Holyjeez

1. PT Cruiser:
   
   The only things worse than the guy who designed this car are the people who signed off on its production and the 9 people who bought one.
2. Baseball:
   
   This is by far the most boring sport (golf has Tiger Woods so they’re ok) and to top that off, they stretch the game length out by having short bursts of activity (10 seconds) surrounded by guys standing around for 5 minutes. The shortest baseball game on record was 7 hours and 10 minutes, look it up. In order to play you can be overweight, and only succeed at your job of getting a hit 20% of the time. If you fail a little less than 2/3rds of the time (even after taking performance enhancing drugs) you are considered a god.
3. Dick Cheney:
   
   This one probably could have just been ‘The Bush Administration’, but this guy is a bit of a stand out. Somehow while he was heading up the committee to find a VP for GWB, he failed to think it would be a conflict of interest if the guy they chose for VP was a CEO for a company that would get $10 billion in government contracts thanks to the war he helped start by spreading false information. Oh, by the way, his committee decided to choose himself. While his Halliburton illegal-ness (I’ll quit as CEO for $20 million and then give you $10 billion in no-bid contracts where you can fail and get even more contracts) is somewhat (like barely) hearsay, his refusal to obey the law isn’t. He refused to release documents required by congress while fighting to extend the power of the executive branch by challenging laws put in place by congress to oversee the president (bye bye checks and balances, hello dictatorship). He also supports forms of torture considered illegal in U.S. laws and international treaties. Even though he likes to start wars so much, he doesn’t like to fight in them, just make money off of them. He dodged the Vietnam draft 5 times saying “I had other priorities in the ’60s than military service.” I bet this guy did too. I’ve also heard he likes to eat babies while shooting his friends in the face.
4. Spandex:
   
   Not a whole lot needs to be said here. Maybe I’m being too harsh on the fabric, maybe its more an issue with people’s decision making skills. Either way, its like locking up your guns to protect you child from shooting himself. If that guy didn’t have access to spandex, he would have chosen sweat pants. Now I’m not trying to be rude to fat people, I am also too fat to wear spandex. So I don’t wear it. I wear t-shirts.
   
   
5. Standard Units:

This is the division of countries for/against Metric before and after World War II.


This is now:

At least we are still measuring things against sizes of a human body part. Can someone please tell me what the length of 1 Rod is? One time the US wanted to be a leader in the scientific world, so we shot the Mars Orbiter 4x too fast into the atmosphere of Mars because we use ‘US Customary Units’. Awesome.

6. Catholicism:
   
   Catholicism has a long and sordid history of supporting the Nazi’s, molesting young children, covering up the molesting young children, moving to another parish and molesting more young children, making up ‘edicts from god’ that are politically and personally motivated, oppressing people, brainwashing children and adults, resisting critical thinking, resisting scientific progress, swindling people out of their money, and controlling people through fear. Now those attributes aren’t all unique to Catholicism, but I just chose it among other religions/denominations because it stands out for its achievements in these areas.
   
   

So these things are in no particular order, and I actually had about 2-3 more that I wanted to include, but this post is long enough already.  Not long like too much reading, long like it took me longer than 5 minutes to make.  Also, I just previewed it in my current theme and it looks like a blind 2 year old cut things from a magazine and pasted them on my webpage, so this thing might be unreadable until I get a new theme.

In case you don’t know, antlr (ANother Tool for Language Recognition) is a parser generator framework.  It lets you specify a language using a grammar and then it can output the source code for actually compiling and executing that language.  I won’t go in to too much detail about how ANTLR works or how languages and grammars work, one because I’m not an expert (CS classes were a long time ago) and two because google can easily tell you the answer.  The main point of this is that ANTLR can then output that source code in a number of different target languages.

It has support for several (Java, C, C++, ruby, javascript, etc.), but is lacking support for Objective-C in the most recent version.

Well I have started trying to update the Objective-C target stuff.  This has and will be a learning experience, but here are the things to note so far:

1. I don’t know Objective-C
2. Objective-C is used mostly by Apple devices (Mac, IPhone) and I have no Apple devices
3. Adding a target language implementation to ANTLR3 is pretty straight forward except for items 1 and 2

Ever seen this error:
com.google.gwt.user.client.rpc.SerializationException: Type ‘your.class.Type’ was not included in the set of types which can be serialized by this SerializationPolicy or its Class object could not be loaded. For security purposes, this type will not be serialized.

