Code Comments

My favorite takeaway so far from: Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

Every time you express yourself in code, you should pat yourself on the back. Every time you write a comment, you should grimace and feel the failure of your ability of expression.

Death, Batteries, and Corporate America

Click image for full size

In reality, both my mouse and keyboard batteries died, and the battery lady was nowhere to be found. Had to “borrow” wired input devices from a nearby cube. A monitor might be next, just ’cause

Sweet Dreams are Made of This

(click image for full size)

Rocket Science

This was originally sketched out during a wonderfully exciting training session on “Problem Solving”.

Urinal Games

Maybe I’m the only one, but this pretty much describes every day at the urinal.

Urinal Games are the games you play against others at the urinal without their knowledge. It is completely acceptable and highly encouraged for participants to practise on their own, but records can only be set and victories only declared while playing against the unknowing.

Currently, there are six events:

1. Power
2. Sprint
3. Control
4. Distance
5. Sharpshooting
6. Musical Composition

Why play? It’s fun. And some of the advanced techniques could theoretically enhance your sexual performance.

Power  

Unleash the full, unbridled power of your urine! Power your way to an empty bladder and make as much water noise as possible along the way. Consider purchasing a decibel meter for helping determine a winner.

Tips:

• Aim toward the deepest part of the water.
• Pinch off while trying hard to urinate. Release.

Sprint 

Very similar to the Power event, with the exception that speed is the only important part. As long as you get it out as fast as possible, whatever else you do along the way is up to you. This leaves open the possibility for style points.

Stylistic Suggestions:

• Patterns
• High arc

Control 

The object of the Control event is to take as long as possible to void your bladder while constantly maintaining a stream. This may sound easy, but it takes a bit more practise than the other events.

Beginner level variations of this event allows contestants to use any means to restrict the stream, primarily manual intervention.

Intermediate level participants may only restrict the stream manually once stream pressure begins to dwindle.

Advanced level participants are never allowed to restrict the stream manually, instead relying completely on muscle control. If you’re interested in this level of competition, consider looking into Kegel exercises for men. See: wikipedia, about.com or askmen.com. This comes with the possibly-added benefit of better sexual performance.

Distance 

Stand back and spray!

Average Distance

This variation is scored by average distance from the urinal, measured continuously for the entire duration of evacuation. If you’d prefer not to use calculus, take measurements every 1 second.

Maximum Distance

The maximum distance variation is scored by taking the maximum urination distance at any point during the void.

Special Notes:

• There are penalties for missing the urinal and making a mess. You may consider taking 4″ off the final calculated distance for each splash.

Sharpshooting 

This skill event has the participant shoot at targets in the urinal. In order to play against someone else, it’s necessary to enter the bathroom before him and place targets in the urinal you suspect he will choose. If you don’t shave, consider using hair. Otherwise, use bits of torn toilet paper.

Score by counting the number of remaining targets; the player with the most remaining loses. If your opponent goes to a urinal other than the one you placed targets in, you lose.

Musical Composition 

An unbiased third party is required for this event. He should sit in a stall or pretend to wash up for the duration of the event. The object is to make different sounds with your urine that come together as anything that could be considered a “musical composition”.

Whoever makes the best composition, according to the 3rd party, is the winner.

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*character images shamelessly stolen from http://english.people.com.cn/

Choking on Things That Shouldn’t Be in Your Mouth

<insert_your_name> & the Blustery Day

It’s been a long day, and work is finally over. You drive home, park your car in the driveway, and go inside to veg out.

Mid-evening, a strong storm marches into town and you peer through the window at the rain pounding the wet pavement. You are strangely aroused. Hurricane-force winds blow powerfully and launch a million water bullets at your window. You instinctively take cover.

Trees bend in the whipping wind. Twigs snap. Leaves are snatched away by a raging river of air. A large branch SNAPS, CRACKLES, & POPS…

<insert_your_name> & the Insurance Company

…right onto your car in the driveway. Nature’s wrecking ball has flattened your little car, or remorselessly molested it, at the very least.

Don’t you wish you had a garage that you could’ve put your car in where it would’ve been safe? Wait, you have one? But you’re using it for storage? What a shame.

