Born at 10:55AM, weighing in at 8lbs 8.8oz, it's Mr. Wiggles!

Dammit, I need to let off some steam.

I'm trying real, real, hard for the image of my infant son relying on me for food and shelter to get me past the image of the enormous, ridiculous brick wall that my predecessor's built into what I'm working on.

I have tried my damnedest to redirect these people I work for around this problem, and every attempt I make to take the loaded gun they're pointing at their foot out of their hands has led to one more loaded gun they manage to somehow pull out of their cavernous desks/other spaces.

No matter what workaround I try, it's just not good enough for them. Yeah, I could easily make something new that would solve their problems now and in the next 20 years, but that's making something new, and that's something that they don't want to do, even if during the timespan of me modifying something old I could have made at least three new things twice as better.

People, please, momentarily stop rearranging the f'ing deck chairs on the Titanic long enough to understand what the heck a tradeoff is. Yeah, things are far from perfect. Yes, I hate the way I to get around them as much as you do, if not more-so. What I'm working on has been so enormously damaged and limited for so long by the people who came before me that it should be expected that there's a whole freakin laundry list of stuff that is going to suck and that you're going to have to put up with.

In the tradeoff, you accept having to deal with one thing for the ability to acquire another; in the case of this business, it's putting up with lack of explicit detail they so crave yet don't understand themselves in order to get what they want working at all. In the case of me, it's putting up with this situation so I get money to support my family.

When a great opportunity drops into my lap, I sometimes don't take the maximum advantage of it that I could out of consideration for others.

I need to remember that when I do this, it's often because I'm acting like a wuss and I'm concerned about what others might think of me, and also often because I lack the confidence to make full use of such an opportunity.

What I need to remember most of all is that when I don't take full advantage of an opportunity and water it down out of concern for others, the opportunity is utilized in a half-assed way, and the opportunity:

1. Either completely fizzles out with the net effect of the opportunity being nil and me not having another opportunity like it for a very long time.

2. The opportunity blowing up in my face and possibly in the face of the person to whom I was trying to show consideration, because half of an opportunity can be more unstable and explosive than a full one.

3. Both #1 and #2

4. #1, #2, and the people around me being dumbfounded as to why I made such a half-assed decision.

I guess that the best way to deal with my latest experience with this is to turn it into a learning experience. Yeah, it cost me something, but I'll learn to be smarter the next time around.

To answer (e:jenks)' question, yes I'm downloading the iPhone SDK and I'll be trying to start writing iPhone applications. It would really help if I actually had an iPhone, but with a baby on the way, I've really been trying to justify it.

I'm not a very well-paid programmer, as I make less than a buffalo elementary school teacher, and once the little one comes into the world, I might as well have my employer do a direct deposit to my landlord, daycare, univera, whatever infant daycare provider I manage to find, and the bank that does my car payments; after those get taken out, we're eating and buying baby clothes off of (e:inscrutable)'s paycheck, which is about half of mine. I'm not going to complain, because people in some other area of the world would kill for 1/100 of what I have, but the situation has me scared shitless.

I probably will end up getting an iPhone, because I can justify it with trying to earn extra money for my family by developing and selling iPhone apps by whatever mechanism Apple sets up. I'm also studying Google's Android phone development environment, so I can enter something into their contest, which has some pretty lucrative prizes. There's so much crap I have to cram into my head to make money on the side, but the more I can cram into my head better off things will be for us.

Screenshot of estrip on a simulated Google phone

Before I got my job in Buffalo, I was severely underemployed in NC and desperately looking for work.

I wanted to work for this one mobile content divider; they seemed cool, and I knew some people in the company who might put in a good word for me. I also really wanted this one social software engineer position at Apple. I got neither job, and ever since I came up here I always replayed in my mind the "what if they hired me" scenarios.

This week, I learned that the mobile company was laying off a lot of its staff and quitting the area I wanted to stay in. I also read the blog by the guy who got the social software engineer position, and he says the position was pretty limiting.

I guess the point of this post is that it's kinda weird to look back and see the smoking craters of decisions I might have made if my life had gone exactly way I wanted it to, and to feel I'm lucky that it didn't.