“A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.” Fred Allen

Mathew Ingram posted about a friend of his Kareem and the fact that he’s a nightmare for big companies. I agree and would say that Kareem is also the opportunity that CreationStep and BandOfCoders is intended to leverage. Leverage is a bad word and sounds a bit evil. I guess we’re a bunch of Kareem’s who got together and are trying to float our own boats. We’re smart, motivated people (hopefully…) who’s boats aren’t floating in traditional companies. You should contact us for a chat if Kareem’s quote rings true with you.

“After too many days of being miserable, I realized it was because I wasn’t happy with my job. I was earning a lot of money, had just gotten a promotion, lived in a beautiful apartment near the beach with my rad girlfriend, but none of it was floating my boat.”

One of the handy features C# has is properties as a first level concept. In most cases it’s relatively straightforward to determine when to use a property and when to use a method. There are, however, some grey lines that will crop up and I’ve bumped into a bunch recently. Some related links:

• MSDN Properties vs Methods.
• C#: Properties versus getter methods which mentions that property abuse call lead to Heisenbugs.
• Finally, I like the summary at the bottom of this.

This has already done the rounds but if not, Paul Graham recently suggested that Microsoft is Dead. He didn’t mean dead like gone-dead and had to go so far as to explain himself.

A few highlights:

• “No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But they’re not dangerous.“
• “All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft’s anyway.“

Well this is getting out of hand, I just took and peek and have 469 comments awaiting moderation. I think it’s a safe guess that it’s 99% to 100% spam. Lovely. I know this is an old issue for sites with comments but I’m a rookie with this type of volume. I may have to get around to looking up some better tools for this.

I’m taking python, the language not the non venomous snake, for a test drive of late. One of python’s core tenets reminds me of something some guy once wrote. Mister python says:

“By philosophy, Python adopts a somewhat minimalist approach. This means that although there are usually multiple ways to accomplish a coding task, there is usually just one obvious way, a few less obvious alternatives, and a small set of coherent interactions everywhere in the language.” (quote from Learning Python)

I wish I’d wrote that in that previous post because it’s certainly another perq of the approach of building the smallest API footprint possible. Doing so makes the framework simpler to use and accelerates a developer’s ability to familiarize themselves with it.

Leon over at secretGeek put together a way for you to check.

It’s for a good cause. My friend’s Cassie and Mike are entered in this contest. That’s Mike stripping off his green belts in the top left video. Lend them your vote. I can’t stop watching it……

While I don’t expect anyone to believe me, I swear this is one I thought of myself a long time ago. It’s proof that ideas are cheap, implementation is all that matters.

Anyway, I had a brief stint in a previous life as a bit of a gym rat. Whenever I was in the gym watching all these people working their asses off it always struck me as odd that we just throw away all that energy. Well technically not throw it away but translating into something useless like noise, heat, a spinning treadmill etc. I often wondered what a farming family from a century ago would think if they saw a modern gym. It’s cool to see someone’s finally trying to do something about this.

What about something more rudimentary though? There’s all these people out there with a need to pick up heavy objects to stay in shape. Certainly there must be customers for that, people who have heavy objects they need lifted. Can’t we get them together instead of all these bright lights lifting the same damn objects over and over again all day?

What about a moving company? Instead of paying for a gym membership, I’ll setup a “circuit” for you for free. Run up the street to 35 Morris, climb the stairs, pick up a dresser, carry it down stairs, put in van, run a mile to another house, move something else, run back to previous house, etc. Sure, the uniforms would be a bit odd but how environmentally friendly is my new moving company?

Maybe I’ll try this next time I’m at a gym and someone picks up some dumbbells:

“Oh don’t worry about those, I already lifted those.”

“Pardon?”

“Those ones. I already lifted them. There’s a bunch over there that still need to be lifted.”

(04:29:40 PM) …brydon: where were you last night?
(04:29:41 PM) NHL: I live in a clean room at a high-tech hosting facility in California.

(04:26:28 PM) …brydon: I thought we were watching the game
(04:26:28 PM) NHL: Oh really? How did that make you feel?