I don't mind a parasite; I object to a cut-rate one. -- Rick Blaine, Casablanca
A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

I’m down with DSLB (Yeah, you know me)

Doolwind’s Game Coding Site: Programmer Personality Test
Your programmer personality type is:
DLSB
You’re a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.
You like coding at a Low level.
You’re from the old school of programming and believe that you should have an intimate relationship with the computer. You don’t mind juggling registers around and spending hours getting a 5% performance increase in an algorithm.
You work best in a Solo situation.
The best way to program is by yourself. There’s no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.
You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We’re not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

Le Foie Gras

Ross a fait une promenade au bord du lac. Il y avait une oie sur la route qui etait au bord du lac. Ross a marché sur la route. L’oie a dit, <<Gonk!>> Ross a continué à marché. L’oie a dit <<Hiss!>> Ross marchait encore L’oie a couru à Ross. Ross a couru loin.

FIN

(With apollogies to my high school french teacher.)

IT71: Once again, I welcome our new mouse overlords

Seems like every few months, we discover a way to accidentally let rodents take over the world. Hm.

it71

1: We can rebuild this mouse. We have the technology. We can make it stronger; faster; better.
2: I for one welcome our new mouse overlords.
3: (For the image)Hiya skipper! Looks like you’re trying to do some genetic augmentation! Would you like me to open the Microsoft Gene Splicing Wizard?

On The Road

This past weekend, Leah and I went up to visit her family and friends in NJ. Here’s some observations…

  • We watched Children of Man. There’s a featurette on the disc showing how — at the risk of a spoiler, I’ll spoil you only this much: there is a baby in the move, and it was added using CGI, which is why it looks like Gollum — they did the baby. At one point, the caption said “Rendering the layers of baby.” Johnathan Swift would be proud.
  • Friday night as I was going to sleep, something made my eye hurt. It was red in the morning, and has been watering ever since. I think I am allergic to New Jersey
  • Many years ago in Maryland, there was a supermarket chain called A&P. They are now called SuperFresh. In New Jersey, I saw a “Super A&P”. It’s as if the name-change had just hit that town, and something caused it to tragically halt halfway through the transformation.
  • There was a stretch of highway on the way home called “The Concrete Mile”. It was made of asphalt just like every other highway.
  • We passed a shop called “Andy Ferrigno’s Equipment”. The jokes to be made may well be endless. I’ll start you off with “Don’t make fun of his equipment: you wouldn’t like it when he’s angry.”
  • When you enter most states, there’s a big sign welcoming you. Often, the sign will remind you of local laws: on the Delaware/Maryland border, the sign reminds you that right turns are permitted on red after stopping. In Delaware, it reminds you that shopping is tax-free. In New Jersey, it reminds you that you need to wear your seatbelt. And right below that is a greeting from Governor John Corzine. I assume the sign was erected by the New Jersey Department of Irony.
  • There’s a town, it seems, in PA called “Schrodinger”. I didn’t get a good look at the sign, because my brain insisted that the sign should say now “Next Exit, 10 miles on left”, but “The town will not exist until you get there.”
  • Unrelatedly, I once took a class in public policy from Heisenberg’s granddaughter. The class was taught by Distance Learning, because, unlike her grandfather, she could not be in two places at once.
  • Billboard: Close deals between laps
  • There is a section of US 222 in Pennsylvania called “MIA Highway”, but we couldn’t find it.
  • Sign by a dairy farm in PA: Registered Holsteins. Thank god PA has cracked down on illegal cows.
  • A sign at a gas station gave prices for “Regular”, “Plus”, “Super”, “Deisel” and “Kero”. For just a second, I read that as “Karo”, and thought that it would be a truly wonderful day if we could make our cars run on high fructose corn syrup. Of course, the fumes would probably send me into a diabetic coma.

That is all.