Light of a Clear Blue Morning

Life often seems desperate, and a bit hopeless. Sometimes life seems like it has no point and all paths lead to a bleak existence on the road to non-existence. Humans seem to have no understanding of anything but “this moment” or “this emotion”, which creates sensations that may be a bit irrational. Things in life almost always turn around and humans have no way of knowing what is coming in the future. Tomorrow may bring happiness and resolution, we must hold out hope in the most desperate of times if we are going to survive. 

Light of a Clear Blue Morning
Dolly Parton

Its been a long dark night
And Ive been a waitin for the morning
Its been a long hard fight
But I see a brand new day a dawning
Ive been looking for the sunshine
cause I aint seen it in so long
But everythings gonna work out just fine
Everythings gonna be all right
Thats been all wrong

cause I can see the light of a clear blue morning
I can see the light of a brand new day
I can see the light of a clear blue morning
And everythings gonna be all right
Its gonna be okay

Its been a long long time
Since Ive known the taste of freedom
And those clinging vines
That had me bound, well I dont need em

cause I am strong and I can prove it
And I got my dreams to see me through
Its just a mountain, I can move it
And with faith enough theres nothing I cant do

And I can see the light of a clear blue morning
And I can see the light of brand new day
I can see the light of a clear blue morning
And everythings gonna be all right
Its gonna be okay

I can see the light of a clear blue morning
I can see the light of a brand new day
Yes I can see the light of a clear blue morning
And everythings gonna be all right
Everythings gonna be all right
Everythings gonna be all right

Its gonna be okay

cause I can see the light of a clear blue morning
I can see the light of a clear blue morning
Yes I can see the light of a clear blue morning
Everythings gonna be all right
Its gonna be okay

I can see the light
I can see the light

Its gonna be all right
Its gonna be all right

Anxious for Grades

I am anxiously watching the grade pages for 3 of my classes. I have a paper in Art History and one in American History that were turned in well over a week ago that I am waiting for grades on, and also a mid-term in C# that I turned in just a few days ago.

I am worried about my Art History paper because there is now a class average, but I haven’t received a grade, and the instructor received our papers by email, so I worry that mine went into an SMTP black hole somewhere or perhaps a SPAM trap and will never return (I am only worried from the grade standpoint, I have a backup of the paper stored on a network drive as well as burried in GITI).

I’m not too worried about American History because it was turned in by a traceable web interface (Moodle) and the instructor has been out of the country for the past week.

C# I am just annoyed by. There are averages appearing which means some have been graded, but mine hasn’t been yet. I really want to know how well/bad I did on the mid-term. It was a two part exam, which made it more fun for me. It was a knowledge test (questions) and a practical exam (programming assignment). It felt like what I always expected a midterm to feel like.

If they were 3 little assignments I wouldn’t be this anxious, but they are big parts of my grade and I badly want to know.

Exceptions

I have had a few programming classes now and it seems as though programmers are being trained to program for failure rather than success. One of the features of modern programming languages is exception handling. While this is a nice feature, because users do stupid things and we don’t always need an application to crash just because we might have a typoed letter in a box where we are only expecting numbers, it sets the wrong focus on programming. We don’t write code to “run” anymore, we write it to “try”, and then we catch anything that could go wrong. This is nice functionally speaking, but perhaps this is something that should be a little deeper in the language itself. It would be nice if a first-year programming student didn’t have to consider whether or not the user of his second program (first is always “Hello World” and output only) will return data that his variable won’t accept. In most languages, if you give bad data, the application will crash unconditionally, wouldn’t it be cool if programs could just naturally throw a generic type error and give the user a second chance?

Simple C# Database Application

image

Basically, it prompts for a GITI ID, user enters an assignment number from the Education module, and it calls the database server and asks for the class code and the assignment name. Nothing special yet. I’m using the MySQL Connector for ADO.NET. It’s kind of lame, but is my first step towards a version of GITI that doesn’t require a web browser. This version talks directly to SQL, and its designed for an end-user, but my vision is to create a console-based server that will handle authenticating users and things like that, handling the interaction with the database itself. Ideally, the Windows Application will then talk to that server and perform its actions, while also maintaining a local cache of information.

