Mike Munhall

I have a pile of books on my to-be-read shelf, but I had no desire to read any of them after I finished my last book. So, I picked up Ender’s Game to read again. It was even better the second time. This was the first time I have ever re-read a favorite. I’m going to re-read the entire series at some point because I hardly remember any of it. That’s a shame, considering Ender’s Game is my favorite saga of all time. (Thanks again, Laura, for introducing me to these books.)

For those of you that have read Ender’s Game, did you happen to see this version? “At Battle School Fighting is Compulsory.” Oh, my God. Give me a break.

Over the last few years my career has been slowly drifting away from web application development (programming) and more toward the leadership and management role that may or may not be an inevitable next step for me. While this is not a negative thing, it is not the direction I want to be going. I still truly enjoy designing and programming web applications and I have no problem continuing down that road until I am ready to move on. This is one of the reasons I left my previous job; I was getting behind on the technical curve and the tools in my tool bag were becoming outdated.

In my new position I am once again designing and coding web and software applications; however, I am not getting everything I was expecting out of the new position. My current job has me doing about 75% maintenance and 25% new development. I would like to be doing 25% maintenance and 75% new development. What to do? It essentially boils to down to two options: Stay in current position or find a new one.

Well, despite my whining about my current job being only marginally better than my last, I am not unhappy where I am. For the most part, I like the people I work with and I am slowly earning new tools for my tool bag. And, most importantly, the job is rather low-stress and at the end of the day and week I am usually left with enough energy to learn new skills and write applications on my own. That is enough for me, and that is how I came up with the idea to start an open source project where I can design and code until my heart is content, learn the new marketable skills, and provide some quality, free software to the ColdFusion community.

So, over the last few weeks, in my spare time, I have been brainstorming, documenting, designing and developing a ColdFusion-based photoblog. Over the weekend I posted the 0.1 version of CF Foto Post on RIAForge (an open source repository similar to SourceForge, but for projects written using Adobe products). Being a photographer, the choice to write a photoblog was an easy one. The fact that there are no other photoblog projects on RIAForge is an added bonus (Who wants to reinvent the wheel?).

Open source is new territory for me. In addition to honing my technical skills, this project provides the opportunity to delve into this new world of collaborative application development. However, I will not just be developing the application, I will be managing the project, as well. My lofty goal is to make CF Foto Post the most used ColdFusion-based photoblog on the web. I certainly cannot accomplish that by myself. I need contributions from a variety of developers with different skillsets to fulfill that goal. This is the appealing aspect the open source movement and the part of my project that I look forward to the most.

I have a long way to go until the 1.0 release, but the project has started, and that is important. Hey, look at me. I am writing code again and having fun.

As usual, after the daily 10:00 meeting at work, I left for a walk around the block. Normally this walk is just a 10-minute quicky, but I decided to extend it a bit and hike down to Famous Footwear for some new crosstrainers. I was going to pick up my new shoes at lunch, but I really didn’t feel like working so this walk was going to be a good a time as any.

So I made it to Famous Footwear, bought my shoes and headed back. Ah. Nice. Squishy. Comfy.

On the way back I walked upon a Wendy’s truck and there are people handing out burgers. FREE burgers. Kick ass. I’m technically at lunch now since I’ve been goon for so long, so I decide to spend the rest of my lunch hour in line waiting for my FREE burger. I’m handed a Wendy’s sack and am given the option of a Single with cheese or the new Baconator. It’s FREE, so I opt for the new Baconator. “Baconator” is marked on my bag and I wait in line. And I wait. And then I read on the sign that the Baconator consists of two 1/4-pound patties, a mass of cheese, five strips of bacon and some mayonnaise. Then I wait some more. I’m in my nice, squishy, comfy new shoes, though, so it’s tolerable. And then I make it to the front of the line and a Baconator is placed in my bag. The sack suddenly becomes enormously heavy and I nearly drop it.

Oh, no. What did I just do? My body cannot possibly process a 1/2-pound of greasy meat, five strips of bacon, a slathering of cheese and a pool of mayonnaise all at once! It’s not like I’ve been eating very well recently. What little room I have left in my arteries for blood to flow is going be blocked by this mountain of calories, cholesterol and fat. Oh, and a Coke. They gave me a 12-ounce can of Coke on my way out. That should speed things up a bit.

If I never post again, you know what happened to me. Ah, the price of FREE.

8/22/2007 3:30 P.M. UPDATE: It’s exactly four hours after I consumed the Baconator, and I have just discovered how my lunch earned it’s name: “I’ll be back.”

I was about halfway through Dreaming in Code when Harry Potter arrived in the mail. When I put the book down to start Deathly Hallows, I was somewhat dissatisfied with it. The story, to that point, was an account of a group of rather well-known programmers and visionaries with the goal of producing an open source personal information manager (PIM) application–like Microsoft Outlook–that would revolutionize the way we use PIM software. A lofty ambition for sure, but with the talented team that was assembled to write the software, you would think they could accomplish just about anything. It wasn’t the case.

