19 May 2000: Picking Up the Pencil

Gazing into the Abyss: Michael Rawdon's Journal

Picking Up the Pencil

Went back to WWDC this morning to work 3 hours in the WebObjects lab. The lab had 21 (!) G4s each with a 15" flat panel monitor, plus an iMac. That's easily $100,000 worth of hardware sitting there for people to come in and play with WebObjects. I was impressed. We (the employees staffing the lab) discussed whether Apple owned the equipment or was renting it. We generally leaned toward renting it; I believed this because a year from now we'll probably have even better machines, so why bother to own so much hardware when it would only get used a few times a year?

Anyway, as I heard happened all week, the lab was full once lunch time rolled around, with maybe 2 or 3 machines vacant at any given time. I was impressed with this, too. Since Apple has dropped WebObjects' price considerably, many people who can now afford it wanted to check it out. I helped one fellow with designing a simple application and showed him what WebObjects and the Builder can do; he seemed pretty impressed, so that was a good feeling.

I also got a lot of really tough questions about details of the WebObjects framework (the part of WebObjects which makes the HTML building work), mostly at a lower level than I ever have to work with myself. This included one fascinating question about a fellow who is doing really interesting interpolation of HTML code on the server. Fortunately, I was able to get a frameworks engineer in there, which took some of the load off. Wow, the stuff some people are doing with this technology! I had no idea! Well okay, I had some idea, but it's something altogether different to have those ideas walk up and smack you in the face (figuratively speaking).

Ah, to be a developer again.

I wore my spiffy red t-shirt from last night's beer bash to the lab. It's pretty nice, actually. I never wore T-shirts at all until a couple of years ago. Now I'm wearing them more and more.

As the lab closed, I found someone's carrying case with his laptop inside it. I dropped it off at lost-and-found. I hope he finds it there. The woman working lost-and-found seemed impressed that I turned it in and didn't abscond with it. That felt good.

I spent a little time working on a server-side perl script to manage my Links du jour which run on the left side of my journal entries. We don't have a database (that I know of) on Spies, but it's easy enough to keep 'em in a flat file. Sometime soon I'll have a page which will allow you to see all the Links du jour for a year, for whatever that's worth!

Tonight I went to Borrone to read. I also spent half an hour cracking open my sketchbook and new art box (not that new, but I haven't used it much before). I drew what must be the first pencil sketch (other than margin doodles during dull meetings) I've done in about six years. It's a superhero character concept I had. Whether I'll ever do anything with it... who the heck knows.

Here it is:

In some ways I have a better grasp of anatomy than I did six years ago. In other ways, I have the same problems with perspective and flow that I always have. Overall I was impressed that these drawings turned out half as well as they did. Maybe I'll do some more sometime soon.