What to do when programming gets boring

As I plow through this book on C# I’m reading in preparation for my new job, I am reminded of some of the antics I used to pull in my code.

For those of you who have never taken a college programming course, I should tell you that some of the assignments are… let’s say a wee bit simplistic. This brings me to my favorite way to keep programming interesting: Fun variable names!

I was writing a program to do something ridiculously simple, its called an event listener. Basically its a program that detects a mouse click, but done in that tedious way that teachers will make you do things to “make sure you know the basics.” Because it was late, and boring, I decided to tell a story with my code. I named one variable Horton and the other Who, and I designed the code to where, when the button was clicked, Horton Heard a Who.

The TA who graded the source code found me the class after I’d turned it in and handed it back to me with a note that said “Your variables had very strange names, but it worked.”

Some people were apparently spawned fully formed into academia having never had a childhood.

I used to draw comics (part 2)

Rachel and Chad will laugh, Todd and Erin will want to hit me, and, hopefully, Missou will roll over Memphis like a freight train over a penny tonight.

I used to draw comics (part 1)

My prediction: Rachel will groan, Chad will laugh, and Todd will want to hit me.

“Why are you so into this game if your team isn’t even playing?”

I am, among other things, a sports fan.

Not the normal, “Oh, hey, we won.  Well isn’t that special?” kind of fan.  More the “YAR!  $%&, REF, DID YOU FORGET YOUR %$&* GLASSES?  THAT COULDN’T HAVE BEEN MORE OBVIOUS!!!  AHHHHH!” type of sports fan.  I am not mean, and I have nothing but respect for the players on the field, but I am, well, passionate.

I have often been asked why I care about the game when its Podunk State vs. Tinyville College.  The best answer I’ve been able to come up with is this: if your local band plays your favorite song by the Beatles and does a decent job of it, you’re gonna sing along.

I care because at the fundamentals, its still the same sport.  Basketball, baseball, football, whatever.  Kids or old men, its still sports and its still fun.

The 4 bit solar system and the “Mars Curse”

We hear a lot that things have changed in the last century, but its one of those things that’s hard to fully describe without a little help from visual aids.  The images in the link below were actual pictures taken by various NASA spacecraft in the latter part of the 20th century.  The grainy black one and the pixelated orange one are particularly entertaining.  Looks like bad 80s video game art.  Or really good 80s video game art.

http://discovermagazine.com/photos/07-the-solar-system-looks-way-better-than-it-used-to

As for the “Mars Curse” mentioned in the link below, its not a curse.  Setting aside for the moment the fact that landing on Mars is approximately as difficult as landing a date with a supermodel when you’re as fun and interesting as a bowl of of chicken broth, getting the thousands upon thousands of things to go right just so you can crash a multi-billion dollar exploration vessel into the surface of Mars at the speed of sound has to be a little depressing.  It wasn’t a curse, it was a conversion error.  Use meters, people, not yards.

http://discovermagazine.com/photos/22-will-the-phoenix-lander-end-up-a-hero-bot-or-a-pile-of-trash

It “could kill us all,” but its still really damn cool

The Large Hadron Collider will be turned on tomorrow, and, well, I think its neat.

Its all the things that kids think are awesome: Its big (27 km), its clearly got hadrons (alien species?), and it obviously collides them at fantastic speeds (think significant portions(99.999999%) of the speed of light).  While we’ve all still got that inner child just waiting for the next big explosion where we can say “heh, cool,” you’ve got to wonder, what exactly does it do that has gotten people worked up enough to think that it could destroy our happy little world?

I think if more people really understood the kinds of speeds we’re talking about here, there would be a lot more people freaking out than a couple of Congressmen.  Imagine if you were hit head on by something traveling 614152314 miles per hour.  You only think I’m making that number up.  Furthermore, imagine that you yourself were also traveling 614152314 miles per hour.  No airbag built would save you from the resulting collision.  In fact, you would be broken up into parts so small that scientists have actually invented new ways of thinking about physics to predict what they would look like.

What these scientists are hoping one of your constituent parts would look like is the Higgs Boson, which as far as I can tell, is a form of quantum jello.  Its the particle without which a lot of the things we have thought about quantum physics will be wrong, or at least need some tweaking.  Truth is, there is an pretty compelling body of evidence that suggests that the Higgs particle really is there, but some people want to see it.  And if they get to smash things together at Ludicrous Speed® and watch them explode into glittering bits in the process, even better.

We should just make sure that they don’t drink while they science this hard.  Someone could get hurt.

Babylon AD sucks

It was about 5 minutes too short to make any sense.  Save your money.  And for you ladies, Vin Diesel is in it, but don’t expect anything good out of it.  Half the movie is spent in Russia (think parkas).