Mokka mit Schlag

Last week’s ABA convention was a lot of fun. I made new friends, learned a lot about birds, saw quite a few species, and heard more. Interestingly, although I got twelve new life birds, I whiffed on all my target species: Boreal Chickadee, Gray Jay, and Black-backed Woodpecker. All three birds were seen by various attendees at various times. I just managed to always be in the wrong group, on the wrong bus, or looking the wrong way to spot any of them. Life birds I did get included:
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I was so taken by the clean look of Mark Pilgrim’s latest blog entry that I just had to look at his stylesheet, and figure out what font he was using. It seems to be Gill Sans at a large size. I’ve now revamped this site to use that as its body font. (Optima is the backup for those deprived PCs without Gill Sans installed.)

On the other hand, he’s using 180% line height which looked a little too big to me, so I’ve set the line height at 140%.

I still need to play with the heading, sidebar, and comment fonts so they match–maybe I should just steal Mark’s choices for these too–but overall this font feels quite a bit more readable and modern to me.

Today I got an e-mail seeking an “XP developer” (in a context where XP obviously stood for Extreme Programming, not Windows XP). What was unusual was that I had to read halfway through the message to find out that they wanted a C#/.NET developer. The first half talked only about XP, Scrum, and Agile techniques.

It’s an interesting inversion of the typical job ad. Normally the programming language is right up top and the methodology is an afterthought, if it’s included at all. Nonetheless, I think these folks got it right. It might well be easier to take a solid Java practitioner of extreme programming and integrate him or her into a .NET XP shop, than it would be to take a .NET person who’d never done XP, and bring them in. On-the-fly training is an oft-forgotten and underrated benefit of both pair programming and test-first development.

Lately I’ve been learning about the Boreal Forest, a large area of Northern Canada (with small pieces extending into Maine and Minnesota, depending on exactly how you define it) that is the breeding grounds for billions of birds every year. (That’s not a made up number by the way. There really are billions that breed there.) For a long time the inaccessibility of the boreal forest protected most of it, but that’s beginning to change. They’re a number of pressures on it. One of the most significant is paper production, mostly for consumption in the United States.

There are several things you can do to help reduce the pressure on the Boreal Forest. The first is to unsubscribe from catalogs you don’t want. Instead of just tossing all the unwanted catalogs you receive in the trash, take a few minutes to call up the company and tell them you don’t want their catalog any more. The way I figure it, every catalog I unsubscribe from equals approximately one bird saved. (That is a made up number, by the way; but it feels about right.)
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This morning I arose at an almost leisurely 4:00 A.M. to accompany the ABA Bus B to Schoodic Point. Unfortunately it was raining; fortunately not too much to send the birds running for cover. I put on my waterproof boots and red poncho, and headed out of the bus into the rain.
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For a long time, I’ve been a fan of the Fisher Space Pen, mostly because it will write upside down. That’s especially useful for writing in bed in front of the TV. However, the official space pens are quite expensive and relatively hard to find. The cheapest model is about $12, but very few places sell that. Some small office supply stores stock Fisher pens, but usually only the more expensive models. The big box stores like Staples, OfficeMax, and Office Depot don’t stock Fisher pens at all.

At the ABA convention this week I found an excellent, cheaper alternative. Rite in the Rain makes a line of All-Weather Pens that not only write in the rain. They also write upside down. #37 retails for about $7. It doesn’t look quite as cool as the Fisher bullets or come in a fancy case, but it does write upside down and it costs half as much. I bought one at the ABA store here at the convention; and it’s working just fine (including upside down in the rain).
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