giving up on the day, possibly due to frozen milk

Published: 12 November 2009

I probably ought to go to bed and as soon as I take a shower (which will happen promptly after I finish this post…), I will. I don’t know why I have such a time getting to bed, but I always seem to drag my feet about it. Tony commented once that he’s the same way, and it just feels like you’re giving up on the day. That idea has stuck with me, and I think I agree. If I go to bed now, who knows what cool stuff I could be missing! Usually for me, given my rather dull daily life (OMG why do you read this??), that cool stuff would be occurring online or somehow involving a computer.

So I’ve been working on a program for class wherein we’re supposed to write a rational class (i.e. a class that represents fractions) that supports dimensions (e.g. 1/2 foot, 2/15 Newtons, 1/4 seconds), and we’re to do it in Java and Smalltalk. My Java version is progressing nicely, I’m enjoying JUnit for unit testing, and it’s generally all going about as I planned (though with increased verbosity and frustration due to said verbosity that seems inherent in Java–grr). It makes me worry about the Smalltalk version, though, with Smalltalk’s lack of static typing and generics and interfaces and access control… Aaahhh! I’m sure I’ll come up with something and it’ll probably be quite akin to my Java implementation, and really, what has happened to me? I’ve been coding in C# so long that the dynamicness and duck-typing of Ruby seem more foreign now, all because of having to declare what my variable is and what interfaces it must implement and what methods it supports before I go using it. Darn conservative C#, wacking out my liberal Ruby zen.

All right, and now I will go to bed and I’m sure I’ll grumble to myself (and Jon, too, when I call him bright and early) when I have to get up for class tomorrow. I gave my milk a good thaw tonight (my fridge is serious) by running it under the tap till it was more or less liquid again, in most parts, enough to make some macaroni and cheese at least. So, I can make a nice latte in the morning with the already-scooped coffee that’s been sitting in the espresso-machine filter in the fridge since two days ago when I got a hankering to make a latte but was thwarted by my milk. Pfhew.

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PC hard drive dying

Published: 8 November 2009

I don’t know if I blogged about it, but I certainly complained on Twitter about my Macbook hard drive eating itself at the beginning of the semester. Well, just this morning my Windows hard drive in my PC started acting up. When I booted the computer, I got a “DISK READ ERROR INSERT SYSTEM DISC” message. I unplugged and replugged my hard drive, both data and power, and it booted. However, when burning a backup CD of some Sims 3 data, it crashed. Jon unplugged and replugged the hard drive and it booted again afterward. I played The Sims 3 for a while as a test and it was fine for maybe half an hour, but it crashed again, first to desktop and then I got the Blue Screen of Death. (In Windows 7, no less!) Jon’s poking around in there now, trying out a different hard drive cable (it’s an old, old IDE hard drive that I wouldn’t mind replacing) and unplugging/replugging from the motherboard instead of just the back of the hard drive. If this doesn’t work, I think we’ll go to Best Buy today and get me a new, fast SATA drive because, seriously, I don’t know how old this 70GB IDE is, I just know I’ve had it forever as my Windows drive.

Update: Jon switched out the IDE cable for the one that was hooked to my CDROM drive, so I can’t currently use my CDROM drive but the hard drive so far has been fine. He plugged it into a different port on the motherboard, so I don’t know yet if the problem is 1) the hard drive, 2) the port on the motherboard, or 3) the first IDE cable. I’ve been playing The Sims 3 and nothing has crashed or acted up, so maybe it was the motherboard port or the IDE cable, and my hard drive is actually fine.

Here’s what I’ve been doing with my Sims:

ghost Sim
Right, so one of my [normal, living] Sims got an Opportunity to take the remains of a loved one to the science lab so they could be brought back to life. I didn’t have any dead loved ones, so I had my other Sim, a kleptomaniac, go steal something from the graveyard. What she stole was Vernon Carpenter’s remains. So my first Sim took them to the science lab, but the experiment didn’t go fully as planned, and I ended up with Vernon Carpenter as a ghost, but part of my family. He’s completely controllable and is just another family member. I designed for him this snazzy bedroom shown here.
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the wily C# shuffle

Published: 7 November 2009

My programming languages professor is quite the wily one. For our last programming assignment in there, we’re to write a fraction class in both Java and Smalltalk, as part of our coverage of object-oriented languages. I asked if I could do C# and Smalltalk, since I really like C# and, darn it, everyone says they’re pretty much the same language. For my professor’s purposes, i.e. teaching us different OO styles, substituting C# in for Java should accomplish the same purpose. (“Accomplish the same purpose” sounds weird to me now, but “accomplish the same effect” did, too. Suggestions on rephrasing?) I sent him a list via email of all the reasons he should let me write it in C#, including:

