Largest amount I can make a check out for on QuickBooks Online is:
“Nine trillion nine hundred ninety-nine billion nine hundred ninety-nine million nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine and 99/100″.
Hehehe.
I guess I can’t pay off our national debt with a single check, then. Damn.
I just wanted to point out that http://www.pixelmud.com/“>Zenia is nice to work with. She’s very helpful and lets me eat her leftover food when I’m hungry. At least she did once, so I’m hoping she’ll do it again.
Look, Zenia, your name even made it into the subject line! You have to be positively glowing with pleasure.
This is the old version, where I was just testing out this instrument:
–> Pompous
Quoting what I originally posted on Xanga:
I was experimenting with a nice sounding VST (a standard plug-in architecture for software generated instruments, and the instruments which hook in using it) in FL Studio (music composition program) and this little clip is what resulted. I bet you’re going to listen more than once…
This one has an additional element at the end which provides some counterpoint and has a nice melody:
–> Pompous-2V
The “2V” just signifies a sort of version number of the song.
The weakness of Google Maps is in its printing capabilities. It’s great for looking up directions and exploring a route, but when you only have time to look something up fast, print it out and jump on the road, only one map view prints, and that’s the current one where you happen to have panned and zoomed the map. On the other hand, it prints out the text-based directions at quite a large font size (on a separate page), which is nice because you’ll be referring to those often while driving. Let me see if I can manage not to get lost tonight.
Thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday.
I have lots and lots of Gmail invites now, if anyone wants.
Half finished. Has some flaws. I couldn’t think of a better name.
–> Electronic-3
Hyper Mike said:
The running motion is actually significantly different running on a treadmill. I think you use your calves much less because the road is essentially being pulled from under you.
I don’t doubt the running motion itself is different, but it’s not for the reason he stated, since everything is relative. It’s still “ground moving relative to you”, whether or not it’s the “surface of the Earth” kind of ground or “rubber surface of the belt on the treadmill” kind of ground. You have the same momentum, relative to each respective surface. So why is one’s running motion on a treadmill different from running on good solid ground fixed to the Earth? I’ve mostly run on treadmills and personally notice only a slight difference, but let’s theorize.
The main difference would be, and this is probably the biggest one, the lack of air volume moving towards you (or you moving through it; same thing) when running on the treadmill. If you’re running at 8 MPH, there’s no 8 MPH headwind. It doesn’t seem like that would make a big difference, but I think it does. The secondary difference would be the machine’s softer surface. Perhaps not always softer (what if you’re running on grass?), but different from real ground. Bouncier. Returning much more of the energy from each footstep. (That explains the decreased calf usage.) Thirdly, the belt doesn’t exactly move at a constant speed, especially on poorer quality treadmills. When you’re in the air, it’s moving at a certain speed, and when your foot strikes the ground it squeezes the belt against whatever’s below it and because of friction the belt slows down a tiny bit before the motor can compensate (if it does). If your center of gravity moves back and forth just a little bit, then that force gets exerted forwards or backwards on the belt and speeds it up and slows it down. That effect might affect how you run. Fourthly, there’s the size of the machine, where you know you can’t take very big steps or vary your pace wildly or you’ll fall off the end or bang your knees on something like that… maybe you can’t swing your arms in exactly the same either way because there are rails in the way or just influencing your movements. Fifthly, maybe an element is psychological. Maybe you naturally don’t lean into the run or assume the same posture when you don’t have the same sensation of forward movement. Still, I think wind and bounciness are prime. It’s definitely not “the road being pulled out from under you” though. When I’m on the freeway driving 65 MPH, that would be identical to driving on a giant “roadmill” at 65 MPH with a huge fan blowing 65 MPH wind at the front of my car (which is nonetheless not moving relative to the surface of the Earth, but that’s irrelevant) as far as the car is concerned. Anyway, we’re all sitting here moving thousands of miles per second through space relative to the sun, or the center of the Earth, and so on.
