12 May 2000 mdorman   » (Journeyer)

Got up at 5:30am, went out and walked for an hour. Better than coffee.

The Joy Of Being An Independent Consultant

For the last two days, I spent a fair portion of the day writing an email to the people I'm working for, explaining why I thought the software they had selected to run their corporate web server (Netscape Enterprise Server) was poorly matched to their desires (to run a dynamic corporate site for a .COM).

This is not my idea of fun. Nevertheless, I've spent the better part of a week reading the documentation on Enterprise Server, and Server-Side JavaScript, while perfectly adequate for many things, doesn't have the facilities that you can get from Apache + any number of extensions.

And the only other options are CGI (not even really worth mentioning) and Java Servlets---which I don't have an intrinsic problem with, but the lack of a community building free frameworks drives development time up, and makes this unattractive for what is supposed to be a fast-changing easy-to-maintain marketing-oriented web site.

So, I wrote the email It may cost me the contract, but if I had been told that I was going to have to use these tools before starting the contract, I might not have. Life is too short to fight against tools that aren't suited to the task you need to accomplish.

And who knows, maybe they'll agree with me...

Baseball

I went to my first baseball game ever last night.

I think the thing that I like about baseball the most is that it so obviously rejects the change in the pace of life that has dramaitically reshaped our society in the last five or six decades.

Baseball doesn't have a set length---there is no play clock or time limits on inings. There is remarkably little violence, at least since Ty Cobb died (although the catcher did once look like he got nailed in an indelicate spot). And at least in the minor leagues (as we have here in Durham), the point for the players seems to be the game.

IRC

After more than a decade on the Internet, in the last two weeks, I've actually spent a fair amount of time on IRC.

I'm not sure it's worth it. While hanging around #debian-devel has been interesting (and has given me a much better picture of some of my fellow developers), I'm not sure it's all that good a use of my time.

Perhaps I'll give it another week or two.

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