davemclain.com

After the July of Doom, I have been more active than before about trying to pare down my spending, especially in the realm of food. My parents gave me a rice cooker a while back, and rice as most of the world knows is a really good basis (or entirety) of an inexpensive meal. Also well known is the wonderful pairing of beans with said rice, a pairing with which I have been experimenting. At the moment I’ve only messed with white rice, but I hope to change that soonish. I have tried variations with black beans, charro beans (pinto + seasonings), refried, and various spices and salsas thrown around, including bacon in a couple notable meals, but I have found the winner:

This beast of a meal, provides 2 solid meals:

• 2/3 cup of rice: $0.10 (bought a 25lb bag of rice for $7, a while back)
• Can of black beans: $0.45
• 1/3 of jar of HEB medium salsa: ~$0.95
• 3 or 4 Tortillas: ~$0.20 (I actually don’t know how much I paid for this)
• Total cost: ~$1.70; Average meal cost: $0.85

Crap, I just blogged about a meal.

The decision to use caffeine for me feels like the decision to use steroids or not, if I ever did anything more physical than sailing in my life. If I drink coffee I will inevitably be twice as productive as I would have been without it (for the math inclined in the room, yes 2*0=0, but that never seems to happen) but I sleep horribly the next night, which makes the next day awful (unless i juice again).

This morning I woke up feeling awful. Not sick, not tired just a general feeling of gross. Now i’m nearing the end of my chaipuccino (oh dear God, what have I become) and dreading the consequences, btu knowing that there’s a good chance I create something pretty awesome today. If only it weren’t in Objective C.

NSBlogPost* post = [[post alloc] init];
post.title = @”Caffeine”;
post.text = theCrapAbove;
[blog addSubview:post];
[post release];

After a long summer of no internet in the house, I’m finally waiting for the Time-Warner cable guy to get here. I started setting up the network so that I can pretty much just plug it in and have it be just like home again. Here’s a diagram of how i’m actually posting this. (yay, Visio)

I’m NAT’d at least three times between the cable box and my laptop. The packet passes through whatever proprietary OS the neighbor’s wireless is running, OSX (Internet Sharing, ftw), Linux/iptables, Libux/whatever DD-WRT uses, and finally through the WinXP network stack. I’m not sure whether my living room is an abomination or a miracle.

In the last 6 months I have at least to some learned the following:

• Objective-C (including a working knowledge of XCode)
• Struts (though I was introduced to it last summer)
• the iPhone SDK
• the Facebook API
• Enough javascript to start using Greasemonkey to increase productivity

and yet I feel like I am slipping in terms of the amount of fundamental things I know about the general space I’m working in. I don’t know if that’s just the natural tendency of the specific to crowd out the general over time, or that I’m only now becoming aware of some of the more technically oriented things that I maybe should have paid attention to in school instead of whatever I was doing.

Here is a list of most of the things I feel I ought to be able to talk intelligently about that I really can’t:

• Compilers
• How the JVM works
• Data Structures - especially tree structures (I honestly can’t tell you what red/black trees do)
• Graph theory/algorithms
• Probability theory
• Design Patterns beyond singletons
• Functional programming (this is particularly discouraging since when we learned some Scheme way back in Junior year I remember taking to it really easily)

Honestly, I’m a little overwhelmed looking at that list, and one of the few things that helps is the realization that there’s not a deadline, other than a realization that for some of these (Data structures, especially) I’m just not doing my job as well as I could, so if over the next 5 years I knock out most of these I’ll still be ok, and probably be ahead of the curve at most places. So in the grand tradition of lists here’s a list of some of the things that I’m going to force myself to do.

• Study the Dragon Book.
• Write a significant project in Ruby (for now I think that means developing a Scrabble simulator with Dylan and my sister)
• Find a good data structures book and study it. (The Algorithm Design Manual, by Steven Skiena?)
• Work through The Little Schemer
• Read Refactoring

None of those get me closer to understanding the JVM. I’m not sure if I’ll be any better at probability theory or graph theory, but I’m fairly certain the preceding list will take a while (12-18 months or more). There is an implicit assumption that during this time I will be working full time programming, which is why the list is so heavy on reading and less about doing stuff like writing compilers. I’m not sure how my brain would handle writing Java, XML, SQL and God knows what else at work and then coming home to try to write a recursive-descent parser for common lisp in Ruby or whatever.

If you’re a programmer (and lets face it of the 6 people who are reading this at my site and not on facebook, 5 of you are and work in places that generate Billions of dollars from applied Computer Science), I’m interested in your opinion on these things, as well as where you’re strong/weak. Two of the things that I didn’t mention because I think I’m fairly strong in that I believe are absolutely necessary to be an effective Computer Scientist/Software Engineer are regular expressions and a firm understanding of networking/networking protocols.

I owe a great debt to the following people:

• Michael
• Dylan
• Jeff
• John
• Brett

They made my living room look like 4 times better by helping me install hardwood floors.

Over a span of 9 wall clock hours, roughly 40 man hours laid nearly 600 square feet of hardwood. Snap together is the only way to go. Seriously.

Here are the pictures of the painted interior.

I was sitting on my back porch eating a peanut butter and honey sandwich, drinking sweet, looking at the trees and listening to the birds. Driving back in from church I passed 2 lemonade stands, one which didn’t even have any adults in sight. Every yard in the neighborhood has an American flag in it (not exaggerating, someone took a whole bunch of American flags and put one in front of every house). I didn’t move to the suburbs, I moved to the 1950s.

I’ve put in three more days of effort into operation chicken little, but that’s rather pathetic given the nearly month long period that has transpired since day 2. Day 3 was the third bedroom. I was joined by Jeremy for Day 4 when we took down the entire living room in one go.

Day 5 was the entryway and “dining room”. Special thanks to Dylan and Dorothy for bringing burgers and beer. Now, I’ve got my parents coming in a week from today, but I’m not entirely sure what projects will be worth doing at that point.

I have vanquished the sky in bedroom 2 (the north-west one, for some reason I think of this as Swanson’s room, even thought that has not been discussed).

Lessons learned:
8 feet 4 inches is plenty wide when it comes to 2 mil plastic sheeting
Use more masking tape when attaching the plastic sheeting to the walls, it’s worth it
Never, ever paint over popcorn ceilings, it’s like kicking a puppy, except over a much longer time horizon
Use more water. I know you’re afraid of messing up the sheetrock, it’ll be fine.
When you use more water the mess you make is much more satisfying

This evening saw the beginning of improvements to the house. I’m typing this post on the iPhone because I do not yet have Internet. Those of you who read my not so clever titles already know that the project that I began was the removal of the acoustic ceiling (the sky is falling) I chose the master bath as I’ve already discovered that the shower doesn’t work properly so I can just use the other one for now. It took longer than I hoped because I am an optimistic estimator and it turns out the ceiling in there had been painted