September 2009 Archives

I know this isn’t the “California for Dummies” I promised but I just couldn’t resist. (It will come, just not today.)I’ve been at DreamWorks for a little over three weeks now, and let’s face it, while it’s nowhere near as bad as most, it is a corporation. That means you have your little corporate sheep moments here and there. You have your “Kickoff” meetings. You have your “Touch Bases.” You have your Microsoft Outlook with your meetings and your calendar and your email and your to-dos all wrapped in that Dilbert inspired wrist-slitting, soul-smothering, oh-God-I-really-do-work-in-a-cubicle-please-euthanize-me user interface. Imagine my inner programmer’s unbridled joy when I found out I would be working on a Linux box, probably one of the most ... more

I’ve been getting that question a lot lately. I’m writing this at work if that tells you anything. I’m not actually sitting on my blog site typing it all into that nice little window it provides; instead, I’m writing it in my favorite Linux text editor Nedit, or as I like to refer to him, Ned. Ned and I are old friends. We go way back to my grad school days when I ran him on an SGI. We took a seven-year haitus as I moved to Windows (forcibly, at gunpoint) and Mac (willingly), but we’re back together again and very happy. Very, very happy.I’m starting my fourth week at DreamWorks and I’m still in training. This is not a ... more

Ta da! It’s Part 4. And I do hope the number of installations required to tell this story does not surpass the current number of Shrek movies. Which means this better be the last because Shrek 4 is in production as we speak.Ludlow, California, has a Dairy Queen. Actually, I think Ludlow IS a Dairy Queen. It’s a good sized Dairy Queen surrounded by parking lot, with additional truck parking across the road, all of which is surrounded by dirt. And every bit of it was packed with cars. People, kids, pets were all going back and forth between the cars and the store. Groups of guys were hanging out near their pickup trucks, probably waiting for their women to ... more