Over the past few weeks I've been reminded by more than a couple of people within my sphere of influence that my blog has been relatively (okay, completely) dead for the past... wow, couple of months, I guess. Granted that at one point I was writing an entry nearly every day, it's got me thinking about why I was able to write so much back in the day and yet never find the motivation to do so now. I could come up with the usual excuses, I don't have anything to write about, or I don't have time, or what not, but those never seemed like the key reason behind why I haven't written much at all in my blog this semester. It wasn't until last night, as I was plodding away at my fifth and final hardware lab report for my digital design class, that it hit me: my creative-writing (more on that in a minute) energy has been poured into lab reports, modeling assignments, documentation at the College of Nursing, and other writing-intensive things. So, where has all the writing gone, you ask? (I'm reminded of an old commercial for Hershey's Cookies n' Creme chocolate bars, way back in the day... where the kid would open up the cookie jar and exclaim, "But where have all the cookies gone?!" after which the 'announcer' would butt in to say, "Into Hershey's Cookies n' Creme bars!" Random? yes. Pointless? probably. Amusing at this time of night? most definitely.) I'll try and explain as best I can.

First of all, I haven't forgotten my blog completely. Yes, it's gathered some dust, but it's still something that I want to write in often. I still come up with ideas, usually as I'm trekking around campus between classes (of course, by the time I reach my next class, and subsequently a piece of paper to write down said ideas, I've moved on to other things), and I have started a number of different blog entries only to leave them lying half-complete and never to return to them again. In fact, I've started more than one "mini-series" and made significant headway into them, after which I lost interest and left them until I find motivation to finish them. Both of them were Starbound related, and I had made outlines and everything for them, and had made it more than halfway through the first one, with more than enough content to finish it and do it complete justice—however, my ADHD kicked in somewhere there and I lost interest completely in finishing it.

Part of the reason, at least at first, that things were quiet was because I was (and still am) planning to restructure my blog and finally move it to my domain and Wordpress. While I need to just bite the bullet, setup Wordpress with the default layout and start using it, I decided I'd do something a bit more bold and attempt to do it "right". 37Signals would appropriately butt in here and add that I need to "get real", somewhat like they did to the beaver overthinking his dam (a beaver after my own heart, if I do say so myself). In the process of doing it "right," I'd be writing a Wordpress plugin that synchronized my LiveJournal and Wordpress the way I felt syncing should happen (no such complete plugin exists, else I'd just use that). It also involved splitting my blog at least three ways—into FutileOhm, a.k.a. my lengthy ramblings about whatever I feel like similar to what it is now, more Starbound/Church oriented writing about my experiences therein, and then random comments/blurbs/links/etc. that I find. The latter of the pieces is due to the fact that a lot of the time I have short ideas that I'd love to blog about, but they don't warrant a full entry on my blog. So, they sit in NetNewsWire (which conveniently saves tabs between web browsing sessions, which has proven as much a blessing as a curse), gathering dust, until I stumble across them a month or two later (no lie), realize that they're just taking up precious real-estate on my NNW tab bar, think to myself "oh yeah, I was going to blog about this..." and then close them. This usually happens during one of my periodic "cleanup" phases in which I attempt (often with great futility) to go against my pack-rat ways and get rid of stuff I'll never use again. Clearly this refactoring of my blog has yet to happen, so maybe it'll become my summer project. You know, because I'll have so much more time this summer when I'm working 40-hours a week on top of being at church or church-related stuff every day except Friday.

Enough of what I've been wanting to do though. The fact is, my classes this semester have been very demanding on my writing skill, as was my job at the College of Nursing during the month or so before I left. At the CoN, after telling my boss I was leaving, I was basically asked to document the programs I'd written and scripts I'd made and what not. I absolutely loved doing this—writing about something I've created and put effort into and know inside and out is something I thoroughly enjoy. I spent about two weeks writing documentation for the various projects I'd worked on, giving it to my boss and coworkers to experiment with, test, and critique, rinse lather repeat. It was intense. Well, any writing is intense for me, but this was even more so because I was on a deadline and I wanted to make sure it was understandable and complete before I was off the payroll. I got it done with time to spare, and while I miss that job, it was good to finish up there in order to make more time for Starbound, which was getting the short end of the straw more often than not when things got busy.

As my job at the CoN drew to a close, I figured I'd have some more motivation to write given the amount of writing I'd been doing the few weeks prior there. This wasn't the case at all. You see, around this time is when two of my classes kicked into high gear and started requiring me to write reports or projects in what has been ever-increasing volume. The most writing-intensive class I'm taking this semester is my CSE120 class, Digital Design Fundamentals. Basically, it starts with "this is a 1, and this is a 0, and they are not the same thing" and ends with us simulating the logical design (using logical AND/OR/NOT/etc. gates, binary switches, etc.) of a 4-bit microprocessor, complete with, well, everything that's needed to make a microprocessor that can perform logic and arithmetic automatically based on instructions and data stored in its ROM (don't worry, that sentence would have flown right over my head too before taking the class). Starting the second week or so of the course, we've had a lab report due every week, each of which has been of greater complexity than the last. Half of them were in the hardware lab, using wires and chips and logic trainer board things to build circuits, and the other half are simulation labs, where we build the circuits on the computer and test them that way.

My first lab report was 1 and 1/2 pages (not including the title page), whereas my last simulation lab report was about 11 pages long, minus 3 pages worth of graphics/tables. This is all single-spaced, so when you do the math you realize that's a lot of writing to have to be doing every week. It's not fun, sarcastic, witty writing either. Instead, it's technical writing about the guts of nice digital circuits, huge tables of 1's, 0's, and X's which are used to build said circuits, and pretty pictures of the simulations of the circuits themselves. (If you're curious as to what my writing style looks like when I'm writing dense, technical stuff using lots of fancy jargon to describe the guts of pieces of a microprocessor, check out one of my sim labs.) That said, I still thoroughly enjoy writing the lab reports for that class. They're enjoyable for me because the subject matter interests me, and as I said earlier, I like writing about things that I created in detail and explaining every last detail of them. That's precisely what I do for the lab reports—I build the circuit in the hardware/software lab, test it, and then write about it. While it's tedious, it certainly accomplishes what it's meant to do, and as a result I know the inner workings of everything I've built in that class pretty much by heart. Print the report on my nice, HP Soft Gloss Laser Presentation paper using my recently-acquired color laser printer, and you're left with reports that have received very high grades overall. Which, in turn, makes it worth my effort... the fact that I could spend two hours less and get a grade a few points lower (still an A) on each one doesn't make the extra effort I put into writing them—creating pretty tables, perfecting each simulated circuit in LogicWorks and tediously exporting it to PDF before plopping into InDesign—any less worth it.

My CSE class isn't the only one in which I've had to apply my furiously-longwinded writing skills, however. The other class this semester which has taken it out of my writing energy is my ECE100 Intro to Engineering class. Because growing up as the son of an engineer and realizing that everything I do, say, write, or make is grossly overengineered in itself is not enough to prove to ASU that I'm an engineer by blood, I am required to take a class which rivals 7th grade science with Mrs. Pate (heh, remember the guinea pig? rusty spoons? good times) in pointlessness. When we're not enduring hour-long lectures in which our "professor" (who's rarely there anyways) or TA sit and ramble to us in broken English about how thinking things through before you do them is actually a good idea, we're typically either making fun of said lectures in our groups (my group is the only reason I go to that class) or being assigned worthless assignments that somehow are supposed to teach us how to become engineers. Contrary to the writing I do for my CSE class, the writing I do for my engineering class is extremely witty, sarcastic, and bitterly-amusing. I don't think anyone in that class takes any of our assignments or "modeling projects" seriously, I just happen to add my own little spin in order to retain my sanity.

