Hummingbird.

KITT is now a Mustang.

It has DNA Analysis Equipment, but not a flame thrower. Fffftt…

One Month. 31 Movies.

Time Bandits.

It’s British, with lots of midgets.

One Month. 31 Movies.

Popeye.

Hilariously bad. But the town looks just like Port Deposit, MD.

From Obnoxious Droppings

As I wrote yesterday, She Who Must Be Obeyed left yesterday to get home. Because of crossing the Date Line, she leaves Sunday and gets there Tuesday. Wrong.
Her flight last night got to Los Angeles at least 45 minutes in time, but some bitch from Qantas (who wasn’t wearing a name tag) told her they closed the gate an hour before the flight. Even after explaining why she was flying, the Qantas response was basically “Tough Shit“.
So, She Who Must Be Obeyed spent the night in tears, sleeping in the airport and now has to wait until about 9:00 tonight for the next flight. This means she’ll get there Wednesday, and comes home Sunday. Needless to say, she is about to go ballistic if she hasn’t already.
If her father doesn’t last until she arrives, I wouldn’t like to be associated with Qantas. You do not cross She Who Must Be Obeyed. The situation now is bad enough, but if that happens she’ll more than likely own a large chunk of the airline before she’s done. You piss her off and I’d rather kiss a pit bull!

She’s flying to Australia because her dad will probably be dead by the time she would have gotten there, but it was worth trying to be there in his final hours.  I hope she still makes it in time.

Bin Laden’s driver is not a POW, U.S. judge says

Osama bin Laden’s driver is not a prisoner of war as defined by the Geneva Conventions and can be tried by a Guantanamo war crimes tribunal, a U.S. military judge ruled in a decision made public on Thursday.

This should have been a much easier decision.  The right of a combatant to be called a Prisoner Of War is very easy to ascertain.  It’s a simple checklist of things like "Is he wearing an identifiable uniform?"  What 5 year old can’t figure that out?

Al Qaeda’s modus operandi is to blend in with civilians and create terror.  They’re not an organized army and shouldn’t be treated as such.  If they want the benefits of POW status, let them create a uniform and wear it.  But here’s the thing:  Al Qaeda doesn’t want POW status.  It’s people in the US that feel guilty about being born that want to provide these unearned benefits.  I haven’t seen the Red Cross visit any captured allied troops, only videos made where people following the rules of warfare, that are allowed POW status, have their heads cut off.

Get your own Micro Nuclear Reactor

Toshiba has developed a new class of micro size Nuclear Reactors that is designed to power individual apartment buildings or city blocks. The new reactor, which is only 20 feet by 6 feet, could change everything for small remote communities, small businesses or even a group of neighbors who are fed up with the power companies and want more control over their energy needs.

Of course you’ll get all the loonies out who think these things explode and such. This should be the future right here. With pebble bed reactors built up for large cities.

I have to wonder if those companies that provide disaster recovery services are looking into this type of thing…

One Month. 31 Movies.

Pulp Fiction.

Check out the big brain on Brad!

The old advertising slogan “Guinness is Good for You” may be true after all, according to researchers.
A pint of the black stuff a day may work as well as an aspirin to prevent heart clots that raise the risk of heart attacks.
Drinking lager does not yield the same benefits, experts from University of Wisconsin told a conference in the US.
Guinness were told to stop using the slogan decades ago - and the firm still makes no health claims for the drink.
The Wisconsin team tested the health-giving properties of stout against lager by giving it to dogs who had narrowed arteries similar to those in heart disease.
They found that those given the Guinness had reduced clotting activity in their blood, but not those given lager.

Via Thoughts of a Regular Guy: Off To The Store

One Month. 31 Movies.

Animal House.

Double Secret Probation.

Seems that the study the other month saying that people of the right are much more happy than those on the left is true.  A couple examples while going through the RSS reader today…

Over at Bill Whittle’s he takes down a lefty troll who starts off with this

Have you considered the possibility yet that you might be ignorant American redneck hillbilly fascists?

But the asshat tries to follow it up with what sounds like a college level thesis about how America is now a fascist dictatorship, that movie stars who happen to be progressive are being put into camps, and all sorts of other drug addled nonsense.  Bill performs a masterly takedown.

