3MF

10 GOTO FirstProgram

I was chatting with NewGuy™ at work and he asked me how i got started programming. That got me thinking about the first program i ever wrote. I think my first experience with a computer program was with 3-2-1 Contact magazine. I probably got the subscription from some fundraiser at school, but it was a publication based on the children's television show of the same name. It was filled with science related articles. Occasionally they would list a good-ole line-numbered BASIC program that you could retype and run. I would spend hours entering these into my Tandy 1000 RLX. I learned the basic syntax by copying and adjusting that code. I think the first program of my own design was some sort of mad-lib generator. At some point i dumped the line-numbers and moved to QBASIC. I made some really pathetic games with that tool but at least they had graphics. I wish i could see those old programs (and magazines) again.

Campus crawl

I headed out to MSU today to visit Lara. A while back, I found a computer for her to take to school. Apparently the school networking staff now hand out CD-ROMs to connect the student computers to the school network; however, the CD only works with Windows XP and her machine has Windows 2000. They included directions for other operating systems but she's not the most computer savvy person so she left them for me to tackle.

After i got the computer online and she checked her e-mail, we took a walk around campus to see where her classes are. I thought the same thing then as i did when i was a high school senior visiting the school for the first time: this is a big place. She lives in the Brody Complex which is way on the edge of campus. Being a music major, most of her classes are in the same building which luckily isn't too far away.

"I wish i could go back to college," from Avenue Q, started playing in my head. It really is like a whole other world out there. It would be so much fun to be able to live in an environment where the only thing you have to worry about learning. We passed the marching band practicing in a field playing the fight song. People were reading books beneath the trees. Joggers were making their way about with iPods in hand. The boys were playing Halo on their computers. Lunch plans were scribbled across white boards (many of which now sport a metallic-like finish). The only disappointing part was how old i felt when i saw how young the freshmen looked.

The whole trip seemed familiar. I had a good friend who, several years ago, actually lived in the same building, just a few doors down from where Lara is now. I occasionally would head out there to make a visit. On the drive out, i saw all the exit markers and geographical features that i had almost forgotten about. My hands just seemed to know when to turn. It almost felt like traveling back in time.

Perhaps inspired by my trip to MSU, I stopped by Grand Valley on my way home. I needed to pick up the textbook for my class which starts Monday night. (Textbook rant: I'm still shocked by how much these books cost. This hard cover priced out to $50 a pound.) There, too, where students scurrying about getting ready for classes. I realized just how different the campuses where. Beyond the obvious size difference, GVSU felt so much more homogeneous. Nevertheless, it still is a nice place to mill about. My brief trip there put me in the spirit of the semester.

No tights tonight

It's pretty difficult to put on a show with no lights, so they canceled this evening's performance. It seems the power went out at the theatre around 4:00 thanks to a mischievous construction crew working on a near by street. The stage manager called me to let me know the show was off. While i'm grateful i'm not wearing my dance belt this evening, it does leave us with only two performances remaining (assuming they get the electrons wiggling again).

I didn't even get to enjoy my night off. Instead of going to Spectrum, i went to Civic where we had rehearsal for Comedy of Errors. (They were kind enough to offer us space to work. We won't be performing there.) We started rehearsing on Monday so it's been a crazy week. So far its a completely different experience than Lady's Not For Burning. We're really playing with the script and the director is soliciting our suggestions often on what type of show we want to put together rather than just telling us what to do. I've never been involved in a process like this before. It will be interesting to see what comes out of it.

Where do you put the space

I often have people come to me with grammatical inquires. I suppose it's because I'm one of those annoying people that will correct you if you use "who" when "whom" is more appropriate. I'm not an expert on grammar and I know i make plenty of my own mistakes in my writtings; but i do enjoy learning the rules. I think my interest started as a freshman at West Catholic where i had the world's greatest English teacher, Dale Gosset. That man pushed hard and let nothing slide. When i was talking my required English composition class at GRCC, i always felt way ahead of the game during peer reviews.