Take, for example, our second "modeling project". The prompt we were given is that this guy, Tom, gets home from a basketball game and wants a cold beer. However, he was stupid and short-sighted enough not to put any of his beer in the fridge beforehand. And, his freezer's broken. So, we had to figure out how long it'd take before Tom could finally relax with a cold one and further destroy his liver. One of my favorite quips (which my audience here will most certainly understand, at least) was one of the "assumptions" I made about the given problem:

Tom has no quicker way to cool his beer, but can occupy himself on MySpace (his pride and joy) while his beer is being refrigerated

Ah yes, there's just something so refreshing about relating any guy named Tom to the Tom of MySpace. If only we could be as cool as Tom.

As the semester wore on, my writing got less and less serious, as I realized that I could pretty much write whatever I wanted, so long as I had enough big words to confuse our TA into thinking I knew what I was talking about. When our third "modeling project" was assigned, I couldn't help myself. My introduction to the report follows:

Tom’s stuck in a rut... again. Now that he’s sober after his basketball-induced drinking binge, he realizes that his final exams are in no less than 10 days and that he is at risk of failing both his French and Calculus classes, which would completely destroy his chances of becoming an NBA draft pick next year. This not only entails excommunication from his girlfriend and the majority of his NBA-bound friends, it could mean the loss of a limb—not to mention his inheritance—upon breaking the news to his parents.

Upon realizing the imminent consequences, Tom decides action needs to be taken to ensure his knowledge of both French and Calculus will earn him at least a passing grade. To do so, he will have to utilize the language lab to improve his understanding of French, and hire a tutor to help him out with Calculus. Because of the successful solution to his beer-cooling dilemma, he has decided that engineering students should be utilized to over-engineer his conundrum in order to ensure he can earn passing grades on both of his critical final exams.

It gets better though. Today was our "final exam" in our engineering class. Basically, we were given yet another "modeling project" type thing, except this time it was to be solved by our groups and had to be typed up in class. I wish I had a copy of it, because ours was absolutely hilarious. Essentially, we were asked to come up with an "IT solution" to the traffic problems around ASU's campus. By "IT solution", it meant that we couldn't just build a bridge or widen the roads or otherwise normally engineer the problem, instead we had to use "Information Technology" to ease traffic congestion. Not content to just tweak the light timings a bit (the lights in downtown Tempe are exquisitely timed as it is, which is a topic for another time, I should think), we engineered our own solution that was something to the effect of this:

Due to lack of foresight in implementing Tempe's infrastructure when planned 126 years ago, large amounts of construction are now required to add additional infrastructure needed for future projects and as such traffic congestion around ASU has become a problem. In order to solve the traffic congestion problems around ASU, raw data from road sensors* and satellite-based real-time traffic monitoring which is already in place and collecting data, will be fed into our extremely complex and technically advanced traffic-flow modeling software which members of our IT department have been developing over the past 15 years. This modeling software will take control of the traffic lights and segment cars into functional groups, which will then be routed through the grid accordingly. To augment the dynamic nature of the supercomputer-powered traffic-flow system, automated, mobile barricades, manufactured by Tom's Barricades and currently in the testing phase, will be controlled by the supercomputer as well in order to dynamically adjust traffic flow based on current needs. For example, a large group of northbound traffic on Rural road may warrant three lanes being allocated for traffic flow northbound and only one being used for southbound traffic. When the funeral procession, traveling southbound, arrives five minutes later, the supercomputer will adjust the barricades accordingly, paying homage to the dead by moving them to the sides of the road and placing them into their 'bow' mode as the procession passes, functionality specifically added to the barricades complicated programming algorithms for such a purpose. In order to create room for the ~$4 billion supercomputer cluster that will need to be built near ASU, the Manzanita dormitory complex will be leveled to make way for a state of the art supercomputer facility to be built there. While many in Tempe may mourn the loss of a historic building such as Manzanita, the iconic design of the supercomputer facility, itself designed by a supercomputer in Tokyo, will bring Tempe's architecture into the modern age and will complement the Tempe skyline.

Although promotion of the current bus system in Tempe could provide a plausible solution to the problem at hand in a much more cost effective way, the engineers involved with the project believe that the busses are worthless, and thus such an option was not even considered.

If you couldn't tell, everything after the asterisk definitely utilized our creative license. And yes, pretty much everything I said there went into our report, including the destruction of Manzi (oh what a glorious day that'd be) and the automated barricades, complete with a function to make them bow as a funeral procession passes. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Whatever the case, the point I'm trying to make is that my creative writing has been expressed elsewhere and as such I'm just out of creative-writing juice by the time I get home and have finished my homework, etc. I'm hoping that this summer I'll once again be doing much less writing, and will thus have more energy to write here once again. Writing takes a lot of energy and work. Heck, just typing this entry has taken me the better part of three hours... and I could have said a lot more than I did. If you're not convinced (unlikely at this point), one of my favorite bloggers who I've mentioned before, John Gruber, has left his job in order to pursue blogging full-time. So, blogging can be a full-time career if you make it one. While I'd love to do that, obviously I can't right now, and thus I'll do my best to keep updating my blog when I can with my insight into strange, trivial, and interesting topics that most people wouldn't have noticed anyways.

Lately, I've been feeling the need to write something profound; something that will shatter the norm and leave my mark on society. I could comment on the continued growth of communism on Rural Road, or try and extrapolate further on the University narthex, but those topics have been done to death elsewhere, so there's no need for me to continue my ride on those bandwagons. No, it's time for something different. It's time, my friends, to pick on Nick.

While the profundity may never surpass that of the original gem I wrote a few months ago, I have been slowly stockpiling ammunition and analyzing his every move (cameras? what cameras?) in order to provide a robust, unbiased commentary discussing the nuances of my good friend Nick.

On being too polite

Believe it or not, there is such a thing as being too polite. Politeness is, in its simplest form, a tradeoff between a small sacrifice of one's own convenience in order to increase someone else's. By all means, being polite is important (particularly for a sprightly young girlfriended lad such as Nick) but there comes a point when such politeness becomes overdone. Opening and holding the door for someone is an admirable gesture of kindness that Nick seems to have mastered well; however, part of holding the door and expecting others to proceed through said door whilst it is being held only works if the kind and gracious door holder knows when to walk through a door someone else is holding open for him, instead of attempting to encourage said door holder to enter before him, which, were he holding the door, he would refuse to do. Confused yet? Good. Me too.

You see Nick, politeness is something that has to be given and taken, all at once.

On giving and taking

Speaking of giving and taking, part of being an upstanding, respectable American citizen is knowing when to take without giving back. Clearly, it's the American way—had we not taken what was rightfully someone else's, we wouldn't have a country, much less large stockpiles of nukes in North Dakota. Sometimes you have to be arrogant, selfish, and willing to take what people put in front of you—there's no better way to make the founding fathers proud.