Here’s something else, though. It annoys* me when I see gym-goers increase the grade of a treadmill so they’re walking up it at the steepest possibly slant, which, they probably think, is giving them a good workout because they’re walking uphill, and that’s harder than walking on level ground. It’s like a challenging hike, climbing up that steep hill, no? At least it’s burning plenty more calories than walking on level ground, wouldn’t you think? Since walking uphill is very tiring! And this would all be true, but… here’s what happens. After ramping up the treadmill, they hold tightly to the bar the entire time while walking on it. I never see anyone walking up that high-grade a treadmill and not holding onto the bar. They’d have to assume a different posture to do that on a real hill without a bar to cling to; a climb, with bent knees. Like climbing a flight of stairs. Anyway, think about it like this: you could have a treadmill that’s adjusted its slope to the point that belt is nearly perpendicular to the ground, and you could still walk on it if you held tightly to the bar. You could walk up a wall if you had an upwards-moving bar to hold on to that would pull you up. (The main exercise in that circumstance would be the “leg lift” aspect and not much else.) You could walk up a real hill and that would be good exercise, but if you held on to the back of something that pulling you up the hill, it would be the equivalent of walking on level ground. Or you could have a friend just push on your back as you walk up the hill. Same thing. So what I wonder is, do these people realize that when they make the treadmill that steep and hold on the whole time, they’re not getting any benefit from going uphill, at all? Also, the Calorie readout on the machine probably assumes the exerciser is doing all the work of walking up a hill, since it doesn’t sense backwards force on the grab bar, or lack thereof on the belt, but in actuality no additional Calories are being burned as compared with simply walking on level ground, and so is misleading. Maybe walking on a slant just feels nice for a change, or gives a little bit of arm exercise (you can do reverse-pushups of a sort while walking, I can imagine), but I do get the impression most of the time that the people walking uphill as described really think they’re “working it” and getting some sort of heavy exercise by going up so steep a slope, whereas in reality they’d be much better served just setting the slope to a slight angle above horizontal and walking without using any rails for support.
*I mean more like amuses, but this ought to be common sense… right?
I’m in Palm Springs, visiting my grandparents here for the day. I was going to drive back tonight, but it’s still wet outside and I’d rather wait until tomorrow morning and exchange darkness for traffic. In one minute it’s going to be my birthday. There we go. I’ve never done anything big for birthdays, except when I was little and had birthday parties. Now, just a nice family dinner where I get to specify the menu. What should I have? My little brother has already volunteered to specify my menu and says steak; I say that’s not a bad idea. Birthday parties when I was little: Those were fun. Most memorable experience is of a friend of mine singing “happy birthday to washing-machine!” because my birthday is the same as George Washington’s. So now you know. Don’t use this information to steal my identity, ok? (I think anyone determined enough would be able to find that information in public databases, anyway. So my plea is directed at the casual identity thief.)
Sometimes friends ask me what I’m going to do (expecting a lavish party or something, who knows what their overactive imaginations hold) and I’m probably letting them down by saying “nothing much”, but in a way I’d rather it just be another day. I suppose there are two ways of looking at it.
One way is like sleep. In general, when I think of days, I don’t think of them as being divided, one from another, by an arbitrary time like 12:00 AM; I think of them as being divided by sleeping periods. For example, even though now it’s technically Tuesday, it’s still part of the same “day” as far as I’m concerned. When I go to sleep and wake up, it’ll be a new day. That means an all-nighter leads to my having a strange sense of the current day, since it’s really one day, but a day with two mornings and two afternoons and maybe two evenings… but it doesn’t feel like so much time has passed. Maybe because I think of a day as starting when I wake up and get out of bed, and not having that as a reference point means that a new day never really started. A birthday is like 12:00 AM. It’s an arbitrary point which divides ages, just as midnight is an arbitrary point which divides days, both being for logical purposes of letting us communicate with others and have standard definitions of things. So what’s the “real” divider of ages? What says that now I’m one year older just as going to sleep and waking up says that now a new day has started? Maybe there isn’t one and I’d rather just see life as one continuous amount of time not punctuated by years. Why even view days that way? (That’s a dangerous view, though… it leads one to sleeping whenever one wants and floating around the clock not in synchrony with daylight or anyone else’s schedule. Anyway, that doesn’t work when one needs to be available to meet with or have calls with others at specific times, which would be during standard business hours.)
The other view of birthdays compares them to new years, or new school terms, or anything that provides a fresh start. Now it’s the first day of my being this age, and here is a fresh chance to make this the best year I’ve lived yet. Just like we have New Year’s Resolutions, or an attitude at the beginning of a semester that “I’m going to study hard and remain focused and not fall behind in any class and get straight A’s; I’ll start my homework when it’s assigned and not wait until the last minute for anything; I’ll do all the assigned reading right away and start studying a week before each exam to give myself plenty of time and consequently not ever have to feel stress when the exam looms because I’ll be confident that I know all the material” and so on. Why not birthday resolutions? Today’s as good a reference point as any.
