In years past I have mentioned my birthday on this blog, in one way or another.  Since I haven’t posted anything since Halloween, I figured why break the tradition.

Over the weekend Stephanie and Emma headed out of town for my sister-in-law’s final wedding shower, which meant I had the house to myself Friday evening and almost all day Saturday.  So what did I do with the time?  I played BioShock until just after midnight, went to bed, then got up at 8:45.  Now, compare this to the Kip of six years ago, when I would play Smash Bros. until 3am, go to bed, and maybe set an alarm clock if I would need to get up by eleven the next day.  So the following has changed: I go to bed earlier and get up earlier.  The following has remained the same: I love video games.  So I can only conclude that decades from now, when I get some time to myself, I will play video games till seven or maybe even eight, go to bed, wake up at five, have a glass of prune juice, and fire up whatever latest and greatest murder simulator the world has to offer.

Once upon a time, approximately two days ago, just as I finished mowing the sixth of an acre of grass within which my house resides, an unfamiliar man in a wifebeater pulled over in front of my driveway in a dirty 1992 Ford pickup truck.  “This is unusual, even for North Carolina,” I thought to myself as he exited his vehicle and approached me.

“Would you be interested,” he proceeded to ask, “in good deals on meat?”

Is this a metaphor? a euphemism?  What plans might this stranger have?  A classic fight or flight response ensues:  if he means no harm (which is almost certainly the case) but I run, I look like a fool and possibly, depending upon his race, a bigot; on the other hand, if I hold my ground, I save face, but I could possibly be abducted and (let’s say) fed into a wood chipper.  He’s approaching, time is running out, what am I going to do??  Ultimately I decide to risk the wood chipper.

“I’m sorry?” I respond, as if I didn’t understand him (which is at least partially true).

“I have good deals on steaks, chicken, and beef.”  A strange wording, considering that “steak” is a subset of “beef.”  I make a mental note to ponder this at a later time.  After all, “steak” is a particular type of beef which (I presume) has high demand elasticity at low prices, so it is worth mentioning.  I mean, it’s not like he’s going to have every type of beef, so specifying up front that steak is one of the types of beef he carries will efficiently answer a nearly-inevitable follow-up question.

It’s been half a minute already; etiquette dictates that I supply some form of response.

“No thanks.”  There, I’ve responded.  My manners are so awesome.

He barely gets a quick “you have a nice day” out before he walks back to his truck.  Which I now notice has a freezer in the truck bed.  Secured into place with a single bungee.  As he drives away, I am filled with questions.  Where does this meat come from?  How did he come to acquire it?  Is this a side job, or his primary source of income.  For that matter, is it a source of income at all?  I’d like to think he just sells meat as a hobby.  After all, even the most rudimentary efforts at the appearance of legitimacy are lacking.  Maybe a logo on the side of the truck.  Or a dress code consisting of pretty much anything other than a wife beater.  I think such things would more than pay for themselves after a relatively short time.  How significant are the savings, compared to a grocery store?  How many other people are willing to buy meat from the back of some guy’s pickup truck?  Regulated food markets have produced enough contamination scares of late, how many people are willing to risk meat from some guy’s truck?

Or maybe I’m overthinking this.  I have a tendency to do that.  I wonder why that is.  Do I find comfort ruminating upon things which are ultimately meaningless?  Is it a way of escaping thoughts about deeper topics?  Or does everyone do this and just not write blog posts about it?  Or maybe I actually do think about things more than other people.  Some form of scientific modesty principle prevents me from leaping to that conclusion, anymore than I would leap to the conclusion that somehow the sun actually revolves around me.

Oh wait, I’m doing it again.

I have a way of remembering to do things that might be idiosyncratic, or it may be completely normal.  So I thought I would reach out to the dozen or so people who read this little blog to see if you do the same thing.  So here’s the scenario:

Let’s say I want to remember to take a CD to the office with me tomorrow morning.  I will pick out some very specific action that I know I will take tomorrow—like picking up my keys off the bedside table—and I’ll visualize myself doing that while thinking to myself “don’t forget that CD.”  I only need to spend a minute or two concentrating very hard on picturing myself picking up the keys while thinking “don’t forget that CD.”  Then in the morning, when I’m picking up my keys, the thought “don’t forget that CD” will magically appear in my head.

