Laid off...
Well, it looks like I don’t escape this downturn unscathed. Integrum just laid off half their staff, including me.
Three guys were suddenly called into one office for a meeting. The rest of us were called into the board room. “Oh, no,” I thought, “they’re laying them off and this is to apprise us of the situation and reassure us that we still have jobs.”
Well, I was half right - the larger group was the one getting laid off. My ears were actually ringing for most of this… “There’s no easy way to say this… The first two quarters were really rough… I hate doing this… I’ll give any of you a glowing letter of recommendation…”
The unlucky ones met up at a restaurant afterwards to talk and plan. Those with savings were going to look into consulting and side jobs for a while. Those without were going on unemployment and starting job hunts. Nobody was really angry at Integrum, just numb and sad.
I’m sad too. This was the best bunch of people I’ve ever been privileged to work with. Hopefully I will be working with them more, just in other venues…
Read more...I just finished asking Diana what she thought about cancelling cable TV while the budget was tight. (She was OK with the idea since she has Hulu.) I come back to GMail and see this ad at the top:
TV Service Too Expensive? - www.DishNetwork.com
Oh my God, I thought, Google did develop mind-reading technology.
Well, no. But they may as well have. They probably displayed that because my last two sent e-mails were:
Reminder: Jobs: Next: Check Chase bank statement for payments to cancel.
I have to backtrack - it looks like the travel budget will be too tight in June. Don't think we're going to be able to make it. :(Read more...
Zyps at MofoCamp
Zyps was one of two chosen topics for Mofocamp last night. I wasn’t really expecting that, so I was totally unprepared, but we piled into one of the breakout rooms and started hacking away.
I said Zyps was ideally suited for simulations or shooter-type games, and someone raised the idea of an Asteroids clone. I said not only could it be done, but half the code was written already (ExplodeAction, WrapAround, ShootAction, etc.). The only uncertain area was keyboard input (and 10 minutes of wxRuby research took care of that).
It was definitely not my cleanest work ever; we copied the entire Zyps repo since the last gem is so old, and ripped the entire contents of bin/zyps as a basis. I didn’t realize it was loading an empty environment from a YAML file, so when I wasn’t answering questions I was trying to figure out why the Asteroid and Ship objects (coded by Andrew Bowerman and Roy VandeWater) I was dropping in were mysteriously disappearing.
Thanks in part to that, we were 40 minutes late for presentation time (which was OK because the Processing team left without presenting), but we finally had a working demo. Lots more to be done, but not bad for two and a half hour’s work.
is.gd at command line...
Saved this on my PATH as shrink_url…
#!/bin/sh curl "http://is.gd/api.php?longurl=$(echo $@ | sed 's/ /+/g')"
Which lets me do this:
$ shrink_url http://current.com/items/90029658_death-star-destroys-enterprise.htm http://is.gd/xHYe
Pipe to clipboard and you’re ready to paste into a browser. I suppose I could also enclose the result in a $() call to my favorite command line Twitter client, but I’m not feeling that fancy yet.
$ shrink_url http://current.com/items/90029658_death-star-destroys-enterprise.htm | cb $ cb http://is.gd/xHYeRead more...
Yet more XBox Live avatar fun...
On this page, Microsoft actually encourages linking to their cache of your avatar image. These actually update as you change your avatar, too.
So here’s a group shot of me and my friends, as we appear on Live currently, apparently with a strong wind blowing from the left…
Read more...