My what a big month April was.  Kip and I had our second anniversary, as he posted about, there was Easter, I decided exactly when I would be quiting my job, and I have sprained my foot pretty seriously by falling down the stairs at church on Easter Sunday.  That is correct ladies and gentlemen, I said fell down an entire flight of stairs, and as it was on Easter Sunday, I was dressed appropriately in my new Easter outfit.  I was told that my skirt did not go over my head though, so I managed to remain modest on my quick trip down to the basement of the church.  So, I spent my Easter Sunday in the emergency room of Northeast Medical Center in Concord, NC.  I fell down the stairs because the heel of my shoe caught on the step and I lost my balance.  I am very heart broken because the very tip of the heel, or the grip of the heel, broke off when I fell down, and those were the shoes that I wore on my wedding day.  They are irreplaceable.  After spending the day in the emergency room, having a pregnancy test (it was negative for those of you keeping track or at all interested), having four x-rays taken, and waiting for quite awhile, we learned that they couldn’t see that anything was broken, so they think it is simply a sprain.  However, the doctor told us that if it still hurt after a few days I should to to the orthopedist to have them do a more thorough exam of my foot.  Well, it is now several weeks later and I still have a sore foot, and it pops almost daily.  On the shoe front, Kip took me to the mall and I bought the cutest flat ballet slippers that were eyelet material to match my Easter skirt perfectly (the same one that I fell down the stairs in).  Of course they were flats as I have pretty much decided to give up high heels for the time being until my foot heals and I will be able to walk in them again.  I shared all of that to share that within the month of buying these brand new shoes, that I absolutely adored, I ruined them too.  I wanted to wear them to Scott’s (and for those of you living under a rock, that is my brother-in-law) graduation ceremony at High Point University.  I didn’t expect it to be such a miserable day, or that we would be sitting on folding chairs on the lawn.  Needless to say, wet grass and perfectly white cloth shoes do not mix in a positive fashion.  The shoes are now grass stained, and no longer white.  I did enjoy Scott’s graduation, and the fun of listening to the arguing African-American family that sat directly in front of us for the better part of the ceremony, and listening to Bill Cosby give the graduation address without having planned a speech (we think).  All in all, it was an ok day.  I go to the doctor on Monday to see how my foot is doing, and exactly what is wrong with it.  I’ll keep you posted on the foot and shoe fronts as the week progresses.

While I was on vacation the other week I was talking to my father-in-law, who works for a company that makes transmissions that go in transfer trucks.  He mentioned that he always asks people this question when they are interviewing for a designer position (i.e. mechanical engineer):  How much do you work on your own car?  I thought this was a pretty good question.  If someone is a mechanical engineer, but never spends any time working with their own car, they probably aren’t going to design things as well.  They may design things that work from a technical standpoint and meet specifications, but they’ll have lots of quirks because they simply aren’t thinking about how it will be used.  For instance, they may put some bolts in a place that would require an extra two hours of labor to get to, when they could have just as easily been somewhere accessible by just opening the hood. That may not be the best example, since I’m not a mechanical engineer, but you get the gist.

I was thinking that if I am ever interviewing programmers, I might ask a similar question.  The most obvious modification, “how much time do you spend working on your own computer,” doesn’t really apply to a programming position.  Sure lots of programmers take their computers apart and tinker with them, but so do a lot of people who think a hash table is something you smoke.

I came up with two alterations that I think would work:

1. In an industry where some say fifty percent of what you know is obsolete in five years, what do you do to stay current?
2. How much code do you write in your spare time?

I’m not saying by any means that a hiring decision should be based on either of these questions, but I do think a candidate’s responses would be telling.  I think it would also be pretty simple to identify whether you are getting BS or a legitimate response.  I think the first question is especially important, because most of the people I know who I don’t think are very good programmers probably have no idea what Ruby or AJAX are.  They’ve barely heard of C#.  You’re lucky if they’ve heard of Firefox.  True, they don’t work in web development, but that’s not the point.  Most good programmers I know tend to follow geek news and they are familiar with the “latest and greatest” technologies, even if they aren’t using them.  You may have been a pretty good COBOL programmer back in the day, but if you didn’t try to keep up with newer stuff, you’re not going to make a good Java programmer.  You’ll be stuck maintaining thirty-year-old COBOL code.  And if you are stuck working on thirty-year-old COBOL code, that’s your own fault.  In the last ten years the internet tubes have been filling up with tons of information:  you don’t have to subscribe to trade magazines or anything like that.  Just reading Slashdot or Digg or Endgadget from time to time goes a long way.  Of course, you’d have to watch out for the person who has heard of Ruby (for example), and lists it as a skill, when all they’ve really done is read the Wikipedia page on it.  I think one of the best pieces of resume advice anyone told me was to separate languages you have a strong proficiency in from those you just have a little experience with or haven’t used in years (thanks Peter).  If someone lists fifty programming languages, they are probably only proficient in maybe three or four of them.  And there are also those who memorize lots of buzzwords and sound smart but really aren’t.  You would need to have a pretty good BS detector.  But I think that is a prerequisite for conducting interviews anyway.

