My Life and Code

I'm a huge fan of most things 1970s, and I recently heard of this movie via a post on Reddit. It's about a sniper who has his sights set on the crowd at a football championship game (they're careful to never refer to it as a Super Bowl). It's sort of in the vein of those 1970s disaster films, except it's not really about a disaster. But it has that same vibe. While I liked the film, here's the problem with it: editing. Or, more specifically, the lack thereof. I have no problem with character building. I have no problem with a movie taking it's time to establish a plot, or characters, or whatever. But by the time this film actually got along with the plot, I paused it to see how much time had passed, and it was halfway through the film.  In fact, at the time of this writing, if you look the film up on Wikipedia, the summary of the film written there starts at the midway point of the film . The opening credits sequence was an early red flag. A long....long.......

In 1982's Blade Runner , Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is tasked with hunting down four renegade replicants , humanoid robots which are virtually indistinguishable from real people. And fans of the film often debate whether or not Deckard himself is a replicant. The debate originates with director Ridley Scott, who has gone on the record by  saying as much , years after the film's original release. But here's the thing: one of the screenwriters, Hampton Fancher, says that Deckard is not a replicant (though he likes the ambiguity), and Harrison Ford, until recently, has been adamant that Deckard is human (a recent change of opinion on his part seems... paid for , so to speak, in my opinion, and it's well known that he and Scott disagreed vehemently on it). The filming of a scene, post-production, with a unicorn that ties into a scene at the end of the film is meant to imply Deckard is a replicant, and to be fair, there is a line which was cut from the film where the chara...

I used to know this girl named Crystal, who was a friend of a girlfriend back in the day. For some reason she crossed my mind recently. On Fridays and Saturdays we’d hang out with my girlfriend at the time’s circle of friends, and Crystal appeared in that group near the end of our relationship. Kind of like when a new character is introduced in the last season of a TV show, she just sort of showed up near the end. Crystal didn’t like me and was pretty open about it. She’d say to my girlfriend, right in front of me , “You can do so much better than him.” I’m not sure why she disliked me so much, and as for doing better, granted, I was no Brad Pitt, but I was a decent enough guy, albeit with faults. Crystal had a boyfriend, and he too was no Brad Pitt, so I don’t know who she was to judge. And as for him being a decent enough guy: pin in that. Even though she was always openly critical of me, I never said anything about it, and just rolled with it. I’m not really sure why. I was always...

If you're cursed with nostalgia and sentimentality like I am (and I only jokingly refer to it as a curse), you may have found that there are two things that can immediately take you back to a time and place long gone. At least, for me, there are two things that easily trigger that: scents and music. I'll talk about the latter here. Not every song does it. But some are just so engrained in a memory that the reaction is immediate: there I am again, the feeling of a time and place returns, I'm a certain age again, reliving a time long gone. And it's often bittersweet -- maybe it's just me, but a lot of those sorts of memories are a mix of happiness (for the experience at the time) and sadness (for the fact that it's over, only to be relived as a memory -- "you can't go home again", they say). There's something that Alex Van Halen once said, that I was trying to find the source for as I wrote this, about there being comfort in the past because it n...

Working in IT, I've met and worked with a lot of recruiters, both as a job seeker and as someone involved in the hiring process. They've run the gamut from "a pretty good person" to "practically a car salesman". But one in particular stands above the rest. Joel is the recruiter who placed me at my current job almost 10 years ago. And he's stayed in contact with me ever since, but not to try to poach me to another company, or to find new candidates to shop around, but rather just to keep in touch . I've never known another recruiter like him. Every few months I get an email from him, asking how I am, asking how my family's doing. It's always social, never business. Every few years we get together for lunch. He's a truly good, decent, human being. I'm grateful to every recruiter who helped me along my career path, and for every recruiter who helped out when my employer was looking for a candidate. And I'm thankful to still hear from...

I've learned some things in life. Granted, I don't always put them into practice , but I do actively try . I try not to repeat mistakes, and to learn from my mistakes and experiences. Here are ten things I've learned, and lessons I try to keep in mind. 1. You can be 100% sure of something, and still be wrong. This is something I've experienced myself and witnessed in others. And it can be a good or bad thing. Unlike some of the other things I'll list here, there's not much you can really do about this one. If you have concrete evidence of something, that "100% sure" probably isn't going to change. But in other cases, you may find that you were completely certain of something yet still wrong. 2. Actions taken out of emotion (especially anger) tend to be mistakes. I'm not a biologist, scientist, or psychologist, but as far as I can tell, the only "purpose" of emotion is to influence behavior. And often, influence it not for the better ....

