Theo's House o' Squee

November 23rd -- Sham Yam Sham

2009-11-24T13:27:52Z

Uphill work to get conscious this morning, but I have the part time job orientation -- unpaid, BTW-- this morning that I'd better hurry to.
Back from orientation, which was all about safety, safety, safety, Spam, and safety. I was not the oldest nor the only female. Not bad!

This is the temporary holiday driver's helper job with UPS, which if it doesn't get too physically tiring should move fast & furious, which if I can't have an intellectually rigorous job will at least keep me moving. UPS seems like a fair company, to judge from the way they treated us temps.
Oh, and it turns out that orientation is paid, too -- now that's more than I expected, right there. I'm assigned to the group that works within 5 miles of here, so I shouldn't have to travel far to meet up with the drivers. But it's not guaranteed I'll get hours every day, though since there's a certain amount of expected attrition among the helpers, if you stick around and are reliable, you'll get work.
If nothing else, it should be An Experience.

Back to teaching myself PHP, which is rather untyped & wild-west-style lawless, rather like discovering that pro racers use training wheels

It's just that after learning rigorous typing for C# and especially Java, going back to PHP and realizing that you don't have to declare if something is a string or a number is... oddly disappointing. Cats and dogs living together! Luxury!

You know what? I forgot to call the school to go get my Actual Certificate for the programming course today....

It was supposed to come in last week, I called and stopped by twice, guy promised to call me when it was in (he SAID that he was given a package tracking number) and looked so honest when he said it.
The important thing is, my "certificate" is official, I just don't have the physical document. But I'd like it anyway, ys know?

Almost #Heroes time. I may be the only person still watching, but I love evil carnivals.
#Heroes might just have the best Thanksgiving episode since Buffy's Yam Sham.

I never expected a "Thanksgiving" episode from this show, but if they'd been doing this sort of thing more along the way, there'd be more interest in it for sure. Three families, three awkward family gatherings. Plus, Mr. Muggles has a girlfriend! With a pink bow! Yam jokes! Fainting guests! Exes bringing new love interests!

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November 16th -- the end of everything, well at least school....

2009-11-17T16:04:48Z

I thought, therefore I twittered:

I only slept solidly between like 2 AM and 6 AM, tho' I did get a lot of UNDER THE DOME read, but honestly wasn't awake BECAUSE of it.

Not that it's not interesting and I really want to know what happens next, but seriously, if sleep were going to happen, I wouldn't be able to read with much concentration, and it's not like I have a seriously limited amount of time to read in. Still....

RT teresakopec Why do I torture myself with Morning Joe? [...] screaming that trying terrorists in NY is "unprecedented." Seriously dumb.

You know, NYC has to be to terrorists like a trailer park is to tornadoes. I mean, it can't raise the likelihood that Al Quaeda is going to want to hit it by more than 2% already. And OH YEAH, there was that little trial for the WTC 1993 bombing, which amazingly didn't result in a big fat disaster.

(If I was a terrorist who wanted to strike at the heart of America, I'd be targeting stuff like the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial and so on, right now, regardless of anywhere trials were located. Stuff that gets them worldwide notice.)

I'd feel much happier about the end of school -- last class tonight -- if I had The Next Step of my career laid out or possible....
My final project was finished with five minutes to spare -- that's completely finished, go team me!
Home after saying goodbye to programming class. Heard that I will get my certificate on Weds. Good timing!

The end of the Last Lab project -- our final project -- came an hour before the end of class. It was a difficult one, and I suspect I'm the only one in the class who finished it thoroughly, including both the ASP application and the GUI client/Webservices server variation. I did really REALLY learn a lot in this class, and had so much fun doing so, too.

Now if I could only get a job doing some of this stuff....

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November 13th: Triskadekaphilia

2009-11-14T16:38:58Z

I thought, therefore I twittered:

No one would have believed in the opening years of the 21st century we were being observed by slit-eyed aliens in our own homes....
Off to a job-seeking workshop at Career Source. This unemployment gig is sure a lot of work....

It's a Job Seekers Network Group that meets once a week, but perhaps it will spur me on to get more organized and on track with what I'm pursuing. It gives me pause to realize that everyone there was older than 35 (a participant polled the room) which may just be a reflection of what job seekers make it to a Cambridge strip mall setting or whatever.

I'm attending Microsoft and NaviSite Present: Elite Web Optimization Event -- bit.ly/3gFBHk

This I heard about at the Boston Web Designers meetup the night before. There's some considerable free software on offer there, including Microsoft Expression and Silverlight (their answer to Dreamweaver and Flash, respectively) which wouldn't hurt me to know, especially if it ties in well with Visual Studio....)

RT teresakopec RT atrios: i think Obama should really rethink his plan to bring Magneto to new york city.

Had to retweet this, because it's obvious both of them have read my favorite-ever X-Men comics story sequence, not to mention the rather cowardly reaction by some conservatives to -- eek! -- bringing Guantanamo detainees onto mainland US and actually treating them like the war prisoners they are.

How Somerville is it? 'Smart Car' parked on Highland Ave, with a Denver boot clamped over a wheel....
Perhaps I will feel less achy if I take a random shower (defined as any shower taken outside of regular shower hours...)

I subsequently crashed and burned by 8:30 PM -- too tired to do more than go upstairs and see if I could sleep. And it turned out that I could... which, you know, if I can do that, I really really need it.

Still, it's been a busy week, and most surprisingly one that isn't devoid of achievement....

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November 7th -- Annotations From A Life

2009-11-07T13:05:04Z

I thought, therefore I twittered:

Miniature Pets Gallery, 10 good, ten bad. I want a mini-goat, but I might take a mini-mule instead.... ow.ly/zR16

Honestly, some of the cutest small things you'll ever see. Plus-- they bred mini-mules from minihorses and minidonkeys! How mini-cute is that?

Honestly, getting an email from Staples with a 'Your Destiny Awaits' subject is more likely to make me cringe than want to buy stuff....

Seriously, I don't want my destiny to involve office supplies and paper, unless the paper company involved is the one that HRG used to work for on Heroes.

OMG, the application for a pharmacy chain job includes a 20-screen strongly-agree to strongly-disagree personality questionnaire!!??

CVS had an even longer one than the one for UPS that I did the other day. I amused myself by trying to consistently answer the questions the way that I thought they'd want... which is pretty much truthful.

bobby-tables.com: A guide to preventing SQL injection ow.ly/zV1h -- My favorite XKCD cartoon, and the tech advice therefrom.

Yep, a kid named so that if you input his name correctly, you break the database! Very geeky humor, but it makes a good programming point.

Back in real life, I knew a guy with the last name of Abend... which in the days of COBOL applications, broke his college's student database because ABEND means Abnormal End, which was a key phrase to Stop Everything in that language.

I am SO not ready for the sun to be setting around 4:30... but it is. FEH. Who thought up this lousy orbit-thing, anyway?
ow.ly/zYOm -- a picture of the first frost, gorgeous!

I guess these two entries aren't unentirely related... the good and the bad of seasonal variety. In my backyard, Maple A is 95% bare, but a slightly-ragged Maple B soldiers on, so that you have blue New England Asters sitting in a bed of orange-yellow leaves, as pretty as it gets around here.

Spare Cat doesn't want the world, just my half of it... so that she can keep the other half of it under observation....
Dear Furslugs (aka 'Cats'): you're not getting fed until 5 PM EST if I have to lock myself in my room with a pillow over my head.
(You can tell they're furslugs by the trails of shed fur they leave wherever they go.)

