Enjoy your Northwest grown Oysters while you can. Unless something changes dramatically in the very near future, they are going to either become very expensive or simply unavailable for pretty much ever.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/04/1243700/-The-Oceans-are-Dying-Oxygen-is-Depleting-Acidity-Rising-at-Fastest-Rate-in-300-000-000-Years

It does not take a biology degree to see what's going on and what the cause of it is. Pouring all of this carbon into the atmosphere and ocean is having a dramatic effect unprecedented in the lifetime of this planet.

From the Article:
"Today's explosive increase in human CO2 emissions and warming of the oceans are recreating the conditions of the great Permian extinction 300 million years ago when massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia triggered the release of enormous amounts of stored carbon. A leading theory is that deoxygenation and acidification of the oceans led to the bacterial production of toxic hydrogen sulfide gas which poisoned species dependent on oxygen. By the end of this natural catastrophe 90% to 95% of all marine species were extinct. The biodiversity of the oceans took 30 million years for to recover."

I don't think we've got 30 million years just lying around for nature to come back and correct this colossal problem. This is no longer a problem we can ignore for future generations to sort out. This is the problem past generations ignored and now we have to deal with it.

Something I found today

So, my puppy was sitting on my lap, acting all cute, as he is wont to do, and i wanted to have a picture taken of it. Well, I didn't want to yell to my wife in the front room, and my phone is also not within arms reach, so i did a quick search on the intar webs and found out there is an easy way to send SMS messages from an email. It even catches the replies.

from Mozleron <*@gmail.com>
to ##########@txt.att.net
date Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 2:42 PM

You might consider grabbing my camera and coming into the office with it.


from ##########@txt.att.net
to *@gmail.com
date Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 2:45 PM

I want to hate you for this.

Mind you, she sent that reply after she was standing in the office, and had already taken the picture...

Interview Questions

I was asked to come up with a rather simple function during a phone interview a little while ago. Since it was over the phone, and i'm completely spoiled by my IDE, I made a pretty lame attempt at it, and completely failed. Having no visual feedback didn't help much either.

In any case, the interviewer asked me to come up with a function that will take a string of characters and return back the telephone keypad numeric equivalent. I actually sat down at my IDE and banged this bit of code out. I think it handle all cases, and fulfills the request.... Too bad it's a little too late to get that job.

using System;
using System.Collections;
using System.Text;

namespace PhoneLetters
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {           
            //returns "2223334"
            Console.WriteLine(getNumbers("ABCDEFG"));

            //returns "222-3334"
            Console.WriteLine(getNumbers("ABC-DEFG"));

            //returns "1-222-33134"
            Console.WriteLine(getNumbers("1-ABC-DE1FG"));

            //returns "222-33134&"
            Console.WriteLine(getNumbers("ABC-DE1FG&"));
        }

        static string getNumbers(string letters)
        {           
            StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
            foreach (char c in letters.ToUpper())
            {
                switch (c)
                {
                    case 'A':
                    case 'B':
                    case 'C':
                        sb.Append("2");
                        break;
                    case 'D':
                    case 'E':
                    case 'F':
                        sb.Append("3");
                        break;
                    case 'G':
                    case 'H':
                    case 'I':
                        sb.Append("4");
                        break;
                    case 'J':
                    case 'K':
                    case 'L':
                        sb.Append("5");
                        break;
                    case 'M':
                    case 'N':
                    case 'O':
                        sb.Append("6");
                        break;
                    case 'P':
                    case 'Q':
                    case 'R':
                    case 'S':
                        sb.Append("7");
                        break;
                    case 'T':
                    case 'U':
                    case 'V':
                        sb.Append("8");
                        break;
                    case 'W':
                    case 'X':
                    case 'Y':
                    case 'Z':
                        sb.Append("9");
                        break;
                    default:
                        sb.Append(c);
                        break;
                }               
            }
            return sb.ToString();
        }
    }
}

While I understand what interviewers are trying to do, I find it very difficult to whip up code on demand on a white board or over the phone for these made up problems. I guess i should go practice writing code to made up problems without the help of a computer so i can better handle these situations where i need to be able to show that i can indeed write some halfway decent code when i have access to my tools.

Smartest creatures of the sea?

You may know about how the Octopus can get bored and depressed in zoos, so giving them toys and puzzles to pull their food out of helps to bring them out of their shells, so to speak. Well, what about in the wild? Apparently some have figured out that they can create and carry a shell around. Step 3, Profit!

This must be how they found Coconut shells in Murcia! Not carried by swallows, they were brought by cephalopods!

The Rockettes, a review.

I got to see the Rockettes show on opening night this past Saturday. It seems to me like it's the kind of show that conservative old rich people would want to see their daughters perform in.

The show was well produced, and it looks like they have tried to keep up with the times, but at the same time, it felt like we were being transported back to the days of yore when they first burst onto the scene. It seemed to me to be the 1950's, but looking at their Wiki page shows that they were first put together in the 1920's, so what do i know?

The final act of the show was a living nativity, which included live sheep, camels, and a donkey. This only went on to heavily reinforce my view of this being a heavily "conservative values" influenced production. Reading about them performing for GWB's 2001 inauguration only piles it on.

There were some really great song and dance numbers in between the Rockettes routines, and when they were on stage they nailed their marks and did all their kicks in unison. But for some reason, it left me feeling a bit uncomfortable. It was almost as if i was watching a show designed for a totally different demographic.

If you do get a chance to see the show, by all means, go for it, but watch out for the animals at the end. I think one of the sheep relieved itself on stage that night...

Stop motion dabbling

I've been wanting to do a series of stop motion animations with my computer, and as i am wont to do, did some reading up on the topic. Turns out, it's actually not that hard, it just takes a lot of time, which I'm ok with.

So, as an experiment, I did this little thing:



Obviously there is a lot of room for improvement, but once i have my Stikfas, i'll be able to start taking this animation thing to a whole new level of awesome.

Corporate Bailouts

My question to the government is this: Why are we rewarding companies for their failures?

In the financial markets, we have a bunch of companies that have been engaging in what can be termed as 'less than ethical' dealings, and now that it has caught up with them, they are crying to the government, and ultimately, the taxpayers, aka, the rest of us, for a free handout to bail them out of the mess they got themselves into. Here is a good explanation of what has been going on.

In the Auto industry, we have at least two companies on the verge of bankruptcy in the face of competition, and a very tight economic market. Reuters has another story about how GM is having trouble. Apparently Goldman Sachs has suspended their rating of GM, and it looks like GM is asking its employees to cry to congress to try and pressure the government into giving GM money.

It seems like the world is in the early to mid phases of another depression, not seen since the 1930s. The financial outlook for the markets and many companies is very gloomy indeed, yet it looks like much of this chaos could have been prevented, and indeed, we see many institutions that did not go the route of previously mentioned shady dealings are doing just fine. One example is BECU, as outlined in this letter from their president.

Now, back to the original question: If companies like BECU and others could avoid this problem, why are the tax payers being forced to give copious amounts of money to the bank that prints our money (the Federal Reserve), and then allowing that corporation to decide who gets that money? Who is actually keeping a watch over how this money is being spent? Who is getting rich off of this, and who is getting screwed over? Is there any way we can gain true transparency into what is going on, and more importantly, keep from getting screwed over in the future?