2157 - A Little Bit Later On


Weather was predicted to be bad and bad it was indeed. The mountains around Villach are all snow-capped, I’d estimate the snow to go down to about 1700 meters. That’s pretty bad for mid-September 🙂

We had rain down here, I just left the apartment to buy some food and my new Asus/Google Nexus 7 tablet.

Yes, I know, I didn’t need one. It’s just so, so … enticing 😄 😄 😄

In reality I don’t even have a use for it. The preliminary plan is to learn programming for Android. Somehow I’m interested in sexy direct manipulation GUIs for boring corporate back-end systems. Maybe it’s only to stay in touch with current technology. It’s so easy in my job lose the connection to not only the bleeding edge, but if you don’t take care even to the mainstream. Suddenly you end up being the equivalent of a Cobol programmer 🙂

Of course I did not take images today. Not a single one, but here’s one taken yesterday instead. It looked unbalanced in color, but using B&W and lightening up the blues extremely did the trick. Suddenly I had a nice distribution of tones to play with, instead of a dark blob on the left side.

The Song of the Day is “A Little Bit Later On” by Ella Fitzgerald. Hear it on YouTube.


There are 9 comments

Markus   (2012-09-13)

I like it. That multi-facetedness of urban life is well captured here.

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andreas   (2012-09-14)

Thanks. I like the ambiguity of those images and am, at least on a subconscious level, constantly on the lookout for them. Doing so becomes a reflex, just like that triggered by bicycles 😄

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Eric Jeschke   (2012-09-14)

Oooh! Do tell! How is the Nexus 7? I am intrigued myself. The price point is very enticing as a "play around" device. I guess my main question is: does it seem reasonably speedy with the stock software? The last thing I want to sink money into is another netbook type device that becomes obsolete so quickly.

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andreas   (2012-09-14)

The Nexus 7 is completely smooth, and although I have tried only one game, ZenBound2, it feels exactly as it did when I tried it on the iPhone a year ago. Of course the iPhone had a much smaller screen and the game was originally developed for iOS. Scrolling, browsing, all fast, definitely the fastest and smoothest I have ever seen on Android. It comes with batteries loaded, you turn it on, it asks for your preferred language, your choice of WiFi, asks you to login to GMail, and then it begins automatically to download all your apps. I have quite some for my Galaxy S2, thus that took a while and a few are seemingly not compatible with Jelly Beans. It also missed a few that are and that I could install manually without obvious problems. Don't know why. I kept the original launcher instead of ADW. ADW was installed, probably felt slower compared to stock JB, and it didn't carry over my settings anyway. Apart from that I wanted to try the stock JB launcher. I also had to login to Amazon to use my Kindle app, but it all works extremely well. No regret 🙂

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Cedric Canard   (2012-09-14)

Glad to hear your Nexus is a hit. Haven't heard anything bad about it. I had a chuckle at your reference to Cobol Programmers. I was one of those once upon a time. I have a friend in England who still is. He works for one of the big banks and is one of two guys who supports the old legacy Cobol systems. He gets paid quite nicely for it too 🙂 By the way, your photo is brilliant. It is the kind of scene that would have me clicking the shutter too. And you've processed it perfectly.

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andreas   (2012-09-14)

Yeah, it would be easy to feel offended. I knew it and I still left it in. The reason is, that although it can be a very comfortable niche, it can easily turn into a nightmare if you are ever forced to change jobs, to do freelance work, etc. COBOL, CICS, host programming in general, are in steep decline for two reasons: People get older and no new come into the job. This is actually in favor of those who still do it. I remember a funny ad by MicroFocus, the major COBOL vendor still left. The ad showed a team of people who were all in their fifties. It was funny because it is completely against the trend in advertising, but the reason is clear: it reflects reality. The other effect is, that companies don't want to rely on their soon-to-be retired developers, and instead of hiring and educating new COBOL programmers, they move projects off the host, to Windows or Java/Linux. Cobol is not dead, but like film it smells funny.

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Paul   (2012-09-14)

I love it, the photo and the comment about COBOL. I did MicroFocus COBOL programming for about a year in tandem with C. They hired me because I knew both languages.

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andreas   (2012-09-14)

Oh my, I really shouldn't have written it 😄 Bu wait, I've done some COBOL as well. 25 years ago for a month, and then between 20 and 15 years ago when I generated COBOL code using TCL 🙂

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Paul   (2012-09-14)

Well, you have more recent experience than I do. Mine was from 1992-1993 and none since then. 🙂 But I still remember: In Every Damn Program - Identification. Environment, Data, Procedure! What a good boy am I! SMH!

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