Jimmy

(Click for full size version.)

I got 4 hours and 20 minutes of sleep last night (give or take 5 minutes), so I’m content to sit and read the archives of xkcd all day, maybe I should say “I’m too tired to do anything else”, rather than “content to”.

At any rate, I thought this comic was funny enough to post. Background: the idea is that sometime early in everyone’s programming career the young new programmer should learn Lisp just for the great feeling that you get when you finally figure it out. Of course this doesn’t inspire much confidence in the time before you figure it out that you spend tearing your hair out (at least not in me, although I will try to learn it at some point), but ah well.

(Click for full size version.)

Of course, I’m still holding on to the possibility that it’s all just a big plot to get young, eager programmers to torture themselves trying to figure out something that’s needlessly complex, but perhaps that’s good for young, eager programmers, in a “you must learn early the hard ways of life” sort of way. (He says. Acting like he’s not also a young, eager programmer.) Of course, knowing what I know about the hacker culture, I’m not sure this is very likely.

I think I’m probably in a very cynical mood today.

-jimmy

Perhaps it’s just the fact that it’s 3:27am, but I found this xkcd comic quite amusing. Or maybe it has nothing to do with the time and everything to do with the fact that I use that phrase quite a bit and I’m always usually up for some self-mockery, even if it’s only in my own head. (Or, in this case, if it’s on the whole big world wide web.)

Hat tip to one of my Huntington University classmates for telling me about the webcomic xkcd, which I find to be very amusing.

Speaking of the time, I should really be going to bed sooner rather than later, since I need to get up at 830am. Hmm.

-jimmy

P.S. while we’re on the topic of internet media, the latest episode of Ask a Ninja, posted yesterday, is rather funny in its description of “Ninjalympics.”

I’m sure everyone has been on the edge of their seats waiting for today’s daily Cow posting.

…

OK. Or not.

At any rate. Here it is.

How much of what I write do people actually understand? Sometimes I take a step back and read something I’ve written and realize that it’s random and/or I’ve left huge connections unsaid and simply assumed, but then I wonder if I’m assuming too much? Should I make those connections rather leaving huge holes in my stories? Or is the level of unreadable-randomness just right?

I should REALLY go to bed.

I’m kinda looking forward to school starting again in 3.5 weeks, if only to get me on a sane schedule again. (OK, semi-sane schedule. The problem with the school year is that I usually sleep about 5-6 hours a night because I continue to go to bed at 2am or later.)

Hmm.

-jimmy

It is apparently impossible for me to go to bed before dawn when I have no outside schedule keeping me getting up in the morning and not mid or late afternoon.

This is generally not an issue, until I agree to see someone off at the airport at 11am. Luckily that’s not actually today, but still.

Anyway. Tonight’s links are just two: one is a movie I Must See. Oliver Stone’s W. Watch the trailer. It’s funny? Perhaps only if you’re part of the 72% not approving of the way he’s running the country.

Also, is it just me, or does anyone else think that China is going to fail quite badly at hosting the Olympics? The latest, um, hiccup is that they’re not actually unblocking internet sites for Olympic guests that they said they’d unblock.

Oh well?

Kinda makes you glad you live in a free country, even if the NSA is breathing down our necks. Or at least some of our necks. And I guess that’s the difference?

-jimmy

I totally forgot to post a strip yesterday, so today you get two strips! Yay!

-jimmy

It all started with an article in The Independent about a new search service started by 3 ex-Google employees. (quick aside: why does the headline refer to “Google old boys” while in the article they keep referring to a women who seems to be the leader or at least spokesperson of the 3?)

From there I had to, of course, check out the new search service which apparently searches three times as many pages as Google does. So I Googled “Cuiled” my favorite search term: “jimmy bouma-holtrop”.

Three pages worth of results came up.

Not one link to this blog. Now, I know this blog is new, but I’ve had a site at jimmy.bouma-holtrop.com and/or www.bouma-holtrop.com/jimmy for nearly 6 years. www.bouma-holtrop.com didn’t even come up. I really liked the format of the Cuil (pronounced “cool”) site, but I’m beginning to see a major flaw in their search methods: half the pages that came up were from WeatherMatrix.net, an organization that I haven’t done anything with for years, since AccuWeather.com bought them out. The only thing I’ve done there recently is delete my account, an action which takes 18 weeks to happen. But come on Cuil, is that all you can come up with? What’s so wrong with jimmy.bouma-holtrop.com? Not close enough to my search term for you?

