While authorizing a third party to conduct a criminal background check (for my application to grad school), I noticed this:

I clicked the “FAQ” link, expecting “why do you only need to know the ethnicity of Michiganis?” to be the most frequently asked question.  But it was nowhere to be found.

Maybe it’s like how they ask you if you have had gay sex with a man from the Congo since 1976 before you can give blood.  If you answer “yes”, they just assume you have AIDS and throw your blood away without testing it.  Similarly, if you are from Michigan and select the wrong race1, you must be a sociopath.

I’m sure you’ve heard that the Happy Birthday song is protected under copyright by the Happy Birthday Nazis, who actively seek compensation whenever the song is used in a movie or on TV.

As it turns out, their copyright claim has never been challenged in court and it may in fact be invalid.  Now we just need someone to challenge it.

I’d like to start this post out by wishing all you mommies out there a belated Happy Mother’s Day!  I just celebrated my very first Mother’s Day two days ago, and I’d have to say it went really well.  It has been a real blessing having Emma in our lives, and we both love her very much.  She made me a very special Mother’s Day gift (with Kip’s and my help of course).  She made a really good hand print, and had her daddy frame it so we could keep it forever.  And then Kip gave me a new Honda CR-V to replace the Ford that I had been driving since college.  True, we bought it a couple of weeks ago, but it was for Mother’s Day.  Kip also got up early and brought back breakfast from Bojangles’ this morning.

At church on Mother’s Day they always have three really pretty flower bouquets to honor the moms that regularly attend the church.  They draw three names from a bowl, and each lady got to pick her bouquet.  Each year they leave out the names of the moms who were picked the year before.  I think that is a very fair way to make sure the same ladies don’t get flowers each year.  Well, it was exciting because my name got pulled second, and you can see the pretty floral bouquet in the picture below.  So, all in all, I’ve had a really good first Mother’s Day!

PS: You can see just how much Emma has grown in the picture.  She is getting so big, and beautiful!

Do programmers still need to understand pointers in this day and age?  Is Java a good programming language?  Why is there something as opposed to nothing?

Please do not indulge in heated debate pertaining to any of the above unanswerable philosophical questions.  Instead, just let me show you what can happen when someone has to program in Java without understanding two things about the Java language: 1) all parameters are always passed by value; 2) objects are basically pointers (whose address can only be modified by assignment).  Without this knowledge, you might write code like this1:

            //ABC-defect#123456 - SetChildren update currSel so we need to take bakup of
                //currSel so that after returning we can set it back to original currSel
           TreeNode tmpCurrSel = currSel;
       int result = setChildren(currSel,fullTree,0,tmpLevels);
          if (tmpCurrSel != null)
                currSel=tmpCurrSel; //ABC-defect#123456

Hint: it does not work as the developer expected it to (and obviously he never tested it after he coded it).

This post has been retracted.  It discussed this overreaching Supreme Court ruling by doing precisely what the court ruled a felony: I made a link that claimed to point to the kind of content I don’t want to be associated with this site in search engine indexes, but in fact it pointed to www.google.com.  I guess you had to be there.

This fall the music game genre is going to be interesting.  Guitar Hero IV: World Tour has announced that it will be like Rock Band: two guitars, drums, and vocals for every song.  The GH4 drum kit, which you can see here, is pretty cool in that it has two cymbal-like pads on there too, instead of having all the drums in a row.  Not that I know the slightest thing about drumming, but I assume this would feel a little more authentic.  The drum pads are also going to sense how hard you are hitting them, and adjust the volume of the drums in-game accordingly.  (Maybe Rock Band already did this?  From what I read it doesn’t sound like it, but I’ve only played it like twice in Best Buy.)  For the guitar parts, they are adding something I have wanted: open notes (as in, strumming without holding any frets).  They’ll represent this on the screen as a solid bar across the fret board (the same way the kick pedal is represented on the drums).  I haven’t heard much about how Rock Band 2 will be improved yet.  Konami, however, is jumping into the genre that they created ten years ago (but failed to bring to America) with Rock Revolution.  The drum kit for that game just looks wacky.

For me, I’ll probably only get GH4 for the Wii this year, since I already have one GH3 Wii guitar controller.  The downside is that there’s no downloadable content for the Wii (at least not yet).  Mainly due to the fact that there is only 512 MB of memory in the Wii.  I am thinking about getting a Playstation 3 (Gaystation 3 to the haters) soon, so I could get any of the games for PS3, but I’d really like to not have too many plastic musical instruments sitting around my living room.  So I’m thinking GH4 for Wii is my more practical option.

For the first time in Vacant Nebula history, I have retracted a blog post.  Upon further consideration (and a little pleading from Stephanie), I realized that the post might cause this website to show up as a result for certain search queries.  Let’s just say, Dateline might have been interested in anyone who came to the site and was disappointed that the link did not, in fact, point to the type of content that was claimed.  In addition, I do not want to attract that kind of attention to a website that has pictures of my daughter.

Fortunately, no one has yet arrived at my site by means of such queries.  For anyone interested, here are the top 20 search engine queries that brought visitors to this website in May, 2008:

That last one is a little weird though.  Yikes!