The Premier Development and Runtime Environment for Business Application Software
December 26th, 2008 Al Kalter
According to my handy Dilbert desktop calendar, today is Boxing Day (in Canada, the UK, New Zealand, and all of Australia except the state of South Australia), Proclamation Day (in South Australia … maybe they don’t like boxes), St. Stephens Day (in Ireland), the first day of Kwanzaa (in the USA), and the fifth day of Hanukkah (in Israel and throughout the diaspora). I hope you bought appropriate greeting cards to cover all of those holidays.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Al | No Comments »
December 9th, 2008 Al Kalter
42 … that’s the answer to life, the universe, and everything! So it is a momentous milestone this blog has reached, which makes it appropriate to talk about another momentous event: the upgrade of our desktop PCs from Windows XP to Vista. We’re living on the cutting edge!
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Al | No Comments »
November 26th, 2008 Al Kalter
It’s a short week here at APPX Software, and at most businesses in the US, as we take Thursday off to fill our faces with food, family, and football, and then stay home on Friday to recover. There may be no more authentic American holiday than Thanksgiving. It’s one that wasn’t invented by a greeting card company, although you can certainly buy Happy Thanksgiving cards at your local store. It doesn’t have a religious basis to it, although expressing one’s gratitude is certainly a significant tenet of most religions. And it does not recognize an individual, or a group of individuals (presidents, veterans) as other holidays do. We may attribute its origin to the Pilgrims, but it truly has become all about family. Except, perhaps, for the turkeys.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Al | No Comments »
November 19th, 2008 Al Kalter
I paid $1.94 a gallon for gas this week. Since I spent a few earlier posts complaining about the high prices of fuel, it’s only fair to report this latest, unexpected development. Never did I even dream that we’d be able to buy gas for under $2 a gallon again. Can it last? Will it go lower? My guess would be that the answer is no for both of those questions. But in the meantime, people are smiling at the pumps again.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Al | 1 Comment »
November 10th, 2008 Al Kalter
Well, it’s been a while, so I’ll offer an apology and an excuse. The apology is for allowing more than two weeks to slip by without a new blog. The excuse is that I was out of the country for 10 days (as if they don’t have internet access there). Anyway, with your permission, I’ll comment on some things that happened over the past 19 days.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Al | 1 Comment »
October 22nd, 2008 Al Kalter
Admittedly, I don’t have a lot to say today, but since I’ll be away for the next week and a half, it seemed like I should put something out here for anyone that might happen to read it. So I’ll provide a potpourri for you, a few quick thoughts that may have no connection to each other at all.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Al | No Comments »
October 17th, 2008 Al Kalter
Today is one of those days when we have what the locals like to call “Chamber of Commerce weather.” The temperatures are comfortable, the humidity is down, the sun is shining … if you came to visit Jacksonville today, you’d want to stay. In fact, when I came to Jacksonville for the first time, for an APPX conference nine years ago this month, this was exactly how the weather was. It helped to make the ensuing job offer that much easier to accept, compared to facing the beginning of another long, cold, snowy winter in Syracuse.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Al | No Comments »
October 9th, 2008 Al Kalter
I admit it … I watched the presidential debate on Tuesday night. And I feel somewhat dirty about it. I probably didn’t scream at the TV as much as I did during last Sunday’s football game, but the frustration and the rant were similar: “Can’t anyone tackle that guy?” “Can’t anyone tackle that subject?”
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Al | No Comments »
October 3rd, 2008 Al Kalter
Time and money. Two things that we would probably all agree we don’t have enough of, right? But what is the relationship between the two? Can we just say, “Time is money,” and leave it at that? No, that wouldn’t make for much of a blog. Pink Floyd had a song called Time and another called Money, the latter being mostly in 7/4 time, which is a very unusual time signature, and I’m sure they made a lot of money on both. But I’d like to examine both, and perhaps question the logic behind some very basic assumptions. After all, it’s never satisfactory to leave well enough alone, is it?
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Al | 1 Comment »
September 30th, 2008 Al Kalter
The end of summer isn’t as dramatic a threshhold in Florida as it is up north. For one thing, schools here re-open in mid-August, making Labor Day a lot less significant as a calendar landmark. For another, the weather gets better after the autumnal equinox, as we start having those “Chamber of Commerce Days” on a regular basis. But I did see one sign of summer last week, which may be disappearing everywhere, and it brought back some childhood memories. What I saw was an ice cream truck.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Al | No Comments »