Anyway. From there I decided to see how I ranked on the more major search engines.

1. Google, which apparently has 62% of the USA search market, has this site ranked 12th, after my WeatherMartix.net member profile at #1 (should be gone within 18 weeks) and other assorted sites, such as huntingtondma.com, which I manage. Not the best result, but I guess better than not being there at all. I should also note that bouma-holtrop.com comes up third on Google.
2. Yahoo, the second in USA search market share, has this blog (well, bouma-holtrop.com/jimmy, which is the same as jimmy.bouma-holtrop.com) at #2, just after bouma-holtrop.com. Go Yahoo. One wonders if it has anything to do with the fact that this site is hosted by Yahoo? One hopes not, for the sake of fairness.
3. MSN Search, the third and last “major” search service in the US, has “Jimmy’s Bio”, a page that I removed from bouma-holtrop.com a week or so ago, as the top result. My old page for Digital Media (bouma-holtrop.com/jimmy/dma) is next, and third is jimmy.bouma-holtrop.com, but not indexed as the new blog yet. Me thinks MSN needs to update their cache for bouma-holtrop.com and all its sub-domains.

One interesting thing is that all four search services (Cuil, Google, Yahoo and MSN Search) all bring up huntingtondma.com in their top 10 or 20 results, an association I’m not at all averse to as I’m the primary “hands-on” webmaster of that site.

Tomorrow I should try to figure out some of these search engines search methods and see if I can do some things to enhance my rankings. Mostly I need to figure out what the f I need to do to get this site on Cuil, since my rankings are pretty good on the other services.

For now it’s bedtime as it’s 6am.

-jimmy

Automagically is a very good word.

That is all.

-j

The serial-to-USB adapter that I use to connect my weather station to my laptop has caused two Blue Screens of Death in the last few weeks, reminding me that when I installed the adapter Windows XP yelled at me and told me it wasn’t a supported device (or something along those lines) and that it might damage my computer. I’ve been using this thing without problems for several years, but I think two BSOD in as many weeks shouldn’t be ignored, even if I’m considering getting a new computer soon and have all my files backed up. Four weeks to the beginning of the new school year is not the time to be taking chances with one’s computer when it’s not a sure thing that I’d be able to replace it ASAP. Plus there’d be a small lose of data even if I did nightly backups.

I’m kind of annoyed at myself for my somewhat cavalier attitude about computers. I tend to think that I’ll be able to pull them back from the brink of disaster, or at least not lose any data if I do have a serious error. And so far I’ve been lucky, but this is the fourth time I’ve gotten a BSOD/”stop error” on this laptop in the less than 3 years that I’ve owned it. And second in the last month. I have the feeling that if things go wrong on this computer, they’ll go really, really wrong. And it kinda seems that things are getting close to that point.

I push my computers way too hard in general. Right now, just having started back up after the crash, I already have half a dozen high-memory programs open: the aforementioned weather station program, which pulls data from my weather station every 5 minutes; FireFox with a dozen tabs open, ThunderBird with 3 e-mail accounts that automatically check for new messages anywhere between every 3 minutes and every 15 minutes; and BitTorrent, which is currently downloading at a speed of 35k/second and pushing the data out onto my external hard drive. And this is a low amount of stuff open for me. I also use this machine for hours and hours every day.

I think it’s time I seriously think about my computing needs and make sure I get not just more memory than “normal”, but a faster processor and better OS, as well. I’m totally going to get a MacBook when I next upgrade, and I need to figure out some way to get Linux running on something newer than 7 years old so I can actually learn how to use it, since I think it may be the answer to a lot of my issues.

For now I’ve just ordered a new serial-to-USB adapter that gets 5-stars from 21 reviewers on Amazon that should work better than my current one, and I guess I’ll make sure to keep my back-ups current and work hard to get a new computer sooner rather than later. Because if it’s just a fact of life that I need a new computer every 2.5 years, I guess that’s just that.

-jimmy