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2010

  • 1 min read

Kitchen Myths

Or, more appropriately: Things you wouldn't believe if only you had listened to your grade school science teacher.

Source

  • 2 min read

Cuddy never had House tutor her.

You don't hire an architect then butt in during planning to suggest using glass as your skycraper's foundation.

You don't scout for an F1 driver, then pull him aside to teach him the finer points of driving on the freeway during rush hour.

You don't ask a gourmet chef to cook you ham and eggs for your snack.

You hire experts then get out of their way because you need them to get their jobs done.

You don't hire a very good programmer then ask him to go back and comment his code (some of which, while pretty hairy, can be rather elegant) just so you can puff up your chest and prove to yourself that you've still got it (for any value of it).

You don't ask Einstein to go back to his equations that produced E=mc2 and have him label each step with an essay. You accept that you're not in the same league as him when it comes to physics, and just accept it.

Sure, you can ask him to explain it, give a lecture on it. But no one can and/or should expect him to spoon-feed it to undergrads.

My objection is not to commenting code. I do that. I advocate that.

But, like any programmer worth his salt, I try to comment on the why, not the how. The documentation on the how part is IN THE CODE. If you're anywhere near a halfway-decent programmer, you would know this, without having to be told.

If You (yes, you; you know who you are) are going to be selling this code to somebody else, couldn't you at least find a buyer who's, you know, actually a programmer? Or at least has one on his staff? Preferably a programmer who's beyond the Hello, world! stage in the language we're using?

But, I suppose I shouldn't complain. After all, this is billable work, too.

  • 1 min read

I can haz comments!!!11!!ONE!1

Thanks to howardtharp and his Tumblr entries, I became aware of the fact that my blog doesn't do comments.

Well, that's fixed now, not that anybody's mentioned anything about not being able to leave comments, or whatever. :P

  • 1 min read

Intel's X11 video driver on GNU/Linux is broken again

I've had enough of this shit.

I'm sticking with 2.10 (last good version for me) until the devs get their shit together.

I'd switch to Debian GNU/kFreeBSD right fucking now if I weren't so heavily invested in LVM.

  • 1 min read

I hate posing for pictures. Plain and simple.

I’m not sure where this aversion came from, though I have hundreds of memories of begging my mother and my aunt to put the damn camera away. It’s not that I don’t like looking back, or I don’t enjoy seeing friends and family in other times. I enjoy the end result.

It’s the getting there that drives me slightly crazy. Anytime someone points a camera at me and demands that I smile, it doesn’t feel natural. It feels like a fake, manufactured moment.

Is that what we’ll all be doing 40 years down the road? Looking back at our lives, one setup shot after another? If it was up to me, my albums would be filled with out of focus, funny face and completely candid shots.

My life’s not made up of perfect moments; it’s filled with awkward and humorous ones. Let’s capture those, shall we?

— Ryan Sohmer, Least I Could Do