Today a friend asked me which was correct: "voicemail box, " "voice mailbox," or "voice mail box." This was one we never covered in class. Quickly i realized that dictionaries are of no help in matters such as these. I started to do some searching and quickly discovered there was no universal standard. Princeton had a nice technology style guide which would seem to favor the last of the three options. Verizon wasn't even consistent in its spelling on a single page. SBC favored option number two. I personally went for the first choice. Anyone else want to register an opinion?

Keyboard potato

The black box sitting on my remote control is a device called a USB-UIRT. What it will allow me to do is send and receive infrared signals (like the ones used to change the channel while sitting on the couch) from my computer. I picked one up because not only have i been known to misplace my remote but also there are sometimes when i'm at my computer and i need to mute my TV so i can hear the sound file i'm working with.

The device will take care of actually sending the signals. To tell it what signals to send you need some software. If you're running Windows, you can use something like Girder. However, there's not really an equivalent software for the Mac. At least my yet. In an effort to learn more about programming for OS X, i'm going to try to create one.

I've picked up a book about Cocoa to help get me started. (Luckily, the book is written for OX 10.2 which i'm still running at home. No Xcode for me yet.) The authors assume some familiarity with the C programming language which, not having a formal programming education, i've not worked with before. So, along the way, i'm trying to learn about C as well. The Apple Developer Connection has some USB samples and utilities to help me in my quest.

This should be a fun project to work on. I'm not sure if i'll ever get it finished but i'm sure to learn a lot in the process.

Wingnuts

I don't often take advantage of the benefit my .Mac membership has to offer. Occasionally i've found it handy to be able to access my Safari bookmarks from work when i need to save something i intend to look more closely at later. Plus, the fact that my most important documents are being backed up regularly is comforting. Every now and then they offer a free download as well. In fact, today i downloaded my complimentary copy Wingnuts. It's just a simple airplane shooting scroller but for some reason i can't stop playing it. I never really play games on my machine so maybe just the novelty of doing something so unproductive is entertaining me. At least it will keep me distracted from realizing that the cost of subscription probably isn't worth the benefits i receive long enough for my account to auto-renew.

Brush-up rehearsal

Today was my first official brush-up rehearsal. What a pointless adventure. As a cast we decided last week not to have one, but when the director found out he insisted we had one. Paul just won't let this show go. He's been at every show. It's like we're not old enough to left left home alone. We basically just did a speed-though of the show with blocking. No costumes or tech, just speaking and moving swiftly to make sure no one forgot anything. I hope we did well enough to get out of having to do another brush-up next Wednesday. My favorite part of the evening was eating a Twizzler during one of my scenes.

Doubleheader

Looks like i'll be accepting the part of Anthipholus of Syracuse in Heritage's upcoming Comedy of Errors. He is one half of the identical twin masters who happen to have identical twin servants. Rehearsals will start right on the heels of Lady's Not For Burning (which, if you check today's paper got a favorable review which apparently featured me in a picture but i have not seen it yet). At first i was a bit reluctant to accept to role because so much is going on right now but i spoke for some time with the Sheri Beth, the director, and she's really committed to working hard to make this production special and, most of all, fun.

It's been a while since i tackled a Shakespeare script so i'm sure it will take some time to get comfortable with the language. Plus its a larger role so there will be plenty of it to memorize. But let's not think of that now. I just have to get through tonight's performance and opening week will finally be over.

The lady wasn't burnt

We got through opening night without too much fuss. There was one point where we jumped the tracks but we managed to get back on course without too much turbulence, but enough with the mixed transportation metaphors. There were a few slow (not missed) cues as well and for some reason Claire keeps calling my character by the wrong name which didn't go unnoticed by the people i spoke to who saw the show. We were spoiled by the audience who was very vocal with laughter.

I had a glass or two of wine and a few of the mini cheesecakes served at the reception following the show. Still hungry, I met up with everyone again at The Cottage. It seemed like the whole theatre went over there; we really filled the place up. I can highly recommend the Bleu Cheese Burger. We stayed till last call. Knowing how crazy opening week of a show is, i planned ahead and took today off of work to recover.

