Didn’t get my walk by the river yesterday. The overcast lightened, but the day never really seemed as nice as I’d been hoping. Instead, I went shopping again, and bought a new fridge for my kitchen. It should be delivered tomorrow. I went with a fridge-only model, which is probably bigger than I need, but since I already have a compact freezer in the kitchen, it seems like the better plan. And not having a freezer in it means it’s both more energy efficient, and a little smaller. That means that when I decide to upgrade the stove, I’ll have room for a slightly bigger stove, which seems like a pretty good tradeoff to me.
I spent some of the afternoon going through the exisiting fridge and cleaning. Tossed out a bunch of condiments that were either nearly empty or had been sitting there aging and never getting used. I’ll just have a few things left to remove from the fridge tomorrow morning to get ready for the delivery. Between slowly upgrading things in the kitchen, and getting ever-closer to finishing up my bedroom, I feel like I’ve been making real solid progress on whipping the house into shape, and that makes me happy. There’s still a lot to be done, but every little bit of forward movement helps.
In the evening, I had dinner with Pete and Beth over at the Sporty. Good to see them again, and it was good to both get out to the bar, and (for once) get home from the bar at a reasonable hour.
- Charles Petzold asks Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? The answer is yes. Part of the problem is IntelliSense, which is Microsoft’s version of code-completion:
That kind of code-completion that forced me to code bottom-up would drive me nuts, I think, which is why I usually program with code completion shut off in CodeWarrior. But then I still think programming top-down is useful. [flutterby]IntelliSense wants every class, every method, every property, every field, every method parameter, every local variable properly defined before you refer to it. If that’s not the case, then IntelliSense will try to correct what you’re typing by using something that has been defined, and which is probably just plain wrong.
- Seems like every year Students fight for neighborhood voice in Marcy-Holmes. There’s a big to-do about the membership requirements there, as students rush out to vote for or against some proposal, and many people get pissed off because they either don’t have the needed proof of residency or didn’t register in time to vote. And then you never see them again. [daily]
- I hadn’t heard about this, but apparently Como residents demand city support because of the rising crime rate here. With the start of a new school year, the weekend parties have been louder and there have been more beer bottles in my front yard on Sunday mornings, but I haven’t been here long enough to know if it’s just part of the yearly cycle, or a bigger increase in headaches. But you never hear stories about students complaining about the Como neighborhood association because everything here is done by committee. I don’t especially like it, and it’s part of why I don’t hear about things like this (since I haven’t joined any of the committees), but it cuts down on the visible strife. [daily]
- A woman in Centerville has put up Halloween tombstones [that] offend neighbors, including names like Ben Dover, Mike Hunt, and others. The Powers That Be (and Moe Szyslak, presumably) are not amused. [scottk]
- If you’re discovering that iPhoto is making gihugic libraries and getting slow because you’ve got a camera that includes large MakerNote fields in the EXIF data, iPhotoSansMakerNote is the solution until Apple ships a fix. [vowe]
- The new book on RFID, Spychips [is] having an influence on RFID liars. And it’s just beginning.
Other companies like IBM, Procter & Gamble, Bank of America, BellSouth, and Philips will also have some explaining to do when people read about their patent pending ways to use RFID to track people through the things they wear, carry and throw away.
One can only hope so. I suppose I need to actually buy the book one of these days. [claire] - Ooh, a good rant by John Gilmore on NYT and wiretapping innocent people on the Internet.
I understand why the authoritarian brass would want routine wiretaps of the innocent; as Orson Welles said,
[claire]Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy.