Ah, yes, the wearing of the cake. Good times!

Jeff Roberts - Feb 1, 2008

Ah, yes, the wearing of the cake. Good times!

So, several days ago, I faced that yearly task–picking out the perfect Valentine’s Day card for my wife.

I’ve approached this different ways in the past: One year, I eschewed getting her anything, proclaiming V-Day as “the invented holiday that makes no sense”. Results were predictable, in hindsight. After that, I spent several years executing my usual card-search routine:

2. Enter Store.

3. Walk to card aisle

4. Find appropriately topical card. (That is don’t buy “Granny you’re my valentine” if you dating Daisy Fuentes.)

It was a perfect one! I love you!! btw, he got m…

Whitney - Feb 4, 2008

It was a perfect one! I love you!! btw, he got me two dozen roses too ;) He’s so wonderful!!

One the face of it, you’ll find few movies more different than End of the Spear and Black Snake Moan: One is a tale of Missionary zeal, the other a gritty portrait of depravity and betrayal.

Thanks to an accident of Netflix and the sickness that descended upon our family, I got to watch both within a twelve hour span, and the messages of both harmonize – Redemption is available to anyone.

Link

Brock Yates and some other ex-C&D guys have a new home, and so far, I like it:
- More terse and coherent than autoextremist.com
- Profane. Gotta love some locker-room profanity when talking about cars.
- Not TOO profane.
- Simple, easy visuals, good RSS feeds. Are you listening EDMUNDS!?
- Did I mention terse? Edmunds.com, particularly Karl Brauer, treat the internet medium as a license to blather….forever…
- They review cars people might actually buy and give honest opinions based around the target audience of that car. Is a Ford Ranger awful? Compared to a Lexus, sure. As a small, effective work truck? It’s awesome, and these guys say so.

I’ve been thinking alot about version control lately, because we’re undertaking a big move from Clear Case and it’s Unified Change Management (UCM) process to Subversion, which is the source-control equivalent of the Wild Wild West–anything goes, wheee!!

Meetings were held, proposals submitted, cost advantages debated, and finally the Big Muckety Muck cowboyed-up and made the call–we’re going to subversion and saving a gagillion dollars.

As with many such decisions, this was communicated to the worldwide distributed sites with the utmost care, forethought, and consideration. That’s right–it was 13th out of 15 slides in a Powerpoint deck. Aforementioned plebians reacted with anything from curiosity to outright rebellion.

(Written using IE 7, since Firefox 3b2 is still as unstable as a tween headed to a Hannah Montana concert…)

I was up until 11 checking-in & building code for our 2/15 deadline, and it seemed like 10 seconds afer I closed my eyes, the weather radio started its DEEDLE-DEEDLE-DEEDLE of a warning:

“…has issued a Tornado Warning for…Scott County in Central Kentucky.” Jumped up and checked the radar and, sure enough, God’s own squeege was headed across the state. So, we woke-up the kids (1:15 am…ah, family time!) and huddled in our secure bunker, a.k.a. the 4-foot-wide half-bath in our hallway.

So, my esteemed father-in-law had a little birthday surprise of his 60th birthday of his own: A Ford 500!

(Not his, obviously…)

He picked-up a 1 year old Limited model (leather, the works…) at Crossroads Ford in Indiana. It had only 10k miles on it, and I got to take a test drive yesterday.

It’s a very well-executed car, and a great replacement for the Crown Victoria: Tremendous interior room, comfort, and driveability. The car stops, turns, and steers like a Euro sedan; driving it, I kept thinking “Volvo” or “Audi”. I found the suspension tuning particularly impressive–not harsh at all, but very well controlled…bumps caused one well-damped motion. There was no float or wallow; the car went where it was pointed and changed directions better than it ought to given its size.

Carriage Ford, honey :)

Whitney - Feb 1, 2008

Carriage Ford, honey :)

- Two Years, two Mannings.
- Wes Welker deserved MVP.
- Give the MVP to the Giants’ D…they kept Brady on his back.
- Was Giselle hired by the NFC?

If it’s possible, I feel BAD for the Patriots? An unblemished season, and then beaten in an ugly, hard-to-watch game that felt like Muhamed Ali’s Ropeadope, played on a football field.

Best commercial: The Bridgestone “Scream”

I missed a lot of them (distracted by Euchre and o…

Chris - Feb 0, 2008

I missed a lot of them (distracted by Euchre and other things), but of the ones I saw and remember, I like that one best too.

