Gun-Door

[Fovea]

No Solicitors, and dammit we mean it.

[Boo_Radley]

1. Haha. Nice

I'm really diggin' your ongoing expose on urban America. You're finding some cool stuff to shoot.

[Fovea]

4. Almost every time I pedal down the street

I see somthing new, or surprizing.

I think that bicycling is the best way to see a place. It's fast enough to get somewhere, slow enough to actually see where you are going.

[Boo_Radley]

6. Yes!

I live in the burbs, so it's not an option, but when I travel I always take subways or rent a bicycle. I want to move to a more urban area, because suburbs are lame, but I'd really have to change my job to do it.

[Fovea]

7. It frankly amazes me

that anyone would want to live in the burbs around Kansas City when we have districts like the Plaza to live in/near.

I think that KC may be one of the world's most beautiful cities, now all we need is a good public transit system.

[Boo_Radley]

8. If it were possible

to move to the city here, I would, but I work 20 miles into the suburbs, and the only decent urban area around here is Washington DC, and commuting into and out of the city everyday would be insane. I'd spend so much time in traffic that I wouldn't get to enjoy the scene, anyway. They're supposed to extend the Metro light-rail out here, but it will be years.

My brother invited me to move to San Francisco. I could crash there until I find a job and a place to live, but I'm a little too timid to move without finding a job first, when I already have a stable, reasonable job that I more-or-less enjoy.

City living is definately better.

[Fovea]

9. What is it you are looking to do?

Just curious.

[Boo_Radley]

10. I work in computers

I work in a network operations center. I do Unix administration and operator work. It's easy and pays well, and I think I'm too old (36) to make a career change right now. The market was dead for a while after the tech sector bust, but it's come back to a reasonable level. I really should get moving on this year, but I might be too lazy. Plus, I'm taking classes now.

[Fovea]

11. Before the stroke

I was a programmer/consultant for Borland. But sadly since the stroke/heartattacks, I am not the same code monkey I used to be. I have some problems with the syntactical demands, and I just don't have the ability to concentrate for very long at a stretch anymore.

In KC there is a company called DST that is a serious consumer of net admins. You might check them out.

[Boo_Radley]

12. Thanks for the tip n/t

:)

[TahitiNut]

13. Oh? I'm surprised you didn't pick a username like 'TurboPolitik'

:evilgrin:

[Fovea]

14. I should have chosen

Delphinian...

[TahitiNut]

15. An OOPer, huh?

:evilgrin: Decent RAD package. As an SDLC evangelist, I had occasional difficulties with some RAD sectarians. It served me right for having been a elegant coding snob, I guess. My 'hero' was Dr. Robert B. K. Dewar - his BAL code for the SPITBOL interpreter was a thing of complete beauty. Awesome. (360 Memory Lane.)

[Fovea]

16. I prefer to think of Delphi/Kylix as a small 'r' RAD tool.

Far from being an advocate of drop, code and go, I also believe in the life-cycle approach. Every dollar spent on the front end saves a hundred on the back end, assuming that code and go even actually gets to a back end. But with everything there are edges and limits.

Large solutions always (at least in my experience) have an iterative element somewhere, no matter how you plan them. The best tools let you work top down, and bottom up.

For a while there it looked like FORTH was the solution, indeed as a linguist, I really loved Moore's lexical bi-directional approach.

So I find that the key strength of Borland was the OWL over the MFC. I know this is windoze centric, but most of my client base were windoze centric.

I really loved PASCAL. My last project before the stroke was helping get Kylix out the door, which some think is a cheap kludge, and others a work of genius.

I vote for genius... I love the DB Express components, they are lightweight and elegant. And Trolltech benefits, IMO from BL's OWL like wrappers.

I miss the cutting edge, but I am not sharp enough to work that way anymore.

[TahitiNut]

17. YOU FORTH LOVE IF HONK THEN

Sentences long extremely and notation Lukasiewicz in writing about wrong is what?

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

Well, despite the reaction many seemed to have to RPN, Adobe seems to have collected a little geld on the elegance it unleashes. (Believe it or not, there're Forth compilers for the PalmPilot.)

Niklaus Wirth was near-genius with Pascal, and Modula-2 is a truly excellent descendant. I still like the daddy, though. What I didn't particularly like was the faddist 'structured programming' era. Many years ago, I'd had a couple of conversations with Edsger Dijkstra, one long one over a few beers in one of the basement bars of the Royal York Hotel in Toronto, where we discussed the hyper-reactivity to his 'go to' analysis that launched that fad. We both lamented the impact (of its misinterpretation) on the industry. It was later no secret that he shared my perspective that SP "methodologies" didn't make good programmers' code any better and made bad programmers' code worse.

I'm a strong advocate of SDLC ... particularly because, if done correctly, it can facilitate extraordinary unit and systems test suites with a big head-start and yield close to four-sigmas qualitative measures. In a "throwaway code world" that always sacrifices the same thing in the Good/Cheap/Fast bargain, that's not valued anywhere as much as it should be. I agree that iteration is an unavoidable (and essential) approach to systems development, and the most desirable is economic efficiencies of the latter iterations of the SDLC itself, both systemic and organizational.

Sadly, the industry has become brokered (not engineered) and coders commoditized.

[Fovea]

18. the industry has become brokered (not engineered) and coders commoditized

and for which we pay and pay and pay.

[bvar22]

19. Absolutely agree on the bicycle in the Urbs.

I'm working on a heated thermal bag to carry my camera on Winter rides in Minneapolis/StPaul.

[ET Awful]

2. So is that orange cap there for the same reason it is on toy guns?

Just to make sure a cop doesn't confuse it with a real gun? :P

[Fovea]

3. It's important

otherwise some of our boys in blue around here would try to shoot the building.

[benEzra]

5. Probably required by law on all replica guns (n/t)