davemclain.com

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];

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 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.

Yesterday I moved into my new place, this morning I was working in my (mostly empty) living room, and looked out my back window to see a neighbor in my back yard, eating my lawn.

she saw me…

then she fled, story of my life. Oh well I’m sure she’ll be back.

Edit: For those of you having trouble:

Amazing what procrastination does to my posting. Stupid packing.

Last night I went out to Shakespeare in the park with the Mankeys, and despite the fact that Dorothy didn’t think I enjoyed cultural things, it was awesome. Their rendition of Much Ado About Nothing was quite good. This also marked my first time going to Barton Springs (I’ve only been living here for half a decade, gimme a break), which just might be the largest pool I’ve ever been to unless you count the ocean or lakes. All of this is just to provide context for our
shocking discovery:

Amazon and Apple, in an unholy alliance, have created a psychic interface to online shopping. Dylan and I were discussing our mutual desire to purchase Digital SLRs. Ever since I got to use Jesuit’s D30 and D60 back in 2002-03, I’ve really wanted one, but the price was prohibitive. Anyway, we were debating about how much they actually cost, and I figured we might as well actually check. I pull out my iPhone, type in Amazon.com and right there ABOVE THE SEARCH BAR is a selection of DSLRs. I have never opened Amazon on my iPhone before, so they don’t have the connection to my fairly substantial purchase/recommendation history.

Their ability to psychically determine what I want to buy combined with their black magic recommendations lead me to believe that soon I will have no choice but to go slave for them again inside their art deco insane asylum on the hill, if only to get the limited employee discount while I slake my thirst for consumerist happiness.
That seems far more likely than iPhone users, who have already shelled out 300 bucks for a small shiny object being very similar to the demographic of DSLR buyers.

I own too much stuff. I have boxes that I haven’t unpacked since I moved off of Oltorf in 2005. This can only get worse moving into a house.

The house does not feel real to me yet. I am only sleeping in my current residence for two more nights, but packing is a beating because my brain hasn’t realized that I actually need to do it.

Today I put 80 miles on my car driving around Austin. Next Thursday, I will have flown 6 flights in 8 days. I am personally responsible for global warming, I’m sorry. At this rate I may actually be able to move to Seattle without suicidal thoughts.
Clowns wear really big shoes…it made sense in my head.

Apparently there was hail up to 1.75 inches in diameter. For those of yall playing at home, that’s a golf ball. Here’s a blurry picture of the courtyard of my apartment with a generous layer of frozen death balls, didn’t get a picture of the river i was standing in that had freaking icebergs in it.

All of a sudden having an underground parking spot doesn’t seem like such a ridiculous extravagance, since it saved my dented car from being dented.

Holy crap, the world is ending outside. I think this is the first time I’ve been in a true Texas storm. I thought I’d seen hail…no, I was wrong. Huge freaking chunks of ice were falling from the sky. I hope the house is okay.

I feel like i manage to not ever be photographed. I either show up at the party before or after the shutterbug, or maybe I’m part vampire and don’t show up in many of the pictures that are taken of me. The more likely explanation is that the social circles I’m in aren’t generally big photographers. Either way, I feel like I’m missing out on future opportunities to look back on my wasted youth.

I’m acutely aware of the lack of pictures of me in a sufficiently large number of awkward BYX events, or minorly injuring myself bike riding, or working at my desk at amazon, or my desk at microsoft, or with any of the people at Austin Capital, or hanging at Matt’s place, or sitting with a  laptop in Dan Brown’s living room, or playing poker at the Mansion, or smoking cigars on Travis Pry’s porch, or drinking wine with Marcoux when we were roommates, or burning cedars at the Lemmon homestead (is it now the Lemmon ranch? (that sounds like a salad dressing)) or sitting at Einsteins with Murk, or chilling with Telschow on a Wednesday (except that real awkward one), or sailing the boat with Mac (somewhere pictures of this exist). Some of those are moments I’m looking forward to having again, but others are gone.