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umjames

698 karma · joined March 20, 2007

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umjames··on SoundCloud raises $75M from SiriusXM
Also di.fm will play artist's shows (aka podcasts) at certain times on certain channels. It should be under the calendar tab.

I have never subscribed to a streaming music service as I would rather purchase a song I like once and own it forever. So di.fm and several dance music artist shows keep new music coming in.

I have SiriusXM in the car and had it when it was just XM. I only listen to small number of channels and when I don't want to hear what's on any of them, I have an iPod Touch that I can use over Bluetooth to listen to purchased music, downloaded podcasts, and audiobooks.

I really wish Sirius would simulcast di.fm's channels just for the variety that they can't (and don't try to) compete with.

umjames··on Swift Playgrounds for macOS
I think Apple bought it and renamed it to Quartz Composer. I remember you could use it to make screen savers and could even write your own patches for it in Xcode.
umjames··on Game Builder: Create 3D games with friends, no experience required
I remember GameMaker from the 80s on the Apple ][e!

Also had Adventure Construction Set by EA (before they went all sports-crazy): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Construction_Set

I also had a cracked copy of Pinball Construction Set too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball_Construction_Set

umjames··on Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks
That's not to say they couldn't revert to their embrace, extend, and extinguish tactics of the 90s, even under future leadership.

I feel that no big corporation should own GitHub, even if their investors feel differently.

umjames··on Why Can't Hollywood Make a Good Video Game Movie?
The game, right?
umjames··on Why Can't Hollywood Make a Good Video Game Movie?
Couldn't sit through the whole thing. I just don't buy Mark Wahlberg as Max Payne. He's a little too clean-shaven in that movie. Was he at least using pain killers to fight past his injuries?
umjames··on Why Can't Hollywood Make a Good Video Game Movie?
I don't want that story to be ruined by directors/producers/writers taking creative liberties.

Some things just shouldn't be live-action movies. Look at all the anime movie failures. They were perfectly fine in their original animated format. No need for live action, except to keep people in the movie industry employed.

umjames··on Why Can't Hollywood Make a Good Video Game Movie?
Not just video game movies, but also movies based on books about video games.

Having read Ready Player One and then seeing the movie, it's like they didn't even try to capture what made the book successful. The book had clues that were hard for the characters to figure out, but in the movie, it was basically trivial for them.

They should have done 3 movies, each one focusing on obtaining a single key and opening its respective gate. It would have left plenty of room for character development and the underlying love story that are in the book. They could have been Netflix movies too.

umjames··on What The Sleep Habits of Famous Writers Reveal About Their Productivity
Would love to see this for notable programmers. Don't know if the data is available for their wake-up times.

Would also love to see how many of these writers/programmers took naps during the day, at what time, and for how long.

umjames··on Why Productive People Get Up Insanely Early
Oh Yeah!!!! :)
umjames··on It's not a meetup
No. What makes it so enjoyable is that it doesn't happen every day. That makes it a special occasion. It means that when you meet your co-workers in person, the quality of the interaction is most likely higher than if you saw them 5 times a week.

Take any single enjoyable thing and do it 5 times a week, every week. You'd have a law of diminishing returns situation. You'd get to a point where you no longer derive enjoyment from it and you may start to resent it.

umjames··on The Serenity of a 5pm Bedtime
I came up with the same idea a while ago, except I would fit dinner in either after work/before bed or after waking up/before the day job. I never got to try it out though, because when you live with others who are on a regular sleep schedule, there will be plenty of conflicts.

I'm still itching to try this if/when I ever get my own place. It's basically a normal day with the sleep and personal time portions swapped. It's easy to come up with the idea since it's the only flexibility possible when your work time is non-adjustable.

umjames··on DuckTales invented a new animated wonderland—that quickly disappeared
Yes. The Tower of Terror. The bad luck eye of the little yellow god. The custard mite episode.

That show was always funny. My first real taste of British humor.

umjames··on DuckTales invented a new animated wonderland—that quickly disappeared
What, no love for Goof Troop, or Histeria? No, that was when you could tell they were out of ideas.

