Trivial Pursuits

I might not keep up my "posts per day" number, but I'm still doing pretty good on "words per day".

I've been very neglectful to this blog of late. Only six days with blog entries in all of June, and most of those entries were me saying "I need to blog more."

Well. Work sucks. I guess I'm still glad I work there, but there have been quite a few days of late where I would prefer, say, cleaning 19^th century latrines infested with Sydney funnel-webs and Ron Paul supporters. The good news is that the sucky part of work is mostly just growing pains—it seems like every day we identify a new position we absolutely need to fill in order to survive another month, but that we can't afford to fill just yet, so Martin will have to do it. That's not a fair statement at all—basically everyone at work is stepping into roles they were never intended to fill—but this is my blog and I can whinge on it if I want to. And this too shall pass. It's a cyclic thing: I have a lot of urgent stuff poured on me for one job, and then while I'm digging my way out of that all the normal work keeps building up and I get further behind—but then finally I smash through the wall and finish everything and spend the next two weeks bored silly until it all happens again. This is the worst crunch so far—just about every crunch to date has been the worst so far—and the longest-lasting, probably three weeks now. But after next week, I think I'm through. I feel bad, because I know when I'm miserable at work I'm a complete pain in the ass to work with, but no one has punched me in the face quite yet, and I haven't quite crossed the line of "open insubordination" with my boss.

Getting a car soon. I went back to the dealer on Monday, but it was such a miserable and pointless process I wish I hadn't. Aren't salesmen supposed to try to sell you things, rather than just pester you to pay money for a car that you don't want? I told him straight up that I had two decisions to make: Insight versus Civic; navigation package or no navigation package. Not once did he even attempt to help me answer either question. He stuck me in a Civic with a frat boy junior salesman whose cousin went to my high school, apparently. I tried to tune him out because he was so godawful annoying, but I was not particularly successful. He appeared to be less knowledgable about the Civic EX than I was—he seemed surprised to learn that you could play music off a flash drive, for instance—but did manage to point out the sunroof, which he immediately acknowledged was the single most pointless feature. Anyway, we drove around the block with him yapping on like a barber on meth, which, as you can imagine, was totally the idea way to get a feel for the vehicle. Then I got back to the dealer and the old salesman completely failed to offer to talk with me about the merits of the two cars I had test-driven and instead tried for about five minutes to convince me to buy the car I had test-driven right then and there, despite the fact that I told him clearly and repeatedly that I wasn't going to buy until the middle of July, and despite the fact that the car in question was the version with leather seats (which I neither want to sit in on a hot day nor want to pay $1500 extra for), and despite the fact that I had already told him repeatedly that I was strongly leaning towards the Insight. What the hell, salesman. Any Baltimorean readers who might be in the market for a new car, my advice is this: only go to Anderson Honda when they are way too busy to talk to you and just give you the keys to a random car and tell you to amuse yourself for half an hour. Now that was some productive car-shoppin'! Unfortunately, they have a deal going with my credit union that offers a very substantial discount, so I'm sort of stuck with the shmucks. But I am considering a Strongly Worded Letter!

Anyway, going there was actually productive, albeit only during the periods when no one was serving me. I only even started considering the Insight because I saw one in their lot last Saturday, and I had the opportunity to really test-drive it properly with no frat boys hassling me. And hell with going around the block—I took that bitch right down to Harbor East and back. (An eight-mile round trip over rough city streets with a bit of highway driving mixed in is about enough to get a feel for a car. Around the block with an annoying dude from Fallston, not so much.) And then on Monday I had five or ten minutes waiting for the frat boy to come out to the car, in which I played around with the touchscreen/voice prompt navigation and audio system, which incidentally is FLIPPING AWESOME. I've never before seen a car audio system that was so well laid out and easy to use, either factory or aftermarket, which is kind of crazy because car audio systems are generally intended for use by people who are driving cars. And I obviously did a lot of research on my own, culminating in finding the Insight owner's manual online and reading the whole thing cover to cover. So I've made my decision: Insight with nav package.

(And if I had test-driven the Civic on my own and the Insight with Fratty McHarfordcounty, would I be deciding the other way around? Mmmm... it would be a harder decision, but I think the Insight would still win. It's a pretty neat little machine, and I think I'm already coming around to the body shape, which was my biggest source of hesitation. Still has a pretentious name, though.)

The rest of my life goes well. The rest of my life is pretty much watching The Wire with my girl, so really, how could it not go well? Lebanese food with Tania and Rob tonight, which scored very high on the excellentometer, and I've got a line on an interesting opportunity, but I haven't heard anything even slightly definitive there yet. Oh, and Up, which was very pathosey in the way only Pixar can pull off.

