just a thought…

Thanks to the lovely web-comic Questionable Content, and its creator Jeph Jacques, I am now addicted to the band This Will Destroy You. There is a good chance that you will not like them, because there is a good chance that you think instrumental music is somewhat unnatural and therefore not worthy of your time. Just to let you know, you are quite wrong. If you feel like checking them out though, I would highly recommend listening to “The World Is Our __” and “Threads”. I like them so much that I actually ordered their newest CD shortly after listening to them; it arrived today, along with an effort by a band called “Crimson Spectre” thrown in as I can only assume a bonus of some kind. If anyone would like this CD by Crimson Spectre, you are entitled to it, for I am not a fan.

I need to blog more. By ‘more’ I mean at least once every couple of days. School is keeping me busier than I would like to be, and what little free time I have is spent reading and playing the occasional video game. The thing that drives me crazy about my classes, is the fact that I’m going to learn very little in them. At least for my programming classes, I’ve already taught myself more than what I’m expected to learn. For instance, my php instructor asked me why I didn’t test out.

The other thing that bugs me, is the number of people at my school that equate computers with money–this is far from the truth. Unless you become a super-genius in your area of study, or invent something so radical and useful, that everyone wants to use it. The people that sign up for computer classes at my college are mostly unemployed, middle-aged folk, that are looking to get in on what they perceive to be the greatest scam ever. In one of my classes, a student said these words, “if statements confuse me.” Now, you may not know what an “if” statement is, and I won’t hold it against you if you do not, because there is a good chance that you’re not a programmer, but if you are in a computer programming degree, and expect to use this degree to make your way in this world as a computer programmer, you should have mastered “if” statements by the end of the first week of your intro-level programming class. I consider myself a mediocre programmer; I would not feel comfortable being hired into a programming position higher than intern or junior, and the sad fact is that I know I am a better programmer than the majority of the people that will graduate with a degree in computer programming from my college.

At the time of this writing, Recapture has been downloaded 130 times. I have yet to receive any hate mail, and registration spam has virtual stopped on my blog (though an occasional one slips through the cracks). I would like to hear how it’s working for other people, if any of them would be kind enough to send me a note.

I’ve decided to start the “Coalition for the abolition of the terms: jump drive, pen drive, thumb drive and all other variants when referring to a USB Flash Drive.” Those other terms really bug me and they need to go away as soon as possible. Seriously, what the hell is a “jump drive”? Are you jumping on it? Is it jumping on you? Are you storing one gigabyte worth of jumps on it? By inserting it into your anus, does it give you the ability to actually perform a “Jump Drive?” I do not even care if “jump drive” is someone’s brand name or registered trademark for their particular type of USB Flash Drive, it’s silly, stupid and not trendy or cool in the slightest. In closing, I recommend that you publicly humiliate anyone who uses any of the now abolished terms–bonus points if you get this on video. After the public humiliation, kindly remind them that they are in fact referring to a USB Flash Drive, as it is a, “flash memory storage device, integrated with a universal serial bus connector.” Then, you may give them permission to publicly humiliate anyone else who commits what we shall now refer to as “the great sin”, and thus, this movement shall spread like wildfire, because as we all know, everyone likes to publicly humiliate the ignorant.