Myths I’m Going to Start

When I first sat down at my computer I was going to write about gay’s in music. Not John Mayer, who is in fact gay music (he embodies it), but Freddie Mercury, Elton John, David Bowie – those kinds of gays.

But then I started laughing about something else and changed my mind. So here are the myths I would like to start. This will be updated, hopefully, randomly:

(Numbered but not in any order)

1. Juice is terrible for you.

6. Apples taste like oranges.

19. Abraham Lincoln was black.

1138.  Kevin Smith was in Return of the Jedi.

22. A Helio is a phone.

73. Abraham Lincoln was white.

1010. College is not hard.

87. Vegans go to heaven.

69. Things fall up.

1564. Shakespeare was just one man.

40. Clamato is delicious.

51. Fidel Castro is Amish.

238. Cody-ness is next to Godliness.

547. The only thing that can kill Steve Jobs is a bullet made from the silver lining of  an iPhone.

4178. Narnia is an iPhone app.

802151. Bluetooth happens after eating blueberries.

The Code I’ve Inherited…

I got a new job a while back. I’ve started redesigning and developing an electric car company’s software. It’s an awesome job, great boss, wonderful environment, aI got a new job a while back. I’ve started redesigning and developing an electric car company’s software. It’s an awesome job, great boss, wonderful environment, and I’m the only software guy so it’s pretty much whatever I want to do goes. It’s great. There is, however, one serious flaw:

THE PREVIOUS DEVELOPER WAS A FUCKING MORON!!!

Let me repeat that…

I got a new job a while back. I’ve started redesigning and developing an electric car company’s software. It’s an awesome job, great boss, wonderful environment, aI got a new job a while back. I’ve started redesigning and developing an electric car company’s software. It’s an awesome job, great boss, wonderful environment, and I’m the only software guy so it’s pretty much whatever I want to do goes. It’s great. There is, however, one serious flaw:

THE PREVIOUS DEVELOPER WAS A FUCKING MORON!!! (HA-HA bet you thought I meant only the last sentence. Pwnd)

Anywho, below is a snippet of code, which proves my point.

if (amps > 250)

amps = 250;

//offset = ((108 – 18) * amps) / 250; //250Ais maximum forward current

offset = ((175 – 25) * amps) / 250; //250Ais maximum forward current

//g.FillRectangle(amps < 100 ? br_pospower : br_negpower, 280, 108 – offset, 30, offset);

g.FillRectangle(amps < 100 ? br_pospower : br_negpower, 580, 175 – offset, 60, offset);

if(amps > 0)

{

if (amps > 250) amps = 250;

offset = ((175 – 25) * amps) / 250;

g.FillRectangle(amps < 100 ? br_pospower : br_negpower, 580, 175 – offset, 60, offset);

}

As Matt pointed out on Facebook, the above code does make sense, and in my haste to post I left out a bit of background, so let me add more context. Our values can either be 0 or something greater than 250 (we just only display up to 250 because our graphs only reach 2.5 which we derive from 250) so checking for the value to be less than 100 makes no fucking sense. You already check if it’s less than 0 so there’s no reason to have “amps<100?”…looks like some code Shawn Kirsch would write.

American Design

I read a book for my final Tech. Writing class entitled “The Inmates are Running the Asylum”. It was a great read for anyone interested in technical design or design in general. The TLDR version of the book would be that Software Developers are terrible at design and this general lack of know-how translates into the terribly bad programs we write. All one really has to do is compare the bulk of Microsoft developed products with those developed by Apple. The differences are staggering, although I will admit that Microsoft Office is getting better and Visual Studio blows the doors off of XCode.

I’ve become more interested with crappy design because of my job, where I am basically tasked to create a better interface for our cars then the one we currently have. Suffice to say our current software sucks. I find myself spending more time thinking about button placement, screen overlap, white space and usability issues and less time actually writing code. That doesn’t bother me much, since marathon work coding sessions can become a drag and have a tendency to increase my Reddit to Coding ratio, but it does kind of become bothersome whenever I can’t get past design issues outside of work. I am going to digress about one such instance shortly but just wanted to preface with a little bit of crap beforehand. Okay, ready?

