Illusory Follies

  Well, I spent the last week in Dallas, TX attending a conference discussing Information Technology in the government. Some neat stuff. It seems like the government is pretty far behind technologically from the commerical sector. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some neat high-tech stuff that occurs in government — especially with regard to custom applications and some very fun hardware. However, they are severly hampered by the beaurocracy that exists and also the insanely paranoid level of security (and the sheer complexity of the security architecture) as well as the conflicting directive to “share information and operate in a collaborative environment”. Yeah — whatever. If all we were protecting was the secret recipe for Coke, I think things would be a lot easier but with the volume of data and the obtuse way that it’s separated and cordoned off, it’s just not being realistic to think that it can be shared.

Sorry for not updating for a bit! We’ve been busy continuing to house hunt as well as taking care of our ever-more-evil little son. At work I’ve been busy with doing some extensive .NET exception handling in my pretty but buggy code as well as getting into some serious shell scripting (never really had a reason to get too involved before). It’s amazing how a single line of bizarre and seemingly random characters can solve all your problems. I’ve also been messing around a bit with regular expressions. I’ve used them before but I had to add data validation to all of my code and it’s been time consuming learning exactly what to type next. Fun, fun, fun. Really — I’ve been enjoying it.
I’ve ordered a second hard drive (it should arrive tomorrow). It’s external, 2.5″ and bus-powered (no big clunky power adapter!). The intent is to use it with my laptop to install the Intel version of OS X. This will allow me to use Windows on my “work” hard drive but then tri-boot between OS X/Ubuntu/Solaris 10 on my external drive. Let’s hope it goes that smoothly.