Sadly, Nick hasn't realized what it means to be a true American yet. You see, he tries to be too nice—often harboring the impression that he has to somehow repay those who generously bestow things of monetary value upon him. Things like, say, food. Every real American knows that if someone pays for your dinner, you politely thank them and smirk, knowing that you can spend your hard-earned money on items less essential to your survival—beer, drugs, hitmen, and other crucial-but-less-necessary items. Nick, it seems, has not discovered his genuine American potential, and as such acts foolishly when such a situation arises. When the generous benefactor finds, to some dismay, Alexander Hamilton resting on the back seat of his car, he can do nothing but wonder whose money was left in his car. Upon realizing that the money was left intentionally as a reimbursement, this benefactor wonders why his monetary extensions are under-appreciated.

Upon being questioned about this unfortunate series of events, Nick responded, "It was either me or Teddi. And Teddi steals money out of wallets, she doesn't give." Exactly. You see Nick, Teddi has realized her American potential and has embraced it with open arms. He was, of course, referring to another incident in which the previously mentioned benefactor was standing in line at a posh fast-food establishment quite near the heart of the Chandler ghetto (yes, believe it or not, such a thing exists). Upon opening his wallet to prepare money for the impending transaction, Teddi quietly reaches over, grabs a $20 bill, and pockets it, all the while resuming normal conversation. The astute benefactor, having prepared in advance for such a beneficiary, thinks nothing of it. That, my friends, is a quintessential example of doing things the American way.

On succumbing to temptation

One can't enumerate the virtues of Nick without mentioning his endeavors on the world wide web. The most notable of these is, of course, his MySpace. Nick was, back in the day, allied with me in my hatred of MySpace—however, it seems the teenage drama nirvana became too tempting for him to resist. It all started with a picture, and from there things took a distinctly downhill trajectory. It's safe to now say that Nick has been fully brainwashed by MySpace, and leave any further conclusions to the reader.

On walking a fine line

Lastly, it is hard to ignore the fine line Nick walks between being normal and—to use the popular term of the day—Brokeback-esque. Recently, Nick was caught raising his hand when the ever-present "who's gay?" question arose. To further incriminate him, just this past weekend, while sitting at a far less posh fast-food establishment a fair distance further from the Chandler ghetto, he quite brashly informed someone sitting nearby that his fly was undone. The victim of Nick's outcry, confident in his fly-zipping abilities, calmly responded that it was, indeed, zipped completely. I can only begin to question the train of thought that led to him looking at such an area long enough to make such a comment.

Furthermore, I'll let the comment below speak for itself:


As the great Jon Botsford said, "the only thing Nick has going for him on that front is his girlfriend."


And with that, I leave you to derive your own conclusions about the ubiquitously lovable Nick.

So, it's my first day back at school, and I'm proud to announce that I'm already bored out of my mind between classes. I've been on campus for a whopping two and a quarter hours now, and already I've had some interesting experiences and observations to share with the world. Scary thought, eh?

The University Drive Narthex

I miss the days of yesteryear, when our church threw the word narthex around as if people actually knew what it meant. The narthex, for those who weren't around then or have simply never heard the word before, is the tiny room thing that sits between the lobby and the sanctuary. Think of it as a combination usher hangout, sound/light buffer, and de-pressurization chamber (for those really powerful sermons). It really serves few other purposes, aside from connecting the cry room and the kitchen to the sanctuary.

Today as I was walking from my car to class and waiting to cross University at the dual crosswalk just west of the bridge, I realized that the two crosswalks form a unique traffic phenomenon. You see, these two crosswalks are spaced as if they were at an intersection; however, no street intersects University at that point. So, you have traffic lights and crosswalk signs that act as if there's a complimentary set of lights and signs that don't actually exist. The inherent problem, of course, arises with yellow lights. People attempt to run the yellow light and make it past the first crosswalk, at which point they realize that there's a second crosswalk. By this time, of course, the light is red and large, unruly mobs of students are attempting to cross the street. As a result, the car is stuck between the two crosswalks in this dead space, feeling stupid for trying to run the yellow light and making a fool of itself in the process. This phenomenon reminds me of the narthex—you can make it in one set of doors but you still won't be home free, so if you try to squeeze in as they're closing the outer doors, so as not to appear late for church, you're still stuck having to open the second set, and as a result you gain nothing. Thus, I've decided to start referring to the space between the two crosswalks on University as the University Narthex. I think it's a fitting name...

Some people...

The other lovely experience I had today was in my first class of the semester—CSE 120 (Digital Design Fundamentals or somesuch) at 7:40 AM. I arrived about 15 minutes early and joined the growing handful of people waiting outside the classroom, which was locked. At 7:30, the door clicked, and the card reader next to it changed from red to green. I thought that was pretty cool, namely that the door automatically unlocked for us, and we didn't have to wait for a professor to show up. The room itself consisted of about 50 computers, weird little Dell things with decent flat panel monitors, at angles facing inwards in pairs of two at tables. I sat down and class started, and a little while later this guy comes in and sits down in the chair next to me. After uttering a few rather loud complaints about how he "froze [his] [expletive deleted] off getting there," he tried to log on to his computer and wasn't able to because it wasn't working. Instead of moving to another seat, he asked me if he could get on the computer in front of me real quick to look something up. Of course, me being me, I let him do so, and after taking about 5 minutes to just get logged on to the stupid thing, he proceeded to look up his schedule. All of this of course was happening as the professor was lecturing, which was mildly annoying.

Upon seeing his schedule he muttered a few more expletives and as far as I can tell proceeded to drop/add a class from his schedule, and then write down his other classes. Okay, I thought, he's almost done. Not so. Then he logged on to Facebook, and started updating his info on there. Lovely. A few minutes later he finished, mind you without logging off of the computer, and I figured my nightmare was over. Later, of course, he asked to borrow a pencil to use for the pre-test thing we were given. With nobody else around to give him one, I felt obligated to, and as is to be expected I never got my pencil back. Argh, how annoying.

I'm a programmer, dangit

My job has been interesting of late. I still enjoy work 95% of the time, but lately I've been a little frustrated with my role relative to the others working there. The big thing I've been working on lately is a big logon script in VBScript. My hatred for VBScript aside, I made good progress on the script, learning how to interact with SQL Server 2000 and ADO in the process, and I pretty much have it complete now. The frustrating thing for me though was the fact that my boss gave me pretty tight deadlines for getting the script done, and would then proceed to ask me to do menial tasks like set up computers or troubleshoot people's problems. While I'm technically paid to do just that, it bugs me because not only are there two other people now who do that full-time (and are much more efficient at it than I am), but when I get distracted from programming it takes me a while to get back in "the zone" and program efficiently again. Thus, every interruption I have usually halves my efficiency for about thirty minutes afterwards. Given that I'm usually only at work for a few hours at a time, that's a major chunk of the day gone, especially when the menial tasks take a good thirty minutes to an hour to complete themselves.

Personally, I believe that if you're going to ask me to program, let me sit and write a program without interruption. When I'm done, you can have me do other things, but if you want my program done well and done right, you'll leave me be. I guess I live in an ideal world though...

It's nice to finally be at the point where I have the money to buy quality products and in the process support things that I feel are worth supporting. Over the past couple of years, I've started realizing that most of the time (there are notable exceptions) you get what you pay for when it comes to, well, pretty much anything. In the process, I've become someone who'd rather use the best tool for the job, and will pay a price to do so. I'd rather pay for something that I know will help me achieve my greatest efficiency and productivity levels than settle for something that just gets the job done.

