I have a job interview next week. The head hunter says they are going to quiz me on C++ basics. He says that I should study up because it is all likely stuff that I've forgotten the names of or never used and would only know if I just graduated from some school that teaches C++.

I find it hard to get my head around this. I cannot imagine being stymied by C++ basics. But, lest I rest on imagined laurels, I'll browse through some books. And...

I challenge you to stump me.

Maybe I'm just a sucky parent, but the days that Isaac has off of school always come as a complete surprise to me. He started telling me yesterday that eyelid and I were going to be going with him to his school a week from tomorrow. Trying to figure out what he was talking about, I consulted the school's online calendar. In doing so, I accidentally discovered that there is no school tomorrow.

So as to be ready next time, I have subscribed to the ICS publication of their calendar. When I did so, I discovered that the entry that says there is no class tomorrow says there is no class from 4:20pm through til 4:20pm on Monday. I thought this suspect since it would be much clearer to say no school from 7:30am to 4:20pm Friday and say it again on Monday. I called the school to verify. There is no school tomorrow (or Saturday or Sunday), but there is school on Monday.

Whee! So much for my master plan of staying informed.

Stop what you are doing, and go buy some 1/2 and 1/2 and some chili-garlic paste (probably in the oriental section of your grocery store).

Garlic-Potato Soup

• 7 cups of water
• Vegetable bullion enough for 8 cups
• 5 large Yukon gold potatoes (could use Russets if so inclined)
• 2 heads (bulbs) of garlic (about 20-25 cloves)
• 2 cups of milk
• 1 cup of 1/2 and 1/2
• 2 Tablespoons of butter (softened)
• 1 heaping teaspoon of chili-garlic paste
• 1 teaspoon of salt

Start heating the water with the bullion cubes.

Add the potatoes diced to 1/2" cubes. Peel them or not. I usually peel at least half of them.

Add the garlic grated very fine or pressed with garlic press.

Bring to a boil, then reduce to simmer for 20 minutes

Add the milk.

Purée with an immersion blender (or carefully in batches in a counter-top blender).

Turn off the heat.

Add the 1/2 and 1/2 and the rest of the ingredients. Stir to combine.

Try not to hurt yourself slurping it down. Recommended: a loaf or two of nice crusty bread to dip in the soup.

I just saw a blurb on CNN saying that Democrats are blowing things out of proportion by saying that insurance companies consider Being a Victim of Domestic Violence to be a pre-existing condition. The reality is that 42 states have laws against letting insurance companies do this. They have the laws because insurance companies used to do this. In the other eight states, the insurance companies that CNN queried claimed they do not do this.

If there are going to be private health-insurance companies (and I don't think there should be), I propose we simply ban Pre-Existing Conditions. If an insurance company offers plan X at Y-dollars per year to anyone, it has to offer plan X at Y-dollars per year to everyone. This is group health insurance where every subscriber is in your group.

The problem with the above proposal is that many people would forgo insurance at all until they've been diagnosed with a serious condition (like Was Just in a Car Accident). This has to go along with some universal coverage scheme. The universal coverage scheme would probably have to include a mandated Every Provider Must Provide a Plan That Covers at Least This Stuff (or 'as much as Medicare') for This Amount of Money or Less provision.

This should be easy for the actuaries. It is much easier to get real numbers on the whole population than it is to get real numbers on a hand-selected group of folks. Set your rates accordingly for your plans.

[Been coding a bunch the last few days, and I just tried C-c C-c to recompile that last paragraph. 8^)]

Here are to videos that I created doing inverse Fourier transforms of data pulled from a simulated swarm. For more details, see the blog posts linked with each.

Dear TavernOnFrance.com,

I tried viewing your website today from my iPhone.  As your site is
100% Flash, I cannot see it from my iPhone.

I then tried viewing it from my Macbook Pro running Safari under
MacOSX 10.6.  No dice there either.  I see a flashy animation of a T
and hear some snappy music forever.  There is never any text.  Never
anything to click.  And, eventually, my browser totally locks up so
that I cannot even go back to the previous page I was on.

I was thinking about eating there tonight, but I can't get a sense of
the menu... so maybe some other time.

ttyl,
Patrick

ps.  I tried sending this to you in email.  Alas,
www@tavernonfrance.com and webmaster@tavernonfrance.com
both bounce.  Thanks for playing.  Stick to the yellow
pages.

Fourier Transforms in JavaScript. Making your browser work for its money....

I spent way too much time today debugging the difference between these two lines of code:

(defconstant +look-up+ #( '() '(:foo) '(:bar) '(:foo :bar) ))
(defconstant +look-up+ #(  ()  (:foo)  (:bar)  (:foo :bar) ))

Specifically, I was doing something like this:

(defun decode-flags ( flags )
   (elt +look-up+ flags))

(defun somewhere-else ( my-flags )
   (when (member :foo (decode-flags my-flags))
      (do-something-spectacular)))

I had written the first (defconstant ...) line. It didn't work at all. I thoroughly checked and rechecked all other aspects of my program. I thought I was thoroughly checking the results of decode also. It turns out though that unless you're very keen, you don't really think much of the extra quote mark in the output of the (decode-flags ...) routine.

Essentially though, rather than (decode-flags ...) returning a list that contains :foo for example, it returns a list which contains the symbol QUOTE and a sub-list which contains :foo. Oops.

Almost two years in, I am still getting used to when I have to quote things and when I don't. This is especially difficult when it comes to type-specifiers. *shrug*

I just saw this article about embarrasing terrorist plot failures via Bruce Schneier's blog and thought some of y'all (especially you boba, hence the use of y'all) might love it, too. I am laughing just remembering it.