am at work, I like to go crazy and treat myself by just doing one thing at a time.

Down with pointless busywork!

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People say “Wow! You are really anti-work.”

And my response is: “No, I am anti-busywork and anti-work-at-the-office-for-the-sake-of-it.”

I work literally from the minute I wake up and reach a coherent mind until I can no longer keep my eyes open and frequently end the day 19 hours later by falling asleep at my desk.

Every waking moment I try to pack with as much productive work as I possibly can.

What I rail against is the pointless busywork, the interminable empty tasks that do not move a project forward, and the ineffectual requirement that most managers have of requiring people to show up at a specific location at a specific time to perform a job that has no actual location- or time-based requirements.

Managing up

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I do so love getting congratulated by my colleagues for having done a stellar job and good work sufficiently well that it got my boss promoted and me nothing.

Flavours of ice cream

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Friend of mine was showing off this “new” language called Ruby the other day.

“It has this feature called mixins! It lets you use features from several classes at once! It’s totally revolutionary! Nobody else is doing this!” he said breathlessly.

“Those who do not study the history of programming are doomed to reinvent features from other languages.” I quipped.

“Huh?”

“Mixins are for “programmers” who had difficulty understanding multiple inheritance.” I added.

“Mixins in completely different and totally new.”

“I will let Howard Cannon from Symbolics know.” I offered.

“Huh?”

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