I'm sitting in the McGill library stealing wireless internet. Hurray for wireless. It's fast too. I don't have any net access in my new apartment yet, so this is the best I can do. It's a leisurely 15-minute walk from my place, which isn't so bad. Not as close as my last place though =\. I'm programming for a professor - writing Windows code at the moment. I figured out how to use tabbed dialogs in MFC. I'm pleased.

Yea, I moved into my new apartment. It's nice. The girl that moved out took her keys with her, which is frustrating. So me and my 2 new roommates are sharing 2 sets of keys. Actually they are sharing one, because I've got a cell phone so they can call me if either of them needs the other set. I'm on call. I hope we get new keys soon...

My room is 3/4 assembled. I suddenly have too much stuff, where in the last place I had not nearly enough. Maybe I should throw some of it out the window. I probably wouldn't miss it.

I might have a job! I went to a recruiting company open house and the guy said he would 'propose me as an option' or something like that. I got called back because they wanted my transcripts. That could be good or bad. Maybe I should have done CPSC honours...oh well. I was also a bit creative with my GPA on my resume. Maybe that was a bad idea. Oh well.

It's cold today. It's April 4th and it's fsckin cold. Where are you, sun?

Right, so it's been a while since I updated. I was busy. I'm doing windows programming, and it's actually pretty interesting. I figured out a lot of MFC stuff that has perplexed me in the past - for example, tabbed dialogs. And WM_NOTIFY messages. It's neat. But I have to stop on May 5 BECAUSE I HAVE A JOB. Yes, read that sentence again. I have a job. Well, almost, anyway. Technically at the moment I have a job offer, which will be delivered in paper form on Tuesday. Which I will then accept. Let me state for the record:

WooooHOOOOO!

I repeat:

WooooHOOOOOO!

A note for any fellow computer science nerds looking for work - when you get an interview, plan to give it an entire day. My interview was about 3 hours, ending only because some people I was supposed to talk to had gone home for the day. This wouldn't have been a problem, except I didn't realize it would be 3 hours, and some conflicts ensued. Oops.

What else is new? My new apartment had ants. Ants! ANTS! Small black ants that did not want to squish. Ants are reluctant to cross baby/talcum powder, so we sprinkled it around the kitchen floor where they appeared. However, this just meant they had to find another point of entry, which happened to be my room. Nice. More baby powder pushed them onto the kitchen counter, which they quite enjoyed. I didn't see it, but my roommate says the counter looked like it was alive. Sick sick sick. Anyway, that prompted a furious call to the building owners (the landlady is on holidays). A bug-killing guy was prompty dispatched and he took care of business. Ant problem solved....for now....(ominous music here)

I went for a walk just before I started writing this, and I thought I'd share with you some of the stuff I saw. I walked down one street - St. Catherine - that is a block or so from my house. I walked about 15 minutes east, then back. This is what I saw:

• Two 24-hour McDonald's. TWO !?!? They ought to close one and ship it to Calgary. They aren't more than 5 blocks apart, either. And both were busy. I almost stopped for fries...
  
  
• 7 men trying to entice me to go into strip joints. In case you aren't aware, Montreal is like the sex-industry capital of Canada. Lots of business buildings are two stories, and the upper story is a strip joint (complete with flasing 'danse contact' neon sign). Downstairs is like a Starbucks or something. But these aren't discrete places. Besides the neon sign, they usually have a guy outside telling you to come in. Most of the time they are speaking The French, and I can't figure out what the hell they are saying. One evening I walked past one with my girlfriend and he says 'Ladies get in for free'. Which, suprisingly, didn't make it any more appealing.
  
  
• 2 Gaps. Same street. Within 10 minutes on the same street. And there are two more not far in other directions. Who needs that many Gaps?
  
  
• 8 thousand 24 hour coffee shops. Not just Tim Hortons, either. Why didn't Calgary have these? I want answers!
  
  
• Every kind of food place known to man. And it's not just the same 8 fast food places repeating over and over. It's tasty food from all over the world. I can get any kind of Asian noodles whenever I want. Any time of day, any day of the week. Noodles!
  
  
• A ninja horde. Really. They were in the noodle place.
  
