Harry's Ruminations

A retrospective on my day off. (sorry...first a pic) VW of America is totally clueless, and the legion of people that bought cars in 1998-2002 have pretty much rotated out of 'em. Bad build quality, terrible customer serice, and hearing the answer "Oh they all do that [leak oil, fail to start, creak, groan, ride like a buick, blow ignition coils, flake off their paint]" * * * Anyway, I arose yesterday surrounded by the insane mess of my apartment, and then I smelled the 57 degree air outside and I had a Ferris Bueller moment, "Cameron, I'm TAKING THE DAY OFF". Whitney's dad's offer of free tix to the Louisville Bats (Triple A affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds) sealed the deal. Three phone calls later, I was off for the day. Made some yummy Pilsbury Cinnamon rolls & a quart of pure Sumatran coffee, and then I made my todo list + shopping list. Won't bore you with the details, but my proudest moment came as I sewed buttons o...

Harvid brainfart moment of the day: So, I'm coding up this fix that AT&T is demanding, and I've solved the problem with a little hack WAY down inside this one module. Without going into too much detail, what I have to do is invert the array that I was returning from this one function (I said it was a hack!) In java, to do that, you need to use a java.util.Comparator class inside the Arrays.sort() method call. Inside the comparator, I need to change the sign of the return value of the java.lang.String class's compareTo() method. So, genius me, I'm sitting here for like 15 minutes trying to figure this out, so I code-up something like this: int ordinal = fileName1.compareTo(fileName2); switch( ordinal ) { case -1: return 1; case 1: return -1; case 0: return 0; } Which is just about the most ridiculous code I've ever seen....so I say to Patrick: "What's the easiest way to flip the sign of an integer?" and he goe...

GAA! National Faggot Week? Warning: British false cognate content!

The weekender blog: Spent most all of this weekend up in and around Louisville. Friday night, I went up for dinner with Whitney and Joey, then Saturday we found ourselves in sunny New Haven, KY: Where we found ourselves at the Kentucky Railway Museum to ride Thomas the Tank Engine on his tour of America. The start of Saturday was a disaster; Joey hid Whitney's keys inside the laundry and we didn't leave until a few minutes after 11, when we had tickets for the 12:20 train. It takes a little over an hour to get to New Haven via US 31E through Bardstown. On the bright side, we got to take the Pup and the drive was a blast with Whitney and Joey in his car seat in the back. Gratuitous cute kid pic: Anyway, we got to the railway museum and it was really fun. We got to ride on the train, with Thomas sitting at the front. It was actually a faux engine, but looked convincing enough. I was rather impressed--very kid-friendly environment, and not too commercial. ...

Pics of the EKU autocross

Suddenly, Central Kentucky is the Scottish Highlands: The high today was ~70, with tonight's low expected to be 61 degrees, and a low cloudlayer blankets everything with a diffuse, gray light, and a mist hangs low. >>cue the Hound of the Baskervilles. :D

Some hellacious thunderstorm blew through Georgetown at around 6am. I was so desperate for sleep that I put my pillow over my head to muffle the thunder and turned off my alarm. So, after getting up at the crack of 9 am, I didn't make it to work until around 10. >>sigh Totally spent today... Hand clap of praise: I was a good boy and went jogging last night around the subdivision across from my apartment house. Only got chased by one dog, and a little pug at that :-) Made it to Bible study last night (late, as usual). Sleepy...so sleepy....