iPhone headset jack

Ok, after just dropping $10 at the airport for an adapter for my iPhone so that I can use my good headphones while on the airplane … am I the only one who thinks that apple really dropped the ball on this? I mean, would it really have changed the phone size THAT much to have a normal jack?

Audio of my High Performance PHP presentation

Looks like Zend has put an audio version of the presentation I gave at ZendCon last year online: High Performance PHP & MySQL Scaling Techniques

This was the biggest audience I ever had for a conference talk.  It was standing room only, and due to bright lighting I couldn’t see anyone in the crowd.

Go give it a listen, but I swear that their audio technician found a way to accentuate my accent.

The benefits of not rewriting software from scratch

Ok, it’s very old news as this was posted over 7 years ago because of the Netscape 6 ‘debacle’ at the time. But it’s the first time I’ve read the post. Every software developer should go read it. It’s a wonderful post by Joel Spolsky on the benefits of NOT rewriting code that happens to ‘be a mess’, but instead keeping it in place.

My thanks to Keith Casey for pointing this out to me in his similar themed blog post about the Broken Window Fallacy.

Robots!

Recently (for my wife’s birthday), our house according to our Son inherited two robots.   More specifically, we now have Roombas.

As my son went around yelling about how we had a Robot, and how it was sweeping the room for us.   It got me to thinking.   Remember back in the day when we all watched the Jetsons and wished for the day when we too had a Rosie to take care of our house?

I realized that while we don’t have a humanoid robot doing it for us, we do in fact have ‘robots’.   I mean, I have robots now that sweep my floors.  My ReplayTV takes care of knowing what shows I want to watch and recording them for me.  Various X10 appliances in my house can automatically turn on or off.

So I guess we have reached that day, just not exactly in the way we originally dreamed of it.

Amazon is great (I’ll say it again)

Ok, Amazon is in my opinion just one of the services out there right now. An earlier post of mine already said this, but this Christmas I’ve had more good experiences.

First of all I ordered some jewelry for my wife that was the wrong size. No issues, went online, a few clicks had me returning it for ‘wrong size’, and a new piece of jewelry was on the way. Oh, and they paid my return shipping!

Secondly, my wife got me an HD-DVD drive for my xbox 360. It worked for half-a-movie then stopped working. I tried calling Microsoft support 5 times, and got cut off every time. Finally I realized she had bought it through Amazon, and they have a 30 day no matter what return policy. She went online, clicked to return just as easily, printed out a free UPS label, and we had it on it’s way.

I got the new one and it worked fine. She even got an apology letter from Amazon stating how bad they felt that they shipped her defective merchandise.

End of year Summary

It’s that time of year again. A new year has come to pass, and I wanted to take a moment to reflect on everything that happened last year.

• I presented at 5 conferences:
  • MySQL User conference 2007
  • PHP|tek 2007
  • PHP|works 2007
  • ZendCon 2007
  • DCPHP 2007
• I flew enough to get upgraded to Gold status with my preferred airline
• In the SCA I stepped down in my position of Kingdom Target Archery Marshal and stepped up in the position of Society Combat Archery Marshal
• I spent far too much time playing the following video games:  Assassin’s Creed, Bioshock, Halo (original), Guitar Hero II, Guitar Hero III, and Rock Band
• I managed to bring a 1 year old baby up to a 2 year old ‘little man’ (rapidly going on 3)