Why there are so few pictures in this blog

Anyone who read my blog from last year (hosted on blogger.com) knows that in general I like posting lots of pictures.

Why so few pictures this time around?  Well, work place policy.

Boeing does not allow Cameras at work.  Secret documents and all that.  Mind you, we have laptops that are taken home every night and we are given USB memory keys, so I think that the fear is more from accidental information leaks than from anything else.  A company has to trust its employees (if it doesn’t, that is a separate article about corporate stupidity… Thankfully Boeing does), but that does not mean it is going to put faith in its employee’s ability to perfectly frame a photography shot!

I hate it when web forms strip newlines

As a professional author (at least I was for a small part of my life), I know the value of proper white space. Paragraphs are not only a technical aspect of English; they are also part of the art of writing.

(Bleck, the last sentence in that paragraph is not good at all.)

When I submit comments or help requests, I put effort into it to make sure that who ever is on the receiving end can read my question or comment easily.  I break up paragraphs by topic, and I even have a closing line.

Thusly (my word of the day), I am irritated when a webform goes and strips newlines from my comment.  I also feel sorry for whoever has to read my 4 or so paragraph question, now all strung together into one large and ugly paragraph.

Yes, I realize that stripping newlines is done because it is the trivial solution to a problem.  A lot of storage formats consider newlines to be syntaxically significant, and apparently the 50 or so characters in ASCII that are unused are not good candidates for some reason.  Mostly newlines are used as a delimiter to make reading a plaintext dump of the data easier, which can make debugging (and other activities) go a bit more smoothly, but this still doesn’t excuse the fact that the result is software that was programmed for the programmer and not for the end users!

Yah a better mouse!

I have a better mouse now, yah!

I still miss my mouse from home through. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 buttons of goodness.

Work

I need to make a new category for Boeing.

Much different environment that at MS, way to many people for everyone to have their own office. Actually my cubical is rather large, but the chair sucks (cannot scoot in with it, who thins that making arms on chairs so high that the chair cannot be scooted in is a good idea?) and I need to requisition a new mouse.

Boeing recently switched over to giving employees limited accounts rather than admin privileges, spyware and government secrets do not mix well.

Some things are very organized here, amazingly so. Other things are kind of weird. Like trash cans. There was no trash can at my desk, the office manager kindly was able to get me one, someone had ordered some and forgotten to pick them up.

Whiteboards are a scarce resource. People keep stealing them, so now they are also special order. Ick.

Boeing recently upgraded to Dell D600 laptops, kind of weird. Where did they GET D600s from? The D600 is an incredibly common (and rather good) model of laptop, in fact Microsoft has 20 or 30 of them just laying in a pile in the lab I frequented, but umm, heh, the D600 is kind of old. 2+ years old. Mind you CPU speed increases have been somewhat minimalistic in that time frame (Hey look, lets shove more cores on the die, alright!), and a 1.6Ghz Pentium M is nothing to sneeze at, the Pentium M (or D, depending on when you talk to Intel is a darn good processor.

I am just wondering where they got the stock from!

Edit:  Catagories added