Those of you that read the comments know that I got a digital camera on Tuesday. Given that it's smaller than my iPod and has a gig card in it, I am planning to carry it everywhere and snap pictures of whatever seems interesting at the time - and then post them. This weekend I'm going to transition the site to Age 8, which will involve a move to either WordPress or my own custom photoblogging software, as well as dropping the rest of the site (no one uses anything but the blog anyway). When that transition to photoblogdom is complete, each thing I put up will then be accompanied by a picture that may or may not relate to anything that I write. For example, I may put the picture of the sky that I snapped this morning on my way to work, and talk about how cool the clouds were, or I may put a picture of the spaghetti that I ate for breakfast yesterday and say nothing at all about it, instead choosing to discuss the advantage of natural fabrics over synthetic fibers.

I'm sure you probably all remember that momentous occasion when I broke down and bought some pants. I will have you know that since then I have remained vigilant, buying only a new pair of shoes (to replace my three-year-old busted up ones) and a new pair of flip-flops (to replace my other ones that fell apart). These are the only items of clothing I have purchased in the last six months, and I want you to all be proud of me and not hold what I am about to tell you against me, because I don't think I could deal with your rejection. That girl forced me, at gunpoint, and with knives and sticks and rocks and pain, to acquire more objects for my wardrobe. It has been said that my clothing consists entirely of black shirts and white shirts, and khaki pants. I do not deny this, it is, as you might say, undeniable. It makes it easy to make it look like you know how to match colors because there really aren't any colors to match. Well, so we went shopping and bought five new button-up shirts for me. FIVE! Button shirts! Shirts full of strange, wonderful, mysterious, scintillating, and frightening colors that leave one with the distinct feeling of wearing somebody else's underwear. I have to keep asking other people if the combination of my shirt and pants is an acceptable schema, because it's so complicated and I know so little about it and I'm just so confused, I really don't know what's going on right now and I'm just feeling a little bit vulnerable and maybe a little bit hotandbothered...

Look, you see? This is what kind of power girls have over guys. Here you are, perfectly content with the free-rangin' lifestyle of being a bachelor, just wearing whatever's on your floor and doesn't seem too wrinkled, living off of pop tarts and cheap pizzas, and then alluvasudden she comes along and nothing's the same.

Let me detail this for you. Your wardrobe isn't good enough anymore, so you end up going out shopping without a specific goal in mind (and that's the really scary part). So you pick out one article of clothing, and you're ready to go, but she says, "Hmm, wait, try this one on." You're thinking, "But I already have the thing I'm going to buy... why would I try on another one?" This is your last rational thought for a while, because your next thought is "Well, what harm could there be in it?". We call this the slippery slope, because then you think "And my, she is awfully cute." That's the end of it. You are firmly within her strangling, foul, ill-natured grasp and you are absolutely powerless to break out of it. When next you wake up, you'll be at home, standing in an enormous pile of clothing up to your ears, holding a receipt for hundreds of dollars and wondering what just happened. As rational thought begins to bubble back up to the surface, you'll think, "Mein Gott! I just wasted a lot of money on useless items and I COULD HAVE BOUGHT THAT NEW SMARTPHONE INSTEAD."

I'm done with that thoroughly long, boring, and rambling story. Good day.

So here's the problem with being high will + high skill: you get more work. When I first started here they gave a nice, tame project where I was sequestered away by myself, working contently and not interacting with anyone. When I gave my boss a status update and he saw what I had done, I was immediately burdened with another project, this time one which actually had impact. Now that I've pretty much completed my first project, it's all about the second one and it's getting heavier. I'm pretty much the guy implementing the user interface for our product. Given that we expect a user base of three millions... that's a lot of pressure. Especially with the deadline moved up by a week and the user interface design committee wanting to use our product to "get it all cleaned up", which is great, I mean, ordinarily I'd love to have them work it over so that it's as intuitive as possible. The only hitch is that we don't have a product, we weren't expecting to be asked for it for another week.

How are all of you? I haven't talked to you in forever, are you good? Getting along well? How's the dog? What are you up to these days?

Thanks to everyone who told me that my site was down. It made me feel giddy inside, like a small schoolgirl, to know that people actually look at this junk. I mean, seriously, people were telling me in person, IMing me, calling me, sending me letter bombs... okay, not that last part. But seriously: letter bombs.

I need to decorate my cubicle with something, it's really boring and it's sorta bringing me down. What should I do?

