Design Problem - Part One

Grr... I am having trouble fully defining my problem. This means I do not understand it, so the designs are flawed. I've been moving faster lately. I don't always think this is a good thing.

Moving slowly and deliberately has been my preferred mode for awhile. I'm quiet by nature. Pondering several things at once: something technical, something humorous, something lewd and something relaxing. I've become mono-thought based.

aside: I've been putting adverbs in this text. I hate adverbs. I take them out, but I view them as mental weakness.

I want to curl up and around with my problem. My problem is a friend. my problem is a companion. We can fight and argue. Frustrate each other, but we always come back. The problem because it exists and me because I do as well. But my current problem is diffuse. It has no requirements. Its a bogeyman stemming from a pile of shitty communication and passive limitation acceptance. My current problem is a organizational lack of commitment to a plan. But this makes sense as two of the four levels immediately above me are now vacant.

A series of leadership voids is creating engineering failures. The managers who are missing should not be designing anything, but they should be forcing issues be resolved. This sucks. Time to go read some Spolsky, see if I can get something useful.

Cooking as permanent hobby

You can have booze as a hobby and overdo it, get drunk and vomit everywhere. You can have Half Life Team Fortress 2 as a hobby, overdo it and fail out of school. You can follow any fad or whathaveyou, and do that one thing for 18 hours a day for two weeks and be done with it.

If you do that with cooking, you'll have a tremendous amount of food you haven't eaten and be broke as shit from spending all your money on food. No one is going to make pancakes all day or roast turkeys. If you're serious about overdoing your cooking, you're going to be making lots of different dishes with different ingredients.

You're not doing that. Cooking is a self moderating hobby. And if you're saying, 'well, what if I eat all the food and put on 300 lbs?' Food coma: it exists.

In other news, I made Red Chard for the first time ever last night. Tasty.

Bucket List

Getting it started:

1. Fart on a baby (thanks @JennyJohnsonHi5!)
2. Get slizzered at the club
3. remove the blight of java from the earth
4. have another rum drink in the Caribbean (should be repeated)

More later when I'm angry again!

Junely array lists

I'm writing real code with real objects and everything, ma. Look at me, I'm using a big boy language with exceptions, IDEs and integrated build and deploy frameworks. I'm growing and learning if nothing else.

I have never really been an OO developer before. I don't think it matters, I'm just gluing shit together. Its not any harder or easier then what I used to do. 3 sprinkles of a new date time object, 2 pinches of framework calls and a solid week of bashing my face against array index calculations. I'd enjoy it all a lot more if the sprinkling and dashing weren't based on reading horrible recipes, erm... documentation.

Dox writing sucks. This is accepted fact. But if your dox suck, so does my ability to use your code. And maybe the underlying issue isn't that developers are bad writers, but that we're bad editors of both our code and english. We write some code and start using it. Now its locked in and we don't want to deal with the editing/refactoring process. Guess what we have?

Fucking National Enquirer of code. Why yes, I want to use a date/time object which makes it an absolute bitch to represent the date as a single number that references an objective 0. You know, as a single number like seconds from epoch or days since Christ's birth/death. Shit that should be there. And this is supposed to be the best this new to me language has?

Fuck me, gimmie a shell and a goddamned call to date. I'll fuck some shit up there.

terrible Hawaiian lager

had redhook for beer friday again this week. my choices are redhook, some ipa and blue moon. its always free so there is no bitching allowed but redhook is the only one I'd buy on my own. which means: it gets enjoyed every time.

gwen stefani: bubble pop electric: hahahahaha, oh god. this song is so good and terrible and wonderful and awful. pop rock, bad sexual innuendo, accurate description of teenage romance and strange possibly racist backup singers. I need more of this.

I probably need to say goodbye to my comfy chair soon. I haven't sat in it for several months now as its been in storage. I was fine with packing it up because I'd see it again. But letting it go forever? Oddly nostalgic and somewhat crippling fear. Its a wonderful chair and I have the the original documentation from 25 years ago when my grandpa bought it, but I think a few pictures and a fond farewell will do it proud.

I have now personified my chair. I didn't have a meaningful relationship with my grandpa. I love him, but I don't know him. He died when I was 10. He got me interested in coin collecting but I flipped out the one time I was supposed to crash at his house with him and my grandma and had to go home. I suppose I'm holding onto the chair as a way to try and get to know him. Have a meaningful relationship with him in some way.

Its quite clearly impossible, the man is dead. And even if he is an angel or something he's not gonna sit down with me and have a conversation about his army days. I can imagine whatever I'd like, but its not going to happen. When I look at my stuff, my furniture, things that I bought, I don't much care. I take care of it and I enjoy it and when its time to move on, I move on with no problems. But when its a gift or a hand-me-down I find it almost impossible to let the object go. Its all I have of that person right now and I don't want to let it go.

This is part of why I dislike receiving gifts. I know I have a finite capacity to hold on to things, to hold on to people and I quite like the things and people in me life right now. I don't care if there's an upgrade available. I have a different rating scale of things and what I have right now is best in the way I care about.

This isn't unique, really. Studies have been done that show if you have to price an object you price it much higher if its in your hands then if its on a shelf. I assume the above is an offshoot of this behavior. This behavior has been exploited for years by marketers and salesmen to, 'have a taste! see if you like it!' And because it is an exploited behavior I view it as weak and something to be avoided.

I can apply this security patch to things going forward so new items and new things don't have the same hold on me. But stuff that got through when the barn doors were open? Locked in. But they won't last forever and I need to get rid of them sometime. I'll probably want a La-z-boy again in the future, but for now I'll be happy with a desk chair and a pug. It'll be beautiful, we'll all see.

weekending with WoW and sushi

We have failed our lettuce experiment. We acquired gorgeous, delicious lettuce. It was tasty in my taco salad. It was wonderful as a cookie deployment system and it held up with great taste for some other meal I can't remember. Or maybe it wasn't that great then? Maybe its wilting and wasting away in our fridge was earned? That two-timing, flavor lacking red lettuce!

Oh, who am I kidding. I have a terrible memory. The lettuce was tasty and we failed it. We failed to eat it while it was in the flush of youth. The flush of 'not being wilted and gross and dude, this is supposed to be crunchy.' Those were glorious days now gone.

If we had our juicer, we could still give it a proper burial by blade. Scattering its pulp from its juice and then savoring its final gift to us. Alas, we're still in the mold haus which means: no juicer. Or toaster oven. I never knew what I was missing before I had one. Its like, 'I want to bake something small very quickly.' Bam. Efficiency in a countertop.

The future is coming and it brings juicers, toaster ovens and honorable deaths for our almost expired produce. The world works in mysterious ways and I intend to make a snack out of it.

orange peels and coffee cups

Having an orange with a cup of coffee is delicious and natural. The citrus tang melds with the bad coffee's bitterness. And the touch of sweetness in an orange lingers for just a second to trick you a little bit into thinking you're not drinking free office coffee but a crafted americano from an espresso machine.

mmmm.... coffee hijinks.

I should be getting my own grinder back soon. I may dump it immediately though and get a burr grinder. For science purposes only, of course. I need to make sure its a good buy before I get one for my dad. My dad, a man who I've been meaning to but a coffee pot and grinder for over a year now. I'll get it done eventually, probably.

But then, for science, I can see if it is a better brew. After that I'll start experimenting with water types and see if that matters. I've been told you get the biggest jumps by using a burr grinder and home roasting. I'm hesitant to try the roasting though as I'm terrifyingly poor handling fire. I'm casual with it which means I light things on fire I don't mean to. Like foam couches.