mgroves

Archive for 2008

So, I got a Nintendo DS (Lite) for Christmas, with a couple of games.

So far, I like it. I even like playing GBA games on it better than on a GBA.

The Nintendo DS completes my (minimalist) collection of every Nintendo game system:

• NES
• Gameboy
• Gameboy Color
• SNES
• Virtual Boy
• N64
• GBA
• Gamecube
• Nintendo DS
• Wii

I think that’s the whole list. Not included are thins like the GBA SP, Pokemon N64, and various handhelds/game’n'watches/color TV games, but every distinct US platform is represented in my collection.

One can download demos via the Wii to a DS. This sounds like a cool feature, but in practice its somewhat crippled. Unlike, say, the Xbox 360, you can download one demo at a time. Which would be an acceptable limitation for a portable system, except that the demo just sorta floats in RAM, I guess, so once the DS is turned off, the demo goes away.

So. Anyone else have one? Give me some game recommendations. And not the obvious ones–more obscure the better. So far I have a couple of bargain bin games (Spyro and Time Ace). They aren’t terrible, but they aren’t outstanding either.

Occasionally, when I am at Chipotle and I get a burrito ‘to go’, I will stuff a bottle of the Chipotle Tabasco sauce in my bag and abscond with it.

My esteemed colleague, Joe, has indicated to me that this is theft, and that I am a thief. And furthermore, he intends to “drop a dime” upon my backside and inform the authorities.

I retort that my action is akin to taking a bunch of ketchup packets, horsey sauce, etc from the condiment stand, and thus, is not theft!

So which is it? Submit your treatise of the subject below.

“I’ve now realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.” – The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 3

“Backups are like insurance: it’s a waste of money until you need it.” – Me, just now.

If you’ll recall, I extolled the virtues of using Mozy as a backup tool some time ago. Let me again emphasize how important backups are.

There is a lot of stuff on your computer right now. Stuff that you may not think is all that important, but if it were to go away, you’d soon realize how important it actually was.

For instance, you might have:

• Address lists
• Pictures
• Homework files
• Financial records

You could certainly survive without these things, but would you want to? A computer is like a wallet: if someone lifts it, or you lose it, you won’t die, but you will be severely inconvenienced.

Well, it’s hard to make a “backup” of your wallet, but it’s so easy to make a backup of the files on your computer, that’s it’s just silly not to.

1. If you have around a couple gig or less of “important stuff” to backup, then just use a DVD burner, dummy! This is a very common method, but note that fire, floods, and zombie attacks may destroy both your PC and your backup. Consider a fireproof safe if you use this method.

2. If you have more than a gig or two to backup, DVD backups can be a hassle. You can use a free Mozy account for 2 gigs or less, or unlimited for $5 a month. Five bucks. Think of all the DVD media you wouldn’t have to buy. Plus, you don’t have to sit there and wait for the disc to finish burning: you can set it to run overnight, on any interval. You don’t even have to think about it, or remember to do it.

3. You can also backup to a second hard drive, like on a network machine or a media server. If your house burns or floods, you still have a risk of losing data this way. Some hosting services, like Dreamhost offer a way for you to backup files to the storage you already buy from them.

Backing up is a very important thing to do. Don’t put it off until later, because who knows what could happen between now and then? You’ll kick yourself if you don’t, and you will be incredibly relieved when you do. If you are reading this, and you don’t have a backup that’s at least a month or less old, take care of it right now!

Which is better, 1) a factory that employs 1000 people and produces 50000 widgets a year, or 2) a factory that employs 100 people and produces 100000 widgets a year?

If you answered “1″, congratulations! You are qualified to be a politician! (Bonus points if you asked “union or non-union?” before answering). If you answered “2″, then you make too much sense to be an elected official.

I’ve touched on “make work bias” before, but Walter E. William wrote a fine column. “Trade versus Protectionism”, so I’d thought I’d link to it.

Have you had a volcano taco from Taco Bell yet?

I’ve had a few…dozen of them. I love them. Actually, it’s just a regular taco with “lava” sauce and an inexplicably red shell (which tastes just like the non-red shells). So, I guess what I love is just the lava sauce.

