sunday april 20, 2008
Timely Acronyms / San Francisco, CA / 19 days ago
I don't know when it started and I don't know why I am so compulsively obsessed, but it drives me completely insane that so many people are unaware of the difference between Standard Time and Daylight Time in their communications.
For example, when organizing a phone call or a meeting with someone's personal assistant in say, June, and that person writes "how does 1pm PST work for you?", I sometimes respond "That will be fine, should I put it down as noon or did you mean PDT?", which is totally obnoxious of me, I know... but I can't help it. I get especially bent out of shape when the acronym mis-usage comes from a lawyer, aren't these folks paid ridiculous rates to accurately communicate while crossing all of their t's and dotting every i?
I'm not sure whether it has to do with a lineage of time-sensitive engineering types on my father's side, but somewhere between the railroad engineer, the television engineer and the industrial engineer I have become a relentless time acronym enforcer and it is driving me nuts.
All I can ask is that everyone please do your part to make sure that more people understand how to properly communicate the accurate acronym when referencing the time... and if that's too complicated, then just skip the daylight savings bit altogether and reduce your acronym length by 33.3% by using PT, ET, etc.
sunday april 6, 2008
Flow or Flop? / San Francisco, CA / 1 month ago
Excited about the recent release of Flow this week, I dove right in as soon as I received the release announcement. My first task was to download an entire site to update my working copy. After about five tries and multiple freezes/crashes, I finally gave up and went back to old, reliable Transmit.
Later in the day when I was having an odd problem with the development site on my local machine, but not on the hosted version, I found that Flow had overwritten one file with the contents of another. Obviously this was baffling and quite frustrating as it meant that the application had to completely mix up not only the location of the files, but the naming and contents as well.
Anyway, I think Flow is a great concept, but further development and testing is certainly going to be needed if the product is going to survive/thrive.
sunday april 6, 2008
It's been a busy month of travel between North Carolina, Berlin and Los Angeles. Two parts work and one part play, Now that it's over I'll be glad to not spend 40 hours in a coach airplane seat inside of 30 days for a long time, if ever again.
Charlotte was easing into Spring with bright, exploding pear trees that resemble cherry blossoms, just with less of a red tint. While in Charlotte I rented a Prius and I have to say, they're more fun to drive than they look. So much fun in fact, I have been considering trading my car now in for a newer model Prius.
Berlin was almost indescribable. I will say that I absolutely loved the city as a whole. That's pretty good considering that I was only there for three days, the weather was either snow, sleet, rain, wind or overcast and the fact that I don't speak German. While I was there my friend and childhood neighbor also happened to also be in town vacationing and though I had just seen he and his wife in Charlotte, we managed to meet up for a brief visit in a coffee shop one afternoon to escape the snow. All in all I think I walked about six miles and slept about 14 hours total.
Long enough to get home, unpack and begin to settle, Dara and I were off again. We spent a quick weekend in LA visiting some friends and eating our way through Silver Lake. We even managed to catch up with Brett and Gina who gave me private sampling of the new Rancid album due out this September. First impression, it's a damn good record.
This weekend I am off to Chicago and followed by a day trip to Cleveland on my way home next Monday. After that I aim to be grounded in SF until the end of June when my sister graduates from Kellogg @ Northwestern.
Future Travels / Dopplr
Carmel-by-the-Sea in May, Chicago in June, São Paulo in August, Rio de Janeiro in August