So, what are you up to?

amatorially posted by Martin Marks at 12:53 at night // five comments by:

• Liz
• Mike
• Julia
• Tim
• Martin

 

This halves my "minimum known distance from my house to a Wire actor" score!

I just saw Robert F. Chew, aka Proposition Joe! He was standing right there! When I first saw him, I thought my eyes were playing me up—I've been watching quite a lot of Wire lately, and just the other day I saw someone who I thought looked exactly like Prop Joe except that he was white—but I went around the block and it was totally him. I was tempted to get out and say hello, but I figured the odds were that he would be less excited to see me than I was to see him, and so I figured I should leave him alone. Still! Prop Joe! Standing half a mile from my front door!

wryly posted by Martin Marks at 4:28 in the afternoon // comment? by:

 

If you'll notice, I am only considering one car brand. They have me good.

Today, for the first time ever, I went to a car dealership! Unfortunately, I was not the only person who did so today, and the dealership was completely jammed up and I couldn't actually meet with anyone. My stated purpose was to decide between the LX ("shiny") versus EX ("extremely shiny") Civic models—leaning strongly towards the EX; if I'm going to have the car for the next ten to fifteen years, I may as well get the shiniest version possible, right?—but while I was there I happened to notice the 2010 Insight and I ended up with a new decision to make.

So, as per my usual approach to such matters, I just made a spreadsheet. The Insight is initally about a grand more, and there aren't any real state or federal tax credits that I can find that reduce the cost. Ignoring insurance and maintenance cost differences, and assuming that gas stays at $2.50 a gallon indefinitely, and I drive only 6,000 miles per year, the Insight only becomes cheaper than the Civic in its sixth year on the road. Assume gas goes up by about $0.25 every six months, we're in year four. Put me at 8,000 miles a year and we're midway through year 3. Factor in the fact that the rate quote my insurer is giving me for the Civic is actually about $40 more for six months, and I'm breaking even at the start of year 3. By the end of year ten, I've saved $4,000 with the Insight. Plus the residual value is apparently higher on the Insight, so after five years it would hypothetically be worth $1770 more than the Civic and I would have spent $1,000 less on it. So... yeah. Kind of tempting, that. I'm a bit concerned about the maintenance costs, but everything I'm reading indicates that those are actually pretty much the same for both gas and hybrid cars. In fact, Honda claims that the Civic Hybrid is about a hundred less in maintenance over five years than the gas Civic, which is about as good a comparison as you can get. (I wasn't really considering the Civic Hybrid, which is like $3500 more than the standard Civic—it would take like seven or eight years before I hit the break-even point there, and I just don't think that makes much sense.) But even if the battery pack failed as soon as it came out of the eight-year warranty and I had to put, say, $2000 into replacing it, I'd still be over $500 up over the Civic at that point.

As the previous paragraph probably makes pretty clear, I am distinctly tempted by the Insight. However, it does have a few cons. It's definitely one of the "preachy hybrids"—everything about it, from its name to its body shape, is intended to say "I am driving a hybrid and am therefore better than you are." Actually, the Insight even preaches to the driver—you get, like, leafy-plant points and awards and things for driving in a fuel-efficient manner, and I swear to God I am not making that up. Now, on the one hand, that is totally awesome. (Some reviewers have described it as Wii-like... and I just ordered a Wii, so I guess that means I'm in the right demographic!) But on the other hand, GODDAMMIT CAR DO NOT TELL ME I BRAKE TOO HARD DO YOU HAVE ANY CONCEPT WHAT DRIVING IN BALTIMORE IS LIKE. Plus, I can definitely imagine getting kind of sick of the running shoe look. Cars should not be fashion statements, because cars last a hell of a lot longer than fashions. The Civic just looks like a car, and that's not a bad thing by any means.

Anyway. I test-drove the Insight today (it was kind of cool—because the entire sales staff was busy, the manager was just like, "uh, here are some keys, have fun, come back eventually I guess") and I certainly didn't have any complaints. Definitely not a powerhouse, especially on "super-preachy mode" (it actually limits your throttle and turns down your A/C and such, though it does so much less obnoxiously than my mother would if she could), but I never felt like I was driving a go-kart or anything. Handles pretty nicely. Visibility's a bit weird, because of the crazy split rear window, but I could get used to that. It seems smaller than it really is because of the shape—it's actually comparable to the Civic, but has a third more cargo space, which is impressive. I suspect I will appreciate the fact that it's a full 1'-1 1/2" shorter than my Subaru when it comes time to park the thing. I'm going back to the dealership Monday evening to actually meet with someone and hopefully give the Civic a drive too, so I guess I'd better have some intelligent questions by then.

