Tue 12th Aug 2008
Heard on a TV ad just now:
Because the Olympics are filmed using Panasonic video technology, then it makes sense that you watch them on a Panasonic Plasma or LCD TV.
Clearly, someone at Panasonic can’t figure out that tricky logic stuff.
“Because you shit food out of your arse, it only makes sense that to eat it you should shove it up there too!”
I’m currently sitting in a café in King William Road, trying to get some coding done. I’m not achieving much, and there’s one simple reason.
There are a pair of absolute fuckwits sitting next to me, and they haven’t stopped talking for about an hour.
The guy, very gay, seems to be a drama teacher. If you are Australian, think of that show “Summer Heights High” - it’s Mr G. all over. I mean seriously.
The woman apparently has something to do with the arts - I haven’t been able to figure out exactly what skills she has, as whilst she’s been yapping non stop she hasn’t really said much of substance.
The last straw was when they were talking about some drama awards night, and she called it “wanky”. I was about to lean over and explain to her about irony - she hasn’t stopped wanking for about an hour!
Pretentious idiots annoy me. I’ll put up with snobbiness or aloofness in people who have real skills or talent. But these people are driving me nuts. I nearly bought my headphones, I so wish I had.
Aha! She’s a drama teacher too!
“It’s just like Pulteney Grammar all over again!”
I’ve never wanted Jaq to hurry up and pick me up from the café so much!
Mon 14th Jul 2008
A couple of weeks ago, there was a puff piece in the local newspaper about a guy and his wife (and teenaged daughter) don’t drive, don’t even have a car. They catch public transport everywhere, and it works for them.
Adelaide is a funny place. It’s not really densely enough populated to have a first-class transit system, and because it isn’t really that good, not many people use it. This is possibly also in part due to how easy it is to drive everywhere in Adelaide, including into the CBD.
I’m a big fan of public transport, it just isn’t working that well here right now.
Okay, I’ve deleted the Safari 4 Preview.
It just breaks too many things.
Firstly, it makes my Online Learning system not display properly.
Secondly, it makes ecto not work very well. It causes it to not post, and in fact not even retrieve posts from the sever very well. And it makes data just magically vanish.
Finally, it kills the ability to edit posts in WordPress Admin area. That’s right, it breaks TEXTAREA tags.
How the hell can you do that?
One good thing about doing benchmarking of algorithms for homework is that I have time to watch TV while I wait for code to run.
And then I see things like the World’s Fattest Man, and World’s Heaviest Teenager.
How the fuck does someone get to 1000 pounds. And you can’t tell me that the teenager’s Mother isn’t to blame for him being so large.
I just couldn’t see the point of living if I could not move around.
Databases are interesting. That’s not really what I mean, databases are kinda boring. But necessary.
Accessing databases, however, can be interesting. Not in the sense that it is something you’d like to be spending time on, but more in the “May you live in interesting times” Chinese curse sense.
I know enough about databases to design simple ones, and access complicated ones using something like SQL. I’m not saying I’m an SQL Wizard, but I can generally fudge around enough to actually get at the data I want. It’s really something I’d rather not do, fiddle around in SQL, but sometimes it’s a necessity.
I do like tools that make accessing databases more “fun”. There are two types that I’ve been using a bit lately.
The first are wrappers that make database tuples appear as objects. For instance, SQL*Alchemy in python, and Java Entity Classes allow you to basically fetch an object from the database, operate on it, and ensure that the data is pumped back into the database. It’s a really neat way to handle data, and allows great persistence of objects in OO programming.
The other is a GUI tool designed for accessing a particular DBMS or set of DBMSs. For instance, MySQL comes with an administrator program, which does a passable job. Lately, however, I’ve been required to access a PostgreSQL database. And there is a great tool for that: Navicat. With the latest version, you can even access a PGSL database over an SSH tunnel, all without having to set the tunnel up yourself.
For instance, I have a machine at my work that I can ssh into, but I can’t directly access the development machine that has the PGSL database on it. I can set up the database as if I were on the work LAN, and then set up the SSH tunnel into the machine I can access. First time, without any hassles, and I was connected to the database. Securely. Over the internet.
I also tried another application I downloaded. But it was written in Java.
Java apps on the Mac really don’t fit. I haven’t used too many on Windows, but as soon as you launch a Java application in OS X, you know it’s a Java app. It doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t use the right file open and save panels. That have all of my shortcuts that make it possible for me to work on several different projects and keep sane, and well organised.
I’ve fiddled with a couple of other Java apps, and almost without exception I have thrown them out immediately. There was a clunky merge application, which lasted one run. Same with Power*Architect. It just interferes enough with my workflow that I can’t make it happen.