In PHP, GITI’s native language, what I did looks something like this:

//get user input for $assID from form
$sql = "SELECT Code, Assignment FROM `homework` WHERE `ID`=’$assID’";
$sql_result = mysql_query($sql, $connection);
$row = mysql_fetch_array($sql_result);
echo $row["Code"];
echo " : ";
echo $row["Assignment"];

 

In C# it looks a little more like this: 

string assID = tIn.ReadLine();
string selectStatement = "SELECT Assignment,Code FROM `homework` WHERE `ID`='" + assID+"'";
MySqlCommand selectCommand = new MySqlCommand(selectStatement, connection);
connection.Open();
MySqlDataReader custReader = selectCommand.ExecuteReader();
if (custReader.Read())
{
string ClassCode = custReader["Code"].ToString();
string AssignmentName = custReader["Assignment"].ToString();
tOut.WriteLine(ClassCode+" : "+AssignmentName);
}
connection.Close();
Console.Beep();

 

Both are very simple. In both examples, the connection properties for the server were set before the lines of code shown. C# is more manageable for doing this type of work once the "data assisting" features of Visual Studio 2008 are ignored. I love C# so far, but I am quickly learning that I can learn to love Visual C++ as well, there isn’t a lot different between the languages (why should there be, they both convert back to .NET Assembly). My frustration that I developed with C++ resulted from not ever being able to find documentation that I need about available "classes", and when I did find the classes I needed, they required additional classes to make them work. An absolutely endless cycle. For C#, there are a lot of built in classes for most common functions, and the documentation is plentiful (not the mention Visual Studio’s ability to read and define constructs in the classes as I get to them, providing me with instant ability to use functions). 

I still have to pick what language I want to take an advanced course in (for my Computer Programming degrees).

Gay Marriage Bans

Looking at the number of states that have some sort of Gay-Marriage Ban on their ballots for November, I am shocked. Isn’t this a step backward for a society? Should we be seeking to limit the rights of citizens like this?

I am personally against homosexuals being married. Marriage has become more about a contractual obligation than an institution to protect love between individuals. The straights have managed to destroy the institution of marriage by being more concerned about whether or not gays could be married than policing the validity of the heterosexual marriages occurring. I believe the rights that are being granted with marriage should be able to be conferred in other ways. If there were two straight men, best friends, who had no family remaining, and one of them became ill, chances are, a hospital would not allow the friend to be present or involved at all. Its a rather disgusting thought. Why is there no legally recognizable institution for situations like that?

The fun part of the whole thing becomes, do we care about love? do we care about family? or do we care about reproduction? The conservative view seems to be one of reproduction. Marriage is a very cold institution when you look at it from a legal view.

Another step towards a parent-less society

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/automobiles/07auto.html

I love Ford’s newest “enhancement” to its vehicles. A special key for teens to use when driving that restricts their speed and stereo use. What a piece of shit! Ford claims the device is to help teach kids how to drive more safely. I must question what the awkward year to 18 months in most states where teens are to drive with a parent before getting their license is supposed to be for. It sure as hell isn’t chauffer training.

I am personally against any device that restricts speed in a vehicle. I don’t know how many times I have been driving and had to speed up… usually above what is considered safe, to avoid a road danger (I think they are called truckers in most states). A brief burst of acceleration isn’t always a bad thing.

I really think that parents should be more responsible in their own driving to encourage responsibility in young drivers. Letting children know the expectations that parents have for them is often a very effective way of getting them to drive responsibly.

Preparing the Manuscript

I thought that preparing a manuscript of my poetry for review by a UNC instructor would be very easy… just pick the poems I like and then submit them in a bound format. Not exactly. I have fighting with myself over the quality of the existing poems and then I’m considering what I will need to write additionally to be able to impress the Advanced Poetry (ENGL 407) instructor. I am a very simple poet, so I worry that I am way out of range for meeting the requirements of the course.

I have also considered taking Intermediate Fiction instead of Advanced Poetry, but then I remember the type of fiction I like to write and remembered that really isn’t appropriate for an academic environment. I am just not grabbed by fiction writing the same way that I am for poetry. I feel that I can challenge Frost, but challenging Tom Clancy or Nora Roberts is a little different. If I wrote fiction, I would bore myself (explains why Creative Writing II went so well for me).

