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Owen Update September 8, 2005

Posted by Owen in : Website, Work , add a comment

Well it’s been over a month since I’ve moved to SF and it’s been a lot of fun. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m having trouble working for myself. I get up at 11 (it’s like being in college all over again) and I don’t work many hours every day (2 if I’m lucky). But what I have been doing has been very exciting and I’m involved in some interesting business deals. What I lack in time working, I make up for in quality, or at least so I tell myself.

There’s some exciting changes coming to Iconator which I think everyone will enjoy. My TODO list, using the excellent Tasks software, is over 60 items long–and I’m making steady progress in completing them. My list contains everything from performance upgrades for Iconator to new features. I’ve recently discovered some nifty JavaScript libraries that will help me make more interactive websites: Prototype and Script.aculo.us. The special effects and interactivity one can do with these libraries is amazing. It’s almost like creating a desktop application on the web, without having to get into DOM minutiae.

I also have some ideas for new websites, but I’m not ready to go public with what they are or what they’ll do… but suffice to say they’ll be so-called Web 2.0 applications. This web 2.0 stuff is so exciting I stay up late dreaming up new ideas.

Fire Drill May 10, 2005

Posted by Owen in : Work , add a comment

Today the building I work in had a fire drill. The evacuation point was two nearby overpasses over the 134 freeway. (I won’t go into the logic of evacuating to a bridge in an emergency in Southern California.) What did most truckers and many car drivers do when they saw hundreds of people standing on a bridge looking down at them? Wave, honk their horns, and nearly get in accidents as they looked at all the people and wondered what they were missing. I had great fun making the universal honk-your-horn-sign–we even got one trucker to honk his horn for 5 seconds. I noticed that many truck drivers would reach for their horns even if they didn’t honk–it must be instinct, like when they see a school bus. It was a very entertaining fire drill, at least as far as fire drills go. :)

Put the Mac Aside? January 9, 2005

Posted by Owen in : Work , add a comment

Jeremy Zawodny nicely summarized my frustration with my Mac when he discussed his reasons for switching back to Windows. It’s true, too. I just don’t feel as productive on my Mac as I do in Windows. Office sucks, browsing the web is slower (I did a side by side comparison, and my PC loads almost everything substantially quicker), lots of apps aren’t as polished on the mac, and so forth. The lack of keyboard accessibility in general on the mac sucks. The only thing I really like in OS X are the Mail.app program and AdiumX. Both of those programs are better than anything I’ve used on a PC.

While Macintoshes are much more elegant and pretty than Windows, there are some areas they could really improve. If 10.4 doesn’t improve upon many of my complaints, I’m going to be very unhappy.

The Apocalypse September 12, 2004

Posted by Owen in : Work , add a comment

At 2:32 PM last Thursday the Internet dies at work. You could literally hear people hitting the refresh button over and over and their productivity ground to a halt. Personally, everything I do requires the Internet, so I took the opportunity to walk around the building. The normally quiet atmosphere was completely changed as people sat there and talked to each other. It was like being in a completely different place. Some people couldn’t cope and just sat there and stared at their monitors, while other people ran up and down the hallways frantically looking for someone to fix the Internet.

Deadly words like “SBC” and “Verizon” were overheard and I knew all was lost. So I did the next best thing to work–played solitaire. Well I would, except the damn company didn’t install it. I was reduced to talking to my coworkers about our favorite alcoholic beverages. Then the Internet came back (2 hours later) on and it was to the grind (for 20 mins until it went out again… then it was time to give up and go home).