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Got the motorcycle up and running today. Took a piece of paper, wrote "Contact Info" in big letters across the top and put some phone numbers on it, stuck that in my wallet, grabbed my riding boots, gloves, sunglasses, and helmet (oh, yes); and off I went onto the open road.
I really loathe feeling inclined to make any... any remark concerning politics; especially considering the current climate. Now, if you make a remark against the right or the country or Bush, you are just a stinkin' liberal. I liked it better when Clinton was in charge. If you made a remark against him, you were just "level-headed." Now, we have some version of mass-hysteria, peer-enforced sedition acts.
several years ago...
Person: Clinton just fired cruise missles into Afghanistan. That does not necessarily seem right...
Public: You are a well-thought out person with moderate views.
fast forward...
Person: Bush just publicly threatened Syria. That does not seem necessarily right...
Public: You Leftist scum! Why do you hate America?!?! Go back to livin' in your hippie commune with the other colored queers!
For instance, this interview that I stumbled upon An Interview With Ann Coulter:
There's always a conflict of interest when people [Democrats] who don't really like America are called upon to defend it.
*knock* *knock* *knock*
"Yes."
"Son, this is the SS... errr... Homeland Security. Please open up the door."
"But... but... I am a moderate. I supported the war in Iraq. I think affirmative action is just another form of racism."
"We know, son. It's okay. We just want to take you to one of our 'Friend Centers' for some re-education."
"Uhhh... can I bring my cigarettes?"
"No, there is no need. The full name is 'Marlboro Presents the Friendly Re-Education Center' -- cigarettes are provided."
But, enough of the build-up. (And, that was all a preface to my main reason for blogging.) The meat of this post concerns a ruling the Supreme Court once passed. It involved a black man accused of robbery. The Supreme Court overturned the man's conviction 8-1. The one dissent was quoted as publicly stating:
The man clearly looked guilty. This ruling opens the door for more and more "uppity" behavior from negroes everywhere.
Actually, I don't know if it is or not. I stumbled across MovableBLOG: MT License Debate, and I read what it had there. Then, I followed a bunch of the links around to Comment on MT and Kicking the Baby Squirrels, again, but I am still not sure what is going on...?
Other than (or, in addition to) the community, Perl's biggest killer "app" is certainly CPAN. There have been and still are efforts to create "CPAN's" for other languages like Python's Python Packages Index, PHP's PEAR, Java's CJAN (I think... this Java stuff always seems to appear and disappear), etc.
But, CPAN still remains un-paralleled. However, that could all change with Parrot.
Someone actually went and summarized the "committee's" attempt at redesigning RSS (now with the non-acronym title "echo"). We'll see if this horse-turned-camel can walk: The Echo Project For Poets
I wonder if so much syntactical, lexical, contextual, linguistical thought goes into the designs of other languages. If it does, they should write articles on it like this one -- Perl 6 Design Philosophy. It's a good read no matter what language you advocate.
BlogRolling.com should have a web service. I am thinking something like getWhoHasBlogRolled( URL ) and getBlogRollOf( URL ). It would be simple to write something that would slowly do getWhoHasBlogRolled( URL ) by parsing the HTML from the BlogRolling search page. And, doing getBlogRollOf( URL ) could almost be "emulated" by going to the URL specified and trying to parse out the BlogRoll (assuming the person has it posted in some form on the page the URL points to).
jr notes in jr conlin's Ink Stained Banana :: Men are from Junkyard Wars... that males try to solve problems even when we are not supposed to.
I don't know how many times I have done this. It's an impulse. I hear problem, I begin thinking of a solution, I began relaying the solution to whatever party is listening. Furthermore, I will often continue justifying my solution, which leads to defending my position, which leads to an argument. I can't even begin to count how many times this led to girl-trouble. She just wants to bitch and vent, but I compulsively begin to want to solve the problem. You, inevitably, make things worse.
Sometimes people do not need solutions, they need to be listened to.
