Scott Bush

While watch­ing the aud­tion por­tion of this season’s Amer­i­can Idol with my wife, see­ing all those aspir­ing singers so excited to receive the show’s “golden ticket,” I was struck by a thought: that’s the hap­pi­est they’ll ever be dur­ing their Amer­i­can Idol expe­ri­ence.
Why is that? It’s because of that moment. That moment is both a pin­na­cle of achieve­ment and the begin­ning of a new, unknown journey.

Do you enjoy a peanut-butter and pesto sand­wich? How about an ice-cream sun­dae cov­ered in vin­daloo? Ever seen a hilar­i­ous Shake­spearean com­edy fol­lowed by a dark and mur­der­ous Greek tragedy? That was our expe­ri­ence (the plays, not the strange food com­bi­na­tions) in Dec. and Jan. as we attended the first two entries in the Seat­tle Shakespeare’s Company’s 09–10 sea­son: Twelfth Night and Elec­tra.

The two plays could not have been more dif­fer­ent, but I’ll start by men­tion­ing how they were the same: pro­fes­sional. If you’ve never been to an SCC per­for­mance, you should check one out. The the­atre, located in the bot­tom of the Seat­tle Cen­ter, is inti­mate and wel­com­ing. The sets are usu­ally sparse but ade­quate to sup­port the act­ing, which is always top-notch. My wife and I have been season-ticket hold­ers for four years now and after 14 plays I’ve yet to see an actor trip, appear out-of-character, or miss a line (that I could tell, at least). This troupe is, in one word: excel­lent.

You may have cringed when read­ing the term “date math,” which sounds both cum­ber­some and dif­fi­cult. It brings to mind the addi­tion and sub­trac­tion of tricky num­bers like 7, 29, and 31; and con­cepts like “two weeks from now,” “yes­ter­day,” and “next month.” And if you’ve every tried to build a sys­tem that tracks rel­a­tive dates you know such things can be a hassle.

So why bother? Because date math is very use­ful! For exam­ple, sup­pose you man­age a web­site that includes due dates, sub­mis­sion dead­lines, and pri­or­ity reg­is­tra­tion peri­ods that recur. If you’re me, you man­age a site that’s full of such dates that recur every aca­d­e­mic quar­ter. Keep­ing these dates in sync is a task that PHP’s date math func­tions were born writ­ten to do.

Hey, it’s not over yet! Keep Read­ing.

The short answer is always “Yes.” Great advice I’ve inte­grated into my work ethic for years now. Never shut down a con­ver­sa­tion or brain­storm with a “no, we/I can’t do that.” Say “yes” now and find a way to make it hap­pen or help the other party under­stand what’s required if they really want it to happen.

This post, as the title would lead you to believe, is basi­cally a meta-post about the year that was 2009. Not inter­ested in my navel-gazing? Feel free to skip this one.

The first thing that comes to mind when I hear “Hot Pock­ets” is, of course, Jim Gaffigan’s hilar­i­ous stand-up bit. So I was intrigued by the use of a .org domain in an AdSense ad for Hot Pock­ets. Click­ing brought me to an ani­mated mar­ket­ing site for a fic­tional move­ment to “eat freely,” by which they mean the abil­ity to eat nasty meat stuffed inside a Pop Tart with­out hav­ing to be both­ered by incon­ve­niences like chairs and cut­lery. Is this what the ven­er­a­ble .org domain has come to?