A vegetarian friend of mine told me that I'm not "evolved" because I eat meat. He said people only started eating cows thousands of years ago because they were savages, they were barbarians and they didn't know any better. People who eat cows now are not evolved. What a bunch of bullshit. People ate cows thousands of years ago for the same reason we eat cows today. Because they are easy to catch. We're not savages, we're just lazy. A cheetah could taste like chocolate heroin, we'll never know. Those little bastards are fast!I love the idea of "tasting like chocolate heroin" and look for ways to work the phrase into casual conversation.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Words to Live By
A story I heard somewhere ...
Sunday, October 16, 2011
We Don't Need No Steenkin' Cable!
Back in March, I wrote a post about The Ultimate Set-Top Box. I've been thinking a lot about it lately and the fact that I just don't watch much cable TV anymore. Sure, when I'm bored I occasionally flip through the things on my TiVo, but it wouldn't be any huge hardship to choose something else like reading a book, playing a video game or working on a programming hobby project. So the question is ... how much extra am I spending on a cable subscription that I don't need?
I did some research. Actually, I did some digging because Frontier Communications made it very hard to find out this information. I tried going through their website via my account to see if I could change my plan. They would not allow me to deselect TV from my current plan. I could add or upgrade services, but I could not remove anything. I finally had to resort to logging into their website as a new customer and look up the currently available plans that way. Still, they didn't make it easy because of the dizzying array of choices available. But I was able to finally select just FIOS Internet without TV, without Home Phone, at my current speed rating. Making this change would save me $30 per month. It also turns out that the next higher speed rating might save me an additional $10 per month.
As Marco Arment recently pointed out in a podcast, $40 per month can buy a lot of TV or movies on iTunes (or Amazon or Hulu or [insert your favorite video service here]). Approximately thirty dollars will buy you a full thirteen-episode season of Doctor Who in HD from Amazon Video-on-Demand. A full season of House in HD will run you about $56. iTunes runs slightly more at $37 and $60, respectively. Remember, these are HD videos that are yours to keep (so long as the DRM continues to be supported) with no commercials or other claptrap getting in the way. $40 per month is $480 per year or eight full American-style seasons in HD. So I could still have the shows that I really do want to watch, in a format that may allow me more freedom to watch when, how and on which device I want to watch it, and possibly still save me money.
Now I just need to figure out how to break the news to my daughter ...
I did some research. Actually, I did some digging because Frontier Communications made it very hard to find out this information. I tried going through their website via my account to see if I could change my plan. They would not allow me to deselect TV from my current plan. I could add or upgrade services, but I could not remove anything. I finally had to resort to logging into their website as a new customer and look up the currently available plans that way. Still, they didn't make it easy because of the dizzying array of choices available. But I was able to finally select just FIOS Internet without TV, without Home Phone, at my current speed rating. Making this change would save me $30 per month. It also turns out that the next higher speed rating might save me an additional $10 per month.
As Marco Arment recently pointed out in a podcast, $40 per month can buy a lot of TV or movies on iTunes (or Amazon or Hulu or [insert your favorite video service here]). Approximately thirty dollars will buy you a full thirteen-episode season of Doctor Who in HD from Amazon Video-on-Demand. A full season of House in HD will run you about $56. iTunes runs slightly more at $37 and $60, respectively. Remember, these are HD videos that are yours to keep (so long as the DRM continues to be supported) with no commercials or other claptrap getting in the way. $40 per month is $480 per year or eight full American-style seasons in HD. So I could still have the shows that I really do want to watch, in a format that may allow me more freedom to watch when, how and on which device I want to watch it, and possibly still save me money.
Now I just need to figure out how to break the news to my daughter ...
Making Your Own Tools
I remember reading somewhere that you aren't a real carpenter until you've made your own tools. Not being a carpenter of any sort, I'm not sure if its true or not, but I've started to feel like it might be true for programmers.
More and more I've noticed that IDEs are becoming required to work with code. And more and more, these IDEs have very similar, but not the same, features. They all offer customization of one form or another, but what's more custom than something that works exactly the way you want it to, because you wrote it that way?
So I've set out on a quest to take the journey of my programming forefathers and write, to begin with, an editor and a language with its own compiler/interpreter. Perhaps the two will be related, perhaps not. Perhaps the language will be generally useful or maybe it'll only be the extension language for the editor ... or perhaps it will be nothing more than an experiment in language design and have no practical purpose whatsoever. But I expect that once I get to a certain basic level of usefulness with the editor, it will become my sole text editor since I do believe in eating my own dogfood.
Since my platform of choice nowadays is the Mac, I have already started writing my editor as an Objective-C OS X application. I started out with the code from the article: Building a Text Editor in 15 Minutes. It has given me a huge appreciation for the underpinnings of OS X and gotten my editor almost all the way to that basic usability level I mentioned before.
As I move forward, I'll be sharing thoughts and discoveries from my journey here. I hope you find them useful ... or at least entertaining.
More and more I've noticed that IDEs are becoming required to work with code. And more and more, these IDEs have very similar, but not the same, features. They all offer customization of one form or another, but what's more custom than something that works exactly the way you want it to, because you wrote it that way?
So I've set out on a quest to take the journey of my programming forefathers and write, to begin with, an editor and a language with its own compiler/interpreter. Perhaps the two will be related, perhaps not. Perhaps the language will be generally useful or maybe it'll only be the extension language for the editor ... or perhaps it will be nothing more than an experiment in language design and have no practical purpose whatsoever. But I expect that once I get to a certain basic level of usefulness with the editor, it will become my sole text editor since I do believe in eating my own dogfood.
Since my platform of choice nowadays is the Mac, I have already started writing my editor as an Objective-C OS X application. I started out with the code from the article: Building a Text Editor in 15 Minutes. It has given me a huge appreciation for the underpinnings of OS X and gotten my editor almost all the way to that basic usability level I mentioned before.
As I move forward, I'll be sharing thoughts and discoveries from my journey here. I hope you find them useful ... or at least entertaining.
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