But seriously, does anyone remember Freakazoid? I only saw a few episodes, but I remember it being very funny.

umjames··on DuckTales invented a new animated wonderland—that quickly disappeared
Loved Dexter's Laboratory. I missed most of Samurai Jack, but what I did see was good. Adult Swim is currently showing Sym-Bionic Titan on Saturdays at 2am (so that would technically be Sunday at 2am). It's pretty good too.
umjames··on DuckTales invented a new animated wonderland—that quickly disappeared
I was a Duck Tales junkie but my love of good cartoons goes before that. I was raised on Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry, before they were censored and rehashed multiple times. I remember religiously watching Danger Mouse, Bananaman, and Count Duckula on Nickelodeon in its infancy. Most people remember the original Thundercats, but I was more into Silverhawks which was around at the same time as Duck Tales.

I always came home from school to cartoons, whether it was Looney Tunes, something from Hanna-Barbera, Transformers, G.I. Joe, old anime like Speed Racer and Robotech (Macross), TMNT, or the various Disney and Warner Bros.-inspired cartoons mentioned in the article. I still watch cartoons, and always will.

umjames··on Philadelphia budget data visualization
Great job! Can you speak (or maybe a blog post would be better) about how you put this together? What did you have to do get/massage the data? What tech did you use, etc?

It's nice to see stuff like this coming out of Philly.

umjames··on Microsoft Messenger will be retired and users migrated to Skype on March 15
Is that because March 15th is the Ides of March?
umjames··on Who wrote the 'Death Note' script?
Hollywood, please don't ever try to make live-action remakes of anime. Why can't they just show the anime itself? It was already good.

I highly recommend watching Death Note in its original anime form (preferably in Japanese with English subtitles). It's excellent. A little culture never hurt anyone. Every story doesn't have to take place in the U.S.

umjames··on Things Bosses Wish They Could Tell Employees
What if I was on GitHub, looking at the kind of software the boss doesn't see the importance in using/writing?

Sometimes, "goofing off" is actually your employee preparing for a future job at a different company. Maybe even his/her own.

umjames··on Things Bosses Wish They Could Tell Employees
I wish there was an opposite post entitled "Things Employees Wish They Could Tell Bosses," but it would probably just be misconstrued as whining.

Sometimes, whining is a good thing. It brings real, honest feelings to the surface. Of course, as an employee, if you don't feel like you're being listened to, you tend to stop volunteering ideas.

umjames··on A new log4j 2.0
Wouldn't u.getA() and u.getB() still be evaluated first so that their values can be passed to the debug method? Without the if statement, how is the debug method not being called?
umjames··on Tiny Piano sales quadruple due to Apple commercial
Or Robert Loggia. I hope they never remake that movie.
umjames··on The Highs and Lows of Side Projects
Here's a simple fix:

You currently have the games as <home team> vs <away team>, it would be clearer if it were <away team> at <home team> (with the time zone indicated, preferably eastern time).

umjames··on The web is still the place
Isn't the browser a native app on every platform? So obviously a native app can do all the things that you say it can't do.

Could this discussion not degenerate into FUD and mudslinging, please?

umjames··on Textmate2 Goes Open Source
True. I just hope the day doesn't come when you can't run non-App Store signed binaries. That would be a dark day for users.
umjames··on Textmate2 Goes Open Source
You don't think it has anything to do with Sandboxing requirements in the App Store and Mountain Lion having an option not to allow non-App Store applications? I'm seriously asking, not trying to start a flame war here.
umjames··on Textmate2 Goes Open Source
Blog post explaining why: http://blog.macromates.com/2012/textmate-2-at-github/
umjames··on Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters
Thank you, I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees the benefits.

It's true, some jobs are soul-crushing enough that you'd rather not be there. You might have family and/or financial responsibilities that make you have to keep such a job. You may be bootstrapping a business on the side so you can escape from such a job, but in the meantime, you still need your regular paycheck.

Not every job has you working with self-motivated co-workers and great bosses. Some jobs put you in a cube farm in a room where everyone fights over the thermostat. Sometimes you have to head a weekly meeting where you have to explain to other programmers why you get NullPointerExceptions on line 5 when line 4 initializes the variable to null. Some jobs still make you use CVS. The office talk at some jobs is never about learning anything, but it sure is loud and distracting.

If you were offered a chance to work from home and avoid a lot of that, I'm sure you'd also jump at the opportunity. Getting a promotion in such a job isn't worth it.

umjames··on Enterprise Software Lessons:If you are Going to Pick Up a Fight, Hit the Big Guy
I'm interested.
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