“Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

- Douglas Adams
The Salmon of Doubt

I ordered it on Black Friday, sitting in a hotel in Ocean City, Maryland, where I had taken my family for a two day getaway over Thanksgiving break. I opted for the 16GB model with 3G networking. I haven’t had the occasion to use 3G on it yet, and I don’t expect to anytime soon, but I figure it’s better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. Someday I’ll likely be somewhere without wifi and then I’ll activate the 3G.

Anyway, the iPad arrived the following Wednesday, and I’ve been using it heavily ever since. The battery life is amazing, watching videos is great, and overall it’s just a joy to use.

I haven’t purchased iPad versions of many apps yet (only Reeder, which is my absolute favorite RSS app these days), but a lot of my apps are universal, so the iPad version is built-in. Very cool. I honestly don’t mind most of iPhone games on the iPad, since i just run them double screen.

In fact, I’m writing this blog entry on my iPad right now, and i just used it to activate the Christmas theme on my blog.

But since taking my current position, I’ve been all about the web. PHP, to be exact.

To be honest, I miss the desktop, but it’s not all bad.

For example, I really like being able to call functions without knowing the their names, just using a string. That’s pretty cool.

Also, there is TONS of documentation and help out there for PHP. Way more than I ever found for REALbasic, my desktop weapon of choice.

The JavaScript event model, though, leaves something to be desired compared to REALbasic’s event model.

And while it’s convenient not to have to declare my variables, I find it makes it all too easy to use unconventional and meaningless names.

INTERNATIONAL POLICE AUTHORITY UNITED STATES SECTION (IPA)
Region No. 2 New York City
P.O. Box 804 Knickerbocker Station
New York City, New York 10002-0804 USA

We, office of the international police authority (IPA) hereby write to inform you that we caught a diplomatic lady called Mrs. Vernon Wallace at (John F Kennedy International Airport) here in New York with a consignment box filed with United State Dollars.

Meanwhile, base on our interview to the diplomat she said that the consignment box belongs to you, that she was sent by one Williams I. Luis to deliver the consignment box to your doorstep not knowing that the content of the box is money. The diplomat also said that her first transit in the state was at Cincinnati Northern Kentucky International Airport Ohio.

Now, the diplomat is under detention in the office of (IPA) security, and we cannot release her until we carry out our proper investigation on how this huge amount of money managed to be yours before we will release her with the box.. So, in this regards you are to reassure and prove to us that the money you are about to receive is legal by sending us the Award Ownership Certificate showing that the money is not illegal.

Note, that the Award Ownership Certificate must to be secured from the office of the senate president in Nigeria, because that is the only office that will issue you the original Award Ownership Certificate of this funds, this is because the fund originated from Nigeria

You are advised to forward immediately the Award Ownership Certificate if you have it with you, but if you did not have it we will urge you to contact back the sender of the diplomat to help you secure the Award Ownership Certificate if at all you did not have it.

Below is the contact information of the person that sent the diplomat:

Name: Williams I. Luis

Email: williamluis60@yahoo.com

Phone: +23480-88-926-727

Furthermore, we are giving you only but 3 working business days to forward the requested Award Ownership Certificate. Please note that we shall get back to you after the 3 working business days, that if you didn’t come up with the certificate we shall confiscate the funds into World Bank account then charge you for money laundering, but if you forward the Award Ownership Certificate then we will release diplomat with your consignment box also gives you every back up on the money.

Thanks for your understanding and co-operation

Yours Truly,
I.P.A REGION NO:2

DCP. DOUGLAS H. KING

Cc: FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION (FBI).

Cc: CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (CIA).

Little Stevie Jobs

Yeah, we may need to get out more.

Tim, the guy who hired me at Township, is someone I’ve known for a long time. He was my cooperating teacher when I did my student teaching back in 1995. I should have ben able to tell where my career trajectory was going to take me, because even back, on my first day of student teaching in Manor Middle School, I was helping him run LocalTalk wires for the school office.

After student teaching and graduating, I went to find lots of work as an English teacher. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to secure any of that work for myself. I decided to change paths temporarily, and I took a job as a computer lab facilitator for Lampeter-Strasburg School District. That was an awesome job, the kind of job where I woke up on weekdays and thought, “Cool! I get to go to work today!”

