“It’s not a 9-5 job. It’s an every moment you’re awake job because you actually enjoy the work that you’re doing.” – Jeffrey Kalmikoff

Somebody stopped me on the street this morning. I was just walking, wearing jeans, a t-shirt, my backpack on, headphones and a gray woolly hat… a coffee in one hand, a smoke in the other…
I guess I was also kind off dancing, you know when you walk shaking your head because you’re listening to something nice…

This guy just stopped me and he said “Hey, what are you listening too?“, I tell him. He says “Are you going to work?“… I’m already thinking “maybe I know him”.

He says “Dude, you must really have a nice job, and you must really like it. You look so relaxed, it’s 10 AM, you’re not in a hurry and you look happy… Anyway, have a beautiful day“. Then he just left.

He is absolutely right, although lately it’s been really crappy(cotton picking, sugar-cane cutting crappy), I still really like my job…

I get to work. I plugin the lappy. Windows Update says “hey dude, there are some updates for you”, I’m like “Bring them on”. Bad mistake.

One of the updates was IE8, and this is the update story(unfinished):
• Windows Update downloads the “IE8 Update”
• The “IE8 Update” starts up, decompresses something in c:\<random string> and says “I have to restart your computer. It will update some stuff and then restart again. During this time you won’t be able to use screen readers, because the update will run before any user services start up”. I say “Ok, do it”
• The computer restarts, Windows boots up
• IE8 Update appears, decompressing some other stuff in c:\<random string> and then it displays a nice window saying “Dude, I will start downloading updates”
• The following window appears:

Some aspects of this window:
- it has nice colors in a modern gradient like mix-up
- it has no buttons whatsoever
- it says Downloading
- YOU CANT BLOODY CLOSE IT WITHOUT KILLING THE DAMN PROCESS, WHICH I DON’T WANT TO DO

30 minutes have passed since it begun downloading and I think it’s downloading the bloody Internet. 30 minutes is forever when you are keeping a user staring at a window that never does anything.

I’ll update this post once it finishes (or not).

UPDATE: Only took 40 minutes, restarted again and now it works

I could have also named this post “how in god’s name did I not know about this game earlier”.

Rev 10-12 years ago, I used to play this nice Nintendo game called E.V.O.. I absolutely loved this game.

I would start with you (the player) as a small fish trying to eat your way through evolution. You would later get to be a dinosaur….. and so on.That was very nice. I played this game almost half of my life, just like StarCraft…

Fast forward 2008, enter Spore…. oh my god. Actually, what I am talking about… you can be your own god.

And how did I find this game? Browsing SpaceCollective and finding a TED video of Will Wright (part of my pantheon of e-gods) present the game. Just fell into my lap, literally.

If you like Sci-Fi, science, computers and games, you really must see this video of Will Wright describing Spore.

If this is old news for you… you could have told me earlier.

Oh yeah, “Happy new year!”

Okay, so the title is a little off…. but it really is my birthday today.

And a good day it was. A nice, short day with a lot of accomplishments.

I got my new ID card (I came out good in the photo, which is a plus), I saw my kitchen almost done (the nice colors we picked, excellent work by extraordinary workers), work was good (as opposed to the usual nasty nature of my work this year).

My wife bought me a classical guitar, which I already love, just like I love my wife (WAF +1, if you know what I’m talking about).
I’m going to learn to play by reserving 15 minutes every morning.

I hope that your day was as good as mine.

“The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.” – Arnold Toynbee

I’m back!

I’ve missed work – just a little – but don’t let anybody know. The second day after my leave I had something really interesting to do, which kept me at work until midnight. Finishing successfully gave me the self esteem boost that I call “I love my job”. It’s one of those rare (rare now, once often) moments that remind me why I became a developer. Enough of that, back to business.

I’m married now, to a beautiful and fun woman that understands what makes me tick, and that’s wonderful. We are fixing our future house, which I hope we are going to finish by December which will include my hopefully spacious office (I say hopefully because we are going to share it, as she want gym stuff in it too). I’m going to use the new office for my fun work (that means work that I don’t perform at the office, which isn’t as fun anymore).

This fun work includes rewriting GUtil into something much better which will take full advantage of Firefox 3, working on the XUL data collection application that I’m going to hopefully finish this year (and which I’m going to use to catalog my stuff – 100+ SciFI and business books, currency collection, god knows how many DVD’s – so I am actully going to dogfood it) and testing Shredder/TB3.

Speaking about ThunderBird 3, it’s almost in Alpha 3 now, so we need all the help we can get. If you have a few hours, please join the testing effort and help us make the next version of Thunderbird a smash hit! After you read some testing instructions for Alpha 3 you can complete a smoketest in a little over an hour and give something back. It’s that simple.

For the grand finale, I’m leaving you with another great book. Odyssey by Jack McDevitt is a great space adventure, in the spirit of The Voyage of the Space Beagle. It’s not very big and it’s easy to digest.

I’m switching to George Martin for this week’s “on my way to work reading”. Cheers!