I’ll keep this site around to serve old links.

My last post was a bit terse, so I thought I’d spruce things up a bit.  With real words, anyway.  I’ve started to settle in a bit.  I rode the Muni subway train home all by myself.  I squashed 1.75 software bugs today, too, a new high in my three-day career.

What’s Square like?  A little surreal, for a Midwestern boy, but that may be a bit of San Francisco showing.  A day begins with a silent office, just like anywhere else.  Over the next two to three hours, people filter in slowly.  At some point breakfast shows up.  (I had bagels and lox today.  Or, some kind of fish.  Another day I had something made out of walnuts and lingonberries.)  All the while, folks are working through their tasks.  There is a lot to do for a product with so much focus.

Lunch arrives at around 11:30, 11:45, or so, and often folks will gather in clumps and take a break.  Today we had a guest speaker (Abdur Chowdhury) from Twitter come in and give some perspective on how abusers think and work.  A cool part of the day was when Jack Dorsey gave a quick shout of “Hey, Square!” to announce the presentation.  The room went silent.  He’s trained us well.

It’s a pretty good place to be a developer.  If you set aside the noise, by will or by headphone, you can concentrate on your task and get a lot done.  Meetings are short and direct, more often than not only involving two or three folks for a minute.  Longer tasks may involve two people from different teams pairing up to solve a problem.

I’m also glad to be back in a strong code review regime.  Every piece of code is reviewed and approved.  This may be while pairing, or by working on an issue branch and sending out to the team for a look.  Very nice.  A good way to learn the standards and conventions, and a whole lot of git.

I’m slowly learning the ropes on the mac, finding things, turning things on or off, figuring out the keyboard, etc.  But that’s another post for another day.  I brought along another Dresden Files novel…

I love apple.  You?  Apple very Square, yet not square!  Tasty, and not tasty.

And so on.  Here are some very quick impressions from almost two days.

• Square
  • Fun, fast-paced.
  • Cramped in the current SF office, moving soon.
  • Growing very fast.
  • Very awesome food.
• Macbook
  • (I’ll have to do a detailed post on this…)
  • Missing lots of keys
  • Unintelligible key combo hints in menu
  • Edges are a bit sharp
  • OS is so-so, very stuck on WIMP,I’m surprised there’s not more innovation here
  • Touchpad is enormous.  And borderline non-functional.
  • I’ve got Ubuntu in a VirtualBox and I’m loving it.
• Intellij Idea
  • In one singular case (extract method), it actually seemed smarter than Eclipse.
  • The rest, surprisingly so-so.
  • Missing flyovers of, well, everything.  Sometimes a man likes to hover without touching anything.
  • Wildly misleading web documents for Mac users.
  • Manages to have more property pages than Eclipse.
  • Is getting replaced by Eclipse soon, perhaps this evening.

The Company was pleased with our performance last year.  So they went against everything we’ve been teaching our kids, and gave us candy pills.

That’s Jelly beans on the left, mints on the right.  Or so I hope.

• How Gamestop ruined my Valentine’s Day
• Gamestop Made Me Do It
• I’m an Idiot

The wife lovingly bought me a copy of Mass Effect 2 for Valentines Day.  In fact, she told me she was going to, hence my desire to get my Xbox working.  She gives it to me, and the first thing out of my mouth is “Oh, you bought this used?  I’ll have to pay $15 to be able to download the free stuff for it.”

I always do this.  My wife could buy me the coolest toy, phone, gadget, or netbook, and I’ll mention how much I like it, and oh did you see the deal on it last week where it was half off?  I make the lovely wife feel like an idiot, and the gift seem cheap and poorly thought-out.

That’s my personal demon to remove.  The real enemy here?  Gamestop, for knowingly selling my wife a game for $55 (a five-dollar discount off new retail price) without even mentioning this to her.  They made a ton of money off the deal, probably way more than they would have from selling the game new.  It was very well publicized in gaming circles that this was coming down the line, there’s no way they were innocent.

I’m putting them on my list of most hated companies.  Companies I won’t go to or buy from.  Congrats, guys — you just joined the ranks of Best Buy and Sony!

This game makes me so happy.  Did I mention that I got all 1250 achievement points in Mass Effect?

Memorial day weekend, we broke the ban on Wal-mart.  Why, you might ask?  Because of Nibbler.

We were in Blytheville, AR over memorial day for the Hudson family reunion.  Lots of food, visiting, long-lost relatives, and, this year, rain.  After the reunion and 2 hours of swimming in an indoor heated pool, we headed out to Pizza Hut for some high-quality food.

We couldn’t find it.  Actually, if I remember right, we set out for a Mazzio’s Pizza, which was long gone, so we stopped at a parking lot to locate (& verify) a Pizza Hut.  But I digress.

