UPDATE: Looks like I was sleeping during my class on 70s funk. It was Albert Hammond who wrote It Never Rains In Southern California, not Kool and the Gang. Thanks Jeff.

You’ve no doubt heard me rant against premature optimization in the past, but Eric Gunnerson points out another “Premature” action to be avoided, “Premature Generalization”.

Anyone here in L.A. going to this?

It wouldn’t be fair to point out the mistakes of other developers being lazy without pointing out that I have been very guilty of this myself. The point of the post is not to trash another person’s coding habits, but to present an ideal to work towards. Sometimes, intellectual “laziness” is absolutely necessary as in the example presented in the comments of that post.

A while ago, Jeff Atwood wrote about the merits of laziness for successful software developers. Lest this become the mantra of sub-performing developers everywhere, I wanted to follow up with a clarification.

I am back from our first Board of Director’s meeting in San Francisco. The sheer amount of legal formality required in conducting business as a corporation is really quite interesting. They aren’t kidding when they say it will increase the amount of paperwork you deal with.

Mathematicians and Computer Scientists know that the Donald that has had real impact in our world is Donald Knuth, not Mr. Trump. He is a giant in the industry and very well respected.

Akumi and I decided to turn the business trip into a short weekend getaway. After the meeting, we all went out to Espetus, a brazilian churrasco place. Each table had a simple dial. Turn it to green and the waiters with the sticks keep coming to your table offering slices of sweet glorious meat. Turn it to red to put a temporary end to the gluttony. Needless to say, it took an extreme amount of willpower to turn that dial to red once we set it to green.

Just got back from the PDC Underground at the Westin Bonaventure which had its fair share of great and not so great grok talks. I went with Micah and Jon and met a few people I’ve only been acquainted with via subscribing to their blogs.

Walt provides this interesting look at how blogs have some influence within the Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Roberts.

Well I’ve kept this relatively quiet long enough, but since Jon Galloway spilled the beans, I might as well mention it. I am no longer an independent consultant.

Perhaps I have a skewed view of reality, but I get the impression that software geeks are leading the charge into building the next generation of social software. Does it strike anyone else as odd that nerds are the ones defining the technologies and interfaces for people to become social? Is this some sort of Revenge of the Nerds we plan to inflict on the “cool” social butterflies who spurned us in our youth?

UPDATE:Well it turns out that half of WebHost4Life’s servers didn’t have enough backup juice to stay up. Guess which half my blog was hosted on? Yep! But it is back up now (which is obvious otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this).

I distinctly remember sending a memo to my body years ago that illness is no longer permitted. But here I am with a persistent cough and lack of energy. I think I’ll have to let my body go and hire a new one.

I learned through Mr. Wagner that my former employer just announced the first ever million dollar skill game tournament.

I caught a brutal cold on my return from Black Rock City, so I haven’t been much in the blogging mood. But I’m starting to feel better (or the glass of Sake is really working its magic) and thought I’d post a quick blurb about the trip.

I arrived back in Los Angeles last night from Burning Man where I spent the week in utter ignorance of the true scale of Hurricane Katrina. Only today have I started to grasp the immense scale of the destruction.

My former coworker who wrote that 2600 article I mentioned recently sent me this link to a GameSpot review of SkillJam Arcade.

Check it out, though the sound quality is terrible.

Remember that online games are written by humans and thus are subject to the bugs and flaws that humans are so good at introducing.