skylarwoodward

while (soon to be ex-roomie) Mitch gets his last couple hours of Zelda in, i’m pakcing everything but the GameCube for the big move tomorrow to my new home!

more after the move…

so while i’m waiting for all the other engineers to catch up to speed on their first sample Cocoa app, i’ve got PLENTY of time to blog. i figure i can start by listing the pluses and minuses of the Apple campus as compared to my own.

Cafeterias:
-SAME: both campuses have gourmet eateries with cool company-cultured names
-PROS: apple has University Ave quality decor with mock Italian frescos, and serve sushi on buckwheat noodles (there’s a name for this…)
-CONS: not subsidized! $$$$

Conference Rooms:
-SAME: both have cool naming schemes and employees have fun refering to them as such. also… decked audio/video systems.
- PROS: apple rooms are outfitted with flat panels and G4 towers, not crappy Compaqs
- CONS: steven spielberg doesn’t hang out in Apple conference rooms.

Courtyard:
-SAME: sunny, green, and fun to chill in with friends
-PROS: apple’s trees are much more mature, and thus in some cases, climbable.
-CONS: ever since the death of the icon garden, there’s no cool artsy sculptures or compelling building architecture. also, the grass literally isn’t greener.

Visitor Badges:
-SAME: uh, they exist
-PROS: none inherent, but they let you walk around in places where doors and walls are decorated with cool legacy apple pixelated icons.
-CONS: no cool time-expring stickers or fun passport theme. no color models available.

back to “work”…

so the rest of this week i’ll be playing over at the fruit company see what new tricks clarus knows now that she, apparently, prefers cocoa over carbon. Apple’s hope is that by showing us all these new tricks we’ll want to go home and teach them to our dogcows too. I don’t know about all that – all I know is they said “we’ll feed you” and i said “i’m in.”

what i’m anxious about to see what other folks show up at this event (a cocoa developer ‘kitchen’). will there be crazy Jobs worshippers ducking out at the first opportunity to sniff which Airport base station his laptop last transmitted to? how many of them will be decked out in Apple gear? what will be the breakdown of iBook vs Powerbook owners? how many people will be there that actually make software i use? will any IM interop client developers make it? hmm… so many curiosities.

your predictions? share comments.

so psyched – it deserves its own entry.

wednesday i wrote about fear, but questioned how that would be related to hatred. it was pretty late – too late to put things together. not that it’s not late now, but i had a chance to think this through already with my community group this evening.

anger, or more severly, hatred is something that grows out of an enviornment nourished by fear. in a sort of miscolored analogy, fear is like the sunshine on the seeds of evil that sprout the branches of anger and hatred. if you let fear continue to influence your life, the wicked inherent in the world will take root in you to the point where your sin no longer grows out of fear, but a much less controllable vice of malice where conscience becomes neglected. think about the actions you take out of fear, and those you take out of anger or frustration and see if that doesn’t play true for yourself.

James 1:21 warns us about this battle for our heart:

Therefore, get rid of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you.

we should look to nurture the word (which is God, who is Love) within us, not the malevolence which meets us though life in a sinful world. casting off fear and worry is part of that step towards nurturing an environment where anger cannot flourish.

today, the self-proclaimed Inventor of the Internet, Al Gore, joined Apple’s Board of Directors. ugh. now i can finally begin entertaining theories that the company is going under.

what’s fun about this is that Apple actually linked to a rumor article suggesting that President Bush demanded a recount of Gore’s election to the board – even though the article mocks Apple’s CEO and its board demographics. maybe this is all just a warm up for April Fools?

i realized this morning that i haven’t been to a retail store (except for groceries) in almost a month now. cool. that’s all going to change when Zelda comes out though.

today i was having a conversation with a friend on the war, the politics of war, the implications, and etcetera etcetera. it was actually pretty cool because it was the first of such in a while with someone who didn’t actually have her mind made up, thought exactly as i did, or exclusively regurgitated political or media rhetoric. what resulted was some decent dialog on the subject.

one of the topics that came up was the viewpoints of some Iraq students that my friend tutors. just to clarify, these kids aren’t Muslims, they are Assyrians and thus a part of the persecuted groups under the Baath regieme, but they still have varied opinons on the war. some of them are in support of the war – (assumedly) to the extent that they would endure war even if they were at home (their families are there now) for the removal of Saddam from power. others, particularly those who experienced Baghdad during the Gulf war, oppose the war not wishing such terror on anyone.

the thought was posed that perhaps those (iraqi students) in support of the war would have different opinions if they were actually at home, presently. that is, that the courage to endure war for the sake of a greater good comes less easily when the threat of harm (mental or physical) becomes personal and real. this i don’t deny but i immediately thought of the dichotomy of the Scottish people during the occupation of the British in the 1200s. (ie, Braveheart) you have folks who are wiling to fight for their freedom – to die for it even, and you have those who would rather endure British rule in hopes of compromising for a more promosing fate than death. both groups desire freedom from tyranny, but what is the difference? fear.

more and more throughout life i realize how all things i do against others – all my sin – is borne by fear. why lie? you fear the truth. why envy or steal? you fear that fortune that has blessed someone else will not come to you. why kill? you fear the harm (however remote) someone else might cause you. (the exceptions being actions out of hatred or insanity – right now i can’t think of how fear is related to genuine hatred.)

well, later this evening i was reading Psalm 37 and it brought things home for me:

Do not fret because of evil men or be envious of those who do wrong;
for like the grass they will soon wither, like green plants they will soon die away.

Trust in the LORD and do good; dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.
Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart.

while worrying about possible misplaced fears of the Iraqi students, i neglected my own fears and the fears of the nation – fear of “evil men” like Saddam and Osama. if i endorse action on the basis of fear, then I have failed to seek God’s heart in this matter. this does not mean i know exactly where I stand on the war now – certainly this war is driven, both by those opposed and against, by many different personal and political agendas. it is too large of a world enterprise at this stage for it to be otherwise. but for each of us should evaluate our own motives to see what drives them. what fears are behind them? and what decisions would we make with hearts convicted by God and not bound by our fears? what action would we take? what prayers would we pray? these are the things i’m thinking about now.

after taking a look at some of pat’s suggestions on CSS resources, and in addition to feeling guilty to convincing a sickly chris to tweek his site for Safari while my own blog remained unfriendly to his beloved IE… i decided to begin the journey into the wonderful world of CSS seeking inspiration for a new site design.

in the end i only commited to a few modest tweaks, the most important of which is finally removing all traces of puke yellow from the site. another wonderful side effect did come, however; mainly thanks to the fact that david hyatt, a fairly CSS-savvy guy, recently created a new MT-powered blog and amidst the few initial changes he made to his default stylesheet were a few that evidently sqwelch the IE sizing problem, but don’t screw it up for everyone else. thanks, dave.

“Fortune and circumstance smile upon your domain.” – the fortune cookie

so my friends informed me today that my blog has scrolling problems under IE on Windows. that seemed odd because my stylesheet is the standard Movable Type sheet, and one would figure that out of all the people installing MT, someone would notice the issue on IE and fix the distribution.

apparently not. i checked out a couple other blogs by folks using the same setup, and sure enough they’ve got a sizing/scrolling issue just like me on IE.

it seems the only common problem amongst all of these blogs is that none of us actually use IE on a regular basis – but that doesn’t seem like a very bad thing. thus the template and stylesheet will remain the same until MS learns to size their DIVs after positioning elements according to stylesheets – or until, I customize my template in a more original fashion.