Department of Unwise Studies

This book is living proof that it takes more than good prose stylings to produce a novel, and that when you add one of every spice the resulting stew tastes mostly just brown. Spoilers follow, but honestly you shouldn't read the book anyway.

It's a book which has a down at the heels stage magician detective, a mysterious mute (the titled Sonambulist) who does not bleed when stabbed and drinks only milk, an albino... and a zillion other things... and makes use of almost none of them. The mysterious mute? Still mysterious by the end, we learn nothing about him despite the fact that he's the sidekick of the main character (the magician). Character development? None. Narrator revealed in a twist? Yes, he turns out the be the villian!... and it's boring as hell. Plot to destroy the city? Check, but we don't care about it. Zombie Coleridge? Yep. Yawn. Demonic assassins? Wait, why were they even added? What do they bring? Bleh. Also there's a man living backward through time. Sort of. Does he add anything to the story? No.

I give this book one star for being able to put a sentence together well, but rest assured the author won't do anything with it.

I'm really vexed that the filibuster has forced me to vote for someone who is able to take a gold plated sure thing on a silver platter with spangles and brass band and drop it on the floor and then run it over with a truck. A loss to learn again the lesson that you have to nominate someone who has done more than work his or her way up in the party to take the big offices would possibly have been educational for the Democrats.

I'm sure in the senate she will have a long career during which she will perhaps amass a record of accomplishment something like a single year of the man she's replacing. And when she wins we're unlikely to replace her until she leaves on her own.

Forte Swordplay is looking to get some beginners with the new year.

Just sayin'.

www.forteswordplay.com

So at the new company (tripadvisor) our group wants to vastly expand. Unlike previous companies I've been at, this one actually has plenty of money and is unlikely to explode at the end of the year.

We're looking for developers. There are some immediate positions which will be mostly Java. There's probably one that will be a lot of PHP. There are also some fuzzier ones that are still shaping up (should be firmed up in the new year) which will be a lot of python but need to know some Java as well. If you hate Java none of these are for you. If you merely hate XML driven Java frameworks you'd do OK, we all hate those.

There's definitely room for novices as well as experienced developers.

BULK PESTO!

http://www.linabellasgarlic.com/

My winter freezer is enlivened with a dozen pestos. Now I don't ever need to go back to the Kendall farmer's market.

Apparently some people I actually know are playing City of Heroes now? I'm curious what they think, but then, I did smoke that crack for three years!

I just got some of these to try as German Longsword gloves:



What the description "Naginata Kote. The indicator finger is in a separate chamber than the rest of the fingers. Deer leather." does not tell you is that this is smoked deer leather. It smells distinctly and strongly like a certain tea snob's lapsang souchang = "smokey bacon tea".

J. suggested that I put them out on the deck for a while. This at least seems to have let the odor disspate enough that it only stinks up the area immediately around the gloves. When I wear them for practice I may end up with smokey hands for weeks.

You know you've been out of work a while when you think, hey, I'll learn some haskell.

Next time you have to write a complicated, important technical document and you're pretty sure people aren't going to hold up their responsibility to read and understand it, ask yourself: what would Van Halen do?

Tonight the bunnies are flopped on the floor making a lambda. Apparently they're programmer bunnies. Good to see that they're using a powerful language, because they're pretty slow so they need all the expressive power they can get.

I'm pleased that now I can read the english translation of The Flower of Battle and pretty much picture the longsword plays and how they work in my mind.

Part of it is that this is relatively straightforward compared to most German longsword texts which often run to the counter-counter-counter and use more varied initial cuts. But I'll take it anyway.

Consuming any star wars media always makes me want to run a star wars game. You can get older but there's always a child inside.

Well in a week of leisure I've managed to revise my resume from two years ago ( it's up at http://web.mit.edu/~ashultz/Public/resume09.pdf )...

... and watch a couple of seasons of 30 rock.

... and there was probably something else. I went to the library, or something.

I'm not cut out for unemployment, I'm too something something to be unemployed!

Upon being laid off along with a large chunk of the company, my primary emotion is... relief at not having to deal with the mess management was making. And extreme relief at not ever having to look at that contractor Java ever again.

My apologies to those left to deal in the wreckage.

I should get my resume together some time soon. But not today.

Just finished the massive tome "The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters" and I can't recommend it. The post title above is not actually a joke - the heroine and heroes get captured with ridiculous regularity. And amazingly the author manages to make a plot involving steampunk and blue glass dream-eating alchemical books not actually that interesting. It comes across as more of a comedy movie, in which the too-many different bad guys to distinguish and the heroes run around in large Victorian sets doing the doors-and-hallway routine.

Apparently this is a best seller, which adds another datum for my "if you give the bookreading masses the permission to read genre fiction they love it because it's not another dry bite of literary ficiton" theory that started with the potter books and of course "Johnathan Strange and Mr. Nothing Happens in this Book".

To make things worse "Glass Books" is book one of what must be a trilogy, though it is basically self-contained. I started book two "The Dark Volume" and realized I couldn't take it, so I skipped to the end to determine that yes, the story is expected to continue from this one as well.

You check in code that does not even parse.

You don't check in code at all.

Your editor is notepad.

Your response to tabs or spaces is "wha?"

Your first code tool is Ctrl-C and your second is Ctrl-V.

Every time you want a connection you make a connection pool with one item, pull it out, use it, don't put it back, and then throw the whole thing away anyway.

... and yet you can get paid as a programmer doing all these things and many more.

Apparently one of the sources of our troubles if you are drinking management kool-aid is bad code quality.

This puts a serious strain on my apathy.

Presently I'm surviving at work on a large amount of apathy. Sadly, apathy is not unlike depression and saps ones energy. I'm greatly saddened by the idea that some people go through their entire work lives in this state.

Even more because it's so rare I'm pleased to see that we're a nation which not only includes the religious like it does in every inclusive political speech but also includes those without religion, who are generally spat on by politics.