Chris Meller

What’s left when you can’t stand being at work because people are so utterly incompetent, political, and generally annoying; but you can’t stand being at home because everyone else is constantly in a bad mood for similar reasons?

How do you convince “management” that purchasing a physical piece of software for 20 people, which will need to be updated manually (no automated deployment possibilities available) every quarter, is a bad idea and that they should instead purchase the web-based edition that is managed and updated by the manufacturer?

Technical and man-power aspects aside, add to that mix the fact that one of the newer executives used this particular piece of software at their previous job and is insistent that the web-based version (which provides identical features, simply in a different format) will not be acceptable. The arch enemies of the IT industry: company politics and user stubbornness and pride.

So what do you have open right now on your machine? Is that pretty standard? Anything else you normally have open (for work / home?)?

Right now I’m at work, and on my work PC we have:

• Outlook 2007
  Have I mentioned how much I love Office 2007?
• Interaction Client
  Our phone system is software-based. This app serves as a gateway to all its wonderful features - company directory, caller ID, etc. etc. etc.
• Firefox
  7 tabs open - Local copy of the site I’m developing, production copy of the site I’m developing, our internal Flyspray bug tracker, a random PHP.net documentation page, an Oracle function documentation page, and the stylesheet for some random site¹
• PL/SQL Developer
  2 copies - One test / development server, one production server. Usually there are many more copies open - 2 servers x 2 or 3 users - 5 or 6 instances with countless queries, procedures, etc. open are quite normal.
• Easy Eclipse
  LAMP (+Oracle - LAMPO?) configuration for site development.
• Visual Source Safe
  Microsoft’s aging source code control system. It’s no SVN, but the interface is so simple a 2 year old could probably roll back my latest screw-up.
• MMC Window
  The Microsoft Management Console has all my Exchange server and Active Directory management snap-in’s configured. Sadly, I spend so much time in here that it just hangs around in my taskbar all the time.
• Windows Explorer
  3 windows - My network home directory (specifically my saved SQL queries and results folder), my htdocs directory, and a set of data files I’m importing into our system.
• ANSI 837 Importer
  Our home-brewed ANSI 837 health insurance claim EDI importer. At the moment it’s eating half my RAM importing a 100MB text file of claims data into our database. Fun times…

My laptop is much simpler:

• Firefox
  5 tabs - Google IG homepage, (mt) Account Center, 2x Google Apps for Domains GMail inboxes, and this write post page.
• iTunes
  Gotta have coding music!
• NetNewsWire
  Mmmm… RSS is yummy!
• XChat Aqua
  Gotta keep up with fellow Wordpress-loving geeks!

So those are my machines at the moment, and pretty standard. Give or take a Photoshop and Textmate session on my laptop, and that’s about it. How about you?

1. I was probably stealing their code. ↩

After ordering a TechNet subscription last week, now that Microsoft offers a significantly cheaper “Direct” (ie: download-only) version, I got a postcard in the mail today offering me a whopping $200 off an early-bird registration to Microsoft’s TechEd 2007 conference.

Just out of curiosity, I thought I’d check the TechEd site and see how expensive this particular conference was. I’m constantly amazed at how expensive some conferences can be, while the particularly interesting ones like WordCamp are 100% free.

In case you were wondering, the regular price for TechEd ‘07 is $1,995¹, but if you register before April 7th, you can save a whopping $200 and get it for the rock-bottom price of $1,795.

I had thought about doing a little “What you could get instead of going to TechEd” segment, but turns out I’m too lazy. Suffice it to say: a lot².

Now if only I could convince my boss to blow about $3,000 (including travel, meals, etc.) to send me to Orlando for 4 days…

1. Can’t we just round up to $2,000 already? It’s $5 lousy bucks… ↩
2. Like an Apple iPhone and about a year of unlimited data service from Cingular ↩

We watch several shows on CBS every week¹, and I keep seeing this commercial for a new series they’re starting sometime soon. I forget the name, but it includes Patrick Warburton, who played Elaine’s boyfriend Puddy in Seinfeld, so I’ve taken note of it.

One of the previews I’ve seen includes a quote by Warburton, who plays the “married guy” to the effect of:

Marriage is all about compromise. Like she wanted to get a cat, but I didn’t want to get a cat. So we compromised: we got a cat.

For some reason, I feel like my life’s been like that lately. Everything is a “compromise”, and I end up doing whatever other people want and have no control over any of it. How very unfortunate…

1. NCIS, Close to Home, and Numb3rs mainly. ↩