(This was originally a comment on (e:jim)'s Macworld journal post, but it started turning in article material when I started ruminating on my current station in life).

I am a 40 hr/wk mac/Cocoa programmer and I've never been able to afford the time and money to go to either Macworld or, more importantly, WWDC (Apple's yearly Worldwide Developer Conference for mac programmers). My current employer certain won't pay for me to go to WWDC, because the previous programmers turned down the offer for the company to pay them to go to it (and then proceeded not to renew the company's Apple Developer Program), which pretty much shut the door for me when I came after them.

The only opportunity I ever had to get a free ticket for WWDC(which costs $1500+) was when I was in college working in my mac programming work-study job, and I had to pass that up because it was summer school and I couldn't take time away from the last class I needed to graduate.

In short, I think I hold the monopoly on (e:strip) of sucktastic experiences missing Apple conferences, unless I happen to share a duopoly in that industry with (e:zobar).

Why am I complaining? Because it's hump day, that's why. I'm allowed to gripe like a 3 yr/old and shake my fist at the world, as well as having delusions of grandeur like starting my own mac developers conference in Buffalo and starting a Buffalo chapter of CocoaHeads where I am the sole member, the president, and still find time to call for my own impeachment.

Time for positives now. I:

Am employed
Have a decent-paying, fairly challenging job
In fairly decent health
Am well/over-fed
Have people who love me
I am living a life that 95% of the world's population can only dream about
Will get to see my son when he pops out in 4 months

Okay, so there probably are more important things in my life than going to nerd conferences and I'm making way too big a deal about missing them.

There's days when I feel like I'm not really a very good at being Database Architect because I don't have some kind of fancy/shmancy Oracle certification and the headhunters who occasionally call me up to ask questions have never heard of the database I manage (i.e. PostgreSQL for the techo-nerds out there).

And then, there are those days when I see billion dollar companies who hire people like that who would refuse to hire people like me (on principle alone of not having a computer science degree) who have the guys with certifications and who do databases headhunters are familiar with who are unable to make the simplest and wisest of decisions (i.e. choosing a proper primary key for their business model, for the techno-nerds out there). On those days, I don't feel quite so bad about not having rubber stamps of approval.

Got my new case today.



I'll probably write a review somewhere on the Internet at some point. Considering my investment, the case was virtually cost nothing.

Posting this entry from Safari running on Windows. Just to see if it feels weird.

I often have the habit of writing parodies of songs for no apparent reason. Several years ago, I started writing a parody of the Rodgers and Hammerstein's "do-re-mi" from the Sound of Music that mixed totally unrelated computer terminology together. I was stuck in a traffic jam and the idea just kind of hit me. When I set my own silly words to existing songs I tend to suffer from writer's block when I think them up, because I can't think of enough good stuff that rhymes; I usually end up revisiting what I've written several years later, when some idea about how to make things fit together hits me straight of the blue (usually from the same stupid place I got the idea to write the song in the first place). This particular parody was especially challenging, though, because in addition to stuff rhyming, I also had to think of computer terminology that fit well with the song. Well, last night I finished, and as I really don't have anywhere better to post this, I might as well post it to what I'm currently using as my diary.

(With apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein)

do, a loop, a do-while loop
ray, it is a thing you trace
me, an applescript reference
"fa", the first two characters of face
.so, a shared library object
-la, will link to a.so
tee, you pipe to grep and sed
And now we're looping back to do


And that is my silly little accomplishment for the week.

I meet Steve.

I show him my program that downloads all the NCSU online course registration web pages and searches them. The program I stayed up two days straight working on to get finished before he arrived and which caused me to receive an F on my Anthropology paper the following Monday.



No intercession from Steve whatsoever.

He comes back to visit NCSU again a year later to get his honorary doctorate. I show him my Shakespeare note-taking program. He tells me "that's what computers were meant to do!".

Again, no intercession of any kind.

After reading the posting by (e:Twisted) and the comment by (e:Zobar) , I realize the error of my ways; I was petitioning the wrong Steve. I guess I'll have to e-mail the other Steve if I want a job in Apple's social software division or their super-secret death-ray department.

(p.s. I'm kidding. I'm actually quite happy with the way things turned out, for the most part).