The Google News photo algorithm comes up with some hilarious combinations sometimes.

(it’s from an old Simpson’s episode, if you don’t get it…)

Sometimes they’re really weird. Night before last, I was dreaming, and woke up. Looked around, realized I had been dreaming, plopped my head back down and fell right back asleep. Although instead of going into another dream, a message popped up (almost as if I was using a computer) saying (via white text on a black background):

If you would like to continue this dream, a charge of $19.95 will be applied to your credit card. Do you want to proceed?

[Yes] [No]

But my brain knew it was dreaming, and the absurdity of it made me laugh hard enough to wake me up again. So +1 for “weird dreams”.

P.S. Oddly enough, usually I can’t read in my dreams. The words are almost always confusingly jumbled, not just in word/letter transposition but in physical orientation and alignment. Sometimes if I focus I can pull them together (literally: they move about in what I can only describe as brownian motion) and make sense of them, but not often. It’s an interesting enough phenomenon that I often try to look for newspapers or books in my dreams when I realize I’m dreaming, and it’s a great litmus test for when I’m not sure.

So in my oh-so-finite free time, I’ve discovered two new TV shows that are both unique and well written, and I thought I’d share…

Dexter is about a serial killer (protagonist) who graciously kills only other murderers. Sounds cliche when I put it like that, but it’s the best saga-drama I’ve seen since BSG. My sister-in-law introduced me to it, oddly enough. Curiously (in the sense of the writer’s take) he’s not motivated by humanitarian concerns, simply survival by staying under the radar. Lots of dry sarcasm, which if you know me you know is the cornerstone of my sense of humor.

The second is Breaking Bad, where a chem teacher decides to go into the meth business to pay for the chemo for his stage-3 lung cancer. I was literally tearing up watching the last episode. (I’m a sucker for drama involving family/marriage problems, what can I say)

“But Derek, you’re a poor college student…and you buy Showtime?” Hardly. I’ve abandoned Tivo, even my Myth box, for Miro. It auto-downloads new TV shows as they come out for you. Read about how to set it up.

Let me know what you think.

I wonder why.
I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder.
I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder!
– R. Feynman

hahahahah

http://www.osnews.com/story/19266/WTFs_m

I’ve been doing a lot of python programming this last year {allurstuff, deseb, flyback, ogmaps}, and several people have asked me variations on the following:

Thought of you when I read this
http://www.xkcd.com/353/
So is python really all that??

Well the answer is: Good god no. While python’s the best “everything is a hash table” language I’ve used, it shares the same problems all such languages have: very little compile time checking of object types. Your function is expecting a list, but someone passes in a string? Opps! And it doesn’t even fail-fast - you iterate over every char in the string. Which means many possible runtime errors, which are infinitely harder to test for and debug. Plus python STILL doesn’t have multi-processor support, even though it has its own reasonably nice threading model.

But it is great for banging out stuff quickly. And the glade/GTK bindings are pretty sweet.

So I’m proposing “Derek’s PvJ Rule”:

For every minute saved typing “my_list = []” instead of “List<String> myList = new ArrayList<String>();“, one hour of debugging is lost, one customer is pissed off, and god kills a kitten.

=P

Saw this in front of my friendly neighborhood evil a few days ago.