R_Edward

I'm exactly the same way. I have a weekly gig that occasionally gets recorded and thrown up on the web. I hate watching the video, because whenever I do, all I hear are my own mistakes. People tell me it sounded great, and I think, "Sure, to someone with no musical training, maybe."

It never occurs to me to realize that "someone with no musical training" describes easily 80% of the audience. Maybe more.

It may or may not have been in customary informal usage for that long [citation needed], but it is still considered incorrect in strict, rigorous, formal usage. (Yes, this is on the cusp of changing, but for now, it's still true.) In formal usage, pronouns agree in gender and in number with their antecedents.

I was wondering: if it starves the fuel of oxygen, it stops the fuel from burning, even if it's still hot, yes? So if it could scale from frying-pan-level to house-level, at the very least, couldn't it be used to suppress the fire, the smoke production, and the further weakening of the structure, to allow a squad to search and rescue more safely? Then when you turn off the sound, maybe the material has cooled below the reignition point, but even if it hasn't, at that point you can fight the fire traditionally.

17 years ago, I worked for a hearing aid manufacturer. The common terms in use there were BTE and ITE, for "behind the ear" and "in the ear." Frankly, I thought the initialisms were poorly conceived. ITE is three syllables, same as "in the ear," and less meaningful for the uninitiated. BTE only saves you one syllable, again at the cost of meaningfulness. But either which way, your terminology is both understandable and correct.

Off-topic: While I was there, they asked employees to submit ideas for a new hearing aid marketing slogan, with the incentive of a free vacation to Vegas going to the person who submitted the one they used. For some reason, I did not win the vacation with my suggestion: "Stick It In Your Ear!"

I didn't realize there were non-outlets there. The prices are strange--I've bought a handful of items, and they were all stickered at or below nearby retail, but when they rang them up, the actual price was even lower. While I love to get a deal, I prefer to know what the deal is before I hit the register. Anyway, that should be a good location, easy access from three interstates and a couple major trunk highways, but then, that's where Cedarvale was, and that died a slow painful death too.

My town just built a "Premium Outlet Mall." I was dubious of the wisdom of that plan, but I just visited it last weekend, and it seems to be pretty popular, even with the Mall of America just minutes away, and with Internet shopping available at the swipe of a smartphone or the click of a mouse. It's not an indoor mall, which I also find curious, here in the Land of 10,000 Snows, but it does have a free indoor parking garage just across the street. The projections are that the outlet mall is going to siphon off about 4% of the take this holiday season. (The article I read was pretty vague as to what size pie that was 4% of, to my chagrin.)

Fascinating. I had known for some time that oak trees will commingle their roots, forming an oak internet. In good times, this helps smaller trees become better established through resource-sharing with mature trees. Unfortunately, the network doesn't just pass beneficial resources; it also passes the oak wilt pathogen, so if one oak tree gets the wilt, it's a pretty good bet that all the others in the immediate vicinity will get it too.

On my first day at one job, HR called me into a conference room to review my compensation package and everything. The HR rep wrote a number on a Post-It and handed it to me, saying, "This is your salary. Here at BigCo we hold salary in confidence between you and the company. In other words, please do not discuss this number with any of your co-workers." I responded, "Don't worry, ma'am. I'm just as ashamed of that small number as you are." [low 6 figures, 28 years experience, Upper Midwest]

The stuff that means the most to me would look like junk to anyone else: an origami crane, inexpertly folded; a used sock with buttons sewn on it; a styrofoam heart with tissue paper and googly eyes glued to it; a few really bad pencil drawings... Handmade by my children, and given to me with love. I'll never part with them.

Four people need to cross a rickety bridge at night. Unfortunately, they have only one torch and the bridge is too dangerous to cross without one. The bridge is only strong enough to support two people at a time. Not all people take the same time to cross the bridge. Times for each person: 1 min, 2 mins, 7 mins and 10 mins. What is the shortest time needed for all four of them to cross the bridge?<

17 minutes, if you can stipulate that at the beginning of the problem, the 10 minute and 7 minute people are on opposite sides of the bridge, each paired with one of the other two guys.

18 minutes, if they must all start on the same side of the bridge, but there is no requirement for all of them to end up on the opposite side.

This also assumes that person who can cross the bridge in as little as one minute has no problem slowing down to accommodate someone else's slower pace; otherwise there's no real point to trying to share the torch.

