Drawing pen tablet XP PEN Star G640 and Google Canvas.

When we work online and the whiteboards are not available to show your ideas something is missing. When I am in the online meeting I do a lot of hand waving and gesticulation with mixed results in conveying the message. 

However, while watching YouTube classes I noticed that a lot of instructors use tablets to draw their ideas. I also noticed some of my coworkers started to use pen-based tablets.

At work, when we draw driving scenarios, trajectories, acceleration curvatures, and so on, a drawing tool is becoming necessary, not to mention trying to convey any mathematic formulas.

While searching the subject, I came across this video and a very inexpensive XP PEN Star G640 tablet for $39, which is nothing compared to what my wife has spent for her design Walcom $$$ tablet.

As a bonus, the video showed the Google Canvas:

https://canvas.apps.chrome/

It is true that at work I use Microsoft Notes with a drawing area, but the cleanliness of Google Canvas is very enticing.

OurSportsCommunity.com: Kenosha, WI

employee self-evaluation day

Today, I reviewed employee self-evaluations, including my own. The
salaries, bonuses and promotions are based on these evaluations.
A lot of people are humble, undervalue themselves and don't come up
with a solid reasons to support the higher evaluations.

I think it is important to remind oneself that the self-evaluation is
not God's final judgement day, and going to it with a head down and
hoping to get what one deserves makes no sense..
It is business, a fish market. Think of 400 people trying to sell more-
or-less the same stinking fish. The one that will feed their kids
tonight is the one who screams the loudest, the most creatively and
who wraps the stinking fish the nicest.

geek: GWT & Spring

Today, while working on the problem I found I my own post from a year
ago about the same problem I am trying to solve:

http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit/browse_thread/thread/40d2de34a06a17c9/3872814bc0197b16

Now, I am not sure I want that solution, but it was fun to see what I
was thinking a year ago.

Web site I am working on

Development Methodology and Project Management

This management methodology is a collection of the best practices I gathered over last 15 years of work. During that time, I have seen a many success stories and great failures wasting tens of millions of dollars. I have put together these notes because even today, after the mountain of books have been published on the subject, I can still see managers doing things in the way that has been described as disastrous more than a decade ago. 

I hope that I can convey some of my observations to the coworkers and clients I will have a privilege to work with, I also hope that this will help me to establish some best practices to follow and improve upon.

My coverage may not be all encompassing, but it is definitely a rich experience.

• I have studied the culture and the mindset of the Japanese "Continuous Improvement", or kaizen (改善) while living and studying in Japan.
• I have experienced the management style of USMC considered one of the most successfully managed organizations in America,
• In USMC I studied the Total Quality Management (TQM) also heavily based on Japanese corporate management
• I have seen 6 Sigma accounting like "MBA" approaches
• I have seen misdirected "throw lots of the money at it" - consulting outsourcing approach
• I have seen the nightmares of outsourcing to cheap labor in India, Philippines and Poland
• I have lived the "lack up the geeks in the server-room for few months and let's see what comes out" approach
• I worked the 14-hour days, occasionally overnight -- work until you quit approach
• I have done the pair-programming, Agile Methods and Extreme programming
• I have worked for companies with Rational Unified Process RUP
• and most of all I have seen a lot of "everyone on the project do your own thing and hope for good outcome" approach

read more at my WIKI...

http://www.taktico.com/wiki/jsp/Wiki?topic=Methodology&action=action_printable&depth=1&hideform=true

work environment

In my whole career as a computer programmer I have never worked in
the company that cared less for the work environment of their
developers, or had a client who cared less, then the place I have
been working at for over a year. For anybody who knows what are the
consulting rates today (not low, I assure you) you'd expect that they
give you a good place to sit and actually do your work, or that they
actually get interested in what you are doing, no such luck.

paddling a canoe... with a tennis racket

Programming Web with ASP/VBS is like paddling a canoe... with a tennis racket.

I am so frustrated. (explanation for all of you geeks out there) I have been programming ASP pages and discovered that a certain instance of a variant (root of all evil) in VBS can be:
- neither an object, Null, nothing, zip, nada
- nor have any length, not nothing, not zero, not a Null length.
I cannot detect it with any comparison, as if somebody erased all reference of it from the memory.
I call it varBlackHole.

Recipe for this varBlackHole?

Pull a Null from MS SQL, stuff it into an Scripting.Dictionary Object (e.g. objDict("myDBNull") ), pass that reference to a function as regular variant (e.g. funFunCheckValue( objDict("myDBNull") ) ).

Function funFunCheckValue( varBlackHole )
   ' Hello World! I am a varBlackHole variant and I am absolutely useless!
   funFunCheckValue = varBlackHole
End Function

programming, managing and sales

Coding is a commodity; not unlike clueless managers, the only differences are that we have more of later around here, also, you cannot outsource wish writing to India.
Good programming, on the other hand, is a rarity, but our managers would not know this make-it-or-break-it difference. With the Internet-tech company where boss thinks the salesperson is an idol and programmer is an idiot, maybe in the near future the skills most in demand will be resume writing and interviewing, but isn't that sales after all?

Today I worked on Apple's WebObjects 5, trying to understand it's architecture. I bounced agaist a lot of problems, I think the server works nicely, but I am afraid that it is trying to be so simplistic that will limit us in the future. There is only one way to know, learn it. I hate to work without a goal, and learning is NOT a goal for me. I need to get something DONE. This is the secret of my failure in school. Some people learn just to learn (and sometimes never use it), I learn ONLY if I can use it.
Ann's birthday, happy 24!

At work in MSDSonline

2/5/02 4:15 PM

Another decent day of work.

The new website is on a staging server; the time is ticking, and it is closer to the deadline of February 15th.

I moved to Kareem's mega-cube, this way, hopefully there will be more thought exchange that will benefit us all, also I should have more clue what is going on in the team.