Rui CarmoThings have been appropriately hectic, although yesterday I had the feeling I was living through a budget version of “H2G2”:Movie:tt0371724 where the “Vogons”:Wikipedia:Vogon are played by some of the people I have to work with (or, in some cases, around). One of the frustrating things about being in Marketing for me is that sometimes I seriously feel like ruthlessly taking over some of the technical aspects, but the big plus is that I can push a lot harder for improvements and backup from vendors.
Anyway, back to my own stuff.
After a stint of not doing much reading and not using (nearly at all) a computer at home, I’m now chuckling my way through “Watching the English”:ISBN:0340818867 – a recommendation from a colleague of mine who departed for a glorious career in the UK and who, truth be told, could already out-English the English (but who drew the line at cricket), and that I will review appropriately soon enough.
On the coding front, I am trying to overcome my long and contentious bias against JavaScript and getting to grips with some of the (utterly brilliant) stuff Apple has managed to put into Dashcode – whoever came up with some of the things inside the iPhone version is a genius, even though I wish the finished code was slightly smaller (but I’m working on that – I didn’t optimize this site to kingdom come by accident…).
I’m also coding little “JSON”:Wikipedia:JSON interfaces to this site to retrieve statistics and whatnot, and gluing those to an iPhone app is almost too trivial to bear mentioning once you get the hang of things – with luck, I’ll have something regular folk can use to perform quick searches and article previews soon enough, although given the kid’s propensity for teething these nights, whatever surplus stamina I have after work isn’t enough to do more beyond poking at my (shamefully large) personal inbox and muttering about JavaScript’s obtuse syntax as I debug the five lines I’ve managed to write.
On the mobile front, the only (personal) thing of notice is that I’ve started using “Twitterfon”:AppStore:Twitterfon as my Twitter client, and that it’s good enough for me to put it on the dock (I like it that much). Surprisingly, it’s from the same guy who coded Twitterfox, which is what I use in Windows and Linux (where I use Firefox as my default browser).
If he ever does a Mac app, I’ll switch to it pronto – Twitterrific is nice and all, but I’d like something snappier. Much snappier.
On the writing front, I’m pushing myself to write something every day, even if it’s not public – often a few paragraphs are more than enough to zone out and relax a bit, although it’s hard to focus on a topic and come up with something worth publishing (or even keeping sometimes). The main conclusion so far is that I need to read more, since my personal writing style is getting somewhat stilted and I need to loosen it up a bit and explore less technical stuff – which is going to be hard…
And I guess that’s as much of an update as is worthwhile doing at this point. One of these days I will go into other stuff that I’ve been sorting out (I’ve already a considerable backlog, but some of it falls under my Disclaimer).