Although, if one's interest level were continuously poked into a particular memory location every time it changed, you might find that if you peeked when it piqued you would find that it also peaked.

On an unrelated note, I was writing an article for a travel magazine, and found a very well-conceived online database of recommended places to visit. Sadly, I couldn't use it in my article, because I couldn't figure out how to cite the sight site.

Plus, do those 50% of the people tend to get lost going from place to place in their daily lives? And do members of the other 50% have a need to be able to precisely locate any of those people without maps, addresses, or street names?

I humbly submit that this is a very nice solution in desperate and ultimately fruitless search for a problem.

Do you mean to tell me that those crates of my dad's 78 rpm records sitting in my basement might actually be worth something? I was thinking about playing them on a 33.3 rpm turntable into my PC, then using Audacity to speed them up to 78, just to be able to hear the music again, and by association, remember my dad. Geeze, there must be at least a hundred of 'em down there, at least!

Or at least Dr. Emmet Brown.

Hmmmmm... I have a knee-jerk reaction to initiatives with names like "Everyone can <fill in the blank>." Everyone may benefit from being exposed to the rudiments of whatever activity you're promoting, but it is clearly, objectively, undeniably the case that no, not everyone can program, or dance, or sing, or build a curio cabinet for any personally or professionally meaningful definition of the term.

Now, it is certainly true that any fool can use a computer... Many do! But using one--or even learning by rote how to craft a Hello World program--is a far cry from being able to look at a problem and mentally break it down into computational steps, then build the program up from those steps. Until you get to the point where you're thinking computationally, I'm not convinced you can really call whatever it is your doing "programming."

Maybe I just need to adjust the onion on my belt and go yell at a cloud or two.

When I'm grinding out Cobol or Algol code (yes, I am a dinosaur), I stick with 80 columns per line. Because, for better or worse, that's all my compiler sees. One compiler squawks when a line extends beyond Col 80, another allows the use of Col 81-90 for a markid, but the standard editor doesn't grant access to those columns easily, so it's infrequently used. But if I'm using a more freely-formatted language, you can bet I'm ignoring the 80-column limit. But I'm still keeping my lines as short as possible, and even wrapping in some cases, because my code needs to be easy to read, and side-scrolling is the antithesis of reading easiness.

Also, when I was coding in PascalVS at the University of Pangaea, I distinctly recall becoming incensed one day over the fact that, while the Hollerith card provided 80 columns, the PascalVS compiler stopped reading earlier than that--maybe it only accepted 72 characters per line. That was irritating. And costly--we had to provide our own cards, and on a student budget, they weren't cheap!

I looked at the nightly order-processing workflow for the regional retailer I worked for one time. I was gobsmacked to find that one section of it consisted of launching the same suite of 5-6 programs one time for each of our 25 locations. And "launching" meant setting a handful of run-time variables, executing the object, waiting for it to finish running, and examining the result.

It was fairly easy to see why this happened. That workflow was the heart and soul of the company's revenue processing, and no one wanted to touch it any more than absolutely necessary, to avoid breaking anything. So when they expanded from one warehouse to two, it made more sense to simply re-iterate the existing code with the new location id. When they added another location, re-iterate it again, and so forth.

I created a Launch subroutine, then replaced all those hundreds of lines of code with a for loop that simply called the Launch subroutine for each object needed. Then I went through the rest of the workflow and swapped in Launch calls where appropriate. Overnight, that workflow became much shorter, more readable, and most importantly, significantly more maintainable. Previously, if you wanted to change what programs were run per branch, you had to insert the launching logic in twenty-five separate spots. Now? Once.

That, my friends, is why we build functions, rather than copypasta-ing the same code over and over.

I would further refine this to, "Learning to code is like learning to write prose: Easy to learn, and easy to do, but not so easy to do well. Especially since 'well' is at least a little bit subjective." There are plenty of people who can write well, who are not commercially successful. And there are people who are commercially successful who do not write very well at all. Cough-DanBrown-Cough.

I found doing tech support for my software to be a very valuable experience. It wasn't nearly as disruptive to my coding process as some of my brethren seem to find it; perhaps because when I'm puzzling out a thorny issue, I tend to take copious notes--and let the phone go to voice mail if I think I'm on the verge of a breakthrough. And being the first person to speak to the users who have issues, you can very quickly sort out the user-education issues from the UI/UX problems.