The radiator joint called today. Price quote is $150, which is a lot of money but it's not horrible, considering what has to happen. See, my drain plug went missing on me. I'm not sure how, but I noticed that I was leaking coolant and I kept adding more and limping along until one day when I went to fill my empty radiator, the coolant went straight through and onto the ground. Well, the shop took a look at it and realized that somebody replaced my radiator with some nonstandard thing - which doesn't take a standard drain plug, which is why the one from Autozone didn't work. So they're going to take the radiator out and rebore the drain plug hole so it'll work with a standard drain plug. So $150 isn't bad for what's happening, IMO. Fortunately my roommate was awesome-sauce enough to find a ride to work today so that I could borrow his car. Thanks Dan.

Also: you know you're a bachelor when you're reduced to eating a fifty cent can of beans out of a mug with a plastic spoon for lunch.

That's when your radiator blows up and leaves you standing there covered in antifreeze, wondering what happened, while you miss work for at least two days since you can't drive your car because, shockingly, there's no coolant in it, and dammit you knew you should have set up a way to get into your development box remotely because now you're stuck at home and you could be working, but you aren't because you didn't think ahead. Then the chica leaves for two weeks, leaving you listless, restless, and bored. Not that life is going to end, but you'd rather stab yourself in the eye with a spoon than sit around waiting for a tow truck to come and take your car to the shop where they're going to charge zillions of dollars to perform a simple fix all because they know what's wrong and you don't, haha! And while you're sitting, pondering these things, it dawns on you that you only have 75 dollars to your name for the foreseeable future because your payroll paperwork for that obscene dollar amount hasn't gone through yet.

Curse radiator drain plugs for not being a standard size. And curse you, Autozone, for telling me that the plug you sold me would work. I hate your brass, taper-threaded ass and all of your terrible commercials with the jingle that gets stuck in my head, I hope your marketing executives all fall off the face of the planet.

Wait until tomorrow.

Wait until tomorrow morning when you can fire up your software and use it for ten seconds, because that's when you'll realize that somehow, without you realizing it, it crashes on launch every time. That's when you'll notice that the major new feature you thought was done and working actually introduces another bug so heinous as to make the program unusable - and untestable.

Last night you were so blasted out of your mind from looking at code all day long and trying to squish bugs and figuring out how to do that thing you don't know how to do by reading the accursedly obtuse documentation, you couldn't see these things which would normally catch you immediately, and will catch your testers, because they're going to be bitching at you since your software didn't even launch. All I'm saying is wait until tomorrow. A shower and a good night's sleep will allow you to see with the clarity you need to not make people hate you.

With that in mind, if you have a Mac and you want in on the action, hit it with the latest build.

Let's talk about notifications. What are they, and why are they so good? An example is a good place to start, and fortunately I've got one handy: Imagine, if you will, that you are trying to write a program that detects when iTunes changes songs. We'll talk about why you'd want to do this later. How would you go about detecting such a thing?

You could use some AppleScript mojo and a timer to ask iTunes what's playing, and then compare it to what you thought was playing, and if the two are different, then the song obviously changed. This method is known as "polling", because you're polling to figure out if what you're trying to accomplish should take place. It is easy to see, however, that this is a terribly inefficient method, because you're eating up processor time by continually asking iTunes for information and by doing comparisons, and memory by keeping the previous track around so that you can compare against it. Let me emphasize that asking iTunes what's playing is not a cheap task, it is computationally very expensive to perform (which makes it slow). By doing this constantly, you are eating up the user's processor time and degrading their computer's performance considerably - which is a terrible, terrible thing for a "background task" like figuring out if iTunes changed tracks to be doing. So instead you compromise: instead of asking all the time, you only ask every so often. Say, every two seconds. That way you give the user most of their processor time back, and you're much less intrusive. But now you've got the problem that you don't know exactly when the track changed, and so whatever you're doing upon figuring out that the song is different is delayed, potentially by up to two seconds (or however long your interval is). Maybe this is a big deal or maybe it's not, but it stands to reason that some people might like to know right away.