First time I have ever seen this.
FrontPage - Sam Ruby's Wiki and A fresh start? [dive into mark].
Person 1: I think the horse should have on-board water storage!
Person 2: That's retarded Person 1. That would be too much weight. And, how would we store the water in such a container to be structurally sound?
Person 3 [largely ignoring Person 2's comments]: We should store the water in humps on the horse's back!
Person 2 [getting irate]: No no no! We should drop this internal water storage, and talk about increasing the overall size of the animal!
Person 1: To make the water storage compartments more structurally rigid, we could place them on the back and embed the water in fatty deposits.
Person 4 [sounding somewhat reasonable]: If we make the animal too tall, it will be difficult to mount.
Person 5: HA HA PERSON 4 WANTS TO MOUNT THE ANIMAL!!! LOL!!!
Person 6: Let's make the neck really long, so it gains the advantages of height but is still easy to mount.
Person 2: How are we ever going to pump blood up a long neck. Plus, I think we should change the name from Horse v2.0 to something else because the original creator of the horse keeps threatening patents on it. I say we call it Hugglesnatcher!
Person 4: Tell me, why again, we need an animal with a long neck when its intended purpose is to be used in the desert?
Person 3: I think knobby knees are cute! Are we going to have to be expert riders to use this new horse?
Person 5: I THINK THE HORSE SHOULD TRY TO SPIT ON PERSON 4!!!!! I THINK IT SHOULD ALWAYS TRY TO SPIT!!!
Person 4: Oh dear, I don't think this redesign of a horse for the desert is going well...
Here we go again down the long path of the complete absence of delineation between the blogs. This is a more technical article, but I have been posting AutoX stuff on this side. I really need to consolidate.
Anways, in the article DrEdEdThrottle Balance II, a guy by the name of John Hajny claims that measuring the temperature across a tire's tread is no longer indicative of whether or not you are running too little pressure on the AutoX track.
I have always disliked these "A" tag attributes, but now I can officially declare them deprecated. Since everyone should be using a browser that has tabbed browsing, these attributes are useless. If I want to open a page in a new window, I wheel-click (or "middle-click") the link, and it opens up in a new tab. Viola! And, if I do not want it open in a new tab because I am through browsing that page and want to move on to greener pastures, I give a single left click.
But, there are people out there that litter their pages with TARGET="_blank" and TARGET="_new"; thus forcing a new window open. Thank God for Mozilla Firebird Extensions! With the extension This Window! (whose home page is at churchillrm :: Phoenix Extensions), I can just right-click on links and force them to open in the same window bypassing those unscrupulous web developers who try to dictate to their users which window should open where.
There is a guy at CWRU who is building a custom chopper. The project's main page is located here -- Chopper. The main bulk of the pics are here -- Untitled Document. Cool, cool stuff.
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In PHP, the standard equality comparison operator is '=='. This is used for both strings and numbers (compare this to Perl's '==' and 'eq'). However, there is another equality operator in PHP, '===' (that's right, three equal signs) that will enforce type checking i.e.97 == "97" // returns true
97 === "97" // returns false as you are comparing an integer to a string
In a similar fashion, there is a '!==' that enforces type checking.
There are times (more often than you would think) that these operators should be used when compared to there un-strict equivilents.
Just your friendly, neighborhood Spiderma...errr... PHP tip-dropper.
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This could be huge! Red Hat Plans Open Source Java (via Emergent Report).
Since when did the phrase:
"yea, I know, but you see, I was drunk; I mean really drunk, so..."Not become an acceptable way to explain behavior? Maybe if you quantify the drunk with "so-drunk-could-not-even-play-foos-anymore?" I don't know. Hell in a handbasket when that reasoning no longer holds water.
But, in more important news -- motorcycle.
Just because it was posted on Slashdot in PDD, Asperger, and Geek Syndrome?.
I had a girlfriend who was completely convinced I suffered from a de-habilitating case of Asperger. I told her that it was just OCD and not some crazy pop-psychology catch-all mental disorder. I don't think she ever bought it.