Spare Cat's mom caught a break -- she's in Stage 3 kidney failure (AKA not bad enough for dialysis) due to the diabetes, which isn't good news EXCEPT they took a kidney biopsy and there's NO cancer. They may be able to improve the kidney function with drugs, so fingers crossed. Not much chance of Spare Cat going home for a while yet.

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October 21st: Remembering the Bang!Path

2009-10-22T12:59:09Z

I thought, therefore I twittered:

No mouseicide overnight, though the cats seem disappointed.

It turns out that Chumley did bring the dead mouse into R's room and attempted to give it to her, while I slumbered peacefully on. And then she ejected him and the mouse, so that I found it on the landing in the morning. Wimp.

I would say that the cats are insufferably proud of themselves, but mostly that's S.O.P..

I need to start a "Keep the Hallow in Halloween" campaign just to play with the Baptists' mindsets.

Yep, some religious types are up in arms about Halloween promoting witchcraft and Satanism, et cetera. The same people who complain about Christ being left out of Christmas, you know? It's probably useless to point out that it's the evening before All Hallows, hence the name. Why, you could put up displays of saints being martyred in your front yard! It would be fun!

Cable box has been returned to the cable office and I have a receipt! And counterperson switched me to a new plan that's $20 less/mo.!

You know what's freaky? My IKEA media center now has all these empty slots. We're down to the new TiVo and a DVD player. I may put back the VCR, since I still have tapes of MST3K and so on, but really... that's all that needs to be there now.

I really wanted to take back that cable box, though, since cable companies are notorious for charging you for "missing" equipment. Getting a better financial deal is sweet, though.

I got my CSS Resume Garden page whipped into shape, but ran out of time to upload it. Still a productive afternoon.

Will have it up later today! I set myself a good challenge, because I had to take headers, paragraphs and nested lists and make them collapse so that they became uniform paragraphs. Without, you know, actually touching the HTML that laid them out as headers, et cetera.

How old am I? I remember when you used bang paths to email people.

Actually, I got onto USENET (through a MITSFS account) a little while after the @ email address had come in, but there were STILL people using bang paths in their addresses, so it counts, I think.

This came up because in class we're starting a module in Web Services, and were recapping the history of Internet connectivity and... I was there, at least peripherally, while this was going down.

Spare Cat was hanging out atop the fridge tonight. Truly nothing is safe with her around.

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October 19th Es Schneit

2009-10-20T14:50:06Z

I thought, therefore I twittered:

There's still just a thin coating of snow on cars in the shadows where the sun hasn't shone yet. Earliest Boston snow I can remember?

There are still plenty of green trees around, which makes this snowfall all that more AWFUL. I want my summer back... at least I'd be happier if we were having a proper New England Fall, which means 70s and high 60s so you can romp on the lawn in the colorful leaves. I walked through a patch of crackly fallen leaves the other day, which made me smile fondly.

Oooh, cable card installer man is coming tomorrow! Soon I will be i/n/v/i/n/c/i/b/l/e i/n/s/u/f/f/e/r/a/b/l/e/ have 2 digital cable streams.

Some would think that I'm already insufferable about this, but damn, it's neat tech and it's been a while since I upgraded a Useful Toy -- already that double-recording capability has come in handy, so that Rosemary can get to watch Desperate Housewives even if The Amazing Race runs way WAY overtime. Even better if the installation works and we can then get the higher digital channels like BBC-America and TCM and National Geographic and so on. And I can copy shows over to my desktop PC up here and watch when Rosemary wants to watch something different!

Nepal's latest adventure sport: parahawking ow.ly/vfUJ -- Thanks to my friend Larry, because not only do I <3 vultures this is NEAT!

This is genius -- first off, the guy rehabilitates raptors, and then uses them to spot updrafts when paragliding, and you can pay to take a tandem ride with him. Not that I could afford the trip to Nepal to do so (which is described as a paragliders' paradise, because of temperature, prevailing winds and spectacular mountain scenery), but using a natural behavior like this (who doesn't want to see birds when they're flying, up close like that?) is just such a WIN.

JSP rocks, especially after learning Java servlets, which are like learning to dance in ski boots.

For those who don't program, here's the quickie explanation -- for this module of J2EE, we've spent most of the time writing servlets, which is Java code that gets compiled into HTML that be viewed in a browser. Which means that every bit of HTML has to be input into strings that the compiler then outputs. JSP, however, starts as an HTML page that you can include bits of Java into. Thus the sudden freedom, like dancing without your ski boots on....

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October 5th -- Looking Forward To Being Attacked. Sortof.

2009-10-06T18:13:22Z

I thought, therefore I twittered:

I seem to be bereft of twit this morning. I am twitless. Handitwitted. Untwitterable.

As they say, some days it's just not worth it to chew through the straps. Not only didn't I have thoughts that would fit into 140 characters, I didn't have thoughts. Very down day, alas.

Awful Library Books: 'Looking Forward to Being Attacked' -- ow.ly/sMNv -- The ToC is a particular delight.

ALB is a librarian's blog highlighting books they've run across -- like outmoded Advice or Career books from the 1970s that deserve to be updated or disposed of. Like the 1968 book about the life of a West Point cadet -- which would be interesting to a military historian, for instance, but not so much if you were a contemporary high school student, you know?

The Looking Forward to Being Attacked book is not so much in that category, mostly in that it's timeless in its editorial weirdness. Outside of a friend who does Krav Maga, I don't know anybody who looks forward to being attacked, but there's a kernel of truth in that if you carry yourself with confidence, your smarter muggers and attackers may choose to attack someone else. ("may" not "will". Bad guys may be a cowardly and superstitious lot but generally speaking they're also stupid in some fundamental ways.

Past time to leave for class, but I have a warm fuzzy Spare Cat trying to lie down on top of my arms as I'm typing.

Oh yeah, she's STILL around. Her mom isn't doing any better, and in fact I was told she's getting a kidney biopsy this week. Although, we can all hope that if they can identify something that they can fix, she might eventually be well enough to take back her cat.

Let me be the first to say that I love and adore kitties, but I'd adore this one more as a temporary visitor. I look upon the Spare Cat as punishment for my hubris in believing that I could manage any cat.

ow.ly/sQrD -- Andrew Sullivan's beagle is getting old. Sniffle-inducing.

"I used to think that dogs were just dogs, beneath us humans, different in fundamental ways. I don't any more. I see the trace of God's love and God's creation in every one. But I only really see it in the one I love and have lived in the same room with for twelve years and counting."

school: we're doing Java servlets. I'm beginning to think that I never really knew any JSP at all....

Speaking of hubris -- it's remarkable to me how much I still don't KNOW. Considering that this is the third time I'm gone through the module on J2EE -- but it was taught differently all three times. This time, we have a thorough grounding on what is included in HTTP Requests and Responses and how the hidden infrastructure makes the Gets and Posts behave.

I rocked through most of the Lab project we had, which was to make a simple calculator -- two fields to enter numbers and buttons to click to make them add, subtract, et cetera. This is on a JSP page that calls another when it returns the answer. Not rocket science, but I can really say that I understand each bit of code I'm writing.

Haven't heard back from the Holiday Shipping Coordinator job... one that I could do very well, indeed, but I'm going to go with the thought that I won't get it. Right now today I'm feeling a little bitter, but damn, I WILL get something soon, right?

