Escaped Thoughts

I've been thinking a lot about writing as I work on my master's thesis (notice that I say that I've been thinking a lot about writing, not that I've been doing a lot of writing). Anyway, I've been thinking about why I've been having trouble writing, and I had an interesting thought.

People always say that the best way to get over writer's block is to just write stuff down without worrying about it, then to go back and make it good later. Unfortunately, I find that as hard as writing good stuff in the first place, if not harder—I almost always plan every sentence and paragraph in my head before I start writing it—and I think I may know why: I write a lot of code. It's what I did for classes, what I do at work, what I do for my master's research, and not infrequently what I do with my free time. And what's the number one rule of writing code? Don't write any code until you know exactly what you are doing. No one ever says, "Write a lot of free-form code, then go back and try to make it into a good algorithm later"—that's a quick road to buggy, broken code.

So now I have two plausible theories. Theory one: I've written so much code that I've absorbed the doctrine deep into my psyche. Theory two (and this is my favored theory): That's simply the way I've always tended to think and approach problems, which is why I've always found writing papers painful, and writing code relatively easy. Either way, I now have something besides my laziness to share the blame for my slower-than-I'd-like progress.

Category: Random

Writebacks (0)

I've recently stumbled upon Enigma, which is an open-source remake of an old game called Oxyd, which I used to play back in middle school on Mac OS 7. It's an incredibly absorbing mix of puzzle-solving, coordination, and simple but elegant graphics. I had forgotten all about it, not having played it in more than eight years, but it took me about 30 seconds to become re-addicted. It's been ported to all kinds of platforms, so you have no excuse not to play it.

Category: Geek

Writebacks (2)

Now that it's suddenly much more important to get it ASAP, I went ahead and ordered Panther. Since it's still somewhat early in the game, I should be one of the many lucky people to get it delivered on the evening of the 24th, so I won't have to fight my way into and out of the new Cleveland Apple retail store which is rumored to be opening that night.

I know what you are thinking: only a total geek would think that getting a new operating system makes for an exciting Friday night. Don't worry, I'm not that much of a geek.

Ok, yes, I am that much of a geek. Deal with it.

Category: Geek

Writebacks (0)

The habit of skipping disk image checksums is a very bad one to get into... it really comes back to bite you when you, say, install a system update from a corrupt disk image and hose your system to the point that it won't boot.

On the bright side, I have another bootable partition I use for beta testing, so I still have a totally usable computer, making this just a minor annoyance instead of a colossal headache. And on the really bright side, Panther is almost here—and this vastly simplifies the decision of whether or not to do a totally clean install of Panther.

Category: Geek

Writebacks (0)

So I knew about Sunday alcohol laws, and I always thought that they were silly... I had no idea how silly they really are (in Ohio at least). So this morning, we're doing a grocery run, and I thought, "Hey, I should grab some hard cider". I knew that they didn't sell wine or liquor in the morning, but since beer is ok, I foresaw no difficulties. Sadly, they were out of hard cider, so I grabbed some Bacardi instead. But will they sell me the Bacardi? No. "Oh, I thought, I guess beer isn't ok after all". But no, of course that's no it, because that would make too much sense. They won't sell Bacardi because it's a cocktail containing hard liquor. Never mind that it has the same alcohol content as beer. Never mind that they would almost undoubtedly have sold me the hard cider. But if I had wanted, say, 4 cases of Miller, hey, no problem. Who thinks these things up?

In unrelated weird-law news, today I saw the strangest ordinance ever. I can't decide which is weirder—the fact that a city would adopt an ordinance in 1982 that requires heads of households to own guns, or the fact that it contains an exemption for, among other things, people "who conscientiously oppose maintaining firearms as a result of beliefs or religious doctrine." I can just see everyone sitting around drafting ordinance, when someone says, "What we really need is to make everyone own a gun!" "But wait," says another guy, "What if people don't want to own guns?" "Good point," says the first guy, "Lets make the law say that everyone has to own a gun, but only if they want to."

And apparently, nobody thought that was a stupid idea.

Category: Society

Writebacks (0)

And for me, today, Dave Barry is that hero. After his original commentary on the Do Not Call list generated some negative feedback in the telemarketing world, he really let them have it. Of course, the ATA spokesperson played right into his hands; you just can't make up quotes that good. But basically, he's my hero for writing the sort of article that we would all write if we were a) that clever, and b) had a nationally syndicated column. Way to stick it to them! It almost makes me want to sent money when the "Barry for President in '04" campaign rolls around.

Category: Society

Writebacks (0)

Suddenly, the appeal of cell-phones with embedded digital cameras is much clearer to me. There are moments in your life when you would never expect to need a camera, but you'd suddenly do almost anything to have one: Today I was running errands, and the car next to me had a dog leaning out the window. Wearing goggles.

I'd love to know why someone thought to put goggles on a dog, or why the dog didn't seem to mind. But most of all, I'd love to have had a camera

Category: Random

Writebacks (0)

Apparently, people can listen to, understand, and retain audio at double or triple speed—or higher! Doing some quick math: 4 years of classes with 30 weeks or so per year at 16+ hours per week gives me close to 2000 hours of classes. Let's be very generous, and say that 1/3 of those hours involved useful interaction that couldn't have been sped up. That still leaves me with 700-1000 hours at least that I spent listening to pointless empty space and long vowel sounds (some professors ...uuuuuuuuhhhhhhhh... could ...uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhh... be ...uuuuhhhhhh... shortened even ...uhhh... more. Much, much more). We won't even go into the hours that were 100% content free, and could thus be compressed infinitely without loss of information.

Now, even assuming it took me over five hours per page to write my thesis, I could have been done one or two times over with all that lost time. So now I won't have to feel bad about not having finished my thesis. I would have been done, but I had to listen to vowels instead.

Category: School

Writebacks (0)

If someone sets up a lab computer to allow input in Japanese, Korean, and 5 (5!) different types of Chinese, is it too much to ask that they include Dvorak as an option?

Category: Geek

Writebacks (0)