Dave Kellam

Liquid nitrogen is fun; flowers make a cool sound when they shatter, almost like glass. Bananas make a huge mess when they shatter and thaw, kind of like goo. And this chem lab has a pretty wicked setup, it’s a brand-new building. Each lab station has a flat-panel monitor and a computer and all sorts of crazy chemistry stuff.

I’ve been doing some general site maintennance stuff over the last week or two, trying to get things going again. I’m in the process of ditching the old photo section and starting up a new one using Gallery (which wasn’t playing nice and took me awhile to get installed). The old photo gallery started getting errors awhile ago but I didn’t bother fixing it. I’ve started putting things that I wrote this year up in the written section, it’s not that hard but it’s taking a bit longer than planned.

Lets see, I installed new stats software and you can see how people are getting to the site. I think that the cron job is set up properly and it should update twice a day (although it might only be doing it once). I also upgraded Moveable Type and added a button on the sidebar so people can donate hosting money. Not that I expect anyone to actually donate money, but dreamhost set it up so their donation buttons only get used for site hosting.

I’ve seen stuff like this before, similar sayings and such, but never wrote them down. Anyway, this time it’s from Larry Wall’s State of the Onion address.

We the unwilling,
led by the unknowing,
are doing the impossible
for the ungrateful.
We have done so much for so long with so little
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing

It sums up a lot and applies well to the technology industry. Software development is pretty unrewarding, save the challenging yourself part. I could go off on a rant, but it’s the general feeling in any industry — nobody understands or appreciates what is involved.