As you can probably tell, school has been keeping me busy. I've been leaning about counting. Sounds easy, right? Well, counting is a type of discrete math. We have learned to count the number of different ways we can arrive at a desired outcome based upon certain conditions. If you've ever taken a statistics class you probably started off by working with combinations and permutations. This is the type of stuff we're working on.
One of our recent assignments involved counting the number of different five-card poker hands. For instance, there are 2,598,960 different hands that you can have. We get this number by considering how many possibilities you have for every card you draw. There 52 different cards you could get for your first card. For your next card, you now only have 51 different choices. So for all five cards, you have (52)(51)(50)(49)(48) possibilities. Actually, that's not quite true; that product would give you the total possibilities if the order in which you got the cards mattered. Since that's not the case, you have to divide by the total number of ways to order five cards (because each possibility was counted this many times). This comes out to 5! ("five factorial") which is the same as (5)(4)(3)(2)(1). This is how we know there are over 2.5 different poker hands. Then we counted how many named hands there were (ie, royal flush, full house, three of a kind, etc). It probably comes a no surprise that the order in which hands beat other hands directly corresponds to how many different ways there are to get those hands. Here are the final counts we came up with: royal flush - 4; straight flush - 36; four of a kind - 624; full house - 3,744; flush - 5,108; straight - 10,200; three of a kind - 54,912; two pair - 123,552; one pair - 1,098,240; and "nothing" - 1,302,540.
Carrie wins but Ken loses. At least i break even.
I'm surprised more people haven't warned me just how crappy your mid-twenties can be. These years have been full of depressing milestones of maturity. I've had to accept the fact that my metabolism is slowing and buy larger pants. I have to deal with being old enough to attend high school reunions and realizing just how young kids currently in high school seem to me now. Anticipation for upcoming birthdays has been replaced by dread. Growing old sucks.
I discovered yet another cruelty this week. Now when i encounter an attractive female of similar age, i must remember to check for a wedding band. If i don't, i run the risk of breaking a commandment. I'm not accustomed to checking out people's hands so it's going to involve a change of habit. If i do meet someone cool and then i discover they are spoken for, it sucks twofold. First, because obviously someone was faster than I and how i'll never know what it would be like to hang out with this interesting person. Secondly, it serves as another evil reminder that everyone around me is getting married except for me. It would be helpful if instead of diamonds, the rings contained a blinking cautionary yellow LED. I would be less inclined to overlook such an accessory.
About two weeks ago, my general manager decided to mix some things up at work. Our web development team has been busy for a while doing many larger scale projects; recently many of those projects have been for our parent company. Some of the Rapidparts projects have been pushed aside to get those done because we earned money for doing those. He wasted a way to renew the interest in developing systems that improve internal business processes and generate more sales. He decided to create a special projects team of which i am a part.
I've been split off from the rest of the web development team and have been paired with another smart guy to get stuff done. If Rapidparts is Law and Order, we thing of ourselves as Rapidparts: SPU (Special Projects Unit). We a focused on certain types of projects. Our first mission is to tackle a large project that's been on the plate for three years now but nothing seems to have been done yet. In order to make sure things don't stay that way, we've been given whatever authority we need in order to make things happen.
One of the best parts about this new assignment is in order to make sure i can stay focused on our new team projects, i've been absolved of having to maintain or support any of our existing applications. I've been at Rapidparts for a while now and have written a lot of code; in the beginning, much of it was crap. Recently i've spent more time maintaining and enhancing existing applications rather than creating new stuff. I've been forcing myself to keep all the logic of how current applications work in my active memory so i know how to adjust them. However, now i get to start with a clean slate again. I can free up my mind by dumping all that old stuff and just thinking about this one project. It feels great.
The other interesting thing about this project is that i will working mostly on our IBM P630 running AIX. This means that the final product will be a green-screen app written in Informix-4GL. While i have done something like this before for Rapidparts, that was a while ago and i will have to do quite a bit of re-learning. I need to forget all about that fancy new object-oriented stuff for a while and relearn the wonders of procedural code. I've also gotten rather accustomed to Visual Studio and it may take a while to memorize all those VI commands again. I'm sure this project will have many more challenges to overcome such at these, but i'm up to it.
