Everybody knows I’m a TV junkie. If I had to give up TV or the Internet, I honestly think I could part with the Information Superhighway first. My newest TV viewing pleasure is CBS’s Joan of Arcadia. For those who aren’t familiar, the show follows a 16 year old girl named Joan who is visited by God taking for several times an episode. The interesting part is that God takes many forms, from a Frenchman who could have easily appeared on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy to a homeless person. God gives Joan some sort of mission each episode, which it seems can only be resolved if Joan figures something out about human nature. The characters surrounding Joan seem well written and play off Joan well. (I have only seen about 3 episodes, so I’m not entirely sure of her relationship with them all.) I highly recommend the show: It tastefully tears down many of the religious crap that has been attributed to the nature of God over the years.

This is as good a place as any to post a list of my favorite shows:

• Friends
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• Angel
• The Simpsons [note: not so much the new episodes, but the early ones will live in my heart forever
• King of the Hill
• Everybody Loves Raymond
• Nip/Tuck
• South Park
• The Real World
• The Screen Savers
• Still Standing
• Two and a Half Men
• and of course…Joan of Arcadia

For the record, this is definately the most unfocused post ever, but I have a lot on my mind:

Topic #1: Employment – Thursday, I went to get a data entry job at this little shop in town. I filled out about 5 different forms, waited for 20 minutes for the guy to come back, and then left after being told that it was lunchtime. So, for an hour, I sat in the local Dairy Queen and enjoyed a double cheeseburger and a HUGE cone. (I hadn’t had any of that soft serve in several years. Good stuff!) After my hour of waiting, I head back to take the typing test portion of the job interview, and just as I was warming up, some dummy knocked over a power pole near the building. After some smoke and flame, the power goes out. I was instructed to come back Tuesday. So much for getting a job in a timely fashion.

Topic #2: Formatting – I formatted my Dell rig for the first time since I got it. I have done this so many times in the last 8 years that I have it down to a science. It had been over a year since I have done the procedure to one of my own machines. I had this one up and going at full speed in about 6 hours (which would have been about 2.5 hours had it not been for dial-up Internet access). I’m certainly glad to have 2 hard drives. I used to have to do all my backup on a parallel port Zip Drive…I didn’t lose one piece of important data and it only took about an hour to transfer all my keepables (including tons of video and MP3s). I decided to go with a crazy partitioning schemes that involves setting up different partitions for different stuff. It makes defragging so much faster and more efficient. My roomate set his rig up like this awhile back and it does prove handy if you need to wipe the OS clean.

Topic #3: The Wonders of NOD32 – Since my Norton anti-virus subscription is about to run out anyway, I decided to forego Norton with this clean Windows install and instead opted for NOD32 Anti-Virus. Norton is notorious for slowing down a system: One benchmark indicated a 10% performance hit, and I know from personal experience that the memory footprint is about 30 megs or so. NOD32 has, for years, been considered the best performing anti-virus program; however, it has also been regarded as not very user friendly and complicated. Maybe it’s because I’m a CIS guy, but I found nothing to be further from the truth. It updates fast and there’s nothing confusing about it. The NOD32 Control Center controls 3 or 4 modules that control different aspects of virus detection. Modular is a very smart design if you ask me. Anyway, my system is hammering and very responsive. I believe part of this is due to NOD32. I highly recommend it. By the way, it has already caught 3 email viruses for me, so I know it works.

Topic #4: Win32 Programming – Today, I started fooling around with Win32 programming in C++ again. Data structures has really helped me, because I think it’s not so scary now. If the summer doesn’t get too hectic, I’m going to finish that journaling program I’ve been threatening to write for the better part of 2 years.

Topic #5: Website Fun – I’ll probably have the control center to my website finished by the weekend. I haven’t had this much fun programming in a long time. My readers (all 2 of you) won’t notice much of a difference in the site, but administering it will be a blast for moi…I sometimes forget how much I love this computer crap even though I decided to teach.

