Cogitations by Brad

Since my accident, I haven’t updated this thing much. Maybe that’s because of the condition of my fingers. I had major lacerations on the outside 3 fingers of my left hand, and had to have stitches, and wear bandages for the past 3 weeks on them. I’ve seen a hand doctor twice, and this last time, he told me that I was ready to start using them a little more.

I’m still going to be wearing a wrap on my middle finger, but the outside two are actually healing nicely. The pinky has definite scars, and the ring finger still has a spot that is healing, but they’re good enough that I don’t have to protect them as much.

I’ve been doing sporatic work on Exposong, including getting image slides, but nothing to show for it yet. I’ll actually be starting back to work on Tuesday, so I’ll be looking forward to getting back to work.

We were driving in Lubbock yesterday. My roommate, Garrett, was driving his Toyota, I was sitting shotgun, and Tina was in the back seat. Someone was tailgating us, so Garrett decides to break to get them off. “Hold on,” he says, not actually knowing that we’re going to have a real reason to hold on soon. The vehicle swerves left to avoid him and over corrected, coming back to hit the left side of the bed of the truck. We fly left, and it feels unreal; the top of the truck hit on the ground, I see the windshield shatter. Most of the impact was on the drivers side. I had blacked out.

Now we’re on all four wheels with people all around the car. A lot of medical people had witnessed it, and they were making sure we were all not too badly injured.

The roof had caved a little on my side, but more so on the drivers side. The windshield in front of me was shattered, and disconnected at the top. I looked down, and my hands were bloody. Turns out most of my injury was in my left hand. I started to see spots.

Emergency vehicles arrived a little later. They put a neckbrace on all of me and pulled me out, making sure that they did all the effort. They had to pry the backdoor off to get Tina out.

Tina and I went in one ambulance to University Medical Center. Garrett went to Covenant Hospital.

Once we arrived, they put me in the hallway. Random nurses were asking some questions. The hospital was overrun with people coming in on carts and police officers. I heard someone say that we flipped 2, maybe 3 times. It took 45 minutes to get a doctor (estimated). Another 15 minutes, and a guy came to get a catscan on my neck, and an x-ray on my hand. They took me back to the hallway.

I had been thirsty since I got there, but they wouldn’t give me a drink. My brother came in finally, because they had locked down the ER (I think for an investigation of some sort). Other people came in and out to visit me, and it would take at least 1.5 hours to get me to a room. Another hour and the doctor came to stitch me up finally. Another 45 minutes and a nurse came and cleaned my wounds up. They must have liked me so much that they wanted to keep me around.

They finally released me, and Daniel and I went and got my medicine.

Thanks to Daniel, Jeff, Hollis, and all others who showed up at the hospital. (I typed this with one hand and another finger)

So I’ve gotten a lot done on this website. It feels like I’m hammering nails with my head. What a tool! At least there’s a little bit of information on it out there, but google doesn’t like to actually find stuff about BASIC when I type in the word (it’s basically stuff about simplicity ).

At least I get paid hourly. If they want to make it complicated, then that just means I’ll get paid more.

I’ve been given a new job, to program a website in BASIC. I feel like I’ve gone from using a motorized screw driver back to using a manual one by hand. I don’t even know BASIC, but I’m trying to learn it. Besides that, I have to learn exactly how http works, because I’ll have to do it all manually. It will be good to learn, but it’s going to be a challenge without the shortcuts that PHP has to offer. No cookie, or session handling. The only security will have to be coded by me.

Oh well, it’s what the customer wants, and unfortunately, my boss is pretty set on doing it this way.

I’m building a website that was previously in COBOL, and even though I don’t think moving to BASIC is a very big step, the previous program only allowed Internet Explorer.

If you’ll look at the bottom, beside the preview, you can see the new background selector. You can use both images, or plain gradients.

I would dare to say that ExpoSong might even be ready for actual use. Of course, you can’t do much more than plain-text slides (lyrics too, but it’s plain-text as well), but there’s nothing wrong with an assembly without images/videos.

