Where I was 40 years ago today

May 15th is an anniversary of note for my family. I've likely bored some of you before with my tornado stories, but here's a link including a picture of the one that rolled up my street that day. If you dig into the Charles City photos there, our house was about halfway between McKinley school and the corner of 8th and Hildreth.

We all survived huddled down in the basement, but the family house lost its roof, was twisted on its foundation about a foot, and the only thing left of the garage was a lawn mower (soon looted) sitting on the empty concrete slab.

A memorable day, even for a six-year-old.

Embarassed

Two of the three guys I work with are Canadian. That means I take more than my fair share of abuse for the stupidity of my country's president / policies / electoral system. Why does Bush have to make it so damn easy for my coworkers to harass me?

Aykroyd vs. Hartman

Nerve has a rundown of the 50 Greatest Commercial Parodies of All Time. In my opinion it boils down to a battle between the over-the-top enthusiasm of Dan Aykroyd vs. the perfectly smarmy Phil Hartman (Belushi makes a good showing too). Change Bank or Bass-o-Matic? You be the judge.

Tastes Like Chicken

JMR and I were very big fans of the Chipolte chicken burrito when we lived back in Minneapolis. They don't seem to have as many Chipolte restaurants out here in Seattle. Turns out that may be a good thing.

Dangers of helium leaks

Going the low-brow route, but I must admit that my inner 12 year old found this funny:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bQpgU67Puo

A Miss South Carolina analogue that actually matters

Various patch-mates have reported enjoying the video in which Miss Teen South Carolina melts down under intense questioning. I personally find the Miss SC video so painful as to be unwatchable. However, the video of Lurita Doan's testimony before the house, where she is shown to have been in clear violation of the Hatch Act, and where the best she can muster is a stuttering "I don't recall" defense (elevated to an art form by another distinguished Bush appointee), is at once painful and pleasing. It's ten minutes instead of fifty seconds, but worth watching.

Taking the GoF to the Woodshed

In this rant (discovered via reddit), Christer Ericson takes the "Gang of Four", otherwise known as the authors of "Design Patterns," to task. My standard line regarding Design Patterns is that it's the worst travesty ever visited on the software engineering profession.

Yes, yes, a couple of the construction patterns are truly useful, but by and large, otherwise smart engineers that have been badly infected with the design patterns meme are worse than useless, they are actively harmful: they end up writing a thousand lines of code to accomplish what could have been done in fifty, nothing can be accomplished in their behemoth frameworks with fewer than five virtual function calls, and they're shocked to discover that the cost of those calls really adds up when they're made smack in the middle of the hottest loop of the application.

My feeling is that the pendulum reached its extreme on this issue a few years ago, but I'm always pleased to see another partisan on my side of the fight.