Rubénerd!

I was looking for something else entirely but came across two images from Code Geass that I'd never seen before. Looking at the fine print it references R3 Zero Requiem which I'm assuming is an OVA of some description. When I first learned all my anime terminology around 2005 I first thought OVA meant the show was... over! True story.

And to think I haven't even finished watching the R2 series yet! Or K-On! Or Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei! Not to mention Saki which I let languish. And I finished Bakemonogatari but I haven't blogged about it! Ditto for Omamori Himari! I'm a terrible person.

Pictures show things

I like cats, but having grown up with pet dogs my entire life I loved the above one, it's a completely believable scene: I'm exactly that way with our little dogs here :). "Who's that doggie? Who's that doggie? You want a treat? Who's that nice doggie?"

As for the image below, it just further illustrates the implausibility of the women's Ashford Academy uniform; either that or C.C. put her skirt in the dryer and it shrunk. Yeah, that must be it. I suppose outfits on these shows aren't supposed to make sense, much like my discussions of said things on my blog here. Did I mention I dropped a heavy duty stapler on my head today?

Hall and Oates famously sang there's life after high school, and I think it's safe to say there are several signs that let you know such sentiment is true. One is you graduate, two is some of your former teachers open a chain of budget laundromats that cater to people allergic to surfactants, and third is people you grew up with get married. Well, two out of three ain't bad!

It may come as a complete shock to many of you here (ha!) that I was a fairly reserved and paranoid kid in school. Most of my life until that point was spent looking after my mum and worrying about whether she'd still be alive in the morning and when I got home, so I wasn't terribly fun to be around. My sister and I coped in different ways, my solution was to keep to myself. I think most people tended to ignore me because it was easier, which looking back now I can understand!

The emergency exits are located...

There were a small handful of people who literally made it possible for me to get through high school, one of whom was Laura Douglass. Of all the kids at that private school who grew up getting what they wanted and not being used to being humble, she was one of the few who was a genuinely nice person. I know, I'm shocked too! When she asked how you were feeling if you looked blue you knew she actually cared about what your answer was. She was ridiculously friendly, smart, optimistic, had a wicked sense of humour (and a laugh to match!), she could play the accordion, and was a better school councillor than... well, the school councillor. Despite us having virtually no interests or anything else in common other than an obsession with silly comedy shows, I was privileged enough to have her as one of my best friends.

I can't describe it, but it was like she had this positive energy that so many other people at that school either didn't have or actively seeked to destroy to make their own shallow existences less meaningless... you know the types. Everybody knew there wasn't any point belittling Laura or people she was friends with because it would wash right over her, turn around and hit them back again!

Is there a point to any of this?

Anyway I belabour all of this mumbling, poorly worded and insufficient for what is deserved description of Laura because I got an email from her a few days ago saying she finally got married to a strapping young chap called Sir Methodist, sorry Methorst, whom I only hope has enough energy and friendly awesomeness to keep up with her!

In case she reads any of my silly little blog here I wanted to publicly wish her all the best and to say Sir Methorst is a lucky guy. I'm glad that of all the people who I knew at that school you were one of the lucky few who managed to find happiness. Heck, you're one of the few who deserved to :).

As I have started signing all my posts, emails and other electronic whatnot of late:
Peace, health and happiness :)
~ Love Ruben

With reference to life after high school, this makes me think I need to pull my own life out of this wild plummeting tailspin its currently in and start flying up again. Which may be a problem because I don't even have a driver's licence yet, let alone an aviators licence. Uh oh, I'm going to get poked fun at for that again!

Photo above is of my bedroom in Singapore in 2004 shortly before we moved again. The reason why its there in a second!

I'm not at liberty to divulge what or for whom for the latter, but over the last two days I've been frantically working on two programs, one for an assignment. 3,900+ lines for the work, 720+ for the assignment, neither of which were particularly complex. Still, my eyes only just stopped protesting when I gave them some eye drops!

Unless you count XML or SQL I've never programmed concurrently in two different languages before, fortunately Java and Python are different enough that I wasn't accidentally writing Python code and expecting javac to interpret it properly! One thing you do really start to appreciate when you do Python and Ruby is just how verbose (and to a large degree tedious) Java is. Having to write entire setter and getter methods to just return what is essentially primitive data, not having a brain dead simple way to read characters from prompts, the gloriously simple Ruby way for dealing with arrays, I could go on. I guess in Java's favour for a learner like me it's fairly consistent and the Javadocs are very thorough and relatively easy to follow.

It's funny though how my brain has started thinking of programming languages as tools in which there's a right one for a job. I could have used Automater on Mac OS X but when I needed to organise a bunch of files and rename them for both projects I wrote a quick Perl script. I never really learned much shell scripting, so for my Perl fills that roll, and it does a superb job. I can remember when I was learning Perl in high school, those were happier days so it always makes me feel warm and fuzzy. Acme! CPAN! Perl golf! Like I've said here, I feel as though my life peaked in 2004, it was a magical year.

Earlier in high school we did Visual Basic, but I'd sooner call my foot a toaster than dignifying it with the title of "programming language"! Well okay I did have fun with that too, I remember showing Ms Coupland some really stupid nonsensical applications that didn't do anything.

The other funny thing is I while I did do some rudimentary QBasic and QPascal in primary school, the "programming language" I used the most when I was a kid were simple DOS BAT (batch) files. I remember writing silly text based games and at one point I even had a crappy flat file organiser for our CD collection which I lost interest in once I realised my dad was so impressed he wanted me to type all the CDs into it! I really wish I could find it.

The next things I want to get involved with in my own spare time if I ever get any again is to continue playing around with my second hand Sinclair Spectrum or even better giving some PDP-8 assembler a try.

I'm sure most of you have some nostalgic programming stories, anything fun or interesting you want to share?

You may remember a few days I go I wrote a blog post about a blog post that ZombiePlan had written on his blog. A blog post about a blog post on a blog, who would have thought it? Anyway I blatantly fabricated a screenshot by inserting words he in fact did not say and then proceeded to pretend he did in fact say what I had fabricated. I like pie.

In response to said post ZombiePlan did what any reasonable person would do under the circumstances and made me into a Yu-Gi-Oh card that mocked the frequency in which I post blog posts on my blog. I write blog posts on my blog, who would have thought it?

The two cards presented above may look identical to the untrained eye, but in fact there are significant differences. In my late primary school and early high school years in the early 2000s I used to play Magic: The Gathering. Yes I'm afraid it's true, you could have been forgiven up until this point for thinking my online nerdish dorkyness was just a disguise, but it's definitely not!

In fact initially I didn't even play the game to start with, I used to collect the cards and put them in card folders because I loved the graphics. This used to work great because often the cards that had the crappiest attack/defence power or the lamest actions had some of the best pictures, so people would give them to me for free.

And why is it that I included the Thran Dynamo? Well when I started playing half-seriously I managed to scrounge up several of these cards and use them in place of mana once I had four down. By tapping one of those beauties, I had three times the mana to activate cards in one turn, and more importantly they could be used with any coloured cards. Not the best card ever, but I thought I was being clever.

It's amazing what you remember... and conversely what you try to forget. I still like pie though.