Events

I just started reading The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery, which contains a fairly good overview of climate change and how we're making it happen. It's important to understand that climate change has happened rapidly throughout history, meaning changes of 2-4°C (4-7°F) have occurred over decades rather than millennia. So, having started that book yesterday, I'm warmed (so to speak) by this morning's Washington Postarticle on the shrinking Antarctic ice sheet: The Antarctic ice sheet is losing as much as...

Andy Borowitz today jokes about a hypothetical Bush visit to reality: For Mr. Bush, the visit to reality, while brief, was still significant because it represented his first visit to the real world since being elected President in 2000. "The President deserves a lot of credit for making this visit to reality," one aide said. "He doesn't have a natural constituency here."

The AP reported today that the President, Secretary Chertoff, and other officials were clearly warned about the likelihood of levee failures three days before Bush went on television claiming otherwise: Bush didn't ask a single question during the final government-wide briefing the day before Katrina struck on Aug. 29 but assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: "We are fully prepared." Six days of footage and transcripts obtained by The Associated Press show in excruciating detail that while...

Like the journeymen of old, I have packed up my tools and traveled far from home to practice my craft. Unlike the journeymen of old, I can go home every weekend. So, I have a new cube, a new team, and a room at the nearby Extended Stay America. As I get settled, I'll write more on a few subjects familiar to the thousands of other software developers who find themselves in similar circumstances: Work/Life balance when your life is there, you're here, and you bill by the hour (i.e., the importance of...

I'm in Nashua, N.H. starting a new project tomorrow, so I'm too pooped to write about anything interesting today. Anne reports that Heather (below), from Saturday's adoption event, is still available, though her brothers Harrison and McCartney have new homes.

We went to the PAWS adoption event in Winnetka yesterday, and came this close to stealing the puppies. McCartney would have been one of them:

Just this morning I wrote about choosing a class over a struct to take advantage of inheritance and abstractness. It turns out, I was wrong. Well, not that wrong. It's just that this particular design doesn't actually derive that many benefits from inheritance. First, there will still be a lot of redundant code. The IEquatable and IComparable interfaces both require implementation in concrete classes, so all of the measurement classes would have nearly identical CompareTo and Equals methods. Also...

The best governor we've got claims he didn't know the Daily Show interview was a spoof when he sat down: "It was going to be an interview on contraceptives...that's all I knew about it," Blagojevich, laughingly [sic], told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in a story for Thursday's editions. "I had no idea I was going to be asked if I was 'the gay governor.'" Interviewer Jason Jones pretended to stumble over Blagojevich's name before calling him "Gov. Smith." He later asked if Blagojevich was "the gay...

I've encountered a problem familiar to veteran C# developers: whether to use a class or a struct for a particular design. So I'm going to follow my own advice and develop first for elegance and second for execution speed. The specifics: As I mentioned earlier, I'm re-writing the way the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture handles measurements. I've identified 16 scenarios in which I use measurement classes, and I want them to be as intuitive as possible. So, for example, scenario #1 is "instantiate a...

Molly Ivins, on congressional reform: Tom DeLay gets indicted, and all the Republicans can think of is a $20 gift ban. Forget the people talking about "lobby reform." The lobby does not need to be reformed, the Congress needs to be reformed. This is about congressional corruption, and it is not limited to the surface stuff like taking free meals, hotels and trips. This is about corruption that bites deep into the process of making laws in the public interest. The root of the rot is money (surprise!)...