resistance to persistence

A little humour for the holidays - I’ve been looking for this one for a while.

“I got a fever and the only prescription is more cowbell.”

Download the video [Windows Media, 4M] of the SNL skit. Will Ferrell shines as usual. Christopher Walken has to be the best SNL guest ever. Alec Baldwin is a close 2nd.

-34 deg with the wind chill today! That’s crazy. And this happens to be the first day I have to take the train into work and then do a bunch of walking. Jenn was nice enough to drive me to the train station today - only to find out the trains were cancelled due to switching problems. Great way to start my commute. So Jenn drove me up to the subway line and I took it in from there. Not too bad after all. I was even up really early ready to make a great early start to the week.

The move went well over the weekend. The house looks great, the movers were superfast and nothing was broken (knock, knock - that we’ve found out yet). Still unpacking for a while, but no rush. Gotta do some Xmas shopping now before I run outta time.

Former mayor Mel Lastman rode the rocket yesterday sitting across from me. A few people did double takes as they walked by him on the platform and whispered and pointed him out to their friends. A couple people actually said hi and waved which brought a smile to Mel’s face. He seemed pretty exhausted and tired, not the energetic Bad Boy pitchman you see above. I’d seen him around before as he lives in my neighbourhood and was eating at the local Shopsy’s diner.

Agileskills.org has a great book for free download as a pdf. I flipped through the first chapter which has a quick intro to refactoring to remove duplicate code. The following chapters get a bit tougher I’m sure. What I really like about this pdf book is the extensive code examples. Not just little snippets and then solutions such as “create another class with blah..”. They actually show complete class listings with the differences in bold. Great for learning.

You can download the entire book or individual chapters.

Here’s the chapter listings:
Chapter 1. Removing duplicate code
Chapter 2. Turning comments into code
Chapter 3. Removing code smells
Chapter 4. Keeping code fit
Chapter 5. Take care to inherit
Chapter 6. Handling inappropriate references
Chapter 7. Separate database, user interface and domain logic
Chapter 8. Managing software projects with user stories
Chapter 9. OO design with CRC cards
Chapter 10. Acceptance test
Chapter 11. How to acceptance test a user interface
Chapter 12. Unit test
Chapter 13. Test driven development
Chapter 14. Team development with CVS
Chapter 15. Essential skills for communications
Chapter 16. Pair programming

What stupid remark can I think up now?

I’m really not a politically driven person, but when idiots get airtime to spew their propoganda and think it’s funny it drives me crazy. This video from MediaMatters.org pieces together two such clips.

Ann Coulter: “they (Canada) better hope the United States better not roll over one night and crush them”…”they (Canada) are lucky we allow them to exist on the same continent”

I can’t believe the arrogance from this woman. I think she should do some research and realize the US does in fact greatly rely on Canada. But facts don’t matter when you can go on a news channel, spew some propoganda, think you’ve made a great joke, stroke your own ego and get some press out of it so someone remembers her name the next time she puts out a book.

Tucker Carlson is running a close second for idiot of the week. Even Carolyn Parrish (who has embarrassed Canada) does a somewhat decent job standing up to his idiot remarks and stereotypes.

Tucker: “Canada needs the United States, the United States does not need Canada”…
“the average Canadian is busy dogsledding”

Yes Tucker, that’s right. Canadians are out dog sledding when we’re not busy building our igloos and curling and fishing and brewing great tasting non-watered down beer. Dumbass. Jon Stewart was right, you are a dick.

Danny Way.com has a ton of videos on the site for viewing. An amazing skateboarder, he went pro at the age of 12 and he’s at least 30 years old now I believe. He’s also got 2 world records to his name (longest distance jump (75′) and highest air (23.5′) on a skateboard). He’s even dropped out of a helicopter into a skateboard ramp. Continues to put the boundaries. Check out the quicktime videos at http://www.dannyway.com/_videos/. In particular, watch dannyway_epk.mov (12.8M) for an overview of Danny Way or if you just want to see his world record run, watch worldrecord_line.mov (820k)

I guess we should feel proud. From CNN:

An American T-shirt company has a solution for their fellow citizens who want to vacation in Europe without having to answer questions about U.S. politics — pose as Canadians. For $24.95, T-shirtKing.com offers the “Go Canadian” package, full of just the kind of things an American traveler needs to leave their country and its politics behind.

The following is surprisingly true as Gretzky made it in the nation’s top 10 list of “Greatest Canadians”, along with a former player and coach, Don Cherry.

Questions are the reason for the package’s quick reference guide, which offers tips in case an American in disguise gets quizzed on Canada. When it comes to sports, the guide suggests: “This is easy to remember. There is only one real sport in Canada and it is called hockey. Regardless of any trivia question, the answer is ‘Wayne Gretzky.”‘

Here’s an article with stories on some American soldiers who were injured in Iraq. Very gripping stories.

I woke up to a winter wonderland this morning. As a kid, this would be a great day. As an adult in a city with bad traffic, this is a bad day. After 8 months without fresh snow, everyone forgets to drive slower and forgets how slippery the roads get. My wife called me 40 minutes into her drive and she’d made it as far as she’d normally be in 10 minutes and she’d already seen 3 accidents. Get your snow tires on and your foot on the brake.

I grabbed the camera and took some shots on the way into work. I’ve got some experimenting to do to figure out how to shoot so much white.

Working on a webapp at work, I decided to check if anyone has successfully figured out how to debug Resin apps within Idea 4.5. In the past, I’ve tried the Resin plugin from Intellij.org, but it’s very old and beta version for Idea 4.0. This doesn’t help when I’m using Idea 4.5. Luckily Google turned up better results to another Intellij plugins page for Resin which has been updated recently. I dropped in the plugin and amazingly it worked great. Resin is great for rapid web development apps. I think deploy it to Tomcat once it’s deployable.