12 step program

My name is Jeremy...and I'm a programmer.
OK, so this isn't quite Programmers Anonymous, but here are the 12 steps to writing better code.

Eyebrows

Ah, we have a fascination with eyebrows don't we?
OK, "we" don't, but perhaps I do.
Women spend money plucking and trimming them for having too much hair above the eye is considered unsightly.
Words like unibrow and monobrow have crept their way into our lingo. Even Merriam Webster recognizes unibrow as an official word.
We even have websites mocking those with the genetic code unfortunate enough to produce too much hair where it is not wanted.
However, copious amounts of hair on the brow is not such a stigma in all cultures.
Famous female Mexican painter Frida Kahlo accentuated what must have been her favorite feature in her self portraits.

To the Chinese, having long eyebrows is a sign of age and wisdom, not to mention fighting prowess.


And, whenever we think of the burly Russian man, we picture a big hairy guy with massive eyebrows.
There is the former Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev...


..to the Cosmonaut Salizhan Sharipov who made the "Famous people with Unibrows list" on Wikipedia.


...and finally the reclusive Russian mathematician who recently won an award for some solving a supposedly unsolvable math problem, Grigory Perelman.


On the bright side, he could be a stand-in for Vorvon the Space Vampire...

I know the date of my demise

This morning I found a second gray hair. I was mock weeping in the bathroom when my middle child wandered by and asked what was wrong.
"I'm getting old! I have 2 gray hairs!" I sobbed.
"Don't worry" she replied. "You still have 30 years to live."

October 10, 2036
R.I.P.

JJA #2 - Recruitment

Recruiters are so notorious for lying that one line in a popular Army cadence goes:

My recruiter told me a lie
Join the Airborne and learn to fly

(for the unaware, the Airborne corps is composed of people who jump out of airplanes, which, technically speaking, is controlled flying)
My recruiter actually didn't lie to me too badly. It was only after I signed the papers that the big lie came, but I will get to that in a later post.

Anyway, I was the one that approached the recruiter. I chose the Army, or rather fate chose the Army for me, because it was a toss up between Army and Airforce, and the Airforce recruiter was out to lunch, so I talked to the Army recruiter. The rest is history. BTW, I had ruled out the Marines, cause I thought they were all nuts, and the Navy was out of the question for 2 reasons: they have a rank named after a bodily fluid, and their uniforms look stupid.
So, the Army it was.
I had one simple demand: I wanted to be a linguist.
Well, they said, not so fast. I needed to pass a couple of tests first.
The first test was the ASVAB. Kind of a general knowledge test. If you kept your eyes open for maybe one day in your high school career, you could pass this test, but there were some who tried to join along with me that had to "study up" cause they had failed it once or twice before and they REALLY wanted to join.
Anyway, having passed that with flying colors, I then had to take the DLAB: Defense Language Aptitude Battery. It supposedly measured your potential for learning a language. All I remember is that I scored a 112. Out of what I do not know, but it was high enough for them to accept me. This test was very difficult, probably more difficult than the SAT, although I took the SAT and DLAB about 6 years apart, so it is hard to really compare.
Well, with the tests under my belt, I was assigned the job code of 98G. You can look at this list to see all the job codes and descriptions that the Army has. My official title was Electronic Warfare Specialist or something like that.
All of this occurred the summer between my Junior and Senior year of high school. Now all I had to was graduate High school, and ship off once I graduated.

Next stop: Shipping off for Basic Training.
Stay tuned!

Fighting Army Style - #1

We shall learn how fight - Army Style!!
When I was still in the Army, our unit was doing some house cleaning, and we came across an old manual on fighting dated from 1971.

The pictures and descriptions are rather humorous, so I will share the hilarity with everyone.

First, we need to learn to stand correctly.
Here is the Front Guard position.


If I stood like this is a real fight, I would get my butt kicked.

Foam Jigsaw

Well, after being in this house for around 5 yrs (wow has it been that long? We moved in November of 2001 if I recall correctly), I finally decided to take the butt ugly 70's style brown paneling out of our hallway. I feared what I would find behind the paneling, since people put up paneling to hide problems that they don't want to fix. I never expected to find...a foam jigsaw puzzle.
A foam puzzle behind butt ugly 70's style brown paneling?!?! How can that be, you ask yourself.
A little background.
We have about an 85 yr old house with very old plaster walls. In some cases, the plaster can be difficult to repair. The folks who lived here before us for about 30 years obviously did not like repairing plaster. They put up butt ugly 70's style brown paneling on every surface they could get their hands on. We have been slowly taking the paneling down and repairing the walls as we have had the opportunity. I was amazed to see the lenghts of stupidity the previous owners went through to put up this paneling in the stairwell.

This is the hallway halfway through tearing it apart:

You'll notice the beautiful framework of wood that they nailed into the walls to keep the butt ugly 70's style paneling in good shape throughout the years. They also filled every crack with FOAM. Perhaps this was to achieve an insulating effect. I guess I'll find out this winter. You'll notice at the top of the picture the desire till make sure every crevice is filled with foam.

See exhibit #2:



This insane desire goes even further when they stack foam pieces Tetris style and wedge foam between the poorly cut pieces of wood. Just to make sure no crack goes unfoamed.
Yeah we need a law entitled "No Crack Unfoamed." Interpret that however you like.
Anyway. The Piece de Resistance...



I mean what the hell is that??!??! Lets take every piece of spare foam we have and spend hours painstakingly piece together a solid block of foam so that the guy who rips this crap apart can take pictures of it and mock it in a public forum.
NO CRACK UNFOAMED!!!
Ah well, I digress.
They actually were hiding something bigger with the paneling.

A big hole in the wall. I'm going to Lowe's tomorrow for some plaster hole fixing supplies.
Adios for now!

JJA - #1

Jeremy Joins the Army. - Episode 1

I was the type of kid who like to do ... nothing. Really. My idea of the perfect day was lounging around doing nothing. If you consider playing computer games and dissecting small forest fauna nothing, then you'd get a pretty good idea of what I spent my time on. So, you can imagine everyone's surprise when I announced out of the blue that I was going to join the military. This was the summer between my Junior and Senior year of high school. Somehow, I was smart enough to know that I would not have done well in college right out of high school. And, since I despised doing anything that I did not want to do, as evidenced by my A in German and F in Calculus, I thought I would go to the place where I would learn how to do one that I wanted to do...learn a language. My sister's friend had joined the Army language corps a year or 2 prior to my decision. That is what gave me the idea of joining the Army to learn a language. Everyone that I told at school laughed at me because I could barely do 10 pushups, and I ran the mile in just under 12 minutes.

Next stop...the recruitment process.

Wbobth?

My friends and I used to play with the Speak-n-Spell when we were but budding young lads. The newer Speak-n-Spells had an "encrypt" feature that took a word, then performed the unbreakable one for one letter substitution. My name encrypted was Wbobth. And thats what they called me. Play with the Speak-n-Spell here