I love Apple for its simplicity in design. They have, I believe there isn’t much of an argument here, revolutionized interface design. Jobs has pulled them from the brink of obscurity and bankruptcy because he stressed elegance. I firmly believe that Mac users are some of the dumbest people on the planet, but the user base doesn’t take away from the fact that Apple has changed the way people look at computers and, for better or worse, they have to be congratulated for that. That being said, there is a problem that I have noticed. It’s not something that most people would catch, I don’t know they maybe they would, but it’s something that I have been thinking about for a while and have finally been able to find the correct words to describe it. You see, Apple’s design suffers from American thinking. They are entirely America Designs.

Now, if this was 2001 I would be chastised as a terrorist for even hinting that an American Design could be bad, but it’s not 2001 (it’s 2009 for those of us counting) and that is exactly what I am going to do. Read: Apple’s design is slipping and suffering from the American influences.

My example is the device I use everyday, my iPhone. It is a wonderful device, the best phone I have ever owned, and I love it so much that I am willing to spend $100 a month just to have the privilege to use it. (Though starting Oct. it will be switched to T-Mobile and I will be paying on $50) I will never buy a Mac computer, so I can’t very well extend my ideas about their design to that device, but the iPhone is riddled with Americanized design flaws.

While playing around with my alarms the other day I realized something: I have three separate alarms set for different days and different times. I don’t physically own three alarm clocks, I own just one and reset it to different times if I need it to as the week progresses.(Actually I don’t own any alarm clocks and use my iPhone but for posterity say that I did) Why is it that on my phone I find the need to have multiple alarms but in real life I would only have one? The answer is efficiency.  It is more efficient,  only takes one button press, to create a new alarm clock than it is to edit an existing one, whereas it takes three presses.

It boils down to it being easier to create a new alarm instead of recycling my old ones. Americanized design.

Now, I would be okay with this if it was a controlled event affecting only first party software developed by Apple for Apple’s devices. However, this isn’t the case. On my third party Budget app it is easier to just create a new spending column than try to edit an existing and the same can be said about my Golf scorecard app with creating courses and my Blacklist app when creating lists. An example can be found throughout just about every third party app I have on my iPhone and it’s something that just absolutely makes me want to scream. I liken it to buying a new printer instead of replacing your defunct printers ink, it’s an issue of cost on the surface but ultimately it deals with efficiency.

Apple, however sleek their programs, are pushing American design into software development and it is something I don’t really like. This is just my opinion. Sure I might try to reference my work on their esthetic’s, I might set a goal of having my software be as easy to use and look as beautiful as theirs, but I will try as best I can to keep wasteful creation out of my work for as long as I can.

I’m sure some people, if anyone actually reads this, might just chalk this up to software design in general. Software is not heralded as a physical thing and therefore it is easier for some to dismiss the principles of design when using it. Who cares that it’s harder to edit? Just create something new it won’t hurt anything. Those people are obviously idiots .

Lilly’s First Blog Post

First off, for those reading this, a collective “Awww…” Yeah I know, very cute. It seems that my daughter has taken a liking to PC keyboards. I guess I shouldn’t say PC because I use the Mac-Boner-Inducing keyboard, and PC’s are completely different from Macs, but you get the idea. I get about two or three IM’s a day at work from Lilly when mommy sets her down to the laptop and lets her prattle away about her baby formula, playing with the giant blue whale on her playmat, drama from the baby down the street and how it feels to have people 20 years older than her change her poopy diapers.

So, in the spirit of those I have decided to capture Lilly’s latest diatribe and post it here. Maybe, if she does it often enough and the stories are truly captivating, I’ll post more and run the risk of becoming the most embarrassing dad in history! So here it is, Part One of The Land Before Time the LillyGreen Sessions:

vx;f. /rdo/oc
5 |
.i,,,,,,,,,,,jx.fk, cr jic,\

Anticlimactic?

Selective Muting — The Most Ambitious Project Part 1

One of the first Python programs I ever wrote was an electronic “key”-board. I mapped the different keys on a PC keyboard to integer values, which correlated to the frequencies of a musical keyboard. It was a cool little project, allowing me to compose music out of sentences and creating entire pieces out of lengthy texts. I remember throwing the first page from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone into an array and listening to the garbled mess it produced. It was cool.