I’ve settled (at least partially) back into my parents’ home once again. It’s very odd coming back. I kinda figured I’d be getting my own place and getting a good job. Making a decision to teach has thrown all of that out the window. For at least another couple years, I’ll be very poor and probably living here in the same ol’ room I grew up in. Does this make me a failure? The more I think about it, the more I think no. This arrangement is the road less traveled. Life would have been easier at first had I went for a corporate job. But instead, I’m going to take the position of a servant, hellbent on trying to change a culture that has frustrated me for a long time, for a lot less money. If that’s failure, nothing challenging would ever be worth doing.

When my Mom wants to change something about herself, more often than not the first place she goes is for the hair. Well, unlike her, I like my hair: it’s short, easy to manage, and keeps me relatively cool. Most importantly, my hair has never been a cited reason for rejection by the chicas.

Since I did want to change something but really dig my hair, I decided to change a few things about my website. There wasn’t anything wrong with the old layout: I just wanted to do something different. And unlike a few times before, I didn’t do a total change. I just wooled around in my stylesheet and shifted some colors and positions here and there. If any of my readers (all 1 of you) really don’t like these changes, I’ll fix everything back. If you are only slightly annoyed by any of this, just deal with it :) Anyway, when graduation finally gets here, I’ll probably be doing a lot of stuff to the backend of my site. Who knows, it may even become useful to somebody besides me.

As hard as it is for me to believe sometimes, there was a time when I did not have access to the Internet. I have very good memories of what was going on in my life during this period, but I couldn’t tell you how I was able to find information on anything. Obviously, there were books, but I don’t remember buying or checking out that many at the library. Then there was TV. I can honestly say I learned a lot from TV, but it’s not like you can get information on demand: You’re at the mercy of whatever is floating over the airwaves. Particuarily, I wonder how I got current news and statistics? I guess I watched CNN and just grabbed stats as they came across. The problem with the statistical stuff not being online was that it was very hard to remembers certain stats from year to year. Now, I can just hop online and pull up secular statistics for about anything and do comparisons. No more hard-core memorization.

Implications of the Internet
It seems like I remember that people shared information with each other verbally more before the Net. There was, from what I recall, a lot more exchanges like, “Hey man, I saw on TV last night…” Nowadays, it’s more like “I found this neato website with [insert name of desired information here] on it. I’ll e-mail you a link to it.” This sort of link exchanging is all well and good, but you have to wonder if society will lose the ability to summarize information on the fly. This is a valuable skill to possess when decisions must be made quick and there is one or two people who must disperse information to an entire group.

I do wonder whether having information on-tap will help enhance our ability to remember facts and figures…On the one hand, we probably don’t try as hard to remember certain things because we know we can pull them up anytime at our leisure. On the other hand, we may be more effective at remembering really important stuff because we don’t bog down our brains with so many of the things that are readily available now.

In my experience, different programming lanugages have different ways of dealing with programmer errors. The following list, while not exhaustive, should highlight the tactics of some of the most popular languages (both past and present):

• QBasic – In keeping with the simplicity of its design, QBasic informs you of errors in nothing more than baby talk. For example, you may encounter “Out of Range!” or “Var not set!”
• C++ – A true bureaucrat, C++ gives you a ton of information which means nothing, making you feel very stupid in the process. After a few years, you think you’ve got a handle on it, then it throws out some new jargon you’ve never seen. For example:
  “c:\documents and settings\new user\somefile.cpp(3) : error C2065: ‘cout’ : undeclared identifier
  
  c:\documents and settings\new user\somefile.cpp(3) : error C2297: ‘<<' : illegal, right operand has type 'char [13]"
• Java – Much like its C++ cousin, Java burdens you down with tons of details about what you’ve done wrong. It is supposedly smarter than C++ and tries to prove this with its gargantuan error messages. It even tries to offer remedies for your unholy instruction.
• PHP – The passive-aggressive language, PHP says almost nothing when you’ve done something wrong. It just presents you with blank screen whose source code contains nothing but a generic header. After a lot of massaging and appologizing, you can generally get it cranking the way it’s supposed to.
• Perl – Despite its name, Perl is not smooth at all when dealing with errors. It routinely screams the word “Die!” complete with the exclamation point. After panicking for a few seconds, you decide to dig into the code and see what exactly has died, only to find that you simply forgot a semi-colon. Talk about a manic, overly-dramatic performance.
• Python – Python is a bit dyslexic. It points to errors in the wrong place, swearing up and down you’ve messed up in a particular location, when if fact you actually messed up somewhere several lines above. Being called a liar by a programming language is probably the most insulting thing possible.

