A few weekends ago, through a combination of stupidity and bad luck, I managed to leave my eyeglasses on a train. Without them I can see about three feet in front of me pretty clearly, and beyond that, everything is pretty much a blurry haze.
To make the situation worse, I was traveling for work at the time, 2,812 miles from home and my extra pair of specs. Luckily, I was in the second-least-horrible place in the world this could have happened: Washington DC. I grew up just outside the city, worked in it for six years, and spent most of my free time between June 1998, when I left school in Pittsburgh, and April 2005, when I moved to San Francisco, in the neighborhood where my hotel happened to be. I still know the city well enough that I was able to stumble my way around and find food for two more days without being able to read any of the street signs or storefronts until I was just about right on top of them. But it was not fun, especially when it came time to try to navigate the airports on my way home.
I’m generally not in the habit of making New Year’s resolutions. I know they’re more often abandoned than fulfilled, and I’ve always thought that if you’ve identified a need for change in your life, why wait for an arbitrary starting date? Why not start right away?
That said, I have a handful of long-standing intentions that never seem to turn into action. Or, really, they’ll turn into a short spurt of action whenever I’m feeling particularly guilty or inspired about them, that quickly fizzles out as soon as something else comes up.
I’ve always liked my name. Tim Moore: it’s short, easy to spell and not often mispronounced. Even when expanded to its formal entirety — Timothy Marcus Moore — it’s hard to get it wrong.
What my name has going for it in simplicity, however, it lacks in uniqueness. Although my Googleability has risen quickly in the last year and a half or so, if you search for “Tim Moore” you’ll tend to come across Amos ’n’ Andy actor Tim Moore, ’70s AM radio soft pop singer Tim Moore, Michigan Republican Representative Tim Moore, or British travel writer Tim Moore before you find any mention of yours truly. The Wikipedia disambiguation page for my name doesn’t even mention me among the nine “people called Tim Moore.”
In case anyone thinks that this site has gone dormant, I want to quickly mention a few changes that I’ve been making behind the scenes at incrementalism.net.
Well, as of three days ago, I’m officially in my fourth decade. It seems like it should feel more momentous than it actually does, but to be honest it actually feels pretty good. Even though it doesn’t seem like that long ago that I was just turning twenty, looking back a lot has happened since then, and I’m in a far better place in my life now than I was ten years ago, for a number of reasons…
Florida points out that industries in large cities have become far more specialized:
New York is great in fashion design and investment banking. San Francisco’s great in software. L.A.’s great in entertainment technology. And Nashville is the epicenter of music production. So if you want to pursue a given career, it’s not just that you can make it in any big city, because now there is a smaller number of big cities that will be the key places for you.
Fellow Atlassian Charles Miller recently wrote an amusing post about methods and constructors in Java that declare a checked exception, but can be called in a way that is required by the specification not to fail. A common example involves string encodings:
try {
s = new String(byteArray, "UTF-8");
} catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
throw new Error("UTF-8 is missing??");
}
This code is the result of two conflicting factors. On one hand, since the constructor in question takes an arbitrary character encoding, the case of the encoding being unavailable must be taken into account. On the other hand, 90% of code that calls this constructor will be explicitly invoking a character set that is required to be provided with the Java Runtime Environment, and its absence would be an error serious enough to justify terminating the VM entirely.
The unnecessary exception-handling code is ugly, and obscures the actual intent of the method in which it appears. Charles jokingly proposes adding a “yoda” statement to Java to tell the JVM, “do, or do not; there is no try.”
Dave Winer has started a campaign to have bloggers post “a virtual equivalent of one of those signs people put on their front lawns” in support of Barack Obama.
I won’t go into a lot of detail right now on why I think Obama is the best choice for our next president, but that is how I feel and I look forward to the opportunity to cast my vote on Tuesday.
This year, even more than ever before it seems, everyone has a pet theory on what Steve Jobs will be announcing at tomorrow’s Macworld Expo keynote session. Since I’ve got my own ideas and have been trying to get myself to write on this site more often, I’ll throw in my two cents on the matter. I don’t have much that hasn’t already been said by many others, so I’ll try to keep this interesting.
