Cool Stuff

1) Joel on Software did a wonderful demo on FogBugz this morning. I'm pleasantly surprised- it looks like a very well-thought-out piece of software. But it's mis-named. Bug-tracking is one of five tasks it tries to do well and in a novel way. The most surprising of these: along with its sophisticated-looking project-management tools, it does scary magic to turn programmers' predictions of task completions into a probability of shipping on a given date, and he even used words like "confidence distributions" and "Monte Carlo simulations" to make it sound legit. Maybe it is legit. I will play with their free demo and report back.

2) On a whim I asked for and received a second LCD monitor today. Because I've been bringing my laptop in to work just to hold the documentation, which finally got annoying. Now my programming IDE and documentation aren't fighting for the same space all the time. Big win. I feel more productive already.

3) Biking from home, downtown to the software demo, and uptown to the office felt very comfortable, even though I intentionally took more trafficked roads than I usually do, just to see how bad midmorning traffic is. Answer: not too scary. Anyhow.

4) Singstar 80's has been obtained by friends. Oh yes.

Local Artistry

...One of the things that's making me happy these days is that this guy lives just a few blocks away. Both melted_snowball and I love his work, and not just cause he took photos of us in our house, even though that was fun too.

He's starting up a photography seminar series next Thursday and subsequent Thursday evenings- I had a lot of fun the one time I've taken a photo session from him earlier this summer, and I'm looking forward to sitting in on as many of these sessions as my schedule allows.

This Saturday he's also hosting an open house at which you can see things like these: smp_photos (though most of those are of course not on paper, since he prints on demand). Speaking of printing, his attic contains a printer the size of a human coffin. It's a thing to be seen, after the art.

Anyhow, he's making my schedule just the more complicated- choices! Choices! Life is good.