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Sept 21 -- No Shovels, Please.

2009-09-22T15:12:42Z

I thought, therefore I twittered:

FABULON ow.ly/qh7K I should just move to Planet Fabulon.

They consistently find the most luscious over-the-top fashion/cultural/historical pictures, plus snarky commentary, plus NSFW homoerotic nudes, plus bad really bad King Super Bad fashion photos

RT pvanb Nothing runs over your foot like a Deere #madmen

This week's Mad Men featured one of the all-time GREAT product placements... which didn't work out so well for one of the characters, but should definitely cement the image of John Deere riding mowers in the minds of all viewers. Just one more reason to love this show.

Cities of the Underworld host just speculated if the Freemasons can be linked to the Templars. No, I'm not making this up.
He also noted that the Masonic Temple in Philadelphia is covered with Freemasonry symbols. Ya think?
@Zenkitty714 -- Aside from the 10% woowoo about Templars it's pretty good. I picture a producer w/ a cue card: "TEMPLARS!" to remind him.

Scene: the producer is trying to pitch an episode to the History Channel execs:

Producer: "A show about the Anasazi in Arizona would be fascinating -- preColumbian ruins! Cave paintings! Spanish missionary buildings and a Conquistador outpost!"

Exec: "I don't know, it would be awful expensive, and who would be interested, anyway?"

Producer: "...some of the Conquistadors might have been Templars."

Exec: "Good, good... can you find some symbols, like in one of the missions?"

Producer: "Sure!" (Thinks: "Thank goodness just about all Roman Catholic symbolism overlaps with the Templars...")

Exec: "It's a go, then. Hmmm, have you considered visiting this Crusader castle in Turkey? We hear there may be some Templars there...."

Went to Whole Foods/Trader Joes, stopped to try vegan deli stuff at the WF cafe. Vegan pad thai was pretty good, not so the chik'n salad.

There were also Vegan potstickers, which weren't very good cold. The buckwheat soba was not too bad. Alas, the "chick'n" protein substitute was terrible, but I only took three little cubes of it in my dish. I also added some definitely-NOT-vegan real chicken from another section of the deli bar. It cost me $7 with the addition of some Nantucket Nectar lemonade, so all in all it was a good run.

RT hoarderstv: Don’t forget to tune in to A&E tonight at 10/9c for an all new #hoarders !

I identify far too much with the subjects... or well, maybe just enough. Because if I just gave up caring my house would soon look like that. (And yes, there was another house where some of the rooms had to have shovels brought in.) So I sympathize, even while I'm moved to action to remedy some of my own clutter.

ow.ly/qpi9 -- The View From Your Sickbed/Daily Dish -- outdated insurance info kills insured woman.

Quick version: needed a liver transplant, hospital had old insurance info, family too upset and rushed to check that it hadn't been updated to a much newer, much more complete policy. Family didn't find out until weeks after she'd been dead and the original insurance company paperwork saying "we don't cover her any more, why don't you try the insurance that does?" reached them.

RT cashmere Telling me not to be snarky is like asking me not to breathe.

I bow to Cashmere's facility with words and general sentiment.

We covered handling passwords in ASP.NET tonight -- how to hash them and as importantly WHY you want to take the trouble.

Part of why I like this class so much -- Fran (teacher) wants us to understand the bigger picture as to WHY things are done a certain way and help us avoid common misperceptions that a shortcut or three wouldn't hurt just this one time. Once I have the Big Picture the little pictures start falling into place for me, because I have a map of where I'm going.

Hey, today is the start of Fall! Already I can find a few trees around here turning, though most remain leafy and green. Here's hoping that after the bizarre summer we had, we can get a long, slow and perfectly typical New England Fall, with glorious warm (not hot, not cool) weather. Come on, we deserve it.

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June 22nd -- Frabulous Day?

2009-06-23T15:53:28Z

::peeks cautiously out, like a prairie dog in black-footed weasel land::

I thought, therefore I twittered:

I really feel for the administrator on Primeval - his team members are more suicidal than lemmings, and even less likely to listen to orders

I can't of course remember what his name is -- never a good sign for the overall worth of a show with me -- but I do enjoy his Blackadder-like disgust and haughtiness. Given that his leading team members are all brilliantly stupid, and in fact at one point their team leader was a marketing/PR person originally, I have to say by now I totally respect his disgust.

And yet, I'm still watching, partly because Connor is cute and Abby is adorable, and partly because their adventures on the whole are so much fun to heckle in my head. Plus, they make Torchwood look remarkably competent, on the whole.

Made much progress with the WP theme this weekend, though it appears that the ability to put Flash in the sidebar is severely limited.
Oooh -- sent off very advanced WP Theme to client, to the point where they need to make Decisions. Decided to go off to a movie this aft!

Yeah, the website that sucked my life away -- but it was fun (when I wasn't tearing at my hair in frustration) and I've learned so very much doing it -- geeze Louise, I built a WordPress Theme from scratch with the help of a tutorial! Not to mention all the Flash and JavaScript/XML besides. I guess I HAVE been paying attention in class.

Going to a movie -- what a strange, wonderful idea!
So... movie didn't happen on account time being mislisted-- 4 pm is too late to watch and get to class on time.

R is off work this week, so she is available for movie-going. I may try again today....

Has anybody reading this seen Sunshine Cleaners? And if so, is it very gruesome?

YouTube - Roland Emmerich's "2012": Trailer 3 (June 18) 720p HD ow.ly/fzXO Not one cliche is left uncliched!

Seriously, an aircraft carrier is swept by a tidal wave... onto the White House!

Amazing, there is no shot of a dog running to safety just before it hits.

Or maybe I'm just jaded -- this week, with so little on TV, I turned to Comcast On Demand and watched a whole bunch of episodes of Life After People from the History Channel, where we go on an extended tour of a future where humankind disappears and everything decays to the point where you can't hardly tell we were here. And the CGI artists just love knocking tall iconic structures over! Yet it does not hit my cliche buttons in the same way that Herr Direktor Emmerich does....

Traffic was terrible -- crawl onto 93, most of the way north. Roadwork plus the all-day Noreaster!
Is 'frabulous' a current slang word? If not, it should be!
The difference between an interface and an abstract class is like the difference between a guideline and a rule. #OOP

We're back into the heart of object-oriented programming, and now I have to pay attention again, because we're dealing with Concepts again. 'Frabulous' came up because the instructor put together a list of madeup slang words to run against a spellchecker and I suspect he's making them up.

But 'frabulous' just sounds fun. In the meantime, we've got a lab where we're going to use both interfaces and abstract classes and have polymorphic virtual methods and whatnot. Of course, by the time 9 rolled around last night, I was tired enough to need help figuring out to format an ENUM (which, if you don't program, is very very simple).

Oh good, while I was writing this, notes from the client came back, so I guess I know what I'm doing this afternoon!

PS -- cupcake_goth's book Gothic Charm School is out!

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June 17th -- The Triumph of the WordPress

2009-06-18T16:43:22Z

I thought, therefore I twittered:

Took the old microwave, some black popcorn still inside, out to the garbage men. Made sure the other appliances watched.

And a friend of mine said, "Appliance death corn" -- though I like to think that I'm merely encouraging the other appliances to work correctly. The dishwasher has been looking shifty....