All right, I just added steveo to my BlogRoll just because he had a ManOWar posting (Ouch!) That's just for you, gnubbs.
I was walking through a parking lot, when I spied a Neon that looked as if it had a tacky, albeit nicely integrated, body kit on it. I did not give it much thought, until I noticed the basket-handle style wing on the back.
"Hmmm... do you think...?"
I took another glance, and sure enough, I spied a massive intercooler sitting behind the front bumper. It was surely time for a closer inspection. It looks like... well... it looks like a Neon that someone or something pissed off pretty badly. The "stretching" of the body molding is obvious. It had big, heavy-looking 17" rims wrapped in 205/50 Michelin's. I peeked in the interior and saw the round gauge pods wrapped in cheapy-looking silver plastic. I moved around to the rear just to make sure, and yes it was, it was badged SRT-4 and had temp tags on it.
I received my first taste of the (now infamous) MSNBOT today. It moved fairly slowly. Around 4:55am, it hit the root site http://alpha-geek.com/. After probing for a '/robots.txt' (and finding none), it moved on from there page-by-page at the rate of 1 page every 3-5 minutes. It did not finish crawling until 10am, about 5 hours later. At least they are not as bad as fastsearch.net. That little bugger goes to town.
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Once or twice a month, I do some IT consultant work for Barefoot & Case, Inc.. Nothing terribly big -- usually just setting up some networking equipment, setting up email accounts, formatting and reinstalling Windows boxes, etc. It's mindless work, but I am able to charge him an insane hourly rate, and he feeds me as much beer as I want while I work.
But, I am leading down the wrong path with what I want to talk about; and that is, mail order brides. I had heard of this practice in various forms of media and discretionary small ads placed in the back of adult-oriented magazines and such. But, I had never met a man who actually "purchased" a foreign female and brought her back to the US. Actually, I had thought that it was a myth, some kind of sordid urban legend involving cock fighting, kidney stealing, and ex-KGB agents in the Russian mafia.
So, in my little rant about hating ECMAScript because of the DOM (which I blogged in Nice to Have Native XML Support, Now Fix the Language Itself), I stated "[DOM is] the kind of bad that has warped my mind so far that I cannot think of an alternative to it." Well, Elliotte Rusty Harold states the items I wish I would have discussed in The Good, the Bad, and the DOM.
If you have never read this, I recommend it -- Perl, the first postmodern computer language. I wish all computer languages had charismatic, well-spoken creators who enjoyed discussing meta-philisophical meanings/consequences of their language. I would love to read articles like this for PHP, Python, Ruby, etc.
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The topic of my secret blog passion is reading about people's work; reading about what people do for a living, the problems they encounter, how they solve those problems, etc. Most of the blogs I read deal directly with the tech industry. For one, the people working in the technology sector are the one's that will most likely blog. Plus, it is what I do; so I naturally gravitate to their blogs to compare problem scopes and solutions. I find it fascinating and, also, very instructive. I wish there were more blogs out there dealing with working in the automotive industry (*hit* *hint* Scott) or, even, mathematics, acadamia, physics, engineering in general -- I could find myself enjoying reading about how a Civil Engineer moves dirt around and the trials and tribulations he faces day-in-and-day-out.
Of course, this brings up an interesting divergence between the computer industry and other industries.
Damn, is autocrossing fun. At any rate, yesterday was another ASCC Autocross event. I had an okay day. We only received four runs. By the third run, I was getting the hang of the three sweepers. On the fourth run, Emily's affinity for eating orange cones reared itself; and I plugged two cones early on. Because I was under the assumption that we were running 5 times, I went down to about "90% driving level" and worked on my line through the remainder of the course. After the run, I was told it was to be my last. D'oh!
Here's a rough sketch of the course.
