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David is an occasional blogger, software engineer, Nintendo fanboy, liberal, news magazine addict, voracious TiVo user, and bibliophile. He was born in St. Louis, grew up in southern Indiana, and returned to St. Louis to attend Washington University. He hasn't managed to escape yet. He's a fan of free wine tastings, too many tv shows to name, and eating out. David makes his living developing web applications used internally by his employer. He doesn't blog about work because he's heard too many stories about that causing workplace troubles. There's more on the about page. |
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25 January 2001 - 12:31 am
Hi. I have a number of things to get share with you today, so please bear with me.
1. The ACM Lounge
Yesterday I told you I would share my opinions on the ACM Lounge with you, so here we go. The lounge is dirty, poorly (or not at all) managed, and contains a lot of out-of-date equipment. All of the equipment that we do have that is less than 10 years old is locked up in a room and the only people who have keys are Rob Fitzpatrick, a past president who nevr comes to meetings anymore, and Sean Leather, who, through no fault of his own, is not on campus very often. ACM also has a library of over 200 hundred computer-related books, but most of them are old, and they are not organized very well. On the plus side, ACM has recently aquired or been given use of, a numbe rof cool computers, like an SGI O2, but we don't have enough desk space to set them all up.
What would it take to fix some of these problems? Well, it would take a decided effort by the ACM leadership (of which I am a memeber, so I bear some responsibility for not addressing this sooner). If two or three of us could devote just one weekend day to the lounge, I think a lot could be accomplished. We might not be able to paint the lounge, but we could probably get the furniture arranged, all of the computers set up, and a library catalog made. We might even have time to go through the closet and spare room, and do some discarding of unneeded crap. This would be a major step in the right direction. Then we could go about getting a lock on the closet door, and perhaps arranging for some painting to be done over spring or summer break.
2. "They say that change is the only constant."
I heard this phrase on a New York Mutual Life ad today, and I realized that change is not constant. In fact, it is anything but constant. A better phrase would be pi is constant, or e is constant. Because of course, for example, no matter where in the universe I am, a circle's circumference divided by its diamter is always pi (3.1415926535897932384626433832795...). I can say this with mathematical certainty. It's a universal constant. It's kind of reassuring to think that this is an operation that you can perform an infinte number of times, in an infinite number of locations, and you will always get the same result.
3. negative273 design
What do you think of the design of this site? I'm of the opinion that we should put some links at the top of the page, under the site name. This is a decision that needs to be made soon, as we are getting to the point where we will have to start archiving some of these entries. This entire page requires that you download about 55k bytes, and that was before this entry (I'm afraid to look at the file size now). I pity our modem users, so an archive setup needs to be done fairly quickly.
I also think we need a better way to display the date, and perhaps the time, of the entry. I tried something new on this entry. Please send us any input you may have on this topic or on the previous paragraph's topic. Thanks.
Posted by on 25 January 2001 at 12:31 AM
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