  
• Churches. Montreal has churches on every street. Now, I haven't gone all bible-thumpy just because there is churches. But they are nice churches - old, interesting stone buildings.
  
  
• People. Hordes of them. Now, I didn't talk to any of them, but they are out there, below my window, shouting and honking car horns. Yea, it's annoying sometimes, but mostly it gives me this strange feeling of alive-ness. The world does not consist of the Math Science building and Mac Hall. Who would have guessed?

Maybe it's just me, but all that seems pretty remarkable. Maybe it's just because all these places are open and all those people are out and about at 9pm on a Sunday. An Easter Sunday. This city is GREAT!

There is a movie being shot on my street. Not actually in the street, in the building up the block. The Masonic Memorial Temple building. Anyone else suspicious? The movie is called 'A Different Loyalty'. Which makes you wonder...loyalty to whom? Perhaps.....the Illuminati !?!? In case you don't have time to read that but still want the low-down on the Illuminati, you can learn the basics from this handy song. I bet the movie will be filled with Illuminati lies - you know, like the Apollo space missions and moon landing. Those crazy masons, always with their conspiracies and trying to take over the world!

The movie-shooting action is actually pretty disappointing. All I saw was a guy in a jacket spanking another guy. Yes, I know - that sounds exciting. But actually they were just kidding around. They were moving a truck or something. And there was a guy holding a plastic box. Just standing there, holding it, looking around.

There were signs on the sidewalk that seemed to be directions for extras - they said 'Extras' and had an arrow. I followed them, because they happened to point in the direction I had to walk to get home. I was not called in to be an extra. No one yelled out 'Makeup' or rushed out to do my hair. There was no one at all, except the two spanking guys. Maybe everyone was out 'doing lunch'.

We got a no-parking notice in the mail that said 'We would appreciate your collaboration to realize this project'. Now that I'm a collaborator, I have some changes I would like to suggest. First of all, Sharon Stone? Come on people. And the 'buddy-monkey' angle? That has been done to death. What? Rupert doesn't like the new script? Can we get Brad? How about one of the Baldwins? It doesn't matter which one. Just do it! If you don't stop infringing on my creative process, I'm just going to take my ideas and go to to Universal. Can someone please get me a low-fat-chai-mocha-latte!? I can't work like this. I'll be in my trailer.

I'm avoiding doing my taxes. Can you tell?

((I was just kidding about the mason stuff. There is a FAQ here explaining that they aren't actually trying to take over the world, and it's just another wacky religion. So, no hard feelings, right? Right? ....))

Check out the new commercial for the Honda Accord 300k. It's not computer generated, they actually set the whole thing up and it took 606 takes to get it right. Pretty impressive.

I spent the last 4 hours figuring out my loan/debt situation. So now I'm kinda depressed. I owe, I owe, I owe. And then I owe some more. Painful. The debt reduction thing might help. And maybe I shouldn't have bought the high-end laptop. I guess it's time to learn how to budget...

I went and had some General Tao Chicken between that last paragraph and now. It was yummy. Now it's time to code....

There is a lengthy article on kuro5hin with lots of links to reading material about violence in society. Now, it doesn't start out that way - it starts out talking about how research in the US is being supressed because it contradicts with the current adminstration's agenda. But after that part (which is interesting in it's own right) the author goes on about how all this research from the 60's was supressed. The results showed that, for example, spanking was strongly correlated with children who were violent (yes, correlation, not causation - he has something to say about that here, keep scrolling it's at the bottom). Also lots about how sex ed has a strong positive effect, and how if you directly stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain, people become absolutely non-violent. Of course, you can't do that research on people any more...

And, you can read about this psychotic guy who thinks the only way to train a dog is to beat it into submission, and how that implies that it's also the only way to 'train' your children. Scary...

I just ate a Korean pear. They are not like the regular pears I know and love. First of all, they come individually wrapped in this sorta styrofoam mesh, then wrapped in paper. Cuz, you know, the world definitely needs more styrofoam mesh floating around. The paper wasn't enough.