(It’s been a while since I wrote the above.) So maybe it’s just another day. But the steaks are about to go on the grill…
http://maps.google.com/“>Google Maps is awesome. I’ve been playing around with it and exploring various areas. I followed the 10 freeway from Santa Monica to it’s ending point in Jacksonville on the east coast of Florida. I never knew the streets in the Park La Brea apartment community had such an interesting layout (search for “park la brea 90036″; what you’re actually searching for and will find are shops with “park la brea” in their names and the map will show all of the matching stores on the map with pushpins). I like how the map images are anti-aliased; that was on my suggestion list for http://www.mapquest.com/“>MapQuest and http://maps.yahoo.com/“>Yahoo Maps for years. Well, it seems like MapQuest anti-aliases the lines on their images now, whereas Yahoo Maps does not. Compare the image quality of http://maps.yahoo.com/maps_result?ed=sqRVCup_0Top4mVO56bWlg7NERsymjVUwcc-&csz=Los+Angeles,+CA+90024&country=us&new=1&name=&qty=”>this (Yahoo) with that of http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?searchtype=address&country=US&addtohistory=&searchtab=home&address=1061+Broxton+Ave+&city=Los+Angeles&state=&zipcode=90024″>this. You’ll note that MapQuest is much cleaner and smoother. However, Yahoo has a Javascript-based pan function whereas MapQuest does not. In Yahoo when you click on an arrow to pan the map image in any direction, only the image reloads, which is quick. In Mapquest the whole page reloads when you pan in one direction, which is not only slow but also means that your scrollbar positions in the Web browser get reset, because as far as the browser is concerned you just went to a new page (since the view is controlled by the Query String portion of the URL). And likely you’ve scrolled down to see the map, since there’s a lot of heading information on the page, and so each time you pan you’ll have to scroll back down to center the map in your window again. Google Maps has the best of both worlds, though, with a heavily Javascripted interface (like Gmail) and a nice anti-aliased display. Try panning on Google’s map by dragging… isn’t that amazing? The map itself is composed of a bunch of tiles, and so when you drag it to expose new areas only the tiles required to fill in those areas are downloaded. It also seems that the page must load tiles around the edges of the map that aren’t viewable, so when you start panning in any direction those already-cached images are shown immediately, while the browser gets to work loading the next set of images that haven’t yet hit the screen. I don’t know how this program will work for someone over a modem link, though… the fundamental speed limitations of dial-up connections much be too much for a program like this to run at a decent speed. But then again, who has dial-up anymore? I hope that’s going the way of 256-color displays (and the whole concept of “web-safe colors”). Actually dial-up is a ubiquitous fallback, since one can always find phone lines, say in hotel rooms or when a guest at someone else’s house far away from the comforts of home, when an emergency Internet connection is needed for a laptop computer, for example. But then, something we’re probably going to see soon is wide-area wifi coverage which will initially only be available in select cities, but the popularity will grow. Eventually, we’ll take the ability to get online anywhere over the airwaves for granted just like we take AM and FM radio stations for granted. That’ll put cell phone carriers out of business, though, since if the Internet is available freely anywhere, someone will start mass producing “cell”-phones which just use voice-over-IP to communicate. Actually that concept exists already, for when you want to talk for free in a coffee shop or some other place where there’s unmetered wifi available; it’s called “voice-over-IP-over-wifi”. But the places where you can find a wireless hotspot that lets you connect are pretty limited. The coffee-shop wifi links which are consistently available make you pay quite a bit to gain access, though I think the services are overpriced because the equipment necessary to set up a hotspot is very limited. Basically all you need is a broadband wired link (DSL or Cable) and a solid wireless router. I bought an 802.11b (slower speed than the current latest standard, 802.11g, but plenty fast for Internet access since it’s faster than most servers’ links) for $10 at Best Buy (with a rebate) and it works great, though the commercial services probably want something a great deal more solidly built and with greater range. Still, it’s a one-time expense. And the DSL or Cable link (or both for reliability) wouldn’t cost much, in the general scheme of things, either. Unless they’re going for a T1 line, but I don’t see why that’s necessary. Starbucks locations (Starbuckses, preciousss!) general have a hotspot provided by http://client.hotspot.t-mobile.com/“>T-Mobile whereas Coffee Bean locations uses a somewhat