Daily Words 1/16/6

Garlic is sexy. If you smell garlic on someone's breath you say "Wow! There's a party going on in that mouth! And I want to join the fun!"

Daily Words 1/17/6

Utah is known as the Beehive State not because they have a thriving honey industry but because Mormons are industrious like bees. This rather disappoints me.

Daily Words 1/10/6

Teenagers don't come with instruction manuals... unless they're real dorks.

Daily Words 1/11/6: Code Innuendo

When merging code to a branch, there's a certain innate humor in the phrase "I'm going to get head and post a build."

Daily Words 1/29/6: Rocky Mountain Fly

At the airport I read Red as I prepared to head for red spaces. On the plane I read about Python's use of whitespace. As I looked out the window I see the clouds and glaciers of white spaces.

Daily Words 1/30/6: On Going Live

It's been crazy, but the Recorder's Office in Washington County, Utah, is now running with new software. They are not only the first site live with version 1.7 of EagleRecorder, but also the first site live with our property software -- significant portions of which were refactored two weeks ago.

There are bugs. Labels don't come out with receipts, but must be printed in the laborious fashion. There are bumps. An attempt to print the first document recorded (2006000002, not 2006000001) wound up with a legal document on a receipt slip. But perhaps that's a better tradition -- the people closely involved can carry it as a memento in their wallets. There are errors. Three times during the week we had to go through their work and fix mistakes caused by bugs, setup errors, and lack of training. There are features that aren't there. There are interactions that are counterintuitive. There are users doing things we didn't expect. But the software is live. It's being used every day. It's meeting needs and serving its function.

This has been a great group of people to work with. Many of our legacy clients are reluctant to move forward because our new software doesn't have all of the warts of our old. But in Utah we're replacing a 30-year-old system. When you're getting features like the ability to use the mouse, side-by-side images and data, and "double click a parcel on the map to open that account," it's hard to be nostalgic.

Daily Words 2/1/6: On the American Work Ethic

The nice thing about salary is you know how much money you'll make in advance. The downside is that how much money you make is not directly correlated with how much or how good your work is.

I have just determined that after taxes, health care, and 401(k) I earned about $10 per hour in January. That's the same take home pay I earned when I was a Little League umpire in high school. Back when I didn't have to pay rent, buy food, or stay up until 2am entering my time for the month.

I might enjoy entering my time more if our Time & Expenses program was named TNA instead of TNE. But only marginally more.