Getting restless

It was a day not filled with good news. It wasn’t a bad day, necessarily. Just not one that contained a job offer.

It’s funny. I’ve been working from home for a few years now and never really felt cabin fever until I was not working from home. I wanted desperately to have some assignment to be done today.

With no job to do, I dusted off a project I’ve been meaning to complete for some time now. It’s a Raleigh-themed web forum I’m hoping fills a gap I see in the online discussions around here. I’m still hammering out details so it’s no where near ready for public unveiling. Still, I’m enjoying working on it and it’s teaching me a lot.

I’m just ready to be out of this in-between state I’m in. Kelly’s working now and I’m not: it’s a total change in responsibilities. I have to play a bigger role around the house than I have before and still find time to job hunt. Then when I do get a job, the kids will be in an after-school program for the first time ever, which means less family time for all of us. At least at that point, though, we’ll be in a routine that will hopefully last us a while.

Maybe some luck will come my way. I feel I could use some right now.

Dennis Ritchie, 1941-2011

Dennis Ritchie, legendary creator of the C programming language and co-inventor of the best operating system ever (UNIX), died earlier this week. He was 70.

Ritchie was every bit as influential as Steve Jobs in shaping our computing world. Perhaps even more influential than Jobs.

Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language and co-creator of the Unix operating system, has died aged 70.

While the introduction of Intel’s 4004 microprocessor in 1971 is widely regarded as a key moment in modern computing, the contemporaneous birth of the C programming language is less well known. Yet the creation of C has as much claim, if not more, to be the true seminal moment of IT as we know it; it sits at the heart of programming — and in the hearts of programmers — as the quintessential expression of coding elegance, power, simplicity and portability.

Its inventor, Dennis Ritchie, whose death after a long illness was reported on Wednesday and confirmed on Thursday by Bell Labs, similarly embodied a unique yet admirable approach to systems design: a man with a lifelong focus on making software that satisfied the intellect while freeing programmers to create their dreams.

via Dennis Ritchie, father of Unix and C, dies

Political, not principled, stand on gay marriage

The Charlotte Observer rightfully takes Gov. Perdue to task for her mealy-mouthed stand on the marriage amendment.

Yes, jobs are important but so is taking a principled stand against constitutional bigotry.

In a press release late last Friday afternoon, Perdue said she’d vote against the amendment. No, not because she supports gay marriage but because “I cannot in good conscience look an unemployed man or woman in the eye and tell them that this amendment is more important than finding them a job.”

We agree that this ill-advised constitutional amendment could hurt the state economically, deterring good businesses and workers from locating in North Carolina. Some N.C. business leaders have begun belatedly speaking out on that issue.

But the governor missed a chance to stand up against the amendment for a bigger reason: The amendment is discriminatory. Her johnny-come-lately assertion came across as spineless and political.

via Political, not principled, stand on gay marriage | CharlotteObserver.com & The Charlotte Observer Newspaper.

Good election day

It’s been a long but good election day! All of the candidates I supported won election, with Nancy McFarlane becoming Raleigh’s next mayor, Russ Stephenson reelected as at-large councilor, Eugene Weeks being elected outright to the District C seat, Randy Stagner winning a seat as the District A councilor, and Kevin Sutton reelected to the school board. Also, both the housing and transportation bonds passed by a good margin. To top it off, school board chairman Ron Margiotta was sent packing when Susan Evans defeated him tonight. There’s still a runoff pending for the District 3 school board seat held by Kevin Hill, but that’s within reach.

A fantastic day, politics-wise!

Google search-by-image

Because I love to see where my public-domain photo of Raleigh will show up next, I decided to give Google’s new search-by-image service a test drive. I uploaded a small size of my pic and lo and behold, Google provided me many, many search results showing where my photo is being used.

So far that’s ABC11 (WTVD), NBC 17 (WNCN), the City of Raleigh (who Photoshopped a light pole out of it!), MSNBC, Business Week, Yahoo! Finance, several local businesses including Four Points Sheraton in Cary, Allied movers, Signs By Tomorrow, and several real estate companies and taxi companies among many, many others. Good to see how far it’s traveled!

Hagan is not paying attention

Tens of thousands are protesting how big corporations own our government and Senator Kay Hagan wants to sell us out even more. Has she not been paying attention to Occupy Wall Street?

I can’t think of a bigger blunder than introducing this bill now. This is not going to go over well with the “99%.”

North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan Thursday introduced a bipartisan bill to entice U.S. corporations to bring home offshore profits at a sharply discounted tax rate – a move she said could help jump-start a stagnant economy.

At a news conference with Republican Sen. John McCain, Hagan said that offering a tax holiday – a temporary lowering of corporate taxes for offshore profits from 35 percent to 8.75 percent or lower – would encourage companies to hire more American workers.

“More than $1 trillion of American company earnings are stranded outside of America where it is not doing one bit of good for the American economy,” said Hagan, a Democrat from Greensboro. “Companies with a North Carolina presence have roughly $200 billion sitting overseas. I want that money back in America and I want it back in North Carolina.”

via Hagan backs corporate tax holiday – National – NewsObserver.com.

Neuse Radio almost here

I’ve been perfecting my Neuse Radio streaming station lately and I’ve almost gotten it to the point where I can let the world listen.

It’s running on the open-source Rivendell radio automation suite, patched through the open-source JACK audio server, encoded with the open-source DarkIce encoder, streamed with the open-source Icecast2 server, and hosted on my CentOS-based VPS in Ashburn, Virginia.

It’s so automated that I don’t have to do anything to keep the music flowing. If I want I can add some chatter (called voice-tracking in the industry parlance) between songs to give it a live sound, but I tend to let the music run without interruption.
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iRP Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs


Unless you were under a rock somewhere, you learned the news that first shot through the wired world about 12 hours ago: Steve Jobs, the iconic Apple CEO, died yesterday. Jobs was quite an individual. Not only did he shape the company that’s synonymous with his name but he put his mark on all of Silicon Valley as well. It’s hard to imagine a Silicon Valley without Steve Jobs, actually.

I played this clip for the kids of Jobs comparing a computer to a “bicycle for our minds” and I couldn’t help staring at Jobs as he spoke. In his 20s at the time, Jobs is every bit like a big, excited kid. Those eyes burn fiercely with a childlike curiosity, like he’s hopped aboard a rocket that will soon be blasting off to points unknown.
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