Back and Caught Up

This is my final act to catch up with being away. I keep my room barely clean, refrigerator slightly stock with water, and bed always made. The first thing I did was make my bed. My rush to leave early Wednesday morning meant I didn't give myself time to make my bed or put any clothes away from the packing I did the night before. My room looked like someone had searched it and hadn't put anything back.. The second thing I do is to take everything off the floor and put it on the bed. Third third major project was to fill up the refrigerator with water. With the warm temperature here, I go through 3/4 a gallon a day. I still haven't cleaned off my bed, but the floor is a good friend.

My sister wants to redesign her website, so I was volunteered by my mom to do the redesign. The refresher on HTML has been worth it. Before yesterday, I didn't remember how to start a new light or how to make a table. Today I do, and I sent off a sample to sister M be examined for quality. She had already given me some rough drawings, but before I spent too much time implementing rough ideas, I wanted sister M to see and to change the design to suit her.

It looks as though I won't finish everything I wanted to finish tonight. I wanted to share some thoughts about the hypothetical questions I posed last post. After an hour on the phone with brother J, mulling over the issues myself for a while, and hearing mom's rationals in person with longer/more in-depth explanations, I've changed my opinion for my first response, and it shed a bit of light on how I see the world. :-) It is likely of little interest to anyone except family, but the best way to know and understand what I believe is to have myself be able to explain my beliefs to someone, and hopefully I'll be able to do that tomorrow evening. Maybe I'll even explain clearly! That would be a refreshing change!

2 Days Until Home

Whooo hooo! Home in 2 days. 36 hours and I'll be on the plane!

The real reason for this post is an article I read today in Discovery magazine. It made me think quite a bit about the moral judgments I make. These questions are NOT trick questions, and don't spend time on either one, because in real life you wouldn't have time to carefully decide.

Question one: A train is chugging down a traintrack ( big surprise ). If it continues, 5 people on a track farther down will die. If you throw the track switch right now, 1 person will die on the other route? What do you do?

Question two: 4 critically injured patients just came into the hospital and won't live much longer. They all need different and unavailable transplants to survive, but they would survive if they had transplants. A person that matches all five donors is about to walk out the doors. (Talk about long odds!) Do you take the healthy person and kill him to save all the others?

Now for the humdinger. Why did you choose what you chose?

Early Bird Gets The Worm

I don't normally bog about work, but I think today would be a good day to make an exception. Rarely does time just "fly by" while working. Time usually passes, meanders, and sometimes plods while working. It doesn't seem to matter what type of work I'm doing or if I enjoy it, the passage of time is something I can't judge very well while working. Last Thursday, I was working hard, didn't check the time and didn't look for lunch since I didn't feel too hungry. Eventually, I pull back, spread my arms, and give a wide long yawn. I tried to guess the time... 12:00? 1:00? 3:00? It seemed as though I had been working forever. 9:30. I couldn't believe it. I was ready for the day to be about done and the clocks only said 9:30. Ugh.

Today though, I started at my normal 8:00 time. I started working, researching, tracking down bugs. Things I would consider fairly routine or even boring. I check the time after a little bit and it was already 11:30! I hadn't done much work, very little productive programming and it was already 9:30. I went for lunch, came back and worked on the exact same issues and the clock yet again jumped forward to 4:00.

My net productivity for those seven hours: I commented out 10 lines of code. The code I commented out were lines of code spread throughout a single file that I had added about 7 months ago. Not only did I get rid of the progress I thought I had made back then, but I also didn't add any features to the program. Essentially, I cut the cost that I myself produced, and got paid for it. :-)

Fortunately, most days I'm a little more beneficial to the company.

I had a nice talk with my mom today. We chatted for a half hour about movies, websites, nephews, and vacations. Based on my mom's recommendation, I am planning to see "Meet Joe Black" whenever I get a card to the local video rental store.

Time to do a little clean up of my paperwork and then an early bedtime.

