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Monthly Archives: November 2010
Good-Bye, Herb
This last weekend (the weekend before Thanksgiving) my bride’s step-grandfather passed away. While I could share a few funny stories about Herb, I’ll share two: the silliest and most valuable interchanges I had with Herb.
Story 1:
Jessica and I often visited Indiana for holidays and important events like Jessica’s sister’s graduations. One such event brought me face to face with Herb, who loved computers and electronic communication, where he insisted on showing me this new search engine. I was not interested because I believe at that point in time I was using Alta Vista or Yahoo! or some such thing. Herb insisted that I check out this new engine Google. He loaded up what was probably IE4 or 5.5 and typed in Google.com. Up popped this primary colored logo with the simplest of layouts: a search field, and a button to search. Good golly this thing was stupid looking and didn’t give me a homepage with news and other garbage. I was pretty sure that this Google site was going to be gone before too long. I was wrong, Herb was right 🙂
Story 2:
Herb was an outspoken Democrat from Southern Illinois. He and his wife, Jessica’s grandmother, Babe, were very active at the time in the Democratic party in their hometown and the Southern Illinois region. I was registered independent in Texas and have generally found myself what would be labeled conservative. I am, however, not a Republican (or a tea partier). I found myself somewhat frustrated on one such trip to Indiana where we met and Herb and I had a really good talk. What we talked about was how parties got rather involved in sides, party lines, and ‘winning’ rather than taking care of people and the problems that the people were facing. We concluded together that it didn’t matter much which party was on your voter registration, but instead more importantly that the people be enabled to exercise their rights, the problems be resolved in a fruitful way, and that the political system not get bogged down in fighting of various sorts. It was the first time (out of multiple discussions with various folks) I had had such a great discussion with someone who on the surface didn’t see eye-to-eye with me politically. It was encouraging.
We’ll miss Herb at family gatherings. And I won’t forget one of the most important things he ever said to me, “Take care of Jessica, she’s a good girl.” I’ll be taking care of Jessica, and not just because he told me to. Good-bye, Herb.
Flash: Not as Evil as Bad Coders
I’m tired of the argument that Flash crashes browsers, consumes CPUs (and thus electricity and your laptop battery), and keeps your fan going. Guess what? Bad code outside of flash, and in HTML5, can do the same thing! Open Google Chrome and launch Twitter, Facebook, and Google Reader and check your resources. Is Chrome eating up system resources? You’ll probably not be surprised to discover that it is. Advertisers are using Flash and they’re using it in intensive ways. Flash by its nature sits as a plugin for most browsers (Chrome actually being an exception) but those browsers and Flash rely on developers doing certain things.
Worse, in HTML5 web workers you can set up a loop that will take a machine to its knees even if it doesn’t do anything. I’d make a demo page, but someone will undoubtedly use it for evil, so just trust me that a bad coder doing bad things can use non-flash things to take down your computer. I can do it without HTML5, too. I can probably write bad code in every programming language and probably take down every machine – because it’s bad code. Don’t blame the messenger [AKA Flash]! Blame bad coders and people who are using it irresponsibly. There are bugs, there have been security problems, but Flash is just as vulnerable as the browsers, and even your word processing software (ahem, Office + Macros).
I should also point out: I don’t code/program in Flash. I have nothing to gain from Flash being anywhere (except of course when I play Scrabble on Facebook, which I quite enjoy). I just don’t like it when people point their fingers at one technology or another like has happened to Flash pointing to the middle of the problem instead of the root.
If You Don’t Vote Tuesday
If you don’t vote on Tuesday then it’s like a vote for the Texas Rangers.
If you don’t vote on Tuesday then it’s like a vote for Pamela Anderson for Sunday School teacher.
If you don’t vote on Tuesday then it’s like a vote for the terrorists.
If you don’t vote on Tuesday then it’s like a vote for my beard to grow out to the point where I actually look like a mountain man.
If you don’t vote on Tuesday then it’s like a vote for eating a sewage shake.
If you don’t vote on Tuesday then it’s like you don’t count. Make your Tuesday November the 2nd count.