Today church was canceled because the snow storm made driving to church from longer distances risky. Since our body of believers drive in from various places into Denver proper the elders decided it was safer for everyone that we not obsess about Sunday morning and instead stay safe.
I’m thankful for our elders and their gracious outlook on life. I could write a boatload more, but I’ll keep this post short. I’ve got a lot to do today 🙂
I won’t tell you my co-workers names. I could, it probably wouldn’t matter, but in this case I’ll use their Winnie the Pooh names. I’m thankful for them because they’re my comrades, we’ve been through the thick and thin and kept moving forward. I’m going to refer to all of them by their 100 Acre Wood genders to keep them anonymous(-ish).
I’m thankful for Eeyore. He’s a great, patient, plodding along character, even if he does have a rain cloud above him. He’s insightful, he’s dedicated, and he’s patient.
I’m thankful for Rabbit. Rabbit is studious, but he sure hates it when you mess with his stuff. He’s got a plan and you’re ruining it. But in the end he contributes a whole heap of goodness.
I’m thankful for piglet. Piglet plods along, unsure of himself, but definitely making progress. Piglet is definitely a loyal friend.
I’m also thankful for Roo. Roo is definitely fun. I like fun.
I’m probably Tigger. I could be wrong about that, but I tend to get super excited and want everyone to do what I’m doing. Let’s all go bouncing! Let’s play this game! Let’s use this project management system!
Christopher Robin is actually a combination of people at the office, but that’s good. I’ve found there are very few real one-person Christopher Robins.
I’m thankful for the full cast and crew. I even pray for them, whether they like it or not. Because that’s what Tiggers apparently do.
Creative Commons: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cyron/105110722/sizes/s/in/photostream/
In the movie Casino Royale James Bond chases a villain up into the scaffolding of a tall crane. It makes for amazing cinematography, a great fight, and heightens (no pun intended) a scene that would have been a relatively standard bar room brawl. But the chase and fight didn’t start there. They started somewhere below and they worked their way there. As it turns out logical arguments, which hopefully have less blood and risk than physical fights, need to be restrained to the lowest possible point of agreement. Otherwise it’s like having a fight on a crane that is floating in mid-air. Since that doesn’t exist outside of the Matrix, let’s assume that’s either not possible or a bad idea.
Opera is a business. Business offer users/customers/beings/entities solutions. But they do that based on a business model. In the excellent book “Running Lean” the auther, Ash Maurya, points out that the business model is what the company is actually selling. Whatever the solution may be, it is based on the business model. If the business model is stable, and a workable business, then the solution can be discarded as time requires it and paradigms shift and a new solution can be put in place on top of the business model. Opera just changed their solution, but not their business model. The jump to webkit is based on offering a solution that they think is viable based on their business model. That’s good business sense.
Web developers are assuming that this change is based on some weird desire to kill the Internet, or destroy diversity. This is a bit presumptuous. If anything my 13 years in the industry has taught me it is that diversity fails to go away. For the sake of argument when I went to BD Conf and saw a wide range of qualified speakers deliver presentations on web development they complained consistently that just because someone had Android and Android had a webkit based browser you couldn’t assume anything. Why is that?
The answer is because every version of Android has its own twist from the handset vendor or the service provider. And then there are the old devices. Those don’t seem to go away. Partially because of two year contracts and hand-me-downs, and partially because some phones work ‘well enough’ for users and they don’t care; But they DO want your website to work on their mobile devices. Many, many devices work with Opera Mobile or Opera Mini and those users take for granted that sites will be workable. Except that over and over again I see developers only testing on iOS or Android and calling it good enough. You can’t gripe about the philosophy of this business change from Opera if you are only paying them lip service. Use Opera on the desktop, the mobile, and even the Wii and test on it if you’re actually passionate about their solution offerings.
One last detail is this: RIM/BlackBerry [disclosure: they are my former employer] is using Chromium for their browsers and has been for a while. They are using the same code base, but they are not shipping the same code. How can their BB10 browser score higher on HTML5 tests if they are? Opera will not be shipping the identical code. They will ship variances. They will update on different cycles. They will do what their business model defines as a good procedure.
Don’t get angry at Opera and state that they’re ruining diversity – they’re not. They’re changing their solution based on the details of the business model, which you may not know specifically. They may have a really great reason to do so that has nothing to do with following Android, iOS or BlackBerry/RIM. Opera has long known it needs to differentiate itself in the market to stay alive and competitive – that’s a major part of their business model. We need to argue about more relevant things like which James Bond movie is best because unless we’re part of the leadership of a browser vendor who knows our business model, we really can’t call those shots anyway.
You’ll excuse me, though, I have to get back to writing backwards compatible, future friendly, cross-platform, web standards compliant code. Code that works in all the variations of WebKit.
Say, how fast is a “jiffy” lube change supposed to take? Is there a checkbox, note field or option somewhere for me to tell my local franchise/store/location/entity that I want to not be delayed radically by car repairman theatrics? I just want to drive up, have them swap out old petroleum bi-products with new petroleum bi-products and send me off in what I think a jiffy is. I’m not trying to complain, but it feels like it takes twice as long as needed because we have to go through the whole, “Your air filter looks like it could be replaced, do you want us to extort some more money?,” process.
Every oil change place seems to take longer than it should because of this. It doesn’t matter if I’m getting Penn-soil, Quacker Stat, or STD oil – even at Walmart – something is weird. I’m pretty sure that a place that allowed customers to feel like they weren’t being messed with would do exceedingly well.
When I was a little boy my dad was building a house. One of the people he had hired to help with the house had a side business as a magician. He and his wife did a magic show for my birthday when I was little. I remember the wonder. I remember trying so hard to figure out the tricks. It wasn’t that I was a skeptic it was that I knew Henry couldn’t be magical because he helped build houses. Houses were like magic tricks then. If you could build a house you could build a magic trick, and if you could build a magic trick you could figure out the blue prints of the magic trick.
I remember even at that early age watching for things that were fast. Slight of hand that required me to blink or miss something. I didn’t see much that was a give away then, and I remember him not telling me when I begged for him to explain how the tricks worked.
Years later I got a magic trick set and a juggling set for Christmas. Marked card, plastic cups with a hidden chamber and foam balls were in the set. Also included were a rubber false thumb and “silk” handkerchief as well as a yellow rope/cord and a large metal ring. I quickly learned the trick where the rope would be tide to the ring and then be pulled off magically despite having been tied on twice. I had the blueprints. I didn’t have to figure out the tricks, I had to figure out the presentation of the tricks. I distinctly remember trying to impress my uncle Jim with some of the tricks that Christmas. He tried to feign enthusiasm, but eventually when I asked him, “Did you see how I did it?” He squirmed a bit and explained to me the tricks.
Magic tricks are rarely about the magic. They’re about the story. They’re about the strain and failure of the audience. You try to see how it’s done, but the failure to figure it out makes it more engaging. They’re like jokes: the non sequitur is really what makes the joke work. It isn’t the logical flow but the illogical flow that actually makes the joke funny. Your mind searches for the connection because you know the obvious connection isn’t right.
I’m thankful that my parents hired the Professor. I’m grateful that I had the chance to be surprised, wowed and educated at such a young age. I’m often please with the number of things I do remember. I subscribe to a ‘magic’ podcast to continue to learn tricks, scams and magic. I love being wrong, it keeps me wondering.