The first half of the book chronicled the problems and the struggles of the organization its first two years. The story didn’t necessarily drag on and on, but you could see from a mile away that the team was going to have problems so there were no surprises, nothing to look forward to; Just day in, day out problems with developing software.  So, after I finished HP7, I was tempted to just leave Dreaming in Code where it was and move on. I decided to finish it however, since I had only a couple hundred pages left. I’m glad I did.

The second half of the book left the development team and began an investigation of why software projects–all software projects–have such difficulty. Without going into too much boring detail, it essentially boils down to software development being as much a creative process as it is engineering, and you can’t really rush the creative process.  There’s a lot more to it than that, but nobody wants me to try to rehash the analysis.  Trust me.  The point is that the second half of the book was much more enjoyable the first half.

Although I enjoyed part of this book, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it unless you are really interested in the day-in, day-out functions of a software development organization or you want an analysis of 30+ years of software engineering problems, what we’ve learned from them and what we haven’t.

I’ll start this off by getting the crappy stuff out of the way: The day I left Denver on my way to British Columbia I felt a tickle in my throat and I was sneezing. Long story short, I caught a cold that kicked my ass during the entire vacation. As a result, I had little motivation to get out my camera and therefore have very few photos worthy of the photoblog. That isn’t to say I didn’t shoot at all; I just have very few images worth sharing. I’m disappointed that I got to my favorite place on the planet and didn’t have the energy to do some really good photography. Nevertheless, the fishing was fun and I enjoyed myself.

Now for the good stuff.

The first day, we fished with Mark Grant, a well-known outfitter in the Sooke area. I met Mark on the trip two years ago. He’s a swell guy and he knows the waters around Sooke probably better than anyone. We were on the ocean for just about three hours before we caught our limit of spring salmon and called it a day. Time flies when you have fish on your line the entire time. The hightlight of morning was Ted’s 32-pound spring. A 32-pound salmon huge, if you’re wondering.

Days two and three of our trip coincided with the 2007 Sooke Fishing Derby. On these days a good friend of uncle Ted, Mark Tolliaffero, took us out on his boat. Just as we began to fish a pod of whales surfaced right in front of the boat then swam right beneath us. It was an awesome sight, for sure. But, salmon have an understandable tendency to avoid predators and we hardly saw any fish the rest of the day. It turned out to be 12+ hours of sitting in an uncomfortable seat of a gently rocking boat in complete silence. Add a gentle breeze and some warm sunshine and top that off with a healthy dose of cold medicine and you the makings for a great nap. We eventually caught a couple springs near the end of the day, one of which qualified for the derby. That fish was mine, and it finished dead last in the competition.

The third day was much like the first, but add some fog. We bagged our catch just a few hours into the day. This time Harold caught the big fish – a 28.6-pound spring that qualified for the tournament. Harold and his fish ended up taking eight place in the tournament. I’m sure it will be delicious when we get it back from the smoker.

This visit wasn’t all fishing. Diane, being the big supported of the arts in Sooke, scored admission for everyone to the Purchaser’s Preview event of the 2007 Sooke Fine Arts Show. After the show we had dinner at this swank joint, the name of which I cannot remember right now. I made it over to 17-Mile House for a burger with their kick ass garlic mayo. I had another burger at another pub, whose name I also can’t remember. I did make it down to French Beach one evening just for an hour or so before I ran out of energy.

As usual, Vancouver Island was beautiful. The Sooke area is growing though, and it scares me to think what it’s going to be like in 5+ years. It’s not going to be the same small town we know today.

OK… now run over to my photoblog and check out some photos of Canada. I have about 15 that I’ll be posting, one per day or so, over the next two or three weeks.

I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows while in British Columbia last week. (I’m working on a draft for that post.) Overall, I really liked it and I think the series ended just as it should have.

At the end of the last HP, I learned of a theory from Zablanc that Harry was the seventh horcrux. I thought that idea was brilliant and it turned out to be correct. We also learned at some point before HP7 was released that “someone dies.” My two (albeit minor) disappointments in the Deathly Hallows come from these two pieces of the plot.

I wish that the horcrux idea had been introduced earlier rather than later in the story. I was on pins and needles for months before Deathly Hallows was released wondering how Harry would deal with being the last and most crucial horcrux (assuming, of course, that it were true). I could only imagine how much more fun the book would have been to read if more of the plot was centered around that idea.

My other disappointment (again, very minor) was that it felt sort of “cheap” that Harry was the one to die in this book, but was able to come back. Not that I’m disappointed that he lived, but it just felt too easy.

It’s been a long time since this slow reader has been able to plow through half of a 750+ page book in two days. The second half of the book really fun. Just like when I finished the Dark Tower series, I am having a hard time deciding what to read next that will stack up to the book that I just finished.

… and photographing.

I’m heading to British Columbia for a few days of fishing and a few evenings of photographing my favorite place on the planet.  See you next week.