Road Warrior

In stark contrast to my electronic-less Christmas, this upcoming trip will be the most gadget-packed I’ll have ever had. I’ll be taking along:

– CD player
– Gameboy Advance
– digital camera
– PocketPC PDA
– iBook
– RSA key device
– zillions of cables, AC adapters, and batteries

And oh yeah, some clothes and stuff too…

Do I really need to drag so much stuff around with me? The answer is…well of course I do, what kind of stupid question is that? :-P We’ve all got to have our toys. In fact, I need *more* toys! I still don’t have a real MP3 player or even a cell phone…

Now I just hope I don’t break my arms dragging them all around.

Hijacking?

From the Georgia General Assembly:

(c) Any person seeking to have an execution performed shall first seek a grand jury indictment against the fetus for the commission of an offense for which the death penalty can be given, including the offense of murder as defined in Code Section 16-5-1, kidnapping as defined in Code Section 16-5-40, hijacking an aircraft as defined in Code Section 16-5-44, rape as defined in Code Section 16-6-1, armed robbery as defined in Code Section 16-8-41, or treason as defined in Code Section 16-11-1.

I tell ya, I was scared at first when I saw the gun in its tiny little proto-hands. But then I looked over at Bob and I knew we were going to be alright when I saw him hide the coathanger under his jacket…

Deep Thoughts

I wonder if cashiers hate it when I pay for something that’s only 2-3 bucks with a twenty. After all it depletes their stock of tens and fives and leaves them with something that they’re unlikely to get rid of since people rarely use fifties. But sometimes that’s all I’ve got since that’s all the ATMs give you now. But maybe I should be using more of my piles of change to pay. Do they like it or hate it when I pay with change? But then, uh…*thinks*…

I like cheese.

In Your Mouth?

At first glance you might think the Stones were back in town. Or that someone’s celebrating a late Valentine’s Day. But no, this is apparently the design for a set of urinals that will be installed in a club at JFK airport in New York.

As if there weren’t enough reasons to be embarrassed in public already…

(Update: They’ve scrapped the idea.)

Mystery Music

I’m sure everybody’s heard a song but not known where it came from. After some more digging through my hard drive I have one song that, even though I have a clip from it, I simply cannot track down.

So far the only lyrics I can more or less make out from it are “the voice that makes me sleep at night” and “you know the voice that makes me feel alright”, and searches on those turn up absolutely nothing. Unfortunately there isn’t an easy way to search on sound samples otherwise…

You can listen to it here if you’re curious and think you might know it. It’s rather crummy quality unfortunately; the original file was only 8-bit mono.

Sharp As Fresh Fruit

One of the languages I neglected to mention in a previous entry was C#, the new offering from Microsoft and a big part of the .NET framework that is apparently to be the foundation of everything they do from now on. I didn’t really know very much about it at the time and, well, I still don’t, but I have to figure out if it’s worth the research.

Despite the initial suspicion you might have about anything coming from MS, C# sounds great — an object-oriented language with a large standard library that covers the most common requirements, that integrates easily into other object oriented frameworks and is platform-independent via a virtual machine and JIT compiling and… Oh wait. I think I’ve heard this story before.

On the surface C# really does seem like Java 2.0. There’s nothing really ‘wrong’ with the language, but its existence seems a bit redundant. Microsoft got slapped around by Sun when they tried to fiddle with Java, so they went off and made their own clone of it. Still, choice is good, and I’m sure there are numerous little subtleties where you can argue that one is better than the other, but I’m not an OOP expert so they’re largely lost on me.

What’s going to be important to me are two things: 1) Am I going to *have* to know it, and 2) Can I even use it? The first point is simply business; if five years down the road it’s going to be hard to find a job *without* ‘C#’ on the resume, then it’s probably worth knowing. The same could have been said about Java and it didn’t really turn out that way, but Microsoft is pushing hard on C# and .NET and they’re the proverbial 900-pound gorilla…

The second point is a bit more important. Currently, despite the promises of portability, the only real implementation of the framework and compiler is on, well, Microsoft OSes. There is an open source implementation in progress for other systems, called Mono, but it’s still in the early stages. For MacOS X there’s an environment from Microsoft themselves, but it doesn’t look well-supported (I can’t even get it to build). Certainly anything new has its growing pains, but at the moment, if I were forced to choose for an important project, Java certainly has a more mature development environment.

