I am … unhindered by talent

MJ tipped me to this amazing method name in the Matcher interface in JMock2:

void _dont_implement_Matcher___instead_extend_BaseMatcher_()

Yeah, I’m not making that up.

As the documentation goes on to explain:

This method simply acts a friendly reminder not to implement Matcher directly and instead extend BaseMatcher. It’s easy to ignore JavaDoc, but a bit harder to ignore compile errors :).

The third grader in me loves stuff like that. To be honest, I’m not entirely convinced that this is a great idea - it smells like a workaround instead of a solution. Still, it’s clever and funny and accomplishes a meaningful task, which is more than I can say for most code in this world.

Makes me want to go do this just for fun. I just need to create an interface you shouldn’t implement … Well, like I said, I’m not sure it’s such a good idea after all…

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Those crazy folks at eatbrains.com organized a flashmob-esque event wherein a large number of brain eating zombies roamed a high end shopping district in S.F. doing, well, zombie kinds of things like chewing on iMacs at the Apple Store. (But can zombies really flash?!? Or was it more of an amble-mob event?)

I love the fact that the Apple Store employees thought it was cool to be invaded:

It may be worth noting that the Westfield Mall and Disney security tried to bar the zombies from entering, but Apple store security did not. In fact, salespeople were jostling one another for a position where they could take the best photo of the zombies (or themselves with the zombies, or their brains being eaten by the zombies).

Great quote from focalmatter.com:

In an ironic twist of fate, the zombies meet another group of people seeking brains to consume: Scientologists.

Apparently this is my 500th blog post. And to think that I could have done something of consequence to commemorate this essentially insignificant event :-).

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I’ve been wrestling on and off for several months with a Firefox bug with considerably more regularity than still counts as fun. I try to move one Firefox window (maybe the download manager) out of the way, and the darn thing pops back to align with the upper left corner of the other window. If I only have one window, it’s no big deal; thanks to tabs this is in fact often the case. There are, however, times when I really need to be able to see multiple windows. I may want to check on lengthy download, for example, or I need two windows so I can follow instructions/tips from one web site while working with another.

Turns out that I’m not alone, and this thing is an official bug with a lengthy pedigree and a fair amount of associated grumpiness. So go vote for this bug to raise its importance! This will hopefully finally get someone assigned to it so we can get this thing resolved.

Thanks.

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Saturday we were happy participants in the wedding of Carol Ford (UMM Science Division Office Goddess, excellent musician, and master gardener) and Chuck Waibel (writer and co-conspirator in Carol’s winter CSA project).

The wedding was a wonderfully relaxed outdoor affair at Earthrise Farm, with various pets and farm animals wandering rather freely in and out of the ceremony. The “dress code” was relaxed and fun; Carol’s litmus test was to ask yourself if “I look good and I could wear this for hours without itching”. A key feature was the almost complete lack of schmaltz, which is pretty uncommon, especially in primarily “roll your own” weddings.

I took a wrong turn at one point that lost us 10 minutes or so on the way down, and we were consequently concerned that we were cutting it a bit close on the time. Conveniently, the bride’s father got even more lost on his way in, and was in fact quite a bit later than us. Since they weren’t going to start without him, this give us (and several others) plenty of time to mingle and chat despite the time of our arrival.

After the ceremony, we headed over to the Dawson Town Hall for a fine potluck reception party, including tons of excellent music from their many talented friends. Sub-Evil Boy and I even got to do two of our songs ( “Crabgrass” and “Taco Man”) to what was an almost entirely new audience, which was fun.

Congratulations to Carol and Chuck, and best wishes for a long and happy life together! If you’re really bored you can check out the less bad of the zillions of photos I took. Watch it as a slide show on the high speed setting, and parts are almost like a really bad animated GIF of the event!

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Despite Skatje’s warnings (via PeeZed) about the crowds (or what passes for such here in sleepy Morris), we all saw Pirates of the Carribean 3 tonight.

By the time we saw the warning (great use of PeeZed’s blog!), Sub-Evil Boy had already headed out in an effort to stake out some front row seats for his friends. WeatherGirl and I figured we’d head over around 7:40pm and see what the lines were like. It was definitely busy for a Morris Theatre showing of a film, but certainly not too insanely crowded, so we went on in. Skatje and the two others behind the candy counter were looking pretty busy, though!

This film was definitely a vast improvement over the mess of the second film and quite enjoyable. Probably not as fresh and creative as the first Pirates, but we giggled our way through fair bits of it. I’m guessing that PeeZed will be well amused by several parts :-). The little crab rock thing was totally cool.

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Please vote - options for "24 hours of Flickr", originally uploaded by Unhindered by Talent.

OK, folks - here’s the bits and pieces from my ambling about on "24 hours of Flickr". I’ve got until Monday, 21 May, to decide which single image to submit. They’ve been contacting certain folks and letting them know that they’ve already "accepted" their photos for the book. Based on that evidence, they seem to favor (but not exclusively) photos with people in.

I’ve had "Tomorrow resting on yesterday" in their pool for the best part of two weeks and haven’t gotten any response, so I’m thinking that might be a no go. "Waiting" is probably my favorite shot in the set, but it’s pretty heavily manipulated, and I have no real sense of how they’ll view that.

CoryQ’s weighed in with a vote for "Breaking through".

