Jeff Boulter's Weblog

Boulters Everywhere!

I'm intruiged by things with the word "Boulter" in them. Mostly because it's my last name and it's fairly uncommon.

I even started a website way back when, Everything Boulter to try to collect all the boulter stuff.

Not too long ago, I set up a search on eBay to email me anytime things appear with 'Boulter' in them. Most of the time I get the same couple of CDs where boulters appear in the liner notes, but I also see some interesting stuff occasionally.

Last week, I noticed someone was selling a UGS Quad map of 'Boulter Peak'. Geez, I didn't know there was a Boulter Peak! It's apparently in Utah somewhere. I forgot to bid on it, but I emailed the seller afterwards and he agreed to send it me for $3. What a bargain. Apparently he's a geologist and found he had two.

I got it in the mail today and found Boulter Peak (8306 ft). It's right here, about 50 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. Now that I know where to look, I found a bunch of other interesting Boulter places in the area. There's Boulter Summit (6080 ft), Boulter Creek, Boulter Springs and even a tiny little dot that's labelled Boulter, but doesn't appear to be an actual town. The whole area is old mining country.

Interesting stuff. Anne were thinking of taking a trip for a few days to Salt Lake City and now I really want to go to visit my namesake mountains. Maybe while I'm there, I can figure out who this Boulter guy was anyway.

That's what I said, booby twaps!

TiVo finally fulfulled my wishlist for The Goonies. Awesome!

What could be better than a movie with Sean Astin (Sam from the Lord of the Rings), Corey Feldman, "Short Round" from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Joe Pantialo from The Sopranos, produced by Steven Spielberg, written by Chris Columbus, has a soundtrack featuring Cyndi Lauper, and features cool Rube Goldberg machines. Definitely a classic of the 80's. The whole adventure reminds me of Geocaching.

My favorite quotes:
""That's what I said, booby twaps!"
"In third grade, I cheated on my history exam. In fourth grade, I stole my Uncle Max's toupee, and I glued it on my face when I played Moses in my Hebrew school play. In fifth grade, I knocked my sister Edie down the stairs, and I blamed it on the dog!"
"God put that rock there for a purpose. I'm not sure you should move it."
"Rocky Road? Heh Heh!"
"I love you Chunk!"

Now I just need TiVo to record "Gremlins" and "*Batteries Not Included". :-)

Yahoo! is one big Joke

I bet you thought that this story from The Onion was a joke. Apparently it's not any more. Gotta love those search guys.

In other Joke-related news, The redesigned Yahooligans! Jokes was launched today, along with the obligatory RSS feed of the daily joke. Get your yuks here.

We've also got a new logo which is NOT a joke. Is it the Yahoo! "YO!" or "OY!"? You decide.

Situated Software

Clay Shirky's essays are usually something that ends up in my inbox and I skip over, usually because they're too long to rip through and move on to other things.

Today I tried to make good on my promise to myself to not put things off and read it right away. Dealing with it right away takes less time than passing it over all the time, but it makes it difficult to focus on the highest priority items.

(Regrettably I wasn't able to follow through on my promise of actually finishing this and posting it, hence why it's appearing more than a week after Clay's essay.)

A number of points he made in his latest essay, "Situated Software" rang clear with me.

First, I wholeheartedly agree that when people build products for themselves or their friends, the result is often way better than a traditional reauirements-gathering, design and planning cycle. It's like hyper-accelerated Extreme Programming. You are the beta users.

Sidenote: I worked with Clay a long time ago when his design firm worked on the never launches redesign of CRAYON. More on that in a future blog.

I've experienced this with some projects I've done at work.

The problem is that people who have this product instinct are rare. Steve Jobs is probably one well-known one. People who have good product instinct AND can actually create it are even harder to find. Hiring is hard enough. Where do you find those people?

While I may claim to know how to make a good tool for say, Geocaching, because I spend a lot of time doing it, ask me to design an accounting tool and I'll probably get it all wrong.

There are some areas where I just don't know if there are people that could wholly conceive and design it. The space shuttle is one that comes to mind, but I'm sure there are other examples on a smaller scale.

At work we fight this every time there's a build or buy decision. Sure, we can write some software to do most of what we want, but might it be cheaper to use some thing already out there, free or not. But it might be more trouble than it's worth and not meet our customized needs. Instead, the generalized nature of any repurposeable tool might make it obtuse, such as forcing you to wade through features you don't use.