Deisderata  is a poem written by Max Ehrmann and first published in 1927. I first heard it…on a Leonard Nimoy album, where it was called…(sigh) Spock Thoughts . It was a short time later when I found it as text inside a greeting card when looking to buy a birthday card for someone. I had no idea that it had existed beyond (and before ) Spock Thoughts . Years later, I had a poster of it, which hung in one of my offices at a prior job. I find it to be wise advice (though your mileage may vary with the line concerning God). Here it is in its entirety, as it entered the public domain a few years ago. In the original printed version, it was all one paragraph, though in later versions (such as the aforementioned poster) it will often be broken into separate sentences based on theme. I’ve done so below. Desiderata Go placidly  amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.  As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. ...

In my post-high school/pre-career years, I used to hang out at a pool hall. I've mentioned it at other times on this blog. One night, while hanging out in the arcade section, watching Jen Monti play Hard Drivin' , I turned to find that the girlfriend who had broken up with me a few months back was standing there. She used to hang at a pool hall too, a different one, and what I learned later was that there was some sort of issue that had caused her crew to not want to go to that one anymore, so the fallback was the one where I hung out. It was awkward. I couldn't look at her, a point she noticed and mentioned later to a mutual friend. It's not that I harbored any ill will, I just didn't know what to say. At that age, I was doing the best I could, and I’ll admit that, often, it wasn't good enough. That was the case that night. At 21, we don’t always handle things the best way. But as the days and weeks went on, I didn't want that awkwardness to continue, so I ...

I have an older cousin who, when I was a teenager, gifted me her old turntable (which was outdated at the time, but has somehow made a comeback), complete with built-in 8-track player (a technology I am sure  is never coming back). Along with it were a handful of 8-track tapes, most of which I had no interest in, but one of them was Queen's The Game , which included a song I'd at least heard  of, "Another One Bites the Dust". So I listened to that one. It was my first exposure to Queen, and I remember really liking some of that album over the summer I listened to it. In particular, the songs "Need Your Loving Tonight" and "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" were favorites of mine. One of the songs got chopped off halfway through due to the 8-track format, ending on one track and resuming on the next. Very awkward. Despite liking some of this album, I didn't really become a fan of Queen until I saw Wayne's World . I'd heard "Bohemian R...

"A republic, if you can keep it." -- Benjamin Franklin  

In my senior year of high school, I started hanging out with this guy named Mike. For the life of me, I can't remember how it started, because Mike and I weren't in any of the same classes, and now that I think of it, I have to wonder if it was through a mutual friend, Chuck. But I'm only a few sentences into this and already rambling. Mike's older brother was in a band, and Mike and I auditioned to join. This sounds fancier than it was. I played bass, Mike played drums. It was through Mike's brother and his band that I met Bill, the topic of this blog post. Bill was the singer in the band. Just a few years older than Mike and I, Bill had an encyclopedic knowledge of music, specifically hard rock and heavy metal. His enthusiasm and love for it was contagious, and I always enjoyed talking music with him. He seemed to know everything about every hard rock or metal album from the 1970s to the current day. I always thought he should've written for a rock magazine. N...

httpResource  is still experimental in Angular, and I've begun playing around with it. Once I got a working implementation on a simple form, I wanted to update my tests. This was challenging. I did some searching and found a couple of posts about using HttpTestingController  and mocking a response, but I wanted to retain the service-level abstraction in my component unit tests, which know nothing about HTTP, only that services are used, and one of them now returns an HttpResourceRef in place of an Observable. Here's the mock implementation I wrote. I'm using Vitest now in this project instead of Jasmine, but the syntax should hopefully still make sense. class ExerciseServiceMock {   get = vi . fn (). mockImplementation (() => {       const paginatedResults = new PaginatedResults < ExerciseDTO >();       paginatedResults . totalCount = 0 ;       paginatedResults . results = new Array < ExerciseDTO >(...

One of my hobbies for a long time now has been the building of a digital library of movies and TV shows. I originally undertook this using media stored on a combination of USB drives and a DLNA server, but just over a year ago purchased a NAS and hosted an instance of Jellyfin . Jellyfin is amazing and I plan to write a separate entry about that later. Today, out of curiosity, I decided to see if it were possible to sort my media in order of how well it was rated (community rating/general consensus), and yes, Jellyfin provides this. And once I'd sorted my movies in order of community rating, I just had to know: What's the worst rated stuff I have here? What follows is that list, in descending order -- my "Bottom 10 Movies", so to speak. #10 - Can't Stop The Music Starring Steve Guttenberg and The Village People Is It Really That Bad?  Yes Okay, okay, I need to make something clear at the outset: I love bad movies. And this one is...woof. Bad. It's bad. It...