Monthly Archives: July 2002

gallagheria

Shopping with the Z


 Zoe has spent an inordinate percentage of her life
thus far in Target stores.  We took her to the Target in Towson for her first outing when
she was three days old.  Now, at 18 months old, she is already
a Target power shopper.

But Target wasn’t Zoe’s first stop of the day.  We
went to the Baltimore Farmer’s Market, down under the Jones Falls Expressway
in downtown on this fine Sunday, in search of breakfast and produce.

And breakfast was found at this fried fish stand–fried
“sea trout” sandwiches with hot sauce.  With a piping hot cup of coffee
from the Key Coffee Roasters stand, it was as good as catfish.

And yes, Zoe liked it, too.




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Administrivia

Techno-atrophy

Tech knowledge is like your muscles — if you don't use it frequently, it starts to atrophy. I can get on my bike for an hour a day to get my legs out of flab, but being more reporter than tech these days has me worrying about whether I'll have to take a week off just to re-introduce myself to code.

Not that not doing hands-on tech stuff these days is necessarily a bad thing. That's why this particular rat swam away from his last job–the tech market is, as I've pointed out before, not exactly a booming publishing segment (see “Pressure Drop”). Maybe clearing room for some other, more high-revenue-potential journalistic specialty (like covering extreme sports, or fashion, or porn) would be a good thing.

I can identify the moment I started losing my tech muscle with extreme clarity–it was when I threw my PC off my desk and replaced it with a Mac–a G4 Cube. I try to keep the blood circulating through that portion of my brain where all tech lore is stored by droppping into a command-line Terminal session every now and then, but it's just not the same–it requires a substantially smaller number of brain cells to use Mac OS X than it does to use Windows 2000 on a daily basis.

It also doesn't help that I have yet to load any Java (or any other) IDE on either my Cube or my Ti Powerbook. The only code slinging I've done in the last six months has been in UserTalk.

But I digress.

Rumor has it that my employer is looking to expand into the extreme sports magazine business. Maybe what I need to do to ensure my continued professional growth is spend more time on my bike.

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