Tonight was the opening night of Grand Rapids Ballet Company's (GRBC) production of Exotica. I was there because i volunteered to run lights. I had never done anything with GRBC before. In fact, it was my first time really seeing a ballet outside of grade school. The most experience i've probably ever had with ballet was watching the movie Centerstage. It has been an incredible experience.
This particular show is about a romance on the shores of paradise. It has a very modern feel. Rather than spandex and tutus, the dancers are wearing wet suits, board shorts, bikinis, and sarongs.. The dancing really is amazing and beautiful. I know people aren't naturally suppose to move like that, but something seems just seems so right when you watch it. If you've also never seen ballet before, i suggest you check it out. Heck, the show's only about 45 minutes so even if you hate it, it's over pretty quickly. Even if you don't leave loving ballet, i bet you will at least see why some people do.
The show runs through May 22 with performances Friday and Saturday evenings (7:30) with matinees on Saturday and Sunday (2:00). Performances are held at the GRBC studios. For tickets, call (616) 454-4771.
My math class began yesterday. My teacher took time to reminded us that we should expect to spend three hours working outside of class for every hour of in class instruction for a three-hundred-level math course. In what i thought was an attempt to scare us, she loaded up on the homework the very first night. I was up till midnight before i decided it was good enough. If i don't do the homework the day it's assigned, i won't have a chance to complete it before it's due thanks to my work schedule. It turns out she "accidently" assigned that much work; she didn't realize that there were two different assignments on the sheet she handed out. She felt bad enough to not give us any homework today.
The next two months are going to be crazy, but i'm looking forward to the insanity.
When i asked my mother a few weeks ago what she wanted for Mother's Day, i was quite surprised to hear her say an iPod. My mom certainly isn't the most technically savvy person, but she does have a computer and knows how to check her e-mail -- however i did have to come over to put the cables back into the right sockets when they moved the computer. Apparently someone where she works brought in an iPod that had all of her massage/relaxation music on it and my mom thought that would be a good thing for her to have as well. My sister and I went down to Circuit City where they had a green iPod mini in stock. Holing the box in my hands made me want one of my own bad but i resisted and wrapped it up all pretty like. I installed the software on her computer and then the family played games. Luckily for me, my sister is living at home so she's the one who will have to teach mom how to use it. I won't even be bothered by support calls.
I caught Bill Nye's new show on the telly today. He stopped making episodes of Bill Nye The Science Guy (BNTSG) a few years ago. Boy did i enjoy the show; although that wasn't the case when i first saw it. I grew up watching Mr. Wizard's World. With that show, the excitement came from the experiments themselves. Don (Mr Wizard's real name) was about exciting as an insurance salesman, but the science itself was really cool. Several years later, the next science\entertainment show i watched was Beakman's World. Beakman was a wacky guy with big hair. In his lab he has his assistant, Josie, and Lester, a guy in a rat suit. This show was more about the spectacle but had enough interesting science thrown in to make it cool. When i first saw BNTSG, i just thought he was a more boring version of Beakman. I took a while to adjust to the different pace, but i eventually did and have learned a great many things from him since.
His new show is called Eyes of Nye. Bill has given up his blue lab coat and bow ties (well, not completely -- he still sports to occasional bow tie but also has long ones as well). This time around the show seems to focus on more "adult topics." Today's show was about addiction. Other topics include modified foods, cloning, and the evolution of sex. You can find out why he's back in this interview with Wired. Looks like it will be airing here in Grand Rapids on WGVU Saturdays at 4:00 pm.
I've realize this week, my little summer vacation, that school takes up a lot of my energy. Freed from the burden of homework and studying, I was able to spend time doing some recreational reading.
