Joe Ganley [http://ganley.org/]

Writing code since 1979

I have been a professional software engineer for over 10 years. I have written many kinds of software, but my particular strengths are interactive graphics applications, compilers and interpreters, and algorithms.

I also enjoy writing, woodworking, and home improvement. Also this. NVConsumer.

~~Bio~~ (under renovation)
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News

- New weblogs here and here.

Thursday, August 24, 2000

I rented Fight Club last night. Wow. I can tell that one's going to take a few days to fully digest. Excellent movie.

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Moderately entertaining story about a couple of guys making a road trip to that phone booth in the middle of the Mojave.

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Wednesday, August 23, 2000

That got me thinking: Do you suppose the phone company will ever stop supporting rotary dialing?

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I was in Denver airport the other night, and the gate agent's phone rang. It was a really old 2500 deskset, with a ringer that is an actual pair of bells. I remember having one of these as a kid, and that there was a dial where you could adjust the volume of the ringer; at one end of the dial the ringer was loud, and at the other end it was really loud. Anyway, it has been so long since I've heard a phone that didn't have an electronic ringer (or worse, lately, one that plays some damned tinny annoying song) that the noise felt really startlingly out of place.

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The 50 Least Influential Movies of All Time. I am one of, apparently, about four people who actually liked The Last Action Hero, and I didn't think Freejack and Runaway were all that terrible. (Though, in their defense, they didn't quite say they were terrible, just uninfluential.) However, happily, those are the only three movies on the whole list that I've seen.

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Friday, August 18, 2000

Vindigo is easily the most useful app I've found for the Palm. (Indeed, it's the only non-PIM app I keep on mine.) Now if only they would cover Silicon Valley and the farther Virginia suburbs of D.C. I wrote them asking if they intended to do so in the foreseeable future, and got a content-free response that new content would be added "as needed"... whatever that means.

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Thursday, August 17, 2000

I'm getting ready to move, so I'm packing a lot. (My life: Work. Pack. Sleep. Repeat.) I just packed up a ton of old cassette tapes, none of which I'd listened to in at least 10 years. I listened to a few of them as I packed: Asia's Asia, Missing Persons' Spring Session M (MP was a great pop/rock band made up of ex-Zappa bandmates), and King Crimson's Three of a Perfect Pair. What great stuff! I was disturbed to find that, despite not having heard these for a decade or more, I still remember every word and every riff in every song. I go upstairs and can't remember what I went for when I get there, but I remember all this music from forever ago. That's no way to run a brain, as far as I'm concerned.

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Friday, August 11, 2000

You know what I really hate? "Enter the last four digits of your social security number and then hit the pound sign." If you know I'm going to enter four digits, don't make me hit the freakin' pound sign! The only thing I hate worse than this is when they make you wait until they're done talking before you can hit your choice. United, despite being the crappiest airline in the land, has a really cool voice-response system for checking flight information over the phone. It never ceases to amaze me how the designers of everyday things -- consumer electronics, especially -- don't seem to know the first damned thing about usability.

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Wednesday, August 09, 2000

Reading people's weblogs, since they are typically organized most to least recent, reminds me of the book Time's Arrow (which, by the way, is excellent).

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Interesting new company: Asynchrony. The idea is that you do programming work for them, much the way many people do now on open-source projects, and they pay you. If I had any time at all for such things, this would be an interesting proposition. (P.S. Go through my link and I get a referral. Thanks.)

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