It was also always good for a smile when a caller would ask if I was familiar with the system. I was, I would say, reasonably familiar with it. Then they'd start explaining to me how it was supposed to work. I let them, because hearing their interpretation of the system narrative gave me valuable insight into how my users' minds approached the problems that my software was intended to solve.

I also wrote my own User Guides, reference manuals, and training material. Who had better understanding of the system than I did?

I make extensive use of e-books and audio books. I especially like audio books because they make my commute bearable. But some books, which may be great stories in the dead-tree edition, are downright aggravating in the recycled-electrons edition. I'm currently listening to a story that keeps jumping back and forth between the present and the recent past, and whatever visual clues the author might have left for that, the reader is failing to convey.

eBooks have issues of their own. Most of these seem to be due to the interface, though, rather than to the format itself. 3M Cloud, for example, seems dedicated to making it as difficult as possible for me to be able to pick up my eBook and continue reading where I left off. My current book drops me at the beginning of Chapter 2 every time I open in. It has a "bookmark" capability, by which I mean I can create a bookmark--I just can't ever find it later, much less return to the spot in the book that it supposedly marks. Frustrating. But I can download and start reading a book in the middle of the night, far from home, and when my checkout period expires, the local copy automatically disappears without my having to return to the library or pay a fine for failure to return the book.

Gonna encourage one of the kids to name their firstborn L'eaughanne!

(Don't worry--they don't do any of the things I tell 'em to do, no matter much amusement it would give me.)

I share a first name with my father, so to save confusion, they called me by my middle name. If it were strictly a matter of social convenience, that would be fine. But you can't do anything in the modern world without submitting some kind of form, and the form is what gives me trouble. I can put my first initial in the First Name field, but then some people think that means I want to be called R.

Some people, confronted with a single letter in the First Name field, might look at the Middle Name field, but often the Middle Name field is actually a Middle Initial field. So now they have no idea what to call me, and usually default back to R.

I could take the daring step of "lying," and putting my middle name in the First Name field, and my first initial in the Middle Initial field, but if they ever try to compare that record to, say, my drivers license or passport, there will be a mismatch, and some uncomfortable questions being asked. This is especially troublesome if the form is something that is likely to be coordinated with other forms in different offices.

Ironically, the first time I ever got any pushback for being an Initial-Name-Name instead of a Name-Initial-Name was when the HR department at Burroughs was processing my new-hire paperwork. Burroughs was chaired, at the time, by one W. Michael Blumenthal.

There'll be plenty of time for doin' physics and livin' in a van down by the river, when you're doin' physics and livin' in a van down by the river.

It's kind of a neat thing, for sure, but what are we thinking are its practical applications? Possible use as an assistive device for the disabled, perhaps?

I'm not sure we do our students any favors by suggesting that math is "magical."

First thought is that the link to "See how Dragdis works" takes you to a youtube video that shows pretty much the same thing as what plays in the page background. I don't think you need both.

I like the concept, though I didn't play around with it to see whether the implementation was what I would hope it to be.

Comic book physics is always good for a fun discussion, but no one seems to ever want to discuss comic book economics. As in, "Oh my goodness! That arch-criminal just stole a $200,000 diamond! Time to swoop in an cause a few tens of millions of dollars in property and collateral damage in order to retrieve it!"

I have a clipping from a small regional daily newspaper from the 60s. The headline reads, "U.S., Canada Rear Warning Staveal Sites of Radtions" which sounds ominous indeed. It took me several tries to realize that someone most have dropped the line of type, breaking it, and reassembling it in the wrong order. It should have read, "U.S., Canada Reveal Sites of Radar Warning Stations"

Those are fine looking templates, and I like the idea of using a bit of splashiness to stand out from the crowd. I just worry that the end result might be that I'm taken less seriously as a candidate than the one who used the old, traditional format.

For what it's worth, I almost wish I was applying for a job at a commercial art house, just so I could use that black resume. Print that bad boy on some heavy, glossy stock, and there's no way they can turn you down!

Aw, dangit! That right there is why I should always double-check my mental math with a calculator.

I should have said 20.45 minutes, not 1.## seconds. Mea culpa. It's still not a huge savings, comparatively.