I missed my little particles. When I first ran them this afternoon a mass of them squirmed around my screen like an infestation of something organic. It was pretty trippy, actually. After all these clean-cut laser beams and carefully computed position data, even the slowly-moving humans I was tracking seemed to move like living things (and with good reason), but throwing the particle filters in there was like releasing a swarm of bees. Actually, moreso than bees, they reminded me of the black squirmy things in Princess Mononoke. I actually felt a momentary sensation of fright as they swarmed out to see them take over the right side of my screen.
Have no worries, though... I'll have them trained in no time, and then they will swarm together rather than apart. :)
Anyway, after a day of heads-down coding, I found myself in a sort of an altered state. It's rather difficult for me to interact with other humans in real-time after hours and hours of coding. Kind of like the feeling of having just woken up from a nap when everyone around you is in the full swing of their day.
Without further ado, today's T3A:
#3 - Cool visualization tool.
As I was refactoring and cleaning up my code today, I looked around online for some tools that might help me out in identifying what parts of my code needed to be cleaned up, simplified, or restructured, and I ran across the Metrics plugin for Eclipse. This is so cool. Check out the visualization feature... there are pictures about 3/5 of the way down that page. It's auto-generated, and it dynamically moves around and morphs as it's scanning in all the classes and figuring out their dependencies. Then you can spin it around, zoom in and out, and stretch it into a hyperbola!
It didn't really help me out so much, but it was definitely cool to see how all my classes and packages were connected together. I imagine it would be a lot more useful for more complex, team projects.
#2 - I have acquired the White Sword.
No, I'm not playing Zelda. I have gradually been equipping my kitchen over the past couple weeks, a spatula here, a coffee maker there, and finally it was time to purchase a knife. Now I could go with a crappy old $20 or $30 knife, or I could spend some real money and get a work of beauty that would stay with me for many years. I looked at many knives... I found some really beautiful ones on sale at Conan - $160 knives on sale for half price, etc. But though I stood and admired them for several minutes, my inner "yes" breaker didn't fire.
Instead, I found myself returning once again to a $50 Kyocera ceramic knife I had been eyeing for a while. It seemed a little strange to buy a kitchen knife from the company that made my last mobile phone, but after my Panasonic bicycle, nothing really surprises me any more. :)
The only thing holding me back was the price tag... I've never used a ceramic knife before, and I wasn't sure if it would be a good investment. But the "yes" breakers had tripped, and it was just a matter of a little rationalization to soothe my "are you doing something stupid again?" warning systems. Which are all too easily soothed.
I brought the knife to the counter, and just before handing over the money, I caught another flash of white out of the corner of my eye. There, in front of me, was a slightly smaller but still quite usable ceramic knife by the same manufacturer, for only $30! And as a special promo offer, it came with a ceramic potato peeler (no, not for ceramic potatoes...). I kind of thought the first one seemed to be slightly nicer, but it certainly wasn't $20 nicer.
So here we have it - my White Sword.
#1 - News from an old friend.
So I was talking with KIP today, and he said he just got back from NYC, where he saw a bunch of PKT guys. In the course of our conversation, he sent me a link to Danny's home page. I haven't spoken to Danny in ages, and it's so wonderful to see him doing well out in Cambodia. Granted, he's there as a missionary, which isn't my kind of thing, but he seems to have successfully combined two things I have often seen as, though perhaps not mutually exclusive, certainly something that very few manage to successfully bring together.
I'm talking about the "Settling down and raising a happy family" ideal and the "Going out, seeing the world, and doing something that makes a difference" ideal. I'm really impressed and inspired by the fact that he seems to be achieving both. Of course the same goes for Joel and Rebecca, but I've at least vaguely been in touch with them on and off for the last few years. It was great to get this sort of one-way update on Danny.
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