Over on Twitter, Brett Kelly (@inkedmn) mentioned that he’s tired of most of his music collection. This was a problem for me a while back, but I have two suggestions that can help. If you’re in need of a breath of fresh musical air, read on. Continue reading ‘Two Suggestions for Brett Kelly’
Archive for January, 2008
There was some hubbub a while back about the way the titles of posts in John Gruber’s linked list over at Daring Fireball link to the referenced post. (Read a synopsis here.) I myself wasn’t a very big fan (although I have gotten used to it), but today I stumbled on what I think is a very compelling reason for this linking style.
With all due respect to Gruber, I don’t have much interest in bookmarking or archiving his blockquotes with minimal commentary. What I’m interested in is the post he’s linking to! Imagine my serendipity when using Fraser Speirs excellent Applescript for archiving the current NetNewsWire item to Yojimbo. The URL for Gruber’s linked items is not to Daring Fireball but to the item in question. So, the script archived the actual item that Gruber linked to and not his linked list post. Not that my opinion matters a hell of a lot, but perish the thought that Daring Fireball’s linked list style change.
Sidebar: The other side effect of getting used to Gruber’s linking style is that I find myself expecting that linking behavior from other sites and being confused when I’m taken to their site. Most notably among these is kottke.org.
This might sound like a strange question, but I’m honestly interested in the answer.
Many who read this blog know a lot about my situation, but here is where I stand right now. I’m 27 years old working on a computer science degree at TCU. The way my prerequisites and course sequences work out, this spring is my last semester of full time work. I’ll graduate after two more half-time semesters in May 2009. My plan (and quite a common course for many here) is to work full time while I finish up my last year of school.1
I have been doing freelance web design for almost two years. I am largely self-taught in most everything having to do with computers, and as a result I’m often bored in my programming classes.2 I’m a very quick study. I consider myself above average in my programming skill and I’m well ahead of most of the others in my classes.
I’m currently an intern at Pier 1 Imports working in the data analysis/data warehousing group. It’s good experience so far, and I don’t think I would mind sticking around full time until I graduate. But that being said, I will be exploring my options starting sometime around spring break.
The question is this: Am I an entry level employee? Or to put it another way, when I’m looking for a job, which job titles should I not even bother with? Any more information you’d need to answer more cogently?
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The last year is Database Systems and Senior Design/Project Management in the fall and Database Administration and Senior Project in the spring. The database classes I don’t anticipate imparting any earth-shattering wisdom since I have messed with database systems on my own and my internship has been pretty database intensive. But I hope I’m wrong. I’d like to actually learn something. ↩
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For example, I took a class in the fall called Interface Design and Scripting Fundamentals. It’s a required class for my degree. There was no interface design discussion (Had there been, I might have learned something!) and the class focused almost exclusively on learning Perl, HTML, CSS, Javascript, and a little bit of PHP at the end for good measure and using scripting languages to interact with MySQL. I already knew almost everything we covered in that class. In fact, I gave a lecture on Script.aculo.us instead of doing one of the lab assignments. The second half of that course’s sequence is this spring and it’s called Web Technologies. I don’t anticipate learning a lot in there either. ↩
I thought today - being New Year’s and all - would be a great day to post some graphs of my Twitter usage. A huge amount of thanks goes to Damon Cortesi for his work on the Perl script that creates these stats and the Numbers template for creating the pretty graphs.
There’s not a lot really to note in my stats. The replies are interesting, though. They show who I talk to and/or about the most. It also seems I’m most active in the mid-morning. Make of that what you will.
UPDATE: There was apparently a bug in Damon’s script that was causing inaccurate stats; below are my revised stats.