WPDesigner.com >> So you want to create WordPress themes huh? ow.ly/ezzf -- the tutorial I'm following, which is sense-making.
WHY why WHY was I so freaked about WordPress/PHP? Or is this tutorial making it look way too easy?
Lunch and post-lunch coma/nap derailed my productivity, but then I didn't get too much sleep last night. Back to being productive!

No, I don't think it's entirely the splendiferousness of the tutorial -- I wouldn't be going so very fast if I didn't have a really great grasp of what the HTML and CSS elements are doing and being able to follow how they work with the PHP/WordPress functions.

All that practice I've been doing with making my resume over in different CSS incarnations, taking my programming class over again? It's all paying off.

Ooops. Almost forgot I have to go to class tonight. Making great leaps and bounds on the WordPress stuff, though. But Java calls!
No sooner had I posted about leaving for class, then I get a phone call and an email message -- class is CANCELED. Lucky I'm running late!
Which means I can continue to struggle with my WordPress theme work. Next to figure out -- how to make pictures show up.

I was just regretting that I hadn't taken any time to go sit out in the backyard, and looking at the clock and realizing that I'd have to take a substantial snack along in order to have something resembling dinner because I'd probably be late even without stopping for dinner, when almost simultaneously the phone rang and I got an email from the instructor.

I'd be all Score! and Whoohoo! but the cancellation is because the instructor's wife had to go to the ER. I'll take just a little bit of joy that I was late, so I didn't actually drive all the way up to Woburn in evening rush hour traffic.

Patio time in the gloaming! I actually shut off the work computer to make myself take a break.

I think on the whole, one of the things about a Real Job with a Real Office is that you end up taking more breaks more often, if only because you have to talk to bosses and coworkers about work stuff, walk a distance to the bathrooms, cafeteria for snacks, et cetera. Even if working at home comes with hot and cold running cats.

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May 23rd -- The Green Canary Is Not A Superheroine

2009-05-24T14:41:05Z

I thought, therefore I twittered:

This morning I'm vicariously following Wiscon via Twitters. So wish that I could have gone -- school AND finances = KO
The top 5 words I've tweeted: time, class, listening, looking, gronk. bit.ly/To6TR

Also vicariously following Wiscon via LJ and Dreamwidth, too. I suppose I could have "afforded" missing a school Saturday class, considering it concerned a bunch of stuff that I know well (no way to predict that in advance, though) and I'm still not flat broke after more than two years of unemployment... but with the uncertainty of just "when" I finally get a job, it feels too much like fiscal irresponsiblity. But damn, what a wonderful group of friends and interesting people, and cool discussions and ideas.
The Tweetstats app is pretty interesting both for the statistical charts (I didn't know I was most likely to tweet at 7AM) and the psychological/social reveals of the most-used words. Although, the top five are a bit skewed for me, because "listening" and "looking" come from the Twitterfox plugin for adding links... oh, and for the longest time, I'd start out my Twitter day with a "gronk", considering how I feel most mornings when I wake up.

Finishing up C# today -- Monday we start Java.
I survived C# Database Transactions. ::proudly shows off scars::
We got let go early on account that it was Mem. Day wkend and it was sunny out. I'm thinking seriously of nappage....

Actually, it's Wednesday we start Java -- we get Monday night off, I keep forgetting. It's not that we didn't cover important stuff - Transactions are so important to data integrity in a multi-user situation! -- but I've been there, done that. As it was, our instructor gave up on making us do a lab, because not only would that take time, he'd have to go over it with us. Instead we did an in-class program set up so that if we ran two instances of it, would set up a race condition that needed the transaction locking to make it work.

ow.ly/8OdG -- just one instance of what they did to teenaged "terrorist" Omar Kadr at Gitmo.

Mercifully brief description, really, and I wouldn't recommend it for the weak-stomached. Suffice it to say, Kadr was a young teenager picked up on near a battlefield whose possibility of knowing anything strategic or important was nil. Anything you could get out of him was probably 'buyable' with a couple candy bars and some priveleges like playing soccer. I can't begin to tell you how Orwellian his treatment was.

Now out in backyard, going to cut grass and deweedify. Right afer I finish teh interwebs.
My "lawn" is less than the size of most living rooms, so cutting it was pretty much waving around a string trimmer. Wiktory!
The backyard smells like newly-cut lawn. I should probably go in before I get hair fever!

I really should cut it more often, especially because I have an electric string trimmer and a hundred-foot extension cord (used to power the laptop, whose battery now holds about a half-hour of charge) Also, there's a bunch of comfrey that's occupied part of the side, and I'm waiting until they've finished blooming before I get rid of them, I hate to kill pretty things!
Well, except if they're vines.
Interesting side note -- when I tweeted "cut grass" I got a private tweet from an outfit called Green Canary that specializes in painting lawns green. I'm not making that up. Suffice it to say, that if I have to CUT my lawn, it's not in need of further greenifying (though once you take out all the weeds, it's significantly less green and more patchy).

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May 21st -- Patio Day

2009-05-22T12:32:46Z

I thought, therefore I twittered:

Supposed to be 92 by 2 PM here. It may be time to put the AC in the window?!

In the living room window, that is. I never did get the bedroom AC taken out....

HijiNKS Ensue - "Imagine a hate-filled pineapple" - SciFi's Choice ow.ly/8gWb

Why has it taken me so long to find this web comic? Because their sensibility of fannish media is so close to mine, such as for instance, the cancellation of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles in favor of Dollhouse.

Live wild turkey in my neighborhood! I'm so jealous that this guy got a picture! ow.ly/8iC0

If a turkey came into my backyard, I'd be over the moon, seriously. I love big birds especially, so a turkey would be a fantastic sighting.

Awww, there's a #SaveEarl hash tag. I rarely do hashtags, but this one I can get behind, I love the show. SIGH

I may love it, but I just never seem to post about it here. (I kind of think of it as the Bizarro Supernatural, since it's concerned with brothers who are way too close, on a Mission.) Anyway, I'm surprised and touched that Earl made top of the hashtags yesterday, I guess there are more of us fans out there than I thought.

That distant noise you hear is me purring in satisfaction as I make another leap in understanding OOP. Objects all the way down!

That was when I was working on the current lab -- I wrote a method that created a SQLConnection object and handed it back to the calling method, which worked the first time, and which I understood everything that happened and why. Not necessary, but that way I didn't have to write it out in four places, and then change the login back to the string that works on the school computer (versus my home computer) in four places.
Besides, if I get this done at home, I can skip the first hour+ of class tomorrow morning -- coming in at 9:30 versus 8:30 is huge! Because that's the time set aside for working on the lab, you see.

Woot! Somerville Public Library has a book for me two days after I requested it via ILL. Now I just have to stroll over today...

And it's Head First Javascript which looks to be just what the doctor ordered. When I ran into Bill Shea (my Digital Design instructor) at school this week, he enthusiastically endorsed the series, and I can see why -- he's certainly qualified to be a good judge of instructional texts. I forsee some pleasant self-instruction out at the patio table with the iBook to hand.
Note to self: we're starting our Java module next week, and Head First Java might make a really great supplemental text, and one that might be worth buying with my own precious money.

Old Sturbridge Village Wool Days! Wish I had somebody to go with me! ow.ly/8lMd

I just have so much trouble justifying the hour+ drive for myself, plus the village is more fun if you have somebody to show it to and find out what they latch onto. It's never the same village twice!
Probably still wouldn't be a good day to go -- in the 90s and so much of it is outdoors in the sunshine. And I bet the grapes are sour, too. (But! Sheep! Shearing! Carding! Spinning! Knitting! Weaving! SIGH)

I so need a hammock -- too hot inside to nap, but oh so pleasant in the patio shade even if it's 91F.