Garages are for cars, not all your kids’ toys and all your crap

I can’t count how many times I’ve seen houses with two-car garages half to completely full of junk with the cars themselves banished to the driveway. When you start filling up your garage with anything but cars and tools, don’t you think it’s time to start throwing things away or selling them off?

Even if you don’t want to take action for yourself, do it for everybody else who has to look into your garage when you leave it wide open for three hours every day.

If your garage doors have windows, the problem is even worse: your stuff is ALWAYS VISIBLE.

Think of the children!

I like my stuff as much as, if not more than, the next person, but there comes a point when you need to sort through your stuff. If you still find yourself without adequate space, please consider a storage unit.

I Was Just Trying To… [U3 flash drive edition]

I was just trying to stick USB Switchblade on my brand new 8GB SanDisk flash drive purchased for just this purpose…

Introductory Plot: USB Switchblade & U3

USB Switchblade is a set of tools that can be used to silently recover data from target machines. It can be transported on a number of mediums, including portable hard drives, iPods, flash drives, etc.

U3 flash drives provide a uniquely interesting opportunity, as most computers will auto-run the U3 data on them. Using some other tools, it’s possible to replace the default U3 launcher with a custom one that’ll run the switchblade tools.

See this post about USB Switchblade on U3 drives.

This is scary and neat at the same time, and I wanted to play with it. I downloaded the tools and went through the steps necessary to make my U3 an uber weapon.

I tested it, and it was neat, but I got bored and told the switchblade stuff to stop stealing data.

Plot Twist

At this point, I noticed that my 8GB drive was only registering as 4GB in Windows. Shit. Since the custom U3 launcher has to been written in a crazy way to the drive, I thought I broke the drive and would have to go back to Best Buy the next day. First, I wanted to try and reset it just in case.

SanDisk has something on their website to update the U3 launcher. Getting the original launcher back on seemed like a good first step, and it seemed to be as simple as running this installer.
[EDIT: SanDisk's page with the installer is here]

I ran the program. FAILURE: the inserted flash drive is not a U3 compatible device. I don’t like the computer calling me a failure.

Argh! The custom launcher had overwritten stuff that the SanDisk installer was looking for.

THE SOLUTION

I googled and googled and googled some more. Eventually, I found a custom launcher that was only a slightly modified version of the real one.
[EDIT: This launcher is on the hak5 page in the Installing section. It's U3_San_Disk_Launchpad.rar]

Putting this on the drive was tense: Will it work? Will I still have to waste 30 min going back to Best Buy?

With this new custom launcher installed, the drive still showed up as 4GB. Crap. Running the SanDisk installer again, however, produced better results. SanDisk’s tool recognized the U3 drive and stuck the original launcher back on.

And what do you know, Windows now says I have an 8GB drive. yay.

Moral of the Story

Stop playing with things, and they wont break. (I had this fun but a few hours before I Was Just Trying To… [iPod edition])

Bad Weather & Headlights or: Interstate Elephants on Roller Skates

It’s rainy. It’s cloudy. Visibility is low. And you’re driving a nearly-invisible car. How do you expect to not get hit?

Grrr…

An annoying number of people around here seem to enjoy playing this game. I would like to kindly request that people stop being stupid…and inconsiderate…and careless. An impossible expectation, I know.

It’s been raining in Omaha a fair amount over the last week. When I’ve been out in it, it’s primarily on my way to or back from work. Traffic is slow, but understandably so.

What is not understandable is that when I look, there are some dark patches in the wall of yellow headlights behind me. Are those patches empty pavement where there aren’t any cars in this bumper to bumper traffic? Are they elephants on roller skates merging into the flow of traffic?

They are cars without their headlights on.

On one dreary morning in particular, I remember passing a car whose headlights were off. By the time I was 20 feet ahead, it had completely disappeared from my view. Awesome.

Especially in the city, the primary function of headlights is not so that you can see, but so that other drivers can see you.

A Call to Action

I have automatic headlights that respond to outside darkness; they don’t always turn on in bad weather because there’s just enough light to keep them off. So I manually double check that they’re on and sometimes flip the switch just to be sure.

If you have manual lights, please make sure they’re on. And if you’ve automatic lights like mine, please do the same.

Thank you.

