Friday the 13th. Who’s superstitious? Not me, but I’ve been around long enough to know there is such a thing as dumb luck. I’ve met a few sincerely lucky people in my life, but that is overbalanced by a shitload of uneducated, lazy, maladjusted types with horrible attitudes concerning the rights of others. Dumb luck says don’t ignore a $455,000,000 jackpot.
The highlighted number is a donated ticket from the bakery. We’ve got a blustery winter day here with some light rain so that may be today's big outing. Noon coffee, that’s where I learned the lotto was that much and also that Nicki’s Restaurant closed the doors. That’s the place across from Barnet's (hardware),established 1962 (if I recall the sign). The waitress who worked there 17 years showed up last week and said there was no notice. They came in for work and the doors were locked. Like the phone company, all talk of good employee relations is nonsense generated for public consumption.
Nicki’s was an institution but I quit going there around five years ago when they unbundled the coffee from their breakfast special. It fools people for a short while but even the die-hard regulars quickly learn that unbundling is a cheap trick to increase the overall prices. I believe the $2.99 “special” wound up costing me $6 or $7 and I never went back.
Questions coming in already. The highlighted ticket means if I win on those numbers, the prize is to be split along a pre-agreed formula at the bakery. The gist is that each other participant gets $20 million. Totally Honest John, no it isn’t in writing. But should we win, I can guarantee you 48 months later I will be the only one left holding more money than I started with. Arrogant? I got fifty arrogant bucks says I'm right about that, safe bet because how you gonna prove otherwise? It's almost as if I said all that on purpose.
Ah, the sharp-eyed note, that is an ordinary household light switch held on by computer bolts. Why didn’t I use something fancy? It’s like this. I’ve never had an ordinary household light switch fail on me. Ever. This product was unwieldy to use without these improvements. No matter how you brought the thing into action, at least one of the cables was dragging along the ground. As can be inferred from the photo, club equipment does not get lent out. Ever.
It is an unfortunate sign of our times that more products arrive without a switch. Our electronic project taught us switches are expensive and tricky to wire, but the lack of a switch means you have to walk back over to the outlet and pull the plug instead. It spells what I’ve been saying, that America is losing its lead in the world from this type of thinking, where the inconvenience factor is passed on to the consumer. Once one manufacturer leaves out the switch, all of the rest must follow suit or be undercut. But what can you do? Have the government require a switch and unleash the Ann Coulters to admonish them half to death?
ADDENDUM
After another round of Arduino testing, I find I cannot recommend the device as I used to. The problem is the C+ language. You cannot properly learn the Arduino without tackling the dreadful constructions of the C+ language and libraries. The Arduino is complicated enough for a beginner making it damn naïve of the manufacturer to add the burden of learning C+ syntax. C+ and its derivatives are by far the worst programming language ever conceived.
I spent 70 hours reading and research to learn the capabilities and operation of the Arduino from scratch. But after 275 hours of wrestling with C+ code—and remember I have two advanced degrees in programming—I cannot work with C+ without keeping a reference manual and a notebook of command and punctuation exceptions nearby. That is not, by any definition, how advanced computer code works.
One of the worst features of C+ is the structureless layout. In good code, there should eventually arise a pattern of what represents good logic flow. But in C+ there is no such tendency. Every “programmer” will do what works regardless of any inherent flaws in his code. (This is jokingly referred to as the “count the feet and divide by two” approach to finding how many people are in a room.) It makes the code hard to maintain as one has to read every line instead of looking for familiar arrangements, say a subroutine or a loop.
C+ is so backward, it allows and even encourages variables to be declared locally. A local variable embedded deep in cryptic code is the surefire mark of a bad programmer. Good advance planning dictates that all variables should be declared in a separate section of both global and local scope. It is insufferable stupidity to write code that forces a debugger to search through command lines to find embedded variables.
Each and every computer language should have one and only one print command that, by default, prints literally what follows in an expected manner. The command may be modified by parameters for special cases, but anything beyond that smells of illiterate programmers. Can the illiterate program? Certainly. Look at HTML, Javascript, Perl, or the entire original IBM computer department. That’s who is responsible for why computers can’t distinguish between “A” and “a”. The whole lot of them bastards are the lowest form of life known on university grounds, yes, even lower than jocks: the one-finger typist.
