Beef, it's what's for dinner

I'm a meat eater and proud of it. While I don't eat meat (beef) all that often, when I do, I really enjoy it. My mom used to make London Broil when I was a kid and despite our best efforts at reproducing it, my wife and I haven't managed to succeed, until yesterday! For a family barbecue (my in-laws were in town and my family came over), I went to Costco and bought flank steak. I know very little about steak, but it looked like there was little fat and it wasn't too thick (a bit hard to tell as each piece was rolled up). My wife marinated the steak in teriyaki sauce all day and then I put the steak on the grill; at first, I thought I had bought way too much steak, but I cooked it up anyway. It was such a big hit that I thought people were going to fight for the last pieces. Mmmmm....beef!

Apple Remote Desktop vs VNC

Lately I've been doing a lot of work between my multiple computers and since I like having only one monitor/keyboard/mouse shared amongst them, I've been using VNC to control then. A friend of mine has told me that Apple Remote Desktop is faster, so I decided to spend the money and order a copy. I received my copy this morning and I have to say that I'm blown away. My network is no slouch (gigabit ethernet) so it wasn't the bandwidth that was the problem in the sluggishness of VNC. Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) is not only faster, but easier to use. If I want to move a file to another machine, I just drag it to the window. It does lots of other stuff, but just being able to control machines (share the screen) makes ARD worth it.

Completed another race

Today I completed the America's Finest City Half Marathon. I'm still not sure what my motivation is for continuing to run, but I figured I was already in shape from June's marathon, so I might as well do a half marathon. This race was a completely different experience from the Rock 'N' Roll Marathon. This was significantly smaller than the Rock 'N' Roll Marathon with a limit of 6000 half marathon runners (it sold out) compared to over 20,000. The budget was much smaller as noticed with the race expo being held in the basement (basically) of a local hotel instead of the convention center. One of the biggest issues I saw with the race, due to its start location, is that we had to board buses to be driven about 25 minutes to the start line instead of basically driving right up to it. So I had to get up at 4:30 am for the 7 am start. Also, the race numbers were given out alphabetically instead of by estimated finish time and then everyone regardless of estimated finish time, started all bunched up. It took me over 2 miles of zig zagging before I was able to maintain my pace.

I did quite well and beat my goal of 2 hours (just over a 9 minute mile) by coming in at 1:49:29 for a pace of an 8 minute, 22 second mile. Not bad, in my opinion.

So, next year, I've decided to just run the Rock 'N' Roll Marathon (I've already signed up) and spend other times with activities like mountain biking and I know my wife wants to go kayaking, so maybe we can do that.

Is programming really engineering?

In a recent blog post that I read, the author said that he had just finished reading To Engineer is Human and said that programming is not engineering. While that may be true in the pure sense of programming, but to say that all programmers don't do engineering is absolutely incorrect in my opinion. I read the book mentioned during my 4 years of engineering school to earn a BS in Engineering at Harvey Mudd College and find it hard to believe that I don't use some of that education in my career as a software engineer (a term that the blog post author doesn't believe in). I do a significant amount of design work in my day to day work and have to problem solve which I consider engineering. Pure programming, in my opinion, is the stuff that is being outsourced to countries like Russia and India (not to say that those countries don't have engineers). Anyone can write code according to specification, but it takes thinking to design software, analyze risks (in most cases not physical risks), and do cost/benefit analysis; skills that I learned in my training as an engineer.

This will probably be an ongoing debate that will never have an agreement, but it saddens me to see people lump together people that have an engineering background with people that just decided to write code as a hobby (some of those people are good enough, in my opinion, to be engineers).