Omega0

Amazon wins.

Luckily I finally figured out what Haskell's monads are (and it's scary, I think these things have more firepower than Lisp macros).  I'm going to need to move on the smalltalk soon, the logo is makes an irresistible argument.

Just implemented Haskell's Either type in Java.

unclean...

[Edit]

It's getting worse.  I just refactored a clunky Java class into something that looks suspiciously like a mix of Haskell's algebraic types and closures.

...and then spent the rest of the day writing a page-long comment so the unenlightened java programmer that comes after me has a chance.

Nifty: http://www.fritolay.com/our-snacks/where-to-buy.html. It's hard to find the chili-cheese fritos around here but this saves a lot of time. Why can't there be similar services to track down live wire mountain dew?

I've been taking a stab at learning C#.  It's interesting.  When I encountered C++ (coming from C), I felt like I was moving backwards language-wise in spite of all the new features C++ supported.  I'm getting that same feeling now moving from Java to C#.  C# plenty of features that Java doesn't, yet I feel like I'm going backwards learning it.  I hope I can force my way through this, I never did learn C++ well.

Off to California on Monday.

Discovered the power of git checkout-index today.  Creating a branch has really pushed me to learn the commands.

Travel plans are finalized: I'm heading out to California 1st week of June.  The Java disaster I've been coding for the past month will get to terrorize its first users.

Nifty trick I just tried:

Take a pound of bacon, weave it into a mat and cook it in the oven.  Then cut it into squares and freeze it.  30 seconds in the microwave and now any burger/sandwich can be a bacon-burger or bacon-sandwich.

The only hangup was the bacon mat came out to 7 strips square making it a bit difficult to cut.  Even so the squares remained intact.

I found a webcomic a few weeks back with a pair of rabbits and (what looked like) simple dialog.  I deleted the link since in was in French.

I just realized that would make it a perfect source of practice sentences.

Stupid!

I had a runaway script wipe out a major chunk of the src directory of a project I was working on.  No need to panic, I'm using source control so I just need to git-reset and "index file corrupted"?

I did a little research and finally recovered the files.  I'm still a bit annoyed at Git though.  The whole purpose of git-reset is to wipe out any changes you've made.  Why the heck should it care if the index file is corrupted--it's about to overwrite it!

Made a batch of english digestive biscuits.  I've been trying to match the flavor of some store-bought ones I received a while back.  My last batch added wheat germ to try to improve the flavor, but didn't show much improvement.  This time I added rolled oats (toasted and coarsely ground) as well as substituting brown sugar.  There was a definite flavor improvement and they browned a lot nicer as well.

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This is why I shouldn't be left alone with a lojban dictionary.  The incantations of the biggest spells from The Slayers translated into Lojban:







Still playing with the phrasing in a few places, making sure the abstracts are in the right spots, debating connectives, etc.  Lojban forces so much extra verbage on you if you're not careful.  Though I'm still debating if ".isezau .ii mi'o tarti co tadji be le zu'o daspo" is a legit way to shorten ".ije .ii curmi lenu mi'o pruci be fo lo daspo be'o tarti"

Now, does the full incantation of Ra Tilt apear anywhere?

Why have I never run into these people before?

One of the small shops started carrying gummy fruit slices in bulk!

( Whine )

Thinking about dropping Firefox.  It stops each day to remind me that v3.0 is out and a few extensions I use have not had their version numbers bumped yet.  Opera beats into shape reasonably well--replacing noscript and adblock+ with a proxy server is pretty cool (though it may be one of those things that's a bit too cool).  Give it a few days to see which one's shortcomings are more annoying.

*

I looks like the hemorrhoids may have been a misdiagnosis. It seems to be clearing up with the new treatments (or at least I don't have any trouble sitting down for now).

Well Christmas is over, as are the vacation days.  As troublesome as hemorrhoids get, they do make it easier to justify avoiding relatives (It's been long enough for the underfoots to evolve in the more mobile and problematic creatures).

*

The dollar gift exchange was kind of boring this year.  The only interesting item was the sombrero contributed by my brother--which was mostly interesting because he picked it up at the orientation for his college in New Hampshire.  Apparently he's also developed a taste for Hawaiian pizza there.  (Wusses.  When I was in Erie we didn't start adding bits of tropical lifestyles to our routines to escape the frozen wasteland (no, my t-shirts don't count.  I wore those because it was just snowing a little and not worth a coat or long sleeves yet.).)

*

I now own a cheese knife.  It's a strange looking thing.  It has several holes through the back of the blade, the edge is wavy and the tip y-s out to two points.  I think it's more properly used to continue honorable combat after one's bat'leth is knocked aside in a dramatic fight scene.

*

My mouse is starting to get flaky.  Logitech no longer seems to sell the MX500 that I currently have and those remaining in circulation are going for exorbitant prices.  The prices on all other non-wimp mice seem to have doubled as well (I knew I had a good deal on the MX500--never realized it was that good). 

Downloaded the new version of the PIC-Lite.  It now supports about a hundred different microcontrollers.  So without any compelling reason for sticking with the 16F690 I have a lot of datasheets to read.

Car gas gauge will cost too much to fix.  Replacing it "260 miles = dead meat" on a post-it note.

Microsoft Outlook is evil.  At work I switched over to it from Outlook Express since our current client sends a lot of Outlook-format meeting notices.  Now I'm hooking on the program by a combinations of reliance on its useful features and curiosity of what the extra buttons do.

and to fill out the post, Screw Java!  Why does a JComboBox's Constructor require a Vector or Array when any Collection will do?  Heck, why doesn't JComboBox use generics in the first place?  It wouldn't break the interface for old code.

Voted.  It was an interesting decision.  My first thought that since Senator Obama was going to win anyway, I could cast my vote for president on whoever I wanted with no consequence.  Then I learned that in his final campaign speech he slipped in a screw-Pennsylvania (that's twice now, what does he have against us?).  In the end though I figured even that wouldn't make a difference and returned to my original plan.

Thankfully, the Green Party was absent from the ballot.  Though we still do have some voters that aren't all there--Mr. Nader still managed to get on.

The Constitution Party was on the ballot, though oddly enough they didn't have a single candidate on it (odd since I remember seeing a campaign sign for Mr. Baldwin).  I briefly considered voting straight constitution--it was the least objectional list of candidates I've ever seen--but passed.

Mr. In looked like an interesting candidate.  He was ambitious enough to run for every office AND had his own political party.  The machine wouldn't let me vote straight write-in though which killed that plan.

So there was no alternatives and I had to vote as I had planned.

*Sigh*

Why can't we have one of those multi-party parliamentary governments where no one can do anything regardless of who wins?

Heard christmas music on the radio this morning.  Someone must pay for this.

*

Have to stop answering the phone due to the quantity of political phone calls.  I commented that I only ever received Republican ones--it turns out the Democrats call during the day when I'm at work.  Shows what type of voters they're targeting I guess.

*

Various organizations are distributing their voter guides.  Doesn't bother telling me about the positions of the important candidates.  Is the Alaska Independence party's candidate OK to vote for?

I found a use for the Acme::Don't module today.  It was easier to comment out a large block of code with it than pod.

( Blah Blah Blah, audio driver screwiness )

First (sort-of)snow today.  Wet, cold and icy, feels like I'm back up in Erie.

I need to poke around an Access database and translate the data into a new format so I'm looking into adding C# to my languages.  So far, it looks identical to Java, but without having to hack in the function pointers and the IDE is less blatantly annoying.