I have a lot of plans currently in the works. I really hope I can get some of them off the ground and completed. The usual problem for is that if I actually do start something, I never finish it. Sometimes I become disinterested in it, sometimes I’m over ambitious and get frustrated. Some of these plans I’m about to present to you are nothing special. They wouldn’t take long or mean much, but they are things I want to get done.

Plan 1: Read - I currently have a large stack of books that I want to read. Some are halfway started, some I’ve never even opened. Besides reading the ones I have, I want to start buying more books, but I really should concentrate on finishing the ones I have first before starting new ones. Some of these books include: The Dune series (book one and two completed, three in the works, four, five and six, sometime), Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, Inside the Third Reich (gosh I hope I don’t get some crazy hateful spam for saying that one), the Phantom of the Opera.

Plan 2: Write - This is one I’m accomplishing right now! Amazing, I know. There’s more than just the blog I want to do. There’s some stories of sorts I want to work on. This one isn’t too interesting and mostly consists of continuing to blog.

Plan 3: Go backpacking - I just acquired a backpack and while I still need some hiking boots (and probably some conditioning), I’d really like to try it sometime. What I could do is start simple, that is, don’t just trek off into the woods and go from there, but instead start with a state campground where I could do my best to bring the few things I need and then hike around there with my pack.

Plan 4: Cook - I’d really like to start trying to create my own dishes.. but I should probably start with ones already created. Having Wegman’s nearby could help me out. I’d like to see the variety of things they have and try to create a dish from the sometimes unusual things I find. I could do a lot of grilling as well.. I can do that.

Plan 5: Photography - This one is going to be the hardest I think, even harder than the writing. The problems I have with writing also exist with photography. I like doing it, I can do it well enough when I get into it, but starting it and finding the ideas I want to write/shoot is next to impossible for me. Another problem with getting photography done is my lack of access to a darkroom. I really like printing, but it’s hard to do with no darkroom. Even if I did have a dark room, I would only be able to do black and white. Don’t get me wrong. B&W is great, I love it, but I would like to do color as well… I just don’t know how. There’s a few solutions. One is that I can keep shooting film and then scanning the film and then digitally producing, or I can buy a decent digital SLR and use that. What makes me unsure of that is what happens if I don’t get back into it? That’s wasted money. Another thing is that digital photography looks so fake sometimes. It just doesn’t have the same warmth that film does. It’s not going away though, so I should learn to appreciate its benefits.

Plan 6 - Games: I want to play more games. Not so much in the realm of video games (though there are a few), but games with real people all in one physical location, while we aren’t staring at a screen. There’s party games like Pictionary and Apples to Apples, but sometimes I want something that involves more thinking. Monopoly and Risk would also be played, but they’re a little over done at times. Someday I hope to get into gamers’ games. Complex wargames and the like, but right now, I think German-style potato-salad… er I mean, board games are the way to go. There’s those and then maybe I can push for Axis and Allies and beyond. There’s also another style of game I want to try, but I’d never find people that are willing to play with me or that I would be willing to play with.

Plan 7: Programming - Learn more languages, styles of programming, read about home brew Nintendo DS development, think of cool ideas that I would enjoy trying to code. That one is simple, but pretty huge.

Plan 8: Academics - Study study study. Mostly Japanese, but also computer science related topics beyond the range of programming. I will probably end up being a programmer, but computer science is so much more than that.

Plan 9: Outer Space - Like I could resist that slightly obscure reference. Didja get it? Huh?

I’m three for three. Let’s see if I can keep it up! (Don’t expect anything on weekends though. My brain needs a rest)

First of all, earlier today I was looking through this article on PC World: 100 Blogs We Love and I must say, I found a few new blogs to add to my ever expanding bookmarks folder.

The first one that caught my eye was Slashfood. First of all, this URL is immensely easier to tell somebody verbally than it’s namesake, Slashdot. One comes out as “Aitch-Tee-Tee-Pee-Colon-
Slash-Slash-Slash-Dot-Dot-Org” and the other
“Aitch-Tee-Tee-Pee-Colon-
Slash-Slash-Slash-Food-Dot-Com”. I really don’t expect anybody to be confused by the former anymore though, unless they don’t spend any time on the internet or the person who is telling it to them is like one of those people who can’t properly pace things like phone numbers. Kevin James had a great bit about that in his Sweat the Small Stuff special that was on Comedy Central a few years ago. I’m getting off track though. Slashfood is really great. I’m personally a big fan of food and cooking, so a website that blogs about it without only being “Here’s a recipe” is great. I don’t fault them for having recipes, but the addition of articles discussing more than that are excellent. Currently I see links to the Mentos Intern (great if you liked subservient chicken), and a post about the current injury sustained by the mighty jaw of Kobayashi-san. Plus, did you know 22 ways to make iced tea? I sure didn’t.