So, I am a male aged 18-25. Fitting this little criterion (as several others I know do), I am the target of marketers everywhere. I adopt technology as early as possible. I have an unnatural craving for anything that runs on electrons. If someone has a gadget I do not have, I suddenly feel the urge to possess it. I spit, drool, and become stupified when presented with stupid cars that go stupid fast. I like video games. I am susceptible to advertisements and content with sexual overtones (blatant or otherwise). Gabe, over at the excellent comic strip Penny Arcade, put it best in his entry Nokia to gamers (scroll to the bottom to see it):
Dear Mr. Nokia, my name is Gabe. You might know me better as a member of the lucrative 18-25 year old male demographic. That’s right, I am a 24 year old early adopter with disposable income just burning a hole in my pocket and a thirst for the latest technological gadgets.
I have already gone through my definition of what classifies an SUV (versus so-called "hybrids") at Defining SUV's So I Know What to Hate. So, taking the cue from Scott where he posts the British Sports Car Definition; it is my turn to define what constitutes a sports car. First off, the British definition is far too lenient. By that definition, you can slap another seat on a John Deere and call it a sports car.
Like I stated in the SUV article, cars' characteristics must be judged amongst its contemporaries. But, what attributes does one measure when trying to decide on a sports car?
All right, I'll convert! But first, you need to get rid of that whitespace thing, and you need a CPAN -- Python rocks, yet again
I have been using Firebird all day today (as I stated I would here -- Switching Browsers), and I love it. It's fast. It renders page nicely. Tabbed browsing rocks! Blocking pop-up windows is a God-send for someone who has been using IE for so long. I have three nit-picks, though.
Just got bit by this one. It's a simple one, and I have reduced it down to some generic offending code. The applicable line isfoo() or (printError("foo had an error") and die); It would not die. It would always print out
print "\nwhy did I not die?";
foo had an errorIt was really bothering me. Here's a full example of the code.
why did I not die?
All right, that does it. I am switching to Firebird. I stuck with Netscape for a long, long time. I resisted the urge to go to IE. It was a long hard battle. I held onto Netscape even as it faultered and failed. Finally, I gave in and started using IE. I have been using IE ever since (sometime in late '99-2000). Now, however, I make the move. How much more evidence do I need? (1 2 3 4 5 . . . .)
Because of my last post (Support Children for the Low, Low Price of $400/Year), I feel guilty for picking on the conservatives. Just to prove that I am just clarifying the definition of "logic" and trying to make sure it is used correctly, I went out in search of a good liberal entry to rip. However, it seems that Democrats do not even both invoking the term "logic" when spouting their agendas. All I could find was statements like:
But even now, there still is some level of democracy in [Iran]. The president, after all, is a man who wants to lesson the power of the clerics.
I try not to get into political idealogy debates anymore. They are futile. No one seems to go into these discussions with an open mind trying to get a different perspective and possibly changing his or her opinion based on newfound knowledge or viewpoints. People seem to argue their side of the political spectrum as a self-involved politically-inspired righteous act of mental masturbation. So, I try to stay away. Plus, the issues themselves are convoluted with hypocritical dogma and inherent complexity that they cannot easily be reduced to a set of fundamental ideals. The Democrats attack Afghanistan, the Republicans go crazy. Four or so years later, the Republicans attack Afghanistan, and the Democrats go crazy. They don't have ideals; they just oppose one another. (And, I unjustly make generalizations about them because of it.)
But, occassionally, I come across something like this --
Child Tax Credits and the Mutilated Beggar Effect. You have got to be kidding me. $400 a year provides an incentive for poor people to have more kids? Where did he get that assumption? If the government proposed tax benefits to permanently injured veterans, I wonder if this guy would claim that the government is providing an incentive for soldiers to act carelessly and get wounded in battle?
Another good thread on PerlMonks concerning OO design in terms of what to expose, what to expect, and when to error (Note: most of these PM threads use Perl for examples, but the discussion(s) apply to any OO language) -- OO style question: how much information to hide?