cheaper service called http://www.sbc.com/gen/general?pid=5949“>FreedomLink which apparently is provided by SBC. (As an aside, I dislike SBC. Their DSL connections are horrible to troubleshoot because they use PPPoE (PPP over Ethernet) which adds a completely unnecessary and pointless level of complexity and authentication to the connection. If you have the choice between SBC DSL or someone else’s Cable, the latter’s probably the better choice.) Anyway, http://maps.google.com“>Google Maps is to the other online map services as Gmail is to the other big webmail services. And no double some people will find it a huge revision of the status quo in how mapping and driving direction sites are done, while others won’t like it. It’s the same with Gmail… I have friends who, for whatever reasons, don’t like it much and just want to continue using Hotmail. Part of it is, I’m sure, that changing an address is extra work because you have to e-mail everyone and let them know, and check the old address often, and so on. I didn’t have to deal with that since I just set me old addresses to forward to Gmail… if you have a Hotmail account you probably have to pay them for that ability, and I know I’d have to pay to do that with my Yahoo account. But that’s okay; “mjhecht@yahoo.com” is for setting up accounts or buying things online and the receipt of junk mail; their spam filter is pretty good and real people I know who want to e-mail me things don’t even know about that address. So I check it every once in a while… and since it gets, maybe, a hundred junk messages per days, I don’t care about posting the address here where it can be parsed by address harvesters crawling the web for addresses. (I wonder how “smart” those crawlers are… do they look for text like “mjhecht AT yahoo DOT com” which people spell out all the time to obfuscate an address when posting it on the Web and supposedly protect it from harvesting? I always assumed they did, or at least some did, and so I used a more advanced obfuscation scheme. More on that another time… I think I’m up to about three levels on the tangent stack at the moment. Or maybe just one level.) Anyway, in conclusion (which is the same as my introduction): check out Google Maps. And don’t worry too much about staying dry, a little water won’t hurt you, we’re waterproof.
It’s funny how the more that I write here, the more I find I have to say. Our brains are interesting that way: generally the more they do of something, they better they get at it. For example, how your memory works is the opposite of how a digital data store like a hard disk drive in a computer or a memory card in a camera works in that the more you memorize, the greater your capacity to memorize more things will be. That reminds me of a book I read (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0380727331/“>Memoir from Antproof Case by Mark Helprin) in which the author describes how he’s made by a strict tutor to memorize the phone book, after which his mind is so receptive to information that he absorbs anything with ease. That’s fiction, of course, but it seems like it would apply. Before I go about memorizing the phone book though, and that’s just like one of the kinds of things I would do, if you knew me, let me say that that there are plenty of other more productive ways of training memory. For example, learning a new language. Anyway, I have a very poor memory for facts to begin with, and I’ve gotten through life with no trouble thus far… But memorizing the phone book as a way to “prime” the mind for more useful information? That’s like how some people claim that if you want to learn a new language and have two years, you’d get better results by, rather than studying that single language straight through your two years, studying Esperanto for one year and then your target language for another year. (Esperanto is the Dvorak keyboard of languages.) So perhaps there is something to memorizing the phonebook. Study the phonebook for one year, then study Esperanto for another year, and finally study your target language for a third year. You’ll be a memory genius, able to absorb complex facts in a single glance!
Anyway, writing is fulfilling and gets easier with practice. And (along with eating oranges) it punctuates the endless hours I seem to be spending in front of the computer nowadays, working in Access or PHP or Access or PHP… Speaking of memory, I can’t remember whether I wrote and posted a “review” of the aforementioned book. And then there were those shoes which lived in a locker at the gym for four months, and I lost my cell phone recently (and didn’t get it back), and my wallet (but did get it back with all contents intact)… But then, I hadn’t lost my wallet in three years prior, so I figure I was due for a wallet-losing. (Everyone has to lose a wallet every once in a while.) But still, maybe I really ought to get started on the phone book right away.
I must have been experiencing mild caffeine withdrawal symptoms… but I’m better now, okay? See, I wasn’t really addicted to that stuff.
