A co-worker of mine related the following story to me. A friend and his wife were happily married with kids. After a business trip, the wife returns home early to find her husband in bed with another woman. Despite their long and previously happy marriage, she is devastated and eventually the incident leads to a divorce. My co-worker and his wife are determined to prevent this from happening to their marriage so they swear a faithful vow: always call before coming home early.

I was playing a bit of counter-strike last night and it occurred to me that there’s one thing that’s missing from every game. Personalized walks. Every MMO game has some sort of custom avatar which you can tailor to your liking, but no game allows you to choose the way you walk. I read that a dog can identify its owner from 100 yards away just by the way he walks. I know the way I identify people at a distance is by their body proportions and the way they walk, not their faces. How about using all the extra horsepower in today’s processors to build something into a game to give you a personal walk. It’d be fun and you share your walk with Monty Python’s Minister of Silly Walks.

Some of those lending stats are kind of scary. In particular I’m surprised that
15.2% of 2005 buyers owe at least 10% more than their home is worth (negative equity). And the story of WAMU’s negative amortization loans growing from %1 in 2003 to %47 in 2005.

I’ve thought the housing market was overpriced for 5 years, and for the 6th I think I might be right. It’s a good thing I am lazy otherwise I might’ve sold my house and moved into an apartment waiting for the bubble to burst. I’d be a bit wary right now of putting too much money into a house right now.

Here’s an investment play… Short stock in mortgage companies which have a lot of sub-prime mortgages, and lower risk by buying stock in companies which only lend to qualified buyers.

At work, we get cheap snacks from a standard vending machine. Everything is $.25. This includes chips, microwave popcorn, candy bars, and Clif Bars. Some enterprising soul has decided that to save money he is going to buy out all the Clif Bars at the discounted price saving himself $1.10 per bar over the retail price. This prompted someone to post a note on the vending machines saying “Please stop buying out all the Clif Bars so that others can enjoy them.” I will give him extra bonus points for etiquette if he goes off and re-sells them.

One of the more amusing memes is the idea that Islamic fundamentalists hate freedom and everything associated with it. This idea was made popular in a Bush statement that just seems silly to me. It’s not like they really hate freedom. They do however hate American imperialism and foreign policy. I like how Bush framed it by making it an us versus them battle. Now he can try to portray everything that is anti-Bush as an anti-freedom and therefore anti-American. When you look at it that way, pretty much everyone hates freedom.

A couple weeks ago the lot next door went on sale again. Last year they bought it for about $500k. The owner and architect designed a beautiful 3500 sqft house. Now they want to sell the lot with the plans for $825k. Good luck with that. Rumor has it that the buyers thought the finished house would be worth $2.5m when it was completed. That’s only about $1m more than I would pay for it. Stupid crazy bay area real estate.

I went to the dentist the other day and she noticed how stained and yellow my teeth were. She said that drinking so much coke was the reason my teeth were all yellow. She recommended using baking soda while brushing to get some extra abrasiveness in. I’m going to cut down on my coke intake a bit to avoid the problem. It’s kind of sad because I used to have really good teeth after I got my braces done in high school. But I broke my retainer while I was in college and haven’t been back to an orthodontist. It’s not that bad, but it’d be kind of sad if I need adult braces again.

After reading about 529 college savings plans, I was amazed at how good they are. I mean I figured they were good, but now I think they are so good, they are abusive. It has major features like allowing anyone to contribute(not just family), being able to change beneficiaries, being able to reclaim get back the money(with a penalty), and not counting towards your childs assets(so he can still qualify for his own financial aid).

The trouble is choosing a state for your 529. The california one doesn’t look good and I don’t think I’ve heard of two people who use the same states’ plans. I’ve heard recommendations for California, Utah, Iowa, Rhode Island, and more. But there’s no clear winner. I personally am against age-based allocations, so those plans don’t appeal to me.

If anyone has more recommendations I’m happy to listen to them, and more importantly I’m interested why.

A long long time ago I read an interesting article from a source I can’t remember(I think it might have been Discover magazine but I searched and couldn’t find it) on some interesting research about why flies are so hard to hit. The summary of it was that they have a fast reaction time, a very wide field of view, and a natural instinctive reaction to jump up and backwards when there is any danger. Based on this new evidence, they explained the most effective way to kill a fly without using a flyswatter, newspaper or anything similar. Instead of trying to hit down on the surface where it’s sitting, instead clap your hands about 2 inches above it and a about 2 inches behind it. This is roughly the space the fly will automatically jump to when it senses danger. It’s been an effective technique for me that I’ve learned and it’s saved me from certain death on many occasions. It’s not an autokill, but I can get a fly about 1/3 or 1/4 of the time.

Someone asked me when I was going to teach Lucas how to program, and I thought about it and couldn’t figure out what would be the best thing to teach him first. The programming languages I learned in order were: Basic, Pascal, C, Perl, Java, C++. But we must have progressed beyond those by now.

Assuming you want to learn algorithms and data structures is it appropriate to start out with a dynamically typed language like Python? Or is direct access to pointers still important enough that people need to start out with C? It really seems unlikely. I’d guess that it makes more sense to teach programming with something like: Python, Pascal, C, Java.

The reality of business programming is that very few people actually do data structures and algorithms work anyways. There are lots of VB programmers and IT people who don’t even need to know about these things at all. Most application programmers just use libraries(as they should) so there’s not really much innovation. Most programmers just build on top of existing APIs and put together new presentation or integration layers for them. Academic programming is different and actually does have innovation in algorithms.