... At least, according to Lisp advocate extrordinaire, Paul Graham in LFM and LFSP, which is actually an email sent by Cal Tech's Mike Vanier. The article basically boils down to LFSP's (Languages For Smart People) being languages like OCaml, Lisp, and other languages that let programmers define their own abstractions (such as macros) and LFM's (Languages For the Masses) that are languages like Java which:
deliberately restrict the abstractive power of the language, because of the feeling that users "can't handle" that much power.
I wonder what Perl falls under. What about PHP?
It's amazing the stuff you come across when you are waiting for your Meta-Directory to process 67,000+ records...
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Amen! This goes back to The Law of Leaky Abstractions (a lot of the time, I disagree with Joel; but in this case, I agree wholeheartedly). Knowing what goes on behind the scenes makes you a better programmer. For example, not knowing specifics on how Sun's JVM works does not necessarily make you a bad programmer; however, knowing it will make you a better one. In the same respect, you should know what your development environment does for you (and know how to do it yourself) before using it.
I have a post brewing. I was just about to write it, now, but my mental manna has been expended for the day. The subject -- "Why DBI Is Awful!" It truly, truly is. I do plan on having some justification for this. After all, you don't step on Tim Bunce's toes for no reason.
Courtesy of Sterling Hughes in his entry Shucks, he points to a nondescript web page with some nondescript code to perform a nondescript action i.e. Upload Web Pages Automatically with AppleScript (scroll down to the bottom to see the code). Did anyone else *shudder* and think of Visual Basic?
Every day, I am bestowed with a finite amount of mental manna. I can use this mental manna in a variety of ways; however, once it is gone, I am reduced to performing brain-dead activities. Mental manna can be used for writing, car work, programming, etc.; just about anything that requires a certain level of concentration.
There are a couple of extra facets to this brain-energy. Occasionally, it can be recharged. If I am having trouble writing, doing some reading may replenish a small amount. If I am having "coder's block," wetting the grey matter's palette with a simple programming task that has sat on the back burner may jump start it enough that I can tackle the much larger task at hand. Additionally, if I am in the zone, each unit of mental manna becomes supercharged and is worth like 10 units. The amount of mental manna one is given at the start of each day, I believe, follows the Stephenson equation.
Currently, I have greatly underestimated the intricacies of hand-rolling my own meta-directory. My mental manna is being completely drained. Not only that, but I would give my left arm to have a zone like this right now.
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This is just a reminder post to myself to read this -- PetShop.NET: An Anti-Pattern Architecture.
Another exploration into the effects of my neurosis. This one, however, is so simplistic, it should be obvious -- DVD's, CD's, and books.
If only I2 was as cool as the media makes it out to be -- What Internet2 Researchers Are Dreaming Up.
Every so often, twice a year or so, it is time to re-explore the music industry and freshen up my collection. I do not listen to the radio or watch The Shiny Things Network, so it is, at times, difficult to find new bands to listen to.
I've pretty much worn out my current trend of Rasputina/Kittie/Boy Sets Fire. So, it was time to move on. I ordered three CD's:
We shall see how these turn out.
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I am having a problem getting Perl to bind OUT parameters correctly to Oracle stored procedures using DBD::Oracle. Everything works fine when I am binding them to normal PL/SQL variable types such as NUMBER, VARCHAR2, etc. The real gotcha comes when I try to bind parameters to data types defined in the Oracle package as:
TYPE myTable IS TABLE OF DeptTable%rowtype INDEX BY BINARY_INTEGER;
People have bad memories. This is not in reference to the inability to remember one's phone number or the 11th digit of Π. This is about regret. People forget their past transgressions; they forget the times they have succumbed to their own weakness resulting in negative consequences; their mistakes are awash in "live and learn" dogma as they repeatedly perform the same follies. If we all remembered our mistakes with the punctual acuity of the vividness of the moment when we first had to come face-to-face with the repercussions of our malice, we would spiral down a terrible pit of mounting regret. The passion of our memories and past deeds fade as an act of mental self-preservation.