I've been saying I need a hammock for the past 9 years, even if I'd only use it for three months out of the year. Yes, I could spread a beach towel out on what laughably passes as a lawn, but I know how many bugs are down there, which is a hazard of being an adult, I suppose.

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May 20th -- Virtual Beartraps

2009-05-21T11:54:22Z

I thought, therefore I twittered:

@inkandchocolate -- is that a rictus on your face or are you actually glad to see me?
275 - The Friendly Floatees' World Tour << Strange Maps ow.ly/868A I LOVE THIS BLOG!

Damn, I could spend about a hundred years on each entry -- my love of maps and geography and neat ways to show stuff is all here. Plus, what seems to be a fascination for West Virginia on the part of the blogger. However, it's NOT inexplicable, because it turns out there are some neat maps to explick.

If you have to be unemployed, I recommend doing it out on your patio. 150% more cheery.

I DID write out a boffo cover letter, which took me an hour. Pity I'll most likely never hear back from them, but I feel all kinds of virtuous.

I will not chew my leg off. I will not chew my leg off. I will not chew my leg off. I WILL NOT chew my leg off.
Sorry. Class tonight is going over SQL inserts, which I learned very well back in about 1985...
I survived C# Database Access and all I got was this Twitter.

Oy. It was a close moment there, as the instructor is going very earnestly into why you have to be careful about setting up your insert statements with the single quotes and double quotes correctly, and I'm looking down at my leg in the virtual beartrap and wondering how many bites it would take me to snap the femur in half.

It's not his fault, this is SO the material that my fellow students have to know, and he's explaining it well, too. But, I could spend 15 minutes reviewing it, look over my in-class code examples from last year for another 15 and be done.

Also, I very nearly finished the lab that we're supposed to spend another 1.5 hours on Saturday morning. Luckily, he has no problem with me coming in late....

Woke up with an urge to finally join Netflix. Perhaps it will pass.

Does anybody have clever arguments to sway me either way? And/or some really cheapass code to join that gets me six months of free movies or something like that?

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May 18th -- Resume for Dummies

2009-05-19T16:59:31Z

I thought, therefore I twittered:

HijiNKS Ensue - LOST finale reaction. I like his solution. ow.ly/7x9g

Scanning actual icons from the Dummies books for decorations on my resume. They are damn clever design.
Test Image of For Dummies Resume on Flickr - Photo Sharing! ow.ly/7EIS Interested in your reactions!

Not that I included any of them -- yet. There's still a bunch of work to refine the page, but it's all "little" details from here on out, mostly on the Photoshop side of the work flow, since I'm adding accents to the subheaders and whatnot.
In case anyone is wondering, I've matched the fonts as closely as possible -- and yes, the colors on the page are authentic as well. Among other things, this phase of the CSS Resume Garden has given me great respect for the Dummies series book designers, who are doing a splendid job of pasting a invisible Don't Panic button on each and every technical-detail-filled page.
Reminder to self: look up how to make an accented "E" in HTML so I can get it right on the actual resume, already....

Note to Self: must try this later! The video explains all. Paper Cd Case !!! Flower Design ow.ly/7AOK

I find that lovely little video almost mesmerizing, because it's such a dance of hands, fingers, paper, curves, straight edges, pencils, scissors and finally an irised CD envelope that's pretty and practical.

SKYNET RESEARCH ow.ly/7API -- yep, THAT Skynet. Hee!
::grumble:: looks like Terminator: Sarah Connor is definitely totally cancelled. Feh.

Of all the shows that deserved to get another season this year, I'd put T:SCC at the head of my personal list. Ah well, you'd think that I'd get used to the feeling by now.

Ran into my Digital Design instructor on the break, he was all complimentary about my work. Nice to be remembered!

This was at the Woburn campus -- he mostly taught at the Cambridge campus, but he was checking up on some things, turns out he's been teaching in the mornings in Woburn so I never ran across him until now. He's such a great teacher, and all around great guy. It also turns out that he's been taking the same Enterprise Solution Developer class I'm taking, that is offered out at the Framingham campus, so we commiserated and he joked about being a student again.

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May 16th -- The Poetic Programmer

2009-05-17T11:52:04Z

I thought, therefore I twittered:

Insomnia woke me up early -- like before 5:30 AM early. I read and played with cats -- now waiting for class to start. Oy.
An Exception object is the black box of programming -- it's the only thing that survives a crash. So to speak....

I suspect I can be a mixed blessing to an instructor, because while I AM paying attention, I'm apt to go off into a rapture about a metaphor that almost describes a concept he's trying to get across. The lot of the poetic programmer is a hard one.
But really, 'black box' has an aptness that is RIGHT in some important respects. Because a crash does destroy the airplane (call stack) back to the try/catch block and the only data that is preserved, from what could be a quite long bit of program is the error message... which you can set up in advance to record vital bits of info, in fact. Yeah, 'black box' does describe it in spirit.
I came away from the class not feeling like I'd learned that much, but looking over my notes, we did cover a whole lot, but mostly material I'd been exposed to before, like Exceptions and how to use them. But what I got in addition, was the theoretical underpinning to what is happening and why, which is the part that lets me "feel" what is going to happen when a program does certain things.

Smokescreening Nancy Pelosi = absurd distraction | Crooks and Liars ow.ly/7iL7

Good argument pointing out what a willful distraction it is to make a big fuss over what Pelosi heard and when. Once again, this is why we need a fair and bipartisan investigation of the whole torture mess, no matter where it takes us. (Though, if you're going to play "he said, she said" with the CIA, I'll guess that the CIA has more reason to lie, then and now.)

Fuzzy the Conciliation Caterpillar! - Wednesday, April 22, 2009 ow.ly/7nJ5

Mark Fiore does the best Flash animated political cartoons ever -- yeah, not exactly a wide open field, but anyone else is going to be hard set to beat him at it. Here's one, pointing gently to the absurdity of saying that we should just let sleeping war crimes lay.

Signs that summer is NIGH include mosquito bites -- I must now have 20 of them, in places that I wouldn't have thought a mosquito could get, like near my tailbone and under my bra strap (where it itches every.damn.time.I.move). I found myself Googling bedbugs in a fit of paranoia, but it seems as if there'd be other signs, like my roommate also having trouble, and OH -- bedbugs, among their other loveable traits, leave excrement trails behind on your bedding and furniture. (You don't want to know what that excrement is mostly made of, right?)

Mosquito repellant just moved up to the top spot in my shopping list. Feh.

... you know, a poetic programmer would make for a whole new appreciation of "I thought that I could never see/A poem lovely as a tree" for the right value of 'tree'.

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May 13th -- Exceptional

2009-05-14T13:04:23Z

I thought, therefore I twittered:

Fringe season finale sure didn't answer a whole lotta questions -- if the series is cancelled, the fans are s c r e w e d.
Well, that answers my question: Fringe PICKED UP FOR SECOND SEASON! ow.ly/6Ccp

What I get for being a Bad Fan, like not finding out that the renewal was in the bag. And also that Leonard Nimoy is going to guest star for a couple episodes next season. When I saw his name for the guest credits in the season finale, I thought it would be for some short dream sequence or something. Kudos for them getting him. Now we only have to wait, what, until September or something like that?

