Acetio | Blogma

I ate shit once. I literally had a piece of a turd in my mouth and I chewed and swallowed it.

Brian and I were upstairs in my room. We could hear our parents laughing and talking downstairs; I shut the door as Brian positioned himself by the window. He had just returned from the bathroom with a big wad of toilet paper. I had a glass of water ready. He looked at me with eyes wide, waiting for me.

"Well?" I said. "Let's get this over with."

Awesome

A - Appendages
B - Bioengineering
C - Caffeine
D - Dirigible
E - Experiment
F - Freeze ray
G - Goggles
H - Henchmen
I - Invention
J - Jargon
K - Potassium
L - Laser
M - Maniacal
N - Nanotechnology
O - Organs
P - Peasants (with Pitchforks)
Q - Quantum physics
R - Robot
S - Self-experimentation
T - Tentacles
U - Underground Lair
V - Virus
W - Wrench
X - X-Ray
Y - You, the Mad Scientist of Tomorrow
Z - Zombies

I don't keep with robotics as much as I used to, back in the day when my main hobby was soldering transistors and little capacitors on BEAM-style solar-powered robots.

Some evenings we don't know what to do, ie. watch, so I sometimes poke around hulu to see what's on, or see if there are any appealing recommendations on Film Affinity.

When I was a kid we would scoop the pumpkins a few days before Halloween and save the seeds and wash them and toast them in the oven and put salt on them and eat them. And they always tasted like pencil shavings. They were too difficult to shell individually so we ate them with the shells, and the shells were woody and tough and inedible.

I admire vegetarians.

I admire people who have convictions and are willing to make sacrifices in their lives in order to live by a code. Sort of like Dexter.

I came across this unattributed story: A tale of Electrical Engineering vs. Computer Science:

"Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?"

One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."

The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years."

This guy has a lot of projects worth looking at.

Some are silly Google API hacks:
http://douweosinga.com/projects/googlechatbot

While some have a bit more meaning:
http://douweosinga.com/projects/sealevel

I have to admit, I post the wines because I think their labels are attractive.

but I tried a 2007 Gabbiano Chianti and found it very nice.

Roedy Green has a funny (and very long) guide called How To Write Unmaintainable Code [Ensure a job for life ;-)]

Misleading names

Make sure that every method does a little bit more (or less) than its name suggests. As a simple example, a method named isValid(x) should as a side effect convert x to binary and store the result in a database.