And I'm back at home looking for work, but not the same person. If I am the same person now that I was a week ago, the $80 I paid to attend that conference and the time taken to pay attention to what the speakers had to say will have been wasted. I honestly pray that that is not what has happened.
If I was a more conspiracy minded person, I would think the American whose lone cow has been discovered to have BSE (Mad Cow) planted it on the cow himself.
Let's consider, so far a total of one cow in Canada has been discovered to have BSE. Despite vigourous searching (over a thousand head of cattle destroyed so their brains can be examined), authorities have been unable to discover where this cow was exposed to the disease, or any other cow or bull that has also become infected. The cow was owned by an American that had moved up to Canada to buy a ranch, after never having worked with "four footed animals." Today the Toronto Star is reporting that beef producers in the US are calling for a ban on importation of Canadian beef until Canada has been 7 years BSE free. Wow, one cow, owned by an American who had apparently not been in the industry for very long, could potentially raise beef prices in the US and devastate Canadian beef farmers. Don't misunderstand me. I'm going to benefit from all this when beef prices in Canada go down (Mmm, beef!) (on the assumption that there will be a glut in Canada of unexportable high quality beef and the Liberals don't start paying farmers to just destroy their herds), but that doesn't mean I want to see our Canadian farmers suffering.
Think of it, there's a conspiracy in there somewhere. How to destory a nation's beef export market and increase beef at home while giving US protectionists a reason to blame Canada.
SARS has taken over all the headlines this weekend. So the continuing BSE crisis is harder to notice. Premier Ralph Klein in Alberta is suggesting Ottawa pony up some compensation dollars, and American cattlemen still want to lock out Candian beef. Nothing new or really unexpected.
I expect the compensation to eventually appear, but the question will be if the cattlemen just destroy their herds or flood the Canadian market, causing regular Americans to come north so they can smuggle deflated price beef into the US where prices will have been artificially inflated.
I've set up my XML Data Binding software on SourceForge. All the source code is now in their CVS database. I just haven't figured out yet how to make a release. And there's probably a bunch of other housekeeping that they expect me to do that I haven't gotten around to yet. Oh well.
In more interesting thoughts, I decided to call myself an Independent Software Developer. If you are looking to get a piece of software running on Linux (porting it or recreating it) because it is a custom piece that you have and it is all that's holding you back from switching. Talk to me. (my posting name(that is the name after the word 'by' above), the at symbol, then the name of this machine as you see it in the location bar of your browser after the 'http://').
So, my time is now spent on a different project. 'mel' was interesting, but it does everything I want now, and additions are not likely to be as useful as what I've already done. So, I've moved on to a PostScript interpreter. Friday night, I decided to see how hard it would be to implement the basic stack based language in flex and bison and had something working within a couple of hours. Saturday I invested implementing the support structure and today I've been working on some of the operators and the graphics system. I'm also learning how to deal with SDL as a graphics system. X lines are not antialiased (though I do seem to remember seeing an antialiasing extension once, I should go look). I'm hoping I can do antialiasing in SDL relativily easily.
No, I didn't get a job yet. Tuesday I was refactoring and working on the graphics system, but I haven't had any time since to work on my programming projects. Wednesday, I went out for lunch with a friend. Today, I went to help someone pack up in preperation for his move on Saturday and tonight I go over to a friend's for supper. All in all, it's been a pretty busy few days for being unemployed.
Speaking of employment though, yesterday morning, I saw an advertisement for what I thought was just the type of work I'd love to do. PHP programming on a contract basis for someone. So, I emailed the guy, and he emailed me back. An hour later, I calmed down enough and emailed him back to say, 'Sorry, I don't think I could deal with working for an adult site.' I know they exist out there on the 'net, but I'd prefer not to have my face rubbed in it.
So much for that. This week I needed some time away from the 'puter. Too much time with the 'puter, and I get headachey and strained. It's been very cathardic, but I haven't really any great desire to sit in front of the 'puter for 10 hours a day again. I need to find something else to work on. Maybe I should get a part time job at Wendy's or something.
And a new week begins.
by alan on Mon 2nd Jun 2003 9:53PM
And I'm back at home looking for work, but not the same person. If I am the same person now that I was a week ago, the $80 I paid to attend that conference and the time taken to pay attention to what the speakers had to say will have been wasted. I honestly pray that that is not what has happened.
