Well the calendar companies have again tricked us all into shelling out even more money for astrological tables which focus on the earth’s location relative to the sun.  So according to an ancient tradition which dates back nearly a year, I will review some of the adventures I have been through with you, faithful reader of my boring blog.

Let’s see...  there was that time I got ripped off on eBay, although technically that happened in 2005.  But I didn’t blog about it until 2006 so it still counts.  Then I critiqued some xenophobic e-mail, shortly before I influenced the direction of American television.  I listed a few of my favorite things, for all to see and marvel at.  Later Stephanie interviewed for and was subsequently offered a job.  But in between those two events, we ate a year-old pastry.  Once we had another source of income we bought a new car.  A few months later I bought a new amp and rocked super hard.  I built the most complex sand castle I’ve ever built, but sadly it could not stand up to the incoming tide.  As the summer was winding down, I let you all in on twenty-six video games that I think are totally cool, before letting you in on a little secret: this is where I work.  Next, I became an uncle at the same time that Stephanie became an aunt, when our new niece began to independently consume some of the extra oxygen in the atmosphere.  Stephanie made a list, focusing on movies, and then I jumped on board the MySpace bandwagon thing.  Just when I was starting to feel like a cool young dude, I got a year older.  But at least I won a hot blonde girl bean bag chair to ease my aging back.  To finish up the year I finished a project that was two years in the making, before being robbed by some stupid teenagers.

Nothing changes on New Year’s Day
—Bono (greatest rock star, humanitarian, philanthropist, and savior ever to call himself all of those things)

Apparently my writing style is analogous to my baseball-throwing style.  According to The Gender Genie, most of my blog posts appear to have been written by a female.  It’s all based on some algorithm derived from some research paper by some grad students at Illinois Institute of Technology and at some school in Israel.

Whatevs.

At work, several people have left in the last year or so, and no one has been hired (at least, no one in not-India) to replace them.  This has resulted in several empty cubicles with equipment sitting in them going unused.  So a few weeks ago, just before Christmas, I took an extra monitor that was just lying around and set up my computer for a two-screen display.  You may recall from a previous post that I have four computers under my desk.  Well I came up with a way to use two switch boxes to give myself access to three of the four machines (the other I’ll still use remote administration for), while still keeping my main machine outputting on two screens.  Check out my schematic (blue lines are video, black are keyboard/mouse):

If that seems a little complicated, that’s because it is. :)  Here is a table of which switch box needs to be switched to what in order to use different arrangements:

The only problem I’m running into is from daisy-chaining the keyboard from one switchbox to another.  The mouse seems to work okay though.  Maybe it’s because the mouse is natively USB, but the keyboard runs through a PS/2->USB adapter (these are USB-only switch boxes).  I suppose a four-way switch box would be a much better option, then I could just have one screen run straight to my main computer and run the switchbox on the other.  But I wanted to do this without having to ask IT for any stuff that isn’t lying around in empty cubes.

I’m currently using the top half of this image as my two-screen display (as seen below).

Something I learned today: overloaded method resolution in Java is done at compile-time, not runtime.  Warning: if you have no idea what half the words in that sentence meant, then you probably don’t care about the rest of this post.

Let’s say Alice (who is in tons of hacking books for some reason) wrote this code:

  public class Alice
  {
    public static long roundToNearestFive(long n)
    {
      return Math.round(n / 5.0) * 5L;
    }
  }

And let’s say Bob (who totally has a thing for Alice even though she says they are just friends) wrote this code:

  public class Bob
  {
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
      System.out.println(Alice.roundToNearestFive(12.7);
    }
  }

When Bob runs his code it will print 10, since 12.7 will be silently converted to an integer (12) to be passed into roundToNearestFive(), and 12 is closer to 10 than to 15.  Bob could call roundToNearestFive( Math.round(12.7)) to fix this, but that is annoying because now he has to first round his floating-point numbers before passing them into a rounding function.  So Bob asks Alice to provide a fix, and she adds a version of the function which takes a floating-point number:

  public class Alice
  {
    public static long roundToNearestFive(long n)
    {
      return Math.round(n / 5.0) * 5L;
    }
    public static long roundToNearestFive(double d)
    {
      return Math.round(d / 5.0) * 5L;
    }
  }

She sends a new .jar file to Bob with the change, and he runs his code again, expecting it to now output 15.  But it still prints 10.

The problem is that when Bob compiled his code, there was no roundToNearestFive(double) function available.  So the compiler generated bytecode that looked something like Parent.roundToNearestFive( (long)12.7).  So even when he runs with Alice’s new code in place, the bytecode is still forced to call the integer version of the function.  The only solution for Bob is to recompile his code against the new .jar file sent from Alice.

For further reference, here is the spec for binary compatibility in Java.  And here is more information about Alice and Bob.