So polling sucks: it takes up way too many resources and it's inaccurate to boot! Let's consider a different method. If the programmers of iTunes were nice enough to tell you when the song changed, it would make things a lot easier. Instead of always going to iTunes to see what's playing, and then figuring out if it's different from what you thought was playing, you could just wait around until iTunes told you that the song changed, and then do whatever it is you wanted to do. Simple! This method is known as "event-driven", since what you're trying to accomplish takes place when an event occurs. The main benefit here is that it takes up very few extra resources, since presumably iTunes doesn't have to do any extra calculations to figure out when the song changes (this is information it probably already knows). The secondary benefit is that it's much more accurate: you find out right away when the song changes, instead of at your next poll interval. Plus you don't have to do any strange comparisons to find out which song is playing and whether it's different from the last one. Enter notifications. Notifications are the implementation of this event-driven method of doing things.

Until now, polling was the method by which iTunesCheck did the "display upon song change" bit. For a long time iTunes wasn't nice enough to tell you when it changed songs, so the only possible method was polling. During my various wanderings about the web, I became aware that somebody was saying that iTunes was now sending notifications upon song change, but I couldn't immediately find much information about it. Then, when Tiger came out and I saw the new iChat-iTunes integration, I knew that Apple had started sending out notification from iTunes, because there was no way they were going to have their IM client poll their music player.

A quick bout of Googling led me to a program that can glom onto all system-wide notifications and look at them, and from there it was easy to see what iTunes was sending out and then write two lines of code to start receiving the messages (com.apple.iTunes.playerInfo, if you're wondering).

What all this means for you, dear reader, is that the next version of iTunesCheck will be lighter, faster, and more accurate. I will also, if you order now, throw in the special gangrene-prevention module, which Stop Gangrene Before It Starts™.

I'm uh... I'm gonna go take a shower now.

I moved into my apartment on Friday. Most of you probably already knew that, some of you because now I live with you. Somehow I accumulated a bunch of stuff since August. You see, when I moved out to my dorm last summer, I fit nigh everything I owned into my car, in one load). When I moved from my dorm to my apartment, it took three loads of my car. Now, granted, maybe I didn't pack as well because the trip is twenty minutes instead of ten hours. I also had one trunkful of somebody else's stuff, but still. Where did all of these things come from? I try to analyze it and I can't see anything that I have more or different from last time. My dad always talks about the constant war on crud, and how if you're not vigilant it will accumulate and take over your life ("I've never had a garage sale! It must take at least ten years to accumulate enough crud to have a garage sale."). This is a similar concept to kipple, a term used to describe the constant entropic increase of tidiness. (uhh... increase in entropy is more chaotic, right? I can't remember. Dwight?). I actually just finished that book. If you've ever seen the movie Blade Runner, it's the book the movie was based on. It's pretty interesting, raises some good points. It's pretty short, if you're into sci-fi I recommend it as a read.

It's true that when you're a bachelor living in a college dormitory you don't own any furniture. I realized this promptly upon my arrival at the apartment when I tried to set up my computers but didn't have a place to put them. Fortunately the last occupant of my room was foresighted, kind, intelligent, good-looking, funny, and stylish enough to leave his bed for me to recline upon, an act of such altruism it can't be accurately described in words. At any rate, I'm also poor (being a prime example of the aforementioned "bachelor living in a college dormitory an apartment without a clear job for the summer" demographic) and can't really afford to buy "furniture", as such. Thus it was that I enacted an old trick learned from my father, passed down through generations as a golden nugget of truth: two sawhorses and a door make a fabulous desk for less! The best part is that it's so large, the vast expanse of my desk space (32" x 80", almost 18 square feet!) stretches before me like the horizon of an unknown planet, covered by the mists of time and low-capacity render distance. I'm not sure you can get a larger desk for $55.58.

I don't have anything to do for the next week, so to celebrate while I'm doing laundry I think I'm probably going to waste some time by playing video games. Ahh, the sweet succor of a misguided youth.

Not that I can complain, really. CS teachers seem to be largely immune to this end-semester panic syndrome. Some people, people that I live with, have had regular loads of homework that are far in excess of any imagery my poor synapses are capable of generating. For example, my roommate just put in forty hours in the last seventy-two on a project, most of it in three or four sittings. I... I had thought that maybe he died or something, I hadn't seen him for days... but then he staggered in, hands dripping blood from munging circuits.

Some of you (one of you? no? nobody?) have probably been wondering about my lack of updatey-ness... it's cool, I'm not dead. I just don't have anything interesting to talk about, which is surely not a departure form the norm. But I'm going to go take a quiz now, and then turn in my stats homework, and come back, and then go to a picnic. I know, who does that anymore? My thought was that the required age for such an activity was sixty, but apparently, and this is news to me too, anyone can partake of things like this. I'll let you know how it goes.