Tonight I went to the gym. I went into the locker room and opened up a locker. It had some things in it, as sometimes is the case when a trusting soul doesn’t use a lock. I noticed a pair of shoes that looked remarkably like an old pair I used to have but hadn’t seen in months, and the thought occurred to me that, hey, maybe someone stole my shoes, and that’s why I hadn’t seen them, and here they are again! But it was just a thought, so I closed that locker and opened the one to its immediate right which was empty, proceeded to change, put my things away, and put a lock on the door. I was about to go out and thought, hey, let me take another look in that unlocked locker. I looked in there and carefully pulled out one reminiscent shoe, holding it at arm’s length. I brought it closer and inspected it, noting how remarkably it looked like my old one. Probably really was my old one, but I wasn’t completely sure yet. I looked at the other one. Then I noted that there was also a pair of underwear in the corner of the locker which was identical to a particular pair I had once had and also hadn’t seen for a while, come to think of it, but underwear being underwear, one doesn’t tend to give it much thought or feel much of a loss or even necessarily notice if a particular pair wanders off. But I recognized this one as mine, and the combined weight of the two pieces of evidence, shoes and underwear, clinched the fact that they were both mine. I next asked myself how long it had been since I had seen those shoes, and I recalled that they had disappeared around the time I moved, which was the end of last September. I’d always assumed they were around the house somewhere, or in a box somewhere, but here they were in a locker and they had presumably been in that same locker since the end of September! Which would be: all of October, November, December, January, and over half of Feburary. So the facts are that my shoes and a couple other things (there was also a nondistinct tee shirt I didn’t mention) were sitting calmly and patiently in an unlocked locker in my gym, undisturbed, for four and a half months. I laughed out loud! Then I closed the door and left the items there rather than transfer them to my locked locker, because what was one additional hour after those four and a half months going to do?
But when I came back after working out, my long lost things were gone and the locker was empty.
All right, that didn’t really happen; of course everything was still there. I took it all home, my beloved pair of sneakers among the other items. And to think that months ago I had considered tossing them out because they were old and falling apart. What would have happened if I hadn’t found my old things? How long would they have persisted in that locker? Probably until the death of the universe.
I could have used the Scripting.Dictionary object instead of the Scripting.Collection object. Dictionary is more like an associative array and has a keys() method which returns an array of keys that can be used by iterating through the array and looking up each value as needed. Oh well, I already have my code working using a collection of two-object collections (to represent key/value pairs).
The Princess Bride: A clever, hard-to-put-down book. Then I saw the movie (on the basis of filling in various classics I seem to have missed as a kid), which was horrible, and I think if I were to try and read the book again I wouldn’t be able to enjoy it because I’d just be picturing the characters from the movie. After watching, I went back and read the author’s introduction to the book which was all about how “everyone’s seen the movie and it’s a beloved classic but now here’s the book, you’ll probably enjoy it too”, and how the movie was made and how pleased he was in how it turned out, and that made me lose most of my respect for the author (William Goldman, not to be confused with William Golding who wrote The Lord of the Flies). If he believes his vision of the story in the book was translated well into the movie, then his vision and mine can’t possibly match, and I read a different story than he wrote.
On the other hand, Goldman also wrote the screenplay and invested a great deal of time and effort in the movie. So my question is: could he, conceivably, publicly announce “sorry about all that, I can’t believe how horribly this movie turned out, I put so much effort into it and involved lots of other people and in the end it completely sucked”. I hope that were I in his position I could certainly do something like that on the basis of honesty and just telling it like it as and moving on, and I’m certainly critical of things I make when I believe they haven’t turned out well. But that’s because I’m working alone, and something I make is wholly mine to criticize. When you’re part of a large team, there’s diplomacy involved, especially when you’re in an elevated position within the team. So being responsible for having written the screenplay and assisted with the casting, for Goldman to publicly criticize the movie would be to insult the work of everyone involved in the, or “his”, project. Now, how much insult any particular person would actually take is based on other factors, and I’m not assuming anything about Goldman’s true feelings regarding the movie. I’m just pointing out by way of example based on idle speculation how in general politeness and diplomacy prevent us from just calling as we see it (and probably how most people see it). I can’t even say whether that’s always a bad thing, because it’ll depend on the circumstance. Based on the length and content of the introduction to the book, it’s hard to see that Goldman was disappointed by the movie in any way; based on the content of the book itself, which demonstrates the intelligence of the writer (and the fact that I enjoyed the book, from which I originally assumed that the writer and myself appreciate similar styles), it’s hard to see that he could possibly think the movie worthwhile.
