Gore Vidal, while appearing on Real Time with Bill Maher, said he wishes that President Obama would talk more about the restoration of the Constitution.
The reality is that Obama never will and neither will his party or the Republican party. The restoration of the constitution is in no ones interest except the American public and its been a long time since either party had the publics interest in mind. If you think Obama has the restoration of the constitution you should check out, this this or this, and I don’t think we’ll see any improvement in the long term. If you think the Republicans do, you need to review the last presidency and how we got to where we are.

The reality is that it’s the publics responsibility to protect the constitution, not commentators, politicians etc. And I don’t mean by speaking out, though it is valuable,  but by participating in the process ourselves. Politics is supposed to be messy and loud in our system and the people who should be most involved is the public. The problem is that most people are far too detached and believe that they can’t really affect things or that it does not affect them personally. The key is to take part in any way you can, school boards, city councils, neighborhood committees etc.

Thursday,

Neal Fords keynote was good. I had seen it before, but he had added some new pieces. But the basic message of "Use each language for what problem domain it best solves and don't be afraid to mix languages" was still at the core.

The Guice talk did a good job of explaining how the dependency Injection worked ,but didn't do a good Job of explaining the usefulness of DI in testing.

Hanselman's keynote was very good, he was witty and engaging and when he started talking about the improvements in IIS7 he kept my attention. At the end of the day IIS7 is looking very good.

The highlight of the day for me was the talk on F#, functional languages are something I see being very big in the near future, Microsoft's recent announcement on F# adds a major increase in Functional languages legitimacy on the .Net platform

I'm putting this up so that people can find me and I can find it.

The schedule

Wow, it has been a while since I've written anything. The last you had heard from me dear reader, I had stepped in molten metal and had the perfect excuse not to wear shoes at work. It was a painful month or more before I was running around. But even more drastic things have happened since then.

To start I had  a chance to help create a new product at Weldon. I worked on a light, I know what your thinking, "A light? Seriously, your a programmer man...surely there's not much software in a light...." well you would be wrong. This light has a quite bit of software in it.

Over all it was a fantastic journey and I'm glad I got to take it. We started with a basic problem, the difficulty of selecting patterns on programmable warning lamps used on fire trucks and ems. At first you think, "Come on! how hard can that be!" then you realize the number of warning lamps on your typical Fire truck/EMS vehicle and that most of the products in the space require you to remove them or disassemble them to change a single option. So we started by asking, how do we make it "wireless". There's two main routes, Radio or Infrared, once we settled on IR and decided to use the same type of transceiver used in IrDA devices things went pretty fast. This single smart choice allowed the hardware, firmware and software to move quickly. In the end we shipped the series of warning lamps and software that runs on Windows CE devices to program them. In short creating the Diamondback Lamp was a experience I'll long remember.

So what more could have changed? Well, I left Weldon for one. While I had a great time working on the lamp other projects started to feel like death march projects and were starting to make me dislike software again, combine that with a good opportunity that came along and it just made perfect sense to leave. So, where am I now? I'm working for Quick Solutions as a consultant, I'm on a fairly big project at Chase Home Finance.

PS
To be even more specific about where I am, I'm writing this at 2am as I sit in my hotel room waiting for CodeMash to start.

Okay, I admit it, I did something grandly stupid and in the process almost burned my house down and I did burn the bottom of my feet.

The story starts like so, my sleep schedule has been off so last night at 2 AM I found myself hungry. I decided to use up the remaining spaghetti sauce from dinner and make some noodles real quick. While sitting on the couch waiting for the noodles to finish I woke up to heavy acrid smoke and flaming spaghetti. So I ran over, picked up the pot and carried it outside, Unknown to me the aluminum bottom of the pan had melted away and when I picked it up molten bits of metal splashed on the floor. I managed to step on several of them. I grabbed my dog and stuck her out on the back porch away from the smoke and then woke my roommate Chris up and he was all "What are you waking me...uhm whats with the smoke". I ran back inside and ran my feet under cold water and grabbed an ice pack. We sat outside while the smoke cleared the house and until I couldn't deal with the pain.

We took my dog next door and left her at my parents house and then Chris ran me to the hospital, we spent a good two or three hours there. I have a few decent second degree burn on the ball of my foot and four smaller burns on my toes. And now for the pictures!

First whats left of the bottom of my pan,

And now for the foot,

So now I get to sit around the house for a day or so with my feet on ice.

Oh and heres the pictures of the pans remains. Normally its about 1/2 an inch thick on the bottom with copper over it, now theres just copper.