As for the second question, most of the people I would consider to be good programmers can’t just work on code at work.  Most of them have side-projects or a website or something sort of code related that they spend some of their spare time on.  The thing I don’t like about the question (at least the way I phrased it) is that it is too leading.  A candidate might think “uh oh, they want someone who writes Linux kernels for fun” and might give a BS response, even if they don’t intend to.  Incidentally, if you find someone who writes Linux kernels for fun, and they are telling the truth, you should probably hire them even if they drop racial slurs and/or their pants during the interview.

So whadda y’all think?  Good idea/bad idea?  Am I way off-base?  I’ve only been on the interviewee side of an interview before, so I don’t really know what I’m talking about here.  In any case, I think these are better questions than “What is your greatest weakness?”

PS: If they answer, “I’m a perfectionist,” they are probably lying.

The top ten best-selling video games of 2006 (as reported by NextGen):

10. Need For Speed Carbon
9. Fight Night Round 3
8. Call Of Duty 3
7. Kingdom Hearts II
6. Gears Of War
5. New Super Mario Bros.
4. NCAA Football 07
3. Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy
2. Cars
1. Madden NFL 07

Cars was the 2nd best selling game in North America of 2006.  Seriously.  I was surprised too.  But Madden is no surprise, selling two-and-a-half times more copies than Cars.  I don’t understand the drive to play the same game over and over again every year.  I know someone who didn’t get a new system last time around until they stopped making Madden on the N64, at which point he bought a GameCube (as it was the cheapest).  He will probably buy his next system when they stop making Madden for the Cube.  That makes no sense to me.  I’m also kind of surprised to see Gears Of War in the top ten, not that I’m implying it is a bad game, I just didn’t realize there were enough 360’s for it to be a top-ten game.  The full article is interesting but kind of long (16 pages long), so if you’re bored you should check it out.

On a side note, why do online news article insist on using “pages” anyway?  Nine out of ten dentists agree that webpages can now scroll vertically without negatively affecting their usability.

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.

I just watched that video of Kramer flipping out after being heckled by some black audience members.  I know it’s week-old news but I’ll comment anyway.  So I guess these guys had been getting on his nerves the whole evening and he wanted to make fun of them in a shocking way, but he clearly went a little far.  In the subsequent apology on Letterman, a lot of the audience was laughing at first—understandably, they probably thought it was a bit, since most of Dave’s audience is probably people on vacation.  I find it ironic that the apology happened there because Jerry Seinfeld was on that night, so he was again riding Jerry’s coattails.

What is funny (to me, anyway) is that there was an episode of Seinfeld that was actually about hecklers, where Jerry went to where a heckler worked and started heckling him while he was doing his job.  Maybe that’s what Kramer should have done.

Well I thought I’d have more to say about this topic when I started typing this, but I’m realizing that I really don’t care what someone I’ve never met says to someone I’ve never met in a city I’ve never been to.  So I’ll just leave you with a funny parody of the event to watch.

Today marks one quarter of one century that yours truly has graced this planet with his presence.  In honor of this momentous occasion, I will now discuss things that I pledge, as an aging person, not to say in the coming twenty-five years.

The problem with America today is ...
I do not believe that getting older means you’ve suddenly figured everything out.  Do you know how many topics have been identified as the problem with America?  Seven hundred and thirty four different topics, according to statistics I just made up.  I think it is plain to see that the world is very complex.  I won’t let myself fall under the assumption that the world is constantly degrading.  If anything I think they are improving (despite what the news tells you).

Kids these days have it too easy.
You may have also heard this stated like this:  “When I was a kid I had to walk to school.  In the snow.  Barefoot!  Uphill!!  BOTH WAYS!!!”  It is a tired cliché, and old people seem to jump on it left and right.  Political candidates have used it to win votes for a very long time.  Yeah, technology is making a lot of things easier (and isn’t that what we want anyway?), but there will always be new challenges to kids that their elders didn’t even have to worry about.  Like how my grandparents didn’t have to worry about getting germs from black people when using a public water fountain, but my generation is constantly assailed with negro germs.