The 'feature' of small scale often enables something to succeed.

One last point I wanted to nod at was the coming of age of MySQL as the "apache of databases". We use it at work. It's certainly not perfect and some of the bugs are pretty bad, but the cost (free) has enabled us to build systems faster than before that anyone can understand. It has allowed relational databases to spread virually through a company that has been tradionally adverse to databases. This is even more suprising when many in the company including executives are refugees of Oracle.

I guess now I've have less excuses to put off reading Clay since he was so on target this time.

First Blog on the Beach

Here's a first - I'm blogging from the beach. Point Reyes to be exact.

Anne's been wanting to do a backpacking trip here for a long time, so she made reservations a few months ago.

On the way in, we realized that we had never actually gone backpacking with just the two of us. We've gone on many hikes and car camped of course. And we've gone backpacking together with friends before, but never just us. So I guess this is first though it seems like the bazillionth time.

The route we took in was the same that I took with a friend in 1995 when I was doing an internship in Mountain View. We went out to Arch Rock, then up the coast trail to Coast Camp where we are staying the night. Apparently we got a really good site. It's at the very end so you don't have anybody walking by and you can't see into any of the other sites. Unfortunately that also means it's a looong way to the bathroom.

On my last trip here we stayed at some roadside campsite nearby where this woman just feet away from us blabbered on all night and kept us awake.

There were only two geocaches on our 8-mile route in. I'm surprised there were even that many because this is a national park and the NPS has explicitly banned them. I guess they must have been placed before the ban. We'll hit two more on our loop back tomorrow and maybe some more on our way home, but it seems unlikely that I'll meet my goal of averaging 2 per day for this week since the two today were the only ones all week.

I have a new enemy in the plant kingdom: stinging nettles. This nasty little plant got me in a few places while searching for the first cache. It still stings a bit. Between them the poison oak, going anywhere off the paths is like walking through a minefield - except sometimes you don't know you stepped on a mine until 48 hours later.

Once we unpacked we realized the first thing we forgot - a pot. I have a small one in my mess kit but it might make our dinner of couscous and green beans more challenging than planned.

It got quite chilly in the evening. It started to make sense why some people walking around here were dressed like Eskimos. This was when we found that we did not bring gloves. No problem, tomorrow's socks work great as today's mittens.

After dinner when it gets dark, we'll head down to the beach to walk around and see if anyone was successful in setting up a fire in the sand. It should be cool out there. Stars are unlikely because it's all fogged in which is typical for here.

Tomorrow we're heading up the mountain to see how well our feet hold up on the second day. Thinking positively, we'll have less water, propane and food to lug back.

Hopefully when I get home and do "the reveal" of my feet they'll be free of toenail trauma from my boots and blister-free.

Yeah, that'll be a first.

Safari2Yahoo

If you're reading this and using a Mac with Safari as your browser, you're obligated to install this.

Safari2Yahoo

Otherwise, you will make me sad. Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

Britney and Condelisa

I had a very strange dream last night where Britney Spears was asking me about how she was doing on the Yahoo! Buzz Index. As typical in most dreams, I could not get to buzz.yahoo.com and the link from yahoo.com was removed. Very embarrassing. I did get a very cool GPS watch though. Not sure what I ate that caused these dreams.

Got the real Buzz Index mail today and I enjoyed this bit:

Top Condoleezza Mispellings: 1. Condoleeza, 2. Condaleeza, 3. Condolezza, 4. Condeleeza, 5. Condalisa, 6. Condelezza, 7. Condoleza, 8. Condelisa, 9. Condolisa, 10. Condalezza

All Hail TiVo!

The 120GB hard drive on my TiVo is full. Not that all of that is good stuff, but we've clearly been getting behind.

So last night we went to the oldest programs and saw that we haven't watched "The Practice" in a couple months. We ended up watching 3 1-hour episodes back to back in 2 hours. Even better was that these were all part of a three part series. Not only were we able to skip the commercials, intro and credits, but also the "previously on The Practice" and "Next week on The Practice". We spent neither time wondering how it was going to end next week nor trying to remember what happened last week.

I think that everyone expected that the show would jump the shark after half the cast left at the end of last season, but it's still quite good. The writing is great and James Spader is awesome, so much so that you barely see the rest of the cast.

All hail TiVo!