I have also been interested in audio computing. I guess since I sing and play guitar in my spare time, and work as a programmer, the marriage of the two is just something that comes naturally.  Up until now I’ve never really applied my ideas much outside of jotting them down, creating a tentative plan, and eventually forgetting about, or flat out abandoning, the idea. I have vowed to not let that happen again, and the project I will begin my new “finish that shit motherfucker” crusade with is a fairly ambitious one.

The idea is one that I have had for awhile, and it comes from days growing up, when me and my brother would sit on the couch and listen to the ball games on tv. See, through the course of watching many, many sports broadcasts I’m sure everyone finds one or two announcers that they cannot stand to hear. For me it’s Joe Morgan from ESPN, I know a few friends who can’t stand Madden (but he’s retired so they’re lucky),  and I would give anything to have a special “Mute Morgan” button on my remote. Unfortunately Samsung hasn’t implemented this feature yet and I doubt they will be anytime soon. Thankfully, I write code and that code saves the day.

It’s fairly easy to grab the frequencies from an audio-in device, a microphone or some other device, and compare those to recorded frequencies from a chart. (Specifically this one) If the frequencies range has a min of 196Hz and a max of 3520Hz then the device is a violin. But of course we have prior knowledge to work with, we know the sounds we want are a voice, on the chart falling between 82Hz and 988Hz, and more specifically we’re looking for Adult Male Voices, falling typically between 85Hz and 155Hz. Seems easy enough right? Sure there are other variables to be accounted for such as crowd noise, sounds from the game (helmets smashing, bats cracking, etc.), and there is always the rule that appearances can be deceptive, but the problem seems straight forward in the approach:

1) Isolate voices based on frequencies

2) Train the program to understand those voices as different people

3) Mute that bastard that you no longer want to hear

So, what first? Well, I’ve been trying to decide upon the best way to receive and handle the tv’s output as the pc’s input. I currently have these which will be used to direct the tv sound into the computer and then funnel that sound to speakers plugged into the computer. (This is the only way I see this working since it’s not possible for me to program the tv’s sound directly, but keeping the volume on zero on the tv and the volume all the way up on the external speakers has worked before, so it should work with a pc in between right?) I am trying to decide on the best way of handling that input in my program, which is currently setup to handle microphone input for testing. Also training my program might prove to be a little much for the first version and might fall to the wayside in lieu of something simpler.

Yes, I know, a lot of maybes, ifs and tryings, but I believe this project to be manageable. Anyways, I’ll be updating this project over the course of it’s lifetime and up until it’s completion, or it’s untimely demise. Hopefully the former. If anyone has any ideas, or input about how this has already been done so I can get some pointers, comment or send me a message on facebook. Hopefully by the end of the year I’ll be able to mute Joe Morgan and listen to my ball games without him.

http://www.har-bal.com/index.php?/frequency-chart.php

Fable II: The Decision — From a while back

I don’t really remember when I wrote this. It’s from a while back, got posted on Facebook before I really started keeping a blog, and just got lost somewhere along the way. I decided since I’m writing stuff once again I should throw this up here because I think it’s an interesting topic and kind of leads to the topic of Video Games being Art? Anyways, if you haven’t read it before, read and enjoy, and if you have read it…read again and enjoy again.

Our Tale Begins:

I love video games. Currently, I love Fable II. But my reason for loving the game goes beyond pure aesthetics and wonderful gameplay. I love the game because it has made me think more than any other game in recent history. You see, there is a mission in  “Fable II” in  which you are “killed” and then transported to a fantasy realm where everything is perfect. The weather is always fair, skies of blue and plenty of everything you could ever need. Now me being a fan of the show “Life On Mars”, UK or US both equally good, this was a particularly interesting portion of the game for me because it is a parallel to the show.  (However, that parallel is a topic for another post, someday…)

In this perfect world your sister,mother and father, who have all been killed in the real world, are alive once again and your new parents have gone off for the day leaving you and your sister alone to play and enjoy life. The day progresses by having you complete a few quaint missions, finding and shooting bottles for example, and after a long day of the sweet life your sister believes it’s past your bed time. You are ordered to “Go To Bed”. (There is a title bar which shows what your current mission is and it literally says go to bed) So, being the good brother and dutiful child you are, you oblige. This is where it gets interesting because eventually you are awakened during the night by odd music playing just beyond the recently opened fence door.

