May 31
holden watching the materials
beleive in art cars
snow balls the baltimore treat
holden watching the materials
beleive in art cars
snow balls the baltimore treat
I have finally gotten around to improving my grammar posting a link about the penguin sweaters, although they are sadly no longer needed. (Sadly because I would love to make one, not because I’m hoping for more penguin-killing oil spills.)
Yes, what with the ongoing move, the impending (still!) sale of my mom’s house, my ten millionth sinus infection of the year and a trip to pack for, the only thing I have to blog about are penguins.
I’ll get around to a real post sometime soon.
tonight we went on a walk down to fells point, the light on the water was perfect, and made holdens face glow even more than usual…
sure I’ve lived here for almost 8 years, ive embraced this city like no other. Ive purchased a home, helped start a art space design to promote its arts, ive decided to raise my child here, and even seriously considered getting a baltimore city tattoo…. but not till today have I really felt accepted. Thats right folks I got an email from john waters, pertaining the ccas cookbook zine. John Waters has always been one of my favorite directors and one of the many reasons I love our fair city…
so yah…. the call for recipes is still open… so heres the description again
Im starting to compile recipe’s for a Baltimore diy cookbook/zine, to be published in the spring of 06 to benefit the charm city art space. The cookbook will comprised of recipe’s submitted by our own community, be it crab cakes, tofu scrable, home made scrapple, vegan cookies, cherry pie’s, beer what ever in a zine format. Vegans, meat eaters, vegetarians, macrobiotic, pagans need all apply. Recipe submissions should include your standard ingredients, cooking directions, times etc, but can also include what music is best to listen to while cooking or books/zines which can fill the time during cooking times. Reworks of traditional Maryland cooking, your moms handed down recipe’s, your own inventions happily accepted, but please no recipe’s taken directly from other sources.
All those who submit recipe’s will receive 2 copies of the cookbook, as well as be able to take copies on consignment. An online version of the cookbook will also probably be made available several months after initial printing. Prices will be determined by cost of printing, but will probably be sold for around $5. All proceeds above cost will be donated to the charm city art space, a diy gallery and performance art space, which has been supporting the Baltimore indepent and punk arts since 2002 in a little row house on Maryland ave.
to submit recipe’s please send email to
recipes@geekpunk.org
I so rarely write about my development work, well mostly becuase I would generally rather talking about things besides work when im not working. Yet as I sit here installing parallels on my new macbook pro so I can … sadly … run xp / visual studio work work… Im thinking alot about experiance I have had recently durring my new job.
For the most part my development experiance has been very varried… I have always worked at places where I was forced to work in many different technologies. I started in perl, moved to vb/asp, to coldfusion, to java, to php , and now most recently to the .net platform. Becuase Ive worked in environments that were technologicly diverse I saw these languages and environments as just tools to build with. Just as a carpenter would have a many different hammers and techniches for different situations so was I w/ my tool set. At my last job I had a great interaction w/ a coworker who was a strong beliver in the idea of mixing technologies to create the best solution. Dont get caught up in the tools, if you understand the problem and the basics of your platform… ( not the “technology platform” like j2ee or .net but the physical platform being a webserver or win/unix box …) then all you have to do is use the write hammer for the job.
Now with most development environments, particularly web development envionrments, your forced to get down to the basics of the envionrment. You need to understand that a web page posts data to a web server, and it returns data to you. That to keep data between posts you have to deal with some sort of state management , that you have a set of html tags that are standard acorss development platforms etc… To solve problems in all of these envionrments you can do nice little tricks, but it all comes down to the basics of http and the server / browser interaction. Nothing is hidden from the developer, and allthough this means that the average developer has to know alot of content knowledge of the web app world in general and the specific dev environement so be it… what you lose in needing to know you gain in flexibility of environments.
Now enter the ms .net/visual studio environment. In .net/vs they go out of their way to hide this nitty gritty basic understanding of web apps from lowly developers. Basic idea is developers should understand their language, and that .net/vs will shelter them from the web platform. In addition they give the developer some quick tools for both “completing” code for them, as well as new “controls” which exist on in .net/vs. These controls in many cases are very similar to stuff in normal web apps, but slightly differnet enough to “hide” whats really going on. A very standard / open / fliexible web platform which is shared across multiple languages/environments gets obscured to the lowly developer to the point where it seems like a whole new world , only to translate this whole new world back to the old world all along… but thats another discussion. So… who cares right… well because its obscured… what happens to developers is instead of being able to share / extend ideas from other technologies… instead of being able to push along w/ progress in web apps like ajax (yes I know about atlas… but how many .net develoeprs do … in a short pole of my coworkers not many did) or common frameworks…. They wallow in almost a .net knowledge ghetto. They only know the .net way… well because .net hides the real way from them. They dont bother looking behind the curtain because ms has decided to tell them they theres nothing fun there, and to just trust them they know whats best. in short… helping to make a group of developers who only sort of know whats going on. I know the idea is its cheaper / easier to get people who know how to do their one thing… and so by hiding the web from the web app, they are making it easier to bring developers on board. But it almost seems as though to say, well we know we cant aspire to have frank loyd wright … so lets just admit its 1970’s architecture from this point on.
But if there is any constant, in 2 years a new thing will make this obsolete , and ill be ranting about something else…. good times.
Every day for the past few weeks, a group of students has been meeting in the study room that adjoins my office. Since we share a very thin wall and a wall vent, I can hear everything that goes on in that room. Sometimes, this is amusing, but lately, it has been hell. This group of students is rehearsing for a performance of Death of a Salesman. Aside from the fact that they’re all really, really overemoting, their rehearsals are coming inches from causing me real physical pain.
I hate, hate, hate Death of a Salesman with the kind of intensity that I usually reserve for gag-inducing smells (rotten tomatoes) or foods (pickles). I would rather bang my head against a wall than hear “you know, in France, they say champagne is the drink of the complexion” one more time. I’d rather attend a high-school musical EVERY DAY than listen to one more rendition of Act 2 of Death of a Salesman. Even with earplugs, I’m constantly cringing. Thank God the semester ends soon.
/rant.