Patrick Foley’s Blog

I lost my friend Mickey today. Michael Sullivan. I first knew him as Stroker, because that was the name somebody put on the back of his baseball shirt. He was one of my first baseball coaches about 25 years ago. He remained a close friend.

Mickey was a great coach. He had us do all kinds of stupid plays like throwing to the shortstop when there were runners on first and third and the guy on first steals - the goal is to lure the guy on third to run home and then catch him at the plate. I actually pulled that throw off once.

When we’d win a game, he’d buy us all popcorn and pop. If we lost, he’d buy us hotdogs, too. There were a few kids he was particularly close to, including my brother and me. He’d take us to Cubs games every year. I felt like a king on one of those trips. His birthday and Christmas presents were usually the coolest things I got (my brother, too). Cubs jerseys with my name on the back. Bowling ball. A frickin’ Estes model rocket that I didn’t even know existed until he gave it to me. Heck he even gave my sister presents, and she never even played for him. He was a welcome friend to my whole family.

When I was in college and struggling, he bailed me out a couple of times. The guy didn’t make much money, but he sure knew how to give it away. After I got married and recently had our first kid, then he switched to spoiling my son. He had a gift for gifts.

Stroke introduced me to Jean-Luc Ponty, first by 8-track and then by concert at Fountain Street Church. We introduced each other to a lot of music over the years, but that was the most important one for me.

Once I moved back home after school and marriage, we enjoyed going out to dinner mostly. Usually a group of us would go, including his sister Kathy, his good friend Kay and later her husband. Many of my favorite restaurants in the area we scoped out together. I’m going to miss that a lot.

For the last couple of years, Mickey couldn’t eat spicy foods, which bummed him out a bit. His health deteriorated in a cruelly painful way. For years he had rheumatoid arthritis, which sometimes made his legs and hands puff up like balloons. It hurt a lot. It brought depression with the pain. Then he got the cancer that would eventually take his life. At the end, cancer got into his brain. He had no short-term memory and limited logic. He was still himself, but not fully himself. I am happy he is no longer in pain.

I don’t know how anybody could be a better friend than Mickey. I wish I could have been a better friend to him. In fact, I wish I could be a better friend to many people. I’m a good guy, but I’m not a great friend. I’m caught up so much in my own life and family that I’m just not always there for other people. My dad is a great friend. He’s always there for people. Mickey is a great friend. He was always there for me.

I count six other friends of mine that have cancer right now. Today I need to pause to think of Mickey. I’ll spend some of that time thinking about what I can do for these other friends - for all my friends - to make their lives just a little bit better. That’s what Mickey always did for me. I miss him already. I am glad he has found peace.

So what’s a “first class user interface construct”? I’ll show you a perfect example in Google’s new gmail.

First some background. I’ve tried many, many webmail systems, and I actively use at least six for various purposes (Yahoo, MSN, gmail, fastmail, Outlook Web Access (OWA), and the free Linux ones). They all have their strengths and weaknesses. OWA has a beautiful interface, but it’s fairly expensive. Fastmail is my primary email system because it’s so flexible, but it’s UI is a tad clunky - geeky even. MSN is pretty but surprisingly awkward - just serviceable, really. Yahoo is quite good, but there’s just something about gmail that’s better.

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I finally started using FogBugz yesterday. It’s not perfect, but it has made a marked difference in my productivity and the productivity of my small team in just a couple of days.

I’m using naming conventions to link cases together into “subcases”. It certainly works fine for a small project, but I’d sure like the ability to roll up estimates into parent cases. Perhaps this will be a future feature.

Ultimately, I don’t just want to track bugs, I want to use Joel’s Painless Software Scheduling. There are elements of this process that are not “first class constructs” in FogBugz, so I have to apply discipline and squint a little to make it work. I hope they take it to the next level. Still, I’m pretty pleased with what’s there.

My favorite Mexican restaurant in Grand Rapids - possibly my favorite restaurant of any kind in Grand Rapids - is Caramba just off the corner of Leonard and Fuller. Jose is the owner, and he’s a great guy, but the food … oh the food!

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I decided to move my blog outside of my company’s website (www.aptica.com). I found that I was censoring myself too much on my business website. I want to talk about serious things and stupid things in addition to business and technology. Heck, I want to talk more about my family and mundane things, too. By moving my blog to my personal site (it IS my personal site at the moment), I feel I will write more.

Blogging is a learning experience for me. I want to write more for my business, and like anything else, writing requires practice. Blogging is that practice for me. Hmmm, I suppose I should write more letters, too.

When I moved this, I upgraded to WordPress 1.5 (blogging software). The new layout is very pretty, but it’s the default. I can’t have that! I have designed my own layout (which is probably less pretty, but it’s mine). It’s going to take me a few hours to implement it, so I won’t be able to get to it for a while. This will have to do for now.

I changed my mind today about the Terri Schiavo “right to die” case. Originally, I sided squarely with the husband. Then I saw video footage of his wife.

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There are only two blogs that I read on a daily basis. I’ve already mentioned Joel on Software. The other is pluralsight.com. I’m not exactly sure of their business model, but they have many of the best Windows minds in the industry (Don Box for example) writing on one aggregated feed. It’s top-notch reading for Windows developers.

Coming back from vacation a couple of weeks ago, my family and I got stuck overnight in Atlanta. Since it was weather-related, the airlines only gave us a discount on a hotel, but at least it was a nice one. Like a dufus, I managed to leave my cell phone charger in the room. Such a thing costs just enough that I didn’t want to buy a new one but not enough to be worth expensive shipping. Luckily, I didn’t have to decide how much it was worth to send to me, because the hotel was nice enough to mail it to me without even asking for reimbursement. How nice! Thank you, Holiday Inn Atlanta North! Thanks especially to William in security.

One of the quickest ways to get a web store up and running is to use Yahoo! Store - or as it is now called Yahoo! Small Business Merchant Solutions. They have very decent, web-based software for entering catalog items, managing sales, accepting credit cards, and all the other minor things that are necessary to sell things online. Their statistics are also top-notch.

But goodness gracious – their support stinks! I have recommended several customers and friends to Yahoo, but every single support incident I’ve been sucked into with them has been abysmal. I find that I always have to lead them through the support incident when it should be the other way around. When I point out their errors, they never even apologize; they just make excuses – or ignore their mistakes altogether.

Here’s a recent email exchange that took place over five days:

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As Joel Spolsky points out, updating web pages by getting just the bits of information that have changed instead of refreshing the whole page is the wave of the future. Whether we’re calling web services within a client-side page or using a gmail-like JavaScript technique (darn cool), it’s going to be a major architectural shift. It’s going to be hard.

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