Love in My Life

Watching the Oscars last night, I heard this quote for the first time by Paul Newman playing Chance Wayne in Sweet Bird of Youth:

"The big difference between people is not between the rich and the poor, the good and the evil. The biggest of all differences between people is between those who have had pleasure in love and those who haven't."

Nicely put... reminds me of how grateful I am for the love in my life.

Gut-Wrenching, Part Deux

It happened again yesterday. This time it wasn't so much of a surprise but still left everyone with that empty, sinking feeling. Let's hope that the feeling doesn't last.

Once again many colleagues, many of which I truly consider my friends, were lost and, again, possibly forever.

So, once again, I must bid, "Farewell!" to them as they move on and pick up the pieces.

Farewell, my friends, and let hope be your guide.

-Danny

Gut-Wrenching

This week I lost several friends.

Not lost as in "at sea" or "to the sin of gluttony" but, nonetheless, lost. Possibly, forever.

You see, this week I saw how it really doesn't matter in the end how hard you work, how loyal you are, nor how great the accumulated values of you're contributions are. It just doesn't matter because, in the end, you're not even so much as a line-item on some bean counter's spreadsheet but, merely, a bean.

This week several of my fellow "beans," of whom I sincerely refer to as friends in addition to being trusted colleagues, were shown the proverbial door. In many ways they just seemed to have lost the job lottery - nothing more, nothing less.

They're hurting. I'm hurt. And..., this sucks.

Alas, life will go on. So, farewell, my friends. Farewell and let hope be your guide.

Your Constant Friend and Now-Former Colleague,

Danny

Update Day

I updated my iPhone with the 2.0 Software Update.  Relatively slow going (more or less a total factory reset and reload of all music, audiobooks, and videos) that took about 1/2 hour to complete but no issues at all.

Immediately downloaded Sega's Super Monkey Ball from the AppStore and handed it to the little boy to play while I activated a new MobileMe account.  Initial reaction was overwhelmingly positive - I had to promise to let him play again as soon as he wakes up tomorrow morning in order to get him to bed on time. "No, Dear, I am not buying the kid his own iPhone."

And I thought that the iPhone upgrade was slow!  Apple is having severe performance issues with iPhone activations that appear to also be impacting MobileMe's debut.  Some of the features aren't even working - I couldn't even get to the Account preferences page on my account.  Curiously, it seemed to perform much faster on Firefox 3.0 than on Safari 3.1.2 - makes me wonder if there's dependency on WebKit's SquirrelFish update to the JavaScript engine that isn't yet baked-in to Safari.

So far my experience, not unlike some of the quirkiness in the initial OS X Leopard release last fall, feels more like a beta than a fully-baked product.  I have every confidence that things will get better but it pains me to see Apple behaving badly.

To Blog or Not To Blog

So, two years and four months have passed and, still, nothing seems worthwhile of posting.  This, by no means, suggests that blogging, per se, is not worthwhile - I follow several blogs on a daily basis.

Somehow, though, it just doesn't seem right for me even though I have often thought of starting (again) several times, even literally writing it down on one of my "To Do" lists.

Maybe later...

Start Plan

So, it's been nearly twenty-one months since I created dBlog but, being concerned about such things as reserving my moniker, it was important to me to create it even though I had no idea if I'd ever use it.

I think that now I may be ready to do some actual writing.

I don't have a plan.

My wife consistently reminds me of this.

But I do, most definitely have a pattern.

In fact, the name that chosen for my blog dBlog is a recurring naming pattern that I use. I have a dinkPad (much underpowered running Fedora FC4 and which I'm currently writing on), a dPod, a dMac, a dHP... you get the idea. Naming my online "thing" (whatever this is now or becomes in the future) dBlog was part of this pattern.

Though, again, not evidence much of a plan, per se.

Incidentally, I'm (re)reading the GoF Design Patterns book so it occurred to me that maybe this is why I survive without a plan. Once you get to know me, you'll realize that I do have idea, or a pattern, I just don't regularly carry the overhead of maintaining a formal plan.

I'm trying to improve on this. We'll see how it works out.

More later...

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