The Phantom City

You know, now I’m feeling better about the fact that I didn’t get that job with them. I suspect Motricity is going to be laying off some good people in Durham to do “what’s best for the investors.”

Anyway, it opens up a great office space for some other company in the American Tobacco campus. The interior of that building is nice and new.

Hey, I work across the hall from this guy! He’s got a window, but since he’s published I won’t begrudge him that.

The article is a good tutorial on the CFEclipse plugin for the Eclipse IDE, which I use for ColdFusion coding at work. (Eclipse and I have come to a pause in our struggle and are trying to normalize relations to avoid future conflict.) I had been ignoring the snippet feature for a while, since I didn’t see a lot of time savings with it, but Jim’s article convinced me to use it again.

Anyway, if you want more about ColdFusion, check out TheCrumb.com.

I’m reading an article about a framework in ColdFusion designed to handle object dependencies, and the author relates everything to making a car — A car object needs an engine and transmission — to make things clear. That’s a metaphor with a long history, but I don’t build cars. I handle users, reports, forms…mentally translating from cars to those kinds of collections of data doesn’t really put me ahead at this point. Too bad we have the Factory pattern name; I think it just encourages it.

The subject line of an email I just received (not spam):

loaner mouse for photo shoot

Yes, that would be a live lab mouse. It’s always the little things that surprise you when you move to a new job.

Nothing quite brings that lesson home than watching your production web server go down just before you’re about to leave for the day, all because a message from you to the hosting reseller inquiring about hard drive capacity was translated by the hosting provider as “Take the hard drives out of that server.”

In an attention economy, reputation can take you a long way. In this case, it takes Atoosa Rubinstein, former editor of Seventeen, to an investors meeting to talk about videos of her cat. Perhaps someday I’ll be famous enough to propose cat videos as a business project. Or maybe I’ll keep it simple and just get a cat.

Link courtesy of Gawker.

Update: Doesn’t Alpha Kitty Atoosa sound like a good name for an anime?

Good mashup.

Link courtesy of TV Squad.

Steve Yegge writes about the Google Way. Interesting stuff.

At Google, projects launch because it’s the least-energy state for the system.

Link courtesy of Joel on Software

GE/Durham makes the pages of Fast Company.

GE/Durham has more than 170 employees but just one boss: the plant manager. Everyone in the place reports to her. Which means that on a day-to-day basis, the people who work here have no boss. They essentially run themselves.

Link courtesy of Jeremy Zawodny’s blog

Yep, after over a year of updating this site on a regular basis, somehow the last few months have proven remarkably challenging on that front. Just when I thought things were starting to calm down at work, and I was going to have some more time to blog, suddenly things changed.

Anyway, long story short, I’m now managing our primary Web presence. That proved pretty busy when it was just me and our programmer handling everything. We’ve hired someone to help out, though, and that is working out well. I’m hoping I’ll have a bit more time, as I catch up all the stuff that piled up while I was too busy to think about it.

Thanks for your patience. I’ve been amazed at the amount of traffic to what was essentially a dead blog for the last few months. I guess Jackie Manuel entries really pay off.