The last good band was The Smashing Pumpkins, the last entertaining video game was Super Mario 64, and the last funny movie was Happy Gilmore.
This is a big one, and I refuse—I repeat: refuse!—to succumb to the notion that somehow I happened to be fifteen years old when all the best bands, movies, TV shows, and video games came out.  I’m not sure what causes people to think this way as they age, but I think we have all seen it time and time again.  I’m not saying I will be one of those old people who tries to pretend he’s one of the cool kids (like that guy who graduated high school two years before you, but he would still hang out in the parking lot after school, and as far as you know he still does).  I’m just saying I won’t act like I lived in some kind of magical golden age where nothing sucked.  I guess people only remember the things they like, and they replay those things in their mind over and over.  When these memories—ripened into nostalgia by years of rumination—are placed against fresh, unfiltered new media...  well, there is no contest.  In the coming twenty-five years I will attempt to be conscious of the fact that things might not have been as good as I remember them.  I have already started this process.  For instance, as much I would like to, I will not assert that Animaniacs is somehow more sophisticated that SpongeBob SquarePants, or that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has a better premise than Pokémon.  I think only the eight-year-old me and a modern eight-year-old could take up that argument.  Presumably with nunchucks and Pokéballs.

Well there you have it.  Originally the list was longer, but there was a lot of redundancy.  Basically everything boiled down to “new stuff sucks” and “there is no hope for our kids.”  I will strive to keep these campaign goals, and in twenty-five years I will present a status report, evaluating my performance in achieving these goals.  Stay tuned!

Do not say, “Why were the old days better than these?”  For it is not wise to ask such questions.
—Ecc 7:10

Well it’s been a while since my last post, so for you, dear reader, I am making another.

The launch details of the Nintendo Wii were announced today:  November 19 at $250.  I’m a little disappointed.  I was really hoping for a $200 price point. Not that it matters, I’d get it either way, and they’ll probably drop the price next year (or maybe they’ll wait till 2008 for the first price drop I really don’t know).  And it’s bundled with Wii Sports, which.. I don’t really care about.  The launch date also doesn’t mean much to me—I won’t be getting mine until December 25—but it seems like they should have beaten Sony’s launch date (on yours truly’s birthday) of November 17, especially since Nintendo (unlike Sony) can ship enough systems to meet demand.  But here’s my biggest disappointment:  getting a second controller (like, a fully functional one) is sixty dollars (forty dollars for Wiimote, twenty for the nunchuck attachment).  Sure, I’m still not going to be spending as much as I would on, say, a PS3 with no games or accessories or anything.  But as long as I’m going to have Wii Tennis I’d like to be able to play it with my wife, without having to spend more money on her controller than I would on a new game.

I apologize if my thoughts are overly disorganized.  I am feeling quite under the weather and debating whether or not I should tell my boss that I’m taking off the rest of the day as a sick day.  I’m certainly not in a state of mind for something requiring the level of concentration of, let’s say, refactoring a O(n²) algorithm down to a O(n) or O(n log n) algorithm (what I was working on before taking a ten minute break to blog).  But I’ve never taken time off for sickness and I probably won’t unless it’s the kind of sickness where I need to be in or near a sanitary bathroom for an extended period of time.

I recently discovered that there is a classification of political ideologies that is kinda like what I believe:  South Park Republican.  Okay so the term was coined five years ago, but I had never heard it until about a month ago.  So I thought I’d share.

Someone at work just came around asking if anyone wanted to be a model for some kind of brochures we’re putting together.  I volunteered. They had me stand in front of a whiteboard, while three other people sat at a desk, and we pretended to be in a meeting.  You know, the important kind of meeting, where proactive synergy leverages best-in-class paradigm solutions.  I’ll try to get ahold of one of the brochures and put a scan up here as soon as I can.

Before I get started I wanted to clarify that I didn’t make a post on Monday because Stephanie had made one on Saturday.  I’m still planning to make blog posts regularly.

Now onto my story.  Last weekend I went to see Thursday at Ziggy’s in Winston-Salem.  I’ve mentioned on this blog before that the last time I saw Thursday was one of the best concerts I’ve ever been too.  I was pleased to see that I wasn’t let down again.

However, I’ve noticed a pattern lately.  I’ll go to concerts, and listen to the less-than-awesome opening bands and think “Is this really worth it?  Standing for four hours just to hear some songs that I can listen to at home?”  Then the band that I actually came to see will come out, and I’ll be like “Oh yeah, that’s why I come to these concerts--these guys are awesome!”  But I’ll spare you another long, introspective rant today.

five four three two one let’s start a fire