I believe this is technically a form of self-hypnosis, or something like it.  It works most of the time, but only recently did I start to wonder if other people use this little trick.  When the thought comes popping into your head, it feels very much like deja vu.  In fact, I think I figured it out when I was curious about the feeling of deja vu when I was little (this was before I learned there was even a term for it).  I reasoned that surely I didn’t have some buried “memory” of a future event, so I tried to induce deja vu like this.  Eventually, I got it to work.

So does anyone else do this?  If not, you should try it, it really works.

Time to discuss something controversial that leads many geeks to commit acts of heinous violence.  I’m talking about programming style!

So there are three basic ways to write if/elseif/else statements in most languages with C-like syntax:

Style A

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if(condition1)
  statement1;
else if (condition2)
  statement2;
else
  statement3;

Style B

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if(condition1) {
  statement1;
} else if (condition2) {
  statement2;
} else {
  statement3;
}

Style C

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if(condition1)
{
  statement1;
}
else if (condition2)
{
  statement2;
}
else
{
  statement3;
}

Personally, I go for the most readable and maintainable code, so I use Style A iff all conditions and statements are trivial (by which I mean, they are short and fit on one line).  Otherwise I use Style C.  (Which you can see, for example, in that gradient-generator source I posted a few weeks ago.)

I’ve posted on my preference for Style C over Style B before, and I’m not going to focus too much on that here today.  However, I continue to see Style B promoted as the universal, be-all end-all solution.  It is recommended by Sun for Java, and by Zend for PHP.

The argument for preferring Style B over Style A usually goes something like this:

What if you come along and add a new line?

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if(condition1)
  statement1;
else
  System.out.println("Condition1 failed!");
  statement2;

Now statement2 gets executed everytime!

The argument makes sense from an academic standpoint, but I am pretty sure this almost never ever happens in practice.  The reason for this is that anyone who has been programming for more than a month will immediately see that this code won’t work as designed.  It is a glaring bug that jumps out at you.  It is nearly impossible to overlook!  (Again, this is all assuming that the conditions and statements are all trivial.)

Now, for the last four and a half years my job has been primarily to fix bugs in a huge body of code, very little of which was written by me.  For the last two and a half years, in particular, I’ve been the guy who looks at build traces and unit test results from the previous night.  And when there are build or test errors, I have to look at recently changed code and decide who is responsible.  This means I have seen most of the errors made by a group of about fifty or so programmers.  That is to say, real-world errors made by real programmers, not hypothetical errors that might be made by a theoretical programmer.  So I think I am reasonably well-qualified to have a strong opinion on the matter.

With that in mind, I’ve never seen an error that was due to the use of Style A for trivial statements.  I have seen some downright ugly code that used Style A inappropriately, with conditions that were ten lines long.  And I’ve seen ugly code that has braces on the if block but not the else block (or vice-versa).  And I have seen several errors in Style B or Style C that result from intermingling of tabs and spaces.  This happens because simple editors like vi and Notepad render tabs that are up to 8 characters wide (per spec, I might add), but advanced editors usually break spec in favor of user-friendliness, rendering tabs at 2 or 4 characters wide (or whatever the user sets them to).  So if code was written using 4-character tabs in Visual Studio, then new code is added by someone using spaces in vi, and this happens back and forth a few times, you get indentation that jumps all over the place.  This is where I think Style C is better than Style B, because it is easier to find the matching open-brace because usually the opening and closing braces are written by the same developer with the same indentation level, even if the code between the braces jumps all around.  Also, with Style B, at a glance the code looks like indentation is wacky, since you have to actually read the previous line (or scan to the right end of the previous line) to find out if the developer actually intended the indentation to increase there, or if someone just increased indentation because they were using a different editor.

