Through My Lense

So yesterday I posted about deciding to try something for 30 days and my first thing would be only taking the elevator if someone else was already taking it. Yesterday was the first day and I walked 660 steps. 440 of those steps I was carrying my bike. I am now deciding to change this goal. Eric not stick to a goal? Surprise surprise. But wait!!!!

I am increasing my goal to EVERYTIME. For the next 30 days, I will take the stairs everytime I go up to the 5th floor at work AND down to the ground floor.

Let’s see how many steps I get today!

So I just got to my desk but the path to work was a bit different this morning. I decided yesterday that for the next 30 days, I would always take the stairs unless there was someone to ride the elevator with. Since I bike to work quite a bit, these 30 days would certainly include times where I’d have to huff it up 110 stairs (5 floors) with my bike.

Think I can do it? Only time will tell.

last night, @danielslaughter (hehe) and i went to the gr tweet up at hopcat. a friend of his from high school had recently contacted him and was in the process of moving back to gr from lansing. she is pretty heavy into the twitter scene and has attended tweet up’s in detroit in the past. very cool stuff.

for the first one in grand rapids, we got 11 people to come out last night. random enough, i knew 3 of them from very wierd things in the past. one guy has been a photographer that i’ve followed on flickr for years but never met. one couple has a newfoundland and was in midas’ cgc class. small world. to make things even smaller, she works at meijer with a guy i used to work with and the lady that coordinated my $500 gift card winnings. and she voted for mason’s photo!

anyways. geeky? highly! fun? most definitely.

grtweetup.com coming soon…

as you may or may not know, there is a huge music festival that is being hosted at the double jj ranch in rothbury, michigan. when they first announced the show, mini woodstock/bonnaroo kind of thing came to mind. from all the news coming from the place it’s definitely making a name for itself. one thing that they wanted to do differently was the ‘green’ aspects of the event. concert go’ers had the option of putting an extra $3 or $7 on the price of their ticket which was to be used to buy carbon offsets for the energy used. they have lots of vegan/vegatarian vendors selling food at the event as well. very cool stuff for a festival to take on and try to do.

i thought about buying tickets but starting the day after falon’s birthday and spanning over the fourth of july weekend seemed inconvenient and i had really wished that they would have picked another weekend. hopefully they make an annual thing and pick another date for next year. everything coming from the festival (news, twitter, calls, etc) say that it will probably be back next year as everyone loves it.

the gr press (local newspaper in the nearest ‘big’ city) has a few writers at the festival using twitter to capture all the events of the show from a in-the-crowd perspective. i was quite excited to find that the press had done this. here are the links:

mlive music

troy reimink

jonathan hinkes

and here a bunch of people that are posted photos to flickr: tag rothbury

the crazy part is that we are about 2-3 miles away from the festival at falon’s parents new house and we can hear music. we were hoping that we’d see fireworks last night but we couldn’t see anything. falon’s mom saw fireworks that direction last weekend for the sandy corley harley davidson bike event but they must have had the fireworks in a different location this weekend. oh well. there are many other events this summer where i will see fireworks. last night was a good time with family and that’s all that counts.

what now? they just restarted the fire from last night and we’re going outside to chill.

it took awhile to process but $500 is $500 and who cares how long it takes. for those of you that don’t know, awhile back i submitted this photo of mason to the meijer pet photo contest. submitted it and forgot about it basically. one day i get an email from someone at meijer.com saying that i won the grand prize. i replied and filled out the paper work needed before i even asked what the prize was. needless to say that i was a bit excited when i figured out that i had just won $500 in gift cards to meijer. that’s just plain awesome with gas so high and two meijer gas stations within like 2 miles of our house. let the free gas begin!

my big question now is what they are going to do with it. i asked and all the lady told me was that it was featured on the pet section at meijer.com which is actually pretty sweet in and of itself. check it!

10 steps to ruin - shlomy gantz

1. evenly distribute data - evenly across home pc, network, briefcase and office. forms of media should include paper napkins, scribble pads, and uml designer from 1989. put stuff in multiple directories, use some names and use your own naming scheme.
2. don’t test - your code is perfect and the defects are the users. do no include testing in plans but if you have to, assume 1 to 2 bugs will be found. make sure any testing is only at the end and only by you. you know the code better than anyone. automated tools like selenium and imacros don’t work and cost american jobs. unit tests are bad as well. cfunit, ant and maven are bad. load testing can be done by having a few friends click at the same time. webload and opensta will again cost american jobs. track any bugs that you find using emails and excel documents. tools like bugzilla and lighthouse pro are a waste of time.
3. document nothing - do not comment your code. leave all commenting to the end of the project because there is always time. but if not, you wrote the code and you will understand it later anyway. document in latin for extra security. use the shortest variable names as possible to save space.
4. do not plan - project plans are always wrong. just code as hard as you can every day. working hard means more productive, good code and more money.
5. no tracking - do not track any metrics because they dont matter, no one looks, and they won’t motivate anyone. if you have to, track everything via 3 hour twice weekly meetings and details daily developers summaries. but keep all data a secret from the developers.
6. no process - do not follow any process and even those who say they do, don’t follow it. source control is annoying. zip files will be much easier if you must. subversion is another one of those anti-american programs. coding standards are not necessary. if it works then its good and don’t show your code to anyone else.
7. trust consultants/experts - no need to check references because they have acronyms after their name and are expensive for a reason. they are better than you because they wear suits and smile plus they will shake hands with you.
8. ignore design/experience - the code is the application. make it work and then make it pretty. either do not involve the user or involve them in every single decision there is to make and never challenge their choice. send them uml diagrams and tech specs for approval before coding. prototypes are a waste of time, just start coding.
9. optimize*3 - if there is a problem, change the code and don’t look at hardware. do not use frameworks. they add 3 ms per request.
10. no training - only buy books and do no send developers to trainings. they will only buy beer with your money.

