Skip to main content

Holidays

I am on vacation. It is very, very nice.

Even before this, things have been slow. On the edge of worryingly slow, but still not slow enough that I've had to fret over anything. I've been enjoying some relaxation and time with my growing baby boy and my beatiful wife.

We've taken the holiday with her family and our friends in sunny North Carolina, where I have been enjoying warm, sunny weather to start my winter. I actually miss the cold.

Although not much has happened externally, a lot has happened internally. I am using the down time to organize myself, my plans, and prepare movements forward for proper exploration of some plans I've had on the back burner for a while now.

More of my time has been able to be spent on more recreational activities, as well, and that is nice. Reading has been lost to me for some time, and I've picked up a few books I've enjoyed. I plan to start another blog, which will be focused on reviews of literature developers, gamers, and other geeks will enjoy, but not necessarily literature about those topics. I want to bring other people in on this one, so if anyone is interested in reviewing good books, new or old, contact me (ironfroggy (ta) gmail (tod) com).

Speaking of the holidays and recreation: I got a Wii! I've been loving it. I have the WiiSports that came with the system, and the new Zelda, but I actually play the WiiSports more, so far. It is so fun. I've been taking the system around to friends' houses and we all have sore arms from so much bowling, the funest game for multiple people and one controller (and maybe my favorite one besides that). Anyway, when I get some good online games, I can't wait to play against some others in the community.

My Mii number is 3456 8115 5527 0431.

So far I can't bowl over a 175, the words "fowl ball" have lost all meaning, and I can sleep easier under the delusion that a higher score is better, even in golf. Zelda is slow going to start, but I'm enjoying it. Kind of obvious how it wasn't started as a Wii game, however. Most of the time the wiimote is just used to make a little fairy (with, so far, no mention in the game what-so-ever) fly around. And I can fish.

I will possibly move away from blogspot soon. I need more flexability.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operate on
1 comment
Read more

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful
1 comment
Read more

How To Teach Software Development

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools Education is broken. Education about software development is even more broken. It is a sad observation of the industry from my eyes. I come to see good developers from what should be great educations as survivors, more than anything. Do they get a headstart from their education or do they overcome it? This is the first part in a series on software education. I want to open a discussion here. Please comment if you have thoughts. Blog about it, yourself. Write about how you disagree with me. Write more if you don't. We have a troubled industry. We care enough to do something about it. We hark on the bad developers the way people used to point at freak shows, but we only hurt ourselves but not improving the situation. We have to deal with their bad code. We are the twenty percent and we can't talk to the eighty percent, by definition, so we need to impro
4 comments
Read more