The best example at this point is probably my camera. As I've mentioned before, I splurged and bought the Canon 20D over the Digital Rebel XT, primarily because the 20D just felt nice in my hands, and was a few hundred dollars more expensive. At the time, the fact that it felt nicer in my hands, and was better than all of my friends' XTs (bragging rights are always a plus) was reason enough to spend the extra money, which at the time I had an abundance of. It was worth every penny though, for reasons I never would have imagined I'd care about a few months ago. Take, for example, the framerate. The 20D can shoot 5 shots a second, versus the XT's 3. "That won't really matter, I don't really shoot sports or anything anyways," was my reaction to that. However, had I not had the 5fps 20D I probably wouldn't have snagged what's probably my favorite picture I've ever taken. If it's not evident from the picture itself, he was swinging around the pole and then let go, and I got about three frames of him falling away, the best of which was pretty much perfect. That was a situation where milliseconds made the difference between a good shot and a phenomenal shot. (Of course, Costco's 12x18" enlargements for $3, combined with their free ICC profiles and accurate color calibration, make a great picture even better). There are other things about the camera which have proven more useful than I ever thought they would too, but that's been the most notable one so far. To me, that picture is worth the few hundred dollars extra I paid for the upgrade to the 20D.

On a similar note, I've learned since getting my camera that the lens you use affects the quality of the pictures you take far more than the camera does. I've mentioned lenses before, but the difference between my current lens and the kit lens that came with my camera is like night and day. The 50mm f/1.8 Mark II prime is Canon's cheapest, lightest lens... it costs about $70, and is made of somewhat cheap-feeling plastic that explains the $70 cost. Optically however, this lens is absolutely amazing. It really is crystal clear sharpness-wise, even wide open, not to mention it's gorgeous bokeh (background blur) and its f/1.8 (read: FAST) minimum aperture. Why would Canon sell one of its most optically brilliant lenses in a cheap plastic housing for less than $100? Simple: 50mm is the equivalent of the human eye (the best way to envision this, is that if you're looking through a SLR camera with a 50mm lens and you open the other eye, things will be the same size in both eyes), and is probably the most common focal length prime sold for any camera—in photo last year, we used 50mm primes pretty much exclusively, for example. One of the biggest advantages I've found with using a prime over a zoom is that it forces you to use your feet to zoom instead of standing in one spot and zooming with a lens. It makes me think about the composition of the shot itself, the angle, framing, etc., more because I can't just stand and follow a subject, I have to physically move closer if I want to zoom, for example.

Mind you, the 50mm f/1.8 lens isn't the highest quality or sharpest Canon lens available (there's a 50mm f/1.4 lens that sports USM and a metal mount, for example), but it does the job for me and as of right now serves my needs perfectly. On the other hand, my dad could really do with a large focal range, telephoto lens for his train pictures (yes folks, he sits and takes pictures of trains... it's supposedly quite relaxing, and I'd much rather do that than say, sit and fish all day... but that's probably because my dad enjoys it). There are numerous zoom lenses with a 70- or 75- to -200 or -300 type range that Canon sells, however the only one that's less than $1,000 which hasn't gotten mediocre reviews is the 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS lens, which Canon introduced in August of this year (as opposed to the 50mm prime, which has been around for over a decade, I believe). It runs about $650, give or take, which is steep when you could essentially buy two point and shoot digital cameras for that price (and nice quality ones, too), but given its reviews and the 3rd-generation IS, I think it might just be worth springing for. We'll see though, we'll see...

Another fine example of things I get anal about quality-wise is paper. I've learned that the paper you print something on can make a huge difference in a person's initial reaction to whatever it is you're printing. When it comes to schoolwork, it may not objectively increase my grade, but it certainly has the benefit of a subjective grade increase. For those of you who don't know, I'm a printer/font/typeography/etc. nerd, and it bugs me when something looks awesome on the screen and then doesn't look as great on paper. The quality of paper can make a huge difference in quality, especially when you're dealing with laser printers. Yes, you can buy a ream of beige-ish (when put next to a truly-white piece of paper, at least), light-weight paper for less than 1¢ per sheet, and it'll still work fine in your printer, and for something like research or what not which doesn't really matter (a.k.a. there's no grade, money, business deal, etc. attached) it's great, and dirt cheap. But when it comes to representing your work, which you've put time and effort into, isn't it worth a dollar or two to print it on paper that's as good a quality as the work printed on it? Currently, I'm addicted to HP's Soft Gloss Laser Presentation Paper. It's very bright white, you can print on both sides with no bleed through whatsoever, and it just feels nice. It truly is soft-gloss... it's not matte but it's not photo glossy either... it's just glossy enough to make text and graphics pop and to feel really nice in your hands. When you pick up something printed on this paper, you immediately say "ooo" (unless you've felt it before), and subconsciously you think, "if this is good enough to print on nice quality paper, it's probably worth my time." Instant brownie points, before the person even looks at what's actually on the paper itself. And the best part is, it was only 10¢ a sheet... I bought a box of 200 sheets last year (to use with Hodge's Color LaserJet, which I truly miss), and I've still got a good 50 left, after printing photo fliers and Centanni presentation notes and pretty much all of my essays, etc. on it last year and this semester. If you have a laser printer, buy some... if nothing else, you'll have teachers pulling you aside and telling you, "I love this paper, it just feels so nice." I'm convinced it actually affects my grades on papers, maybe not significantly, but enough to make it worth my while by far. Besides, it's nice to stand out from the crowd and be unique.

There are numerous other instances in which you get what you pay for, but there are other notable things where buying on teh cheap (intentional misspelling of 'the', for those who might jump at the chance to correct me) gives you just as much quality as you need. Computer memory, whether it's RAM or flash memory (CompactFlash, etc.) is usually good enough no matter how cheap or free it is after rebate or on sale. I just bought 2x512MB memory sticks for my G5 (finally bumping it to over 1GB of RAM) for $30 a pop at CompUSA on Blue Wednesday (a.k.a. the Wednesday before thanksgiving, which as far as I know doesn't have a color associated with it, so I took the liberty of making up my own, because colored days are always better, especially around Black Friday). Despite being some brand I've never heard of before, they worked like a charm, even in my relatively-picky-about-RAM G5. I was happy.

CD-Rs are also better bought for <5¢ a pop, because usually even the crappiest brands work fine in CD players and obviously will work just fine in computers. I remember when my dad used to refuse to buy CD-Rs unless they were free... when Thanksgiving rolled around, we'd stock up on free CD-Rs (usually after rebate, but who's counting?) and be set for the next year. This year, however, there were no such deals, which was very disappointing. Thankfully, we still have a good 100 left from earlier this year, and given the rate at which we now use them (maybe a couple a month), they'll last us a goodly while.


As for why it took me a week to crank out my thoughts on this subject, especially given my promise last week to finish it "tomorrow" and the fact I had it pretty much half-written that night too... beats me. It's probably because I enjoy keeping all my avid readers in suspense. Or more simply because I didn't get a chance to sit down and type for a contiguous period of time. Either way, now you have it.

One of the websites (dealnews) my dad visits on a regular basis during his incessant deal-searching has the wonderful and so-very-fitting slogan, "How to go broke saving money." That's how I feel today... I'm out ~$250, but I saved about that much (arguably more, if you count the extras I got) in the process!