Incidentally, before the lava sauce comes out of the bottle, it’s referred to as magma sauce.

I’ve recently learned that the volcano taco will soon be discontinued, so I thought I would soliloquize it here, in iambic pentameter.

Volcano taco missing from my life,
Erupting thy way into my lone heart.
Shall I compare thee to the summer’s heat?
Thou art more lovely and more delicious.
Rough winds do shake my glad taste buds anon:
Your retail lease hath all too short a date.

Good bye, volcano taco, and may a flight of angels sing thee to thy rest.

I’ve been attending some user groups and informational sessions lately at the local Microsoft offices, and I’ve come across some very handy tools (if you use Visual Studio).

• GhostDoc (free): A tool that automatically generates XML comments for C#. It doesn’t generate comment stubs, it actually fills in comments based on best guesses and naming conventions.
• Resharper (not free): This is an add-in which adds a lot of handy functionality to C#: refactoring, coding assistance, refactoring, code generation, etc. It’s like intellisense, except with a lot of additional…sense.
• Microsoft Pex (free CTP): This add-in hasn’t been officially released, but you can download a CTP. Pex is a tool that helps to generate automated test cases based on an intelligent algorithm that crawls your logic for edge cases, exceptions, assertions, etc. If you like the idea of TDD, but think that it might require too much work to write test cases, Pex is a tool that is a must have.
• NUnit (free): speaking of TDD, one might find the built-in testing framework in Visual Studio to be less mature than something like JUnit, which has been around for a while. NUnit is a .NET version of JUnit.

Cathering Vogt noticed that Obama was very popular among her 8th-grade colleagues.

So, she tried an experiment. She wore a homemade t-shirt with “McCain Girl” written on it to school one day just to see how tolerant Obama’s supporters were.

Here are some responses:

• Classmate(s) suggested that she be be “burned with her shirt on” for “being a filthy-rich Republican.”
• One person told her to “go die”.
• Some people were “calling me very stupid”
• And finally, one person said that “she will not judge me for my choice, but that she was surprised that I supported McCain”. Her teacher.

She wore an “Obama Girl” shirt the next day and got less flak.

Not all that suprising: these are 8th graders who are bombarded with The Daily Show and Green Day and the agenda of the NEA and what not every day.

But the most bothersome quote to me was that she was a “filthy-rich Republican”. There is clearly a populist perception that Republicans are all greedy and rich, and got that way by “exploiting the common working family” or some such tired rhetoric. This is a very dangerous thing, because it leads to very stupid laws that are meant to “reduce economic inequality”. And they will reduce economic inequality: they will make us equally miserable.

The way to improve economic conditions is not to make conditions worse for the rich–it’s to improve conditions for everyone. It’s not by envy and soaking-the-rich, but by reduction in government interference: subsidies, price controls, taxes, bureaucracy, tariffs, bailouts, entitlements, protectivist trade, and monopolies (government and private). Let’s be very skeptical about central planning and err in the favor of markets.

There was a pumpkin carving competition at work recently.

Our group decided to (as usual) not make any sense and carve a pumpkin with John Travolta’s face.

I can’t really take any credit: the artistic work is entirely Jonny’s. So, I’ll just leave these pictures here…

So haunting…

Speaking as someone who worked in the pizza business for a good amount of time, I found this guy messing with Domino’s online ordering system (which, I should add, is not available to my area–let’s get on the ball, Domino’s!) to be extra-hilarious.

Especially the personal-size pizza that he ordered with “none” sauce, “none” cheese, and Beef on the “left” half of the pizza.

It’s a perfectly valid order. It’s also perfectly insane. Domino’s followed the instructions as best they could. Here’s the monstrous result:

I’m sure the beef was carefully placed on one half of this atrocity before it arrived, but at some point in transit, the beef went AWOL, due to the lack of cheese and sauce that usually acts as a bonding agent.

My greatest wish in life is to somehow travel back in time to that Domino’s kitchen when this order arrived. It’s just too bad there’s no “none” option for crust.

It happens to be…a three letter word: JOBS.