9 more days until I go home!

Tennis and Biking

Ah, another lovely Saturday comes to visit. Later this evening, I may be going to visit my cousins who are down here for vacation time. They said they would call me and let me know when a good time to visit popped up. My guess is I'm not going to get a call today: they are getting in today, and after an early start, a long drive, a long wait at the airport, flying, getting baggage, driving to their hotel, unpacking, and planning, the last thing they want is MORE things to do. :-) I hope they enjoy their time in Orlando.

I hope everyone enjoyed my pictures of SeaWorld. I was going to go back this Sunday after church, but when I realized it would be Easter weekend and prime vacation time, I decided it wasn't worth the crowds. Instead, I'm going to play tennis this afternoon and read a book. Don't know what book yet, but any book will do. Any suggestions? My living room has close to 2500 books and the library is just down the street, so if I can't find it in time for this weekend, I'll try it for next weekend.

I may go bicycling tomorrow. Depending on the weather and what I feel like, I may take a ride on the "nature" trail near my house. I don't know why it is called a nature trail. The 10 or so miles of it I've driven by are all by the road and next to housing developments. Not very naturish.

Weekend Adventures

The weekend is done, and it was great. I'll start where I left off: Saturday. I went to the Regatta, arriving 10 minutes late. By then I had missed the karate/tai chi demo. Next was yoga dancers... all under 10 I'm guessing. No wonder they could stretch! But the next show was by far the best, the Chinese Acrobats - or the Dragon Legend Acrobats as they are billed in the Epcot center.

It was by far the neatest part of the day. In the Epcot center, I'm sure I would be sitting 50-100 feet away. At the regatta, I was only 10 feet away. I didn't get any pictures. I thought it was just a local group - I was really wrong. In a way, I was happy I didn't have my camera. It meant I could just watch without worrying about my video moving or losing track of the action - I had a thoroughly enjoyable time. My favorite part of the show were the twin contortionists. They weren't as flexible as others I've seen, but they did their whole routine on one hand! They had a five minute routine, and it was all done standing on their hands. I didn't see them waver or look like they lost their balance in the slightest.

Sunday: I went to Aikido class on Sunday morning (so early... why so early!), then headed off towards Seaworld. I enjoyed my time there. From the other times I've been there, I've figured out which of the up-close 'wet zones' get the least water, and then positioned myself there. I got some nice pictures, which are below, along with my geo-caching pictures on the way home. I found one geo-cache. The other one was in a park, off a trail, and I couldn't find it anywhere. As you can see in the picture of the one I found, the caches can be quite small.

Saturday Plans

I'll start with todays activities and then state Saturday's plans.

Today - I covered the software support department by myself today. The two others who normally cover that area went out of town. I only called them twice during the day for questions... I only had three calls, one of which was already expected and planned for.

After work, I went to "Meet The Robinsons". It is a Disney production, all computer animated, and it was very good. The hero goes forward in time to regain his confidence as an inventor and as a result has to fix the time stream because of his actions. It was a standard plot outline, but some of the smaller quirks were hilareous. The singing/mobster frogs were extremely funny, but the T-Rex would have been my favorite if he had been given more screen time. A big spoiler ahead: The main focus of the story, the kid, never finds his mom.

The River Regatta start was this evening, and the movie finished early enough that I could see the last few activities: a fire dancer and Polynesian dancers. It was very enjoyable to sit back and watch and listen. In fact, the picture on this blog is the opening ceremony.

I was going to go to Sea World Saturday, but the Regataa's entertainment tomorrow looks far too fun: Martial Arts/Tai Chi Demo, Yoga Dance, Chinese Acrobats, Para Jumpers, Jazz/Moder Dance, and Belly Dancing - all lined up from 10:00 to 1:00. With all that going on, I'll go to Sea World tomorrow.

Going To *Bed* Early

I had to get the title right. I didn't notice I had mispelled the last post until I was ready to post this one.