My first purchase was the Adobe Creative Suite (v2.0, of course). As a result of my recent photography endeavors in which I've become increasingly pleased with the quality of my camera combined with my wubbly 50mm prime (if you have a Canon EOS camera and don't have one of these lenses yet, get one now; worth every penny in a number of ways), I figured it was finally time to plunk down the $400 (plus tax) for the student edition of the Creative Suite, seeing as I use Photoshop and InDesign frequently enough now to warrant buying them, and having a legal copy of the whole suite is just a good thing in general. So I walk into the ASU Computer Store, grab a CS2 box, and bring it up to the counter. "We actually have a version that's $190, with some limitations, for students only behind the counter if you'd like," says the guy behind the counter. "Okay," I reply. Turns out that students are entitled to buy one copy of the Creative Suite, minus the printed manuals (bummer... heh), that's licensed through Adobe's "Student License" program for $190 instead of the usual $400. After signing away my soul (well, not really, I asked lots of questions to make sure I wasn't signing into some gimmick, and indeed I wasn't), I paid just over $200 for software that retails for $1,200 (gotta love student discounts). AND, wait until you hear this... by registering online with Adobe, I got a free font! Not some cheesy font either... Adobe Garamond Premier Pro, in all of its OpenType glory =D (which—for those of you who think fonts are things you download for free on 101freefonts.com or what not—would set me back a cool $300 if I bought both the font itself and the Opticals). That was really exciting.

My second purchase wasn't nearly as exciting (it's not often you get a $300 font and pay $200 less than you expect for something), but it was a deal if I ever did see one. You see, I let my friend Patrick "borrow" my Sennheiser HD477 headphones when I helped him build his computer a few months back, and I have yet to see them again. If I went over to his dorm and pounded on the door I'm sure he'd give them back, but I figured I'd buy a nicer pair and just have him pay me $20 for the pair he has instead (he was planning to buy some, and he said he'd pay me for them if I bought a new set). I initially went looking for a pair of HD497s, which are the next model up. Turns out Sennheiser's released some new models in the same line, and I was intrigued, and wondered whether they were worth the extra money. I finally settled on the HD485, because of their improvements over the HD4x7s (single cord, better frequency range, etc.), and started looking around for a deal. The cheapest price I could find was on Target.com, which after tax and shipping was basically the same as everywhere else ($80 or so). I found a 10% off coupon on dealcoupon, which knocked ~$7 off the price. Then I remembered I had a $25 gift certificate (from Hodge, I believe) as well... so when I got home I applied that and ended up only having to pay $50. That was good enough for me, so I purchased them and that was that.

I feel accomplished!

My first "real" program with the potential to be used by a user base larger than two or three people went "live" yesterday. The reason I enquote "real" is because it's a pretty pitiful excuse for a program (it doesn't do much), and by "live" I mean it technically can be downloaded by nurses to use at home, although it hasn't been thoroughly bug-tested yet and no big announcement telling all of the nurses to switch has been made. It does however work, and it works pretty darn well if you ask me. Given that I'd never touched Visual C++ or MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes, I believe) before, I feel pretty accomplished that I produced an application that works and does so relatively elegantly. I'd post a link to it, but it's useless if you're not part of the College of Nursing.

I still don't know what I think about Visual C++, the Win32 API, and MFC. The reason I ended up coding it in C++ as opposed to C# is because I had to avoid using .NET, given that the app will be installed on any number of home systems of people who don't know what the heck .NET even is, much less have the framework (or the broadband connection to efficiently install it... it's upwards of 20MB, which is suicide for a modem... unless you're Pasta, in which case you scoff at 20MB and keep nagging your parents to get broadband while you leave your computer downloading overnight). So, the only real choice was C++ and MFC, which is good and bad in itself.

I like C++ in general because I like C, and there's something about automatic memory managed languages that rubs me the wrong way (*cough*IhateJava*cough*). The problem with using MFC is that you have to dig around for the documentation, because most of the results returned on MSDN are for .NET, unless you search for an MFC method/class specifically. Of course, the MFC/VC++ documentation is inconsistent, incomplete, and generally lacking when it comes to the functionality I use (of course... obviously the documentation-writers were out to get me), which doesn't help much. MFC is also showing its age, and thus doesn't always take well to the automation that Visual Studio .NET (2003) tries to impose upon it. (I have my own opinions about Visual Studio's automation, but that can wait for another time.) My 1337 CodeWarrior skillz paid off, however, and I beat it into a halfway-decent app, which I then pretty much rewrote because of the server crash a couple of weeks ago.

Here's how it works (for those curious, which is probably nobody at this point, but that's their problem, not mine =P ): It presents a username and password login screen for the nurse. They enter their credentials and click the OK button (or Cancel to quit). The program then pulls a list of drive letters and associated shares from the internet, which it parses. It mounts the first drive (the Z: drive, in this case), and then either continues mounting drives or handles updating itself, if an update is available. If it finds that there is a later build available, it spawns an "updater" process, quits, and then the updater process copies the new version over the current version, and launches the new version, at which point the user starts over and can mount their drives. There's a simple status window as it's mapping drives that tells the user what drive it's trying to map. When it finishes, it tells the user what drives it mapped, and quits.

The app weighs in at ~270KB with MFC linked in, which is nice too—small = good. So far, it works exactly as expected, with the exception of a stupid regex error that made it initially not parse share names with spaces in them... that was a two-character fix though, so all is good now (and the autoupdate worked like a charm too).

So, I feel pretty accomplished... it's nice to have an application "ship" with your boss's approval.

Too smart for my own good?

Lately I've been wondering whether I'm too smart for my own good. Not because I think I'm smarter than anyone or because I claim to know everything, but because, given the situations I'm in at school, work, and church, I feel that some of my "potential" goes to waste. I don't believe I'm the only person in this situation—I think a lot of the time that people are stifled by the lack of resources/people to execute their ideas. I've just been realizing this recently, at work and church especially, and it makes me wonder what would happen if more resources were available to me.

Take work, for example. I have a pretty good idea of what it would take to migrate our domain to Active Directory over the course of one weekend or so, with few glitches along the way. This would solve so many problems we face in IT on an almost daily basis that it's not even remotely funny. Not to mention it'd put to work our dual-Xeon machines that are currently just sitting around doing nothing but idling and wasting electricity and take the load off of the 1.6ghz desktop machine (a.k.a. no redundancy whatsoever and probably the cheapest components money [or lack thereof] can buy, given that it's a Transource box) that's acting as our Secondary Domain Controller and the old decrepid Pentium (II?) machine that's now acting as our Primary Domain Controller. The list goes on and on from there, but basically we'd be using a Microsoft-supported operating system (Server 2003) on still-waranteed machines with still-available components.

Why can't we just bite the bullet and migrate then? Because for two people (me and my boss) to migrate an entire domain seamlessly in 48 hours is not nearly enough time, given Murphy's law and the fact that we have so much other crap going on that we can't plan how we'd execute it or do any sort of testing therein. If we had a few more full-time IT staff, I think we'd be able to do it and do it well, and 99% of the nurses wouldn't notice the difference.

The same goes for an integrated login script-a-majigger. I know how to implement one, and given a few weeks of time to sit and design, spec, and implement code for it I'd produce something that fits our needs to a 't'. However, given the daily distractions (video editing that needs to be done yesterday, P: drive migrations, server crashes, other miscellaneous tech-support problems, making changes to the drive mapping application), it'd take me months to produce something that's up to my boss's standards (which is good... I'm glad he has high standards, because the crap that some of the previous faculty there created is causing us nightmares to this day).

