At the suggestion of my wife, I started reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I’m about a third of my way through it and it’s a very enjoyable read.

What is a fleur-de-lis?

🔗 Fleur-de-lis

While attending school in Louisville, I observed many fleurs-dis-lis (⚜️) throughout the city. I had seen the symbol before (most notably used by the New Orleans Saints), but I had no idea what it meant. As part of my bus commute research series, I decided to take a look and see

a) what the fleur-de-lis symbolizes
b) why it is associated with Louisville

The fleur-de-lis is a stylized lily and is commonly used as a decorative symbol. Apparently, many saints are often depicted with a lily, which is why I often associate the fleur-de-lis with a religious connotation. It seems tied to French history and is often associated with the French monarchy, but it is often seen in other coats of arms across Europe.

Why is the fleur-de-lis associated with Louisville?

Basically, places that saw strong French settlement during European settlement adopted this symbol. Louisville was one of these areas (many settlements along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers were strong French settlements, which is why the fleur-de-lis is popular throughout these areas). It also seems likely that the fleur-de-lis is chosen to pay homage to French contributions during the Revolutionary War. This symbol is so much a apart of Louisville’s identity that it is included in the Louisville Metro Seal and the Flag.

🎧 I can feel this narcolepsy slide…

🔗 Extract from Plato’s Republic: On That Which is Correct Politically

Smart and funny.

I think a future hobby I might get into will be posting random pictures of Macho Man Randy Savage on a new tumblr site.

For silly reasons, I moved this site to be a Github Pages site. At first, I thought I would enjoy the git commit/push dance with writing posts. The novelty of this has worn off over time. I’m now in the process of writing a simple Swift CLI to post to my site. This CLI takes in a file, creates the file in my repo, then uploads the data associated with that file. It’s an interesting way of using up my idle time to reinvent the wheel.

🔗 Horsepower

I spend approximately 1.5 hours on a bus most workdays. I recently had an idea of finding an subject of interest and reading about it while on the bus. Topics can vary and I may include any number of links for the subject.

The first subject that I thought of was Horsepower. Specifically, I was curious about the origin of the unit of measurement. For brevity, Wikipedia did not disappoint.

[James] Watt defined and calculated the horsepower as 32,572 ft·lbf/min, which was rounded to an even 33,000 ft·lbf/min.

Source

Of course there is a standard for calculating Horsepower for automobile engines as dictated by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), but I also find it interesting that there are other variations of the Horsepower unit in use. I figured there would be an Imperial and Metric version, but I had no idea there was a “Boiler Horsepower” or a “Tax Horsepower”.

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.

— Oscar Wilde

And you may ask yourself, Well… How did I get here?

via @davewiner. I love this image.

🔗 The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA’s Voyager Probes Across the Universe

‘‘I would not leave my wife to go with Angelina Jolie, as exciting as that sounds,’’ he told me. ‘‘And I would not leave Voyager to go to the new Mars missions. I will not leave Voyager until it ceases to exist. Or until I cease to exist.’’

Testing a microblog post workflow. 🚀

My son’s daycare has an Anakin Skywalker figurine missing his right hand. ✋🏻

Floating point equality is hard when you don’t think about it.

You Know You're not Really Peter Pan, Don't You?

This is only a dream. When you wake up, you’ll just be Peter Banning - a cold, selfish man who drinks too much, is obsessed with success, and runs and hides from his wife and children!

🔗 The long arrow operator in C++

I’ve always enjoyed a step into the absurd. This long arrow operator fits the bill.

Now, before we continue, you should realize that this post is not a serious one.

This also introduced me to the left arrow and the WTF operator.

🔗 Replacing My Kid’s College Fund with a “Start Something” Fund

I understand wanting to provide opportunities to your kids, but this feels misguided. I think providing options is the most important thing one can do for their children. Max may not be like me, and that’s okay. Actually, that’s better than okay; it’s great.

This culture of entrepreneurship is good in small doses, but it’s hardly the silver bullet that people want it to be.

Having said that, the author’a idea is an interesting one. I just find it to be a bit shortsighted.

🔗 NBA Jam Oral History

I loved playing NBA Jam. I remember getting royally pissed at the “rubber-banding system” when I was a kid. It was entertaining to read the developers' story.

Friday nights are for movies and pizza. 🍕

Father's Day

I had the good fortune of watching Cars 3 today with the reason I’m able to celebrate Father’s Day. Max had been looking forward to this day for the past week. We talked about how we were going to take him to see this (his second theater experience) and how we would get popcorn (his first popcorn experience). Leading up to today, Max talked about this at least once a day. He was excited.

