Categories
Food

Joel on Coffee: Starbucks vs. Customer

Joel has an interesting piece on Inc. Magazine’s site on how Starbucks’ policies are getting rather anti-customer. I think he raises a good point, that you have to be careful that the policies that allow you run a profitable business don’t get in the way of providing the best service you can to a customer, but I was sad to see that instead of getting his coffee from a decent coffee house, he just went up the block to another Starbucks.

Though as he says, Starbucks serves the “modern adult milkshake.” Maybe a decent coffee house wouldn’t fit his needs anyway.

Categories
Etc Family

Twelve Flights and Counting

Last night marked Jack’s twelfth flight on an airplane in his thirteen months of life. Mandy found an excellent article on four things to keep in mind when flying with kids, and I have a few of my own to add, one for each flight:

  1. Take way more pacifiers than you think you’ll need. Those little clip things that hook a pacifier onto the kiddo are worth their weight in gold. We always forget ours.
  2. Have a backup bear, sippy cup, storybook, etc. Basically, if you care that something will be rendered too dirty to use by hitting the ground in the airport, bring a backup.
  3. The “family bathroom” in Detroit is the nastiest place in the airport. Apparently it’s the clandestine smoker and bladder-control-problem paradise. Anything that touches the ground here is forfeit. Just change the kid in the waiting area or the men’s room. They’re much cleaner.
  4. Car rental car sets are a crap shoot. Have a backup plan or just bring your own. It’s big, it’s heavy, it’s a PITA, but being stranded at the car rental place is even worse.
  5. Morning flights are easier than evening flights. Especially evening flights that get delayed into red-eyes. Kiddo at 4 hours past bed time is no fun.
  6. I am undecided on the best means on transport for Jack. We’ve done the
    MacPac Possum     when he was smaller, the big stroller and the umbrella. Jack likes the big stroller the best, the MacPac is great through security but doesn’t hold much, and the little stroller is the easiest stroller to deal with. I’m not sure the Mac is really an option any more now that kiddo is running around and wants his wiggle time.
  7. Try to relax. Most people on the flight understand that dealing with a sub-one-year-old is hard and won’t lynch you if they cry a bit. The kid picks up on your tension and it just makes things worse.
  8. This one is from observation-only: breast feeding on a plane is a pain in the ass, especially if you’re on the aisle. If you can, get the window seat. Of course, everything else is a pain in the ass on a plane too.
  9. Timing flights around naps is a very very good idea. This assumes you have a nap schedule and that the flight is on time.
  10. Delays suck. So do layovers. Direct flights are the best if you can swing it.
  11. The water feature in DTW is a great way to spend some time. Kids love it.
  12. Ask for help if you need it. It always amazes me how helpful people tend to be towards frazzled parents with an unhappy baby.
Categories
Etc Work

Working From Home

Mandy’s always looking out for tips on how to make working from home work out for both of us and she found a great article with some tips for making it work.

For me, the most important things are:

  1. Having a routine with a clear separation between work and home,
  2. Having a set space in the house that is “the office” and
  3. Taking breaks, especially getting out of “the office” for lunch

If you work from home, what works for you?

Categories
Computers

In Git, Branches Are Just Names

This was the mental leap of the day for me. A small leap, but a cool one (for me):

  1. Git represents commits in the repository as a Directed Acyclic Graph
  2. A branch in Git is just a pointer to a node in that graph.
  3. Master is just another branch and as such, it’s just a pointer into the graph.
  4. Once you’re done working in a branch and the work has been merged back into master, there’s no need to keep the branch label around. The story of how the commit happened is still in the DAG.
  5. “Deleting” a branch is really just removing that pointer into the DAG. Therefore, it’s safe to delete branches that have been merged back into some other line of development.

Whereas in the other SCMs I’ve used (Perforce, Subversion), branches are usually seen more as a copy of some set of a tree into a new namespace or directory. For example, in svn you generally cp your trunk into someting under /branches/, like /branches/awesome-feature, and then merge your changes back in later. If you then delete that branch to clean up your branches folder, you pretty much lose that hunk of history. Furthermore, svn doesn’t really deal well with the branched history when showing the change history for a file in trunk futher down the road. With Git and gitk, you can easily see the branch and merge points and figure out what changed when.

Categories
Etc

Home Sweet Home

A view down a reference table in the Grad
A view down a reference table in the Grad

I’m back in Manchester / Ann Arbor till the 29th for a family wedding (congrats to Jenn & Matt!), working in my favorite of workplaces, the Grad’s reference room. Ann Arbor is predictably quiet in the summer, especially this being the week after Art Fair; it seems that there’s no one in town except the orienteers.

Mandy, Jack and I are staying in Manchester, but if anyone who’s still in the area wants to get together, leave a comment…