Category: Random Thoughts

The general category for posts on this blog.

Harry Potter

Random Thoughts

One thing I do that has remained a constant practice in my life has been to avoid situations where I am guaranteed my expectations have exceeded reality. Mostly this comes in with movies and books. Should I happen to not see a movie just as it comes out, or read a book within a couple months of release, and that thing takes off with reports of it being “The best ever!” there is a narrow window of opportunity to see or read it before I’m forced to put it off until the hype blows over. The reason for this is simple… people talk it up so much that it can’t possibly stand up to it.

Harry Potter is one of those things. People were telling me for years that they were simply the best books ever written, utterly fantastic, it would blow me away. So, I didn’t read them. There was so much build up, that I knew it couldn’t possibly be as good as the hype. And it wasn’t. I finally started reading the Harry Potter books a couple months ago. I’ve been reading one of them, then another book or two, then the next Potter book, and so on. I’m almost finished with ‘Goblet of Fire’ now, that’s why I’m writing. The first book… ehh… it was good, no doubt, and for young readers its an excellent book for interesting non-readers. Its short, its light, full of fluff and fun, and to any person over the age of about 18 or so, completely and utterly transparent. The plot, while not bad, was predictable. Yeah, I’d seen the movies, but that didn’t matter, even the things left out of the movie I saw coming. It was not a complicated book. That’s both a good thing and a bad thing, as I said… good for young readers or new readers, bad for anyone who has heard all the hype.

The second book was better. Still a bit predictable, and more fluff than substance, but it was a fun read that I enjoyed. However, still far from being ‘the best ever’.

The third book, moreso… the story growing up as the boy does, becoming more complicated and involved, relationships becoming less simplistic, and overall a much better book.

As I move through the fourth book, I can see it continuing to grow. The story is more complex, more textured, the characters breathe on the page and display more traits like those you find in our own world, and its beginning to lose its predictability.

I look forward to the fifth book. And the sixth, the seventh, and more, if she decides to continue on.

Now that the books are out of the way… lets talk about the fans. I’m reading the UK versions of the books. One, because those are the ones my fiancee owns. And two, because reading the book with the authentic English (or Brittish) vernacular just appeals to me more than having them all sound like a bunch of Americans despite the fact that they are in England. As such, the books I read have covers that most of the people I pass on the street have never seen. Constantly, I am berated by people yelling at me or even grabbing me or my book forcibly, demanding to know how I got ahold of the as of yet unreleased sixth book. Once I explain to them that its an old book, most of them just stomp away, not even apologizing for my sprained wrist or nearly tackling me. Few ask why the book is different, and to those that do, when I try to explain that its the original UK versions, their eyes glaze over like I’ve just tried to explain in depth quantum mechanical theory to them, and they stumble away, dumbfounded by the knowledge that Brittish English and American English aren’t the same, and that people actually write in languages other than American English. Only one person so far has actually carried on a conversation of intelligence and cared about the differences in the books (simple things like that people in the UK call a ‘flashlight’ a ‘torch’ and so on).

I’ve met numerous people who are going to go out Friday night and stay up at book release parties until 12:01am Saturday to buy their copy of the book. Because, obviously, the books bought at that time will be better than the ones the store will be selling all day the next day, at reasonable hours, like after the sun comes up, or even after a lazy brunch.

As it is, my fiancee, a huge Potter fan, but not an insane Potter fan, is actually going to wait until sometime the following week to read it. Her UK copy is being shipped overseas, and while most who order through Amazon will get their books on Saturday if they specified the next day shipping, next day from England means Monday or Tuesday.

Anyway, back to work, or something… Harry and Cedric have just… nah, not going to tell you. Read it yourself. I do recommend the Potter books… but I do not recommend becoming a Potter fanatic.

Something About the Weather

Random Thoughts

I have been known from time to time to check the weather report. If I have plans for the weekend, or am going on vacation somewhere. Sometimes, if I’ve heard about a storm coming in, I’ll even pop over to Weather.com or some place and see the predictions. But I don’t come even remotely close to being considered obsessed about it.

The people in the office I currently work in, on the other hand… I just don’t get it. They monitor the weather like a hawk eyes a field mouse. They meet in the aisles between the cubicles to discuss recent developments, storm or no storm, the way most people might discuss a recent vacation or a movie they just saw. And I just don’t get it.

What could possibly be so interesting about the fact that today is two degrees colder than yesterday as well as five degrees colder than it was on the same day in some other year? Who cares that three different weather sources are predicting different chances of rain?

If someone out there knows, please, I beg you, explain it to me.

Let the hunting begin!

Random Thoughts

No, this isn’t a review for some game or anything like that. Jodi and I are looking for a house. Well, we’ve been looking… today was the first time we had the real-estate agent actually take us to a house to look at it first hand. It was pretty nice. Good house, nice yard, 1.2 acres… a bit far from work, but hey, I like the bus and there is one out there too.

But the house hunt has officially begun! Cry havok and let split the puppies of peril! (The dogs of war are stuck in Iraq, so its the best I could do.)

