is a blog by Brendan
You know, Java is great until you have to design a user interface with it. Then again, I could say that about pretty much any language that isn’t PHP (which just delegates UI to HTML).
I plan on never designing a non-HTML UI, so it’s a good thing I know a fancy boy UI programmer already. I assume he works for pudding.
The problem with doing research on any old thing that pops into your head, which I do, it’s neat, thanks to Google, is that you end up with sentences of which you understand maybe two words. To wit:
“Like myobatrachines, sooglossids have a ventrally incomplete cricoid ring, horizontal pupils, winglike alary processes on the hyoid, and a divided sphenethmoid. Amplexus is inguinal.”
From a page about Seychelle frogs. I mean, I understand “horizontal pupils” but that’s about it. As has been the case ever since I read Wuthering Heights, in high school and at gunpoint, I have this dark suspicion that the narrator is unreliable–that, in this case, the author of that page is just making up words to fuck with me (Kris Straub has actually done this). I mean, “sphenethmoid?”
Now somebody comment on my Livejournal feed explaining what that is, and how I’m dumb.
Oh, sure, Cody Powell may have a cool devlog and I don’t, but I know what it’s like to double-wield Covenant plasma rifles. Does he? Well, probably by later today he will. I’ve got nothing! My life is ruined!
What’s it’s like, incidentally, is that somebody thought up a way to make Covenant weapons useful.
Maria and I went to San Francisco last weekend, and it was pretty great. We left very early Saturday morning and got back very late Monday night, and although we unfortunately missed hanging out with Kris, we did get to play games and bum around with Leonard and Sumana a lot.
It was like every few hours we gained a new and spectacular privilege: aside from Leonard’s food, to which I’ll get in a moment, we discovered the mafia geese of Fairyland; we gained admittance to the residence of Kevin (more on this soon too); we got a quick-but-personal tour of Berkeley; we spent big wads of money at Games of Berkeley; and we played arcade games both vintage and new. Hell, Maria attended the national American Academy of Pediatrics conference practically by accident, and I got to have one of the first looks at Leonard’s newest awesome secret project (so awesome, he got banned from the API of at least one site!). It was that kind of weekend.
Now, Leonard’s food. It should be sufficient to say that Leonard’s fondue made me–the guy who hates cheese–like fondue, but I’m going to say more. We also got to eat his first-ever attempt at home fries, which were unfairly perfect, and his first-ever attempt at pie ice cream, which was also pretty freaking great. Leonard’s food is world peace. Leonard’s food is the answer.
As for Kevin’s house: when Ian and I were younger, we had on our 386 Magnavox computer a program called Floorplan Plus. Because we were dorks–huge dorks, the budding dorks of legend–we spent hours on that thing, designing about a million floor plans so that both of us could completely fail to go into architecture.
My houses were silly, but I always tried to make them sensible. Ian, on the other hand, was constantly reinventing a place he called Jamhouse. You can pretty much imagine what it was like: the perfect residence, as envisioned by a ten-year-old boy. And Kevin’s house is that house, but with a better sound system and more art. It is my future house’s role model.
I need to say something about Sumana too, because she was a major part of the weekend and I’ve barely mentioned her. We stopped for lunch in Berkeley at De La Paz; it was warm and we’d already walked a lot, and Maria (who is hypoglycemic) was getting kind of dizzy. Sumana got up, ostensibly to go to the bathroom, but first snuck over to the bar to have the lone waiter express-deliver a Coke to replenish her blood sugar. That is the kind of friend Sumana is.
Before February of this year I’d never been west of Minnesota, and now I’ve been to California three times in eight months. Two-thirds of that is due entirely to Leonard and Sumana, whose hospitality and thoughtfulness are boundless and unfailing.
I wouldn’t mind seeing I Heart Huckabees, which people seem to like. I like Jason Schwarzman (everybody likes Jason Schwarzman), and I liked David O. Russell’s Three Kings, and I like high-concept movies. Usually.
What gets me, though, is that all the critics go “existential detectives! Quantum mechanics! It’s WACKY!” and nobody mentions Dirk Gently. I’m not going to get huffy about this, because art is theft, but hasn’t anybody read those books? They’re not as well known as the Hitchhiker’s Guide series, but they were still bestsellers. Apparently about six dorks on movie forums are the only ones who’ve picked up on it.
Yeah, that puts me in real good company. As I wrote to Leonard yesterday, I’m never certain that I have any taste.
First Leonard called me out on it, then Maria called me out on it, then Leonard sent me a text-only debunking, then tonight Jon of all people sent me the definitive Snopes proof. Yes, I would have noticed the weird TV shadow and the odd intersection of the panel and the teletype if I’d been looking for it, but I wasn’t, OKAY? OKAY! I TAKE IT BACK! I’M SORRY! I QUIT!
I don’t actually quit.
I’ve been thinking about my performance evaluations class (which I’m failing, but still find interesting, except for the math), Leonard’s comment on bad metrics and the concept of keystroke counters and loggers (thanks to spam). There’s a quote in the textbook for the aforementioned class, “that which is monitored improves,” attributed to “Source Unknown.” So I can’t call out the person who said it for being wrong, which it is.
Here’s a handy set of heuristics for deciding when to monitor. For you! It would be better drawn as a flowchart or tree, but I’m lazy.
Good Things To Monitor
Bad Things To Monitor
Incidentally, this also covers the basis of the problem I have with standardized testing. Or the lecture-test educational system as a whole, in fact.
Update 09.25.2004 1054 hrs: Leonard has pointed out to me that I somehow copied the wrong Crummy hyperlink. It’s fixed.
Leonard has pointed out that that picture‘s caption is incredibly fake when you think about it for a second, as I failed to do. The concept of “home computer” in 1954 would have been equivalent to “home aircraft carrier” today; there was no concept of the use for one, much less a market, and it’s not like whatever device actually is pictured there would have had any home applications itself.
I still want to know why there’s a steering wheel and a teletype, though. Maybe it’s for trying to drive a vehicle without a windshield. Or… or a very complicated bank vault.
I guess you could buy art from Jon Morris and have every cent go to fight multiple sclerosis, but I already got the best piece, so y’know, why bother?