I Was Just Trying To… [iPod edition]

Me: My iPod’s broken, and I spent 5 hours last night fixing it.

Coworkers: <sympathy>

Me: You see, I was just trying to…

Coworkers: </sympathy>

Me: …install Linux on it and use it to boot another machine

Coworkers: <loathing>

The iPod

When necessary, I’d like to be able to boot whatever machine I’m at into Linux. I realize there are Live CD distros, but I’d like something a little faster.

I decided to do an install on my 80GB iPod Classic since I have that on me more often than I do a flash drive. The idea was that I could boot a computer via USB into my iPod-installed Linux. (I’m not talking about Linux for the iPod, btw. That’s not yet possible for the 6G Classics and not what I was going for).

Apparently, iPods don’t like to be repartitioned.

My iPod limped along, and neither Windows nor iTunes could see it. Giving up my Linux quest, I tried to set things back, but no partitioning program (parted, fdisk, Windows computer management, Acronis Disk Director, Partition Magic…) could figure out what to do with 4MB blocks on a FAT filesystem. 5 hours of work followed…

The solution: accidental and still mysterious.

1. I installed an old version of the iPod updater onto the new version of iTunes, partially breaking iTunes.
2. I told the iTunes installer to repair iTunes.
3. While iTunes was fixing itself, it detected my iPod for a split second and prompted me to restore the iPod to factory settings.
4. I clicked the PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, JUST DO IT! button.
   
5. I repeated steps 1-4 because files were in use on the iPod, and iTunes stopped seeing it.
6. iTunes synched my music, and life was good.

Whew.

Stay tuned for I Was Just Trying to… [U3 flash drive edition]

Weed whacker vs. Double-edge, single blade razor.

As much fun as it might be to prune with a chainsaw, the bushes cry at your enthusiasm. Similar is the story of impatient shavers attacking skin and stubble with their multi-blade disposable razors.

Getting a good shave is important. Even if a quick shave is all you want, I would argue that you should at least learn about wetshaving. It will leave you smoother, more satisfied, and in less pain than whatever you were doing before.

Wetshaving

There are a lot of resources out there on wetshaving, and I don’t much feel like writing it all over again. So here’s the summary:

• Keep the shave area moist with warm water (shaving is preferably done just after a shower).
• Use lube (shaving cream, soap, etc).
• Shave to remove layers of hair over a number of passes; don’t try to take it all off in one swipe.

It sounds simple enough, but I know a lot of people who just use water (or not even that) at a time of day opposite of when they showered. Here’s a little video about wetshaving; this guy’s amusing and has his own blog too. See the bottom of this post for more resources.

Introduction to Wetshaving

DE Razor

I used to shave with a Mach 3 and then a Quattro. More blades is better, right? Maybe not. From www.shavingstuff.com:

Most men on the planet shave with a disposable or cartridge razor with some sort of canned foam or gel. This has several issues:

1. Cartridge razors are expensive
2. Aerosols used to dispense the cream or gel from the can are not good for the environment
3. A cartridge razor is made for the “average” male face, leaving little room for superior results. Furthermore, multi-blade razors can be quite irritating to many men due to repeated shaving of the same area by the multiple blades and the possibility of ingrown hairs due to the “lift and cut” operation.

The use of a double edge (DE) razor can alleviate many of these problems. They are quite cheap, extremely sharp, and when properly used can provide an extremely close shave with little or no irritation. The same can be said of straight razors, though they have a higher learning curve.

Bottom Line

Due to irritation from my Quattro cartridge razor, I was only ever able to shave every other day or every third day (even wetshaving). Wetshaving with a DE, I can shave daily (though it usually works out such that I don’t). Also, get a brush; it’s worth it (I use a cheapie from WalMart, but it works fine).

The shave is close and my skin is happpy. Yay.

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Resources

Here are some good resources and explanations on wetshaving:

Badger & Blade – Wet Shaving FAQ

ShaveMyFace.com – Guide to the Art of Shaving

How to get that perfect shave – Today, Weekend Edition – MSNBC.com

Great Video Howtos:

• Mantic59′s Shaving Blog: Introduction to Wetshaving
• Mantic59′s Shaving Blog: How To Shave Part 2: Lathering
• Mantic59′s Shaving Blog: How To Shave Part 3