Today I went to a graduation.  This wasn't any graduation but someone that use to work for me for a couple years.  He's older than me, has a family (two kids in high school) and never went to college before, although his wife has a masters so this was new to him.  He was going for all the right reasons.  He didn't like where he was nor where he was going so it was time to change it -- off to college he went.  The first couple classes in electronics, he brought in some questions from his homework (which I encouraged, I have a similar degree) so we used the whiteboard to draw out the whole thing and break it up so it's easy.  Each time we did so, at the end he'd shake his head "That's it?! Are you serious?" -- this was great, it let me know he was understanding how to make it simple.  To make it stick, I made a point to bridge what he was doing at the office with what he was learning so it was practical and useful in other places.  I also began to teach him how to ask exact questions to get the answer he wanted.  This went on almost daily as I was his manager/mentor.

Interestingly, he graduated exactly 5 years after I obtained my bachelors.  Same place, same time, just 5 years later.  It caused a moment of reflection of what I'd done in those 5 years and more importantly, I had a direct hand in someone's continuation of bettering himself.  It was a somewhat strange feeling watching him walk across the stage.  I'd guess it's the same feeling my parents had when I walked across that very stage -- I wasn't expecting that since I have no kids.  Strange as it was, it made me proud.

After his commencement, he told me he wants to talk -- thinking of the next step, "what's next".  I'm sure it'll be a great conversation because by now, he's fully outgrown his position where I use to manage.

One often overlooked aspect of programming is that evil legal side.  Case in point, you are keeping user records of some kind.  Now, I'm not talking about SSN, Health Records (HIPPA) or bank info.  No, I'm speaking of retaining a users home phone, address, first name, last name, etc.  At what point does this fall into the legal consideration category?  The answer is "check your local codes".  Yea, it sucks, but there's hope.

Within 5 minutes I was able to find the state of Ohio's code regarding (legalese warning!) Private disclosure of security breach of computerized personal information data which is a fancy way of saying if someone steals enough stuff to grant the ability to steal someones ID or other non-public records.  The Federal govt has a law(s) for it, but local laws usually reach further and are more clear (as clear as a law can be) as to the actions necessary for this (typically notification and credit monitoring).  In this case, here's what the Ohio Law says "Private" information would be... Article 1349.19 section 7 chapter B items 1-4 (I don't make this stuff up)

(b) “Personal information” does not include publicly available information that is lawfully made available to the general public from federal, state, or local government records or any of the following media that are widely distributed:

(i) Any news, editorial, or advertising statement published in any bona fide newspaper, journal, or magazine, or broadcast over radio or television;

(ii) Any gathering or furnishing of information or news by any bona fide reporter, correspondent, or news bureau to news media described in division (A)(7)(b)(i) of this section;

(iii) Any publication designed for and distributed to members of any bona fide association or charitable or fraternal nonprofit corporation;

(iv) Any type of media similar in nature to any item, entity, or activity identified in division (A)(7)(b)(i), (ii), or (iii) of this section.

If you can't get it though normal means (public records, mass media or publication), its considered private information.  Still leaves room for "what is public" but something to consider.

Been thinking about it for a while now and I finally bit it and bought a Zune (4g, black) and I was mildly irritated right off the bat.  Let me back up -- I have a sandisk 1gb that has the mega-idiot feature.  You plug it in, its a mass storage device, copy paste, copy paste, unplug it, it rebuilds its own index, done.  Sigh, I guess I have to graduate to using someone else's interface and I'm FORCED to use it.  Not so happy about that, but oh well, I'll get over it.

I download the software from the zune website and ! I've got a ...firmware update available?  Really now??  Ok, I'll play along so update away.  Sure enough, a process that I am very familiar with commences and within a couple minutes I've updated to 2.1 -- cool.  It activates my zune (which again, I'm fundamentally against, why should I have to activate? ...agh, anyway) and now I'm met with the zune software.  It's bad, I kind of like it until I try to copy over my playlists ...which are in media player -- both made my MS so they'll work nicely!  Bernt!  Wrong.  The correct answer is to open up my current playlists and changed them over to m3u(?).  Grr.  Ok, great, fine, dandy, now I got music and away it goes.

I'll confess -- I had never bothered to look into pod-anythings.  At all.  Ever.  Why? I'm not a fan of apple and the crap they sell.  Luckily, on the zune is a (shameless) plug for msnbc that you can download the evening news ...I happen to missed yesterdays news so off I go.  I see I can subscribe so I get everyone of 'em from, cool.  "So what else does this thing have?" and it was all down hill from there.  I find strongbad has a feed, ask a ninja, bbc radio, discovery, cnn, a bunch of places and I subscribed to 'em all.  I configured it to take some more so than others (keep 3 vs 10 etc). 

Alright, I got some musica and some podcasts downloading, awesome...soooo how do you make this wireless sync work?  Long story short, I gave up on Vista and it worked perfectly on XP (I got a spare PC that has all my junk on it) -- and its nothin short of freakin awesome.  I come in, tell it to sync, sit it down and a few minutes later, done -- even connects @ 802.11g!  Now, just a week later ...I've got about 500m free and thinking I should've bought the 8gb at LEAST.

I needed a little humor, so I pulled up my favorite RFC documents.  Now before you pass out and die of bordom, hear me out ...and this was a stark reminder of how much of a geek I am.  Anyway there's two experimental RFC docs that exist, and yes they are real, and go as such...

A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers

and... of course there's an update to an "old" 1990 protocol so we also have...

IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service 

For those of you who think I'm kidding ... check out this and this.  So whats the point?  Sometimes, RFC standards can be fun ...and god I'm such a nerd.  I think I'm going to suggest another update and suggest the transmission of datagrams using an affixed data-holding device for higher datagram capacity.