Now, we all understand what this means, this is your freedom. You are free to leave this obviously phony, make believe world and return to your real life. You can become the hero that everyone elseneeds and you can leave this wretched, condescending evil land once and for all. It was at this point I started thinking…

Would I really leave this place?

Would You?

Honestly think about it, forget that this is just a Video Game, and imagine it is a fine piece of literature written by Voltaire, Shakespeare or Steinbeck. You are presented with this wonderful place, a beautiful world in which the only problem is that the other you (the real you) might be dead. Your real world might be gone forever, you may never rise to be it’s messiah, and in it’s place would only be this world. What would you do? Would you stay? Would you go? Would you just sit there and masturbate furiously until you couldn’t breathe anymore and with your last panicked breath just scream “Fuck it!”? (just to see if you were reading?)

Would you really leave this place?

I don’t think I would.

I stayed.

Of course the game just repeats the day into infinity, the same missions, the same “Go To Bed”, the same music box and open gate, and there is no real reprecussion for spending time in the Perfect world, but I stayed.  And when the chance came again, I stayed again. Every time the gate opened and music played I returned to the cottage, slept through the night, and began the day again. I went about joyfully shooting bottles and chasing chickens back into their pen. I eventually left, but given the choice, I stayed and I don’t know what that says about me. I’m sure it says nothing at all about the deeper workings of my psyche, it’s just a game after all, but it’s an interesting question to ask.

So, what’s the point? Well, if you haven’t played Fable II for the Xbox 360 yet, take your time. It’ll be there. Knock out some of those others, “Gears of War 2″, “Resistance 2″, even “Super Mario Galaxy” if you haven’t yet. But, when you sit down to play Fable II take at least one decision you make in the game seriously. Do what you would actually do in real life and see what happens. Maybe don’t slaughter that entire village of Gypsy’s or chase and kill the rabbits. It doesn’t matter how you’ve played the game so far. Whether you’re using magic, pistols, or axes. Whether you’ve created an evil badass akin to Vader or you are the perfect example of perfection, like recursion. Just do what you would really do.

After you’ve done it, if you feel like it, think about it.

“Is this Guy Canadian?” — “He’s low priority!” — “So, is that a yes?”

Whoa! I wrote something again. It’s been awhile, I know, but hopefully I’ll be able to keep this up regularly like I did before. It’s amazing how life altering things like graduating from college, getting a permanent job, having a baby, and planning a wedding (eventually :] ) have a tendency to zap time away from you and other activities like playing video games, guitar practice and blarging, seem to be lost. That being said, never fear, I’ve decided to make my first post back a good one. (Guess what it is from the title?)

I won’t say this post is directly correlated to a recent status post of a Conservative friend of mine on Facebook, but let’s just say that it’s easy for a person with little or no experience of how the system really works, and who actually uses it, to blast it instead of actually digging for facts and any kind of knowledge. That’s not a hit on all Conservatives, but just one in particular that it seems to me just spews and never researches past the talking head and limbo.

To get past my personal griping of that I begin as such:

I often find myself passing the time in between writing code and waiting for said code to compile by trolling the popular site reddit. A few days ago I happened upon an interesting link that got me really thinking about this topic and made me wonder how they got away with it. (For those of you too lazy to click that link and watch the video basically Private Insurance had an entire “game plan” laid out of scare tactics to try and make the public view Government  run insurance as the worst thing since the Devil butt-fucking a baby while Jesus, Hitler and Gandhi watched and got circle jerked by Mother Teresa…well, not quite that bad but close)(Is that even too graphic for me?)

So I researched the topic. Not just on the Youtube, but also on TIME the story popped up as well. There’s no way they actually had this plan, and that people working to put this together didn’t stop for a second and think, “Hey, maybe we should check our facts and understand what these government programs actually entail.”  Of course this didn’t happen and the big ol’ wheel of private interests rolled over the facts and the public. Normally this is where I’d bash the Conservatives for pushing private interests  over public good but apparently the Donkey’s can’t get it together either.

Now, if you’ve read this far you’re probably wondering where the facts are? Sure me spitting game about moron Conservatives and equally aloof Liberals is entertaining, but there has to be meat in this word sandwich else it just ends up tasting like a hotdog from McDonalds. So, listed below are myths about health care in our Northerly Neighbor, Canada.