Or this error:
Error: Type ‘your.class.Type’ was not serializable and has no concrete serializable subtypes

It can be caused by multiple reasons, but if you feel like you have done everything correctly (included source in GWT’s classpath during compilation, implement Serializable, google searched, prayed to the god of your choice) then you probably have the problem I had.  your.class.Type doesn’t have a default constructor.

So if your class has no default constructor (one that takes no arguments), add it and try again.  If that doesn’t fix it, and you find out what else is wrong, please post it as a comment here.

Also as an added bonus tip, when google searching for errors, your error usually is of the pattern: “something common to all errors of this type” “something specific to my project” “some more common stuff”.  Like in this error you have common stuff:
com.google.gwt.user.client.rpc.SerializationException: Type

Then specific stuff: 
‘your.class.Type’

Then more common stuff:
was not included in the set of types which can be serialized by this SerializationPolicy or its Class object could not be loaded. For security purposes, this type will not be serialized.

The way to search for that is take your stuff and replace it with an asterisk (*) and put the whole thing in quotes and google will wildcard your specific stuff and you will get better results.  So a good way to search for this error would be (trimming because google only lets you search 32 words):
“com.google.gwt.user.client.rpc.SerializationException: Type * was not included in the set of types which can be serialized by this SerializationPolicy”

Hope either of those things help someone.

Completely ignoring my last post, which said I will make more technical posts, here is an opinionated post about the world.

There are several instances of our society putting pressure on schools/parents/<insert authority figure> to coddle people.  Give everyone a participation award.  No one gets first place because that singles out the losers.  Don’t make Fatty McFat Fat take responsibility for eating McDonalds everyday, it’s McD’s fault.  I sneezed, I better take 15 prescription drugs that are advertised to me.  My kid doesn’t like homework, better give him some medication.

These are all instances of fail on a national level.  But this isn’t even the worst of it.  It is one thing to ignore the fact that some people are losers, but even worse, now we award it.

First example, congratulating people who fuck up really badly but it could have been a little worse.  A SWAT team raids the wrong house and the home owner, rightfully so, thinks his family is being robbed.  He freaks out (probably shits his pj’s) and shoots at them, giving minor injuries to 3 officers (shrapnel hit their protective gear).  Then the SWAT team gets honored for performing bravely under fire.  Let’s break this down.  SWAT team makes huge effin mistake and raids an innocent person’s home.  This is breaking the law last time I checked.  Otherwise we should just let the police raid any home they want, and then if they don’t find anything “oh my bad, I meant to raid a drug dealer’s house.  As you were little 9 y.o. girl who will have nightmares for the rest of her life”.  Next, super luckily, no one was killed on either side.  At this point the right thing to do is to say “We owe this family some sort of restitution, the people involved with the mixup need to be punished, and we need to change certain protocols to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”  Instead they said “sorry we F’d your house and life, but our guys did a great job of not killing you, so we will give them awards”.  This is like congratulating someone who has already shit their pants for not shitting them the second time.

Next example, congratulating people on a miraculous acheivement when they totally fuck up, but then make a turn around.  This one is slightly different from the previous one because these people are celebrated more than someone who doesn’t fuck up and is just a badass from the beginning.  These stories usually have jesus, a warm cup of cocoa and crying.  Josh Hamilton was a good baseball player.  Then he F’d over his life by doing drugs.  Then through the graciousness of jesus (who apparently hated Josh for a while when he made him do drugs and ruin his life) he was able to come back and be an above average baseball player.  Therefore JOSH HAMILTON ROCKS!!!!!!  I gotta be honest, I didn’t completely read this story because it has my 3 least favorite things in the world: baseball, rewarding shittiness, and attributing only good things to religion.  But let’s break down what I skimmed over.  Everyone thought J.H. would be the shit so he was drafted high.  He did ok, but didn’t amount to much because he did drugs all the time (OMG he has 26 tattoos).  Bottom line, as much shit as this guy got in to, he should be in jail.  Illegal drugs, drunk driving, drug suspensions from MLB.  Instead, he is now back to playing decent baseball for a decent (tettering on 500) team.  He did hit 28 homeruns in one round of the home run derby, only to lose (but he got congrationlations on losing, see last example).  If we compare his life and achievements to say (to stay in the baseball realm) Cal Ripken Jr., then we shouldn’t be singing J.H.’s praises, we should be calling him a douchebag that makes more money than he is worth.  Giving extra rewards to someone for fucking up their life but eeking out a turn around is like paying your worst employee a bonus the one time he shows up to work not late.

Last example, rewarding someone for not winning.  Funny enough J.H. falls in this category too with his home run derby P.E.  But a better example is our current president.  He was rewarded for almost winning the election by becoming president so that he could build up arguably the worst administration in the history of the United States and dump tax money to large affiliated corporations like it was going out of style.  I only say arguably because some people would argue, but its true.  Then he almost won the war in Iraq and he was rewarded with a Mission Accomplished party, and yet we seem to have accomplished nothing besides dumping a lot of money, life, and international credibility down the drain.  Then he almost won at working 40 hours a week, and was rewarded by taking more vacation than any other president ever.  So congratulation GWB, you are awesome at not winning.

I don’t really have a closing to this.  Only a minor call to action.  The next time you see/read/hear someone being rewarded for overall shittiness, stand up, look them in the eye and say “I’ve got your reward right here!” and then punch them in the face and/or genitalia.

I use bait and switch in the loosest possible terms.  What I really mean is ‘domain name change/theme change/lost my old posts — I changed my blog’.  I think I only baited 1 or 2 people in to reading my blog.  And I’m switching it to a new domain because I like this one better and the other one I’m not going to pay for anymore.

I’m a pretty infrequent poster, but this time I’m going to try and focus more on technical posts.  Or at least try to post them more frequently.  We will see how that goes.

It has only been 3 short days since the Twin Towers attacks and I can already predict a lot of naysayers, especially people at the JREF will try and convince people that psychics are fake because no one predicted the events of 9/11.  I’m seeing a name, it is something like Steve or Stephen.  I also see a computer, it looks like a PackardBell.  I’m thinking Steve Bell or Stephen Packard.  What, no one named Steve Bell blogs on the JREF site? OK, yep it is definitely Stephen Packard.

Well here is what I have to say to you Stephen Packard — You shut your mouth, you have no idea how hard it is to be a psychic.  First I had to pay for my certification.  And then wait 5 whole business days.  Plus the “specialties” selection was just a radio button, so it took me at least 20 minutes deciding which was my most powerful specialty.  Was it voodoo, or psychic detective work, or spell-casting?  I’m so good at all of them.  Luckily I foresaw that problem with the application and I spent my 20 minutes deciding well before I even reached the page.

Then, I had to enhance my abilities so that I could accurately predict things.  Maybe not everyone is as dedicated as I am.  Maybe they didn’t remember to “start and end [their] sessions with a small prayer”.  Maybe that is why they didn’t predict the 9/11 attacks.

Or maybe they were just afraid of being made fun of.  Like always.  It is almost impossible to make a prediction without letting a few ‘pew pew pew‘ noises slip out.  Do you know how embarrassing it would have been to say “Na nananananana - A terrorist attack is coming on 9/11 pew pew pew pew” on national TV?  No one would have believed us anyway.

So in summation.  FU JREF and FU Stephen Packard for claiming my powers don’t exist.  I bet you will feel really foolish writing this article 8 years from now and then seeing that I predicted it all the way back here in 2001.

*No tricks were used in the making of this blog post.  I promise, and you can trust me, I’m a psychic.

Death sucks. It comes with a degree of finality our brains rarely encounter in other scenarios. Our brains are great at delusion, acclimation, and routine, and being close to someone who dies wrecks that shop.

I’ll die at some point. My wife will too. I’m (technically my wife is) having my first kid sometime this month, and as morbid as it sounds to mention, he too will die at some point. My brain tries to fall back to its tricks to make me ignore this inescapable truth, but I think accepting and embracing it is a much better option.

Life isn’t a circle. It is an intersection of many short lines. You start, you stop, you encounter people and experience things in between. Make the most of those encounters. Have more experiences.

Our brains make us ignore this because, well, death sucks. So find ways to remind yourself. I’ve made a set of rules for myself anytime I’m reminded of my mortality.

For example, any time I go to a funeral, I do several things that day.

1. Eat dessert at every meal. Why? Because I might die tomorrow, and I like chocolate, so fuck it, I’m having a fudge brownie for breakfast.
2. Stop, talk to, and give money to any homeless person I see. Why? Because I’m most likely better off than them, and if they die tomorrow, I at least gave them some companionship and a chance at doing whatever makes them happy that day.
3. Reach out to my friends and family, Why? Because I’m often lazy at my relationships, and in the end they are all I have.
4. If something else makes me happy that day, add it to the list. Why? Because the whole point of life is happiness — everyone’s happiness.

It isn’t curing AIDS, or achieving world peace, but to me it seems like a good way to honor someone’s death. By having it be a reminder for me to live.