Harry's Ruminations

TCL goodness One girl told me I loved my car more than I loved her. I replied that I love my car. I don't love you. Oy. Make a girl feels special, whydoncha?

Yeah, you knew it had to happen...I like football. Why not indulge in that national passion--Fantasy Football. My team's called the 'Madden 09 Wannabees', and we had our draft at Bufallo Wild Wings on Todd's road: View Larger Map Anywho, Here's the linueup I got (picked #8 in a serpentine draft): Starters: RB - Brian Wetbrook - Philly RB - Willis McGahee - Balt'more QB - Vince Young - Ten WR - Larry Fitzgerald - Arizona WR - Plaxico Burress - NY Giants TE - Tony Gonzales - Kansas City RB - Ahman Green - Houston K - Josh Scobee - Jacksonville Def - Dallas Da Bench: RB - Jamal Lewis - Cleveland WR - Joey Galloway - Tampa Bay RB - LenDale Whilte - Tennesee WR - Jerry Porter - Oakland QB - Rex Grossman - Chi-town. ( yes, yes, I caught alot of ridicule for this one... ) TE - Ben Watson - New England Went in with a pretty conservative strategy: - 3 decent running backs, with two backups (or trade fodder) - 2 good WR's, with 2 alternates. - 1 backup each for QB ...

We had GREAT seats. I've never had seats like that for anything...not a High School band concert, even. We were 2 rows back from "center stage". When they were doing their skits, the performers were maybe 5 feet away from me. I could see the creases in the makeup, that some performers were a LOT older than they wanted to appear. And then, it hits me. I've got highly made-up women on a platform above me dancing in spandex, sequins, and stockings: This is as close as I'm ever going to get to a strip club.

You'd think the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Baily Circus is unchanging, right? Wrong. Two words for you: House Cats. Yes, there's an act in the middle of the 1st act of the Circus where a two trainers do an act with trained housecats. I'd pay real money if Letterman would do a walk-on and and make some quip about "Stupid Pet Tricks". But, it got better. I've been to the circus in Lexington many times, most recently in 2001, when the "Red" Ringling Bros. circus came to town. This is the circus with Bello, a clown/aerialist/acrobat main character with Vanilla Ice's haircut. It's also the traditional, 3-ring "Big Top" show. What we got this time in Lexington is the "Blue" circus, a one-ring circus with a plot (trust me!) that plays like an amalgam of Cirque du Soleil and a broadway show. The theme to the blue circus is the "Circus of Dreams", and they have a faux family (all players in the circus, natch) ...

Back in the dark ages of 1998, I took my first programming class. As was the style of the time, the class was taught in Pascal , a language Nicklaus Wirth designed explicitly to teach structured programming concepts. Think of Pascal like an advanced jet trainer: They teach you all the cool stuff with it, before they turn you loose in the F-15's to wax some MiGs. Anyway, Pascal had some neat concepts and quirks, one of which was the way it made a distinction between 'functions' (subroutines that returned data) and 'procedures' (subroutines that were passed data and operated on it). So, for example, you might have a function called 'double' that took an integer and returned that number times 2: function double( k: integer ): integer; begin double := k*2; end With the above, the parameter 'k' isn't modified, so you'd call the code this way: ... var i:integer, result:integer; i: = 2; result := double(i); # at this point, 'i' is still ...

I went to my first meeting with my new division yesterday, and I must say, It sounds pretty good . A particular highpoint was The Wifi Guy . Nice idea for the new media--funny, viral, very over-the-top. LXK's making a big foray into wireless consumer printers. Thing that gets me--why aren't we doing some sort of co-branding with Apple? Apple's main selling point these days is cordless, wireless, de-cluttered desktops. With this new line, seems like we'd be right there. Anyway, good to be hearing a different tune.

I'm writing some toy apps that integrate with our libraries, and so I was looking for a good, Windows-compliant version of GNU Getopt . Cygwin has a version, but that ties me to the cygwin installation (I think...) Anyway, Getopt is straight POSIX C, and googling around I found this C++ .h called TCLAP it's well documented and implemented as inlines in the tclap/CmdLine.h . Seems very similar to the ruby 'optparse' module in spirit and implementation.