A juggling technophile shares personal stories, challenges, humor and perhaps some political commentary.
Don’t even fu*king go there.
State Senator Robert Ford is hoping to outlaw lewd language and is pushing for a bill that would prohibit profanity…a list of qualifications for profanity including words or actions that are lewd, vulgar or indecent in nature [Source, Larry Collins of Count on News 2, Sen. Robert Ford pushes to outlaw profanity]
What’s next? Three clam shells?
The question I hate hearing the most is "What’s a website where I can see your work?" Fortunately, I have not had to answer that question in a good long time. As a freelancing web application developer, I end up working on websites briefly and then move to the next project. When I move on, someone else comes in an continues to evolve the website so using that website as an example becomes a risk of misrepresenting my skills. Perhaps I made a site that had valid HTML and CSS and was Section 508 compliant. With 30 seconds and one incorrect tag, another developer could break all that work. Besides, once someone else modifies the site, it no longer represents my work anyway. That would be like the previous home owner coming back to my house with guests to demonstrate her tasteful choice of colors on the walls.
To complicate the ability to demonstrate my skills, most of the work I have done has been on proprietary systems with most of the functionality available to the company. For instance, I spent a year and a half working on a billing system. In no way could I show someone code samples from that project. I cannot even walk them through the client side of the project since I no longer have access to it and even if I did that would be revealing client confidential information. The front end of that website was a single marketing page and a login screen.
And never judge a developer by their own website. I would love my personal websites to represent me professionally, but frankly, I am too busy doing work for others.
I digress. This post was not intended to be a discussion of skills demonstration. Instead I came to exclaim with glee that I spent the morning ironing out some nasty problems in my current application project! Unfortunately, all the changes, no matter how significant, will only be seen by me. The output, the stuff on the screen, does not appear changed. So even my client cannot see what I have done. And this is why I like to work on my house myself…because sometimes, I like to point at something tangible and say, "I did that!"
Student: That knocked the wind out of me!
Master: Just breathe.
Tennessee has 19,838 bridges. 4,101 are deficient. Of those deficient bridges, 2,776 are fully operational while 1,325 are structurally deficient.
The United States has 599,766 bridges. 152,316 are deficient. Of those deficient bridges, 79,792 are fully operational while 72,524 are structurally deficient. See a PDF map of the structurally deficient bridges done by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. The map is an effort to geocode bridges from the Federal Highway Administration’s National Bridge Inventory (NBI) with data from 2007 except for Kentucky and Pennsylvania which was from 2006. See more information at CleanBeta.
Note: This is the kind of post that my wife hates. She will now have me performing miracles to get from point A to point B without crossing any bridges when we travel.
