Light Vs. Dark
April 28, 2008
Some people like to work on their computers with the lights off, and I can’t for the life of me understand why or come to like it. You can’t very well see the keyboard, your desk, or anything really. You have to squint into a bright light bulb for hours at a time, which I’ve heard isn’t good for your eyes, and it doesn’t seem to actually make the monitor easier to look at. I’ve seen offices partitioned into “light” and “dark”, and it’s just silly.
If I ever get stuck working in a dark office, I’ll bring my own lighting and force anyone who wants to enter my office or cubicle to don the sunglasses and unfold the umbrella I will provide them to help shelter them from the unholy rays shining down upon them. The least I can do is be sensitive to their condition.
They Wouldn’t Be Missed
April 23, 2008
When a TV show loses an actor or actress, the writers have to replace their character with a new one and make sure it’s all consistent with the plot. This takes valuable time away from what could have otherwise been a kick-ass space battle.
I’d be too impatient to artfully work around a change in cast. I wonder if you could get away with doing a half-assed job of replacing the actor or actress but essentially keep the character the same. You could introduce the new character, make a lame attempt to flesh them out for that episode, then forget all that and write the new character just like the old one: same personality, same way of speaking, same past, knowledge, etc. You’d just pretend that nothing really happened and continue on. It’d be hilarious!
Recode, Repeat
April 9, 2008
It’s a shame how much software is rewritten all the time. Incompatibilities of language, interface, and execution platform and the proprietary nature of most software development seem to have doomed us to forever reinvent the software wheel. The number of linked list implementations out there must be staggering. In a perfect world, someone would decide a linked list would be a nice thing and implement it, and then everyone else would use that one implementation from then on. Sadly, the reality of software today is that one person’s implementation of even a very generic data structure probably won’t satisfy the needs of other people. There’s a missing link in the software systems we use that would let us create abstractions that anyone can reuse for their own needs.
Sneaky Weather
April 7, 2008
Damn this San Luis Obispo weather! It’s always stabbing me in the back. It was supposed to be 65 degrees today, it’s actually 61 degrees right now, but I’m hot as hell in these pants, shoes, and long-sleeved shirt. I can’t win.