Now that I've corrected a vital detail, I'm going to let you in on a non-secret: I'm going home! I bought the airline tickets today and will be heading home near the end of April. I'm going to be seeing my whole family; with the exception of my brother... but don't worry, it just means I'll be able to flip him farther when I see him - or I miss a block and lose a tooth. But no worries, I'm sure my brother would never injure my beautiful teeth. ;-)

Time to read some proverbs and go to b-e-d.

Going To Be Early

I've found a geocache! I signed in the log and now I just need to visit geocaching.com and post my visit. The contents of the container were pretty neat. There was a spool of thread, and odd shaped paper clip, a weird quarter, plastic frog, plastic ring, mechanical pencil, and an Olympic medal (a souvenir). If I'm still down here in a month, I want to go back and put something of my own in it.

Any ideas of what would make a good trademark item? It should be unique, small, under 2 dollars, and memorable - just as a rough guideline. Feel free to ignore any of the guideline, so please suggest something! I can't think of anything.

Three Lessons Learned: GPS Style

Three Lessons To Live By:
1. A GPS is dangerous when driving - I tried to help, but the GPS just couldn't reach the gas pedals.
2. Geocaches are dangerous - right by a restaurant with an open meat freezer. Uhg. Apparently vultures like to hang around that spot.
3. Enter coordinates EXACTLY. Being a mile off isn't fun, especially when walking.

I received my GPS this evening. UPS delivered about 6:00. It's been fun to use so far. Wednesday, I plan to make a good day of it. I'll work extra tomorrow and get off early Tuesday and go bicycling. With a 10 mile route, I think I can get 5 caches. There aren't any major hills to speak of in Florida, so it won't be too hot. (The weather yesterday was in the 80's )

I'm off to be soon. I'll try to read another 30 pages of "The Bourne Identity" before I go to bed. Have a good evening!

Weekend Activities

I've gone to Aikido class twice at this point. I don't think I've been quite this sore since I last did a hard weightlifting session; but instead of biceps or quads, it's my shoulders, hips, gastrocnemius', toes, wrist, elbows, neck..... they were GOOD classes.

Playing tennis didn't help the soreness factor much. At least I put up a better fight against my boss this time. I actually won a sets. It's a little harder on the joints than racquetball I think - but I haven't had much experience for comparison yet.

Geo-caching Preliminary Prep

I have blown through the 100 mark for Wei-Hwa puzzles. Since I have a gmail account, I get to use my Google ID to personalize my homepage. On the homepage, it has a small puzzle, a lot like Sudoku, and during lunch I'll do one or two, if I'm compiling then I will finish one, and during the evening, I'll usually do one or two more. It's taken some time to get this far, but only another 50 more, and I'll have finished the puzzles!

For the big news of the day: I've ordered my GPS! It will be coming to my address down here and then the world will open up! I'm getting a "Magellan Explorist 500 LE North American Handheld Color GPS." I prefer to call it my gps. :-)

And in other minor news: after having the car sitting under a tree with a multitude of birds for 3 weeks, I finally decided to get a car wash. In another three weeks, I'll probably have to do it again, but I won't announce it for you - there can only be so much excitement in a single year!

Bridge to Terabithia

Today's review: Bridge to Terabithia

I found Bridge to Terabithia to be far from what I was expecting. I was expecting a light adventure, with pretty graphics and a happy go lucky storyline. It was far darker than that. To give a brief overview of the dark-side of the movie (minus one big plot device ): the hero's father is extremely poor, shows his love to his youngest daughter all the time but barely a word of thanks for the hero, bullies at school, another father that beats his children, the heroes are unpopular and ignored (usually) by their parents, and bullied at school. It is dark, but the odd thing was, by the end of the show, I had decided that it was a kinda-nice show. Yes it is serious, but you see people overcome their circumstances, and build their own world of joy.

