reesesWeb

Maaaaan.

I have this thing I do, that is probably the first thing people who know me pretty well think of when they think of me. Apart from my contortionist abuse of english, that is. It's not my first language, so I have an excuse.

I like to say something outlandish or hyperbolic, and keep a straight face. I don't know why I love it so much, but I can't pass it up. I really, really love it when someone figures it out, but it's funny enough otherwise. Of course, I'm the only one who thinks this is funny, since everyone else thinks I'm serious, but almost all of my jokes are that way, based on an elaborate chain of what I consider to be very erudite observations about the world, literature, culture, and language.

That said, I'm very, very good at casting the dry line, and you should be careful if you ever ask me to help you fix your computer, because I'll tell you to use the "rm" command, which can be anything starting from "restore metadata, dash rewrite factorisation, forward slash". I'm sure Nat remembers someone not asking the ever-important,"Are you sure?" or "Really?" and being quite peeved.

Anyway, I've stumbled into this at my new job. "Already?" you ask. Yes, already. When talking about interviewing, people already at the company mentioned that they wanted to make their interview process a little more rigorous. Hey, no problem, I'm actually good at that. So, at a few opportunities, I joked that I would make people cry, or be especially tough.

Now, I am definitely a tough interviewer, but I've never interviewed someone who didn't have fun. I ask tough questions, but if you're the least bit geeky, you're going to have fun sussing it out, and I'll keep the tone light and jocular. I don't believe in acing tests, and any test that can be aced is not a test. That said, if you're wasting my time and don't know the difference between parens and curly braces, and insist that Java is your best language, well, it's not going to go well.

Besides, while I'm an a-hole to many people, I'm not an a-hole to strangers. I prefer to lure them in first, so I can inflict the most damage.

See, I'd say that while keeping a straight face in person, and you'd have to weigh my body language against the outlandishness of the statement. My one weakness is that I try too hard -- if I seem really, really serious and sincere, I'm lying out the tuckus.

What has arisen from this type of declaration (which only becomes funnier the longer people believe it in the face of evidence to the contrary) is a real perception that I'm some broken intellectual bully who likes to spring upon unsuspecting interviewees, carefully contrived and impossible to answer questions requiring lateral insight. As if there's something wrong with that.

I also like the soft inside of a meringue.

Oh, and JavaCC is great, but the documentation sucks.

Go ahead, Google for it. I'll wait.

Exactly. It doesn't exist! What does exist is a loose chain of non-representative examples. I gave up on them and took a socratic approach using JUnit.

My first test was "testDoesntPukeOnInput()", which did exactly that. Red bar.

I tweaked the grammar until I had the identity parser, and got a green bar. So I added "testParsesOneField()". It's not actually named that, but it basically pulls out one field into a structure. Red bar. Fix the grammar, both tests fail. Mung around, and javacc complains. Mung around more, and javac complains.

Mung around more, waving a magnet randomly in front of the spinning hard drive, and lo, both tests pass. So I use the venerated software engineering technique of copy-and-paste to repeat the code to pull out the other fields in my test sample.

Let me tell you, this is beautiful code. I haven't written a grammar for a complicated corpus in some time, and the last time I did do it, I wrote a recursive descent parser on my own. That's the great thing about controlling the language -- it will appear just like something for which you could easily write a parser.

But, I have unit tests, and isn't that the point? I hate the term "refactoring" as much as the next guy, so I'll just say,"cleaning up my garbage so no one else dies from the stench."

[SCENE THREE, THE CUCUMBER PIT]

Kat's (well, the one she acquired from me by way of adverse possession) laptop has been acting up lately. When she closes the lid, instead of suspending, it goes into some uninterruptible hypnagogic state. I really, really believe that she did something, but I can't see what.

What this is leading to is a requirement to buy a new laptop. I hate buying computer hardware because something fails. It messes with my worldview, which is based on the notion of using a computer until it's far too slow and outdated, and then you stick Linux on it and use it some more, until the cost of electricity is so much greater than its utility that I give it to Dread.

This also comes at a time when I am shopping around for an LCD for my desktop machine, so I'm balancing $850 for a 20" LCD against $1000-2000 for a decent laptop, and wondering if I should get two laptops and a super-cheap 15" LCD for the desktop, and should the new laptops be G4 Powerbooks, and how cool would that be, and it would be great for picking up babes if my wife didn't have the same laptop, so should I get her an iBook, but I have this feeling that I would end up with the iBook and she would take the PowerBook, and the iBook can't do multiheaded display like the PowerBook can, and besides, why should I worry about picking up babes since I'm married and too tired to do anything with them other than perhaps show very poorly in an arm-wrestling contest?

What will probably end up happening is that Kat will get a new Thinkpad, I'll take the old 600x, and for some strange reason, it will never fail on me. Oh, and I'll wait six months and buy that 20" LCD for $400.

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