rexgoode

Arizona Desert I am a proud native of the state of Arizona and an even prouder resident of the moderate state of Oregon. Not to be a traitor, but I love my adopted home state. I don’t like my biological home state so much. Just this morning, while relaxing ever so briefly in a hot tub at my gym, one of my friends there said to another, “I can’t believe it’s almost Labor Day. Where was summer?” The other agreed and bemoaned the lack of warm days this year, not only this summer, but from... Read Full Story

Pad Thai So, in case I haven’t made it clear, I love spicy food. I said it before in “ Some Like It Hot .” I have an ongoing love affair with capsicum, the little chemical that makes spicy food hot. It’s really good for you. So often, I sit down in a restaurant and see the little “spicy” icon ( ) on the menu. I eagerly order the item thinking, “This is gonna be good!” I dive in with my fork and wonder where the spiciness is. It is very disappointing. That’s because most people’s idea of... Read Full Story

I recently created a new blog on my readersclubs.com site where I write reviews of movies and television shows I see. I enjoy watching and I have a lot of opinions. I also did it as a means of helping myself learn more about using WordPress , which is the software that runs my blogs. In particular, I wanted to write a plugin, for the sake of practice. A film criticism site seemed a good place to do that. So, for your not-so-entertaining enjoyment, here is the info on a WordPress plugin I... Read Full Story

  Crocodile Dundee's Knife Do you remember the scene from Crocodile Dundee where some punk tries to mug Mick and his girlfriend? The mugger pulls out a knife and threatens them, saying, “Do you want me to cut you with my knife?” Mick replies, “That’s not a knife.” He pulls out his considerable blade and says, “ This is a knife!” As much as I enjoyed Columbus, Ohio’s friendly and outgoing people, I couldn’t handle the terrain. From my 16th story window at work, I could see a long way in... Read Full Story

Prairie Dog Now, getting back to my prejudices about Easterners. In the movies, they are often portrayed as blunt, rude, and impatient. I know that Ohio is more mid-west, but my prejudices didn’t know the difference until I moved there. One night, before Barbara and the kids joined me, I went to a grocery store. On the way out to my car, the very young man helping me with my groceries carried on a conversation with me. I was pretty stunned. I started see that everywhere I went, people... Read Full Story

The Out of Towners Turning down the transfer to Anchorage earned me a lay off. I was unemployed a couple of months. It didn’t look very promising to get a new job at that time. I always seem to be out of a job in the middle of recessions. I expanded my job search all over the country. I got a call one day from a headhunter looking for a Sybase DBA who would be willing to relocate to New York City. The idea intrigued me, even though I was pretty certain I didn’t want to raise my family in... Read Full Story

Man Doing the Splits You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I’m flexible. I really am. No kidding. So, I may not be able to do the splits, but if you look over my long career, you’d have to admit that one of my strongest character attributes is my flexibility–my willingness to change to fit what is needed. My last job doing TCL is an example of this. I didn’t know TCL from any other language. I had never heard of it before I got that contract. I just turned on the computer and started... Read Full Story

Boeing 747-8 Just when I thought I would be relegated to quality assurance hell, I saw an ad in the paper that looked just like something I wanted to do. They wanted someone with experience doing database administration (DBA). I really like indices and queries. They are beautiful things. It was going to be a job with a computer consulting company. I would not only have to win over the consulting company, but also their client. Their client was a start-up company that had a contract to... Read Full Story

Repeatable Processes After my contract with the State of Oregon, I had a short dry spell. The rain fell again in the form of a contract position where I was to create a bug-tracking database using Sybase and SQL with a front-end product called Scopus. This is not the same as the current product called Scopus. I enjoy bugs. I’m not talking about the creepy-crawly types. I’m talking about an error in a computer program. They’re there. Sometimes they don’t cause much trouble. Sometimes they... Read Full Story

Philip Ahn as Master Kan So, I grew up on the original Kung Fu series. I loved Masters Po and Kan, played respectively by Key Luke and the ever soft-spoken, Philip Ahn . We knew that young Kwai Chang was ready to leave the monastery when he could the pebble take from Master Kan’s hand. You are right if you recognized that I didn’t say that quite right. I started, as many human languages do, with the subject of the sentence, followed by the operation you want performed. Just as I loved C... Read Full Story