Because I have a big preference for a happy ending, I probably won't see it again when the DVD comes out, but such an ending did show how much the young boy had grown.

Now for the basic plotline which gives away all but one huge plot turn. For those who have read the book, you know the plot already. Mom, you can ask what it is when you call. :-) ..... A boy who is harassed at school becomes friends with a new transfer that no-one wants to be friends with. They go off to play together after school, and they build a tree house which becomes their castle in their imaginary world of Terabithia. They have a few problems getting along (mostly related to the boy's impression of being rejected by his father, which isn't really true), but a tragedy forces the boy to grow up and stand on his own two feet. At the very end, he brings his little sister to the imaginary world to be the princess of Terabithia and future queen.

Next movie review will be "TMNT".

Music and Lyrics

Today's review: Music and Lyrics

I went to see "Music and Lyrics" tonight. It was an assignment given to me by Mom: to go see the movie and to blog about it. I have SO MUCH to do with all my homework. It is rough. :-)

I thought the show was pretty good. Other than the protagonists sleeping together in the middle of the movie, it was pretty clean. Now onto the plot with personal commentary! Hugh Grant is a washed up '80s rock performer. ( The 'POP' band he's acting for was real, and if the movie's examples of their songs are accurate, I'm going to find some other songs and listen to them. They were enjoyable) The current diva of the day loves his music and gives him and 8 others the task (competition) of writing a hit song. He hires a song lyricist but the lady (Drew Barrymore) who waters his plants has a better ear for the lyrics, so Hugh Grant hires the caretaker. They struggle with their personal demons: she lacks confidence and Hugh lacks scruples (get the song out, even if it isn't what is should be). Near the end, Hugh presents the song, the diva ruins the song, Drew refuses to let it happens and gets kicked out, Hugh tries to reason with the diva and Drew.... and the movie ends wonderfully. With Drew confident about her writing ability and Hugh with his composing ability.

The twist at the end isn't a surprise, but I don't want to give everything away.

Smarter This Time

Or not. My boss is planning to ship this coming Tuesday. By Friday night, we fixed all the bugs. The installer is doing what we want, within limits, and we're ready to ship. My boss is testing the installer on several systems and randomly tries to print. Failure. Printing works only on XP. Not on ME or 98. Back to the drawing board. Six hours later (not including Allan's time spent working on the problem ) I figure out that I must be missing an initialization of printing. I create a test to see if this is the case. After taking an hour to code the test, I run it... and it works slightly better - it now prints to one printer. I just need to get it working for the new printer now. Since the test was as simple as I could make it, I need to go back through and go line by line and add in code very carefully. I'm guessing that the coding will proceed at a line ever 2 minutes, which would be an average of one letter every ten seconds. I think the average for software programmers is 20 lines of code per hour.

Does this mean I'm an incredibly fast programmer, to be doing 30 lines of code an hour? No, I've spent (in previous months) two, maybe three weeks, working with this exact same code. My average with the previous time included? 3 lines an hour, maybe 4. A letter every minute. Whew, the rush!!

All the code isn't that slow. Two weeks ago, I used a whole week to create a system manager program in a mere 3300 lines. All but 300 lines of the code was carefully analyzed, changed, moved around, and debugged. Several times, I took a whole hour just sitting back and studying the flow of the program. Understanding the why is 10 times... 100 times more important than knowing the what of the program. I could tell you the "what" of the program 8 months ago. I couldn't have told you the "why". Eight months ago, I couldn't have figure out the program myself if I took two months. Today, that same program took a week.

Oh, one last detail to bring to mind how excruciatingly slow, boring, and frustrating programming can be. My co-worker Dan, spent over a month working to get the installer right. Wednesday, we tossed away that work and started afresh. Could we salvage ANY of the code? No. But by Friday, we had an installer working. That is because Dan didn't give me all the details of HOW the installer works, but WHY the installer does things certain ways.