Hell, it seems like a well-written application written for Windows, and running in Wine or VMWare seems to feel better than just about every Java application I have ever used. Well, maybe not every one. I guess a Java application that didn’t feel like a Java application would slip under my radar.
Which is what I’d want.
I think I can say that, since I used to be one.
I guess having been a teacher means I know how to spot when one isn’t really prepared, or doing their job properly, or just plain incapable.
I’ve got some teachers, both lecturers and tutors, who I don’t really have much time for.
There are a few things I really dislike. The first is obnoxiousness. I have one lecturer who is not only obnoxious, but also boring. He can spend a whole lecture teaching a tiny amount of content, and perhaps this is why he is so boring. He is also dry, and does not use examples to elaborate particularly well. His worst trait is probably the questions he asks. It is never clear whether a particular question is a rhetorical question or not. Finally, he seems to think that it is acceptable to just discard all negative feedback that he receives, as it is “probably invalid”, or the person “just has a grudge”. Never mind that you are just a crap teacher.
The next thing I dislike is when someone is teaching something they don’t really know that well. This is definitely a place I have been, having to teach stuff I didn’t really know about. I have one tutor who as much as said several times there were things he didn’t understand. I’m paying good money to go to Uni, I don’t want to waste that, or my time. At one stage, when I knew I was right about something, and he wasn’t really listening to what I was saying, I basically gave up and let him continue. I know (that with a ternary relationship total participation isn’t automatically implied), and I think now that the rest of the class thinks that it is.
My third annoyance is to do with general organisation. I hated being poorly organised when teaching, and did my best to overcome this issue. I know at times I didn’t and it really embarrassed me to be the one who was at fault. Not having work prepared ahead of schedule, not being on time, these are all things that turn off the good students, perhaps more so than the bad students!
My final gripe is about… I’ve forgotten what I was going to write next.
Last night, after Uni, I went to the supermarket to buy a few things. BBQ chicken is always worth a couple of meals, so I thought I’d grab one of those. There was a short-ish line for the deli, so I used the whizz-bang new touchscreen system to place an order for a small BBQ chicken. It printed out a little voucher, which promised me a coffee on the day of printing only, and which I could also use to collect my goods.
There was a counter that I assumed was where you go to wait for the express-style ordering, so I went over there. A couple of minutes passed before someone asked me if I was waiting for something. I pleasantly said yes, I had ordered a BBQ chicken, and dutifully gave her the number on my voucher.
The next (fat, but that’s immaterial) girl took one look at me, and just said “we don’t have any.”
I said “Super. Does your feeder know you have gone out.” No, I really said “Well, that’s pretty silly. Your automated system should have told me there weren’t any left.”
She haughtily replied, “Yeah well, the system doesn’t work properly.”
This raises lots of questions in my mind. The system in question stands to really improve a shopping experience - it means you have to deal less with people (and let’s face it, people are dumb). It also should make things quicker, and less hassle free. Instead, I walk away vowing not only to not use the system again, but to abuse it. (Can anyone say, I just printed out 30 BBQ chicken orders, and used the vouchers to get 30 coffees I threw away out of spite?)
Thu 14th Feb 2008
I hate statements that are unqualified, and therefore meaningless, with regard to statistics.
On Sunrise this morning, in the local news, they trotted out the chestnut:
“12% of people charged with drink-driving in the last two years were P-platers.”
This is totally meaningless without an indication of what percentage of the driving population are P-platers. What if it is higher than 12%? Then P-platers are actually more responsible than the rest of us…
Bah.
I don’t like doing technical support. It is just not something that I find enjoyable at all. I don’t mind fixing the occasional computer - I had a mate’s PowerBook G4 for a few days the other day, and even got a bit miffed by how frustrating that was. Long story short - it seemed like the hard drive was buggered, but after replacing that (which was very hard), I by chance removed and reinserted the RAM, which doesn’t require a complete disassembly, and it booted fine. I then spent 40 minutes fixing my sister’s laptop’s internet. Which again I didn’t mind, as I was the one who had left it set up to use a static IP address when i was working on getting an ad-hoc WiFi network going. It took 40 mins to fix something that if I had the machine in front of me (or even VNC), I probably could have fixed in 4.
One thing I will be doing at my job is some technical support for a specialist software package. I’ve listened to my boss (still sounds weird calling him that, since he’s a mate of way back) and I really don’t think it will be fun. I can already parrot a heap of the phrases he uses several times a day, and I’ll be heading out with him to do some site visits late this week or next.
Well, I’m not the person to tell that sometimes you have to do stuff you don’t really like, just to keep the money rolling in. How many years was I a teacher for again?
•
Whilst trying to tag this post, I realised that I don’t have as much to rant and rave about since I am not a teacher. I’m not the angry young man I was. Still, this is as close to a rant as I am getting, so it’s going in that pile…
