Tonight I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and started playing on my guitar and decided I’d record it.  So if anyone’s interested I put up a recording of myself playing Tonic’s “If You Could Only See” on the acoustic music page (you’ll also find it at the end of this post).  Which reminds me I never got around to making that page look nicer.  You know, using some CSS and what not.

After I recorded this I listened to the original again and realized I’m playing it way too fast, and my strum pattern is different.  I still thought it sounded ok.  I came up with a way to kind of play both parts on one guitar for the cool part of the song after “when she says she loves me.”  I guess you only know what that means if you’re familiar with the song, because I’m certainly not going to put a recording of myself singing out on the intertron.  I mean I’m not masochistic.

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if you could only see how blue her eyes can be when she says
     when she says she loves me

It is said that anyone who was alive when President Kennedy was assassinated still remembers where they were when they heard the news.  I think it is safe to say that my generation will have the same experience when remembering the events that unfolded six years ago today.  What follows is my account of that day.

It started out as a normal day a few weeks into my sophomore year of college at NC State.  Garrison and I set out bright and early from 508C Sullivan Hall to Daniels for our 8:05-9:20 Discrete Math course, where we met up with Jason and Nate.  After being bored out of our minds for an hour and fifteen minutes, the four of us headed over to The Atrium for breakfast.  I think I had Chik-fil-a that morning.

We sat down to eat as a nearby TV projected CNN images at us, but there was no audio.  If there was a crisis you couldn’t tell it from looking around.  There were no groups of people standing around staring at televisions screens.  I, too, wasn’t very concerned.  At this point only the first plane had hit, and I was unaware of just how wide the building was.  This led me to underestimate the size of the hole: it just looked to me like some kind of small propeller plane had crashed into the building (remember that there was no video of the first plane hitting the building for several days).  I thought it was an unusual event which probably claimed the life of the pilot, who was probably the only person in the plane.  I wondered if the people inside had time to get out of the way or if any of them were injured, and why someone would be dumb enough to fly a plane so low in the middle of Manhattan.  I concluded to myself that it must have been a poorly planned stunt by a thrill-seeker.  The idea that this was no accident had not yet crossed my mind.

Since there were only thirty minutes between classes, I had to practically inhale my food, leaving me with little time to ponder the events on TV.  I quickly headed off to Winston for my 9:50-11:05 Philosophy course.  I overheard a few people talking before class about how a plane had hit the World Trade Center, but I didn’t hear anyone say that a second plane had hit yet or that it was a terrorist act.  Still thinking that it was a small plane, I wrote this off as your typical overreaction to unusual but ultimately insignificant news.

After class I walked back to the dorm room, and when I came in Garrison said “the towers are gone.”  “What?!”  “The World Trade Center towers.  They’re both completely gone.”  I think I sat down and watched the news for a while, trying to comprehend how it could have possibly happened.  The towers had always been there.  How could they have both been destroyed in the hour and a half since I had seen one tiny hole in one of the towers?  After a few more minutes of Fox News it became abundantly clear that this was more than an accident made by some idiot in a small plane; this was a deliberate act by several idiots in two very large planes.

I don’t remember much of what happened for the rest of the day.  I peeled myself away from the news long enough to take a shower, and for some reason I distinctly remember trying to make sense of it all in while I was in there.  I guess that happens when there’s no computer or TV to distract you.  Later that day, our 2:35-3:50 Linear Algebra class was cancelled (as were all classes).  The next time the class met—just two days later—the professor made a way way way too soon 9/11 joke.  To help illustrate something about vector math he had drawn an airplane on the board, in front of which he proceeded to draw a tall building and cackle.  Amazingly, Garrison, Jason, Nate, and I were about the only ones in the room who didn’t laugh.

everything is gonna be alright, be strong believe

Not too long ago I posted about Budget and Time Warner not being very good at communicating what happens on their website to the real people who also work for them.  In order that none may claim me to be a negative Nancy, I’m going to post about one company that seems to have gotten it right: Papa John’s.