College taught me how to program, learning the why behind a program is far harder. When I worked at Emerson Process Management as an intern, my boss told me something surprising: They don't expect a new hire to be useful for 6 months. Why? Because it takes them six months to figure out what is going on and to start producing more than than they get paid.

Following the reasoning out, specialists should get paid a lot more.. why? Not because they are better at programming or know the syntax of C++ better than anyone else, but because they figure out the why. At EPM, as part of my project, a guy was hired for 2 1/2 months from Sweden. He could barely speak or read English, yet in those 2 1/2 months, he had a fully integrated Windows application produced. He knew the why behind MFC.

And I'm starting to ramble. I didn't go to Sea World yesterday or today. I'm going to plan for Wednesday... barring more programming problems.

Working Hard... Not Smart?

Ah, the joys of a release. My companies Windows product that I'm working on was scheduled to go out Monday. Everything is testing fine until Friday morning. When we put everything together, the installer explodes, and the Bank Reconciliation programs decide that they prefer a hard crash for every little strcpy. And for the last weekend and Monday and today, we've been working overtime just to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. Ah, the joys of salaried pay.

Family Blessings

And yet another week goes by without a GPS for hiking or an electric piano for night time enjoyment. Next week.. next week. Actually, next week I'm planning to go to Sea World so I won't need any of those things. It is a rough life down here. :-)

Saturday night, it was 11:00 I had brushed my teeth, and was getting into bed, when I started to listen to the noises. There were a few bullfrogs and some sort of weird twittering insect making noises. It sounded like a hot summer evening in Pennsylvania when all the crickets are going full time.... except I was inside the house here and it still sounded close. It lasted about a minute, and then it went completely quite. I waited 5 minutes and haven't heard a thing for the last 5 minutes... nothing. The house doesn't creek, no bird calls, no wind, no cars from the nearby highway, no neighbors. creepy.

I'm off to bed. I know it is barely nine, but I've been feeling tired lately. It is a vicious circle because I also set my alarm to go off earlier if I get to bed earlier. On a more personal note, I was thinking about home and family. Specifically about this last weekend. Everyone but me was at my parent's house, and I was just thinking how lucky it is to have a mom and dad that's willing to watch the grandchild to give K and R time to relax together, to have a mom and dad that opens home to my older sister so she can live at home while she works and breeds dogs and feed cats, and to have a mom and dad that wants to visit my brother and sister and law even though they live six hours away. That doesn't really stand out to me to much, but then this evening I'm thinking about other families I know and the troubles they go through and it's amazing that us siblings have parents like Mom and Dad and siblings like each other. I wouldn't trade any of them for anyone else I know. I love you guys (and gals). I'm going to call home now. :-)

Sisters, Plots, And Music

I'm so happy. Katie is debating today and she gets to show off the baby at the same time. I was asking her (Katie, not the baby) what the schedule for today was, and she described the schedule to me and she mentioned something about CR and I realized I had completely forgotten about the baby! Wow. I must not be a good uncle! Mom is going to watch CR for the day... wait... this is suspicious...

(1) Mom hears about an open spot for a debater
(2) Mom tells sister
(3) sister accepts
(4) Mom holds baby

Ha! I knew there was a plot to hold the baby somewhere! And I found it. The great mastermind behind this fiendish plan? MOM!

Over last weekend, I played some Beethoven music I brought south with me and tried playing it a bit. Moonlight Sonata and The Pathetic Sonata (Opus 13). At this very moment, I'm reading the company's notes for The Pathetic Sonata... "full of sorrow, with a mingling of love and devotion..." Nowhere does the author mention anything about excitement. Beethoven has a whole measure of 1/64th notes. There is no way that even "Grave" can play those slowly. And the very next movement has the left hand playing at 552 notes a minute. That is 9.2 notes a second. "full of sorrow... love and devotion"???? Did the guy that wrote that line ever hear the music played? How do you get "full of sorrow" from a tempo marking of "Allegro di molto e con brio!"

