Well, I’m finally going to WWDC this year. After so many years of trying to land a full-time Mac programming job, it’s finally happened and now I have cause and means to get out there and see it all.

I’ll be at the various get-togethers as well, so if you see a waddling fat guy wearing a brown Duff Beer hat, say hi.

The sessions look great this year, and I have it on authority that there are some very amazing little announcements coming out at WWDC, but, of course, the person could not be specific (nor would I ask that, having worked there). But we’ll all know Monday anyway, so there’s no sense in caring right now when we can just sit tight, eh?

Step One: Underestimate the size of the memory by 50%.
Step Two: Using that measurement, allocate a quarter of what you think the server has in memory to a MySQL query cache, and the other half to various other caches in MySQL and Apache.
Step Three: ab -kc 50 -t $((5*60)) http://the.server/

In about thirty minutes, when I could actually enter text at the keyboard again, I discovered the folly, adjusted the sizes, and ordered more RAM. During that thirty minutes, however, I was about to die. I’d cancelled the benchmark around thirty seconds into it when I noticed no progress and the fans in the G5 started to sound like La Guardia’s runway around mid-day. It didn’t let up for a half-hour more.

0xDECAFBAD

I must not attend meetings. Meetings are the mind killer. Meetings re the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my meeting. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the wasted time has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

I about died when I read that…

CNN.com – Tech jobs leave U.S. for India, Russia – Jul. 14, 2003

Marcus Courtney, a former contract worker for Microsoft and Adobe Systems and president of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, said many tech workers understand and even endorse free trade and globalization.

They even enjoy living on the cutting edge — taking courses in advanced computer languages, getting experience in a variety of business disciplines, and endorsing a philosophy of continuous improvement, he said.

But many find it tough to reconcile their macro-economic outlook with their own unemployment.

“We need to move beyond the idea that individuals can simply cope and retrain,” said Courtney, whose 275-member union is asking Congress to study and possibly regulate offshore outsourcing. “Workers need a voice over their economic future and a voice against the executives making these unilateral economic decisions.”

I trained to be a programmer. For a while there that’s exactly what I did. I figured I was doing things the way my parents and theirs always did: start at a small job and work up. A year and a half later the Bust put me on unemployment. My money was running out two months later so as a last resort I picked up a technical support job with a local computer company. I’m lucky: that job netted something great within the company and that’s where I am today, but I’m still, in essence, technical support. That’s completely not what I set out to become.

Word Soup: Get a Job…

Summary: Meet Bob. Bob is lazy. Bob needs to get a job. Hi Bob!