I reserved tickets a few days in advance just to ensure we had seats (our local theater is fairly small; I didn’t think a Sunday morning showing would be sold out, but when your theater seats about 50 people for the screen it would be showing on, you can never tell). Our showtime was 10:45AM. Easily the earliest showtime I’ve ever been to for a movie at a theater. I can remember staying up for midnight showings on Thursday night releases. Now I’m hitting up brunch specials for Pixar movies.

Before the movie, we went out and had breakfast. We shared a smorgasbord of scrambled eggs, bacon, hash browns, and hot cakes. Max was a bit restless leading up to the food being served. Fortunately, there was a coloring book with crayons at the restaurant. Unfortunately, Max didn’t want to color, but insisted that I color the picture so that he could watch. The juxtaposition of this meal to popcorn at the theater was definitely something I had yet to experience (even for a man who loves brinner).

Cars was the first Pixar movie that we watched with Max. I feel like there is a lot of dislike towards Cars out there (maybe this is a byproduct of Cars 2). It also feels like hating on Pixar these days is as about as fashionable as hating on Eagles. I am not one of those people. Maybe my tastes are unrefined and I’m easy to please, but I’ve enjoyed every Pixar movie I’ve seen. I even enjoyed Cars 2. It’s not my favorite, but it amused me and gave me a few dad joke chuckles. I felt that Cars 3 is better than Cars 2. Maybe not as good as Cars, but it’s still pretty good (except for the fact that Chick Hicks wasn’t voiced by Michael Keaton and that nearly ruined the movie for me). However, my enjoyment of the film may be skewed by the fact that Max seemed to have thoroughly enjoyed the movie.

After the movie, Max was ready to get up and leave before we could stick around for the end of the credits. Alas, I do not know if there is anything special after the credits of Cars 3 (I assume there is, but I did not get to see it). We walked into the lobby and Max looked up at me and said, “I want to race”. So I did what any responsible father would do: we raced. Once we got outside, he held my hand and we raced to the car. Making car noises the entire time. It was a pretty special moment.

I’m now attempting to alter the Python script to prefix the posts with the proper yaml metadata. 🐍

This is a test! Just a trial balloon. 🎈

I’m kind of infatuated with micro.blog. The idea of “micro” blogging is right up my alley (with my limited time and attention to a full fledged site). So much so, that I’m not starting a new feed for these types of posts.

That's a Hell of an Old Hound Dog You Got There

What’s he go by?

On January 18th, 2017, I made one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made in my life. After a short battle with cancer, Ashley and I decided to put down Buckley. We adopted Buckley in March of 2008. Buckley has been a great companion. He knew all of my fears, anxieties, and secrets. We had many highs together and very few lows. On Wednesday, I quipped that I wish I had many little Buckleys. However, the truth is if I had many Buckleys, then he wouldn’t have been as special. I love him so much and I miss him greatly.

🔗 How I’d Teach Computer Science

I think this is an interesting idea, but it’s a bit short sited. I can’t emphasize this enough, but Computer Science != software development. There is definitely overlap between the two, however, it is certainly possible to have one without the other. I have met many software developers who were excellent at writing software that didn’t know the first thing about the time complexity of a given algorithm. I feel that distilling computer science down to what equates as process training is a disservice to the Computer Science field (says someone with a Masters of Engineering in Computer Engineering and Computer Science).

I do think offering courses with development methodologies in the curriculum is a worthwhile goal for college course work. I’m embarrassed to admit that fresh out of my college course work, I was fairly unfamiliar with source control. I had classes that taught us how to create UML diagrams to map model relationships for our OOD assignments, but I had not learned how to properly use source control, or how to plan a project, or what constitutes a good bug report. Shortly after landing my first job, I felt shame in what I didn’t know. I felt like a failure because I was unfamiliar with some of the technology stack. I felt inadequate around coworkers even though I held the highest degree. I remember being bitter towards my education.

Over time, my bitterness faded. I learned the different methodologies, different languages, and different tools of the trade. These came easy to me with a little patience. I still wish I would have had professors who had pushed us to use some of these tools/methodologies in our projects, but I eventually forgave them. I learned to be proud of my Computer Science background and it eventually set me apart from others in my field. It alone does not make me a better developer, but it’s an extra tool in my toolbox that others may not possess. I think this appreciation for my education has turned me off toward some of the formal education bashing that resides in my profession. There are many developers who tend to negatively view a traditional education. That’s okay. It’s their right. I just want to point out that those things are not equal, but they also don’t have to be mutually exclusive either.