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Well well well, my friends who are blogging just grew by 1. Check out Henry’s (Wen2 as we call him) blog at http://hhartono.blogspot.com .

It’s kinda cool to be able to influence someone to join a trend, just as I originally tried out blogging after seeing my former manager blog. Hopefully these blogs will grow up to form a community of some sort, and then it’s time for us to take over the world… uhh… scratch that… maybe just having a blogging community would be good

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In a galaxy far-far away, this incident happened:

A web application was needed and created for a certain department. It was supposed to be up an running within a year. The application still was not running after 2 years…, and a certain developer who shall remain nameless, inherited the application for completion.

The developer was baffled when he looked at the application. He had a couple of problems:
- The application was found all over the place, development server, production server, different locations within the development server, and various different versions. He had no clue which files were the ones to work with.
- The application was started by a student, who had to leave because his/her co-op term finished after a few months, only to be continued by a consultant who also had to leave. End results: a complete mess, partly working application, a jumble of HTML, and scattered pieces of files that our poor developer had to figure out.

Our developer then met with the client, fixed the functional problems, found which files ware actually needed to function and still had a headache trying to figure out the HTML. Of course, he would like nothing better than to start all over with the application, but that would be time consuming. So the developer had to continue working on the messed up HTML, trying to fix it, since a specific designer is not available.

Moral of the story:
- Have complete documentation of applications that you are working on. This helps the next person coming in to know what you’ve done and what’s to be done.
- If you’re not very good at design, ask for a good designer to help with the HTML part. Do not allow developers to act as designers because it’s generally not their strong suite. What ends up happening is jumbled HTML that nobody can fix that easily. Of course, this works vice versa…
- If you don’t have the resources to complete a project, then identify this at the beginning so things like developers acting as designers don’t happen.

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I never really liked coffee before, never believed it when people said coffee would be addicting. So one day, I was strolling thru the mall, and innocently purchased a white mocca at Second Cup. “Hey, this doesn’t taste half bad”, I thought to myself and then thought nothing more.

Well, a month later, I’m buying white mocca’s at Starbucks, Second Cup, and wherever else I can find one. What has gotten into me? Somehow the taste really makes me enjoy it very much, and the cold weather doesn’t help either I guess.

Even now, I find myself thinking of coffee after meals. I think I better start restraining myself before this becomes a full blown addiction, because it’s kinda expensive

People, be careful of coffee, it’s addicting (as if anybody doesn’t know this already)

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I downloaded Firefox at work a couple of days ago, and guess what? Good bye IE ! Seriously, it loads pages faster, has lots of cool features like the Live bookmarks for RSS feeds, tabbed browsing (no more clutter on my taskbar from too many open browsers, yay!!!), and lots more extensions. Don’t know why it took that long for me to give it a try, but great thing I did.

There’s just a couple of sites that won’t open because of ActiveX components, and I still have IE installed for those kinds of situations, but other than that surfing with Firefox has truly been fun.

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Oh wow, nothing like finding out from searching something completely unrelated, that your own brother is blogging . He never told me, and I never thought my brother would have a blog.

The funny thing is, I was actually searching something at technorati (I think it was Raptors – Heat or something…) and found his post about the game. To my surprise, there were Indonesian words in there, and to my shock, it was my brother :).

I think I’ll leave him a comment to let him know that I’ve found him. Here’s the link if anyone wants to get to know him.

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For the last week or so, I’ve been learning to type with the dvorak layout. Mainly because it’s supposed to save your wrists a couple of miles worth of typing every day (http://www.theworldofstuff.com/dvorak/).

“Less Finger Travel: Because of the arrangement of the keys, the Dvorak keyboard requires less finger travel. It has been estimated that a QWERTY typist’s fingers travel 16-20 miles a day, while a Dvorak typist’s fingers will only travel about 1 mile. This is a major benefit to the health of your fingers.”

So, I’ve followed the training on this page, as well as typed a couple of pages worth every day. I’m glad to say that as of right now, I’m up 30 wpm on the dvorak layout. Of course, this is still a far reach from my normal speed of around 80 – 90 wpm, but hey it’s not bad for one week’s worth of typing.

I’m planning on getting up to speed within the next 3 or 4 weeks, and hopefully switch to dvorak for most of my typing, because my writsts have been known to hurt once in a while from too much computer work.

Another thing I found by learning dvorak is that it’s actually quite fun to be able to switch back and forth between two different layouts without too much trouble. I guess our brain is really wired in an amazing way.

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