I get the sense that my father's doctors are running out of ideas when they suggest battling the cancer by prescribing arsenic. Plus, as his labs get worse, he feels and looks better. This cancer stuff doesn't make any sense.
If you're looking for some fun, check out Moby Dick! The Musical which opens July 20 at Circle Theatre. It's about a group of Catholic school girls with a very limited budget who put up a musical based on the Herman Melville classic in order to save their school. I'll be working on the deck crew to help wrangle the great number of props. This production is full of fun and some amazing vocal talent. The show runs through August 5 so check it out if you can.
Of the more than 300,000 paternity tests administered each year, the results of 87% of them can be seen on the Maury Povich show.
Since i'm looking at grad school for the fall of 2007, i need to start worrying about the GRE. I picked up a study guide to get me up to speed. In the very first section, i learned two very disappointing facts. This first is that the math (quantitate) section of the GRE expects you to know roughly same about of math that was test on the SAT. The GRE folks assume that you didn't take any math classes in college; they just expect that you won't forget what you knew. Hence i will not get the chance to show off all the stuff i've learned in my many math classes.
Secondly, they do assume that your vocabulary has grown but they stay away from "technical" terms. Again this is frustrating because most of my classes focus on very technical words and definitions. I took the first sample test in the book and discovered that i performed poorly on the verbal section. I was quite surprised by this because i never have problems with reading comprehension in my classes. I noticed that the GRE people like to trick you with words that have alternate, less common definitions. For example, the words "list" and "flag" are often used as nouns but can also be used as intransitive verbs with very different meanings. The practice test got me scared so i'm making up flash cards from a variety of found word lists. I've never been good at route memorization but hopefully this will work.
I've spent the last few days working through all of the chapters of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. I really liked the book. While sometimes it seemed as though the author was saying "just type this" or "click here," you get the most out of it if you really think about what you are doing. It would be impossible to go into any great depth for all of the features of Cocoa so i appreciate the breadth the book choose to cover. If a chapter seemed too basic, there's always a "for the more curious" section at the end which provides interesting insights as to what's going on at a deeper level. Te book does demand a lot from the reader so i wouldn't say it's for the beginner, but it would be good for a programmer with at least some C/Obj-C experience to see what Cocoa is all about.
The only problems i ran into were in Chapter 27: Creating Interface Builder Palettes. It turns out that changes to the Mac OS since the book was published caused the samples to no longer work. The folks at Big Nerd Ranch posted an updated chapter.
Now it's time to start Advanced Max OS X Programming. I'm starting to like this whole free time thing.