No Open Blockers

I turned 30 a few weeks ago. Ok, so it’s probably time I learned how to ride a bike.

The actual learning process itself was pretty uneventful. My wife and I went up to the parking lot of the community pool, I got on her bike, and just went. No catastrophic falls, no accidentally riding into oncoming traffic. Twenty minutes later we were at Dick’s buying me my own shiny bike.

I became addicted. I’ve gone riding every day since then, even if it was just 30 minutes at lunch. I’m happy to report that I haven’t fallen yet. Though after that much riding that quickly, I have to admit that my ass is killing me.

That isn’t to say it’s been without incident. My wife and I have been taking the baby for rides after work (she has a baby seat on her bike, I’m not daring enough to risk Leanne’s well being, just my own). Every time we go, I insist we leave the front door unlocked. That’s in addition to my wife leaving the garage door unlocked when she closes it. Call me paranoid.

Call me unlucky too. The one time I forget to leave the front door unlocked is the one time I accidentally locked the garage door when I closed it. Seven years of instinct in simultaneously closing and locking the door kicked in before I realized it. Half a second after I heard the click I realized what had happened. Then I cursed. Loudly.

It gets worse. Here we find the family locked out of the house, yet I could see the spare key. It was in the little box attached to our front door for when realtors come to show the house. There it hung a mere 4 inches below the lock itself, mocking me.

I thought back to a month ago when we put the house on the market. The realtor gave us an option…

“Do you guys want the fancy digital one that only realtors can unlock or a combination one that you guys could unlock as well?”

The geek in me smelled technology.

“We’ll take the digital one. We’ve been here seven years and haven’t locked ourselves out yet, why the hell would we need the combo lock?”

In addition to my keys, I also left my cell phone inside. So on top of everything else, I had to suffer the indignity of asking a neighbor to borrow his phone so I could call our realtor to come let me in. To make sure I fully paint the picture of how big of a douche I looked like, realize I was wearing one of those stupid looking bike helmets at the time.

So one 45 minute bike ride later, our realtor showed up to let us back into our own house. Any longer and I was about to carry out my carefully devised yet extraordinarily stupid plan to scale the outside deck to the second floor screen door into the kitchen which, by our estimates, had about a 66% chance that we left it unlocked.

Getting back to the actual bike riding, the timing of my new found skill is great. I was running out of new options for cardio at the gym. We had been looking for something to do outdoors as a family. And I had been looking into possible Python projects for the summer, and I already know of a really cool combination of the two.

So what did I learn from this whole experience? Apparently not much, since I once again declined when the realtor offered to swap out the digital key holder for the combination one (I don’t think she wanted to be called out here again the next time we do this). Mmm… the sweet smell of digital technology on my front door…

When I started this site, it was meant as a trial of using a blog to communicate with my students. Around the same time I had been trying to maintain a separate work blog. That was too much to handle and I think there is a cross over audience between them, so the two kinda merged into one. This site won since I’m hosting it on my web server and not surprisingly, having full access to the server is better than limited access.

The whole idea of “Professor Jay’s Notebook” was partially due to the school focus and partially due to the fact that I wanted to use a really sweet notebook-style theme I found. However, I have a short attention span and tend to change the theme every 6 months or so. And to be honest, I was getting kind of tired of the whole “Professor Jay” moniker.

So, I’ve been slowly migrating this site over to a new domain: noopenblockers.com. I set up automatic redirects so notebook.novasurv.com will still work, just automatically kick you over to here. I’ll leave it that way for a while, but to anyone using the RSS feed, be sure to update the link.

Why No Open Blockers? It came from a previous project as we were trying to ship the 2.0 release. We had progressed past the stage of “It actually compiled? Ship it.” to having a list of prioritized bugs. The next stage of just wanting to be done had migrated to “No open blockers? Ship it.” (where blocker was our highest priority for bugs). I liked the phrase and ran with it.

Of course I bought her a Mario. A Donkey Kong too.

Sorry for the quality, my wife’s phone is such crap that it might as well be a banana.

She apparently spent the day carrying him around and hugging him (I was at school at the time). And when I take her to GameStop, she runs to the Mario games yelling his name.

Hell. Yeah.

I’ve been boycotting the movies for about a year now. I don’t really like… well, people in general, so the prospect of sitting in my family room watching a movie three months after it was out in crowded, noisy theaters is really appealing. And with the recent flood of pure crap in the theaters, at the end of the day I’m still just watching Fight Club rather than renting the new releases anyway.

I do love the feeling of a good summer movie and was happy to realize that this summer shows promise. After poking around IMDB for a while, I came up with a quick list of potential summer movies to get me out of the house. Maybe.