Another new one I found was mental_floss. The tagline says it all “Where knowledge junkies get their fix”. I really like to know about everything, it’s just something I like to do. I don’t like it when I don’t know what somebody is talking about something and I have no idea what they are talking about. It might be an academic subject, or they could be talking about cricket.. I want to know about it and be able to hold a conversation with them. A lot of the time, my knowledge ends up amounting to trivia, which isn’t all bad. I know of a place where that can come in very handy.

I can’t explain what I find attractive about Retro Thing. It’s just plain interesting. I wasn’t alive when most of these items they write about were in they’re heyday, but I still read it. It probably goes back to the acquisition of knowledge I mentioned when talking about mental floss.

That’s it for me today. I hope you can find something new and fun to read from that list, or any other form of blog discovery you may have. When I get the chance, I’ll let you know about some other blogs that I was made aware of before I was linked to the original article. Maybe you’ll enjoy them as well.

I was linked to an article by reddit or digg.

Here’s the article: Six Language-independent Ways to Write Better Code

My comments on the points brought up:

1) Plan for extensibility - I think this is one of the most important points brought up by this article. Pretty much, when you write for something for a specific application, don’t write it for a specific application. Write it so that it can be reused and changed easily. Like the example given in the article, you write some code that works with BMP files, but then your clients want to be able to use JPG files as well. You have to try to figure out where your code is limited by the specificity you wrote into it. Code reuse is the name of the game.

2) Don’t use magic numbers - If found myself in various situations where I’ve used magic numbers. Not usually in the sense of a size of _something_ (something being the key word), but lots of the time as a return value for a function that needed to return some status, but a boolean value wasn’t enough. Rather than having if (a > b && c > d) { return 14; }, the 14 should have been replaced by a constant I had declared earlier, such as AC_GREATER (a pretty bad name as well), which would have been set to 14 when declared. Then we can also have if (foo == AC_GREATER) { return; }. I think this makes quite a bit more sense. Now you know that foo is trying to compare itself and see if A and C were greater than B and D, rather than it being an arbitrary 14.

3) Document why, not what - This is a tip that I really need to start adhering to myself. In general, the comments I write (if I write them at all), only say things like “a structure for holding SomeObject” or even worse “increments the counter”. These say nothing. Why do I have that structure? Why am I incrementing the counter? Obviously an explanation of why I’m incrementing a variable called i in a for loop isn’t necessary, but in other situations it is. I should remember this one.

4) Don’t reinvent the wheel - Out of all the tips, this is the one I’ve heard most from my professors. If you have code that solves the problem already written, use it. Hopefully your code is general enough that you can use it and you don’t have to rewrite it for each particular problem. It goes back to point 1. General, extensible code is your friend. Write it, use it, love it.

5) Work Incrementally - This is one another that I need to do, but I’m not exactly thrilled about it, mostly because it involves something I hate. Structured testing. I do sometimes write too much code at once at that makes it so it’s really hard to narrow down where a bug is occurring. The solution lies in testing more often, after I get a small piece done, test it before going on to the next. It’s unit testing and boy do I hate unit testing. I’ll leave that to my SE friends to do.

6) Find somebody willing to criticize your work - This applies to more than just coding. Constructive feedback is a great thing to have. Bringing in a fresh eye is sometimes the most important step of the process. They aren’t stuck into the way you’ve been thinking and could point of problems and solutions you never thought of.

Not bad for the first real post in 4 months, eh?

It’s been a few days since my last post. I don’t think there’s anything I can do to completely prevent that from happening again, but I’m going to try it again. Nothing has really changed. I’m still going to try to find things on the internet, link to them and write about them. I think I should try to find more blog to respond to as well. Maybe that way I’ll pick a few things from them. I have a huge list of blogs that I currently read or should be reading, so that would be a good place to start.

Another thing is that I can use my lunch break to do the blogging. It’s some free time where I’m not distracted by my Nintendo DS or other people in my house. I can just find something and write about it.

So let’s see how this goes, all right?