I still liked the silent Pepsi Commercial best, tho this is an easy second. There weren’t any other ones I liked at all really.

Wow…I’ve been underwhelmed before, but just…wow.

Okay, so let’s review: I had a bout of unaccountable Car lust starting earlier this week. The Astra was the newest Euro kid on the block, all sexy and angular. So, today, I took a detour on my way to work and drove one.

Walkaround: The car is handsome and substantial…it really doesn’t look like an economy car, but rather an upscale small hatch, a segment the MINI Cooper created. Doors open and close with an assuring thunk. The hatch is pure euro, complete with parcel shelf and a good-sized storage area with the seats up. The rear window is very small (but we’ll get to that…)

Looks like we’re down to Obama -v- Clinton, McCain -v- Romney. There are other players, but it’s apparent that Huckabee can’t play on the coasts, and Super Tuesday should seal that.

Probably the best phenomenon of this primary season hasn’t been the campaigns or races themselves, it’s been the “race to decide” among the media. I used to identify this as a Fox News only phenomenon (NEWS DAMNIT!), but it seems to spread to others. Thing is, the networks seek certainty–Who’s the front runner? Who is soon to be out?

Joey: “I wish we had cable.”

* * *

LOST why do I care again?

Eli Stone actually made it through a whole episode and found some stuff to like. On the whole, I’d rather sleep, but eh. This one gets the biggest award for “Zero chemistry between main character and his ice queen fiancee.”

Oh, and Sydney’s dad from Alias is a co-star. He pretty-much plays the same character. And ‘Ed’ shows up in flashbacks as his Dad.

yes but if you add water and reheat it, congealed …

Whitney - Feb 5, 2008

yes but if you add water and reheat it, congealed oatmeal can be pretty good. by the way, you left something on at home. (K)

I thought it odd that when I checked-out Rich Dad, Poor Dad as a book-on-tape from the library that the first cassette was not rewound. Nor was it at the end of a side…it seemed as though someone had stopped in the middle of the tape. None of the other tapes were that way.

Then I found out why: This book is complete crap.

I suffered through half the tape, then took the book back. The author kept spouting platitudes like “Poor people work for money, Rich people have money work for them,” wrapped in some saccharine false anectdote format.

Dave Ramsey has recommended it on several occasion…

Chris - Jan 2, 2008

Dave Ramsey has recommended it on several occasions, so I added it to my “to read” list a few weeks ago. Looking for something to use a Borders’ gift card on, I started going through that list last week to decide which book to get. After reading some reviews on Amazon and elsewhere about the book, I took it off the list. Seems like you’ve confirmed my assumptions from those reviews… Thanks for the warning about it.

Yeah, yeah, I’m a eurosnob. Sue me.

The Camry is getting on my nerves…it sure beats walking, and it gets great mileage on the highway, but I’d really like to get back into a hatchback stick with good steering. I’ve heard good things about the Mazda3, but I don’t like their looks all that much.

The E30 has world-class steering, but it’s only a coupe, it gets 20mpg on a good day, and it’s loud and rides like a brick. And it’s about as safe as a car designed in 1980 with 1st gen high-explosive Airbags can be (that is, not very)

One part of programming I enjoy is the creative process–taking a thing you’ve sketched out on a whiteboard, and making it come alive. Once you’re at this long enough though, you start to see common problems crop-up, no matter what problem you’re solving or what language you’re solving it in. I’d like to think through one of those today (or at least start to…)

The problem is, I can’t really give a snazzy name to the problem itself. When you’re dealing with multithreaded programming, you can say “I have concurrency problems,” and someone in the ether will grok what you mean. When dealing with GUIs, you can talk Model-View-Controller (MVC) all day. As my friend Chuck would say, what I have here is a “meta” problem–a problem about a problem.

As a programmer, should it bother me that I’m beginning to think of Windows as a well-documented, flexible system? One that’s not-too-awful to program in?

I beginning to understand why Rana found Java so jarring…documentation varies in quality and it’s all over the place. With Windows, MSDN is your friend :D

(Note: I don’t find windows secure, consistent, or all that well-designed, but after reading Raymond Chen’s excellent “The Old New Thing” it’s easy to see why the sins of Windows 1.0 through 3.11 really affected the designs of Win32, leading to many gaping kludges and security holes.)