I finally finished Code Complete. I started it nearly a year ago. (Hey, it's a big book and things come up.) At least i can honestly say i read every page of that book. It felt like i also learned something on every page as well. Well, maybe it wasn't so much learning new things as it was generally rounding out my knowledge of the software construction. It's nice to read research that agrees with things you believe. The book is also a great source of inspiration. Jack said he tried to pick it up every year to see if he can get something new out of it. If i were to attempt the same feat, at my current pace, i would be perpetually reading the thing. Actually, that's probably a good idea.
Toward the end of the book was a chapter on debugging. This is a task i've had to do every since i wrote my first line of code that didn't work as expected. I've always just did it without ever realizing what i was doing which it made it hard to explain to others what to do. Steve McConnell, the author, describes the debugging process in terms of the scientific method. Once a programmer finds an error, he must make a hypothesis as to what might be causing the error. Then, he must perform an experiment to see if the hypothesis holds up. Once the exact cause is know, it can then be fixed. I've seen programmers that try to fix without completely understanding what's wrong. This coincides with a post at the SQL Team weblog about being able to identify and simplify the problem. It's also a good idea to start small with your hypothesis. If you're quick to think that "the computer is messing up" or that the .NET framework must have a bug before thinking it might be your own code, that's also a problem. I think that finding and fixing the problem aren't nearly as important as understanding how the error came up in the first place.
Today i caught one of those "cable previews" showing the pilot for a television show called Filmore Middle. It's a sit-com about an eclectic group of teachers working at a New Jersey middle school that's not known for its academics. Justin Bartha stars as Jeff Cahill, the "cool" teacher who breaks all the rules and pretends not to care but really does. Deon Richmond plays Calvin Babbet, fellow teacher and right hand man. (I remember this guy from The Cosby Show; he played Rudy's friend Kenny -- he was funnier back then.) The virtuous teacher, Alice Fletcher, is played by Sarah Alexander whose English accent kept me entertained. She will predictably be the source of romantic tension. (Actor names courtesy TV Tome.)
The episode itself centered around this kid, Adam, who is remarkably unpopular but has potential. Mr Cahill "pulls a favor" to get him considered for admission to a private school. To get in, the kid needs to get a B on a history exam and his prospects don't look good. The history teacher just happens to be Ms Fletcher who is unlikely to bend the rules. Mr Cahill ends up giving the kid the answers to the test to help him out; but this plan is uncovered thanks to the usual clueless student mistakes. Cahill and Babbet convince Fletcher to give the kid a makeup, and they help him study for it. Test time comes and the kid is down to the last question: if he gets it right, he gets the B and goes to private school -- if he gets it wrong, and he stays put. The kid blows the question when clearly he knows the correct answer and gets a C which means he stays. The moral being he wanted to stay at a place where a teacher cared as much about him as Cahill did. Awww.
The show reminded me of Boston Public, only the kids where younger and it was far less dramatic. Plus it had that caring-teacher element of Boy Meets World. The friendship of Cahill and Babbet also seems reminiscent of Ed and Mike from Ed. I have to image its going to be a tough sell to get adults to watch a show about middle school in prime time.
I saw similar previews last year. It turns our one of those shows is now on the air. If fact, Medium is on NBC as i'm typing this. I wonder what will happen to this one.
My friend Jeebs has just completed a master's degree program at GVSU. As one of the requirements to earning a Master of Science in Physical Therapy degree, she had to complete a group research project. She worked most of this past semester on this thesis. I made her sit down and explain it to me. It's titled "Inter-rater and Intra-rater Reliability of Slow Motion v. Real Time Rancho Los Amigos Observational Gait Analysis." (Ohh, those long titles get me all excited.) Jeebs gave me a copy so i could read the whole thing myself. The paper itself summarizes the results of a quasi-experimental study investigating the success of a standard quantitative evaluation technique of abnormalities present in the way a person walks for individuals with neurological disorders. They collected a lot of data and got some really interesting results. The paper has been submitted for publication to Physical Therapy Journal. That reminds me, i better renew my subscription.
It's really inspiring to know that the people with whom i graduated from high school are doing such impressive things. Not only Jeebs with her thesis, but also my friend Katie who wrote a chapter of a book on autism (which i got to help proofread). These things further reinforce my desire to pursue a fancy degree of my own.