I'm Back!

I've decided to try to resurrect this blog, mostly because I have never been a fan of social media.  I guess the big news at this point (since I haven't posted in so long) is that I joined a local band called Custard Pie.  We play pretty much every weekend, mostly in north San Diego.  More info on the band, including a complete gig schedule, song list, etc., can be found here.  I'm going to make an effort to post more over the coming few weeks, as there are some fairly fun things happening in my life.  Most notably, my girlfriend and I will be traveling to Perú to visit her family during Christmas this year.  There should be lots of great photos and stories from that trip, so stay tuned.

Mac Screen Capture App

Screen capture is a pretty useful thing.  It's even more useful (and easy to do) with Captured.  This app is written by my friend, Chris Sexton.  He has graciously allowed me to contribute to the project.  Together, we've been able to put together what I think is a pretty awesome screen capture app for the Mac.  The latest version features the ability to upload your screen captures to a variety of places - your own FTP account (via SFTP), Imgur, Amazon S3, or Dropbox.  The URL to the uploaded file is automatically copied to your pasteboard so you are ready to insert it into an email, IM message, Tweet, whatever - complete with URL shortening, if you desire.  It rocks.  You can get it from the Mac App Store.

Busy Week

Technically, I had the whole week off from work (mandatory PTO).  Or course, I have no shortage of side projects I'm working on, so I took advantage of the time off to push out two of them.  They are both in support of the District Taco business, which is run by a couple of friends.  First, on Monday, I pushed out the District Taco Chrome extension.  And today, I released the District Taco Android app.  If you're an Android user, live in the DC/Virginia area, and like tacos, look for it in the Market.  They are both fairly simple apps, to be sure, but it was a hell of a lot of fun working on them.  Keeps me out of trouble, anyway.  The Chrome extension was particularly fun.  As for the Android app...I've never been a fan of Java, Android is the only platform that has been able to get me to write any Java code.  With the explosion in mobile apps over the last couple of years, it's probably not a bad thing.

Reviving the Blog

Stop me if you've heard this one before...moved my site yet again.  This time, I'm pointing it at Blogger.  I actually liked Typepad's layout and integration with Facebook, etc. a lot more, but I didn't want to pay just to get custom domain support.  Blogger gives me this for free.  Anyway, we'll see how long I stay here, I seem to keep changing my mind.  Not that it really matters much, I don't think I have any readers left. :)

Spend Your Time Wisely

Naturally, since I love what I do for a living, I tend to spend a lot of my free time doing things like building web sites, writing utilities, etc.  One particular site I have been building is for a local business owned by a close friend.  It has been a lot of fun for me because I built it on App Engine, Google's code-in-the-cloud platform, and it gives me a chance to learn some more Python, probably my 2nd favorite language (behind C++).

Anyway, on to the point.  Recently, several tasks (bug fixes, enhancements, etc.) have been "assigned" to me.  I asked the owner to put together a prioritized list of items, so I could easily just go down the list in my free time.  The idea was that the most critical items would be put at the top.  However, as I have been working down the list it is clear to me that this was a bad assumption.  I am again reminded of the question my friend Alan always asks..."How many more XXX will we sell if we do task YYY?".  In this case, the 2nd highest priority item on my list was to align cell items differently in the product listing table.  This table is three columns wide.  Items at the bottom of this table naturally align to the left.  The owner wants the item centered if there is only one in the bottom row, and left aligned if there are two.

To me, this is purely cosmetic and should have probably been the last item on the list.  Not to mention it's a bit of a pain in the butt to get items to align in a conditional manner.  But, somehow, this was #2 on my list.  Higher than the ability to delete products from the list.  Higher than adding links to previous blog entries.

Having worked on many projects where priorities have been completely screwed up, I shouldn't be too surprised.  I guess the message I'm trying to send is - if you are in a position to determine the priority of work items, do your best to make sure the ones that give you the biggest bang for the buck are at the top of the list.