At first I was afraid to order pizza from a website.  It’s the kind of thing that requires instant communication to the human beings in the brick & mortar location.  If it’s not done right, your pizza could take hours to get prepared, or worse yet it might not get made at all.  If this required the manager to check his e-mail or something, it would not go well.  But after the time I called in an order for pick-up, and they decided to deliver it (and Stephanie called me from the apartment just as the cashier was trying to find my order in the computer), I decided I’d try to remove the idiot answering the phone in a noisy room from my pizza-ordering process.

I’ve now been ordering Papa John’s online for over a year.  That’s a whole year without hearing “Thank you for calling Papa John’s, please hold.”  In that time, I’ve only once had an order messed up, when I got pepperoni instead of pineapple.  Even in that case it was printed correctly on the receipt, so I think the guy making the pizza just didn’t read closely enough.  This is a problem that could easily be solved by replacing all the humans with pizza-making robots.  The kind which will someday take over the world.

My only real complaint is that I can’t use the coupons they send in the mail when I order online.  But usually they have the same deals or better online so it’s not that big of an issue.  On the plus side, you can take advantage of the system to some extent.  For example, Stephanie and I prefer to get pizzas with pineapple and bacon.  A large 2-topping pizza is $12.99.  Now, either through an unadvertised online promotion or a glitch in their system, a large Smokehouse Ham & Bacon specialty pizza is $11.99 (with ham, bacon, onions, and green peppers).  You can remove or substitute two toppings from a specialty pizza and still get it at the same price (I’m not sure if the rule is 2 toppings, or half of the toppings).  So if we substitute pineapple for onions and remove the green peppers (or substitute extra cheese), we now have the original pizza we wanted, with an extra topping or two, for a dollar less.  And when there are deals such as “free cheese sticks with a large specialty pizza,” which there usually are, we are able to take advantage of them (we technically have a specialty pizza).  So now we’ve got extra toppings and cheese sticks for a dollar less.  Funbelievable!

Joel (as in, on software) made some predictions on his blog yesterday as to where the state of development on the web is going and why he thinks Google’s AJAX-y apps could be troublesome for the company if they don’t adapt well.  I’m not so sure about all that, especially since it is easier to adapt on the web than it was for off-the-shelf business software written in 1989.  Plus I don’t see any web/JavaScript platform becoming as ubiquitous as C++.  But he makes his point well and it’s an interesting read.  Maybe in three or four years we’ll realize he was right.  And if he is right, could this be a second coming of Yahoo?  YUI currently seems to be the most financially backed JavaScript/CSS “platform” of the type that Joel is mentioning, even if it isn’t the most popular right now.  Something interesting to ponder.

I had to devote a small part of my blog to spreading the word about The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.  I wouldn’t be doing this except for the fact that you probably haven’t heard of it.  It’s a movie about Steve Weibe’s efforts to beat “Gamer of the Century” Billy Mitchell’s 1982 world record Donkey Kong high score, and the efforts of Billy and his posse to stop him.  It’s a documentary, but it’s still really entertaining and hilarious.  I won’t spend time repeating things you could read on various other sites.  I’ll just suggest that you go see it if you can find a theater that’s showing it (you currently only have two options in North Carolina..).  Failing that, save it in your Netflix/Blockbuster queue so that you can watch it whenever it comes out on DVD.

you’re the best around, nothing’s gonna ever keep you down

Sure coming up with a great algorithm can be fun, but programmers only get true freedom to express themselves in their comments.  And it’s always fun when you are fixing a bug and run across a funny or ironic comment that you don’t recall typing but you can tell without a doubt that you were the one that wrote it.  While looking through some code I wrote about a year ago, I ran across these comments and thought I’d share.

long numSubLists = (numPRC + (MAX_SUBLIST_SIZE - 1))/MAX_SUBLIST_SIZE; //this math is right.. work it out if you don't believe me. :)

Assert(numReturned == returnSize); //this could only be false if something is broken hard...

PS: assertions are awesome.  I’ve found nothing else to be better at preventing future programmers (especially myself) from breaking my code.