James's Weblog

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is easily my favorite CS book (although I confess it is the only one I’ve actually read). Its exercises happen to utilize characters named with double entendres: Alyssa P. Hacker (“a Lisp hacker”), Cy D. Fect (“side effect”), and Louis Reasoner (“loose reasoner”).

When I was a teaching assistant at Berkeley for its SICP-based course, I created my own character: Oski M. Wizard (“a Scheme wizard”). The name was perfect since “Oski” is the name of U.C. Berkeley’s mascot, and SICP is also known as “the wizard book” due to its cover graphic.

Sadly, he never got much exposure. I tried to get Professor Fateman to use him on one of his exams, but I think he didn’t understand the joke. (I probably should have pitched it to Professor Harvey instead.) At least I managed to use him in some practice exercises I gave to my section (which is more than I can say for another character I made, Sue D’Coda).

Poor Oski. And he so desperately wanted to impress Alyssa.

I never really spent much time watching the Olympics, but this year I watched it every day, partly because it happened to be in China, partly because only recently have I been able to watch HDTV programming, so watching everything in high definition still seems novel.

• The opening ceremony was very impressive, but why did China have to taint it with the digital doctoring?
• The new gymnastics scoring system is totally broken. Laypeople can’t relate to the scores and have no idea what’s good or bad. This was even worse for the team and all-around competitions since not all gymnasts performed the same exercise at the same time and each exercise had its own baseline for difficulty scores. I also think the difficulty scores get way too much weight. And, of course, the tie-breaking system is a joke.
• The outfits that the U.S. women’s gymnastics team wore made them look like Coca-Cola cans with blond ponytails.
• The linesmen who run up to the javelins and shot-put balls as they’re landing are nuts.
• I think I liked it better when the Summer and Winter Olympics were in the same year. I think having Olympic games every other year is too frequent and takes some of the magic out of it; I remember the 1984 and 1988 games seeming more special. (Of course, that might be because they happened to be the first two that I have any recollection of, and the competition between the two sides of the Iron Curtain heightened some of the drama.) Plus, they got to distract everyone from all the presidential politicking.
• Isn’t this a perfect opportunity for NBC affiliates to do something useful with their other digital subchannels instead of showing around-the-clock HD weather reports?
• Why were events shown live in the Eastern Time Zone (and presumably in the Central Time Zone) but not for the rest of the U.S.? Meanwhile people on the west coast had three extra hours for various newscasters and websites to spoil results for them.

I always used to avoid depositing checks in ATMs. A few years ago, one of my friends got screwed when he deposited a check only to discover later that the bank had no record of it. I preferred handing them over to a teller and getting a receipt.

One Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago, I realized that I forgot to deposit a rebate check that was going to expire the next day. The bank was already closed by the time I got there that day, and it’s not open on Sundays. With no other alternatives, I deposited the check through the ATM.

It turned out to be way better than dealing with a human teller.

This particular branch had newfangled ATMs that offered envelope-less deposits. I inserted my check, the ATM scanned it, used OCR (or maybe a mechanical Turk) to read the amount, showed me a confirmation screen to double-check the transaction, and printed out a receipt with a copy of the check. This is great:

• No more deposit slips.
• Minimal waiting in line.
• I get a receipt for each check. Since going to the bank was inconvenient (particularly for the above the reasons), it usually wasn’t worth making a trip just to deposit a $5 or $10 check, so I’d wait until I had multiple checks to deposit. Unfortunately I’d get a receipt only for the total deposit amount, which made it difficult later if I needed to determine if I had received and deposited particular rebate checks.

Procrastination pays off once again. Had I been responsible, I’d have deposited my rebate check promptly with a human teller and never would have tried using the ATM to do it.

My crotch is really sore, but I think I can sort of ride a bicycle now. I have a hard time getting starting going uphill, though.

I think the bicycle Mitchell lent to me is too big.

Things to do before I turn 30:

1. Learn how to ride a bicycle.

A little over one year after he passed away, my dad got an absentee ballot and a jury duty summons. Go, California.

I really liked The Bourne Identity. I thought The Bourne Supremacy was not as good. I had heard that The Bourne Ultimatum was better and was looking forward to it, but after watching the DVD this past weekend, I think it’s the worst of the bunch. Some spoilers follow.

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(Note that this might not make much sense to anyone who hasn’t lived in New England.)

When I was growing up in Massachusetts, I used to hate going to Building #19 with my mom. Building #19 is a chain of stores in New England that sells heavily discounted items; it sells overstock, clearance items, damaged goods, and liquidated inventory from failed stores. It even sells food that’s a bit past the sell-by date. It basically sells a lot of junk, and you never really know what you’re going to find at any individual Building #19 store. It is not comparable to any stores I’ve seen in California. Dollar stores don’t come close.

I didn’t like it as a kid since it had few toys, if any (possibly that’s because Child World/Children’s Palace was still in business and in the area at the time), although they seem to have a somewhat better selection now. Over my past few visits to Massachusetts, though, I’ve developed a new appreciation for the stores. Each store is full of cartoons drawn by Mat Brown and Bill White (who even run a Building #19 cartooning class) utilizing a distinctive style of self-deprecating humor. I confess that I think the illustrated Building #19 advertisements influenced me (particularly the lettering style).

I was at one today, and an announcement over the PA system interrupted the store music with the message:

Building #19: Where else can you get a free cup of coffee? If you find a freer cup of coffee anywhere in New England, we’ll reward you with a second cup and immediately lower our price.

An Abbott and Costello moment at a Wal-Mart where I was buying a 377-type of watch battery for my mom:

“Hi, I need a three seventy-seven watch battery.”
“Okay, that’s three seventy-seven.”
“Right. Three seventy-seven.”
“Three seventy-seven.”

By then I had realized that she meant that the 377 battery coincidentally cost $3.77, although the clerk seemed kind of oblivious to that and to her ambiguous wording. Or maybe she just got a kick out of confusing customers.

I swear, someone on NBC’s Heroes must have the power to make everyone stupid.

(Some spoilers are below.)

The season had some hints of grand designs, but unfortunately the writers’ strike obviously made the later episodes rushed and a bit incohesive and made the finale totally anticlimactic. It was missing much of the excitement from the first season, I guess partly because there weren’t any compelling villains: Adam just didn’t seem very threatening, Sylar was impotent, the Nightmare Man was a big loser, and the Company was in shambles. One would think that Adam would have accumulated at least as much power, knowledge, and influence as Linderman over the years.

I wonder how long they’re going to milk the “I went to the future and saw the apocalypse, now we need to stop it” pattern.