December 2004 Archives

The Overscheduled Child

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Over at MSN they have an article about how kids need time to "do nothing," unstructured play time that's theirs and theirs alone.

Then a pretty damning indictment of the modern conventional wisdom of parenting follows.

This led me to think four competing thoughts simultaneously. They are:

1. I wish I knew how to play a musical instrument.
2. Kids are much more resilient than we think.
3. Formulaic anything is never as good as original work.
4. It takes all kinds of childhoods to make all kinds of grownups.

What would Jesus serve?

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I was perusing the great width of the World Wide Web and stumbled across a few heretofore unread pieces by my old friend Basil Valentine.

He talks about the importance, taught to us by Jesus himself (Jesus is Lord!), of the proper reverence towards food.

Amen, Basil, Amen!

I posted a couple of days ago about Hugh MacLeod's website.

If you mosey down to his post Flacked by Chanel?, you'll see that he's getting posts on his website that look like something that could have been written by the folks over at BzzAgents.

I myself was interested because I nearly got taken in by a corporate sponsored disinformation campaign.

There's a method for writing and deploying software that involves having a lot of the work already done. This method is pretty simple: you write a deployment platform and then host your applications on the platform. The various folks who vend this stuff are known mostly by three letter acronyms: IBM, CDN, BEA. JBoss, on the other hand, is a four letter word. More below.

The Hughtrain

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Okay, so Hugh MacLeod is a monomaniac. But he's a good one.

I've been lurking on this guy's site for about six months and I always laugh out loud.

I haven't shared it with y'all because, well, he swears a lot and he's talking about things that I've tried to talk to folks about before and just gotten blank looks.

But if you'd like to read what Jesus Christ might have written if he was intent on making a living selling stuff instead of founding a religion and defeating the Romans, then this is the site to read.

Follow his links; it'll open up a whole world of blogs that are wonderful reads.

On the downside, it'll waste an entire day. If you wanted to go to Inverleith Park and play a pickup game of touch rugby, a blog like this can ruin your day, 'cause you ain't leaving your seat until you've read every damn post.

During the last two months, I was making a phat £300 for every extra six hours that I spent in the technology slave pits over at the ConHugeCo, PLC where my contracting firm has me pimped out.

That's outstanding pay, as far as I'm concerned, and although I might complain, I really do love it.

But at that rate, Hugh cost me about $10,000.

Did I say it would waste a day? I'm lying. I've lost over a week in there. A fun filled week, to be sure, but still, there are pints not drunk, conversations not had and girls who are still saving themselves for me because the one fateful moment that they could have met me I was too busy reading his blog.

As Hugh might say, just because it's an adventure doesn't mean you won't get crushed.

About this Archive

This page is an archive of entries from December 2004 listed from newest to oldest.

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