Things I may have learned recently-ish:
- Painting pottery is fun. I’m not very good at it. I apparently also have a thing for beer steins… out of which I drink coffee, because beer isn’t very good in my opinion. But steins are also a LOT of coffee, so it’s impractical to drink coffee from steins.
- Speaking of coffee, I’m sticking to black coffee straight up because of my diet/exercise regimen. I’m normally a sweet coffee kind of guy… this drinking of only bitter coffee is “interesting,” but not in the “most interesting man in the world” kind of way. Still trying to stick to it.
- Virtuoso‘s JDBC driver is not especially reliable. And I really wish I’d kept a “total time elapsed” for this entire process. I didn’t even keep a “real time elapsed” – but I’m predicting it takes days.
- I may have found a bug in JSoup. There’s a method that gets the representative text of a parent HTML node, and it’s removing one space character where I don’t think it’s supposed to. Will investigate further.
- Had a discussion yesterday – well, sort of a discussion – with a programmer who was arguing against Kotlin, saying that it didn’t really do anything Java didn’t do. That’s a particularly reductionist argument; after all, Java doesn’t do anything C doesn’t do (Java is written in C when you go deep enough) and C doesn’t do anything machine code doesn’t do. Why doesn’t he just use machine code? (Or he could use Kotlin, which is remarkably expressive and saves a ton of time.) Of course, he also was arguing that non-nullable types were a waste of time – and how great Python was, so maybe his priorities were skewed way differently than mine.
- Two friends may have finally seen an end to their job hunts, which is a good thing if true.
- Gradle is nice, but I still prefer Maven for most things. Yesterday I considered getting module interdependencies working as a “milestone.” That’s a crappy milestone to have. This stuff should just work.
- Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” – particularly the original release – is a great song. As a Christmas song, I’m not … sold (what the heck?) but as a song about perfect expressions from an imperfect source… the song’s recording even echoes its own form, in an awesome fractal. He’s pitchy, off the beat, all kinds of things… and yet I dare anyone listening to it to not be thinking “… Hallelujah!” in a sympathetic echo in their souls.
- I first heard “Hallelujah,” as far as I know, on American Idol.
- I altered a core setting (the audio in/output mix) on my A/D device (which I use to record audio) a week or so ago – and yesterday, when I went to use it, couldn’t get any sound out of it. Memo to self: when you change things, set them back! I’m usually a lot better about this, and don’t know why I got it wrong – maybe someone interrupted me so I didn’t fix the hardware before getting up? I don’t know.