Mind you, the Insight has six cup holders as opposed to the Civic's four, so I guess that sort of settles it right there. (Seriously, would that be on the specs page in any country other than America?)

gamely posted by Martin Marks at 4:55 in the afternoon // ten comments by:

• Disgruntled Wii...
• Martin
• Moss
• Liz
• Tori
• Martin
• the old feller
• anonymous
• Mike
• Martin

 

Clearly, the Doc learned how to drive in Baltimore.

Man, this is why I'm totally getting a new Honda this year.

quintessentially posted by Martin Marks at 11:11 at night // comment? by:

 

O.o.C.Q.o.t.D.

"I think you're getting confused with the St. Pauli Girl, because I'm pretty sure the Swiss Miss is underage."

Some time later:
"I guess that's one of the benefits of polyamory."
"St. Pauliamory?"

congenially posted by Martin Marks at 11:46 at night // three comments by:

• the old feller
• Julia
• Martin

 

O.o.C.Q.o.t.D.

"...We're transporting puns across state borders for the purpose of prostitution now?"

heartily posted by Martin Marks at 11:48 at night // comment? by:

 

The Age of Quizzical Machines

So when the Singularity hits and AI becomes as ubiquitous as computers are now, I imagine a future where there are artificially intelligent machines programmed with a complete and encyclopedic knowledge of, say, The Brady Bunch, who go around asking people revealing questions and using that information to determine, once and for all, exactly which Brady they are.

amateurishly posted by Martin Marks at 7:03 in the evening // one comment by:

• the old feller

 

Inspired by getting "oohkari" in testing.

The odds of the random temporary password generator I wrote giving a new employee the temporary password "sexmeup" are one in 78,364,164,096. I am not sure if I really want this number to be higher or lower.

scrupulously posted by Martin Marks at 8:26 in the evening // three comments by:

• Tania
• Martin
• Tim

 

Hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö.

The problem with programming tutorials is the same problem English teachers have: from a language-user's perspective, syntactical elements of either natural or progamming languages (like "noun" and "handle", say) can only really be defined by how they act, not by what they are. "Person, place, or thing" is what we tell kids, but it's a terrible test of nounliness. Much better is to look at where it fits in sentences: can it be a subject? can you make it plural? can you put an article in front of it? can adjectives modify it? (Of course, each of those things requires defining something else, so it's a miracle we ever learn it at all.)

With the English language, I know syntax both unconsciously (i.e. I don't say "I alligatored threely") and consciously (i.e. I know that "alligator" is in the class of things called nouns and "three" is in the class of adjectives). The former I learned the same way we all do, the latter I learned through instruction (and some very good English teachers). But in the world of programming, I am more or less self-taught. The simple concepts—the stuff I've been doing since GW-BASIC, like variables—I've internalized by now. But now I'm trying to teach myself object-oriented programming, and I find myself feeling a little bit like a feral child, because not only do have I never been taught how objects work, I have no intuition either. A better analogy might be a speaker of one of those Borgesian conlangs with no nouns trying to learn English.

Anyway, this whole ramble was inspired by a single sentence: "In PHP5, objects are defined by handles, not unlike resource type variables." I thought about it for a while, and I think I know what a resource variable is, because sometimes I've tried using print_r on a variable and it just said "Resource", and that meant it was the result of a MySQL query. But it's still so clearly the wrong way to define things. Don't tell me what it is, dammit, tell me how it acts, and give me enough code samples that I can begin extrapolating from the input. (Which, to be fair, this tutorial pretty much does, but still. Dumb sentence.)

Side note: The interesting thing about programming languages is that we can in fact define the parts of speech in three different ways—like natural language, we can do it semantically (type X is such and such a thingie / a noun is a person, place, or thing) or syntactically (type X behaves like such and such / a noun can function as a subject), but we can also talk about how the parser treats them, because the parser isn't a black box, it's made by people. That doesn't do a programmer very much good (although you'd be surprised how many tutorials try and talk like that—goddammit, tell me how to USE it, I'll learn the theory once Moss founds his Great Books of Computer Science program!) but it's kind of cool nonetheless.

piquantly posted by Martin Marks at 7:37 in the evening // one comment by:

• Erika