1) Canada has Socialist Health Care — The biggest myth of all, and one that I wish most of my non-researching Republican friends would understand, is that Canada’s health care is not socialist.  In socialized medical systems, doctors work directly for the state, however in Canada doctors run their own private practices and only the insurance is handled by the state. We already have this here, it’s called Medicaid/Medicare.

2) Canadians don’t get to pick their own doctors — Seriously? Canadians pick their own doctors, just like Americans do, and they pull a Super Mario on us because, since it all pays the same, poor Canadians have exactly the same access to the country’s top specialists that rich ones do.

3) Canada’s HC only covers the basics — This one is true. Bummer, oh wait, the basics cover 100% of all doctor’s fees, ambulance fares, tests, and everything that happens in a hospital? Sure this varies from province to province, but I would care the venture that a majority of the American’s in debt because of medical expenses would love to have that even half of that terrible “Basic” coverage. If that’s basic in Canada I’d love to see their cable, Skinamax and Canadian-HBO is standard.(Although their programming is underfunded and everyone has chest hair and gray beards)

4) Canada’s doctor wait times are horrendous — This one is also true. But like it’s predecessor there is a catch. Our wait times aren’t much better. I have sat in hospital waiting rooms for almost two hours, bleeding into a wrap of gauze, waiting for someone to take me back. Now that’s personal bias, but this one has got to be the most baseless argument I’ve ever heard. This is a population debate and has absolutely nothing to do with who runs the office. If you have the only tire service in a city, and everyone drives cars, you’re going to be busy. If the government ran the service it would be just as busy.

5) Canadian’s pay monstrous amounts in Taxes — This one may be true, I don’t have a chance to observe many Canadians while they pay taxes, but I doubt very much that the meaning behind it has much merit. Of course the taxes will be a little higher, I believe it’s of a magnitude of 10%-15% across some provinces, but when you consider that most companies cover the small $180-220 deductibles that the Canadian Insurance requires, it seems almost like you’re breaking even.

So there you have it, 5ive 5un 5acts about Canadian Health Care. All researched and from semi-refutable sources. As trust worthy as the internet and about 15-20 minutes of research can be. I am obviously for HCR. Especially since the government has no plans of abolishing private health care. If you want to pay out the anus for the right to see a doctor, knock yourself out. I’ll take my extended wait times and high taxes as long as when I’m sick I don’t have to worry about hiking the number of Medically indebted Americans to 77 million and 1.

iPhone

So, first off. I have a daughter now. I don’t know how you wouldn’t know that if you actually know me, but I figured that my first post back should include that information. A preface to knowledge folks about the most important thing to ever happen to me.

Now, the point of the post. On top of a daughter, new jobs, buying a Prius,looking to get a house,  and getting back together with Jamie (love you!) I also bought an iPhone. Even though I still think that Macs are ridiculously overpriced, underhorsepowered and only art nazi douches use them on a regular basis, with the exception of JRoes because he’s just gay enough to fall into this category without actually being an art nazi, I have to say that I really love my iPhone.

Sure the keyboard takes a little getting used to and I still can’t get it to go to landscape mode sometimes when I tilt it to the side; it’s got a shitload of stuff it can do, the best mobile browser I have ever seen and I can play music and movies on it.

That being said it took me all of 24 hours to decide that I needed to jailbreak it. Now, for anyone that doesn’t know jailbreaking the iPhone is a process that allows you to run custom made applications that can be downloaded from a separate download center, instead of restricting your downloads to the provided Apple App Store and iTunes. (Which by the way still sucks the big one) It may not seem like that big of a deal, but for anyone that has an iPhone and hasn’t done it yet I would highly suggest it.

For example, there is a legitimate download from the Apple App Store for the Pandora Radio Service.  Pandora is this wonderful internet music genome project that allows you to setup radio stations built around your favorite musical artists and then stream the music to your PC, or iPhone. It’s a tremendously cool service, but there is a draw back to using it on the iPhone.

See, once an app is running, it has the iPhone’s complete, undivided attention. If Pandora was running I couldn’t surf the web, or text, or do anything else except for stare at the cd albums of the songs I was listening to or lock my iPhone and stare at the black, blank screen. This is where the jailbreak came in.

