Zen Of Beer

Amazon Workspaces When our group began looking at how we can move our environments to the cloud, I had a thought. In most of my personal computing I'm working from a phone or a Chromebook. When I need to do something that one of these devices can't handle, I'm opening a remote session to my personal desktop. From there, I've grown accustomed to working in the smaller screen, and smaller monitor. It works, I'm plenty productive. No, I don't get my 3 monitor setup, but I'm getting by without any pain to speak of. What if I could do the same thing in the office? I've already given up carrying around my laptop to most meetings, because it's heavy and the 40 to 60 minute battery life makes it useless beyond the first meeting of the day. I do most of my stuff on my phone, but I could often use the bigger screen, keyboard, and ability to project over HDMI from my Chromebook. What if I could just use a cloud VM for my "real" computing, and do

It's That Time Again Here we are. That time of year in the Pacific North West that seems so oddly out of step with the American seasons. That time of year when, suddenly, the dark clouds part, and a blinding golden ball of fire threatens to rain down burning death upon us all. Over night we go from a calming 60° to a hellish 80°. How does the Pacific North West respond? They sit in the office gushing about the beautiful weather. They jabber on in the grocery store about the warmth. Bla, bla, bla. But the words are nothing more than a lie. You can see the truth by simply commuting to work. When this time of year hits, people change. They change from polite, standoffish tree huggers to aggressive rage monsters behind the wheels of their Volvos and Subaru Wagons and Teslas. They yell. They honk their horns. They gesture obscenely for no apparent reason. They turn in to the minds behind four wheeled projectiles that lock on to motorcycles and try to take them out. It's not l

So, What's It All About? At some point in October of last year, Google announced that they'd be implementing podcast support in Google Play Music. Myself, I've always considered this one of a couple of important missing features. For several months, I waited. Some users got early access in A/B testing. I didn't. Someone let slip in February that it was supposed to go live. It didn't happen. Finally, today, April 18, 2016, it went live. Initially it went live in the browser app. The rollout to the mobile app, so far, is a little slower. I don't have it yet.  How does it work? Well, first, they've added a podcast setting to the smart options for your listening. Along with radio station suggestions, you're also presented with a Podcast option. Cool, I guess. It's the afternoon, and I'm listening to a podcast dealing with the Waco, Texas biker shootout. This part is cool.  It's also very easy to subscribe to the channel of the podcast

Killing A Little Time So, Google Calendar Goals is telling me that I want to do a daily blog about some damn thing, or another. I was doing OK keeping up for a while there, and then I sorta lost interest. Let's give it another shot while I sip a little coffee, and look at the backyard view. Chromebook And Crouton What's to ramble on about today? For quite a while, I've been a Chromebook user. I've been a happy Chromebook user. I love these things, and I recommend them to anybody who will listen. Even as a professional software developer, I find these things meet the vast majority of my personal computing needs. Sure, it won't handle a little music mixing or development, but it'll do damn near anything else.  Where it does fall short, is one of the previous points. I've been unable to do any development on personal projects. Yeah, there are some cloud IDEs, a few browser plugin IDEs, but none of them happen to be the tools I'm used to using.