Whenever you venture into a new shower, there are some basic criteria that need to be examined. For your convenience, I give them to you in a fancy bullet point list.

• Is the water temperature reliable? Can you set the temperature and then lather up knowing it will be the same when you rinse? Or will you have to re-calibrate with soapy hands?
• What is the ratio on the dial? Is "a 16th of an inch a tousand degrees", or does it allow human steering? My shower is the former, I always know that in a case like this, I might as well give up. If I spent a day in there, maybe I could get the dial just right, or I would have buy some finely tuned mechanical tools from the hardware store. The kind that Swiss watch makers use.
• Is there a place to position your clothes outside the shower? If not, are they out of range of the water or will you splash all over them when you shower? I got some shelves pretty high up in my shower, those do the job fairly well.

Finally, whoever came up with the shampoo&conditioner in one combo deserves a most sincere pat on the shoulder. I hate waiting for the conditioner to kick in ("that's a tough minute"), so if I condition with shampoo everyday, I can forget all about using the conditioner seperately and my day starts out better.

That's right, I'm not doing it. Tomorrow I'm literally moving to the Netherlands, I've been preparing myself for this for quite some time, fantasized of it even longer. Okay, not necessarily Utrecht, but fantasized about going to college abroad. I thought by know I would have something grand to say, some kind of mini speech to myself. Well, as it happens, my thoughts and my schedule don't correlate very well, so I don't really have anything to say, I'm just ready to go. Furthermore, making announcements [and plans, at least big plans] is a bad omen for me, it tends to go to hell (well maybe not to hell but let's say plans change). So even better, no big words, they'll come at some other time when things are probably more quiet.

Joel did a nice cut and paste job selecting the best writing about software he could find and published it in dead tree form. If you google these articles, they are all found on blogs and such, so there's no need to drag your ass to amazon for a drop of wisdom. I was making my way through the list, when I had quite the unusual reaction to one of the pieces. Paul Graham writes about Great Hackers, about half way through his article he says "To drive design, a manager must be the most demanding user of a company's products." When I read this, I literally said "yes, yes, YES!!" Rarely do I see anything put clearly and perfectly accurately like that. The hammer striking the nail in the exact center. I react that way, because that's how I've always felt about design. As a user I think about problems I face as a user, as a coder I want to solve those problems. It takes both to solve them, though, it also takes input from a lot more people to solve a problem for more than one person, but this is the very core truism that underpins the whole science of design, at least to me.

If James Bond movies had less shooting and explosions, we could hear the music they play in dramatic scenes much better and everyone would be happier.

Yep, that's the new show on CBS. At least it should be. I came up with a great new idea for a show today, a reality show. The premise is simple: "Life at the post office". There is not a group of slower moving, less enthusiastic, barely among the living group of people than the bunch working at the post office. And if I worked there, I would be like that too, cause how else could you possibly survive a job like that?

The show would present their daily lives, their work day as it is with no embelishment. Packages delivered, mail sorted, customers standing in line for 30 minutes.. And people would watch it and love it, because people are idiots and will watch anything that's on tv that they haven't seen before.