["Oh bother", said Pooh, as all his carefully constructed logic dissolved in a tragic axiomatic anomaly.]
Note: I didn’t link to the earlier book because I couldn’t find the edition I have (with that introduction) on Amazon. Bought it at a run of the mill megabookstore, though. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/034543014X/“>Here’s their base item with reviews.
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0093779/“>Here’s the movie. I guess a lot of people liked it. Fine, it’s a classic, and it has some amusing scenes and memorable lines here and there… but it was something completely different from the book, and that’s probably why I was disappointed. I remember that the first 100 pages or so of the book went by in a couple minutes of the movie… all the cleverness and nuance of the writing was lost.
I am a very all-or-none kind of person. Either I’m working hard with a great deal of focus, or I’m barely getting anything done. I just ate four oranges, because if I was eating oranges, I might as well really eat oranges. I bet that’s annoying to others, though, because now there are hardly any oranges left. So the people who eat just one orange at a time are left out in the cold because they don’t have any. Whomever buys the oranges around here may decide to get a whole bunch next time, assuming that since they disappeared so fast someone has a habit of eating them in quantity, and then either I’ll actually eat a whole bunch as predicted, or else I won’t eat any and there will be extra oranges floating around and getting moldy.
That also reminds me of a time when one of my old roommates and I went in on a box of sixty Eggo waffles from Costco. I probably finished them before he was able to eat more than a few, because when I decided to eat waffles, I could easily consume about eight or so in a sitting. Too bad we only had a toaster with two slots, though. Now I have one with four (gyahahaha). But I was trying to gain weight back then; now I’ve decided that’s a useless exercise and besides, I think I actually CAN gain weight now, so in the interests of not doing so I’ll limit waffle consumption to around four per sitting. Except that we don’t have any (I wonder why). But then, whatever singular food I ate in great quantity was balanced by the non-balanced diet that resulted from not eating other things at all for that particular meal. Then the next meal, I’d eat only one of the other things in great quantity. And there’s a great deal of exaggeration in this paragraph, but the bottom line is that my roommate and I never split a box of waffles again.
Likewise, I like to work on one task at a time until I get it done. When I have several projects going on at the same time and all demand my attention, I don’t work very well on any one of them unless I tell myself that I’m going to devote all my energy to one project and work on it until it’s done. The problem there is that if I become bored with a project or haven’t been given the direction in which to proceed, I’ll lose my focus and waste time. I greatly dislike the idea of working on something and then being told that what’s needed is something else; if I’m given a final design of, say, a program, I can work on it and produce something to that specification very fast. When I’m given some sort of general direction and I can produce a result that satisfies how I think the project should be done, but I have to spend a great deal of thought on deciding how “they probably want it”, I’m slowed down considerably because these are two separate tasks. There’s the “designing” part, and there’s the “implementation” part. Implementation’s easy, but when I’ve come up with the design myself and don’t know if it’s what’s desired, I feel like I could be wasting a great deal of time on the implementation. But communicating a design specification is extremely hard, and nobody wants to do it. So one thing I need to do is get better at sketching out (on paper) as many parameters and screens for a program as I can think of, and getting feedback based on that before I sit down and start creating something. That’ll fix part of this bottleneck.
Anyway, oranges are good (as long as they don’t have seeds). But I only left one, and it’s somewhat green. Too bad. I’m just inconsiderate, eh?
Well, that took all of 30 seconds. I made a function called “pair” which takes two arguments and returns a new Collection of its arguments. Then in the original Collection I’m building, I can add the results of a function call like “pair([name],[value])”.
In the iteration over the main Collection, the iterating variable gets assigned the sub-Collection which consists of exactly two items, the fake “name” and “value” objects, so both are accessible.
I want to get a list of the keys in a VBA Collection object so I can use them for something while I loop through the collection, but apparently one can’t do this.
Like “foreach($array as $key=>$data) {…}” in PHP, but there’s no way to put the “$key” in there for VBA. That’s kind of short sighted, but then, early versions of PHP didn’t have that facility either. I guess the only way to get around this is to make a Collection of two-element Collections (the sub-collection will consist of the key/data pairs) and just let it index itself numerically.