Church is kinda the same way. I have a billion ideas for improving the sound system, streamlining worship, improving the room, etc. all of which we potentially have the budget for... however, I've realized that Starbound doesn't have a good salesman (or saleswoman, but for laziness' sake I'll say salesman). What do I mean by that? Well, between Brandon, Anthony, and I the number of good ideas that exist is pretty overwhelming. None of us can take any of these ideas and say, "okay, we're gonna do this, this, and this... it's gonna cost this much, and it'll take this long." Well, we can do that, but it takes us months, instead of minutes like it potentially could for someone who's got that sort of a mindset. The reason I say we need a salesman is because we need someone to take the ideas, make the trivial decisions, and pitch it to Vince or the elders or whoever so that we can actually put our ideas into action. We currently spend too much time trying to perfect our nascent ideas and not enough time just doing them.

So, all of these potentially good ideas go to waste, and then we end up scrambling at the last minute, or Vince ends up just doing/buying something that isn't really the ideal solution, and we end up "eh" about the whole thing. It's nobody's fault, and there's nothing we can really do about it (as hard as we try, we will never be as good as a "born" salesman would be).

Anyways, just more random observations which you probably knew to some extent or another and are now wondering whether you cared to have fleshed out by yours truly.


Expect more tomorrow (*gasp* intriguing, isn't it?)... I started rambling about a couple of other topics but figured there was enough for one entry here already. It's fun to keep everyone on the edge of their seats, too =).

It's been a long time coming, this one has... as the saga continues, I'll provide a bit more background by touching on my thoughts about the foundation of the system of roads in Phoenix—the "Roman Grid System"—and my thoughts on why it's a blessing as well as a curse (mostly a curse, however).

To start with, the only reason I refer to what Wikipedia calls the grid plan is because of a humorous fellow named Nick Roser. Indeed, he may not have been the most intelligent bulb in the shed, but he had the most amusing names for the weirdest things. Any time we'd get going in Centanni's class last year about driving, he'd bring up two topics: the annoyances of women drivers (which I won't touch on here), and the shortcomings of what he always referred to as the "Roman grid system" of road planning. Indeed, his name was accurate... quoting from the Wikipedia article above:

The grid plan was a common tool of Roman city planning, based originally on its use in military camps known as castra. One of the most striking extant Roman grid patterns can be found in the ruins of Timgad in modern-day Algeria. The Roman grid is characterized by a nearly perfectly orthogonal layout of streets, all crossing each other at right angles, and by the presence of two main streets, set at right angles from each other and called the cardo and the decumanus.

Figure 1: My to-scale rendition of the Phoenix Metro Area

The grid system works well for the type of area (metropolis, if you want to get specific) that Phoenix is. Namely, it allows expansion in any direction—you just add another road parallel to the furthest road out there (chances are, at this point, said road already exists) and you instantly have more space to build. You can instantly direct people to any new development nearby, because they already know where this road is (or they know it's "somewhere *motions with his hands* out that way") and because it intersects all of the other roads we're familiar with, they can use squareulation (hey, triangles give us triangulation...) and common sense to get there. If road B is closed (see red x on Figure 1) you can go around by taking its parallel (road A, obviously) and you'll still be headed in the same general direction. In fact, you can also take roads C or D, 'cause those go the same way too (fancy that!). You can get pretty much anywhere any number of ways (I'm sure that number could be calculated, but contrary to popular belief I don't have the means nor the desire to do so). This has numerous advantages, the most notable of which being that if there's traffic on Z on the way home from ASU, you can take Y and get there just as fast ('cause there's less traffic on Y, due to its odd-numbered index in the alphabet).

Thus, the grid system is all well and good... until you start introducing things like, oh, public transport. In an ideal world, you'd have a bus that runs up and down every street, thus you'd have the A bus and the B bus, etc., and everyone would be able to get from any point O to any point P on the grid by taking a maximum of two busses. This is of course very inefficient (as is Bogosort, a sorting algorithm that is akin to "attempting to sort a deck of cards by repeatedly throwing the deck in the air, picking the cards up at random, and then testing whether the cards are in sorted order"—completely irrelevant, but funny nonetheless). So, you decide to run busses on weird routes throughout the city that are determined to be most heavily travelled (wow, that makes two words—bus(s)es and travel(l)ed—in one sentence that can be spelled two ways... unless you go by that weird book that Urban always referenced, in which case there is, supposedly, a right and wrong way). This works alright, except that Angry Chandlite, III, thinks he lives on one of the more traveled routes in Phoenix (when in fact he lives in the boonies, somewhere near Carley's house...), and therefore demands that his cronies vote for someone to legislate that buses should run only to places in the boonies and not along routes that are actually more popular (heh, popular Phoenix bus routes... how oxymoronic).

Therein lies the greatest shortcoming of the grid system of city planning, the inability to create useful systems of public transportation. By that, I don't mean that a subway system to get around Phoenix or what not wouldn't be helpful, but that it'd still be inefficient in the long run.

On second thought, that's not the greatest shortcoming of the grid system—the lack of roundabouts is. Roundabouts have to be the coolest thing about driving, period. I mean, aside from stock car racing, what else allows you to go round a circle as many times as you'd like (typically less than once, of course) simply because you want to? Not to mention the consistent flow of traffic and the ability to route traffic from more than two cross streets efficiently. Unlike traffic lights, roundabouts allow traffic to come from all directions and can handle intersections between multiple large and small roads (including dual carriageways) effortlessly. And, if you're smart and crafty enough, you can combine multiple roundabouts into a Magic Roundabout, in which traffic flows counterclockwise and clockwise, and is just generally awesome in itself.

So class, what have we learned today? Well, we've learned that the Roman Grid System is bad because you can't have roundabouts. Or good bus routes.

I was fretting yesterday because I only worked 10 hours instead of my usual 12 last week (because I took Friday off), and therefore I have(/had) to work 14 hours this week to pull my usual 24 hour twoweekage. Well, I ain't frettin' no more, let me tell ya.

(For those of you who are worrying because this isn't about driving... it was either this or nothing for the next week, so I figured I'd continue my driving saga at some later point and amuse you now with my day today.)

I shattered my previous record of how late I stayed at work today... my previous record? 8PM. The new one? 1AM. Yes, that's right, I worked 12 hours today... 12PM to 1AM with roughly an hour for dinner while my boss went home to grab the NT Server Install CD. So, I was on campus from around 7:30 yesterday morning until 1 this morning... a cool seventeen and a half hours for those who can't count right. What the hell happened, you ask?

Well, let me explain.

I got to work and heard my boss explaining to someone else that we were trying to recover the Z: drive. The Z: drive is where the nurses keep all the stuff that they work on with other nurses (as opposed to the P: drive, which is their own personal crap), and happens to be the drive that the Dean works off of exclusively. Lovely how that works, isn't it? I asked what happened, and it turns out that nurmain—our primary domain controller and the file server that hosts profiles, P: and Z: drives—had crashed. It had frozen and wouldn't boot properly. So, everything else I was working on suddenly became not so important, and I started to tackle the problems with nurmain.