So, for the moment, I’m still fairly undecided on whether learning C# would be worth it. It seems unnecessary, with Java already out there, but it might be the next ‘wave of the future’ in professional circles. This doesn’t really affect me work-wise at the moment since we’re still heavily focused on C for portability and reliability (I imagine C# support for MVS mainframes is still a ways off…), but I still don’t want to feel like I’m falling behind. Looks like it’s wait-and-see for the moment…

Water Wars

Gotta love it when the water lines to your apartment get turned off for maintenance without warning. Maintenance in general is rather poorly handled in this building, despite regulations they have to follow, but I can’t complain too loudly — they could probably nail me with a dozen infractions in return. :-P

Saw Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World in the theatre last night, and was fairly impressed. I can’t speak as to its actual historical authenticity, but it certainly *felt* realistic.

Beef In Motion

Right now you cannot get a steak and cheese sub at the Subway near where I work. Or any of the other locations I’ve been to recently (you can’t throw a stone without hitting a Subway around here for some reason). Why? Well according to a little sign they have posted, it is because there is insufficient beef because of import restrictions due to the recent mad cow scares.

Insufficient beef. In Alberta. Wait a sec, they are using Canadian beef, right? Why yes, all beef used in their subs is 100% Canadian beef, the sign assures us. But it’s still considered imported because it’s packed in the U.S.

So, we raise cattle here in Alberta, ship them off to the States to be slaughtered and packed, and then import them back here before putting them in our sandwiches.

…

This is probably some side effect of franchising and their supply chains, but something still seems wrong here…

But Really I’m Not Actually Your Friend But I Am

Over on LiveJournal there’s a bit of an argument over exactly how the ‘friends’ lists should be managed, and it brings up the question of just what a ‘friend’ means within these systems and what behaviours that implies.

If I read your journal, am I your friend? Or are you a friend of mine? Not necessarily; the other person may not even be aware of your existence. Or the relationship is weighted; they feel like a friend to you, but you’re an acquaintance to them.

When you make it a friend-or-nothing choice and tie concrete benefits to that relationship though, then there’s bound to be trouble. Putting somebody on a friends list is a convenient way of being able to browse journals you’re interested in, tempting you to add people to the list even if you don’t really consider them friends. But then that also causes you to appear as a ‘friend-of’ on their lists, which is a relationship that doesn’t necessarily exist, and forces information into their profile that they can’t control. That also opens up your private entries to that person as a side effect.

It looks like the way they’re leaning is to separate people into ‘friends’ and ‘readers’ with only friends getting the additional friends-only post access, and the ability to ban ‘readers’ from showing up in your profile, so you don’t have to tolerate offensive names and such showing up in your info.

One wonders why they would bother listing readers on your profile at all, but apparently a lot of people want to know who’s reading them and consider it ‘stalkerish’ if you read them without revealing yourself. But then the expected way to ‘reveal yourself’ was to make them a friend of yours, with all the problems noted above…

Hopefully the new system will satisfy most people, but this whole discussion reveals a lot of attitudes about the relationships between bloggers that I hadn’t really thought about before. Why do I care, on my own separate site here? Well, the same kind of thinking can be applied, even if the formal system isn’t exactly the same, through things like linking and comments. I also do have an LJ account, though it’s really only for making comments on others’.

Killing Time

Flash games are evil. They waste your time and rob you of productivity that could have been put to something far more useful. So here’s a bunch of them.

Bubbles: Similar to the old arcade classic Puzzle Bobble/Bust-a-Move. The instructions aren’t in English, but it’s pretty straightforward: make combinations of three bubbles touching to pop them and clear space.

Orca Slap: The sequel to penguin baseball. This guy apparently intends to make a whole series of 10 of these games.

A variant on penguin baseball. Not PETA-approved.