_Mark_
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Below are the 7 most recent journal entries recorded in the "_Mark_" journal:
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03:11 am
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Continuing adventures
Since our last episode, I've upgraded cameras again - Canon finally came out with a 20x superzoom, and even after using the SP-550UZ and SP-570UZ for over a year, I'm still happier with the Canon UI. Also, Canon's autofocus algorithms work much better for me (I've gotten far more bird-in-tree shots without needing to resort to manual focus... only the catbird, and sometimes the cardinal, linger long enough for that to be worth the trouble :-)
More recently, that's gotten my shots of my first eagle (and eagle kit)  and closer to home, first moorhen and close shots of a tree swallow. (the latter was accessible because I'm still going out in  the Airis Kayak.)
I haven't entirely neglected my traditional hobbies - spent an afternoon touring the  Taza Chocolate factory in Somerville ("over by the junkyards and car shops" :-)
Went to Pycon in Chicago again this spring, but it looks like I didn't get around to posting those pictures; shooting 45 pictures/day (since 1 January - 55/day since 1 April, weather matters though the birdfeeders really helped this winter) it's sometimes difficult to keep up with the tagging - though maybe I have enough data to build a bird-recognizer now. (Working "near" NLP gives me a new appreciation for what computational modelling can do - heck, my camera can identify multiple human faces in a picture, and iPhoto (which I can't actually use) can match them... so it should be at least possible to do at the level of "hmm, you've got 300 heron pictures here, I bet this is another one"...)
Speaking of work, MetaCarta is still around; we've even got an open req (in Marketing, not engineering, sorry) and recent funding (as well as, of course, actual customers :-) Poking around on LinkedIn (while setting up my Google Profile) reminds me that I've been on this project for over 7 years now, which is an unusual level of attention span for me :-)
Tags: birds, chocolate, metacarta, photography, picture, scenery, travel, work
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05:23 pm
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... and Leon is getting Larger ...
We're hiring again, yay - another support person, a UI person (primarily browser-based uis), and a "windows" person (systems development and deep SMB geekery, "Visual Blub" doesn't really count...) As usual, send to my metacarta address.
Tags: metacarta
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09:05 pm
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busy busy busy
Gee, I haven't posted in over a month. Time to fix that. As an excuse, work has been both captivating and busy, we've brought some cool new people on board, but there are some things we're still looking for. There's a particularly hard-to-fill windows/linux crossbreed position, which includes security responsibilities; we're also starting to look for someone who can take over my release engineering responsibilities, because they're a lot more well-defined than they used to be, and I'm getting some advanced research projects put on my plate (we're still working out the details of that one, but if Debian! Releng/sysadmin! scripting! Shipping Products! Attention to Detail! gets your attention, get in touch with me at work...)Got another chance to go to Magic Wings, which is less overwhelming when it isn't summer time, but is still impressive. (Probably still better to go on sunny days than cloudy ones, though.) The picture here is some random butterfly perched on the exit sign...
Tags: butterflies, metacarta, picture, work
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07:08 pm
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New Office!
While I was in Sweden, my office moved out from under me (this has happenned 3 times now :-) Only by about 5 blocks; now I have a view looking down on the central square fire station, which should add photo opportunities...
Tags: metacarta, picture, work
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05:19 pm
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New Toys All Around
So, a major debian release (which means more work for me, but it's already on the schedule :-), a major direction change for Apple (though the only "real" new toy out of that is the 3.6ghz P4 dev kit, not, say, a laptop) (and yes, my iPod (!) played the song listed above on my drive in, entirely at random :-) And Lenovo (the company that actually *makes* all of the ThinkPad laptops, and now owns the name too) had a webcast demo today of the ThinkPad X41 Tablet, probably the least-secret new-product ever, the FCC pictures have been out for months... and without a new mac laptop around the corner, the X41/Tablet and the upgraded FlyBook tablet-with-everything are both turning my head...
Current Mood:  amused
Current Music: "All about the Pentiums" - Weird Al Yankovic
Tags: debian, mac, metacarta, work
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03:30 pm
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Jobs!
Update 2005-03-11: We've hired some of these, but go to the MetaCarta web site for current descriptions anyway, we're certainly continuing to hire!
We've finally nailed down a bunch of job descriptions for engineering hires. Full descriptions inside lj-cuts.
( System Validation Developer )
( DB Engineer/Data Librarian )
( Linux/C++/Python/Java Developers )
( Windows/Linux Engineer )
( CMS Integration Engineer )
Current Mood: excited
Current Music: "Chain Gang" - The Pretenders
Tags: metacarta, work
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12:18 am
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Automation! (work related)
I just came across Pragmatic Project Automation, a book that both explains and justifies the rather aggressive build/release automation I do at work. I've taken this approach because I don't have *time* (or attention span) to do these repetitive jobs by hand, and really do believe that the based way to get something done the same way twice, reliably, is to have the computer do it... to the point that I have a "big-red-button" script that
- Checks out the current source tree in a reproducible way
- builds it into packages
- makes an install DVD from the packages
- loopback-mounts the ISO and exports it for net-install</ii>
- drives a keyAT serial-to-ps2 frob to reboot a machine and request that it PXE boot/install itself
- waits for it to come back up and runs the short version of our automated test harness
- summarizes the build failures
And as I write this I'm working on making it post the summary directly - I've been reading it an manually annotating it, but this gets it to other people's attention faster. Sound a little obsessive? (No, sounds a *lot* obsessive Yeah, yeah.) And I haven't even hooked in the KVM switch that'll let me take over the entire inventory of systems. What excites me about the book is primarily that it says "This is a good thing, and here's how to do more of it" - not that anyone's been dubious, of course - and secondarily that it comes up with *names* for the different aspects of what I'm doing already.
Now I just need to find someone else who takes it so completely to heart, is enthused about it, and has the skills to execute on it (ideally, advanced python fu, but *I've* only been doing python for 2 years, the reasoning and problem solving is much more important... ) and hire them. With the right associated skills, I could hire them immediately (because the open reqs are for other more specific needs) but for this alone, probably after the first of the year...
Current Mood: vindicated
Tags: metacarta, work
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