Well, I've had quite a lot of time on my hands recently for reasons I'll go into in another post. So I've been reading alot about areas of programming that I've had little time to explore in the past. I've been diving into Nemerle, Cω, AspectJ and Eiffel

So this weekend I really concentrated on AOP. I grabbed a ton of articles from the ACM website and others than I found via google. I also managed to grab a copy of all the AspectJ tools off of the Eclipse website. I installed it Friday night after driving down to the cabin and I finished the documentation by Saturday night.

The thing I was struck by the most was that the needs for AOP, Design by Contract and Dynamic Languages are all very similar. You can do all of them in compilers. But that limits their true abilities, what happens to my contract in an Eifell object that someone subclasses it in C# or VB? Similarly AspectJ's greatest weakness is that the ability to weave code stops once we are outside of the AspectJ compiler. How the languages expose the ability to select methods and objects to be modified is independent of the need for the runtime to support weaving during the loading and verification of the classes.

By combining meta data on the assembly and a way of integrating weaving engines into the CLR you would have a way to enforce contracts, perform cross cutting for AOP languages and even dynamic language support.

"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture,"Pastor Ray Mummert, 54 of Dover, Pennsylvania

In Dover, Pennsylvania the "Intelligent Design" crowd has won a small victory. Unfortunately the school board there has chosen to not only require teachers to state that Evolution is a theory, but require that teachers must discuss "Intelligent Design".

Now, I personally have no issue with requiring teachers to discuss the fact that Evolution is a theory, a 145 year old one that has gone through rigorous debate and study. But to require the teaching of "Intelligent Design" is ridiculous, its simply a repackaging of creationism. Almost anything you find on it will be self published and not peer reviewed. The only difference has been the renaming of christianity's "God" to something that the courts can't object too.

I'm one who fully believes in every individuals right to speak and hold ideas that others disagree with, however in the context of teaching science the ideas put forward should be based on scientific principal. Not theological conjecture.

Well, from what I understand w.bloggar now works with dasBlog for new posts as well as editing posts. It turns out that w.bloggar was not supplying the post date when it called editpost, this created two posts, one on 0/0/0 and one on the actual post date. Two entrys with the same item GUID and seperate dates crashes the server quite nicely.

So if all goes well I'll be using w.bloggar from now on. One of the reasons I find my self not posting is my dislike of web based editors.

I'm not a coffee addict, but I tend to be a bit of a coffee snob and I'll admit that I've never brewed a cup of coffee that meets my own standard. Instead I leave it to the local coffee shops like Staufs. So when I saw the ads for the Senseo from Phillips and Dowe & Egberts I was intrigued, single cup coffee with quality would fit me perfectly since I only drink a cup or two a week.

I received the Senseo for Christmas from my parents, upon unwrapping it I immediately tried it out. It was simple to operate, you have to flush it out the first time you use it, but after that it takes about 90 seconds to heat it up and only a minute to brew your cup. On the convenience side I was quite impressed. I've owned several coffee machines over the years from a Mr. Coffee to my favorite Krups, and all of them made better coffee than the Senseo. I tried all the roasts and followed all the tips and even googled to see what others had found. Basically my two complaints are that it lacks a robust full bodied flavor and that it is bitter.

From what I've read the issue may not be the coffee maker but simply the quality of the coffee from Dowe & Egberts(Sara lee). I've already hunted down a few coffee companies that make pods for the Senseo. I'm hoping that I find a blend that hits the spot, but the prospect of having boxes and boxes of pods of bad coffee fill my pantry may make me decide to simply stick with my krups for now and let others blaze the trail ahead.

Follow Up:
I've recently tried the pods from JavaOne, I spotted them while shopping at Sams Club and decided to try them out. I tried the French Vanilla and found it to be even bitterer than the Dowe & Egberts blends. I have however found that Dowe & Egberts dark roast with cream and sugar is acceptable. In general I dislike adding cream to coffee, its like ketchup and food. You can cover up lots of bad tastes with ketchup.
I'm still tempted to see if I can salvage my Senseo experience, I've found a Kona blend and several others that look promising. There’s even a company that makes a reusable filter. Though I suppose that kills quite a bit of the convenience factor of the Senseo.

Well, I'm looking into switching blog editors. I hate using HTML based editors, they feel clunky and you can't compose offline then post. I've looked at several editors in the past and had problems with them behaving with dasBlog. So after quite a lot of looking I think I'm going to switch to Sauce. If I do switch I will look into using it for my blog reader as well.

I love RSS Bandit but the lack of a blog editor is a big issue, I need to be able to read a blog then create a post,save it without pushing it to my server. Then after mulling my words and making sure I don't put a foot in my mouth or come off as an unthinking jackass, post it.