Adrift in the 21st Century
After a surprise storm in late October, downstate New York hadn’t seen any real snow until yesterday. Admittedly many people prefer it that way (it sure makes driving easier), but I’m of the view that you can’t have a genuine east coast winter without the stuff. Besides, without the snow the countryside just looks bare and dreary.
For now though, winter is back on schedule. There were even people out skiing at Rockefeller State Park.
Swan Lake – Frozen and Snowed Over.
Today I went to the memorial for Carol, one of my grandmother’s best friends. Carol passed away last month after a long illness.
It’s hard to know what to say at such an event. Words seem painfully inadequate. She was an extraordinary person in many ways, but above all she had a knack for bringing cheer and joy wherever she went. In our hurried, impersonal world, that is indeed a rare gift.
One of the more poignant moments at the memorial came when her close friend explained that Carol had said previously that she didn’t want any memorial to be held. ”I know. But it’s not for you. It’s for us,” the friend replied. And it was.
Goodbye Carol.
It’s hard to believe that I made my first post to this site’s predecessor (myownlittleworld) exactly ten years ago. The site has had its ups and downs since, much the same as its author, but I’m hoping it will still be going strong ten years from now.
Looking back at old posts and the memories they conjure up, I recognize the skinny, sharp, cynical, occasionally confused kid who posted his musings on these digital pages. I’m not sure quite what he’d think of the current version of me, but I hope wouldn’t be too terribly disappointed.
And if I could send a message to that fellow (not that he would have listened!) what with hindsight being a benefit and all, it would have been: Don’t take yourself (or anybody else) so seriously. Life is just too short.*
*Seriousness is a leading cause of chronic overcautiousness among other damaging neuroses. Such a condition, if untreated by ample quantities of levity and silliness, frequently degenerates into a state known as ‘being a tiresome bore.’
I try to avoid saying too much about politics. This is partly because most of the time others have already said what I would have said, and said it better than I could have. In truth though, I steer clear of political posts because I really have nothing nice to say, and who wants to be Cassandra anyway?
Still, given that the 2012 ‘election-cycle’ is almost upon us, and given the absurd spectacle we are now greeted with, now seems as good a time as any to say what I think, and what I think (writ large) is:
The Democrats deserve to lose this election.
In spite of the early snowstorm at the end of October, it’s actually been a very warm winter here in New York so far. Feels a lot like winter on the west coast, except warmer. On the bright side, the days are starting to get longer, albeit very slowly.
Here is the view from lower Manhattan on a gray, blustery morning.
It’s no big secret that air travel in general has become a lot less fun than it used to be. Shrinking seats, escalating fees, and of course the ever-increasing list of ‘security’ procedures foisted upon us by the good folks of the TSA and the Department of Hopeless Stupidity.
The whole situation seems to have disintegrated long past the point of parody, with disabled toddlers being groped by TSA agents and holiday cupcakes being confiscated as contraband, but there we are.
strlang – a simple language for string manipulation
strlang is a programming language I created with the goal of making string manipulation simple and straightforward. It is an imperative language with a minimalist syntax. The language and its compiler were written as part of the Programming Languages and Translators (COMS 4115) course at Columbia University in Fall 2011.
Features
This photo is from last year, descending White Mountain Peak in eastern California in the middle of October. Meanwhile it’s 50 degrees and sunny outside my window here in New York in mid-December.
One of the benefits of being on the east coast is that we do have four full seasons. Of course as my photo suggests, you can have seasons in California too. You just may need to drive to a different part of the state to see them.
Prologue
Like many folks who began using Java around ten years ago, I found it very useful with two exceptions: it forced you to use objects for everything, and it was slow.
Since then, nothing much has changed about the object-oriented nature of Java, although some of the more annoying limitations of the early days have been more or less dealt with.
While computers have changed a lot in the last 20 years, we still use clock speed (MHZ or GHZ) as the primary metric for describing speed. Unfortunately, the manufacturers don’t make it easy. First AMD and then Intel switched away from labeling their processors by clock. Thus if you purchase a new machine today, the processor is likely to be a ‘Core i3 2100′ or a ‘Phenom X4 2200′. The numbers that they use after the processor type aren’t the clock speed, rather, they’re some sort of internally-designated model number.