What is the deal?  Tonight, Kip and I were stopping by BJ’s to pick up milk on our way home from church, and they were closed.  It was 8:30 in the pm, and they are usually open until at least 9 pm if not later.  That wasn’t the part that annoyed me though.  I don’t have a problem with businesses closing early, I have a problem with businesses closing early and not announcing to their customers in some form of LARGE sign saying that they are closed at this time and for this reason.  But no, BJ’s did not do this courtesy for their customers.  Instead they had an employee stand at the closed and locked automatic doors and yell at you that the store was closed.  Which brings me to the real reason for this rant.  I do not, and I will repeat, DO NOT appreciate being yelled at by a sales person, whose sole job is to satify the customer, for something that I was not previously informed of, like the closing time of a store prior to its normal time of closing.  And more to the point, it was the way that she informed me of their closing.  I walked up to the automatic doors and when they didn’t open, I began to search for a reason as to why they didn’t open, like the aforementioned sign.  The employee proceeded to stare at me, and then shouted “WE’RE CLOSED” very angrily and slowly I might add, as if I were currently trying to pry the automatic doors open with my bare hands while wearing my church clothes like some crazed lunatic.  As I walked away it occurred to me that tomorrow is a holiday and that could be the reason for the early closing.  But as I got back in the car with Kip, we realized that tomorrow is a holiday, but not one of the major ones like Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve or President’s Day Eve.  All of those holidays might merit leaving early to attend a party of function of some kind.  But who really goes to a Martin Luther King Jr. Eve party???  I mean, it can’t really be a holiday as I have to work tomorrow and so does Kip.

No, and I don’t care.

What does etiquette dictate that one do when someone uses the n-word in conversation?  When we were at the police station recently, the other couple there was present when the guys were brought in, and they mentioned to us more than once that the guys were a bunch of “stupid niggers.”  Another time a coworker (at another job) was talking about when he was in the Marines going after some “sand niggers.”  It surprises me that some people still think and talk this way, so I don’t know how to react.  I imagine most people wouldn’t say anything but would feel extremely uneasy..  At least, that’s how I what I did.  Is there a more appropriate reaction?

Jim: What did you just call me?
Huck Griffin: I thought that was your name.
Jim: That is our word! You have no right to use it!
Huck Griffin: Hey hey hey, I’m cool, I’m cool, no problem!
...
Huck Griffin: So, could you pass me the oar, n-word Jim?
Jim: Thank you.

--The Family Guy

About a year ago my company hired a new Chief Executive Officer (what the kids are calling a C.E.O.).  One of the things he started doing is taking five randomly selected people from the company out to lunch every month.  I was randomly selected for this month, so I get to have lunch with the CEO tomorrow (presumably at his expense, since he probably makes more than my annual salary every month).  I don’t really have any hard-hitting questions.  I suppose I could ask if we plan on hiring any more programmers in not-India.. but I probably won’t.  Or I could ask something completely irrelevant, like what his opinions are on British literature from the early eighteenth century.  But I probably won’t do that either.  I might post an update later this week, if there is anything worth blogging about.  I do think it’s a pretty cool thing for a CEO to do, even if he’s not exactly Bill Gates or Larry Page (we are something like a two billion dollar company though... I think).  He also has a rule that none of the people invited to lunch can be the boss of any of the other people (so I guess it isn’t purely random).  Which is good, I’d say.

We finished The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess over the weekend.  I’ll try my very best to avoid spoilers, but I do have to tell you that at the end of the game you find out that Ganondorf is Link’s father, and Zelda is Link’s sister, and they had a retarded inbred love child at the end of Ocarina Of Time and that is what the Ooccoos are descended from.  Sorry, I couldn’t just keep that to myself.

We clocked in at just under 60 hours, including finding all the heart pieces, which I am proud to say did not require GameFaqs (although we did use the assistance of the fortune teller to find three of them).  That also includes hunting down all the Poes, something for which I did use GameFaqs (but just for the last ten).  If there were some way in-game to tell if you got all the Poes in a given area, I wouldn’t have cheated.  But with the entire game to explore, I just didn’t have the patience.  In Ocarina Of Time, there would be a Skulltula icon beside the name of each area on the map for which you had found all the Skulltulas.  Something like that for Poes would have been nice.  A way of changing day to night would have helped too, since most Poes are only out at night.

The weirdest thing about the game is that Link is not left-handed (something I wondered about last May).  If you’ve not heard about this, allow me to explain.  The game was developed (as a Game Cube game) with a (canonical) left-handed Link, just like Link has always been (except when facing east in A Link To The Past, naturally).  When they decided to move the game to the Wii, they found that people wanted to control a right-handed Link.  But all the maps had already been designed for a left-handed link, and they didn’t have time to change them.  So they did the easiest thing possible—they flipped everything in the game.  What you see is a mirror image of how the game was designed.  Link is right-handed.  Most other characters are left-handed.  Characters will shake hands with their left hands.  The layout of Hyrule was supposed to (approximately) line up with the map from Ocarina of time (i.e. desert and lake on the west, Kakariko village on the east).  The sun rises in the west and sets in the east.  Maybe they thought no one would notice that, but I used the location of the sun to determine if it was morning or evening, and that messed me up a bit.

Lastly, I’d like to mention the Wii’s notorious battery usage.  After going through two sets of batteries in about a week’s worth of Wii Sports and ten hours of Zelda, I bought some rechargeable batteries (the kind that claim to work 4x longer in high tech devices).  For the rest of Zelda (about fifty hours of gameplay), I didn’t need to recharge the batteries once.  This could be because the batteries actually last longer (hey, anything’s possible, right?).  But I think the main reason is that I played with the pointer functionality turned off.  Since using the pointer basically turns the Wiimote into a low-res IR video camera, I think that drains a lot of battery.  I set it to not use the pointer because: a) I kept selecting the wrong things in the menus, b) “calibrating” it to my TV actually made it worse, c) I hated having a fairy on the edge of my screen all the time, d) when I went into first-person mode I had to hold my hand awkwardly to look around, and e) if anything was on my coffee table the view to the sensor bar would get blocked.  Now I can add another reason to play without the pointer function, if any other games give that option.

In conclusion, if you’ve been avoiding Zelda games in the past because the great fairies weren’t topless, then Twilight Princess is the right game for you.