Where Is Joel?

Today I said a difficult goodbye.  My favourite jeans are totally and completely beyond salvaging.  The developed a hole.  I patched them.  They developed a hole around the patch.  I patched them again.  They developed a new hole around the patch and now there will be no more fixing.  I’m sad.  You develop a relationship with jeans.  You love them.  And now they’re gone.  Tragic.  Here I commemorate them with a picture and a last goodbye.

Farewell my faithful friends.

I have been out and about enjoying the weather in Edmonton lately.  Since I like to keep things topical todays post will be:

THE GREAT WAFFLE SHOWDOWN!

Above is depicted the two cheapest waffle brands available at the downtown Sobeys in Edmonton.  Eggo and Our Compliments Belgian Waffles.

Here’s the run down:

Eggo waffles as we all know are light and delicious.  They have small holes and discourage the addition of too much syrup for the perfect Eggo/Butter/Syrup taste.  God that’s lucious.  Sweet.  Succulent.  mmm…  Oh, sorry, I’m supposed to be writing here!  I can’t lie, I love these things.  They cook perfectly in the toaster, so that the inside is warm and the outside nice and crispy.  This one wins.

Our Compliments Belgian Waffle:

Ok, I do like Belgian Waffle.  You put some Strawberries on them, dress them up nice.  Dang that’s good.  The main problem here is how these things cook in the toaster.  Either the inside is not nicely cooked or the outside is too crunchy.  Who wants their Belgian Waffle cooked rock hard?  Not I.  Not I.  Sorry Our Compliments.  Eggo Reigns supreme.

So tonight I googled “where is joel”.  Hey, I can’t pretend I don’t need some sort of affirmation of my awesomeness (Or at least mediocrity.)  What turned up is very irritating.  ”Where is Joel Baum” is the name of a movie.  Come ON!!!  How am I ever supposed to compete with a movie in term of achieving google results.  That is SO not fair!!!!

ZOMG(My favourite new saying of the night)

Joel out.

This is a weird post, but it does bring up something I was thinking about today.  I think I put a fair amount of thought into what I wear on a day to day basis.  Not what I wear around the house, but out of the house.  Now I would have you believe that there is a mere 4 seconds hat goes into me selecting clothes for an occasion, but that is a lie.  Minutes out of every day are actually spent deciding what I should put on and it is situationally specific.

So given that

a) some period of time is exerted on this matter.

b) as much as we hate to admit it it DOES affect how people think of us.

c) despite out best intentions it affects our judgements on others.

What brings about our thoughts on fashion?  I don’t read gossip magazines.  I do read magazines like Wired and Sports Illustrated.  Every page of these magazines has a subtle influence on what I think is cool.  What it ultimately comes down to however is on the street, when I see someone I perceive to be “cool”, or of high social worth some part of me works towards emulating them.  And for them they emulate others etc.  Eventually we all emulate that which publishers, fashion magazines etc. tell us is cool.

What a weird world.  If only I was at the top of that ladder!!!  Haha.  Later y’all..

JJ

Anyone else notice that this site is still in beta?  That’s weird.  Note, The flames lost to the canucks tonight.  …

…

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Disaster.  #utils -30 (utils.me)

So I slept 2 hours last night.  About 4 hours the night before and maybe less the night before that and then again the same the night before.  But I’m running over some code I wrote here and I have done…  the STUPIDEST thing I have ever ever ever ever done since I began programming.  That’s 8 years folks.  It’s so stupid that I actually laughed out loud.  It’s unbelievable that even at my most tired ever my auto-pilot did not steer me away from this.  Anyways, I am running an external program to do some machine learning and I need to keep track of the order the instances being trained are are being written to the file it reads from for later processing and no identifier can be written to the training file.  Natural thing to do, store the instances identifiers in an array right? *WRONG* apparently the natural thing to do is write them to a file as I write the training file and then read the order I wrote them to that file about 10 lines later.  Seriously.  It results in like 600mb of unnecessary file IO in like 10 lines.  I’m sure my delirious self thought there was some good reason to do this, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what that could possibly have been.

*Hanging head in shame.*

The Oh No Graffiti I took a picture of last week has now been covered up:

I kinda liked it more with the graffiti

Found this hole in the sidewalk. Tweeted about it. The City of Edmonton got back to me on twitter to find out where it was to fix. WELL DONE Edmonton!!!!

Soon To Be Fixed!

These decorative poles could use a paint job…  Or I don’t know, maybe some “posters” to cover up the paint job.

Decorative? Pole

I HATE HATE HATE these stupid screens. Yes, I understand that they make colours more vivid or some sort of mumbo jumbo like that but did anyone stop to think that people actually *use* laptops? We carry them around, not sit with them is some sort of dank dark basement. My Macbook is completely impossible to use anywhere that is bright light.
Yesterday while trying to take a picture of how the middle of the screen is brighter in bright sun than the rest of the screen I managed to take this. I actually really like the photo, but seriously, this is actually a picture of my LAPTOP SCREEN. … Take a moment to contemplate that… The following picture is a picture of the actual screen of my laptop. Someone try and tell me that’s good design.

Picture of my MacBook Screen.

It took me a little bit so figure this out so I thought I’d share it.  In order to just get unique elements out of an array try:

my @list = ( "a", "a", "b" );

for( my $i = 0; $i < scalar @uniqueList; $i++){
print $uniqueList[$i];
}

It will print:
ab

Gotta say…  I don’t really understand it.  There is an option on your photo stream to sort by interestingness.  What seems to choose the interestingness is not how often a photo has been viewed, or comments, or anything rational, but rather some voodoo magic.  However it does seem to correlate over the long run with photo views.  Self fulfilling prophesy?  This from a flickr newb keep in mind.