Posting, Toys and Work

Random Thoughts

Well, after two months of posting every day (except Mondays), I’ve fallen back into my old habits of not posting as often as I’d like. Frankly, sometimes there is just nothing to post about… or I just plain forget.

Anyway… I continue to buy new toys for myself. After getting the PDA Phone, I’ve gotten myself a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse for it, so its like having a little computer, much smaller than a laptop, everywhere I go. I’ve spent some time fixing it up with software, mostly free stuff, and getting it to the point where I find myself using it pretty often. Calendar, contacts, emails, even writing (the screen is small, so writing for the website can be annoying, but I can do it, and will since work is getting really boring again). Its pretty sweet.

Speaking of work, did I mention it was boring? As much as I love the idea of getting paid thirty bucks an hour to play Freecell (up to 75% win ratio, should have myself up to 76 this coming week, 77 the week after at this rate) and Minesweeper (which cheats, the mines aren’t set until you click a square, you cannot lose on the first click, and it always has at least one spot where you have a 50/50 chance and no way to determine logically which one it is), I feel like I want to tear my eyes out some days. When there is work to do, its awesome, like right now, I taught myself how to utilize XML files on the webserver to emulate global variables for a .NET app instead of making constant round trips to the database server for building my objects. But when I’m waiting on someone else to finish their work before I can start mine… I keep telling them, I cannot design a front end for a back end that doesn’t exist. Its like asking someone to design a car chassis without telling them the size of the engine that needs to fit in it. Sure, you can do it, but when you finish your sports car design and they hand you a diesel truck engine for an 18-wheeler, it just means you have to start all over. I can’t build a screen for data input without knowing what fields to put on it. I’d go for dynamic screen building, but it looks bland and just gives you text fields, none of the fancy radio buttons and drops downs that people like to see on their forms. Bah! And then there is this one screen in the application that is blank because I’ve been waiting about two months for someone to give me the info that goes on it (its a help screen that has to have specific guidelines for contacting support desks and all that)… and I’m still waiting.

Enough. I’m done. Off to clean the bathrooms.

Appearances can be Deceiving

Random Thoughts

I read on the bus to work every morning. This week I’ve been reading ‘Lamb’ by Christopher Moore, an excellent book thus far (about half way through) and its looking like it will get a very good recommendation out of me. The book happens to be a semi-satirical look at the life of Jesus Christ, Joshua, through the eyes of his never-mentioned-in-the-Bible best friend Levi, who is called Biff. Anyhow, as I’m riding the bus, I notice the guy sitting next to me. He looks ‘normal’, and I mean that in the “We never suspected anything because he was just a normal guy” sort of way. He wore typical business casual clothes, khaki slacks, a polo shirt, and nice shoes. His hair was an average short but not too short guy hair cut. He wore glasses, had a watch on (a nice gold colored one that may or may not have been actual gold) and a wedding ring. As he sat, he was flipping through some papers and highlighting as he went.

A brief aside here… If curiosity kills the cat, then I’m glad I’m not a cat. I have an insatiable appetite for looking at things that I shouldn’t. As a child, one of my favorite pastimes was sneaking into my father’s closet to take a gander at the Playboy magazines that he kept hidden there. I was like eight years old. Eight year old boys don’t really understand looking at naked women, but I did understand that I wasn’t supposed to look at naked women, so that’s why I did it. At jobs, I’ve always poked around the networks to find files I shouldn’t see, also because I believe that if you really want to keep something secret you should take the proper precautions to ensure that it can’t be seen. So back to where I left off, a guy sitting next to me highlighting papers.

I’m pretty good at misdirection and that sort of thing, so I’m pretending to read my book and stealing glances with my eyes only over to his work. This ‘normal’ guy is reading through and highlight passages in satanic texts. He’s flipping through pages of books by Crowley and others, making special note of referenced texts. Of course, you might be wondering, “How do you know what satanic texts look like?” And I might answer, “Umm… because I’ve read most of them myself.” but you might think less of me, so instead I’ll say, “Because all the pages were printed from a website, and when you print from a website the URL appears at the bottom (unless you disable that in Internet Explorer) and it has ‘satanic texts’ written in it!” But even if you choose to believe the former, at least I have my head shaved and sport a goatee, and have had a number of people tell me I look evil (when I’m not, I’m really a nice guy), while this man looks like the poster boy for Suburban Living Monthly (which, ironically, is the same look and acronym for Sociopathic Lunatic Monthly, both of which I’m pretty sure you can pick up at your local Kroger). I can only hope that he was doing research for something he’s writing, like a novel or a screenplay, which, I assure you, is what I was doing when I read the same books, and not researching quotes for his manifesto swearing his faith to the one true lord which he’ll have on him as he sacrifices teenage girls and he’ll include copies of with the video tapes he sends to the authorities of his deeds.

Some days I wonder if my imagination is too active, or if I actually see things that other people don’t… Time will tell I suppose.

