“Gold” is coming to town where I live next month. … Thomas J. Brown - Aug 5, 2007 “Gold” is coming to town where I live next month. I’ve never been big on the circus, but their female ring leader, Liliana Escobar, is pretty hot. Maybe I’ll go see the circus. -)

Back in the dark ages of 1998, I took my first programming class. As was the style of the time, the class was taught in Pascal, a language Nicklaus Wirth designed explicitly to teach structured programming concepts. Think of Pascal like an advanced jet trainer: They teach you all the cool stuff with it, before they turn you loose in the F-15’s to wax some MiGs. Anyway, Pascal had some neat concepts and quirks, one of which was the way it made a distinction between ‘functions’ (subroutines that returned data) and ‘procedures’ (subroutines that were passed data and operated on it). So, for example, you might have a function called ‘double’ that took an integer and returned that number times 2: ...

I went to my first meeting with my new division yesterday, and I must say, It sounds pretty good. A particular highpoint was The Wifi Guy. Nice idea for the new media–funny, viral, very over-the-top. LXK’s making a big foray into wireless consumer printers. Thing that gets me–why aren’t we doing some sort of co-branding with Apple? Apple’s main selling point these days is cordless, wireless, de-cluttered desktops. With this new line, seems like we’d be right there. ...

I’m writing some toy apps that integrate with our libraries, and so I was looking for a good, Windows-compliant version of GNU Getopt. Cygwin has a version, but that ties me to the cygwin installation (I think…) Anyway, Getopt is straight POSIX C, and googling around I found this C++ .h called TCLAP it’s well documented and implemented as inlines in the tclap/CmdLine.h. Seems very similar to the ruby ‘optparse’ module in spirit and implementation.

hello my name is harold and i like to spend my tim… Whitney - Aug 2, 2007 hello my name is harold and i like to spend my time inventing my own language and pretending other ppl know what I’m talking about…. No! I don’t want to go on the cart! Bring out yer dead lollercart ...

Ah, Luc Besson (The man who wrote The Fifth Element) brings us another gem of style-over-substance. If you could epitomize Eurotrash in a movie, this is it. But, God, such fun! Nothing like a man barrel-rolling a W-12 powered Audi A8 to remove a bomb attached to its undercarriage. Frank (Jason Statham), is a very, very bad man, but his schtick great–Always wearing a crisp suit, always in a clean car, always in control. ...

Ah, so two weeks have elapsed of my new job, two weeks that skated between elation, boredom, fear, and frustration. It’s a whole different world over here. Some people like it, some people don’t. Me? I’m withholding judgment for now. I do like my team–they seem like quiet, competent, hardworking folks. They’ve been helpful to a total outsider in all senses of the word–an old unix + java wonk who’s now playing in the world of C/C++ and Windows. ...

(Scene: Inside a meeting room with my new department, going over survey results) S: “Well, the results indicate I’m not doing too well with y’allz careers on and individual level. So let me know if you’re aching to do something different..or if you’re bored with what you’ve been doing for 6 years.” B: “Like…Harold was.” Yep

:-) I’m pretty content with what I’m doing,… Jeff Roberts - Aug 3, 2007 :-) I’m pretty content with what I’m doing, although I just started ramping up for this iteration and found that all 3 of the things on my list are gated until NK does some work. Oh, well, another day or so to tie up loose ends before they turn into PTRs. ...

Link So, basically: Create a struct to hold your class. Create a Window struct. Enter your event loop and process events That’s kinda it…The rest is a bunch of nasty #define’s and macros Windows has built-up.

So, I’m reading through the documentation on Windows printing, trying to learn what this is all about. My team writes stuff that sits between the Windows Spooler (spoolsrv.exe) and the Kernel-model communications pieces. Anyway, so I come to a great fork in the road: GDI and XPS. GDI (Graphical Device Interface) is the way that earlier windows programs (Win32) talk to the display and printing subsystem. Essentially, everything in GDI is a bitmap. This is “the old way of doing things”. ...

Hrm…let’s see. Yesterday: - A French Bank closed 3 subprime hedge funds because there’s not enough liquidity to value them. I don’t know what that means exactly, but it sounds bad. - The S&P dropped 3% yesterday. - The subprime mortgage fiasco is turning into a vortex. I yanked my 401(k) back into a money market. I’m NOT looking forward to a repeat of the bath I took on my Roth in 2001.

not enough liquidity to value them….the mtg co’s… Whitney - Aug 5, 2007 not enough liquidity to value them….the mtg co’s are so far upside down on their lending that it’s not even worth the analysts’ time? well, the hedge funds were invested in the subprime mortgages and mortgage brokers themselves. I used to be invested in Harbor Fund’s Harbor Bond fund and it had a great run investing in mortgages, but it scared me so I got out before 2005. ...

link The final type is known simply as the demand clause, and this means that the lender can demand repayment of the loan in full at any time for any reason. This clause gives the lender the same powers as the acceleration and due on sale clauses, but also allows the lender to raise interest rates even if you aren’t selling your property. Yikes…

Yeah but that’s typically included in ANY loan ya … Whitney - Aug 2, 2007 Yeah but that’s typically included in ANY loan ya get. The lender USUALLY reserves the right to demand payment in full at any time for any reason…..every loan I ever did had that as part as the standard loanliner - at both bank and CU.

The good: I have an office (yes, my own!) and it’s really sweet–near the door, the printing area, the break area, and the AA desk. I got all my stuff over here in 1 load, and everyone’s been really nice so far. The bad: I don’t have a power cord for my phone yet. If you want to contact me, better try email, IM, or cell. Think I’ll break for lunch and hit some yummy leftovers.

Sounds cool! I keep talking to the empty side of … Jeff Roberts - Aug 1, 2007 Sounds cool! I keep talking to the empty side of your old office but no one answers :-)

So, I took one 2 hr block to myself. I grabbed my once-a-month blow fund and headed out after a rather trying Saturday of watching the kids, and said, “Damn it, I’m going to see something for me.” Something with nary a trace of romantic comedy, meaningful plotline, or maybe even sense. I went to watch “The Simpsons Movie”. Let’s cut to the chase. You get to see Bart’s penis, Homer flips-off the residents of Springfield, Otto hits a bong, and Marge says ‘Goddamn’. That’s why this movie is PG-13. ...

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Holden Beach Sunrise, originally uploaded by miniharryc. (Trying out a post from Flickr, so forgive me if this is weird…) Rest of the set

Nice pics! Jeff Roberts - Aug 5, 2007 Nice pics!