I downloaded an application from the Cydia service, an application packaged with the jailbreaking software, called “Backgrounder” that allows a downloaded iPhone application to run in the background thus letting me surf Safari whilst singing songs sung by Snow Patrol, Santana, Simon & Garfunkel, Stone Temple Pilots, and The Rolling Stones. (a-little alliteration)On top of this immensely useful application there are new themes, my iPhone currently looks like an Ubuntu desktop, a myriad of ringtones and new backgrounds that can be used.  It’s great!

So, go Jailbreak your iPhone. Just don’t tell Apple you did it. They might get angry and throw turtleneck sweaters at you.

Maybe this year?

The weather is warming up. It might only last for this week, beautiful 60’s and warm sunny skies never seem to last that long in North Carolina, but during this time my mind has been focused on one thing. It might happen this year. They might pull it off. It’s, it’s possible.

I am a huge sports fan and would say that outside of Battlestar Galactica, Life On Mars, and the random [adult swim] programming my television stays glued to Sportscenter. It’s the only interesting thing on TV that doesn’t deal with people dying or someone blabbering over what a half-witted celebrity is wearing. To top it off the sports casters are entertaining in their own right despite the fact that if you actually listen to what they’re saying, more often than not, it doesn’t make sense.

Now, if you know anything about me you know that there are two sporting events that I love. One of them is the FIFA World Cup (yeah yeah I like soccer, I’m gay, big whoop, 2010) and the other is Chicago Cubs opening day.  They are both spectacular events, with beautifully, intricately cut grass and men set upon a field to do battle in a classic game and though they are both amazing only one of them makes me feel like I’m 12 years old, whetting in anticipation. Guess which one?

Of course it’s Opening Day. Monday, April 13th, 2009. Home opener, against the Rockies. (Though technically the home opener is not always opening day, fuck everyone that doesn’t open at Wrigley Field.) I can’t wait, it’s the third most important date of 2009 to me, and when it finally rolls around I will gleefully sit and watch, if I get tickets or see it on TV, or check MLB.com religiously until the final pitch in the bottom, or top, of the ninth.

We have a day, we have the teams, we have the fans and everyone is set for another season to begin. It will be long, it will be hard, it might get flaccid sometimes, and more often than not – as history has shown – the Cubs will let me down, but I can’t help but be optimistic that every new season is THE season and that every new year is THE year. Some people would call it dumb, while others say that I jinx them every year, but I mean you gotta have faith.

So, in the hopes that maybe this year the Cubs will pull it off, I yell a hearty “Go Cubs Go!” and await the 13th. (the season actually begins the 6th against the Astros, but if you’ve read this far you know how I feel about this)

Eat Like You’re Broke

There are a lot of fat people. It’s kind of a requirement to be an American citizen. That’s the real reason we fight immigration so hard in this country. They make the rest of us look bad. They work harder, therefore they’re in better shape; all skinny and not pudgy around the waist. We thrive off of late night pizza delivery and that morning Egg McMuffin.

I have been attempting to lose weight, and in the past two weeks I’ve dropped 10 lbs. I researched this and it seems like an average, normal amount to lose.  I thought it was a lot, but apparently I think to highly of myself because my weight loss is just run of the mill. The thing is, I don’t exercise. Ever. Unless you count typing. Or masturbating. OR typing while masturbating. Any of those. Or all of them.

I was always told that if you drastically cut your calories, I was taking in like 3,500 a day now I’ve cut myself down to like 1,200, and don’t exercise regularly then your body will actually put on weight. Now, maybe it will take more time, but so far my method seems to be working. I don’t know anything about weight-loss, BMI, calorie burning, or any of that other made up horse-swa, but I do know that if you don’t eat as much you don’t get as fat. That’s simple. Not like typing and masturbating which, logistically, is  very complicated.

So, my advice to everyone that wants to lose any weight, because your boyfriend doesn’t love you when you’re fat, or because your dad picks on you for being a fat-ass while your older brother gets all the fame and glory because he can still run a 5.5-40, is to just stop eating out so much. Eat like you’re broke and can’t afford to hit McDonald’s and AppleBee’s everyday. Be a little conservative with your money so you can buy Video Games and gasoline. And a new keyboard…just because.

I also started eating apples, which coincidentally taste like oranges.