Stench from rotten refrigerator sickens 28; San Jose office evacuated - San Jose Mercury News ow.ly/6CDj
Lunch time! Turkey Helper, ice cream for dessert and a good book in the backyard to look forward to!

I swear that these two items have nothing to do with each other. My fridge, except for needing a good scrubbing where there was an unfortunate OJ spill, is not now, nor ever has, nor ever will, emit a stench so strong that it will put anyone in the hospital.
Anyway, the poor drone who volunteered to scrub out the fateful refrigerator doesn't have a sense of smell, which makes sense why she'd keep going when an ordinary person would have opened the door, gagged, and engaged the services of a Hazmat team.

finished The Last Colony, sitting out in the backyard. Now in class learning about Exceptions....

I wondered why Scalzi named the colony planet 'Roanoke' and then DID NOT title the book 'The LOST Colony' -- but he answered that, much to my satisfaction, as the plot played out. (And I foresightedly got Zoe's Tale from the library at the same time, so I have the parallel story ready to roll.)
Class was... as close to boring as it gets, last night. First we had 45 minutes more Lab Time... which not only did I finish during Lab Time on Monday night, but then I spent some home time on Tuesday reworking a couple little things. So if I'd come late to class, I'd have been perfectly fine. After he went over the lab and how it could have been done (I could have shifted more operations to the Calculator class, and had to make fewer calls and many fewer lines of code) we then spent the next 2+ hours on Exceptions.
And, honestly -- I'm already pretty experienced in dealing with Try/Catch. The takeaway for me was going over what this does to the Call Stack -- I likened it to having to unravel a piece of knitting if you make a mistake. And if you've left a life-line threaded through the stitches a couple rows back, you can regress to the Last Known Good Row without having to frog the whole thing.
So, it's good to have a better conceptual understanding of what's going on, but really, I could have gotten that in the first half hour of lecture and demonstration. Saturday, we're going to have an Exception lab, and then get into dealing with databases, which is my bread and butter, so yay.

Twisted and funny "Peanuts" parody strips --> ow.ly/6P6P

The rest of Medium Large is funny, too, but these strips in particular are subversive and/or sacreligious.

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May 12th -- Cascade For Dummies

2009-05-13T12:52:15Z

I thought, therefore I twittered:

Insomnia Fairy bonked me over the head real good. I have barely the strength to glare balefully back at the world.
Cornflakes for breakfast make the world seem much more reasonable.
I bought more So Delicious Coconut Milk at Whole Foods yesterday -- which costs a deal more than regular milk. But -- the luxury of having Corn Flakes for breakfast is something I'd pay twice as much for. I made Jiffy-brand corn muffins the other day, using the "milk" instead of water, and they were noticeably improved as well.

Now if they'd only make some coconut-milk "cheese" life would be getting close to perfect.
The Daily Dish "Full Cheney Panic" ow.ly/6qgI
And as history slowly accepts that this man disgraced his office more profoundly than any before him, as it sinks in that this man did not merely make mistakes, as all flawed politicians do, but committed war crimes, with pre-meditation and elaborate subterfuge, he slowly realizes what's happening to him. He can feel it. And so he resists the way he always resists - by lashing out, attacking, smearing, snearing, and grabbing every inch of the limelight he can.
Making another resume page with CSS -- this one is going to be Resume for D/u/m/m/i/e/s/Hiring Managers, should be cute.
After far too much research, I discovered the font used for subheads in the Dummies series books is Cascade Script. Which I can't afford.
I ended up looking at literally hundreds of font samples, and Googling increasingly complicated search terms, since "fonts for dummies" got me Google book search inside actually Dummies books.

But what's weird, I'd never looked at the typography and design on a Dummies book, and it's really quite a complicated scheme, but it works really well. Just a for instance: all the page numbers are in Cascade Script, but the page title is in a sans serif font. Actual code examples are in Courier New, body text is mostly Myriad Pro.)

I'm trying a slightly new format with my Twitter updates -- make them into a list, for easier reading.

As long as I'm talking food -- does anyone here have experience with Vegan "mozzarella"? I noticed that there are two brands of soy cheese at Whole Foods that allege to melt. My one test experience quite a few years ago was EXTREMELY disappointing, and it wasn't until I tried the Amy's brand macaroni & "cheeze" that I decided a second try at some of these things was useful, which has led me to discovering the So Delicious yogurt and coconut milk. It would be really great if there was a dairyfree "cheese" that behaves and tastes like the Real Stuff to go along with it....

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May 11th -- Ph33r my D3struktor!!1!

2009-05-12T16:16:06Z

I thought, therefore I twittered:

Venetia Phair Dies at 90; as a Girl, She Named Pluto - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com ow.ly/6bDx

Some face was saved last year when the union announced the coining of the term “plutoid” to designate a dwarf planet beyond the orbit of Neptune. More vexing to Mrs. Phair was the persistent notion that she had taken the name from the Disney character. “It has now been satisfactorily proven that the dog was named after the planet, rather than the other way around,” she told the BBC. “So, one is vindicated.”
Damn I would have loved to meet her -- she sounds wonderful!

I don't know if it's sad that I'm actually excited to be improving the lab program we worked on at school last week.

I got a Foreach working on my double-ended Queue generic collection. Why this is AWESOME will not be grokable to anyone not into C#. SIGH

You know, I really do LIKE programming -- it's like a giant steampunky machine to me, all whirring gears and steams escaping, like Rube Goldberg's worst dreams, but it RUNS and does COOL things. I like making things, is what it comes down to.

Tonight in class we're learning Destructors. Phear Me!

Actually, they're a whole lot less exciting than the name might imply, but I get my excitement where I can.

Heh. Instructor says the most likely time we'll need to know about Destructors is in an interview for a programming job....

Says it's a classic interview question. Everytime he says that about a concept or programming pattern, I star and underline it in my notes. If I ever got an interview, I would rock.

Ugly Overload: Baby Pigeons? (Oh, so ugleee and wrong!) ow.ly/6jkU

Proving, I guess, that not all baaaby animals are cute. Which is curious, because I can find baby vultures and scorpions cute, but these? Not so much.

So far today I've already finished and neatened up the IDisposable lab we had for class last night, which leaves me with... not much else to do, though I can pick up where I left off with JavaScript and CSS, I suppose. I should be able to get the next book in the Old Man's War series from the library, so there's that to look forward to. Oh, and apply for Jobs....

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May 10th -- Mission of Mercy

2009-05-11T12:32:33Z

I thought, therefore I twittered:

Spare cat was seen checking out the cellar last night. Of course, Chumley then stalked her, but it was Progress, all the same.

A Q&A With Amazing Race Host Phil Keoghan - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com ow.ly/64jP

Of the various Reality Show-type hosts, he really is my favorite, not the least because he does so obviously care about the contestants and spends time with them.

Saturday Night Live - Digital Short: Motherlover -- From the same guys who brought you Dick in a Box... ow.ly/64Ok

And I like this one even better, not the least because that's Susan Sarandon and Patricia Clarkson playing the mothers!

Making Stars CSS page more beautiful. Added a comet! And better lettering and stuff, too, but -- comet! How often do you get to do that?

Resume Stars CSS touched up some more! ow.ly/65Jw

Hope I'm not harping too much on this, but I'm so pleased with the way it came out. Even if the header graphic needs a bit more work for legibility's sake. This has been a great exercise for getting me deep into the intricacies of CSS manipulation.

