Author: broderic

The final four is without a number 1 seed. Either the regular season polling is wrong and neither of the teams that were ranked number one should’ve been or the whole thing is a sham. My guess is that it is all a sham.

Imagine a George Mason winning it all. It would be like crowning a third rate team as national champs.

I’m just venting that my bracket is all blown up. Anyway, I’ll probably not watch any of the game. College basketball sucks anyway.

When beginning prograrmming, you usually write a “hello, world” program. This post from my cousin can be considered one. Of course it is lame as can be, but I hope to heck that her writing gets better.

We’re getting a quorum together, so now we must watch what we write. Whatever?!

Update: Looks as though yin-yang has changed the original post to something even more inane. That link above doesn’t work. Use the one. Anyway, welcome to the blogosphere, yin-yang.

Nice game Duke. You suck. You got beat by some team with a player nicknamed “Big Baby.” Perhaps that was what Riddick should’ve been nicknamed. Hate the playa. At least most everyone else’s bracket is fracked too.

Trying to be like Athos21, I will give a review of a restaraunt I ate at over the weekend.

The place was located in Cambridge, MD right off the main strip to Ocean City. It is called Greek and Italian Family Restaurant. When you first pull in, you can’t help but notice that this was a former Gino’s. Walking in gives you the same impression as walking into any fast food joint, plastic booths, menu on the lighted boards, yet we were sat in a booth by the door by a waitress.

The prices were decent. I ordered the philly cheese steak with onion rings, and my companions ordered fried shrimp basket and a ny strip dinner.

The cheese steak was disappointing. The bread got soaked with the oily mess that was the steak and fried onions so that itb was coming apart in my hands. When that happens, I usually begin eating faster. The onion rings were pretty good though. Crisp.

The shrimp basket was another disappointment. When placed on the table, one of my companions said, “Where’s the shrimp?” Cambridge is located on the eastern shore, by the Chesapeake Bay. By virtue of being next to water, you would think the fish or seafood would be fresh. The shrimp in this basket came from some place else and looked to be the same kind of frozen, breaded shrimp found at Red Lobster. The fries that came with it came from the same suppliers for BK as they had the same weird coating.

The ultimate disappointment/disaster came from the ny strip dinner. First, if I come into a joint such as this, steak would be the last thing ordered. My companion doesn’t think of it that way and went ahead and ordered it. This place doesn’t have a grille with fire. It has the kind of grille that McD uses for frying burgers. Imagine a steak fried on this thing medium rare. It came out worse than that. It was grey like you took a steak from the freezer to the frying pan without thawing it out. It was chewy (I had to help eat it). It was disgusting. I felt sick after eating 3 pieces.

Overall, don’t eat there. Ever. My companion summed it up: if she was ever famished and had this place as the only place to get food, then she’d rather starve.

Spent a night at Hyatt Chesapeake Bay, because it was my older brother’s birthday.

This place is a resort/spa situated in a small eastern shore town. Nothing really to do in town, so most of the time was spent at the resort. Swam in the pool. Shot a pool. Played ping-pong, desktop shuffleboard, air hockey, and arcade hockey. Played pinball on Harley-Davidson and Monster Bash and won free games. Ate. Drank. Made s’mores. Almost burned down the resort.

It was fun. Yet, not relaxing. I am spent and feeling tired.

This is a screen cap of my espn.com brackets for the 2006 NCAA. I just had to post this because it says Syracuse won there game which they didn’t. It must be true that all Syracuse broadcasting grads do end up at ESPN.

While teaching myself how to program Cocoa (can you smell the delicious?) via Aaron Hillegass’s Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, I ran into some difficulties with a challenge he gives in the book. This particular challenge occurs, for those following along, in chapter 15 “Images and Mouse Events.” He would like us to create an application using NSBezierPath in a custom NSView to draw ovals on the screen.

I have a faulty implementation. It works but damn is it a hack. I don’t know how much memory it leaks. I don’t know how efficient it runs. I don’t know if it follows the proper idioms for Mac programming. It works. Let’s leave it at that.

Yet, I would like to clean it up and make it a simple demo program (save, delete, undos, etc.). One issue is the use of document based application for the base. I don’t think I am following the Model-View-Controller paradigm. I have the view doing all the work. I would like to separate that by having the MyDocument class save and manage the NSRects in an NSMutableArray. Yet the NSArray holds objects and NSRect is a struct. What to do?

This article perfectly describes a solution to my problem. It is also well written. Damn. Programming for the Mac is fun.

Once you become accustomed to NSLogging everything under the sun, it can come as quite a surprise that a few common Objective-C types don’t bend so easily as the rest. Examples of such types are NSRect, NSSize, and NSRange. These compromised “objects” are implemented as plain C-structs rather than as proper objects, presumably as a performance consideration. Since they’re not objects, there is no freebie “description” method enabling them to be effortlessly passed as arguments to NSLog.

It also turns out I could’ve used NSValue. That is beautiful.