There’s a hotel downtown called the Bonaventure. My grandparents stayed there once, when I was little, and I enjoyed riding up and down the glass elevators. I recall the building being about forty stories tall, and the elevators, which ride on the outside of the building, moving extremely fast. Years later, I ran into the hotel again, quite randomly. I was in high school, or perhaps had started college and was home for a break, and it was a day when I set out for a random walk and stumbled into the L.A. marathon on a part of its route that went down Melrose Avenue. I think it was at about Mile Fourteen that I hit the marathon route, and I decided to just walk along with it for a while. So that I did, wearing my jeans and white tee shirt, unlike those runners with their skimpy shorts. I was in no shape for running, anyway. So I walked along. I sampled an apple-cinnamon Powerbar that day, which was the first time I’d had a Powerbar, and decided it was quite delicious, and after that I began eating lots of them. Apple-cinnamon and malt-nut, those were the only two flavors I like(d). I don’t see those on store shelves now, though; only chocolate and peanut butter and other flavors which aren’t particularly palatable to me. So I walked with the marathon, all the way to the end. There was an old man with one leg on a single roller skate, pushing himself with crutches. There was a man with a megaphone preaching about how if you believed in Jesus, you would go to Heaven, and I remember thinking how that didn’t make sense, because did he really mean to say that a man who had lived a life doing horrible things could just declare his belief in Jesus and go to Heaven, whereas a good man who did not believe would go to Hell? I wanted to ask him this, but I was too shy, so I moved on. Eventually I got to the end, which was downtown. I stood at the finish line for a bit, but that wasn’t too exciting. I saw the Bonaventure hotel in the distance, because the building is very recognizable (one large central cylindrical tower surrounded by four smaller cylinders), and thought maybe I could ride in the elevators again, and so I did. (The outer glass elevators, and I think there are eight of them, slide in the seams where the four smaller cylinders join the central cylinder.) I went up and down a few times, wandered around a bit, and then it was evening and the sun was beginning to set. I found my way home on a bus, which was cheap that day, too; normally Metro buses in L.A. are a dollar thirty-five but that day they were fifty cents. Maybe someday I’ll stay in that hotel. Or else just go back and ride the elevators.
http://www.at-la.com/westinbv/“>Here’s the hotel, by the way. Pretty neat, huh?
I’m reading The Lake of the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe, which is the second in a series. I’m a sucker for stories based on pure imagination which create whole worlds and adventures set in those worlds. Maybe it’s the mundanity of the world we live in, or the fact that we seek to establish routines so that we avoid dealing with new and interesting experiences. This world really isn’t that boring, actually, despite the dreams of other worlds we’re capable of. And I’m not one to shy away from exploration and adventure, or at least that’s what I tell myself (so it’s in principle), but then I come across wonderful opportunities and don’t take them. For example, a close friend of mine went to China (Shanghai) recently and invited me to come along, at least to stay for a week and visit. For the cost of a plane ticket alone I could go, since she would provide accomodations, and aside from that I’d only have to pay for food and other incidentals. I certainly can afford the plane ticket, so why haven’t I gone? That’s simple, actually: Because I’ve built up responsibilities here in Los Angeles. And the longer I’m here, the more responsibilities I tend to create for myself. I don’t have a full time job anymore (I’m a consultant), so as my own boss conceivably there’s no reason I can’t pick up and leave. But it’s not as simple as just taking a vacation. I told myself, now isn’t a good time, because right now I have several programming projects to finish and a new client where I will be a network administrator. The programming projects I can take with me on a laptop. But there are offices I have to visit, and things that need to be fixed or smoothed over, and to take off means neglecting those relationships. I don’t like the idea of being tied down, and yet I’m tying myself down, by accepting monthly retainer fees or agreeing to provide support and service. I’m far less free than when I was in school, because at least then I could skip class and no one would care; as long as I didn’t miss exams I could take a few days off and I only had myself to answer to for my grades. And there were school breaks, which provided ample time to travel. I probably wouldn’t have done it alone; with http://personal.fuyuko.net/“>Fuyuko I visited Rome, Germany, Prague, Japan (twice), and Hong Kong. Those were the days, and yet, there can be plenty more. So why not? It’s only the world awaits. I’m less free than when I had a full-time job, because that provided vacations and those same exact routines I mentioned earlier. Vacations as a routine part of a yearly cycle of work; a standard part of the accepted way things are done. In fact by writing this I’m procrastinating; it’s 3:30 A.M. and I have something to finish before tomorrow afternoon. Since I won’t get anything more done tonight, I might as well go to bed. I hope I dream up something exciting (and remember it).
But 2:30 A.M. isn’t too bad.
