Tag Archives: Musing

Unification Day!

By Don Meyer on | Leave a comment

Today I merged my blogs. Yes, I’m at that advanced level where I can ignore and fail to update not one but two blogs!

One was more technology related, and hosted on my company site (Stormgate Software), and one was this one, a more personal blog.

The theory was that I’d post things related to the company, or software and hardware technology in general on the “business” blog, and post personal stuff here. That way I could point potential employers etc. at my tech blog, and not at my more personal stuff.

The reality is that even my personal blog contained a fair amount of technology posts, and really nothing that I’d feel uncomfortable about having as part of my online digital extended “resume”.

If there is anything truly personal, it tends to go on my Facebook page. And even there I try and avoid anything too polarizing or private. I’m linked on FB with both current and former co-workers, so even there I keep in mind the potential variety of my audience. And if someone want to not hire me because I support, say, women in technology, would I want to work for them anyway?

I’m hoping that by careful categorization and tagging the mix of tech and “other” will co-exist nicely.

My goal is to post more blog articles as well. We’ll see how that goes!

Posted in: Personal | Tagged: ,

Coding As Always

By Don Meyer on | Leave a comment

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So, coding.  Something I do most days at work, but not every day at home.  With the Apple iPad on the horizon, I think it’s time to do some more at-home coding.  And software design of course.

I also plan to get back to Mac development at some point.  In that vein, here’s a very cogent discussion by Brent Simmons on deciding which OS versions to support.
Email sent to a developer on supporting 10.6 and up

Posted in: Programming | Tagged:

So Long Suncoast

By Don Meyer on | Leave a comment

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This Saturday we discovered that apparently all of the Suncoast (and Sam Goody) stores in St. Louis are closing.  This means that places like the West County Mall and Chesterfield Mall no longer have a place you can go to browse for DVDs and CDs.  Okay, sure, I bet Sears has a selection, but really…

Okay, I know it’s just a store in the mall that sells DVDs for essentially list price.  Nonetheless its closing truly saddens me.  I think I’m really mourning yet another nail in the coffin of the shopping mall as an interesting place to be.

I’ve always liked shopping malls.  At the risk of sounding shallow or materialistic some of my fondest memories of childhood are going to the mall with my mom.  In those days, the mall had all kind of cool things – toy stores, hobby stores that sold things like chemicals and test tubes, and of course book stores.

If this sounds like an old-guy rant on the good old days, and how civilization/kids/music/sports/food was so much better back then then that junk we have today, well, so be it.

I’ve been lamenting for years how the interesting stores seem to be vanishing at the malls, and the trend continues.  In a few years, unless buying clothes is your major thrill, there will be little point in going to the mall.

As evidence, here’s an off-the-cuff list of neat stores that we’ve lost from local malls in sem-recent memory:
The Warner Brothers Store
The Nature Company
Waldenkids
Rand McNally
Suncoast
Camelot Music
B. Dalton (as a small in-mall store)
FAO Schwarz
KB Toys

I know I’m missing at least a few bookstores.  Sure, we have huge stores now (Borders, B. Dalton), and that’s nice in a way, but it’s much more of a monoculture now, and that’s never a good thing.

End of old-guy rant.

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