In conjunction with this, people are apt to forgive others. No singular person wants to be held accountable for his or her past mistakes in their entirety, so we allow others leeway with their's to prevent having to fess up and face our own. Everyone gives everyone else the benefit of the lowest common denominator, so we can afford to expect it for ourselves. We are indentured servants to our failings. At some point, one must decide that another's (or our own) "mistakes" are not oversights or brief lapses of judgement; rather, it is the methodology by which the other conducts him or herself (or ourselves).
Think back 5 or 10 years ago (5 years ago for me would place me at the ripe age of 19), most likely, you had a vastly different view of where you would be now. But, still, you have little or no regrets? Or, maybe, you consciously shifted your 5-year-old expectations to match where you are now so it does not generate stress for you. (Alas, I am getting into the "ideal" versus "behavioral" self before I meant to.)
Last night, about half past midnight, I was feeling restless. Regardless of the reasoning behind my agitation, I came to the decision to do some inner-Lakewood hard driving to relieve the spirits into acquiescence. It was a random Tuesday night (or very, very early Wednesday morning, depending on your point of view); it had been raining earlier, but the roads had dried by this point... what could be the harm? A cursory flashlight-check of Emily's fluid levels and tire pressures, and I was on the street giving the engine time to warm. Once she was up to operating temperature (or, shall I say, once she was in the wide variance of temperatures Emily operates within depending on her very fickle mood swings), I opened the engine up and blasted down a residential side road. Alarms of the cars parked alongside the road disappeared behind me as I repeatedly stomped on the gas pedal in 2nd gear and went 4-tire (or, at least, 2-tire) squealing around any corner I happened to come across. At first, I tried to leave some semblance of a margin of safety. I tried to keep myself from overrunning my headlights beyond a reasonably prudent level; and I attempted to keep myself below 85% ability through the corners. But, the more I drove; the harder I drove. Eventually, I was fully committing myself to the corners. Soon, thereafter, I was entering the corners at speeds that I did not believe I would hold. But, I did hold; and I continued to click the dial up notch after notch.
It was a 90° turn off of Hilliard onto a side street. I hit the apex a little awry and had to adjust the steering wheel in slightly more. There was a bump or a pothole or something that coincided with my steering correction. Emily went from her standard pushing-slide/slowly-rotating-front-end-through-turn mannerism into a severe understeering four wheel drift. I fluttered the throttle searching for a point where the front end would weight and I could gather some traction. Nothing was grabbing. There was not much room to increase my turning radius, so I held the wheel rigid. Everything seemed to happening in slow motion (as you always hear when people are in these circumstances), but I still could not react fast enough. It was as if I was in a slower slow motion instance of the episode. Suddenly, with no conscious provocation, my left foot (yes, my left foot) drifted from its braced position against the side of the footwell and hovered above the brake pedal. The little bugger ever-so-slightly applied pressure to the brake as my right foot continued to manipulate the throttle in a brute-force attempt to find the right sequence of slight depressions to decode the traction cipher. (Now, mind you, I am used to good ol' FWD understeer. What happened next had me pretty well confused as to what to do.) My back end sprung loose and began swinging around rapidly.
My arms freaked and begin scrambling to counter-steer. Both feet were confused -- the left smashed the clutch into the floor; and the right went full into the brakes.
*BOOM!* whump whump *BOOM!* whump
I came to a stop straddling the curb. Back into 1st and off I went with no damage done to anything but my ego and (possibly) car. I pulled into a well-lit parking lot and surveyed Emily's passenger side. It seemed that each wheel had hit the curb at a slight enough of an angle that the tires had absorbed the blow (thank God). I gave both wheels several good yanks to verify tie roads, wheel bearings, etc. were in sufficient working order and returned home, tail between my legs.
