I love that Chrome uses Safari’s WebKit engine. I love that the version it uses is more advanced than that which Safari uses, so you not only get to use fancy CSS3-esque features like box-shadow: and border-radius:, but it features the improved Web Inspector.

But I find it rather silly to show rounded corners and drop shadows if you have this problem (Safari also shown for comparison):

Safari 3.0	Chrome 1.0

Remember, Chrome and Safari use the same layout engine. This bug only shows up when you use box-shadow: and border-radius: together .. in Chrome.

When IE & FireFox can’t show either the shadows or rounded corners, they at least fail gracefully.

If anyone has found a way to make Chrome behave, I’d love to hear about it. I’d like to be able to recommend people to a Windows browser (other than the awkward-on-that-platform Safari) in which to view my work with optimal presentation.

Coming from an historic peace church, I’m not much for patriotism and the holidays thereof. But I’ve always liked watching the fireworks, and this afternoon I found myself — quite inspirationally, mind you — whistling Stars & Stripes Forever. Sometimes things just stick with you.

A family member gave us a gift card to Cracker Barrel¹ recently, and it was a fun Fourth-y place to eat brunch, even though it’s somewhat stressful to take a 15-month-old to a sit-down restaurant. Afterwards, I picked up Practices of an Agile Developer and Dreaming in Code at the nearby Books-A-Million², though I am now annoyed to see that it looks like I could have gotten them both for half what I paid, had I purchased them from Amazon’s Used section. I’m glad I got them, though. Hopefully I can find time to get through Practices this weekend.

Jennifer is sitting in her chair next to mine working mapping out our debt snowball³. I’m hoping she finishes soon so we can go crash.

Oh yeah, and I hope to make this blogging thing a regular deal.

BRENT: Ever since I was a kid I pictured myself working at home. I thought it would be as a novelist rather than a programmer, but it’s about the same thing: I sit in a chair in front of a computer and make things up.

I like people and I like meeting people and hanging out. But I don’t like working face-to-face and day-to-day with people. I’m quite introverted that way. I just find it draining, and always have, going way back to elementary school.

I sometimes think of it this way: there are dog people and cat people. Pack animals, with their politics and pecking order, on one hand — and solitary hunters, camouflaged in the tall grass, on the other. I can be gregarious, and I’m certainly competitive, but I live further along the feline side of the spectrum than most folks. Which is not at all unusual for geeks.

I make exception for my wife, of course. We work well together. And it is indeed great that we’re both home all day.

I never thought of myself as a “cat person”, but perhaps I am, at least relationally. And, contrary to popular opinion, I have spent some time working in an office. I just prefer working by myself, at home. kthxbye.

I need a little app on my laptop display that shows a thumbnail of the external display’s contents. Does such a thing exist? If not, how hard would it be to cook up?

I think I got maybe three real calls from that ad in two years. One was a kid asking if I was hiring. Another was a real client, but it was too little, too late —- they called after I’d decided to stop trying and close down.

Anyway, I had a really nice, easy-to-remember phone number. I had it forwarded to my cell phone, and kept it for a long time after letting O.L.D. slide. It seems that lots of people before me had it, though, judging from the kinds of wrong numbers I got.

To date, I’ve recieved calls from people looking for:

• “Household Financial”
• Oak Lawn Memorial Cemetery (not sure how they got that from Design)
• Some motel (Caller: “Room 214, please.” Me: “What?”)
• Someone named Bridget. Bridget has a lot of friends.
• An animal hospital. An older lady ignored my recorded greeting and left me a message asking if we had any dogs that nobody wanted, because she needed a companion. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t call her back.

And that doesn’t even include all the people that called to ask me to do their landscaping. Next time I start a business, I’m going to do more thinking about what to call it.

Most of my early-evenings will be taken for a few weeks. But at least I have a plan, now.

Let’s take the concentration impact first.  I’m a software engineer, and programming requires extended periods of concentration.  Actually this isn’t unique to programming, a lot of fields require that you concentrate.  (Probably just about everything worth doing requires some concentration!)

---

I maintain that programming cannot be done in less than three-hour windows.  It takes three hours to spin up to speed, gather your concentration, shift into “right brain mode”, and really focus on a problem.  Effective programmers organize their day to have at least one three-hour window, and hopefully two or three.  (This is why good programmers often work late at night.  They don’t get interrupted as much…)

That last part is something I knew, but had never seen put into words before. Now that I have some tangible ground to stand upon, maybe I can structure my work-environment a little better. Like closing Apple Mail and NetNewsWire … unless I’m really looking for a special email.

On the other hand, maybe this is where I belong for now. I’m only now regaining my ministry-outlook on life. Partially as a result of me living 1.5 hours away, our family singing ministry ground to a halt. We’ve done one or two experimental forays back into that realm, one of them last Sunday — we sang “He’s Still Waiting By The Well” by Greater Vision.

It was actually kind of funny: Alley, Tiffany, Tim and I were supposed to sing “Fly Away” by FFH, because as the result of yet another substitution, Alley’s father-in-law realized he was scheduled to play both special music and an offertory on the same Sunday (and we couldn’t have that). We had played with several songs — Testify To Love by Avalon, and You Found Me by FFH, but we meshed best on Fly Away. So since His Way didn’t carry that accompaniment track, I ordered it from christianbook.com. Turns out they use UPS to ship overnight … but UPS doesn’t deliver on Saturdays. Yup, you guessed it: our overnight shipping dragged on into four-day shipping. Sidenote: the Christianbook.com customer service rep apologized to me for the mixup and offered to refund the shipping when I returned the CD … so don’t think they’re evil or anything.

Where was I going with that? Ah yes: ministry-outlook. I don’t think I’d be content to just live a normal American Dream life: job, wife, kids, vacations, old, nursing home, dead. I need to do something that matters, or benefits a cause I believe in. That’s part of why I decided to work for StewTech. It’s also part of why we might be going on the road again as the Bergey Family Singers or something like that. And why I’m going to renew my efforts to record a piano CD. More on that in another post, though.

So instead, Tim and I finished up the garage roof. That’s the first reason today was a good day … getting projects done makes you feel good.

I had lunch with Stuart Washington and his father, who are the founders of Stewardship Technology, a company that makes it possible for individuals to tithe or give to churches and missionaries electronically. Or, they will soon. I’m going to help write the software to do it. That’s the second reason today was a good day … it now looks very much like I’m going to have solid work until at least the end of the year.

After the roof was done, I drove to Home Depot to return the roof nailer we’d rented. (Roof nailers are the bomb. Don’t leave the ground without one. Unless, of course, you’re flying rather than roofing. Then you might get locked up.) On the way back, I got a call from Shannon, who was killing time while waiting for her band practice to start. This caught me off guard, and I launched right into conversational autopilot … not a good move. Now she thinks I’m one of those people who always say “mm-hm” in the middle of other people’s sentences. Oh well. But that’s still the third reason today was a good day … random calls from girls.

It looks like Mom is sick now, too … she’s sleeping on the sofa with a bucket, and Dad’s sleeping in his chair. I’m blogging at the dining room table in case either of them wakes up and says anything. I guess it wasn’t a good day for either of them, and I’m sure it won’t be tomorrow, either.