You can tell me why you disagree with me, and I am fully aware that there will never be agreement on this point; however, I’ll continue to avoid Style B until my pay is docked for it.  Someone has to stand up for what is right.

Now that the election is over, I thought I’d share a few thoughts.

One: Stephanie and I went by our polling place at 6:30 PM on election night, just to see what the line was like.  There was literally no line.  We could see inside and there were some booths that weren’t even occupied.  No more waiting in line in the cold for ninety minutes to vote early for me.

Two: As a general rule, I don’t like to hear other people’s opinions of politics.  Especially the opinions of people with extremely strong opinions.  That said, I’ve been surprised and impressed with the mature, sensible way most (but not all) of the extremely conservative people I know have reacted to the results of the election.  Just one example: “My man didn’t win, but I will now support this man as my President.”

I haven’t made a post in quite a while (over two weeks).  For those of you who have been eagerly anticipating something deep and moving, I have to apologize, as this post is decidedly meh.

I am sharing a comment on Yes Man, Jim Carrey’s newest movie.  If you haven’t seen the trailer, I’ve conveniently posted it below.

Here’s the thing.  I’ve already seen this movie.  Except last time the guy lied all the time, but now he says “no” all the time.  And last time magic forced him to change his behavior, whereas this time he experiences some kind of enlightenment.  Other than that, I think it’s the same movie as Liar Liar.  While Liar Liar taught us the importance of telling the truth, Yes Man will teach us the importance of giving in to peer pressure.

I think I’ll say “no” to this one.  (See what I did there?  I’m so clever.)

I found it very ironic the way the title of my last post was displayed after being imported into Facebook:

Remember when Dane Cook was funny?  That’s what Stephanie and I were thinking when we watched his new special on Comedy Central the other day.  Maybe it’s harder to write funny material when you’re not stealing it.

American Gladiators is back on TV.  (Or would proper grammar be “American Gladiators are back on TV?”)  In any case, Stephanie and I caught the show last night.  It’s kind of like you remember it, except with less stuff happening and more people talking.  In other words, just what you’d expect in today’s post-Survivor reality TV format.  I guess they want you to care about the contestants so they spend time talking about them?  I don’t—I just want to see people get jousted so hard their fingers come off.  And some of the gladiators are clearly trying to make names for themselves (ahem, Wolf, yeah it’s really cute how you howl whenever the camera points at you, but you look like an idiot).

Maybe I’m remembering American Gladiators through the rose-colored lens of memory.  In fact, I know I am.  I was, after all, twelve years old at the height of the show’s popularity.  Still, the new show isn’t entirely without its good points.  For one, the lady gladiators aren’t quite as scary (i.e. manly) as they used to be.  Another improvement is the updated Eliminator, which is now incredibly grueling.  Somehow moving the uphill conveyor belt to the end of the competition makes it a hundred times more difficult.  When the contestants finish, they are barely able to move.  I don’t think it will be long before someone finishing the Eliminator just throws up right on Hulk Hogan’s legs.  That would be hilarious.

I’ll probably keep watching, at least for a little while, although I’m not sure if I would be doing so if there were other shows on TV.

A few weeks ago I started playing through Resident Evil 4 again.  This is just a quick post to say—regardless of my earlier comments—that I have enjoyed the game way more on my second time through (I’m about 90% through now...).  The factors contributing to this are probably:  a) I knew what I was doing and what to expect; and b) you get to start with the weapons you had when you finished the game last time.

There is also a weapon which is opened up after beating the game (I won’t spoil it), which costs a million pesetas.  About two-thirds of my second time through I had saved up enough money to buy it.  It’s actually so powerful it makes you feel like Kramer in that episode of Seinfeld where he was taking Karate with a bunch of ten-year-olds.  Or like Dwight that episode of The Office where he did exactly the same thing.

If anyone is picking up the Wii port who never played through the game before, my only suggestion would be to read the weapons upgrading FAQ on GameFAQs before you start spending money buying/upgrading weapons.