With two of the projects I’ve been working on finally out the door, I’ve finally got some downtime at work. To make use of the time, I’ve started reading Debugging Applications for Microsoft .NET and Microsoft Windows by John Robbins. One recommendation he makes that’s very useful is to treat warnings in managed code as errors. I followed that advice for our in-house bug tracking tool (a customized version of the IssueTracker starter kit) and it revealed at least a couple dozen instances of methods that needed to be overriden, unreachable code, declared but unused variables, etc. I wonder how much of the code we’ve written since last year needs the same treatment?
Month: September 2005
$44.92
That’s how much it cost me to fuel up the Volkswagen Jetta I drive today. $3.59 a gallon, and only because I drove past stations charging nearly $4 a gallon for premium. Buying the same amount of gas in continental Europe or England would have cost me at least double that amount though, so I won’t complain. But telecommuting regularly is looking like an even better idea than it already was.
Refugees?
I was listening to C-SPAN on the way into work and one of the callers had an interesting question: why are the people suffering in New Orleans being called “refugees” in the press when people in Florida suffering from hurricane damage aren’t?
I checked out the Wall Street Journal this morning and sure enough, there was that word. Checked the Washington Post, same thing. Was the caller being overly sensitive? Maybe. Was he reading some racial connotation into the use of the word? Probably. But it may also be that the press has been sloppy in how it uses words. Usually you see the word “refugee” in the context of someone fleeing another country from religious or political persecution. The people in New Orleans aren’t running from some dictator, they’re from here. They’re just unfortunate enough to be too poor or too ill to get out of the way of the storm in time.
Taking Time to Think
Came across this blog post via digg.com. The management tips seem quite reasonable in isolation. But when I try to map them to my current workplace, I don’t know if my employer is necessarily ready. Guess it’s one of those “your mileage may vary” kind of things.