Any thoughts? I’d certainly appreciate any ideas or suggestions!

1. A bit out of place, 2. Waiting, 3. Things we’re not supposed to do, 4. Detritus, 5. New, and slightly less so, 6. Have chairs, will travel, 7. Red roofing truck, 8. Distorted views, 9. 5th and Colorado, 10. Texture (and color), 11. Yellow and green (but not lights), 12. New leaves, old seeds, 13. Hero of the guitar, 14. Considering the matter, 15. Cups and dice, 16. You don’t always see what you’re looking at, 17. Sight/Vision, 18. Tomorrow resting on yesterday, 19. Cherry blossom, 20. Broken stems, 21. Breaking through, 22. Delivery mechanisms, 23. Lost seed

Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.

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5th and Colorado, originally uploaded by Unhindered by Talent.

Ah, posting again. Grades are (finally) all turned in, and now I can turn at least some of my attention to other pursuits (like Flickr and blogging) that are of little professional consequence but keep me from going insane :-).

This was taken on my "24 hours of Flickr walk". There aren’t many of these old street signs left in town, but the few we do have are cool.

Being a "sprung from nothing" railroad town, the bulk of Morris has a nice, regular grid system of streets. The east-west streets follow a very sensible numbering system (5th, 6th, 7th, etc.) The north-south "avenues", however, are named after U.S. states (e.g., Colorado), but in a (as far as I have ever been able to work out) completely haphazard and random fashion.

The two avenues that flank the railroad tracks that run through the middle of town are Atlantic (commonly known as Main Street) and Pacific. This sort of makes sense (Atlantic on the east of the tracks, Pacific on the west), but after that it’s a jumble. We live on 10th and Nevada, and the next street over is Wyoming. Colorado and Montana are also adjacent, but completely on the other side of town from us. If there was any rhyme or reason to their choices and ordering of states it completely escapes me. Consequently everyone can tell you the numbered street for things, but rarely can they tell you the cross avenue.

CoryQ has pointed out that they aren’t ordered by date of admission into the union. I hadn’t ever thought to check that, but a quick look definitely rules out that possibility.

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Waiting, originally uploaded by Unhindered by Talent.

Another from 5 May (24 hours of Flickr). I ended up playing with this for way too long. I liked the composition, but the lighting was quite flat, so I kept fiddling in hopes of making something happen. Eventually I settled on the GIMP’s retinex filter, as it really helped pop the mid-ground boxcar on the left which, in turn, really helps balance the image.

I have no idea what retinex actually does, but I quite like its effect, especially on flat, largely monochromatic images. Like any trick, though, I have to be careful to not overuse it.

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Stumbled across this gem via Naughton. I just about wet myself laughing during the presentation, and I thought I’d rupture something when he got to the bell sound effect during the graph presentation. I also had to go find the actual PowerPoint file so I could see the small print that got lost in the video. Stay through to the end - there’s an easter egg worth waiting for :-).

Yeah, I love PowerPoint. And this guy’s got it pegged, even down to the semi-embarrassed, slightly rushed clicking through some of the adornments on the graphs. A perfect example of what Dijkstra used to scathingly call “Panchromatic Concept Animation”.

More and more of our students assume that they must use PP if they’re going to present more than three sentences in front of more than two people. Worse, I fear that more than a few have never explicitly considered the possibility that there might be an alternative! Given that the vast majority of their models are a fright, it’s no surprise that their slides often make me want to cry.

Happily, our CSci majors tend to make very nice slides for their senior sem presentations (in part, of course, because we work closely with them), and the slides for all five presentations at our CSci senior seminar conference two weeks were clean and focussed. Nothing blinked, flew, faded or fiddled. No one had to click backwards through a 37 part incremental reveal to get to a previous slide. In short, they did a great job!

I seem to be on a weird chicken/egg theme here recently. I’ll try to stop soon.

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A family tragedy, originally uploaded by Unhindered by Talent.

Sunday night I was walking home around 10pm, and discovered a big tree limb had come down about a block from our house. Amazingly I could see, there in the pitch dark, that there was a full clutch of eggs lying cushioned and (apparently) unbroken amongst the shattered wood.

There had clearly been a large hollow space in the limb, which had probably been the weak spot where the limb gave in the high winds. A winged couple had set up house and home there, building a nest and laying at least seven or eight eggs. The hollow was also full of soft sawdust and such, presumably the product of the many critters that had made their homes there and contributed to the hollowing of the limb.

In the drop (which must have been at least 30-40 feet), the eggs came out of their nest, but were sufficiently cushioned that they remained largely intact. In the dark, in fact, they looked undamaged, although if you look at the large version of the pictures it’s clear that many were cracked. There was also one broken wide open on the sidewalk (although I suspect that might have been the work of an animal), and I saw another broken in the grass the next morning.

Suspecting that animals would scatter the scene overnight, I ran home, grabbed my camera, and went back to take some photos. Most were pretty awful - framing and focus in the nearly pitch dark isn’t my forte - but several provide a reasonable document of it all. It’s not exactly George Shiras, but it’ll do :-).

Here we have the clutch as I found them. I’ll try to post a few more later. Many of them are detail shots (since I like detail shots :->), but there’s also a shot or two with a little more context.

Note: I’m pretty sure this came down in the same storm that ripped off a big part of PeeZed’s old willow.

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