Let me tell you a bit about nurmain. She's a beautiful beast, if you like beastly things. Her specs include:

• Dual 300mhz Pentium processors


• Two massive power supplies that supply upwards of 300W a piece


• Five or more gigantic 120mm fans


• The marvelous Windows NT Server operating system


• Lots of other joyous crap that is prone to fail at any given time

Oh yes, I'm sure you're incredibly envious that I get to work with such a powerful machine. Did I mention the half-an-inch thick coating of dust that got all over my nice creme shirt? Yeah, that was fun too.

Anyways, my boss called Microsoft, and got what you'd expect from a company when you ask them about support for an operating system that's 6? 7? 8? years old... "Windows NT? We don't support that. Time to get a new server." Dell's support said basically the same thing.

So, we were pretty much on our own.

Long story short, it turns out the RAID controller had gone bad. This wasn't just any RAID controller either, it was an über-card (12" PCI card, for those not in the know... absolutely massive by anyone's standards). How did we figure this out? Well, by hitting our heads against the wall for a long time before finally trying my original idea (my boss is very smart, but I tend to get lucky when it comes to these sort of troubleshooting situations) and throwing the über-card into another PC, using just nurmain's backplane and another computer to access the drives themselves. Once we did this and realized that it crashed that PC as well, we swapped it out for another RAID controller (from the server which we also got fixed today, thanks to a long but productive call to Dell support) and it worked like a charm. Upon trying to put this newer RAID card in nurmain though, we realized that it was just too new or nurmain was just too old, so when I left we had Server 2003 installing on a PC with the RAID card in it, with a SCSI cable sticking out the back that was connected to nurmain's backplane. I call it nurfranken meself (it's late, so I find it amusing...)

That pretty much sums up my day in the windtunnel (Natalia and Jessica Bender, among one or two others, will get that reference). I'm amused also that this all came about on the day I happened to only get 3 hours of sleep, but hey, who's counting?

My words to the wise for today: Wub your backplanes, and they'll wub you back (ahahaha, I'm so punny... I didn't get it until after I wrote it too, believe it or not... guess I really do need sleep).

Ah yes, driving. It's that thing we love to hate... "if only there were decent public transport," we say... only to consider it a huge inconvenience when we find ourself without a vehicle for an afternoon. There is a solution to this problem: nuclear weapons. I say we start over and build Phoenix from the ground up around multiple public transit systems (just like I think we should build ASU from the ground up again with a 1 mile x 1 mile underground parking structure underneath it), however that may spark controversy so I'll leave that debate for another more appropriate time.

I've decided to write an n-part series about my experiences while driving over the past year or so that I've actually been driving (I only got my license last November). My driving experience is almost exclusively contained to Tempe and Chandler. From my house, ASU is an almost straight shot down Rural and church is an almost straight shot down Ray—both are arguably the most main roads in Tempe and Chandler respectively.

So, I've decided to pit Tempe and Chandler against each other, picking out the nuances of the Tempinians and the Chandlites who frequent my commutes. Why make semi-amusing names for the people of Tempe and Chandler respectively? It makes them seem less human when I poke fun at their horrible driving. And yes, we live in Arizona, so the drivers in both cities inherently suck from the outset.

In this saga, I will refer to four distinct entities: Tempe, Chandler, Tempinians, and Chandlites. Tempe and Chandler will refer to the city itself, and anything that's dictated by the government. This includes traffic light timings, road conditions, road work, and anything else that drivers themselves have no control over. Tempinians and Chandlites (aren't those great names?) are the drivers themselves, complete with inherent stupidity.

I have compiled my thoughts over the past couple of weeks (I've been meaning to write on this for about a month now), and I decided it was time to devote all of my blog-worthy energy towards this topic, so for the next couple of weeks (or until I finish the series, basically), I'll write on nothing but driving. So, sit back, relax, and brace yourself for an overly analytical look at something we all take for granted.

General Observations

Having made upwards of 100 trips up and down both Ray and Rural in the past few months, I've realized some glaringly obvious differences between the overall driving experience in Tempe and Chandler:

Light timings: To put it simply, Chandler needs to get its act in gear and take a lesson from Tempe. Tempe's light timings are impeccable; sometimes I wonder whether Chandler's lights aren't controlled by a potent combination of preschoolers and DDR-like traffic control mats (how's that for a mental picture of Chandler's traffic control center? wouldn't surprise me...). Nine times out of ten (depending on traffic), I can drive on Rural (or McClintock) from Warner to University and not miss a light. In fact, when there's relatively few Tempinians around, one can set his cruise control at around 48 and not take it off until he has to turn onto Knox six and a half miles later. Tempe's light timings are consistent and very, very accurate. Chandler, on the other hand, may as well not time its lights at all. There is a groove that will get you through two or three lights at once down Ray, but that's only granted that you can get into that groove and stay at about 50mph the whole time. The thing that bugs me most about Chandler's lights is that when you are sitting at a red light and it turns green, there's about a 95% chance that you'll miss the next intermediate light(s). The major lights are relatively well timed, but when you bring intermediate (a.k.a. between major intersections) lights into the equation all goes to heck very quickly. One of the later installments of the driving saga will touch on light timings exclusively, but that'll give you some clue as to how I feel about that.

The Optimal Lane: I have the firm belief that driving anywhere can be quantified based on a handful of variables and that patterns emerge when doing so, but one of the things that bugs me about Tempe is that the Optimal Lane Theory that I developed in driving to and from church before I started commuting to ASU on a regular basis falls flat on its face. Here's the basis of my theory: when driving on a two-lane road (with a shared middle lane and/or separate left-turn lanes), the left lane will always move faster. This is because of the middle lane's functionality—anyone turning left should not slow down traffic behind it (significantly, at least), because they can join the left-turn lane and wait to turn there. Similarly, people joining traffic from the left have room to accelerate to nearer the flow of traffic before joining, thus reducing the number of times traffic in the left-hand lane have to slow down. On three-lane roads, the center lane should be the fastest. This one's more obvious—if you're in the center lane, you're not turning left or right, so the center lane should just be through traffic exclusively. If only Tempinians realized this...

More to come

Obviously, there's much, much more to come; the two topics I touched on above just scratch the surface of what I have to say. Any comments are welcome, and I'm very interested to hear anyone else's personal experiences driving in either or both city... or some other city in the valley which has its own quirks and annoyances.

So, the saga hath begun... exciting, isn't it?

Ah yes, November... it's arrival can only mean one thing: *sings* Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat. Please put a penny in the old man's hat... *hums to himself*

Anyways, it's a typical Tuesday morning in the library after English class (which only finished 10 minutes early today, believe it or not), so that means all of the ideas I've compiled over the past few days will get written about.

Peterisinsane.com

I guess I should mention first that Nick actually wrote in his blog. Mind you, he didn't write more than a few sentences, but it's a start. In his first entry, he mentioned contributions towards the purchase of peterisinsane.com; I saved him the trouble and just bought it for him right out (gotta love $2.99/yr domains from Yahoo). Of course, this caused some panic when I sent him a text saying he now owned peterisinsane.com for the next two years. He called me up and asked, "How much did that cost?! That must have been expensive, right?" to which I replied, "It was less than I make in an hour." He asked, "how much is that?" and I said, "it was $6." Somehow, he misinterpreted this dialog and understood it as being $6 an hour for two years... so at this point he was going insane. I reassured him that it was $6 for two years, calmed him down a bit, and that was that.

