June 2007

For today’s walk we decided to go through Theodore Wirth Park and circle back to home via Bassetts Creek Valley Park. Nothing unusual to report, except that Bassett’s Creek, as the watershed for most of Minneapolis and its north-western suburbs, is kinda gross. Can’t wait for them to complete the long-awaited 2004 Watershed Management Plan.

Walk Stats
Track Map
Distance: 2.69 miles
Time: 1:16 hours

No I’m not getting an iPhone today. Nor will I be getting one tomorrow. Verizon has decided to punish me and every one of their existing customers for Apple’s innovation by making sure to enforce to their dying breath the 2-year contracts we signed. So, I won’t be getting an iPhone for about a year. But, I will be bad-mouthing Verizon in the interim.

Constantly. Whenever the chance comes up.

Now, that being said, I’m okay missing out on this Apple insanity. Mainly because, no matter how bad Verizon is (did I mention that they’re really, really bad?), AT&T, the exclusive wireless carrier for the iPhone, is worse. They’ve been documented installing equipment in their central offices to allow the NSA to snoop on their customers’ internet connections. Didn’t Verizon do this as well? Probably, but at least they are saying the right things, like how they’d never allow wiretapping of their customers without a warrant. AT&T just shrugged their shoulders and said that if you aren’t doing anything illegal, you have nothing to worry about.

Uh huh, heard that one before.

So, to my friends that are getting their iPhones tonight, please see my entry on FireGPG and think twice before sending me any e-mail from your shiny new device without encrypting it first.

For today’s dog walk, I thought it would be fun to see the I-394 traffic nightmare that was supposed to be starting today. So, we walked down to the Thomas Ave. pedestrian bridge over the highway and… traffic was moving just fine. Turns out they didn’t start construction and narrow the lanes down from four to one until 9am this morning, long after we’d arrived home with the dogs, given Babbage his daily bath, driven to Uptown to pick up insulin for Pascal and coffee for us (Large Caribou Cold Press with shot of white chocolate), driven back home and begun our work day.

I was severely disappointed. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

Walk Stats
Distance: 1.92 Miles
Time: 0:54 Hours

For about a month now we’ve been taking our two dogs, Babbage and Pascal, on daily walks after their 6:30am feeding and drugging (Pascal has diabetes and needs insulin twice a day, Babbage has atopic dermatitis and is prepping for a Pfizer drug study at the University of Minnesota). Even more recently, I’ve started carrying a GPS receiver with us and recording the different tracks we take around our neighborhood. Honestly, when we moved in to the Bryn Mawr area, we had no idea just how many wonderful routes we could walk right from our home.

Here’s where we went today. It was 3.16 miles and took 1:17 to complete. This is one of our longer walks since it’s Sunday and we haven’t been able to walk for the last few days due to raw paws on Babbage.

I had just been documenting the tracks on a separate page of this blog, but decided that since it’s become such a large part of my daily routine, it deserves main page treatment. If it bothers you, good reader, having posts of our walking route every day, let me know and I’ll relegate it to the back pages once again.

Found this amusing link showing how “the world’s worst car,” the Trabant Sputnik of East Germany is/was made. This video in particular, reminds me of several enterprise software jobs I’ve had. Sure, most of the projects started out with detailed plans and documentation, but in the end management almost always abandons quality in favor of deadlines.

“Just keep kicking the grill until the hood lines up,” could easily have come out almost any of my boss’ mouths (if our project had a “grill” and “hood” that is ). “We’ll formalize the workaround into a documented procedure later.” In fact, I think a couple of them even had the same exquisite mullet as the worker in the video.

That’s one of the big reasons I’m out on my own now and why I refuse to call any software I write, “enterprise quality.” I’d much rather build Porches than Trabants.