I would like to thank everyone who made it to the show last night. I hope you had as much fun as though of us on stage did. Only eight more performances to go!

Playing dress up

We now have most of the costumes all set for the show. Apparently we rented most of them from the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. The replacement value for all the items we borrowed is near thirty thousand dollars. Some of the things they sent for my character were quite outrageous. One piece looked like it was made from the pelts of Grover and Oscar the Grouch. Another was more of a light lilly pad color with sleeves that draped down to the floor which had at some point been attacked by a Bedazzler. Amanda, the costumer, wouldn't let me wear either because she said i would detract too much attention from everyone one else. In the end, i'm stuck with a rather dull black tunic of sorts.

Because i'm in tights the whole show, they made me get a dance belt. I have quickly grown to hate that piece of fabric; it's horribly uncomfortable. I'm even more upset i had to buy it myself. When will i ever wear this thing again (and don't say in another period show because if i think there will ever be a chance of tights again, i'm not auditioning)? Community theatre shouldn't be pay-to-play.

Show opens Thursday night. There will be a reception with snacks immediately following in the lobby. Get your tickets now!

The dictionary's not for burning

We've been working very hard over the past week to clean up our little production. With this show, more than most, we've been very careful to get every line word for word. The real star of the show is the language itself. While written in the twentieth century, the play is set in the 1400s. The author, Christopher Fry, went out of his way to dig up wonderful words from the past. Most modern dictionaries have long forgotten their meaning, but with a little research, we were able to give figure out what exactly we were saying. Here are a few of the words i find most enjoyable to say.

Keith Oberfield calls The Lady's Not For Burning "the best Shakespeare play not written by Shakespeare." (But don't worry; it's no where as difficult to follow as the Bard can sometimes be.) We are anxious to get the chance to perform in front of an audience to share the words i've listed and so many more.

The right combination

I came across a pair of interesting articles today on MSDN. In them, the author shows how to put together a class that would assist in generating combinations. Here combination is used in its mathematical sense, meaning an unordered arrangement of objects (differing from permuations where order does matter). You specify how many total items you have and how many of those items you would like in each subset, and it will tell you how many possible unique subsets you can make and the elements in each of the sets. Typically you come across this stuff if you take a statistics course or if you had an algebra class that went into probability.

What i found most interesting about the articles, was how the author deviated from the standard formulas you might have learned in your math classes to use more efficient algorithms that do the same thing. The first article looks at (among other things) calcuating the total number of combinations. That processes traditionally involves very large numbers (thanks to all the factorials), but the process was rewritten to avoid the potential data overflows that would otherwise occur with large sets of data. The second article looks at finding the m-th combination in the series of possible values. One way to do that would be to loop m number of times, essentially adding 1 each time, but again that can take quite a while with large sets. The author uses some very interesting math principles (specifically something called a "combinadic") to make quick work of the task.

This type of stuff makes me excited about taking more math classes at GVSU. It would be fun to tackle a programming challenge like this for once rather than putting together another HTML form that dumps its contents into a database.

Crisping sleeve

Today i had my first Hot Pocket. I've never been all that comfortable with food that come out of the freezer. Aside from the occasional frozen pizza, i typically stay away from them. I think i'm intimidated by the thawing process. However during my last visit to the grocery store i thought i would try to mix things up and deviate from the list of fifteen things i always seem to buy. The Hot Pockets were relatively cheep and I thought i should see what i was missing out on.

I was very amused by the preparation directions. I had never before encountered a crisping sleeve. What a magical device they must be be. I think it's funny how they have a top and bottom but i can't tell the difference. I wonder why you can't use them more than once. I may have to run a few experiments to see exactly why.

Actually the first time i heard the term "crisping sleeve" was back when we were tying to come up with names for our improv team. There were quite a few names on the short list before we settled on "part of a complete breakfast." Randy, out team leader, had suggested "crisping sleeve" because the term also greatly amused him. (He must have had for more Hot Pocket experience than I). Other names on the list included "escape from fat camp," "division by zero," "coached by a viking," and "even a bit odd." Ah, what could have been.