Since when was The Shining a feel good movie? Since somebody creatively edited footage to make this promo.

My wife can be a real bookworm at times. She took Twiggy to the local Starbucks in the downtown area of Culver City to have a drink and read her Spanish book outside in the beautiful weather. As she studied, she could overhear two guys behind her loudly engaged in annoying guy talk about some hot coworker of theirs and how some other guy got to her first.

Saw this on the Snopes site about a Coke ad that Coca Cola released and then had to recall because of a hidden risqué image. Pretty damn funny. It just shows that companies shouldn’t skimp on QA.

Just to put housing prices in Los Angeles in perspective, we bought our small 1000 sq foot town house condo a year and a half ago. I just found out this week that our neighbors sold their comparable unit for 30% more than we paid for ours. It boggles my mind.

Ian Griffiths takes an in-depth look at C# 3.0 Extension methods and the potential problems with it. Of particular note is his philosophy, which directly follows from the idea that code should be written for humans, which he summarizes whe he say…

I just heard thunder. I don’t think the weather here in Los Angeles got the memo, but we already had a thunderstorm. To the thunder clounds, go away and come back later when the yearly quota has’t been filled.

Found this post in the trackbacks section of my post on Mental Laziness. It’s a classic example of where management pressure often leads to mental laziness.

Found this post in RossCode which mentions a blog post that discusses how to bind enumerations to drop downs, something I’ve done quite often.

Perhaps it’s a rather innocuous practice, but after seeing one too many I am compelled to rant a bit, if only to be a total jerk. What do I speak of? I was going through the blogs in my blog reader the other day and I started noticing the predilection for geek blogs to have “cute” titles and/or subtitles with code snippets. I know we’re geeks, but must we be THAT geeky? It’s become so trendy that I must start the backlash now.

Ok, I am looking for some blogging fresh meat, so I thought I’d try my hand at starting a meme. The criteria is purposely vague and very simple. I want you to list ten blogs you’ve really enjoyed reading recently. Especially the underrated, undiscovered, recent finds. They don’t have to be your favorite blogs of all time, just ones that have caught your notice recently.

Leave it to Ian to cut through the crap and give a very clear and detailed account of what exactly the new var keyword in C# does.

Good to see James revive this. I really need to buy this book.

Certainly there’s been a bit of a bad reaction regarding the name changes of Indigo to WCF and Avalon to WPF.

In 1582, the Julian calendar was really starting to show its age. A bunch of brains got together and came up with the Gregorian calendar, which was received by the general population with a big middle finger in the air. Many saw it as an attempt by greedy landlords to cheat tenants out of a week of rent.

Picked up our airline tickets to Spain today. We’ll be visiting in November, landing in Madrid, travelling through Andalucia and ending up in Barcelona. The main thing I want to visit in Madrid is the area where I used to live called Torrejon de Ardoz.

UPDATE: Looks like I was sleeping during my class on 70s funk. It was Albert Hammond who wrote It Never Rains In Southern California, not Kool and the Gang. Thanks Jeff.

You’ve no doubt heard me rant against premature optimization in the past, but Eric Gunnerson points out another “Premature” action to be avoided, “Premature Generalization”.

Anyone here in L.A. going to this?

It wouldn’t be fair to point out the mistakes of other developers being lazy without pointing out that I have been very guilty of this myself. The point of the post is not to trash another person’s coding habits, but to present an ideal to work towards. Sometimes, intellectual “laziness” is absolutely necessary as in the example presented in the comments of that post.

A while ago, Jeff Atwood wrote about the merits of laziness for successful software developers. Lest this become the mantra of sub-performing developers everywhere, I wanted to follow up with a clarification.