Despite all my attempts to convince myself that it was a bad idea and not needed (I mean, I even tried to solve the problem with XML), I have found myself working on a schema and data validation system.

Last night I woke up in the middle of the night and Gloria was restless. She was fidgeting around and I asked what was wrong. “It’s this damn bug in the bed,” she said.

So, right. I got an iPhone. Among other things, this means that I will now start writing about what apps I like, once in a while.

Once again, I’m writing a look back instead of a travelogue. Oh well!

I am not Andy Lester. I do not have piles and piles of advice on getting hired. Every time I go through the hiring process, though, I gain a bit more wisdom to share with applicants. Here is some for you today.

More and more, I’m dealing with lots of mostly-JSON web service APIs. I enjoy this. It’s simple, and tends to work well. I think JSON is a really nice format to work with. I had a discussion with Ingy and a bit of the #yaml gang about things I don’t like about YAML (largely it’s implicit types) and I ended up thinking that YAML wasn’t quite as insane as I’d thought. Still, from the perspective of clarity, JSON blows it out of the water.

If you can’t handle even this light amount of attitude, you probably should stick to … I don’t know what. Support from consultants?

I really liked “Mexican Radio,” the one hit by one-hit wonder Wall of Voodoo. I bought their album, Call of the West, in college, and I liked it, and that was that. I didn’t know they’d been around before or after that album, and hadn’t really thought to look into it.

I see a lot of crazy email content and headers. I should post more of them, just for giggles. Here’s one I found sitting in wtf.msg in my home directory at work:

My house is a three home unit. There are three living units side by side, each with a third of the porch, a third of the yard, and the same amount of space, more or less. Our unit is at the south end of the house. For much, much longer than we’ve lived here, the residents of the north end of the house were unchanged.