Related topic - Trans Siberian Orchestra. That band is who I first heard "The Pathetic Sonata" from. i think the actual name of the song was "Mephistopheles." I'll look it up tomorrow. It was such a beautiful, enrapturing part of the band's song (the rest of the song wasn't so enrapturing), that as soon as I first played it for practice I recognized what it was... and after I looked at the temp markings, I also realized the Trans-Siberian Orchestra was playing the song at one third tempo. Bah. I can play it almost at full speed... but only for about 30 seconds... Well, I can only play two pages of the 17 pages song at that speed. After the first two pages, my familiarity with the song goes down rapidly. After hiking this weekend, I'll probably sit down for a hour or two and practice.

50 First Dates - Update One

Ha, I've successfully ripped the DVD to my computer and am now using VirtualDub to modify the movie. I've gotten through the first 20 minutes of the movie. I had to restart a few times until I figured out what would make a good editing. It's moving at a decent rate right now. VirtualDub keeps crashing about 2-3 minutes fairly regularly, so it's going slow - but I am making progress!

But - time for the interesting part of today!

A few days ago, I posted some break-dancing videos that I enjoyed. Today, I'll post some of the comics I enjoy.

First on the list, because it is a completed comic, is the Miracle of Science. Decent comic - drawing isn't great, but the storyline is the second best long running plot I've read in a comic...and the comic is finished! No wondering for three years how a particular story arc will turn out! ( Some webcomics update once a week... very boring... but I still check )

DMFA - Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures - I check this one multiple times throughout the day. Not because I enjoy it that much, but because I have one batch file that opens a whole bunch of my favorite sites and when I want to see one, I see them all, and DMFA is the first on that the batch file opens.

Last but not least is Vexxarr. An interesting read. There isn't much of a plotline, but the dialog is full of sarcasm, thinly veiled threats, and statements of impending doom upon anything non-mechanical.

By admitting the fact that I read webcomics, I have fully shown the world the lack of life I have.

Good luck Friday Kate!

Ghost Rider

For today's post on an incredibly popular and commonly read blog ( I think I hear my brother laughing ) I will do a review on the movie Ghost Rider.

I watched Ghost Rider Friday night. I don't want to give away any of the plotline, so I'll just say the plot is completely predictable, the fights were disappointingly simple, and the special effects are very good. As much as I enjoy watching a whole street of cars flip into store fronts while bursting into flame, I don't think I'll see the movie again. That was a short review. :-)

Almost short - I can't help it, I need to rant a bit more about the boss fights. Sunday, I watched the last two fights of Gorgeous. THAT is a good fight: good choreography, closely matched opponents, good reflexes, speed, humor, character development during the fights and both fights together last 30 minutes if they were put back to back. In Ghost Rider, there were no close fights. Ghost Rider always outpowered his opponents (by a huge amount) and had no finness while doing it. Come on! The movie gave Ghost Rider an unstoppable physical attack and a spiritual attack that is only SUPER EFFECTIVE against any evil. And movie goers are supposed to think that Ghost Rider is ever in trouble? Bah.

Kick Your Heels Up And Dance, Come On Now

I was considering what I should put in my blog today and I was having trouble. When a person has such a fantastic, famous, regularly updated, and popular blog, choosing a good topic i s a challenge. But worry not dear readers, for today I have decided to share the greatness of my blog. I will do this by mentioning a few of my favore websites.

My secret is out - I just want to share some cool websites I know about! OK, today, I'll start with the musical dance. Sorry for those on dial up, but these are big files - Oh, and mom. I've shown you these before.

extreme crew
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Bkk3Um1LkU

extreme break dancing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tyxlaib9UF0

This post is also in premature celebration of finding a hobby while I'm down here - competitive ballroom dancing. The studio is nearby, but I still need to find out what the class schedule is.