I was without Internet service for three days last week and AT&T had dropped the ball three times. What was scheduled was a series of appointments, three consecutive days in a row, with the hopes of getting the DSL light on my Motorola 2210 Modem green once again. It was not until day four when a technician showed up and and made me happy.

Three days of schedule rearrangements, fabricating projects to fill the time at home without connectivity for long stretches – 8am to 12pm, 1pm to 8pm, and 8am to 8pm.

After each missed appointment a call was made to AT&T, routed to a friendly and personable representative, on my side, fighting for me, trying every test and scan with all the patience in the world. How could I not persuade my nerves to ease, “I know it’s not your fault..” at the tip of my tongue.

But nothing had been delivered, still without Internet, still not sign of a technician showing up at my door. Frustration regained its strength. Blame had been shifted, packaged and routed into their well oiled abyss.

It was an abuse of my time and there was no need for their intention. I would much rather had been told that appointments we running long and they would need to schedule a time x days in the future. Painful, yes, but a truth I could have accepted and one they later admitted.

The value of a smile and a firm handshake plummets if they hold no intention and are not part of an organization’s culture throughout.

Kat and I had a great experience at 90 Miles Cuban Cafe this afternoon that I think is the perfect example of what a great work environment can do for a business.

We both recently went vegan so whenever we are eating somewhere new we always have a plethora of questions and today was no different. “Is there any dairy or honey in the creole sauce?”, “can we have our roll without any butter?”, “are the beans cooked with chicken stock?”, and so on.

He quickly picked up on the fact that we were vegan, genuinely offered some recommendations and then, believe it or not, came up with a dish for us on the fly. It was delicious!

How hard was that for him to do? Not very hard at all, but we rarely have such experiences. He just as easily could have mentioned the tofu sandwich and been done with it. But instead, since there were no instilled guidelines handed down from management, and he clearly loved working there, he actually got excited in coming up with a dish he knew we would love.

They now have two repeat cusomters for life simply by removing any guidelines and allowing their employees to treat the place as if it were their own.

In the middle of shopping at Whole Foods the fire alarm went off, freaking everyone out. It quickly was shut off and an announcement came on stating that it was just a test and that they apologized for the annoyance. Hmmm…. Ok.

So we went up to the garage to our car and this is what we found.

There is also an issue with printing packing slips from PayPal’s Multi-order Shipping tool. Only the first 3 slips print out.

Other than those two issues, oh, and the lack of Sliverlight (which means no Netflix viewing), I have been loving Google Chrome and am using nearly exclusively.

Artichoke… One of my favorite poems, but I have absolutely no idea who the author is.

“A man in Afghanistan once told me that a third of this planet eats with spoons and forks, and a third of the planet eats with chopsticks, and a third eats with their fingers. And they’re all just as civilized as one another.” – Rick Steves, The other side of Rick Steves

Use GitX?

Ever been tempted to click the Gist it button? Or maybe you accidentally did click it, only to find out…

GitX will try to upload your current commit as a git patch to gist.github.com – GitX User Manual

The attempt will be made without any confirmation on your part.

So, what if you don’t want to upload your commit?

Well, you could just make sure never to click the ‘Gist it’ button.

Or you could disable the button from within the preferences, and flip it back on when you do want to Gist something.

That’s OK, but what I really want is a message confirming the action, so if I do ever accidentally press the ‘Gist it’ button, I can just cancel the request. And since the code that GitX uses to run these commands is in HTML and Javascript, It is very easy to slip in some code of our own.

Here’s how to add a confirmation message for when the ‘Gist it’ button is clicked

fyi. This is a really quick and semi-dirty hack that will be lost if you re-install or download a new version of GitX.

1. Open Finder > Application, ctrl (right) click the GitX application and select ‘Show Package Contents’.
2. Navigate to ‘Contents/Resources/html/views/history/’ and open ‘index.html’ in TextMate or other plain text editor.
3. Add the following within the head tags:
   [code lang="javascript"][/code]
4. Update the ‘Gist it’ button to look like:
   [code lang="html"]
   Gist it
   [/code]
5. Save the changes made then quit (if open) and re-launch GitX.

Now, whenever you click the ‘Gist it’ button, a notification message will appear within the notification_message div (The same place as ‘Gist it’ status notifications):

confirm_gist() also takes an optional string which can be used to alter the confirmation link, like so:

[code lang="html"]
Gist it
[/code]

Caveat

Re-installing or upgrading GitX will wipe this ‘hack’ which is why I didn’t alter the gistie() method in the history.js file. Altering as little as possible, and only the index.html file makes it a bit easier to ‘track’ and save if a feature like this is not implemented in future releases.

Lighthouse user James T uploaded a patch, https://gist.github.com/fc3c9773f6a2bcbeb7a9, that may be worth a look. It is very similar to what I have done, but involves rewriting-or-renaming the gistie() method and creating two new javascript methods. He also added some nice CSS stylings to the buttons.

You can alter or add to the stylings by adding to the stylesheets found in Contents/Resources/html/css/

Also see GitX’s Lighthouse ticket on this very matter: #58 Suggestion: Usability of “Gist It” button. As of this post (16 March 2009), and GitX ver. 0.6.1, this ticket is still open and clicking ‘Gist it’ will upload your commits to gist.github.com without confirmation.

Don’t Launch
Happy Notes
Overnight Success: It Takes Years
5 Awesome Sci-Fi Inventions (That Would Actually Suck)
Apple logo converted to second monitor
Listable
Double your userbase with two lines of code and a box of Modafinil
Nerd Merit Badges
War? (Boagworld interview with Daniel Burka and Joe Stump from Digg)
Amanda Offenbacher Photography
Stack Overflow Podcast #27 (Interview Alexis “kn0thing” Ohanian and Steve “spez” Huffman of Reddit)
Orange Alert
Priceless

I’m getting very tempted to rewrite an application that I’ve been working on for about three months now. All sorts of reasoning to do so have tugging at me, but what actually prompted this temptation is a side project I’m working on with @iheartcinnamon (kat). It made me realize how hard it actually would be to move the application forward.

The core of the application, while works flawlessly, is implemented rather poorly. The code is horribly organized, methods were created on a case-by-case basis which has lead to duplication throughout, business logic is confusing at best, the XHTML templating system is a complete mess, and, well, I could go on for awhile.

My side project has reaped the benefits of this, it’s core is implemented with clarity, ready to be extended anywhere. Since the two projects have similar core needs, writing it came as second nature; I already knew what it needed to be and how I to get it there. But does this warrant a complete code rewrite?

Three months is not a long time, per say, but extending the development time would cut deeply into its launch date. What to do? How do I satisfy my itch of rewriting it, bring clarity to the code so it can be extended with ease and make sure I launch fast and often?

Before I do anything, I’m off to do some research into the implications of rewrites and I will return to this topic in another post.