Monthly Archives: September 2001

“What’s the use of sending a $2 million missile into a $10 tent to hit a camel in the butt?”

“Are you guys ready? Let’s roll.”

Todd Beamer, to fellow passengers aboard United Airlines Flight 93, moments before they stormed hijackers on their plane. Beamer leaves behind a pregnant wife and two sons, ages 3 and 1.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41095-2001Sep16.html

Just dug this out — my World Trade Center ID from when I worked for Investment Dealers’ Digest back in 1993.

I had spent quite a bit of time in the WTC at IDD’s offices, as well as Cantor Fitzgerald’s. It’s hard to believe that not only is the office space no longer there, but some of the people I worked/met with may be dead.

FDR said it best – A date which will live in infamy.

Just got back from a quick vacation to the White Mountains in New Hampshire. We stayed at the Red Jacket Mountain View hotel (highly recommended!). Tommy and Petey really enjoyed our visit to Story Land, and Tommy especially loved his first ride on a train. My favorite part of the trip was our visit to Mt. Washington.

I’ve now sworn off word processors. LaTeX is the cat’s ass. It reminds me of the good old days of writing college papers in troff (actually ditroff, which was Kernighan’s rewrite of Ossanna’s original troff code), but it’s 10000000000x more powerful. I’ve noticed that I now spend much more of my writing time actually writing and not messing around with fonts, spacing, etc.

Now if I could only easily convert my MS Word docs to LaTeX (and vice versa)…

Found a great web site the other day that’s perfect for us “need to read every tech site” folks. Check out Freshnews. The site displays the headlines from ~30 major tech news sites like Slashdot, cnet, Ars Technica, etc.

I’ve been playing Chief Technology Officer for a start-up named BD-X since January.

Well, the problem is that even though 1) BD-X has a very good business plan, and 2) we have met with many potential customers (most of them are very large financial institutions), the venture capital wells have run dry.

Soooooo…

I have recently accepted an offer from Paytronix Systems in Watertown, MA. as their V.P. of Engineering. I’ll most likely be starting with them mid-September.

More to come soon…

I’ve been saving all sorts of interesting articles, papers, and web pages for a few years now, and have recently placed many of them online for everyone to enjoy.

I’ve just re-read “The Pragmatic Programmer” by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas again. What an incredible book! These guys have collected in one book many of the software development processes and ideas that I’ve discovered (the hard way) over the last 10 years, and many ideas I’ve never considered. Great stuff. Buy it if you’re a software engineer or software manager! It will be a must read for anyone that works on my development team.