David McCreath » Cogitating

Why I’d Be a Better VP than Sarah Palin

mccreath — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 21:56:33 +0000

Roseanne Cash brings the funny to the Nation.

Jena, Louisiana and the Jena Six

mccreath — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 04:34:18 +0000

In September 2006, a group of African American high school students in Jena, Louisiana, asked the school for permission to sit beneath a “whites only” shade tree. There was an unwritten rule that blacks couldn’t sit beneath the tree. The school said they didn’t care where students sat. The next day, students arrived at school to see three nooses (in school colors) hanging from the tree.

It gets worse. Read the rest over at While Seated.
Appalled doesn’t even begin to cover how I feel about this.

Your April Fool’s Joke Sucks

mccreath — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 16:08:56 +0000

Anil Dash: Your April Fool’s Joke Sucks. Seriously.

BitTorrent for Software Distribution

mccreath — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 17:17:07 +0000

Not a new concept, and in fact one of the legitimate uses frequently touted for a protocol that is admittedly usually used for distributing content of questionable origin. But I bring it up today because [Parallels Desktop for Mac](http://www.parallels.com/en/products/desktop/) is now out of beta, and after three attempts to download the ~58MB disk image from the Parallels web site that each timed out after fifteen or so minutes, I found a [torrent](http://btjunkie.org/torrent?do=stat&id=2908d10a28e915379a784a69d12099c9a72ff9df51d9) for it. Using the torrent, the disk image downloaded in 11 minutes.
There are still some significant hurdles to getting BitTorrent into use by non-nerds: Configuring your router and your client to actually achieve that kind of speed requires some fiddling, the nomenclature is awkward (”torrent”, “seed”, “leach”, “peer”, and “tracker” all make some kind of sense, but don’t relate to anything in the Internet experience of most casual users), its reputation is that of a “pirate-ware”. But distributing something like Parallels, which so squarely aimed at nerds, should be a no-brainer.

Leo and John

mccreath — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 00:26:33 +0000

For [Micki](http://www.mickipedia.com/?p=717), and by proxy, [Violet Blue](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2007/02/01/violetblue.DTL).
I guess I could have used Beavis and Butthead, too.

My Senator’s An Idiot

mccreath — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 03:25:03 +0000

Ted Stevens goes off the rails while arguing against net neutrality. I’m sorry, folks. I didn’t vote for him. I didn’t vote for the annointed daughter of the drunk frat boy that became our governor, who I also didn’t vote for. These politicians are not representative of all Alaskans.

Time for a Change

mccreath — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 22:30:23 +0000

It’s taken me a while to actually do the deed, but today I handed in my letter of resignation at the [Anchorage School District](http://www.asdk12.org/). As of February 21, 2006, I’ll be under contract with [Mule Design](http://muledesign.com) as Lead Developer.
I’m really excited about the chance to work full-time with these folks. I’ve been doing small part-time jobs for them since September, and it’s gone very, very well. That part-time work has given us the opportunity to get to know each other and to figure out how we’re going to work 4,000 miles apart. Yes, that’s correct. Katie and I are staying in Anchorage. We bounced around the idea of moving down there, but ultimately Katie and I decided that we couldn’t move down there as quickly as Mule and I wanted to start working together, so the team at Mule very graciously agreed to try a long-distance contract. So far it’s working very well. It helps that we’re only one hour apart and that San Francisco is pretty easy to get to from Anchorage, but it’s still a huge gesture of faith on their part, and it’s very appreciated.

I find that I’m ambivalent about leaving the school district, but not so much because it’s a great job. Don’t get me wrong, it has been a great job and I’ve learned things there that I might not have learned otherwise. When I took the job, I had the amorphous title of “Webmaster” working in the Public Relations department. I was the first person hired specifically to work on the web site, which ran Webstar on a Workgroup Server 80. I eventually upgraded the machine to blue and white G3 and added some database functionality with FileMaker Pro before finally moving over to the Information Technology department, which had just hired their own web developer. He and I set about building the district’s intranet and web development team which has had as many as five full-time developers/programmers and one content specialist (the PR position that “webmaster” eventually turned into).
But the reason that I’m leaving is really that I want to do other stuff. I’m an okay programmer and I’ve written some stuff that I’m pretty proud of, but it’s not where my passion lies. The thing that really fires my rockets, that really makes me stand up and whoop with joy when it goes right, is building web pages. The HTML and CSS. And that’s what I’m going to get to do for Mule. Mike and Amber are both amazing designers, and I love taking a Photoshop comp and figuring out how to make it semantic, valid, and _look exactly the same as the comp_. That last one is the trick. It’s like doing a puzzle, but in a way that programming isn’t.
There are some other considerations. Since I’ll be contracting with Mule for at least a while, we’ll be using COBRA to keep my insurance from the school district. But that’s expensive and only lasts eighteen months. We’ve started looking around at alternatives, but as you can imagine, the prospects are disheartening. But we’ll figure it out. It feels like the country is reaching some sort of critical mass with regards to health care and insurance, and I know for a fact that we’re not the only ones looking.
Anyway. Into the future!

Crapulence Mitigation

mccreath — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:29:31 +0000

While I was puzzling over a CSS problem, Nadav wondered if there might be a “crapulent” way to fix it, maybe by adding a `

` wrapper or something. And then I found my new job description.

A Significant Event

mccreath — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 23:47:18 +0000

Yesterday, for the first time that I can remember in my life, I got a haircut before I really needed to. First flossing daily and now this. For me 40 is not the new 30, 40 is the new 12.

A Brief Marketing Note

mccreath — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 18:55:05 +0000

“In Action” is not a good name for a newsletter, no matter how you *write* it, because when someone *says* it in his or her head (or to someone else, for that matter – “Hey, Frank! Did you see the last issue of _Edify In Action_?”), it will always *sound* like “[inaction](http://www.answers.com/inaction&r=67)”. And if you do a haphazard job with the display, like Edify has done here, it’ll even look like it. This is doubly true if the development of your main product is glacial.