But it wasn’t meant to last. Within a few months, I had been contacted both by Etown and by Eastern Lancaster County School District about tech jobs. Still not the teaching job I had trained for, but it sure paid a lot more than being an aide. My preference at the time was to go to Etown, since my good friend Joe worked there. His boss Dave had recently left Etown to moved over to Manheim Township. But Etown moved more slowly and Eastern Lancaster Country offered me a job, which I took.

For five weeks.

Because five weeks was how long it took Etown to hire me. I started working alongside Joe in February of 1998, and we had a blast.

For about a year and a half.

Because that’s how long it took for Joe to move over to Exeter Area School District. Interestingly, at that point, Dave came back from Township to work at Etown again, where he stayed until the fall of 2008.

In 2000, Dave and I managed to hire Mike, a talented computer tech and network admin. Mike had previously been working for Dave at Township. Are you getting a sense of how cyclical things are?

Mike moved onto IU13 in 2007, but Dave I kept working together until his departure from Etown last year.

Then, about two months ago, Tim called me. This wasn’t terribly surprising since we had kept in touch over the years. He had moved out of the classroom and into technology. He had also moved from Penn Manor over to Township shortly after Dave left Township to go back to Etown. Confused yet?

Tim said he was looking for a new webmaster/database administrator and asked if I’d be interested in applying. I said yes and got my paperwork together. The funny part is that I wasn’t looking to leave Etown. Etown had been far from a perfect workplace over the years, between administrative scandals, leadership upheavals, and various technology-related situations that I’ll never be allowed to talk about but took quite a toll on us personally and professionally. But in reality, in 2009, things were better for me at Etown than they had been in a long time. Still, I felt like it was the right time to move on when I got Tim’s call.

And move on I did. I’ve been at Township just over a month now and I’m really enjoying the work and the people.

Truth be told, though, I do miss my friends at Etown. I’m blessed to have been part of a great team at Etown and to have worked with some amazing people. Some great tech people I’ve worked with over the years at Etown: Dave and Mike (of course, mentioned previously), Tom, Dan, Ted, Christine, Kathleen, Brian, Gayle, Amy… and the list goes on.

Some of you may be wondering what happened to Kodiak, the student information system I had developed for Etown. Honestly, Kodiak kept me at Etown for a long time, through several job offers, one of which was particularly tempting. But Kodiak was retired in July, 2009. It had a good run, but Etown understandably decided it wanted a commercial product. With Kodiak put to rest, I felt more comfortable moving to Township, since Etown’s SIS no longer depended solely on the knowledge in my head and my head alone.

So, long story short: Yeah, I actually left Etown. And yeah, I’m happy.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think corporate (and private) America should be doing far more than the status quo to help people in need. But making someone download IE8? Weird.

I moved my blog to WordPress.

Why? Well, as you probably know, I’ve been using Tangelo, an application of my own creation, for my blog for about four years or so. But I haven’t updated Tangelo in a very long time. I haven’t had a public release since 2006, I believe. So I decided it was time to stop fooling myself and let go. Tangelo is dead, and that’s okay. I can stop working on it.*

And that’s actually quite liberating. Because now I can stop worrying about developing my blog application and focus more on writing, which was the whole point to begin with.

So why WordPress? Because it’s powerful and ubiquitous. It’s built on open standards and it rocks pretty hard.

The cool part is that I still have all my posts. That’s impressive because I started this blog on Blogger back in 2002. From there I migrated all of my posts to Movable Type a couple years later. Then when Tangelo was ready for testing, I moved all my posts again. And the other day I exported them from Tangelo and into WordPress. That’s really quite a journey in weblog terms. The only thing I lost was the old Haloscan comments, and while I could probably salvage them, I don’t see a reasonable way to link them back to their original posts, so adios.

At any rate, here we are. Enjoy the new digs while I get things situated.

* If you’re a Tangelo customer, sorry. But I’m guessing you probably saw this coming. If you need help moving from Tangelo to WordPress, drop me a line and I’ll be happy to help out.

Nowadays I like to think of SQL Server and Oracle as the Death Stars of the relational database universe. Extremely powerful. Monolithic. Brilliant. Complex almost beyond the ability of a single human mind to understand. And a monumental waste of money except in those rare situations when you actually need to destroy a planet.

– James Devlin