But, that's not what I am talking about. It never is. I have a habit of not talking about the topic I am trying to convey. I prefer to shepherd others towards it and not feed it from my hand as a carrot. After all, Verlaine never came out and just said to Rimbaud:
Votre psychose est ce qui vous tuera. Elle est ce qui tue chacun.*
Just for a short time, I wish everyone would step back and think through the implications of their actions. The choices made now can and will affect the outcome. Live teleologically.
Joseph Campbell said:
We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
But, he was old; and he had as bad a memory as the rest of us. Truth and validity are not pretty words that flow together and are quotable. Our mishappen hippie, Campbell, just so happened to have been a student of Carl Jung -- the one of Psychology and once-friend-turned-arched-nemisis Freud fame. Which, coming around to it, brings me to behavioral self versus ideal self. It is an old theory from the annals of Psychology. We each have both in us. And, the more your behavioral self is different from your ideal self; that is, the more your actions are in direct opposition to your ideals, the more stress you feel and the more depressed you are. There are two ways to counteract this. The very few have their regrets, and they force there behaviors to conform more to their ideal selves. The rest lower their ideal self or build a framework of loose justifications that they believe to convince themselves that the two "selves" are not that far apart.
It all comes back to how you justify your actions, and what you tell yourself when you look in the mirror, Dorian. If you don't have regrets you should. And, "no," 20 years from now, people then probably won't care what you did now. But, what you are doing now will affect how you are 20 years from now. And, no, I am under no obligation to offer redemption.
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*Your psychosis is what will kill you. It is what kills everyone.
Ahhh... fresh from This week on Perl 6, a clarification between "run-time" binding and "compile-time binding" (for Perl 6).
Run time binding looks like $foo := expression
Compile time binding looks like $foo ::= expression
The difference between the two (if you are not already intimately familiar with the two) comes straight from the source (Damian Conway) in this Google-cached thread -- Google Groups: View Thread "Compile-time binding".
::= is to := as a macro call is to a subroutine call
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I need to burn up some vacation days before the end of July. Actually, I should burn, optimally, burn them before June ends. There is a "use them or lose them" policy with them; and everyone loses them come the end of June. I was afforded some leniency because of the time tables of my two projects, so I have until the end of July. I could use them all up catching up on all of the various "stuff" that has sat on the back burner while I used up all of my free time working -- bicycle maintenance (more), car work, various "new residency" things, re-organize my computer systems, develop penultimate email client, and whatever else (I am sure there is more that I am forgetting). But, there is a stigma in my mind that tells me I should use my vacation days in another manner. Something like drive to the Mississippi river and throw a rock in it for I have never seen the mightly Mississippi. At the very least, for the rest of my life, I can sleep soundly knowing I have seen it.
Actually, the notion of a drive-a-bout appeals to me. But, it would be much better had I acquired my motorcycle. My ex-roommate screwed me on that one (I'm talking about you, Sparky).
Hmmm...
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Because it is mildly entertaining (even if it might be slightly perverse in a male mentality sort of way), I shall go ahead and document "The Bet" as referenced by Chuckie in the comments section of "Not Many People."
[Just as a disclaimer, you probably won't find this amusing in the slightest if you are not normally amused by drunk people making outlandish yet amusing yet, somehow, commiserable wagers.]
Starting a new project? Going to use Perl (or any other scripting lanuage that optionally supports OO constructs)? Want to decide whether or not to use OO?
Perl Monks is good.
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I ran across The Anti-Javascript FAQ written by a very "passionate" Aahz Maruch (who has a blog on the The Artima Developer Community ). This led me to the aforementioned ((J(ava)?)|ECMA)Script hating page. There, he mentioned that "JavaScript form-validation duplicates coding effort." This is true. This is very true. All data validation submitted via a form should be handled on the server side -- validating it client-side is just to provide some user-ease. But, user's like easy things.
I am one of the few people under 35 who have driven in a completely original 1953 Cadillac. (This is the closest thing I could find on the Internet. This is a 1950 Cadillac, but it looks very similar.)