• X-Men Origins: Wolverine – Actually, I’m already behind on this list. I just got back from seeing it. Surprisingly better than I expected. It had the cool explanation aspect that is usually reserved for the first movie in a comic book series with enough foreshadowing that you can pick up on because you know the story. Really excited to see what they do with the next ones about Magneto and Xavier. Though I have to admit, I’m pissed they didn’t get Sawyer from Lost to play Gambit. That would have rocked.
• Star Trek – Over the course of my life I’ve watched approximately 6 minutes of Star Trek. I’ve just never been into it. This one, however, has me pretty excited. It’s got the guy from Heroes, the guy from Harold and Kumar, and the guy from Shaun of the Dead (too damn lazy to look up any of their names). How can it not be good?
• Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen – I have virtually no doubt in my head that this is going to suck. I loved the first one, it was the epitome of summer blockbusters. Sure, the plot made about as much sense as the ramblings of my 21 month old daughter, but seeing giant robots throwing each other through buildings kinda negates the need for a plot. That said, I’m afraid they are going to try to really out do the first one in this one, in the end producing a disaster of a sequel. Let’s just hope it doesn’t do to Pirates of the Caribbean (the first one was amazing) what its abominations they called sequels did.
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – Anyone reading this site for longer than 3 minutes will realize I’m enough of a geek that this shouldn’t come as a surprise. This was my favorite book in the series and I’ve been pretty happy with the movies so far, so I’m hoping it doesn’t disappoint.
• G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra – A Transformers and a G.I. Joe movie in the same summer. I think part of my excitement is that it makes me feel young again in a year where I turned 30. Whatever the motivation, this has the potential to completely rock (like the first Transformers) or be a complete failure (like Spiderman 3 — someone needs to be publicly flogged for that one).
• Inglourious Basterds – Ok, so Quentin completely dropped the ball with Death Proof. It would have sucked on its own but was made all that much worse by having to follow Planet Terror which was simply awesome. But I’m still a big Quentin fan and this looks like it has some real promise. In short, it’s Brad Pitt kicking the shit out of Nazis in graphic gore. It’s like Fight Club 2. Except with Nazis.
• Ghosts of Girlfriends Past – A cookie cutter romantic comedy that is the theatrical equivalent of stabbing yourself in the eyes with a spoon. Anyone who thought for even a second that I was going to see this, please send me your IP address so I can add you to my firewall. And then go find the nearest person and ask them to slap you for me.

I just found out that Hugo Weaving is the voice of Megatron in both Transformers and its upcoming sequel. That’s in addition to playing Elrond in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Agent Smith in The Matrix Triology, and V in V for Vendetta. If it somehow came out that he was in Empire Strikes Back he’ll legally be declared a god among geeks.

Last night was the last lecture of the semester. I now send my kids off into the wild with hopes they won’t fall into darkness (read: become a C# programmer).

And sure enough, after a semester of my code snippets of pure genius on this blog, I find the WP-Syntax plugin that offers really sweet syntax highlighting for multiple languages. Just in time for a three month break from being able to force students to read my blog.

This also means at some point, I should go back and reformat all my code posts to use the plugin. What a bitch, but really, the syntax highlighting is pretty damn sweet. Here are a few examples taken from the plugin site itself.

Java

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public class Example {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    System.out.println("Hello World");
  }
}

PHP

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<div id="foo">
<?php
  function foo() {
    echo "Hello World!\\n";
  }
?>
</div>

Ruby

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class Example
  def example(arg1)
    return "Hello: " + arg1.to_s
  end
end

Python (ok, Hello World isn’t a great example for Python, come with me on this one)

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print "Hello, World!"

Bash (again, shitty example, but I’m really excited bash is supported)

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echo 'Hello World'

Even SQL and Scala are supported. This rocks.

So I apologize to anyone who needs to look at my old code snippets. I had to yank out the CSS style that formatted the background with the white and green line highlighting and numbers, so they aren’t quite as apparent as they used to be. I’ll try to convert the most relevant ones to next weeks’ final first, then eventually (read: annoyingly slowly) convert the rest.

UPDATE: HA. I ghetto hacked the plugin to default my old code indication tags to the plugin based tags (defaulting to Java since 95% of the stuff I post here is Java). It’s not the most ideal situation and I’ll eventually write a script to run through my posts making the changes, but for now at least my OCD isn’t completely pegged by the fact that all my code posts looked like shit.

I went downstairs to get more coffee and came back to find a substitute sitting in at work for me. Might as well put her to work.

This picture doesn’t do justice to the scenario, but she’s banging away at my second keyboard mounted under the desk.