House of the rising Moonglum

Ha, I just discovered that I was the only one able to post comments for about a month here. Sorry about that. Feel free to comment away. Of course everyone who used to read this blog reads twitter or Facebook now instead. Twitter is ok, since I can get an rss feed off of it, but Facebook doesn’t seem to have one. Seriously people, no RSS feed? That is so 90s. Heck I want category based RSS feeds. Waaay too many really active people linked to me for me to be able to keep track of all that. Of course it does mean that the LJ load is lower and easier to keep up with.

So, to celebrate comments being open again, I pose a question: which methods do you use to keep up with friends, and how often do you check them.

People need to learn how to scrape the snow off the roof of their car BEFORE getting on the interstate. Watching a six foot slab of ice fly off the roof of a speeding SUV and float away like a snowflake is quite beautiful. Watching it come down and slam into your windshield is less so. Fortunately no damage was done, other than to my heart. But if it hit edge first instead of sideways I could have seen a quite different result. At least that guy got off the road and scrapped his SUV down then. On the other hand, I saw similar flying slabs of snow or ice at least three more times on my drive home.

Consecutive runs of an application with differing results.

“Group and run” in IntelliJ always gives my results in alphabetical order. There is no particular reason that it should, and it not doing that has no negative consequences. In my two years of using it, it has just always exhibited this behavior. Until right now. This concerns me somewhat. I prefer to rely on the stability of my operations.

I remember the first time I thought about stability of operations what when working on a computer game with Alain. We had something that needed to be random (I have no memory of what). I wrote the code but when Alain was testing it, he was always using the same data. Imagine my shock. Aaah the joys of using pseudo random number generators for the first time. It’s a computer. Same numbers in, same (”random” sequence of) numbers out. If not, then something else is going on under the hood.

Too busy to look into it now though since it doesn’t actually impact the work.

Arresting a sitting governor?! I LOVE Fitzgerald! Loks like a-Rod was a bad bad boy. Selling off a senate seat. Pretty awesome. Trying to get a critical editorial team fired for cash money? Priceless. But doesn’t Fitzgerald know you are supposed to wait until they are out of office to do this? Could Daley be next? Will this actually have any impact on pay to play politics in Illinois and Chicago?

Exciting times.

Edited to add: If Fitzgerald is looking for ideas of what to do now, I’d say Stroger should be next on your list.

This article from the WSJ talks about how the foreign companies that are currently building cars in the US are handling the economic downturn. Asking for a bailout is not one of the things they are doing. It just feels like pouring good money after bad.