joe shaw

On the way back from Logan last night I got to go through the new tunnel, and now I understand how the Big Dig was $12 billion over-budget.

It’s a really nice tunnel. Maybe a little too nice.

I mean, I’m all for making it a pleasurable ride with a long-term future, but was it really necessary to make it jewel encrusted? The emerald and ruby pattern along the top of the walls are nice, but the diamond walls and solid gold guard rails are a little over the top. Is this really the most effective use of our federal tax dollars?

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Rob: Nice work with the volume manager stuff. At this pace, you’ll be done before I even get a chance to touch it.

Havoc: Keynote is pretty nice, although it lacks a lot of the customizability that people love from PowerPoint. The templates aren’t great, the clipart is virtually non-existent, and it’s trickier than it needs to be to change things like fonts and colors on various objects, but it has a ton of promise.

Of course, I think about rewriting Achtung off and on. With a nice high-level language like C# or Python and a much better platform and supporting libraries (like DiaCanvas, perhaps?) it seems like it’d be a lot simpler these days.

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I’m still on vacation, but I was so excited about the new office that I stopped in today and set up my cube. It’s huge and it’s more closed off than my old one. (Although that’s somewhat unique to my cube, many are as open as the old ones) And it’s got natural light, too, which makes it basically perfect. Except the chair, it’s more uncomfortable.

Anyway, is this not the sweetest desk setup you’ve ever seen? The photo kind of sucks because I only had my zoom lens and couldn’t get far enough away to get a holistic picture.

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Here is a picture of a squirrel: