Monday, August 22, 2011

Tally CL "Singer-Songwriter" Post

I usually dismiss the "I'm a singer-songwriter, wanna be my band?" ads on Craig's List, but something about this guy seems... I don't know... genuine? I still have a river of funk flowing through me, and decent chops (for a thirty-something white guy), but my Achilles' Heel is that I don't have a decent bass rig anymore. I sure would like to *spank my bass a little and see what this dude can bring to the table...

Male Pop/Soul Singer-Songwriter Looking for Musicians & Producers

*(I don't slap it, I spank it baby.)

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Spotify/FastDelegate Rabbit Hole


I have become quite the fan of Spotify, but my arse has become increasingly chapped by the "can't play track" errors it's been giving me lately. A quick conversation with my dear friend, Mr. Google, revealed that I should probably empty Spotify's disk cache.

Like a good little user seeking the path to the disk cache, I went to the Spotify "Help" menu, at which point the good little programmer in me was overpowered by curiosity and clicked on the "License" menu item. It turns out that those guys use quite a bit of F/OSS code! By this point, the obsessive-curiosity (which makes me spend 3 hours on Wikipedia following links) had taken over, and I was spittin' new Chrome tabs aster than you can say "OCD much???".

Of the several projects I ended up learning about, "FastDelegate" gave me the most brain-food. Maybe it's because I live a little further away from the metal, maybe it's because I've never actually been paid to write C++ (except for that one time, but I was young & needed the money...), whatever the reason, this head-first submersion into C/C++ function pointers, member function pointers, compiler nuances, and all the blood-n-guts that drove these folks to make "FastDelegate" kicked my brain off its candy-ass treadmill in the Managed Code Fitness Center, and put it on a 40 mile forced march with an Assembly Code rifle in its back!

Oh, as for the Spotify error messages - deleting everything in the disk cache cleared that problem right up!

Monday, August 1, 2011

Muscle Memory

So that's what it's called - muscle memory! I remember the first time I tried to do a quick "copy/pasta"* from an actual piece of paper (2004, Naples), as well as the first time I caught myself typing "&&" into a not-programming-related e-mail** when I meant to say "and" (2007, Tallahassee). It's also what makes it hard for me to concat strings in PostgreSQL (since everybody knows that "||" means "or").

So what about you? What sort of muscle memory, repeated motion, ritualistic routines have you nurtured at work, only to have them show up uninvited to your meatspace party?


  * If you thought that was a typo, I suggest increasing your 4chan-related depravity.
** Yes, those do exist, albeit increasingly rarely.


P.S. - Thank you, Mr. Google, for helping me bring the words "muscle" and "memory" from the tip of my tongue all the way to the tips of my typing appendages...

*QOTD

"I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter." - Winston Churchill

*For the uninitiated, "QOTD" == quote of the day (not to be confused with qotd). :-{)>