if you haven’t noticed by this point in the blog post, shlomy took the approach of what not to do in a project. the best part of the presentation was that all of these things, he has actually seen at corporations across the nation working as a project recovery consultant. the last slide said “i pity the fool who took this literally.” lol

one question was asked about where to start since we can’t fix everything in a week. shlomy recommended the chaos report by the standish group.

email shlomy for more books/articles. anything from cooper is always great. shoot the project manager is a great ebook on myths in project management.

*this post is part of my notes from my experience at the cf united 2008 conference in washington dc from june 18 to june 20*

when the lost trailers came through town for the kenny chesney after parties in mid-may, they took some time to shoot a video for their latest song (hollar back) when they were here. b-93 was saying that they were recording it and i figured that it was just live show video from the intersection. which i was pretty excited about because i was at the show and was hoping to see myself on screen. it was announced today that b93.com had a preview so i just peeked and wow. what wonderful publicity for the city of grand rapids!

here is the link on b93.com to read more and check out the video. i also took a few screen shots of notable buildings in grand rapids. check them out below.

see the river house condos through the calder?

grand rapids skyline

intersection crowd

more grand rapids skyline

intersection stage

the video is definitely very cool to see even if you are not a country fan. i was hoping for some more distinguishable live shots but grand rapids should be very proud of the results.

i suck. again.

history:

april 29 - my bike got stolen. ya that sucked.
may 3 - uad event in kzoo. first short dock. bleck.
may 10 - falon’s first tulip time parade. same ol’ parade for me.
may 17 - kelly had game night at the fountain house. early night.
may 19 - went to ann arbor for a work seminar. long day.
may 21 - branded played outside van andel for the chesney street party. good times.
may 28 - falon’s parents found a house to buy. fun old farm house.
may 31 - checked out our first hunt test. cool stuff.
june 3 - spring <br /> conference in athens, oh. another great year!
june 6 - whit/grants in south elgin, il with the dogs. great new friends.
june 7 - labfest in mendota, il. awesome time with some cool dog/dog people.
june 10 - my dad turned 55 today. last birthday dinner at gma’s. i will miss her swiss steak.

and that brings us to current. i am sure there are photos of some or all of that on flickr but i am too lazy to find links for each item.

future:

on going - try to blog
on going - try to bike to work more
on going - try to exercise more in general
on going - try to be cleaner at home and work
asap - get new camera/lens
june 16-20 - washington dc for cfunited 2008
june 21-22 - b93 birthday bash
june 21 - aunt/uncle’s 30th anniversary party with bronk brothers
july 2 - falon’s 23rd birthday
late july - hopefully a vacation, moving a friend and a few uad events down south

this good for now. more to come. *hopefully*

I’ve been getting bugged about photos of my new bike. Oh wait, you don’t know what happened to the old bike do you? ya I suck at blogging and it got stolen.

So here’s my new bike! It took awhile to make the claim and get the insurance check. I claimed it on my home owners and it only covered 75% of the bike after my deductible but better than nothing right? I tried to justify it in my head that I needed to put that much into it for a tune up and some fixes but not sure that’s really true. Oh well.

Yesterday I went for a 5 mile ride at lunch since everyone else insisted on going out for lunch. Screw that. Restaurant food is way over priced and I’d rather spend what little spending money I have on other stuff.

Here are the rest of my photos from yesterday’s ride.

Since we moved into this building, I have shut the light off when I left the bathroom. Does it really need to be lit when no one was in there? I didn’t think so but evidently lots of other people thought it did as I very rarely found the light off when I went to use the facility. Today (being Earth Day), I made a small sign letting people know that it was earth day and to shut the light off. I put the sign there this morning and I just visited the men’s room to find… DARKNESS!

Success is sweet. Now… to think of what goes on tomorrow’s sign.

*update* I just expanded my bathroom signs to the women’s bathroom as well with the help of Falon to let me know that no one was in there.