Work

I had a highly productive day at work today. I was busy the whole day, which lasted about 10 hours, and accomplished a number of things that needed to be done (not the least of which was helping to replace the broken guy on the foosball table). I felt a good deal of satisfaction about it as I was leaving work and resolved to make tomorrow (now today) as good as today (now yesterday).

The problem began to set in when I was on my way home. My satisfaction was slowly replaced by a sense of pointlessness. So what if I had a good day, what meaning did any of it have? Is this the point of my job? Of my career? My working week should be devoted to doing this for another 30 years? Good grief!

Look, I understand that I have let society convince me that I am supposed to find some sort of meaning from my occupation and that underlies my dis-ease. But what am I actually supposed to do about it? How does one build a personal sub-culture that reject the fallacies of the larger culture that subsumes it? And why do I feel I need to ask another question here?

Backpack

This looks like a pretty cool tool.

Virtues

Admirable human characteristics or dispositions that distinguish good people from bad:

• Courage
• Temperance
• Generosity
  
• Goodwill
• Patience
  
• Pride
• Wittiness
• Honesty
• Friendliness
• Justice
• Modesty
  

This list, of course, is not my own.

I couldn't agree more

Copied wholesale from Instapundit:

Bush critic Bill Quick writes: "This is one of the most important articles to appear to date in the entire span of the war on terror."

The link to Bill Quick's site doesn't seem to work for me, but I highly recommend the article.

People's Republic of MA

The deal is all but done. We should be there by August.

As a pair, are there any bigger blowhards in the US Senate than Kennedy and Kerry?

Six Feet Under

First, a little background.

Emily and I have been watching Six Feet Under together for as long as we've been dating (almost 20 months now). This last season however, we've been having her friend Margaret over to watch with us. (She's a poor grad student who doesn't have cable.) Anyway, what's pretty cool about this is that she kind of looks like Claire. At some point I even started bitching at her during some episode when Claire was doing something stupid.

For the sake of convenience we record every episode on TiVo (well, a very poor imitation...) and watch it later. Usually we'll cook dinner, or at least make some bruchetta, before watching the show. Sometimes when someone is busy we skip a week and then end up watching two episode in what night.

That's what we did tonight and it was the last two episodes of the final season.

Frankly, it was the best television I've ever seen.

Better than the any episode of M*A*S*H. Better even than that episode of West Wing where Will Bailey makes it rain.

Update: Ryan prefers the West Wing episode where President Bartlet names two nominees to the Supreme Court. That was also a good episode, but still pales in comparison to the Six Feet Under finale.

Update: The superb song that was played at the end is 'Breath Me' by Sia. You can download it here.

You don't see that everyday

I really enjoyed this column in which a blogger blasts the L.A. Times for its coverage of Cindy Sheehan - but mostly because it's in the L.A. Times!

Via Instapundit.com.

The 40 Year Old Virgin

****1/2

Emily and I saw it today. It was hilarious. Seriously.

Sex Toys

...now on sale @ Amazon.

.NET blows

When I'm not busy being an entrepreneur, I spend my days as a programmer. And over the past couple week or so, I've been fiddling with C#, .NET 2.0, and Visual Studio 2005. Specifically, I've been trying to make NHibernate and Spring.NET play nice. Let me just say that it has been... shitty.

This isn't my first experience with .NET. I spent a glorious 5 months working in a .NET shop in Dall-ass about 3 years ago. At the time I even thought it was an improvement over Java (generally speaking). I'm not so sure anymore.

But before I get all nit-picky, let me give credit where it is due. Even with my limited .NET experience, I have found a number of things where MS got it right:

• Properties - not a huge deal, but certainly better than the getter/setter bullshit of Java Beans.
• Boxing/Unboxing - Java introduced it in 1.5, but most developers are constrained by other (read: business) considerations and can't instantly move to it.
• foreach - Again, Java caught up with 1.5.
  
• Delegates - Using interfaces as a function pointers gets tiresome.
• using - Not the declaration of namespaces at the top (the using directive), but ability to clean up an IDisposable without a try/finally block (the using statement).
• Generics - New to both Java and .NET, but erasure in Java is incredibly stupid.
  

Again, I'm no .NET guru, so there are probably others. That being said, .NET has a number of issues.

• Collections - Knock, knock. Who's there? The ISet interface. The ISet interface who? (that was the punch line)
  
• Visual Studio - I can remember when MS had the best IDE around - it was in a time we like to call the late '90s. Since then, Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA have blown VS out of the water. MS has always been known for their tools, so what happened?
  
• non-virtual methods - All methods are non-virtual by default in C#. Do you have any idea how ridiculous this is? Seriously, this might even be dumber than erasure. Take today for example - I was trying to customize Spring to handle a few peculiar ways we will be using it, but was thwarted several times because I couldn't override certain methods. I seriously had 3 or 4 different solutions that would have been better than what I ultimately implemented, but each was futile because the guys who wrote Spring didn't declare everything virtual. I don't even blame them, they're just following the .NET paradigm. (And please spare me any bullshit arguments about the cost of virtual table lookup. If we were that worried about performance, we wouldn't be running byte code against a virtual machine.)

All this might not seem like much, but it was enough to annoy the shit out of me today. And apparently, I have even more headaches to look forward to.

Poker

Jeff and I are setting up a poker game (Texas Hold'Em) for next Wed (8/24). Let me know if you are interested in joining us. (Here in Austin, of course.)

Soccer Update

Emily is out of town, so I had to play our last game of the season without her. I still enjoy it of course, but I'd rather she was there.

Well, we lost 0-4. One of the problems with our team is that we don't have a regular goalie. There are a couple guys who take turns, but none of them are any good at it, and nobody really wants to do it.

So, there we are, down 0-1 at the half, and the guy who was playing goalie wanted someone else to take a turn. And guess who got drafted. Yep, me. Mind you, I've never played goalie in my life and I've only been playing soccer for 9 months.

Anyway, you can do the math and see how many points I let in.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Emily & I saw it on Sunday. This movie wasn't awful, but it wasn't any good either. I give it 2 stars (out of 5).

Johnny Depp can act, but who wants to see him do a creepy Michael Jackson impersonation?

Alliance of Sodomy Supporters

Seriously.

Corset Piercings

Dude, how messed up is this?