suacoustic

I really love my job and really enjoy being around the people that I work with.  Many folks probably think that the geeks don’t have any fun or enjoy their jobs since what they do is SO technical.  Most non-technical people think that we sit in our cubicles slaving away for hours on end (well, sometimes we do…) or that we are in very serious meetings all day trying to figure out the next big product or web service to release. 

Really folks… it is NOT rocket science - we just have a bit different outlook on how to solve a problem and have extremely complex humor.  Consider the following dialog with one of my developers this morning regarding what I thought was a really neat image function on a website that I ran across:

ME via email: Hover over the image of the bed and see how the large image on the right pans with your mouse movement.   A neat feature for the customer sites in the future??? 

Developer reply: Doesn’t seem all that great to me. I’d rather have the full image pop up and then be able to resize the window to view the whole thing at once if I wanted. Here you lose that option. I also don’t like that it occurs on a mouse over. It looks neat, but I think it’s more of a nuisance than a feature.

My reply:  Hmmm…  tell me how you really feel… *grin*

Developer reply:  I could if you wanted, but that would involve ranting and links to usability articles and such. Plus I know it would inevitably lead to me pointing out how there’s no right mouse button on a mac and how much that ticks me off, and seeing as your a mac guy I just don’t want to go down that road.

And that was the end of it… that is the ‘rocket-science’ application of weeding out useful and no-so-useful features that we are considering as upgrades to our customer sites.   So you see, web-design is really NOT rocket science - two mere mortals could have had the same conversation and came to the same conclusion as the code-jockey, database-cowboy guys did in this case… but the way we do it is so much more fun. 

You also must know that we both laughed out loud to the responses here - guess you had to be there.

The moral of the story is that: Web design and application development is NOT rocket science - mere mortals can participate in the process as well, but the tech geeks with their playful sense of technical humor have much more fun at making decisions such as this.  Being misunderstood is so difficult sometimes… but I wouldn’t change it for anything… geeks have more fun.

my neighbor since we moved into our current home - passed away June 21, 2008.   I do have fond memories of Mr Farless as he was a great neighbor for the 7-8 years since we moved in next door to him.  When he was in good health, it wasn’t strange to see him working in the yard and keeping a small garden behind his home.  Although he always offered some of the best of his small harvest to my wife and I, we accepted on only rare occasions.

He was always up for a pleasant conversation with any of his neighbors, and often offered me the use of various and sundry yard tools.  I’m not much of a yard man myself, so his sage wisdom and advice (and the proper tools) always came in handy in helping me keep my yard straightened out.

Its amazing how you start to miss the little things when someone falls ill and doesn’t make it out of the house as much as they used.  After Frank fell ill, we didn’t see him quite as much around the house.  Only after he passed away, I realized that I could have been a better neighbor while he was ill.  I will miss the brief little chats we had and offer the sincerest condolences to Kim, Terry Don and the rest of the family.   Thanks for the memories Mr Farless, you will be missed.

Read the obituary for Frank Farless courtesy of the Daily Dunklin Democrat.