  1. The Ph. D. student we had as a substitute mentioned that my professor is his advisor, the student is doing C# stuff, and my professor is not all that familar with C#. This would give my professor more experience with it, and in a case where he already knows what the expected result of the program is.
  2. The same Ph. D. student pointed out that if you know C++ and you know Java (which my professor certainly does), you can read C# fine.
  3. You can use Mono in Linux to run C#–there’s no need to have .NET or use Windows. This point stems from the fact that my prof is a big Linux person and either dislikes Windows/Microsoft or perhaps just GUI interfaces… He has brought his laptop to class before to show code examples and he’s so hardcore that his window manager, fvwm2, doesn’t even have title bars on the windows, by his configuration, so to move a window you have to hold down some key combination and drag it with the mouse.
  4. For our first program, he let me work in Ruby instead of Python. Ruby is to Python as C# is to Java.
  5. Recently on StackOverflow, I was reading someone’s response about learning a new programming language, and I thought he had a good point. He said that if you already know Java, there’s not much point in learning C#, but instead perhaps learn ML or C because those are different kinds of languages. If this programming project is intended to teach us about object-oriented programming, then it doesn’t seem like it would matter whether we wrote in Java or C# because they’re so similar.

He told me in class he had been considering my request, but had decided that since I code in C# all day at work, it wouldn’t be helpful for me to write the assignment in C#, too, so I should do it in Java since I’ve barely worked in Java before. Then he went on to say that anyone else, however, that isn’t familiar with C# can use that over Java. My classmates started laughing and I had to say “Damnit, that’s not what I intended at all!” Grumble grumble.

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the unexpected biscuit surprise

Published: 31 October 2009

Jon and I just came back from eating at Cracker Barrel. It’s not a restaurant where we eat often, but sometimes I get this irresistible urge to eat biscuits and gravy, and Cracker Barrel is the best place to quell that urge because 1) IHOP is meh and 2) Waffle House food looks and tastes like it has been dipped in grease after cooking. So we went and waited for about twenty minutes before getting a table because that place was packed with old people, like always. When we finally got in and got our food, all went well until I noticed my lone sausage patty was still very pink inside, so I sent it back for replacement bacon. Mm, bacon. Beyond that, things went off without a hitch until I had finished my gravy-drenched biscuit and was about to prepare my jam-drenched biscuit. I am pathological about splitting my biscuit before doing any drenching with other foodstuffs, thereby getting a larger other-foodstuffs-to-biscuit ratio, but I immediately noticed something was awry when I split the last biscuit on our table. For one, biscuits aren’t normally resistant to splitting, unless you’ve got a week-old, rock-hard biscuit, and then you oughtn’t to be splitting it anyway, you should just gnaw at it plain or feed it to the dog. This biscuit, however, was special, and insisted on staying half unsplit. I looked at its innards and saw why: that jagged, plastic ring that is normally found beneath a milk jug lid was lodged there. Hm.

Jon and I had a good laugh about it because that’s never happened to either of us before. Sure, we’ll occasionally find hairs in food, and that’s definitely grosser than freshly baked plastic. A plastic milk jug ring in a biscuit, though, that’s not grody, that’s just the result of an overzealous milk-opener who has been given the task of mixing batter. I saw our waiter at a nearby table, so I leaned back and watched him, hoping to catch his eye. One of the managers (or so I assume; he was dressed nicer than the regular waiters and looked manager-y) saw me and came over. I pointed out the undercooked sausage and he started to go off to get me some bacon instead, but I caught his arm. “Wait, I have something funnier.” I held up the biscuit con plástico and said “I don’t think the milk ring is supposed to be here.” He got this dry, amused look on his face and said “That’s from a buttermilk jug.” Taking the biscuit, he went off to the kitchen in the back, and Jon guessed “Someone’s going to get an ass-chewing.” I bet he took it back there to show the cook.

Our waiter was a totally nice, friendly guy though, and kept me plied with sweet tea and Jon with coffee, so I left a good tip. He can’t help it if the biscuits are plastic-filled and the sausage is rawness-filled. Jon and I bought oodles of candy in the store part, and I’m looking forward to the Reese’s Cups. On a side note, it drives me bonkers when people say that as “ree-see cups”. Dude, it’s some guy’s name, just possessive. Do they pronounce the name “Reese” by itself as “ree-see”? Ugh, it’s “ree-sihz”.

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most accurate fortune ever

Published: 26 October 2009

“You would do well in the field of computer technology” read a fortune I got today when I ate my leftover orange chicken for lunch. Matt @ work likened it to “You would do well as a marine biologist”; really, what prompted them to write this as a fortune? It’s now pinned to my cubicle wall as a validation of my life’s work.

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