Then Michael Totten has to deal with a bunch of weenies going well off the deep end over his reporting.  From Iraq.  Where he actually is reporting from, in the field, talking to ordinary people.  Since that doesn’t fit with their predetermined world view, they conniptions fly!  Honestly your IQ does drop if you follow the link he has in his post to the sewer hole.  I mean really… Michael has the best reporting I’ve ever read.  Lots of details, the bad AND the good, and the pictures remind you these are people we’re talking about.

Every once in a while I’ll come across a right wing blog that really dehumanizes the left.  So why does it seem that every time I go to a left wing site it’s pretty darn offensive?

I’m a coder… Not a monkey coder, handed subroutines by a project manager with inputs and outputs. 

Nope, I’m more of an engineer-artist-programmer.  I see a need and define it myself.  Then I come up with a creative way to make the solution to the need.  Then I write the code.  Then erase it and start over because it wasn’t elegant code, but I know how it has to work now.  Maybe another rewrite until it is finally a work of art.  Ugly code bothers the hell outta me.

There are keys to being a good programmer.  For me, its not letting people know what you’re doing until you’ve got something to show them.  In fact at work, I don’t think I’ve really ever had someone tell me what code I have to write.  I’m the main coder in my group of engineers right now.  Everyone pretty much knows if there is a need, then I’ll come back with something shortly.  Or even better, they won’t even know the need existed consciously until I show them something that takes care of the problem.

I’ve found 8 rules for coding from Holding a Program in One’s Head by Paul Graham.  It’s a work of genius it is. 

• Avoid distractions.
• Work in long stretches.
• Use succinct languages.
• Keep rewriting your program.
• Write re-readable code.
• Work in small groups.
• Don’t have multiple people editing the same piece of code.
• Start small.

Please visit the Paul Graham’s essay above.  Each of the 8 rules is well described as to why it is so important.  And why just about every company writing software does it wrong.  Any other programmers out there think that the rules under which the operate breaks every one of these rules?  I would never take a job as a programmer.  I’d take an engineering job or an operations job where I could do code no problem.

They’ll use wussy devices for shaving…

The real clinker is the electric razor. A couple of years ago it was one that oozed KY jelly on your face. Then it was one that you took in the shower. Or that Santa could ride down an undulating snow-covered hillside on because it had articulated heads. This year it’s a gizmo that I looked up and sells for a cool $199.95 (or $200 Canadian).

Face it, no man has ever bought himself an electric razor. No manly man has ever bought a manual razor that needs a battery to vibrate the blades. No serious man has ever bought a razor with more than two blades. And, no honest man has ever had prioritized shaving creams with our without emollients (aren’t those like perqs or bonuses?)

Hot water is nice, but isn’t absolutely essential either.

From a comment by Fast Eddie over at Kim du Toit’s page…

One Month. 31 Movies.

Army of Darkness.

Good? Bad? He’s the Ash with the gun.

You see them walking the streets.

Gaunt and pasty… slowly dragging themselves around.

Moaning horribly as if some great tragedy has occurred.

A plot summary from the latest horror film?

Nope… Startrek.com is going offline.  Trekkies the world over will now come spilling out of mom’s basement.  No more will the arguments of the 72 vs 73 original episodes be spilled throughout cyberspace… Well, at least on that site.

One Month. 31 Movies.

The Hills Have Eyes.

Lets go camping in the desert.

After this I’m not for Romney.

via Michelle Malkin…

–On guns, he may have gotten himself in trouble, in an attempt to diffuse the flip-flop label, by standing by his support for the Brady Bill and the 1994 assault weapons ban. He even said he would have signed an extension of the assault weapons ban when it expired in 2004. He also employed the odd phrase weapons of unusual lethality” to describe the type of guns he would ban.

If he can’t support one of the few basic rights, he’s outta there for me.  Romney sounds just like a typical north-east elitist when it comes to guns.  I’d expect him to do a typical photo op where he shows up for a skeet shoot with a 2000$+ shotgun.

And with Lieberman supporting McCain, things get more interesting.  I can see that ticket… while the nutroots and antiwar groups don’t like Lieberman, the rank and file who vote democrat seem to not have an issue with him.

One Month. 31 Movies.

Ed Wood.

Johnny Depp in angora sweaters.

You like this?

Object-oriented programming is popular in big companies, because it suits the way they write software. At big companies, software tends to be written by large (and frequently changing) teams of mediocre programmers.