Cleaned out my car preparatory to helping a woman move her stuff for the Time Traders Circle. So I am doubly virtuous! ::prances::

Mission of mercy accomplished -- the worst part was finding a parking spot in Central Square, but I used a loading zone with my flashers on.

I like helping, and this was a dead simple assignment -- help her carry small stuff out, drive the car, help her carry it up to the apartment. Now if I can just find a website or two to volunteer work on, and also find somebody to trade me hours of gardening time....

Just caught Spare Cat trying to chew on the antenna for the wireless modem. She is random.

It was clear, sunny, and warm yesterday -- it was also gusting to 30mph, so it wasn't much for sitting outside, unfortunately. The biggest excitement was when the latched-but-not-locked back porch door BLEW open, which startled Chumley so much he galloooped upstairs and hid under a bed.

I got some improvements on my resume website made, though, and cleaned out my car, and had my Major Expedition for the day. So, despite the headache that plagued me early on, it was a good day.

Today, I have a couple goals, like improving the C# double-ended queue lab project -- because, yes, I'm a completist like that AND there's one bit of functionality I want it to have, because it's exactly the sort of interface utility I'd want. Because it should show you in an output box what the queue looks like when something is added and taken away, and it should be updated automatically. As the instructor said, there is not much of a reason for this program to exist in the real world, but as a lab to demonstrate the lessons it makes a lot of sense, and also it's good practice for working on GUI interfaces, too.

And I want to make at least two more CSS-styled pages for the resume project, using weirder and weirder designs and cool code that I can ~~steal~~imitate from the CSS Zen Garden examples.

Everyone should have a hobby, right?

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May 8th -- Lilac Time

2009-05-09T13:21:47Z

I thought, therefore I twittered:

Despite the hopelessness of the cattlecar Career Fair yesterday, I DID feel that I was highly employable and skilled and able to show it.

@janice_e The best takeaway from the experience was good confirmation that the market is failing me, not vice-versa.

At one point, I was diagramming out the double-ended queue we wrote for our recent lab in the programming class -- the one I rocked, and the hiring manager (not an HR, a guy who writes Java) was really intrigued that you could pass a datatype just like any other variable. So I think I passed the casual "does she know enough about programming?" barrier with flying colors. If they only had an opening for me!

@batwrangler Y'know, the whole Day of the Triffids story would have been so different with just a little Roundup on hand.

My backyard smells like lilacs, which are blooming well this year because the neighbor cut back the maple on that side. Yay neighbor!

@victoriajanssen - and my childhood home had them outside my bedroom! I never expected that a favorite part of homeowning w/b the backyard!

I end up feeling much more calm and centered when I sit out there for a while. And though I'm right in the middle of a busy city/town, there's enough birdsong and whatnot to feel like I've reconnected with nature and all that.

Read half of THE GHOST BRIGADES for the past two hours, good enough that I wasn't aware of the time passing!

Having previously gulped down Old Man's War in like a day and a half, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that I could get so engrossed that I lose time with this one, too.

Going to see the Trek movie with rakshathedemon this afternoon, which should be geeky fun for all. I'm not seeing a whole lot of complaints, you know?

In other news, when I talked to Mom on Thursday night, she was SO happy -- she's not only "graduated" PT and OT with some very pleased therapists to say goodbye to, when she went to her doctor for her followup, he was shocked at how well she looked/was. Especially the not- being bent over with pain, I expect.

She's still on oxygen, since the pulmonary hypertension isn't going away, because of the heart murmur backing up some of the blood in her lungs, so she has to stay on some medications, and use her powerchair to go longer distances on the campus. But, overall, her quality of life is up, and she's even doing better than she was when her back acted up, with some hope that she might be weaned off the oxygen for longer periods, enough to be able to get out and about.

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May 3rd -- Droning On

2009-05-04T12:42:06Z

I thought, therefore I twittered:

Things done this morning so far: foddered cats, balanced Quicken, signed up for a dating website via Facebook... wait, WHAT?

Don't get your hopes up too much, this is definitely toe-in-the-water time. I'm finding, though, that I've got a definite preference for how much education, political preference and town of residence makes for my favorable impression. Sorry, Everett guys -- I lived there a while, and while I know objectively there can be very nice people in residence, that's not the way to bet.

Smoking Gun site -- mugshots of a guy arrested over 1333 times. ow.ly/4V8N

The full account of his arrests and jail time, hospital time goes on for pages and pages. Probably that's all that's kept him alive this long, getting dried out and medical needs taken care of. The saddest thing is, you can see that there's a nice guy in those mugshots -- a nice guy who needs a ton of help.

Got the Zen of CSS Design from library -- from the guys at CSSZengarden.com, which is answering questions I didn't know to ask!

Seriously in love with the book at the moment, that takes various of the designs and goes into techniques and concepts of a particular design element or CSS hack (like, at least five different ways to substitute a picture for a header tag, each with its pluses and minuses).

Wrestling with C# -- DateTime, you are my BITCH.

Dept of I Crack Myself Up -- class Employee variables are drone1, drone2, drone3 etc.

Like, for instance 'foreach (Employee drone in employeeList)' I gotta call them something!

But seriously, I worked out how to transfer a terminated employee from the employeeList ArrayList to the terminatedList and delete said employee from the employeeList on my own... well, with just a little Googling, which doesn't count as cheating, right? Also, aced the DateTime handling since we're supposed to record the termination date.

It would be all much simpler if we were doing this with an actual database, of course, but having to work with collections is damn good practice, and somethings there's a good reason for dealing with stuff in arrays before you commit it to a db.

I am SO ready to be employed, already.

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April 30 -- Spring Haiku Time!

2009-05-01T12:36:34Z

I thought, therefore I twittered:

HijiNKS Ensue - Saying Goodbye Is The Hardest Partition (Backups? Are your friends) ow.ly/4waN

A cautionary tale. If I have learned anything with working with or owning computers for the past 25-ish years, it's that hard drive failure is inevitable, and in direct ratio to the importance of the irreplaceable data you have.

Today I will have my first bowl of Corn Flakes in 15+years. Thank you, So Delicious Coconut Milk.

...has become reacquainted with the delicate art of balancing the ratio of Corn Flakes to milk so that it comes out even.

It tasted like milk enough that I might actually drink it straight -- like skim, not full-bodied -- but in cereal, it really really rocked. (I take it all back, God, You DO love me.)

One nation, seven sins - Las Vegas Sun ow.ly/4xDw -- Cool graphic of where our national sins are, statistically.

How does your region stack up? Why am I not surprised that the Bible Belt scores kind of badly on most of these?

RT scifri: Today is National Honesty Day. Really.

Would I lie to you?

Behold, I have become the Garden Destroyer! Take THAT, weeds!

Every time the breeze blows, hundreds of maple blossoms fall on the yard. The ground is turning yellow-green.

isiscolo pointed out that this almost made a haiku, and improved on it thusly:

Maple blossoms fall
Ground is turning yellow-green
Every time it blows.

Awwwww!

Remains of a lost American explorer found ow.ly/4C6x (There's a Tony Hillerman mystery in there, for sure.)

