The injustice of it all!

Constat d’infraction. That’s my French lesson for the day – “notice of infraction” or traffic ticket. Now don’t get me wrong on the “injustice” claim. I’m definitely guilty. And let’s face it, an American anglophone driving his wife’s Beetle with a red rose on the dash in hockey-playing, English-hating rural French Canada on a balmy +8 degree day really deserves to be fined – if only for his lack of foresight.

What’s unfair about the whole thing is that I never get tickets for speeding anymore – only things like running stop signs. The post-40 version of me couldn’t run down Fat Oprah with a broken leg on my way to the Krispy Kreme store. I drive that slowly. Sometimes I move so slowly that stopping at a stop sign just seems down right redundant.

Oh well, it’s more exciting than my last double infraction – forgetting to renew my license and registration.

Benjamin Bummer

Every year when the Academy Awards roll around, my “seen it” list is usually looking pretty sparse. I was disappointed to learn that Wall-E wasn’t nominated in every category this year since that was the only one I managed to see. So this week, my wife and I cashed in our baby-sitting points with the mother-in-law and set off to see as many nominees as we could. We made it to Revolutionary Road, then The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. And then we stopped… I think if we’d finished the evening with The Wrestler or The Reader, we probably would’ve just driven off a bridge on the way home.

This year, Hollywood seems seems to have taken its version of gloom in an entirely different direction – away from the profitable “I’m glad I’m not that poor sucker” theme and into “Holy Shit! They’re talking about me!” territory. Apparently cheap attempts to generate sympathy are no longer enough. They actually want to draw us into the misery as well!

Revolutionary Road, for example, convinces us that we are all trapped in the monotony of “family life” and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. Benjamin Button twists the knife by reminding us that nothing lasts – not the memory of tucking my son in bed at night, not the kiss I give him on the cheek before sending him off to school, not the tender moments spent beside my wife. He reminds us the best laid plans are all just ephemeral flashes in the dark expanse of time. Thanks for that, Ben. Next time, I think I’ll see something upbeat, like Frost/Nixon.

Mission Statements

Any corporation worth its salt has to have a clear mission statement that includes the purpose and values of the corporation.

Here is a counter example from a CEO who obviously lost focus on his core business principles:

The founder of an Islamic television station in upstate New York aimed at countering Muslim stereotypes has confessed to beheading his wife, authorities said.

Muzzammil Hassan was charged with second-degree murder after police found the decapitated body of his wife, Aasiya Hassan, at the Bridges TV station in the Buffalo suburb of Orchard Park, said Andrew Benz, Orchard Park’s police chief.

Hassan’s wife had just filed for divorce. She leaves behind two children, ages four and six.

That Yahweh’s got me in stitches

You might say that God has come under a little criticism lately for the so-called “wrathful” way in which he set early humans on the straight and narrow. But here are a few quotes from the heart of the Pentateuch that show he has a fun side too! (Warning: Contains Biblical potty humor. Please skip if you’re easily offended.)

“To be honest”

Never start a sentence with the words “to be honest”. It will be heard as one of the following:

• I am about to lie to you.
• I expect to get credit for the ignorance/incompetence I am about to confess.
• I would normally lie in this situation, but to be honest…

Walking stick

I learn something new almost every single day from my beautiful five-year-old son. Last night, as we shoveled the mountain of snow from our front steps, he discovered a big crack in his favorite walking stick. His face clouded over for a few seconds, then he put the stick on his knee and finished breaking it in half – in anger I thought.

Then he said “Look Daddy, now I have two favorite sticks!”

“In a nutshell”

That must have been one hell of a nut:

In a nutshell, loop quantization is the result of applying C*-algebraic quantization to a non-canonical algebra of gauge-invariant classical observables. Non-canonical means that the basic observables quantized are not generalized coordinates and their conjugate momenta. Instead, the algebra generated by spin network observables (built from holonomies) and field strength fluxes is used.

Victoria’s Secret

My wife observed that as we watched the Victoria’s Secret fashion show on TV this week that I looked on with the same stuporous grin as James Caan, George Hamilton, and Sean Combs. But in my defense, I did manage to learn a life lesson in the process:

When your wife complains that both she and Heidi Klum have had two kids and “Just look at her body!”, criticizing Heidi as “sub-par” compared to the other models really doesn’t count as being a supportive husband.

Uncle Bob and Utility Classes

Robert Martin passed along more to me than the test-driven development bug (TDD really sounds like a disease, doesn’t it?) In reading his book Clean Code, I realized that my one great sin against the gods of Object Orientology was my overuse of static methods. My previously held opinion was that any operation that was stateless should be represented as a static method (that is the definition of static methods after all). These tend to show up as utility functions of the form:

public static String MyUtilities.stringTransformer(String input, String pattern);