We Need to Fix IT

I hope you all had a great weekend! Mine was overshadowed with the knowledge that I have to get back to studying, but I did get a puzzler done yesterday (woot!) and we did some grilling (though did not go shopping):


People make fun of me for taking pictures of food, but who doesn't like looking at food? Come on! The food was so good that even Fred was beached and she didn't even eat any of it:


Anyway, on to the topic at hand: IT. Oh, and when I said "we," I mean IT managers, not poor college students. I think a clear concern amongst my friends is ending up in a dead end job. No one wants to be at a company like IBM where you get assigned to some project that no one could care less about and you beg for time to pass quicker. Part of the pull to this career for me is that the work is so fun and exciting that days zoom by, and I even at TI I started to become tired of just putting the same feature on different tools. Having innovative spirit is important, and when tech guys become maintenance men you really keep new ideas from the field. I wonder how much universities can really do to excite their students. How do you explain to students what they can do one day with what they know? That kind of spirit just comes from being around other smart people and meeting CEOs of startups and such, both of which I'm thankful to have been exposed to at UT. All you can really do is come up with interesting projects for students to do and hope that it sparks further interest, which is another thing I think UT is good at, but I have no idea how things are done at other universities. Well anyway, this problem is a very hard one to fix, but it is very real. IT isn't as sexy as it once was, and I think we need to go back to that time like 6 years ago where everyone was trembling with excitement over technology and think about what we had outside of an invisible bubble.

Google, you rock. I say that mainly because I just found out about Google Transit for Austin. You just put in two locations and it'll use Google Maps to show you what bus(es) you need to take as well as the times for the next bus and how much money you save on gas. Very cool, and it's in 9 other cities as well.

Some researchers in Australia have apparently used a study to develop software that can rate a woman's looks on a scale from 1 to 10 based on a picture of them. While I appreciate the talent it must've taken to even attempt something like this, I think it's fairly flawed. First of all, using a panel of 50 "volunteers" to determine beauty is really biased and not random at all. On top of that though, even physical beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I see something like this causing immense emotional damage to lots of women, which fashion magazines already do quite well.

We have some new software versions out this weekend. The cooler one is FoxIt Reader version 1.3 with support for more stuff and more pro-version features minus the bloat you'd expect. The other new version is iTunes 7.1.1, which doesn't ostensibly change anything but I'm thinking will fix stability issues that I've noticed in recent months and I'm sure that some of you have had to deal with as well (like erasing the library metafile for no reason).

Here's a one-liner: one blogger put up a list of 10 great sites for web developers and I had to plug it because some of these sites really are awesome (a couple of them I've been checking out for a while). Not only that, but almost all of them are really easy on the eyes.

I don't think it's much of a surprise that 300 managed to keep top honors this week at the box office with $31.2 million, especially since everyone and their mom seems to have seen it now. 300 and Zodiac are probably the best movies out right now, anyway. Wild Hogs also continues to impress everyone with $18.8 million at #2, and the new releases (none of which got much critical acclaim) took the next three spots. Of course, TMNT (not "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles") comes out next week, and I estimate it having a good weekend given its appeal among not only today's youth but also among college students and young adults who grew up on the original TV show and movies.

The only other movie news comes from the Russian site filmz.ru. They have some character posters from the Fantastic Four sequel that look good, albeit a little too airbrushed. Hey, I can't complain when they give us a close-up of Ms. Alba on a poster like that. They also have some pictures from Pirates of the Caribbean 3, which aren't all that exciting but I'm sure that I have some diehard fans reading and there's really no other news out there this weekend.

Now for some Unconscious Mutterings:

I say ... and you think ... ?

1. San Francisco :: California


2. Sadness :: Morose


3. Spirits :: High


4. Harriet :: Tubman


5. State :: Secretary


6. John :: Q


7. Offense :: Defense


8. Timeless :: Classic


9. Account :: Bank


10. Refuse :: Reject