I have nearly finished my Mozilla Composer Tutorial. It is the result of about three days worth of work. As you’ll notice, there’s a pretty lame Flash animation at the top. Believe me,I wouldn’t have included it if it wasn’t part of the requirements of the project. I’m sure it needs some revisions and I need to add some navigation elements at the bottom of the page, but as it is right now, it’s not a bad piece of tech writing, even if I do say so myself.

I did the whole thing using Macromedia products. It must be said that Macromedia’s FireWorks can really spank Adobe’s Photoshop in some areas. Fireworks’ native file format is readable to any modern browser, thanks to its use of the PNG file format. And, even better, the web graphics produced by Fireworks are smaller with better color saturation. I thought pigs would fly before I would denounce Photoshop, but I think that day has come. Fireworks is king!

Joss Wheadon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff Angel can make me feel very sad faster than about anyone. Me and my roomate have been watching the 4^th season of Angel, and the first 3 episodes weren’t sad at all. This fact is very much unlike Joss, who normally bums us out in the first episode. (This trend is more consistent in Angel than in Buffy.) Starting with the fourth episode in the season, though, all that changed. I was wrenched when it was over. And me, being the one who likes to know what happens next, loaded up the subsequent episode. Same thing. I went to sleep last night an unhappy little boy. Joss never lets any of his characters be happy for too long. It wouldn’t be so bad if I weren’t so emotionally invested in the characters. I think they are all well written, as none of them fit into a neat little catagory. Almost every character he has created is neither all good nor all bad. Even the worst of his villians can garner pitty, since they are almost never evil for evil’s sake. Anyway, I’ll dive into some more of season 4 tonight and end up a wrenched-out ball of emotions again…It’s oh so fun!

[Note: When I say a wrenched out ball of emotions, I don’t mean that I break down and cry or anything like that. I don’t get that invested in my shows. What I mean is that I’m either sitting there at the end of an episode saying, “Oh my God! That didn’t just happen!” or “Why didn’t you let them be happy for just a second!!!” And I don’t lose sleep over my shows either, just in case anyone may wonder.]

It dawned on me the other day that the Mad Max movies make no economic sense. Sure, there was plenty of scarcity, and scarcity is the thing that economics focuses on. However, in studying econ, you learn that people substitute more costly things for those that are less costly when things get the most scarce. The biggest, most illogical economic feature of the entire movie is the use of huge, gas-guzzling muscle cars. Fuel is the currency of their world, as it is the most precious thing available, yet the inhabitants of this post-appocolyptic universe give power to those individuals with the most wasteful equipment. In the real world, the muscle-bound head hauncho would be riding on a mo-ped. You know, the kind that gets 30 miles to the gallon. His people would marvel at his ability to travel 60 miles on a gallon of gas! Efficiency is his source of power. [Geez, this post makes me realize why I’ve always been considered a geek!]

I found out yesterday that I was voted Outstanding Student in the Department of Information Systems by my professors. I don’t work hard because I seek accolades like this, but it does make all the hard work and extra hours of gleening my assignments for errors somewhat more tolerable. This is an acknowledgment that what I’ve done up to this point is what I should have been doing. The one thing I hope that comes out of this is that it’s important not to underestimate someone just because he comes from one of the most backwards places on Earth. We all are neither ignorant nor dumb, and we have as much potential as anyone else. Representing my area in a positive light is important to me becase we all do not fit the stereotype.

I will not let this go to my head. I don’t know anymore about computers now than I did yesterday before I found out. Nor is this a reason to let my guard down, as I have “many miles before I sleep*.” Hopefully it can never be said that the effort I put in is proportional to the amount of praise I get for it. That’s not how I operate.

*Walking by a Woods on a Snowing Evening, Robert Frost