I just finished reading part 2 of the Bill Venners interview with Erich Gamma and Erich so eloquently distills some of what I was trying to say in a recent post.

I’ve heard of writer’s block, but never dealt with coder’s block until today. Seriously, I’ve always been able to just unleash that kernel of code simmering inside in a big pop of keyboard slamming.

I’ve been following with interest Shelley’s progress with WordForm, a blogging engine. I hadn’t realized that WordForm was a fork in WordPress until she recently mentioned it.

So they say that email is an addiction.

In my limited experience so far, and from anecdotal evidence of nearly everyone I’ve ever met who had a boss at one time or another, managers as a whole still do not trust their employees. It’s a real shame if you think about it, because the whole point of hiring employees is to scale up and create an infrastructure capable of handling more work (and ostensibly more profit) than you can now.

I know it’s been around a good while now and has been the darling of the blogging community far that time, but I only recently started to play with Flickr. My initial resistance was due to my complete dissatisfaction with other online photo management tools such as oFoto, Yahoo Photos, SnapFish etc…

Many developers, especially those fresh out of college (though older developers are just as prone), fall into the trap of believing in an absolute concept of “the perfect design”. I hate to break such youthful idealism, but there’s just no such thing.

One trap that developers need to be wary of is the mentality of the Hammer Truism. This states that

When something tragic befalls a friend, or even an acquaintance, I used to wonder if expressing my condolences and sorrow really meant much to the afflicted person. It certainly is different from person to person. For Akumi and me, I think the answer to that is yes, it is helpful. We certainly felt some degree of comfort knowing friends and even strangers who read my blog were sending us well wishes and thinking of us.

I know the timing is pretty crummy, but here it is. It is required, yes required, that I give you a true geek birthday salute (i.e. a blog birthday greeting).

Four friends who hadn’t seen each other in 30 years, reunited at a party. After several drinks, one of the men had to use the rest room. Those who remained talked about their kids.

A soccer buddy, and Doctor, sent me this interesting report. Here’s a snippet…

I swear I never do these stupid quizzes or memes or whatever you call it, but this is only three questions. If it’s good enough for Sam Ruby, it’s good enough for me.

One of my friends from our weekend pick-up game sent around this quote from Nick Hornby’s novel, Fever Pitch (which was regrettably turned into a movie about baseball, rather than soccer as it was written).

Yesterday we drove down to the San Diego area to spend the day with Akumi’s dad in Chula Vista, right on the border with Mexico. Trips to visit her dad end up being culinary expeditions of the highest quality. For lunch, we had some of the most delicious Ton-Katsu since Japan. Unfortunately we stuffed our faces so much that by the time we went to dinner, we were still a bit full and couldn’t enjoy the meal. Which was too bad because we went to the best Sushi place in San Diego. Perhaps the best in Southern California. Sushi Ota.

Today, the esteemed Dare Obasanjo, MSN Maestro, RSS Bandit Ruler, XML Guru Extraordinaire, Social Software Seminarian has just completed his 27th trip around the sun.

UPDATE: Whoops! I linked to the wrong versions of putty and pageant. I corrected the links.

Alright, it’s time for me to pull this ratty old thing out of the closet, dust it off a bit, and step onto it. Yes, my pedestal.

For the past several days, I’ve been consumed with working on the Subtext blogging engine (not to be confused with the Subtext programming language). It’s been the most fun I’ve had writing software since, well, since working on RSS Bandit as a matter of fact. ;)