One Mad Cow => Protectionism
by alan on Thu 5th Jun 2003 5:13PM
If I was a more conspiracy minded person, I would think the American whose lone cow has been discovered to have BSE (Mad Cow) planted it on the cow himself.
Let's consider, so far a total of one cow in Canada has been discovered to have BSE. Despite vigourous searching (over a thousand head of cattle destroyed so their brains can be examined), authorities have been unable to discover where this cow was exposed to the disease, or any other cow or bull that has also become infected. The cow was owned by an American that had moved up to Canada to buy a ranch, after never having worked with "four footed animals." Today the Toronto Star is reporting that beef producers in the US are calling for a ban on importation of Canadian beef until Canada has been 7 years BSE free. Wow, one cow, owned by an American who had apparently not been in the industry for very long, could potentially raise beef prices in the US and devastate Canadian beef farmers. Don't misunderstand me. I'm going to benefit from all this when beef prices in Canada go down (Mmm, beef!) (on the assumption that there will be a glut in Canada of unexportable high quality beef and the Liberals don't start paying farmers to just destroy their herds), but that doesn't mean I want to see our Canadian farmers suffering.
Think of it, there's a conspiracy in there somewhere. How to destory a nation's beef export market and increase beef at home while giving US protectionists a reason to blame Canada.
Compensation
by alan on Mon 9th Jun 2003 6:33PM
SARS has taken over all the headlines this weekend. So the continuing BSE crisis is harder to notice. Premier Ralph Klein in Alberta is suggesting Ottawa pony up some compensation dollars, and American cattlemen still want to lock out Candian beef. Nothing new or really unexpected.
I expect the compensation to eventually appear, but the question will be if the cattlemen just destroy their herds or flood the Canadian market, causing regular Americans to come north so they can smuggle deflated price beef into the US where prices will have been artificially inflated.
Like that's going to happen!
SourceForge
by alan on Thu 12th Jun 2003 5:29PM
I've set up my XML Data Binding software on SourceForge. All the source code is now in their CVS database. I just haven't figured out yet how to make a release. And there's probably a bunch of other housekeeping that they expect me to do that I haven't gotten around to yet. Oh well.
In more interesting thoughts, I decided to call myself an Independent Software Developer. If you are looking to get a piece of software running on Linux (porting it or recreating it) because it is a custom piece that you have and it is all that's holding you back from switching. Talk to me. (my posting name(that is the name after the word 'by' above), the at symbol, then the name of this machine as you see it in the location bar of your browser after the 'http://').
New Project
by alan on Mon 16th Jun 2003 11:56PM
So, my time is now spent on a different project. 'mel' was interesting, but it does everything I want now, and additions are not likely to be as useful as what I've already done. So, I've moved on to a PostScript interpreter. Friday night, I decided to see how hard it would be to implement the basic stack based language in flex and bison and had something working within a couple of hours. Saturday I invested implementing the support structure and today I've been working on some of the operators and the graphics system. I'm also learning how to deal with SDL as a graphics system. X lines are not antialiased (though I do seem to remember seeing an antialiasing extension once, I should go look). I'm hoping I can do antialiasing in SDL relativily easily.
And then I didn't have any time.
by alan on Thu 19th Jun 2003 9:16PM
No, I didn't get a job yet. Tuesday I was refactoring and working on the graphics system, but I haven't had any time since to work on my programming projects. Wednesday, I went out for lunch with a friend. Today, I went to help someone pack up in preperation for his move on Saturday and tonight I go over to a friend's for supper. All in all, it's been a pretty busy few days for being unemployed.
Speaking of employment though, yesterday morning, I saw an advertisement for what I thought was just the type of work I'd love to do. PHP programming on a contract basis for someone. So, I emailed the guy, and he emailed me back. An hour later, I calmed down enough and emailed him back to say, 'Sorry, I don't think I could deal with working for an adult site.' I know they exist out there on the 'net, but I'd prefer not to have my face rubbed in it.
Beating around the bush
by alan on Fri 27th Jun 2003 5:08PM
So much for that. This week I needed some time away from the 'puter. Too much time with the 'puter, and I get headachey and strained. It's been very cathardic, but I haven't really any great desire to sit in front of the 'puter for 10 hours a day again. I need to find something else to work on. Maybe I should get a part time job at Wendy's or something.