Monthly Archives: October 2007

Writing Software in a Feedlot

A lit­tle story: I’m from West Texas where cat­tle ranch­ing is big. In com­mu­ni­ties around the Pan­han­dle, there are feed­lots where cat­tle go to spend the last 3–6 months of their lives before becom­ing steak. Feed­lots can hold a lot of cat­tle. As you can imag­ine, the air qual­ity around feed­lots is pun­gent, to put …

October 31, 2007 – 9:00 pm | By Brett Bim | Posted in Programming | Comments (3)

Day 3

I’m find­ing that I lack the abil­ity to con­cen­trate for long peri­ods of time. I think con­cen­tra­tion is a habit, one you can fall out of and work­ing at Bill­Ma­trix for 7 years on top of my already bad habit of being dis­tracted by shiny, jan­gly things has put a seri­ous hurt on my abil­ity …

October 31, 2007 – 4:46 pm | By Brett Bim | Posted in Abyss Diving | Comments (0)

Day 2

So my plan is to doc­u­ment how­ever long this lit­tle no hav­ing a job exper­i­ment goes on. My apolo­gies for 95% of my read­ers who are non-technical but most of these lit­tle daily sum­maries will be focused on my learn­ing process. I’m set­ting the clock as of yes­ter­day since the first two days of the …

October 30, 2007 – 5:13 pm | By Brett Bim | Posted in Abyss Diving | Comments (0)

RIP Pandora, 1993–2007

October 30, 2007 – 7:25 am | By Brett Bim | Posted in Random | Comments (2)

A Dive Into The Abyss

So, as it turns out, my bitch­ing about my self-review was unnec­es­sary. Mon­day, Octo­ber 22nd, I quit my job. I actu­ally almost did it the Fri­day before but wanted to make sure I wasn’t mak­ing a rash deci­sion (as if detest­ing each minute you spent at work for the past 4 months could ever be …

October 26, 2007 – 3:19 pm | By Brett Bim | Posted in Work | Comments (0)

Functional Programming Comparison

Seem­ingly late to the prom, Microsoft is adding lambda expres­sions to C# 3.0. For those of you unfa­mil­iar with lambda expres­sions, they are basi­cally just syn­tac­tic sugar for cre­at­ing anony­mous func­tions that you can pass around. Func­tional lan­guages like Lisp and to a lesser degree, Python, have had them from day 1. In these lan­guages, …

October 23, 2007 – 12:19 pm | By Brett Bim | Posted in Programming | Comments (0)

Deborah Kerr, RIP

Deb­o­rah Kerr has died. One of my all-time favorite romances is “An Affair to Remem­ber” and I thought she was won­der­ful in that. She’s prob­a­bly best known for that steamy kiss with Burt Lan­caster in “From Here To Eter­nity”. The NY Times obit linked above has all the other per­ti­nent details. I’m a lit­tle sad …

October 18, 2007 – 2:55 pm | By Brett Bim | Posted in Culture | Comments (0)

Who Knew

Did you know Ravel wrote a con­certo for the left hand? Me nei­ther though I guess I should have, given how fark­ing hot Bo Derek was in Bolero. He prob­a­bly needed to blow off some seri­ous steam. But more seri­ously, I can totally see maybe a tone poem called “It really does feel like some­one else” …

October 17, 2007 – 2:14 pm | By Brett Bim | Posted in Random | Comments (0)

It’s the Most Wonderful Time, Of the Year

Does that lit­tle jin­gle make you think Christ­mas? Well stop it, it’s not what I’m talk­ing about. Hal­loween nei­ther even though it’s a great lit­tle hol­i­day. No, I’m talk­ing about review time. That time dur­ing the year when the review fairy comes down from on high where she’s been hang­ing out with Jesus and John …

October 17, 2007 – 1:22 pm | By Brett Bim | Posted in Work | Comments (3)

God Tells Baptists Dancing Is Off-Limits but Pissing On Bar OK

Appar­ently, an assis­tant foot­ball coach at Bay­lor was caught Sat­ur­day night tak­ing a leak on the bar at a local pub. Yup, you read that right, on the bar. The coach had been drink­ing the hard stuff for a lit­tle while and “appar­ently thought no one was watch­ing him”. To which I say, this is …

October 16, 2007 – 1:05 pm | By Brett Bim | Posted in Sports | Comments (0)