Spoiler alert: the state of the union is strong

The always-sarcastic-but-in-that-cute-and-quirky-feminine-way Katherine Mangu-Ward over at Reason sums up my feelings on the SOTU:

Last year, 48 million viewers saw the speech, clocking in at about 20 percent of the U.S. adult population. That's nothing to be ashamed of. We should be happy that 80 percent of American adults found something better to do at 9 p.m. on a weekday than listen to a politician talk.

I happened to be one of those unfortunate 20 percent last year, but only because I was following along as Reason live-blogged it. And I did it again this year, too. I swear next year I’ll actually try to have some alcohol ready for the annual drinking game fun.

As for my reaction to the actual speech… see also.

Practicing with columns

Communication is such an important skill in so many careers and yet it seems it is often taken for granted. Part of the reason that I do these long pseudo-essays in semi-formal op-ed style is to really force myself to practice writing. I spend a lot of extra time trying to be careful about sentence structure, word choice, and style.

In college I got a lot of practice out of necessity; many assignments required writing, and sometimes lots of it. Now that I’m in the professional world, the obligations are far fewer. Sure, I write instructions, documentation, and long emails sometimes, but not nearly as often to keep up my “strength” and most of the stuff I write day to day for work are hardly a literary exercise. Forwarding jokes, pictures, and blurbs to co-workers doesn’t count.

Doing these posts forces me to organize my thoughts and express them intelligently and, if possible, entertainingly. It’s not easy, and I don’t claim to be particularly good at it yet. I’ve only been doing this a few months now, but I hope that after a couple of years I’ll be able to see some progress. At the very least I’m hoping I’ll not lose the practice I gained in school getting a creative writing minor (as an aside to my computer science major). Better yet, I hope to improve. Only time will tell, though.

Don’t get me wrong: I am interested and passionate about the topics I discuss here, but I admit that it’s also a good way to force me to practice writing. Being able to express ideas clearly and successfully and persuasion… these could be very useful skills to have in the future.

New PC assembly: it’s LEGO for adults

I’ve always enjoyed putting together computers. As a geek, cars were never really my area of expertise and it was nice to have something “hands-on” that I felt confident about. So when deciding on my new PC, I looked forward to getting to build it up. Really, though, it’s nothing to be too proud of: as Jeff said, “It's dead easy, like snapping together so many LEGO bricks.”

Manufacturers make it really simple and just about everything is color-coded these days. But it’s been fairly straightforward for as long as I can remember, even back in the Windows 95/Pentium days.

Underground Allure, or The Silent Libertarian Killer

As a [relatively] recent college grad I can still remember the smell of piss-drunk baseball-cap-wearing douchebags and the nasal voices of this-jacket-ironically-doesn’t-fit-well my-hair-is-ironically-the-same-as-it-was-when-I-got-out-of-bed indie fucks. Countless experiences with said groups have been etched into my psyche. This isn’t me on the psychiatrist’s bed unloading, though. It’s no longer harrowing; just stay with me for a moment.

One of the great many tropes I witnessed first-hand so much was the classic “It’s popular; now it sucks”. That link to TVTropes is an excellent article summing it up and I suggest you skim it now. It’s particularly funny to anyone who’s seen friends or idiots at parties do it because of how true it is.

New PC specs: wedding performance with practicality

Computers can fill many roles in our lives, and their flexibility and adaptability is part of what makes them so ubiquitous. The basic design hasn’t changed much since von Neumann and the market has simply grown and grown meeting every conceivable need. You’ve got ultra-portable netbooks, home and office laptops, family desktops, power gaming rigs, and various flavors of file and web servers.

In my case, we had just about all the good stuff already. A decent laptop to use on the couch, a slightly aged performance desktop for gaming use, and a Windows Home Server for backups and media storage. I set out to build a gaming and developer machine that would last for many years to come, plus so I and the missus would both have a full desktop to use. As such, I did not attempt to skimp on quality, but I was practical and wise where necessary.

Welcoming a new family member

Isn’t it adorable?

In my many years of using computers, I’ve never truly gotten to build a “dream machine”. I’ve always made do with Frankenstein monsters that I’ve cobbled together with a part bought here or there to keep going as the technology progressed. Or the dreaded “family computer” that’s shared and was purchased by parents without so much as a keen eye for specific hardware.

Mostly it has been a matter of money, which I did not have previously at my disposal. Even after getting a job, necessities took priority like mattresses, furniture, appliances, etc., and before you know it I’m still without a decent home computer of my own.

Well, this Christmas, I decided to change that finally. I would build exactly what I wanted, with little compromising.

My goal, as you’ll soon see, was future-proofing. I intend to spend well, but wisely, in order that this last for many years to come by anticipating future upgrades.

In the next few posts, I’ll cover both the specs and why I picked what as well as a fun adventure with photos as I put ‘er all together.

Facepalm

The media:

Within an hour of Saturday's tragic shooting in Arizona, the Twittersphere had quickly seized on a map put out by Sarah Palin's political action committee last year that had gun-sight images over the congressional districts of House Democrats she wanted to win for the GOP in 2010.
[…]
"The way that she has it depicted has the cross hairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they have got to realize there are consequences to that action."