So, as soon as peterisinsane.com makes its way through the system and registers in your local domain servers, you should see some sort of placeholder for Nick's website. What exactly he'll put there, I don't know, but I intend to help him out and I'm sure he's open to ideas if you have any. I'm just still amused at the fact that peterisinsane.com actually exists, and I think the ensuing amusement will be well worth my $6 investment. Where Nick will find time to actually put anything up at his website I'm not entirely sure, but hey, he's got two years to make good use of my investment, and with free hosting and a free domain, I don't think he'll be in any sort of hurry.

Hmmm....

I got an anonymous comment a day or so ago in response to my Shipwrecked entry in which I mentioned blogs that I enjoy reading. The comment said this:

Subject: John Siracusa
Although the FatBits blog just started a month or two ago (Ars had no staff blogs at all before then), John Siracusa has been writing for Ars Technica since 1999. You can find a list of his articles here:

http://siracusa.home.mindspring.com/john/articles/ars

In particular, his Mac OS X reviews are widely viewed as the best (or at least the most thorough) on the web.

There wasn't any notion as to who wrote it, and it got me wondering: who is this mystery reader? As far as I know, the only friends I have who would read John Siracusa's writing have LiveJournal accounts (Bryce, possibly Evan) or would sign their name when posting an anonymous comment. Given the fact that it was early in the morning and I had nothing better to think about, I started speculating. Was it just someone random who'd stumbled across my blog and knew about FatBits? Was it Siracusa himself, reading what others had written about his blog (which is easy to do thanks to Google BlogSearch)? The world may never know.

Blog readership

The mysterious comment combined with an Alertbox article about blog usability—which I stumbled across via Joel On Software—got me thinking about my blog. Currently, my known readership consists of a fairly large subset of my friends (both from church and school), my mom (and most likely my dad too), Brian and Liz and others from the homegroup, Mrs. Centanni and Mrs. Urban (both of who have hit the site at least once, however they may never return for all I know), and other people who have some connection to me through my sister or otherwise. Overall, that's a much larger list than I ever expected I'd find regularly reading my blog, so I'm happy as-is. I often wonder though whether people who have no clue who I am ever read my blog, whether frequently or once-off because they stumble across it. Currently, I'm okay with just the people I know reading it, because I don't think it's really worthy of going "mainstream"—I write about too large a variety of topics and tend to have way too many personal references which people who don't know who I am wouldn't get (a.k.a. the whole Nick thing).

After reading the usability article, I realized just how many of those rules I break on a regular basis (or just as a result of this being a LiveJournal), but I wonder whether or not I would gain readers on anywhere near the scale that, say, Daring Fireball or Joel on Software does/would if I did follow the rules. I think that moving to my own site, where I'll have a WordPress (and therefore have inherent integration with the blogosphere) and the ability to have an "about me" page, not to mention no ties to LiveJournal (as nice as it may be) will automatically gain me a bit more credibility and potential readership. But I wonder, will I ever hone my writing enough to compete in the big leagues? To get hundreds or thousands of hits a week? A day? Will I ever have huge debates and flame wars popping up in my comments (a la any big blog that discusses controversial issues)? Will I ever have more comments than I can count on my fingers for a given post? Once again, the world may never know... but I'll keep wondering nonetheless......

Don't worry, I'm not coughing up fiery ash or anything... I can explain the title, just give me a minute...

Great hackers

I've been reading The Best Software Writing I by Joel Spolsky (of Joel on Software fame), which is basically a collection of essays written in the past couple of years about software, development, programming, and other related matters. If you've ever programmed on any level, or consider yourself nerdy on any level (Tall Brian, I'm looking at you), I'll let you borrow the book when I'm finished reading it as it's well worth the read.

One of the more interesting things about this book is the fact that it's a compilation of writings that you can find on the internet for free—it's the comments and intros written by Spolsky that make the book worth the money, and that makes it a fun read because you're not reading one person's writing the whole time.

Whatever the case, one of the essays in the book is Great Hackers, by Paul Graham. He doesn't mean hackers in the sense you're thinking ("i'm gonna hax0r ur computr and delete all ur filez" comes to mind), but instead he's referring to software developers, also known as programmers. Graham outlines the characteristics of the programmers who revolutionize software, and who program because they love it, and therefore write good, efficient, and robust code.

I think the thing that affected me most is that a lot of the characteristics he mentions I can relate to... I'm not going to sit and list them all (because I'm too lazy to read through it again right now), but I could definitely see myself fitting the role of a "great hacker". Of course, a great hacker would never say he was a great hacker, so maybe I'm just misleading myself, but I like to think that I might someday become something like that.

On the other hand, I started looking at other programmers I know, most notably our DBA at work, in this light. Our DBA is definitely not a great hacker, and it aggravates me on some level that he's writing code that is inefficient and quite possibly very insecure and he doesn't even know it. A few days ago, he was working in ASP.NET and trying to get some HTML stuff to render correctly, and he was basically just guessing and checking as to how HTML actually works. He didn't even know proper HTML tag syntax, much less simple things like what a TR and TD do. It bugged me that he gets paid to do this full time and he doesn't really even know what he's doing—he relies on VS.NET to create the HTML for him, and then just hacks it until it works. That's not programming, that's modifying already poor code. Oh well, so it goes I guess.

My trip to hell (part deux)

Ah yes, hell. Seems like forever since I was last here... and by forever, I mean six or seven months. Yes friends, I'm reading Dante's Inferno again, this time in our Human Event class as opposed to Centanni's (AP Senior English) class last year. Some of our discussion today was semi-interesting, I guess, but I really miss Centanni's Catholic spin on the whole thing, and the variety of sayings that suddenly became valid when we were studying it in her class. Almost instantaneously, any form of the word "hell" became valid in her class—which of course led to some very good times indeed in there. It was common to hear her say, "Go to hell! Oh wait... we're already there, aren't we?" or, "Life really sucks in hell, doesn't it?" *sigh* Centanni's class is very much missed.

More ohmpage things

I've been thinking a fair amount about my ohmpage, the design, layout, etc. the past few days, probably because I haven't been able to spend any of my free time actually working on it, so I just think about it instead.

Actually, I did get a chance to bodge something together, which is basically just a prettier version of my original placeholder page (*clicky*). Just doing something as "simple" as that made me realize just how much I hate HTML/CSS, or namely how much I hate IE's ability to follow standards. I'll let others handle the IE standards rants (links in no particular order, and of no particular significance except to provide boredom relief and to prove a point). It took me an hour and a half to get the simple page I have there to not look absolutely horrid in IE, and to look the same in Firefox and Safari. Actually, I take that back, it took one tweak to get it to look the same in Firefox and Safari, and about 10 to get IE to even render everything within the bounds of the background image. This is why it will take me months to get a decent website up, because I like things to look good and it takes forever to get them there.

Speaking of which, I've been thinking about colors to use for the site, and I'm thinking white (obviously), greys, and possibly pastel blue or green accents. I tend to like lighter colors myself (which, of course, is why my room is mostly dark green and dark blue—I know, go figure), and I tend to prefer very clean, simple layouts that have lots of curves and soft gradients to accentuate things. Because things like curved boxes and such take forever to implement properly with HTML/CSS, it'll be a while before I find a design I like, I think. I may however just say screw it, make a simple skin for Wordpress, and use that as my website until further notice. I haven't decided yet... if you want to help with the design, let me know =).