Anyway, so I bit into it, and it tastes somewhat alcoholic. I'm not sure exactly like what...something fruity. Not really what I was expecting. And it was absolutely huge - I feel kinda nauseous now that I've finished the whole thing. The texture was somewhere between apple and styrofoam too. It wasn't as dense as an apple, but it was very rigid & crunchy.

I feel robbed. I generally like fruit, and this fruit was bad. I can't get any decent nectarines or peaches, I'm stuck with pears and kiwi for now. Did I mention that fruit is cheap in Montreal? Compared to Calgary, anyway. Calgary was obscene.

I don't really have much else to say at the moment. Just wanted to whine about my Korean pear. It's been that kind of day...

Ok, my last post was pretty bad, but this one is chock-full of useful information. At least, I think it's useful.

First up - Worse is Better. Worse is better is a software design philosophy that came out of a talk about why LISP was failing and UNIX/C was succeeding (back when LISP hadn't failed yet). The guy who came up with it, Richard Gabriel, has a page about it here. In his talk he contrasted the way the LISP community did things 'The MIT approach', or 'The Right Thing', with the way the UNIX/C community did things, 'The New Jersey Approach' (Bell Labs, where UNIX came from, was in New Jersey). Basically, the LISP guys wanted their systems to be Simple, Correct, Consistent and Complete. That's actually a tall order, so it took them a long time to build their systems and they were very difficult to get right.

Meanwhile the New Jersey guys were only really concerned with the system being Simple - Correct, Consistent and Complete were nice if they were easy, but were ignored when it was difficult. Hence, the systems were easy to build and use, and so were more popular.

On the site, Gabriel has a bunch of follow-up papers about Worse-Is-Better as a design philosophy. I can see how it must have influenced the Extreme/Agile programming folks, with the whole 'design for today' thing. I have an initial tendency to lean towards the MIT approach, but it is really hard to make progress that way. Recently I was working on a program that needed a simple 2D sort of editor UI. I had another project that was going to need a 2D editor, so I decided the best way to do the first project was to build a completely general 2D UI editing API, then they both would be easy. After about 3 days of 'design' I realized I had made absolutely no progress on the program I was supposed to be working on, so I threw away the general API and just coded what I needed. It worked out pretty well.

So, maybe worse is better. Who knows. Anyway, I ended up at that site because it was linked from this site, which is about the UNIX Hater's Handbook. There are lots of interesting little articles there about why UNIX is bad - including a great internal SGI memo. The UNIX Hater's Handbook was recently made public domain by the publisher's because they didn't want to reprint it anymore. You can get it here. I think more publishers should have that attitude...BTW, I'm not advocating that you hate UNIX, but the book is pretty accurate a lot of the time...

Second topic - Jared Diamond. About 5 years ago I read a book that had been reviewed on slashdot called Guns, Germs and Steel. It was interesting but it often put me to sleep. I wasn't getting enough sleep at the time, so that's not entirely the fault of the book. But I haven't had good things to say about it. However, today I read two articles by the same Jared Diamond. One was about why societies make bad decisions that lead to their downfall. This has happened a lot in the history of humanity - for example, the people on Easter Island cut down ALL the trees. All of them. They had to know they were running out of trees - what were the people cutting down the last tree thinking? Easter Island isn't that big. So he explains why this kind of thing can happen, and how to avoid it.

The second article was titled How To Get Rich. Which isn't really what it's about, but sort of. Since Diamond knows all this stuff about social groups that have or have not worked, business people are always asking him how they should organize their businesses. So he gives his opinion. Basically, he says that being isolationist, secretive and/or dictatorial has hurt most of the societies that tried it. There is an interesting bit about guns in Japan, and how the Samurai got rid of guns. Samurai warriors liked to give speeches before a battle, but then peasants got guns and started shooting them before the battles. So the Samurai got rid of the guns (by shutting down gun factories, etc). They could do this because they were still in power and Japan was very isolated, so no one re-introduced guns for a long time. Obviously this doesn't work if the country on your border has guns - then they invade you.

Jared Diamond seems to know all sorts of interesting little factlets. I bet he's a hoot at parties. The articles made me kind of want to go back and re-read Guns, Germs and Steel. Maybe some day. Right now I'm reading Darwin among the Machines. Or trying to, anyway.