My reaction:

The weather outside is frightful

It always amuses me to watch the local collective freak-out whenever the weatherman declares “Snow’s a’comin’!” Bread, milk, and eggs go into zombie apocalypse rationing and schools and banks close faster than a cock-tease’s legs.

What can explain this mass hysteria? It isn’t like snow is unseen in these parts — in fact, we usually get a good dusting once or twice a year at least. And yet, without fail, it’s always like this.

Well, I suppose I can’t complain too much. My employer is one of those that shuts down at the first sign of ice, so I do get a free paid holiday…

More photos here.

Timidity in fear of reprisal

I haven’t written much on here thus far about the big G, mostly because I went through my big non-theistic binge some two or three years ago. Had I been writing then I surely would have been overflowing with thoughts on the matter, but as it has since become more-or-less “settled” for me I don’t often find topics to discuss. I’m also not too keen personally on ranting about how there is no god.

As a libertarian (something I have mentioned a few times on here now), I’m much more of a “live and let live” kind of guy, and as such I don’t really desire to trample on other people’s faith. If you ask me about it, I’ll tell you honestly: I don’t buy it and I think it’s horseshit. But then, nobody asks me. Maybe that’s for the best, as I’d rather like to avoid the inevitable consequences that would cause.

But that’s what brings me to the table today: atheist cowardice.

Change of exam plans

So I didn't take the test like I previously mentioned doing. None of the usual suspects like laziness or money were to blame. I wasn't abducted by aliens and no dogs consumed homework. I just decided not to do it.

I stand by what I previously said about the certifications (though perhaps I downplayed the personal financial hit too much). My reasoning for delaying taking any exams for now came after making that post, though I suppose the seeds had already been planted. I've had a lot of time lately to get more and more practice with Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4, and WPF, which I previously had little to none. As such, I started to feel that spending a hundred bucks (a little more, actually, even with the coupon) on a test that's now obsolete wasn't such a good idea.

I studied for it, though, and was very prepared to pass it. I still learned a lot, as a result, and I'm for the better I think, despite not having the credit for it.

The test was only the first in a series of tests to earn an MCTS, which could then be continued into an MCPD. Since I'm so late to the game, though, my book and practice material was for the original VS2005 version. According to Microsoft, though, the updated VS2008 one didn't necessitate knowing the new 3.0 material but even so there was a 2nd Ed released of the study book. Now that VS2010 has been out for eight months, the new 2010 exams are available. This time they didn't even bother updating 70-536 — they just dropped it altogether.

There are a lot of other changes to the exams for 2010, such as no longer having a combined Windows/Web über-MCPD (Enterprise Application Developer). With the dropping of the old 70-536 test, the paths of Windows or Web now really need you to pick one or the other.

Frankly, I don't know what to pick. So far, in my four years doing .NET, I've done both more or less equally. At any rate, that's my new dilemma. I think I prefer to take the updated exams for VS2010 now that I'm using it primarily, but I'm really not sure which path will be more valuable at this point.

Converting an image to grayscale in WinForms

A simple little helper static method to easily convert any image to its grayscale counterpart using older WinForms classes (System.Drawing namespace stuff).

Bird droppings

By now everyone’s heard of our dead animal epidemic. So far, there aren’t any real results in from the vets on why, so far as I’ve read. Still, it was parroted around all day today at work. We (that is, as our state) love getting our fifteen minutes.

While I’m interested to eventually hear what actually probably happened once they’ve had time to figure it out, I mostly just enjoyed watching the slams fly on /.:

Maybe the birds realized they were in Arkansas and figured suicide was really the only way out.
antifoidulus

I got arrested traveling through Arkansas once. They got me for contraband. I had a bunch of books. I got off on a technicality: no one could prove they were books....
Himring

The birds were hit by emanations from the Arkansas school system, and promptly forgot how to fly.
hyades1

And my favorite...

Arkansas - America's Somalia.
Alsee

As someone who’s not big on tribalism, I have no problem with people slamming our state. It’s often much deserved and I often am the one doing it. (As if I were somehow obviously exempt from the label “Arkansan”).

It's also an interesting live experiment in tangents as you can literally watch the conversation get hijacked by a vegan/PETA debate on eating meat and then one on existence of god. Great sociology fun! The tangential stuff easily makes up half or more of the comments, which is probably because just about anything is more interesting than Arkansas on a slow news day.

These aren't frosted, though

I've been doing a lot of hardware research lately towards purchasing parts for a new system (which I'll probably cover in great detail soon). One of the hardest decisions was the graphics card, so I spent an especially large amount of my focus on reading up on them. Since this started during the limbo before Radeon 6000 series cards came out, lots of review sites were posting the same AMD marketing material as previews before the hands-on reviews were possible. As such, I saw the following slide a ton of times:

And every time I saw it, I thought of these:

Spoilers: I ended up going with Barts.