American Beauty, Desperate Housewives, and the middle class

While I was working this weekend I re-watched American Beauty I was struck by how similar it is to Desperate Housewives. Or rather, how much the hot new TV show as taken from the best picture. Both are tales of middle class mid life crises. The plots center around people whose middle class dreams have come true and they turn out to be trapped by insipid daily life. It seems that the children born in the 50's and 60's had a pretty idealized view of what would happen if they achieved their middle class dreams.

I'm only 32, but it is certainly possible that I might someday have a mid-life crisis like that. I wonder if that's why extreme sports are so big these days. It's a sign of Gen-Xers trying to escape the boredom of their parents lives.

Speaking of the middle class... The middle class is rapidly shrinking these days, it used to be that a wide range of jobs could provide stability, reasonable pay and reasonable benefits. Today's job market is much more stratified with a few high paying professions and a lot of low paying ones and very little job security for both types.

College education is almost a requirement to get one of the high paying jobs, but the soaring cost of education makes it difficult for low income families to afford it. And for those low income families who send their children to college, they often go into significant debt. The graduates are then forced to select the highest paying profession to recover their costs, even if it means taking a career choice they aren't happy with. I know several people with law degrees who gave up legal work after a few years because they didn't like it. It's less of a problem for programmers because job satisfaction is relatively high, but I know a bunch of programmers who aren't that happy, but can't really afford to leave their jobs.

HDMI vs S-video

For kicks I hooked up my game PC to our new HDTV. First I just used S-video because I had the Tivo hooked up through the HDMI jack. My first impression on using the S-video was "this is crap, why would anyone do this other than as a novelty"? And I pretty much gave up hope right there that it was going to be an interesting gaming experiment. Then on a whim the other night, I unplugged the Tivo and stuck the PC into the HDMI jack(Thank god the TV came with a DVI-HDMI cable because that costs $100 for the 6 foot cable at a retail store). Wow, what a difference, now that was cool. It's still not quite as good as my PC monitor, but it's huge and it make gaming entertaining for everyone, including the player. The only problem is that it moves the pc, keyboard and wires into the middle of the living room, and the one wireless keyboard and mouse I have is broken already.

Yay Java, boo java DOM

I had to spend some time porting some C++ code to Java. Whenever I do something like this, I remember the reasons why I hate C++. It's really not the language itself so much as everything around the language when compared to Java. Having a large, consistent set of collections class libraries in Java is a huge time saver.

One of the problems with C++ is that developers have too much flexibility. Flexibility is good, but it leads to inconsistency. Inconsistency is bad because it means it doesn't do what you expect which of course leads to bugs and requires documentation. Integrating several different pieces of C++ code is particularly troublesome. Different standards for different projects really hurts productivity. C++ works fine if you have a single large code base that was well designed and has good standards which everyone abides by.

I've heard a couple of different good things about C# lately. It is actually supposed to be pretty good, I am just so anti-Microsoft that I can't bring myself to use it.

The one thing I had forgotten was how annoying java DOM implementations are. You'd think they would make it easier to just build a DOM object and print it out. But in fact you need code like this:

      TransformerFactory tFactory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();

      DocumentFactory dFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();

      DocumentBuilder dBuilder = dFactory.newDocumentBuilder();

      Document xmlDoc = dBuilder.newDocument();

      Element element = xmlDoc.createElement("rootElementName");

      ... // add more document manipulation

      Transformer transformer = tFactory.newTransformer();

      transformer.transform(new DOMSource(xmlDoc),new StreamResult(System.out));

Maybe there's a shorter way to do this and I just don't know it, but that's a lot of code for something that should be really simple.