It was a heavy downpour, and in a flat place like north-eastern Arkansas, that means something, since there’s nowhere for the water to go.  There was 1-2 inches of water basically standing in the lot, with more coming down every minute.  Suddenly, my wife jumps out of the car, and starts looking underneath.  She then runs around to my door and opens it, asking for beef jerky.

I had a pretty good idea what was going on… an animal.  A minute later she jumps back in the car with a shivering chihuahua, emaciated, missing hair, and with some scabs from the harness it was wearing.

We run back to the hotel, get my wife changed, and head to pretty much the only operating store in the county, Wal-mart, to pick up some basics for the dog.  There, we met an officer who told us to just take care of the dog, animal control was full.  We left some messages with folks down there, and still haven’t heard back.

So, that’s my path to destruction.  The real question:  should I go back?

Then: Bush was reviled and derided for telling people to “Go shopping” after 9/11/2001.
Now: Americans are ruining the economy by saving their money!

Then: Americans don’t save enough.
Now: Americans are ruining the economy by saving their money! (OK, that was mostly a dupe, but still…)

Then: John McCain called for the TARP money to be used to buy up the bad mortgages. He was called an idiot, that was a stupid thing to do.
Now: Let’s make a Bad Bank to buy up all the bad assets!

Anyone? I’m not saying that the “thens” or the people who said them were right, I’m just saying that there’s a bunch of idiots running the country.

Along those lines, he has made a lot of announcements that, frankly, haven stolen the thunder of my 2012 campaign, like a bipartisan cabinet and lobbyist restrictions. And I will be truly grateful when he brings me my internet.

I have some draft game reviews sitting around, I’ll get to them soon.

Have a good 2009!

I can’t believe I missed the press releases, but such is life.

The main community site is at http://www.leagueoflegends.com/

I wish them the best.  The game is fun and has a lot of teamwork potential.

The quality of “debates” on TV is incredibly low.  I suspect they are pretty bad in person, too, but at least you saw real humans.  VP or pres debates, things devolved into a contest of who could remember the most random facts.  There was no debate going on.  There was two people talking.  Oh, sure, they would occasionally respond to what the other said, but beyond a one-liner about disagreeing, they’d fall back into what they had memorized.

Likewise, the discussion on SlashDot is frustrating.  You have a lot of people completely ignoring what the others are saying, or at best giving a “X is not what caused Y, Z is” and going on from there.  No one takes a balanced view, allowing that X and Z both are causes of Y, or stepping back and looking at the big picture.  Well, there are some, but you could count them on two… fingers.

Don’t get caught up in the hype.  Take a step back, learn some facts, and make a decision based on wisdom.  And for the love of monkeys, don’t buy the line that there is some vast difference between the two parties.  This comment on the above story is pretty descriptive of why.

The problem comes when I continue the internal conversation at that point, and then speak one of my quips.  I may have gone 5 minutes ahead into a conversation.  I get lots of bewildered looks.  Sorry!

Anyway, I find myself suffering a bit from the same thing with posting entries to this site;  I’ll think them through, considering what point I’m trying to get across, and (in my head) post it to the site.  The issue is I never actually do…  So, don’t be too worried if I reference something I talked about earlier — I’m just crazy.

Daddy, what if the whole world was clay except for chain saws?

I don’t know, goofball, I just don’t know.

• Rumpelstiltskin would be the prime example here.  By learning the name, and speaking it to the creature, the miller’s daughter got out of the bargain she had made (to be able to spin straw into gold, she had to give up her firstborn).
• In The Tenth Kingdom, the blind woodsman would only release his prisoner and give the heroes his magic axe if they could guess his name.  (Luckily, he kept it in his hat.)
  
• The undoing of the Horned King in The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander was the speaking of his name.
• In Aidyn Chronicles for the Nintendo64, the main character Alaron lacks a True Name, which binds his body and soul together.  Without it, he is incomplete.
  

The question is, does any of this apply to the real world?

It was, in fact, in my playing of Aidyn Chronicles that I first became cognizant of this whole business.  In it, there is a discipline of magic called Naming set in contrast to the more familiar Elemental (fire, air, earth, water) magic.  At the time, I thought, “What’s the big deal?  Is having a name and giving a name so important?”  This was 2001.

Flash forward to 2007.  I have a daughter now, and she’s struggling to learn everything in the world.  She will eat up new words and start using them immediately.  She feels every word brings her more power.

Well, knowledge is power, names are knowledge, and therefore names are power.  So I guess it makes a bit of sense.  You can know about something.  But this is not just knowing something, it is naming that something.  If you know enough about a thing, you can name it, categorize it, relegate it.  Give a name to your fear, the saying goes.

I suspect naming can have broader powers too… a way of setting the stage for a debate, for example.  If you coin a product name, a movment, a philosophy, or anything, you may well be determining the ultimate fate of that thing.  At the very least, you’re doing a bit of mind control by making a popular name that everyone speaks.

Wikipedia has a bit more discussion in this vein, under the True Name topic.