Screen Scrapes and Screen Shots

Random Thoughts

Its really funny sometimes… the big stuff, world hunger, politicians, war… even things like my car getting broken in to… they don’t really bother me. It all just kinda slides right off my back. But the little things just grate on my last nerve.

I’m a programmer, been doing computers for twenty years and programming for eleven. I’ve worked with all sorts of languages, dealt with umpteen different kinds of servers and thousands of applications, and over time in a career like this, you learn the terminology. Certain things mean certain stuff. For example, when dealing with mainframes or midranges and converting their text displays to another format there is an interim step called a “screen scrape“. It got this term because you are literally scanning the data stream to the terminal or PC, identifying and pulling out text and fields, and munging them through some sort of GUI to display to the user or do stuff to the screen (like autofill certain fields). Then after if they used a GUI, you plug the data back into the fields and submit it to the mainfraim or whatever. You are scraping the screen for data and fields and doing stuff with it. On the other hand, a “screen shot” is an image of the screen captured for display elsewhere (often in user manuals or to accompany a bug report).

Some of the people I work with, some of whom have been around computers longer than I have, keep calling their screen shots “screen scrapes” and its driving me up the wall. And the even worse thing is, because they don’t understand the difference, when I ask for “screen shots”, I usually get back blank stares. Finally they’ll ask, “Do you mean a screen scrape?”

My head explodes on a regular basis.

Evolution

Random Thoughts

It looks like they are at it again… Evolution versus Creation. Although now, the creation side of the debate has come up with the theory of ‘Intelligent Design’ which is basically Evolution except that its not random, God planned it this way. I shrug when I think of this fight, because to me there just doesn’t seem to be much place for an arguement. I mean, if the religion side were asking only that evolution not be taught as a random series of lucky genetic combinations and focus only on the scientific evidence of DNA relations between species that indicate an evolving path, that’d be fine. But they always seem to want to take that extra step and make the schools teach God.

Its hypocritical… they say Evolution teaching is against their and their children’s beliefs, but they want to replace them with teachings that will be against other parents and children’s beliefs. The class is science, its about what you can prove and what you can theorize from what you can prove. We can prove DNA similarities between species. We can theorize an evolutionary path. Done. Why ask the schools to speculate on the nature of God? We can’t “prove” that God exists, nor do we have proven facts that point toward God as a theory. God is speculation. God is faith.

Plus, this is elementary school, middle school and high school. And if they are going to teach God, then I demand they teach all the other religions too. By the time we are done, public education will look like a comparative study of theologies. And really, I wonder if these people fighting evolution would like the school to teach other religions… I doubt it.

Playing Hooky

Random Thoughts

Sometimes I just feels good and right to blow off responsibility and do something else. Today I decided that it just wasn’t really worth my time and effort to actually go to work. My boss and our main backend programmer are both on vacation, and my immediate responsibilities involve redesigning a page layout so that its “printer friendly”. So last night, in a burst of brilliance, I turned off my alarm and slept the sleep of the contented soul. I woke up and did my best to do nothing upwardly productive all day long. I played computer games, I browsed the web, I went out for lunch, I went to a bookstore and bought crappy books off the bargain table by authors whom by sheer virtue of their being published I respect but by the fact that they were only published once I figure from their work I can get a taste, perhaps, of how not to write.

Damn, I think when I bought those books I did something that might be considered productive. Crap. Now I’ll have to skip another day in a couple weeks and try again.

There are days when I love being a contract programmer, and confident in the knowledge that no amount of work they can throw at me will ever be more than I can deliver on time.

World’s Worst Fortune

Random Thoughts

So last night we ordered chinese, General Tso’s Chicken as usual from the place across the street. It was good, as usual. And after the meal, I opened my fortune cookie.

Promote literacy. Buy a box of fortune cookies today.

Wow… Not a fortune, but an advertizement. I fear for what this might be an omen of…

I’m a Switcher

Random Thoughts

No, I haven’t gone from PC to MAC. I’m not that crazy. But after having my car broken into three times in downtown Atlanta, I figured it was time to do something about it. So I’ve switched to public transportation.

Let me begin by saying that I’m not really happy with it. Mostly this is due to pricing and passes. From where I live I have to utilize two systems, I start out in Gwinnette, then transfer to Marta. Both systems sell monthly ‘Unlimited Use’ passes, however, neither accepts the other’s card. And while I get free transfers from one system to the other, it still means I have to carry cash, tickets or tokens on me every day. It also means I can’t take advantage of the monthly discounts.

On the other hand… Not having to actually drive myself to work is nice. I no longer care about all the idiots on the road, its the bus driver’s job, or in the case of Marta I’m on a rail not the street. I get to work more relaxed. And while it takes an hour to get to work, and anywhere from an hour to two hours to get home, that’s time I can spend reading, or writing, or just listening to music absorbed in my own thoughts. Looking over the whole thing, its a pretty sweet deal.

I’m looking to move again, and in my search I’m trying to put myself within reach of Marta, then I’ll be able to use just one system and get a monthly pass. That’ll be cool.