Category: What the…?

As usual, from the Fujin:

Your present plans are going to succeed if you stick to them.

There’s always a catch.

Wind, snow, and ice outside

All eyes follow Mommy

Cats inside are bored

I’ve been reading books introducing the concept of Object-Oriented Programming for a lot of years now, for a number of different languages and with any number of authors. And it boggles my mind that the convention in every single one is to try to explain notions like methods or instances with variations on cars, fruits, or small mammals.

Maybe twenty or even fifteen years ago people who were learning basic programming might not have been all that familiar with computer interface elements like, say, a button, but that’s no excuse in 2008 (almost 2009) not to use some sort of more concrete examples when describing how OOP is implemented, instead of grasping for ever more strained “real-world” explanations.

Today’s the sixth anniversary of the day I didn’t die from a bunch of blood clots in my lungs, the result of having my leg more or less immobilized for a couple of months after breaking my leg and ankle.

Three years ago, I took the opportunity to celebrate by dancing on the grave plot Barbara and I had bought earlier that fall. The next day I was in the ER with an intense pain in my foot that turned out to be gout.

Now I’m just a couple weeks off of crutches after wracking up my knee back in September.

No dancing this year. Just gonna lay low.

Just spent a little while waiting at the DMV for an extension of my disabled parking permit, and a couple ahead of me was there for a redo on his new license because when he’d gotten it on Friday the clerk had apparently hit the wrong button on the form for the guy’s sex. “He’s been worried about it all weekend,” his wife said, laughing. The clerk was laughing, the guy was laughing. He offered to prove he deserved the “M” right there at the counter.

Reports (well, pictures, mostly) from friends Eric and Sara.

I was just retiring a set of sneakers that I’ve had for long enough that the soles had cracked across the ball of the foot. I’d just finished lacing up a pair of dress shoes that I’d polished for an event this weekend, and I decided to pull the sneaker laces since they were in fine shape.

As I was stripping them out, though, I tried to remember the last time I actually needed to replace a pair of laces and I couldn’t. When I was a kid I always had to replace laces, tie together laces that had broken, etc. Has shoelace technology progressed to the point at which the laces now outlast the shoes?

Steven Weinberg, co-winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics, from his September essay in The New York Review of Books, “Without God”:

It is not my purpose here to argue that the decline of religious belief is a good thing (although I think it is), or to try to talk anyone out of their religion, as eloquent recent books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have. So far in my life, in arguing for spending more money on scientific research and higher education, or against spending on ballistic missile defense or sending people to Mars, I think I have achieved a perfect record of never having changed anyone’s mind.

I don’t remember when I got this (although it’s almost certainly from Fujin) but it was tucked underneath some business cards on my desk:

Your careful nature will bring you financial success.

Doesn’t sound like me, but I’ll take what I can get considering the times.

From the Fujin:

Tomorrow is a good day for trying something new.

No sign yet of last Tuesday’s “opportunity.”