Because ….

It's been a while since I posted anything and Kari bribed me by allowing me to purchase the new Lion upgrade of Apple's operating system. I really like the updates to Mail and iCal.

Not so much with Reminders as I had much higher expectations, I'm still using Things and trying to get my task list to sync across 2 macs and my iPhone. Cultured Code, will you let me into your stinking beta for cloud sync?!?! No goodness yet, but I fall apart without my task list to keep me on track.

I have a new job now, one which I really enjoy. I'm back building large websites and am running a development team responsible for keeping Zumiez.com alive and kicking. The current site is not a representation of my work, but I've managed to change a lot of things on the back-end which have improved the performance and stability of the site. At the moment, we're actually adding 8 new servers to the farm until we make the switch to the Amazon AWS cloud in the October timeframe.

I also enjoy working with Linux and OSX. It had been a long time since I'd lived most of my day in a terminal window and Vim, but it feels like coming back home after spending 9 years at Microsoft. I recall back in 2001/2 feeling like I was on top of my game and I could be proud as I'd architected and lead the development of some of the largest web sites at that time.

But then I took a detour into the Marketing and Biz Dev world working with and mentoring mid-size to enterprise ISVs. Looking back, I loved the work, but I lost my technical chops in the process and becoming a manager of a biz dev or marketing team was not on my Christmas wish list.

I am much happier now. Going 9 months without a stable job was tough, but I landed exactly where I want to be and can excel. I see myself as more of a software development manager/director who still cherry picks projects to maintain my technical skillz. I'd put myself at sub-God or maybe newb Guru status, (who am I kidding I am just a re-treaded wannabe). I tried emacs and reverted back to Vim…. I just feel much more at home in Vim.

I have to admit I was going to go python, but setting up virtualenv vs rvm for ruby was a real pain.  I did get code completion working for django in vim, but it is so easy in rails/ruby.  I've reverted back to ruby/rails - I'm not quite ready to join the cool kids on that front.

Just to be uber-geeky, I even threw up my .vim and .vimrc on github And here's a cool screen shot, which I grabbed with (CTRL-Shift-CMD-4) - (gotta love apple for this kind of stuf):

 

Alright, I think that is long enough to put most readers to sleep.  Maybe it will even deter Kari from asking me to post for a while.  Hmmmh, she could bribe me to post regularly if we bought a new camera with a nice zoom lense or two...

cheers,

James

 

Window Live Writer...

I know you computer nerds out there already know about Window live Writer ....this might not be interesting to you but I absolutely love Windows live Writer to edit and publish blog entries. It is so much easier than posting right to blogger.

Here is the Link:

http://get.live.com/

You can download mail, writer, and many other features with this link.

So CALLING ALL NERDS(myself included)... you need to download asap. I did. HEHE.

Read blogs as "feeds"

To all those who hate listening to music while you are reading a blog, uhumm Tami, you can have all your blog you read put on Outlook as a RSS feed.

All you have to do is go to the person's blog and go to the bottom of the page and click on

"Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)"

It will then ask you if you want to subscribe, say yes, and it will be seen as a feed on your Microsoft Outlook.

You can read without listening to music, and see when a post comes in instead of having to click back and forth to read through your blog list....

I did this to all the blogs I look at...it comes in as new mail in your outlook when someone posts.....