I hit a wall with the stupid book about JavaScript and Ajax and PHP where the next chapter's exercize on putting together a simple page that updates a clock just.doesn't.work. -- I even went to the website and downloaded their code for one of the exercizes and it just doesn't run on my system, so I know it wasn't a typo on my part. Feh. One of the hazards of trying to learn on your own, nobody to explain to you just where you've gone wrong.

I suspect there's something in the way that PHP or whatever is set up on my iBook that's at the heart of the problem because I'm not getting any errors. Today I'll see about trying to run it on something else....

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April 29th -- Collections, Interfaces, and IEnumerator, Oh My!

2009-04-30T13:33:29Z

I thought, therefore I twittered:

I caught Spare Cat at foot of the stairs, venturing bravely where no cat... okay, HER, has gone before. She then skittered back upstairs...

She's far less afraid of the other cats -- at least, mostly her reaction is to hunch up and stare at them when they cross her path. I've tried to carry her downstairs a couple times, but she usually freaks out halfway down the stairs, so getting to the foot of the stairs, and putting one paw softly on the floor before retreating is actually HUGE.

More on Collections, Interfaces and so on tonight. I think I'm really finally 'getting' objects and referential identity -- go team me!

I felt all Teacher's Pet last night when he praised the questions I've been asking in class. I did have a moment when I realized just what I was missing, though, because we were going over code where he did a Console.WriteLine on an object returned by a GetEnumerator()... and it turned out to be important, because the reason he didn't downcast it was because a WriteLine command will automagically convert an object into a string. I knew that, sort of, but not enough to catch on right away that it was happening. That got us into a small diversion about objects and how the compiler/running program handles them, which was enlightening -- and once again, I feel like I have a much better handle on the logic and paradigms behind the programming rules we're learning!

Wow, I really didn't twitter a lot yesterday, did I? Or LoudTwitter is missing some, anyway. Will have to investigate.

I got home late enough last night that all I did was check that I got Lost safely recorded on the TiVo, so I have that to look forward to....

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April 28 -- Some of Summer In A Day

2009-04-29T12:46:41Z

I thought, therefore I twittered:

I joined twitter on 20 June 2007 - whendidyoujointwitter.com ?

You know, for once I was early into a trend. I should mark my calendar or something.

Flickr: jack_mord's Photostream ow.ly/4dwa -- fascinating Victorian death photos, oddities. Some very disturbing, beware!

Definitely not for everyone, beware! Like for instance, you ever really wanted to see exactly how distressing leprosy was?

Taming the Bicycle ow.ly/4eqU Mark Twain article on learning to ride a bike!

One of those high-wheeled Victorian bikes, in fact. Find out again why Twain was a famous humorist then and now.

Dandelions have bloomed in the day and a half since I've been out of the garden!

Oooh, 93F... but 20% (yes - 2 & 0) humidity. It's nice if you have some shade and a vanilla non-dairy frozen dessert sandwich.

Learning JavaScript and AJAX in the backyard is harder than it looks. Wind keeps riffling the pages of the book! No, seriously!

ow.ly/4hJp The Torturing of Desired Intelligence, The Daily Dish

"I was concerned that the CIA intelligence was probably derived from torture by the Uzbek security services. Karen Moran reported back to me that the US Embassy had replied that it probably did come from torture, but in the War on Terror they did not view that as a problem."

RT cupcakegoth -- Cupcake Goth meets Mini Cupcake Goth: twitpic.com/463iy

cupcake_goth has her Gothic Charm School book coming out soon, btw. In the meantime, she's got a Mini-Me to comfort her....

RT pollinatewildly: Maybe it would help calm the panic if we called it "bacon fever" instead (RT paulandstorm ) #swineflu

RT librarythingtim: "Why is Cataloging Hard?" and why to make it easier tinyurl.com/dewdg3

RT zen_habits: Very cool:I can't stop watching this 7 second video: bit.ly/kXsde

It's truly neat -- a magnet falling through a pipe-shaped magnet sloooooowwwws its fall down. Startling, even when you know what's coming.

Wow, two or three 90 degree days and we've passed right through spring. No, seriously, it's not just the dandelions that have sprouted -- the bleeding hearts bloomed too, and all the violets, and I'm getting buds on the rose bush already. Also, the damned Japanese bamboo in the corner that I keep having to kill off has sprouted about a foot and half -- no, I'm not kidding. Today's menu of Fun includes getting out the shovel and digging down to get out some of the roots. That only stops it for a while, since the bamboo on the other side of my neighbor's house (and side street) can and does send out suckers that long.

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April 27th -- The Funny Side of C#

2009-04-28T13:08:26Z

I thought, therefore I twittered:

H1N1 Swine Flu - Google Maps ow.ly/44G8

Making Light: Flu Redux ow.ly/44N0 -- discussion of the science behind flu prevention and treatment

Some good, reassuring info, worth your time to look into if you have questions.

My take on it: It's likely that the relatively high death toll in Mexico was because there's less accessible medical care/people are poorer, which means the initially affected didn't get to the see medical personnel until they were on death's door. Whereas now that people know what to look out for, and patients are getting early intervention and support, it should be much more survivable than the initial presentation.

RT pnh: How did I avoid knowing that Samuel Morse was a pro-slavery, anti-immigrant crank? bit.ly/m2qyz

It was Morse's birthday yesterday I wondered why the scifri twitter was all dots and dashes!

...is fighting the good fight with Javascript, which is dead easy after Java and whatnot.

Seriously, it's so pleasing to have my increased mastery of OOP concepts pay off here, too. I feel all virtuous and stuff. Now if I could just get a job, any job, that would let me work with stuff like this and get provable practical experience....

RT devilstower: ljburns Are Cap'n Trips jokes officially non-funny yet?

Yep, I've been thinking about The Stand, too, where a superflu kills off just about Everyone. (BTW, Devilstower is known to my GEnie-era friends as Mark Sumner.)

Frank Rich - The Banality of Bush White House Evil - NYTimes.com ow.ly/496E

I worry that I'm becoming Theo-One-Note on the torture issue, but it's the issue that most agonizes me at the moment. It is a betrayal of everything that America stands for, and if we don't put our house in order, we're leaving the door open for it to happen again, worse. For me, it's not just the moral issue, it's that torture actually produces bad intel that hurts your side AND it does actually "embolden the enemy" because they can prove you're the evil guys their leaders warned them about. It's so wrong on so many levels and yet there are so many people acting as though this were a minor issue, or as Peggy Noonan suggested, want to walk on by.

is learning how to override operators in C# -- making '==' more, um... equal?

Um, yeah -- guess who was twittering during OOP class last night. Partly because we wrote some model code that overloads the meaning of "==". Which, frankly, I just didn't get WHY and the lab work gave me a classic "OH!!!1!" moment when it became clear just why there would be a reason for it -- which goes into the difference between relational equality and referential equality.

Pointers are the Higgs Boson of C# -- you can't see them, but your existence depends on them.

Once again I said 'pointer' in class, and the teacher corrected me that I should be saying 'reference' because C# (and Java) doesn't let you manipulate the actual memory addresses (which in classic C programming is what a pointer does) but only refer to them indirectly. Another "OH!!" moment. And then it follows that the pointers are out there, but we have to take them on faith, like the elusive Higgs Boson.

We're covering Collections tonight. "As God is my witness, I'll never use Arrays again!"

Heh. The teacher wqas saying that once we'd find out how useful ArrayList, Stack, Queue and others collection structures are, we'd never use a plain vanilla Array again. "How do you keep them down on the farm, now that they've seen ArrayList?"

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