Last weekend I moved to a new apartment. I’d gotten fed up with the terrible management at the last apartment complex, so I left as soon as my lease expired. The new place is about the same size, also has Google Fiber, and has an even better view–I can see Town Lake from my desk.
Month: December 2016
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It’s amazing how cowardly Americans have become
4 Schools Go into Lockdown, Call Cops on Man with an Umbrella. It’s a gun! No, it’s a sword!
Whatever it was, two different people spotted a man carrying it near Poly High in Riverside, California. They saw something, and said something. As a result four local schools went into lockdown mode yesterday.
Police hunted for the menacing maniac and finally, according to The Press Enterprise, “a campus supervisor at Poly spotted a man who matched the description given by both callers.”
The weapon he was carrying?
An umbrella.
The lockdowns were lifted, but the threat continues: Rain is in the forecast. [Hit & Run]
That was the high school where I was an inmate in the 1980s. I took ROTC while I was there, which involved about a hundred students marching around with bolt-action rifles (albeit rifles which had been rendered incapable of firing) at least one day a week. No lockdowns were involved.
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The end of CityDesk
RIP CityDesk – Joel on Software. In those days all the cool kids wrote their own blogging platforms. I wrote CityDesk. In what turned out to be a monumentally wrong bet, I thought that people would want to blog on Windows, with all the slick WYSIWYG editing goodness that wasn’t yet available in early versions of HTML. CityDesk kept your entire website in a SQL database (Microsoft Jet, the backend of Access) and had a frontend like a word processor. Every time you needed to publish, it generated the entire site as a set of html pages, which it then uploaded to an ftp server for you.
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Over the years the CityDesk code base (VB 6.0, another bad bet) stopped running on the latest versions of Windows. Nobody else cared but by that time I was using a custom version of CityDesk which only ran on Windows XP. So until recently, I had a virtual machine set up with Windows XP running in there, and a copy of CityDesk.
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Matt Mullenweg over at WordPress has been trying to get me to move Joel on Software over to WordPress for so long it’s not even funny. I finally gave in. [Joel on Software]
I used CityDesk myself to manage my main website for a number of years after the sad demise of UserLand Frontier, before finally replacing it with nanoc around the time I moved to Austin in late 2012. It was an unusual product in that it was actually better than any Mac alternative at the time (something that’s usually true only of games).
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New job
I’ve just started a new six-month contract as a programmer with Integrity Digital Solutions. I’m in Temple for the week for training, but after that I’ll be working from home. It looks like it will be a pretty good job.