I know a lot of Americans who absolutely hate the idea of our products coming from other countries. They whine and complain, saying, “they’re stealing our jobs,” or they state that in fact, the workers are underpaid and oppressed in their jobs because it is a 3rd world country.

In fact, when our factory jobs go overseas, it’s a good thing. Not only do we stimulate the economy of the countries, and add wealth to the country, we get a good product as well, at a lower price. They are happy to have a steady income, that probably pays more than they would get without the factory, and our pocketbooks are better off because the wages of paying their employees are lower.

Does it take away American jobs? In a way. Do we as Americans want to work for $5.15/hour (actually more now that minimum wage is going up)? Do we want mundane factory jobs? No, most of us do not. Our nation is moving away from the low, hourly rate jobs, and into the educated, high salary jobs. There are plenty of jobs for the uneducated, and even though it hurts when 1,000 people lose their job to a factory relocation, without change, our economy will never grow.

It’s important to remain informed on the major issues. A lot of times, politicians will tell us what we want to hear, but it’s  not always what’s best for us in the long run. So, before you complain about the economy, make sure you know the facts.

Looks like I’m going to be working this summer. My boss wants to set me up with office hours, which is promising, because that will mean I’ll get a steady paycheck. It also means I’ll be in Lubbock for most of the summer, which isn’t so bad; I already commited to the softball team with our college group.

I’m finally finding a group that I’m comfortable with at Cross Campus. Kind of ironic that it’s happening now out of the whole year. Better late than never.

Announcing version 0.3 of Exposong! With custom schedules, presentation backgrounds, plugins, faster screen rendering, and a major overhaul of all the source code, it’s an estimated 250% more usable than the previous version! There’s even a German translation for native speakers (we’ll be needing more translators for other languages, for anyone who wishes to be involved).

For plugins in ExpoSong, I’ve gone mostly the route that was in the tutorial at pocoo.org. It’s helped me in understanding it a lot, but I decided to go the route of abstract classes, instead of a capabilities list. This helps documentation, and lets the developer know exactly what needs to be implemented without searching through developer documents.

I’ve been using firefox in combination with adblock plus for a long time now, and haven’t really second guessed myself. A lot of websites aren’t there for the users, but in fact just there to make money. I don’t appreciate when there is less content than there is advertisement, so it is sites that abuse their power to advertise that make me use adblock.

One of the things I’ve learned in microeconomics this year, is that in a free market society, you can often help yourself the most the most by helping others. This is how Christians can be profitable business people, because in fact by being fair to customers, they are in in fact helping others while making a profit.

Back to the adblock issue, I’d like to reward more people for being responsible, and using a fair amount of advertisement, but I’m not quite sure how this can be done with adblock right now. Maybe the feature that I’m looking for is an opt-in for each website. What I mean is, I disable ad-blocking for all websites. If I visit a site, and they are using more than three ad-banners, I put them in a list that blocks all advertisement for that site.

I see over-advertisement as being as offensive as spamming. I think the web community as a whole needs to start discouraging bad behavior. This would be another toolkit in the users toolkit that I think would help the web as a whole.

There’s so much I’m learning about programming while making ExpoSong. A lot of it would have been nice to know while I was making the bulk of it, but I’m learning as I go. Instead of having the classes be attributes of the main class, from what I’ve figured out, I think it’s going to be best to put the class attributes in the module that the class is defined (e.g. schedule.py, Schedule (class), schedule (attribute)). Hopefully, this will allow me to cut down the 400 lines of code in the application.py file. We’ll see.

I’m going to have to do some major changes before I can get 0.3 pumped out, so I’m going to see what I can get done in the next couple of weeks. I’m just now starting to get some motivation after Spring Break (time off always kills me when I have to come back). Once I get plugins working, I should be able to pump out new features a little bit easier, so we’ll see what happens.

Edit 12:02am: I may start pumping out code for my boss, so I can get paid. It is more important to pay the rent than to get ExpoSong further along, so that’s where my priorities lie. I’ve got a paper due on Thursday as well, so that’s also very important. I may have to remove all signs of games from this computer so I can get something done.