 

I suppose the only thing I can do is make an attempt at the manuscript, worse case, I don’t get into the class.

Thirty Hours from Anywhere

Reviewing my academic record is a bit like galloping through the woods on a psychotic horse, you are never really sure where you are going to end up. Just about any degree I want I am about 30 hours from. I was reviewing my academic program for Fayetteville State University this morning and discovered that I am not 50 hours from a degree like I previously thought, I am a mere 38 credit hours from having a BS in Psychology. I am also only 30 hours from a Bachelor of Liberal Studies with a concentration in Humanities. I am starting to feel like I am running out of academic options. I open a college catalog and can identify most of the courses in it, because I have either already taken them, or have already determined that I would absolutely hate them. Maybe one day I will grow up, have a real life and no longer spend my time trying to find courses to fill my time with.

I don’t get the digital fuss

I am starting to hate this whole “digital” thing that is happening. Digital being just digital is fine, but unfortunately, digital often means compression. Compression often means loss of quality, therefore, digital often means loss of quality. Theatres in the United States will soon be upgraded to using digital projectors and receiving movies digitally. No specific clues have been given as to what this means, but it is probably safe to assume this means they will be delivered by Internet. This thought suddenly makes me think of blocky, bad YouTube videos, and seeing those on a massive screen. Not a pretty thought. If a film canister is damaged during transit, it is possible for a few frames to be damaged, but the rest lest completely intact. In a digital delivery form, it would require the use of a good verification algorithm (better than a CRC) to validate the files, or else they could be unwatchable. I’m sure they have considered that though, and there will likely be a cute little Windows app, or maybe a custom Linux distribution made to handle that sort of thing to take the burden off of the theatres. They can probably automate the whole thing, like when you order digital prints online to pick them up at the store, no user intervention at all, so you can walk into the theatre and at the scheduled movie start time, watch “File Not Found” appear on the screen when some part of the system fails to do its job properly.

Digital television is a little different. It is possible for the cable company to give you a great stream, or a really suckily compressed stream, on really crappy equipment/software. My digital cable box has developed a habit of restarting itself lately,  this wasn’t a problem on analog (although, funny enough, a lot of channels are still analog and I still have to put up with this bullshit).

Digital mediums coming at this stage in human understanding of “art” is a very bad thing. Digital formats loose so much from traditional arts because the formats are badly used. The focus now is on “media delivery” methods and how to make the most profit from it, not on how to bring art to the common person and letting them experience it to its fullest.

DVD is a great technology, the compression is relatively low, and there is a lot of room for the full artistic experience. The same is true of CD. These technologies freed us from lousy analog formats that were badly made. There is a huge difference between DVDs and streamed movies however. DVD uses the digital format to its fullest, not taking short cuts. This is because a DVD is physical. CDs are analog creations, MP3s are digital reinterpretations of that. When played on good equipment, there is a difference between a “ripped” song at under 320 kbps, and a song being played from a real CD. A lot of MP3 stores don’t sell the best possible quality of songs, therefore, cheating the consumer out of the experience, and to make things worse, MP3s take songs out of context. MP3s encourage a move to a single style of music creation, no longer focusing on a cohesive creation. It is like developing a culture where books are purchased a chapter at a time, it might make sense, but the full experience is lost.

Digital is the demise of most forms of art.

Why change election law?

In New York City, there is currently a very strange thing happening. The city council is considering removing a term-limit law for the mayor, just to allow Bloomberg to run again. In 1993, the people of the city voted to impose a limit. In this situation, the city council wishes to change the law due to a current crisis. My question to them is simple, why does the law have to be changed? Why can the city council not just create a bill that would allow a one time override of the law? I find myself agreeing with both sides of this political fight. The people put the law there, and these are exceptional circumstances in which continuity of leadership and the expertise of Bloomberg might both be important to the city. So… why does everything have to be so set in stone? In the academic world, rules of how things are done apply to everyone, unless a dean or chair approves a permit, override or other device for a one-time change. If I want to take a course that is restricted to a major other than my own, a dean can approve that just one time for me, and have no impact on the catalog definitions at all.

Government is so silly.