Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Wawa!!
May 03, 2006

I shop at Wawa, our local convenience store, much more often than any person should shop at a convenience store. Today, for example, I stopped at Wawa three times. Yes, that’s pretty obsessive.

There are a few observations I have made about Wawa in my high-frequency visits, some of which I have probably shared before, but I would like to record again because it’s on my mind at the moment, having just returned from a trip to the store.

First stop: Coffee people. Are you a coffee person? I don’t mean the kind of person that simply enjoys coffee. And I don’t mean the kind of person that says, “I simply can’t get motivated in the morning if I don’t have my coffee.” The people I’m talking about are the OCD folks who would scream “must have coffee” in the morning if they didn’t require coffee to unzombify themselves. Even then, the act of getting and consuming the coffee is no longer what arouses them from this stupor so deep they forget to put on actual shoes with their suit-pants and instead wear their battered old pink bunny slippers with the missing button eyes.

No, the coffee itself isn’t enough. Whatever rejuvination they gain from drinking coffee in the morning happens after I encounter them at Wawa. Dang it.

High Performance WordPress
May 02, 2006

A thread on the support forum recently crossed my radar, wherein help is sought for a sick WordPress. It seems that the popularity of some blogs, especially those with high number of commenters, is causing issues on those servers.

Having recently gone through some operations to optimize the user experience on my blog, I have some personal involvement in trying to optimize my own site. I have a lot of control over my own server (I run this site on a VPS) so many of these changes were easy to implement. Some of them would still work if I was using shared hosting, and it still may be worthwhile to know these things when talking to a shared host if you can make any performance suggestions.

You can use these tips to keep your site running ultra-smooth, because keeping your server online is one of the more important aspects of running a web site.

kupple.com
May 02, 2006

kupple.com looks pretty promising for finding couples to hang out with. Now I’ve just got to get everyone in the Downingtown/West Chester, Pennsylvania area to sign up so we can find the perfect match.

Nearly Every Child Left Behind
May 01, 2006

Skippy wrote some of this thoughts on what amounts to No Child Left Behind - our public schools’ proclivity for teaching to the standards set by the government for testing, and not teaching to practical life skills.

I have two thoughts on this topic:

Thought one:
In India, students (as many who are in physical proximity to their schools) are instructed in about 6th grade to decide on their future career, thus educational path. They are taught a minimum of what they need to know to move on to specialized areas of study. When they begin their lessons in their field of choice, they learn nothing outside of that field. For this reason, they excell in their areas of expertise, but can’t answer cross-vocational questions.

A prime example of this behavior was in one of the Indian software development contractors I worked with very briefly (before he ran off from his employer without a green card). He was a decent programmer, but he had to be instructed explicitly what to do. He was unable to make intuitive leaps in his functional coding because the matter of the project was completely outside of his scope of knowledge. My experience with this one contractor has been my general experience with off-shore contracting in India, where their affectation for specifications seems admirable at first, but then you come to realize that without that explicit and thorough direction, they can make no judgement of their own.

You might think waiting for input from the employer to be a virtue at first, but in an organization that stops working entirely when they can’t make an intuitive guess of what their employer might want - to be sorted out later - the half-planet time delay becomes a significant factor. “You did not work today because you could not take a guess as to what we would like for a UI and decided to wait for our input?” Yeah, no.

Without a well-rounded education, like that which American universities provide, schools that provide career directed or core-proficiency directed instruction will result in less proficient workers.

The Many Faces of Ba
April 30, 2006

Yesterday was a trial as we attempted to do some not-so-serious house hunting in the nearly perfect weather. Why? Riley was in “scream continuously” mode.

It’s rare that he does this these days because mostly he has very specific wants and knows how to communicate them. For example, when he wants a bottle (when will he finally accept sippy cups??) he’ll say “Ba?” And when he wants his blanket, he says “Ba?” And when he wants to play with a ball, he says “Ba?” And even “Ba?” when its time for that bath he loves. It’s a very flexible word.