Humans popping out all over

The newest baby girl is getting a little more recognizable as a human, at nearly a month old -- not so compressed looking. They are like butterflies that unfold their wings for a while until they take shape. The cramped conditions inside mama are gone, and the baby expands into the world. To see and feel and taste and smell and hear the ruckus all around.

The other girl is 3 years old. Once "the baby" herself, she is now more of a little person. At least she knows how to communicate most of the things she needs and wants. She lost her position as "the baby", but she gained the position of "big sister" with all the power that implies.

What will these children grow up to eat? Will there be a world fit for them to live in when I am gone? Will we have used up all the fuel and salted all the fields? With methane venting from the melting tundra -- it seems very bad for them in the days beyond my life.

"Why worry?" one might say-- "just grow your children right." Yes, I'll try. But I certainly can't grow corn in the Sahara.

Yes, I know the dinosaurs had to die out and mankind will have to die out eventually. But the dinosaurs were too stupid to know they shouldn't shit in their own water supplies. We are smarter than that.

The Tell Tale Heart of Internet

It is final. Our household revolves around Internet. It is not that we are all websurfers or computer professionals, although my wife and I both are computer geeks. But a couple days ago the cable modem smoked a fish and so much for Internet. No bits per second. Zero.

But our phones, our banking, our connections to most people in the world is through that cable connection to broadband Internet. Without it our phones ceased working, our email stopped working, Skype and Vonage stopped working. Everthing stopped working. My job depends on Internet.

So for the 2.5 days without Internet (or almost without -- there was still a spotty connection of rogue, unsecured wireless routers out there for an emergency email to my work, or two) -- life was more like the old days -- watching TV for the news, using my cell phone for almost everything else. It was like returning to the year 2001, when Internet for me was ISDN slow mode, NT still ran on most of my computers, and there was no "War by Bush, for Bush" and I used AOL disks and CDROMs for coffee coasters.

Now, after a cable service call, it is back to normal - back to the Internet for news, for phones, for work, for everything again.

The Anti-Language: Visual Studio CLI

The last few months have been very busy for me. Usually I keep myself busy anyway -- I have this blog, another blog and even another blog, but those are only for my amusement and not for money or fame.

I am working too hard now to maintain these blogs as frequently as I'd like. What at first seemed like a 2-3 month contract has now entered the 5th month, and as far as I can tell, it may extend indefinitely (not infinitely, mind you) into the future. I am not complaining about the job at all, I welcome that aspect of things.

Being a C programmer by preference, and a sometimes C++ programmer by employment, I am not put off by immensely complex projects. Every non-trivial system I design takes mind numbing quantities of complex steps to complete, sometimes reaching into years. I would rather complete things in far less time, even in days -- if possible -- but complexity takes time.

Microsoft's .NET programming environment is my least favorite toolkit however, and it has taught me much about the power of a monopolistic corporation to bastardize an otherwise fine programming language like C++. I would much rather code in C, with all its warts and pitfalls -- but that is not the goal of .NET that I can determine.

C is like machine language with libraries of functions that many, many fine programmers have already written. All I do is write my mess in there and -- whooosh! A new system. C allows one to shoot themselves in the foot, of course, but any cowboy that shoots themselves in the foot is not a very competent cowboy.

Visual Studio (2005 in this case) seems to bend everything around the idea of "Common Language", as though C++, Java and Visual Basic can be simultaneously enveloped by a "Studio" of glorious multilingual software agents, all dancing in harmony and providing a "rich user experience". To me that is just Marketing Propaganda disguised as a programming language.

I just see it as unnecessarily complex, composed of far too many layers, and replete with thousands of "objects within objects" which almost-but-not-quite do what I need to do. I wind up writing all kinds of dumb wrappers or "un-wrappers" to fix things that shouldn't need fixing.

If all I did was write business programs in a relational database environment, I guess I could see the point of all that .NET crap. But trying to write scientific programs, it is just mountains of goop that crowd out the entire point of the system -- to solve problems.

I can write 2 programs -- 1 in C (with a GUI of sorts) and 1 in C++.NET (with an immensely complex GUI). The C version will run in about 1 megabyte of RAM. The C++.NET version will run in about 90-100 megabytes of RAM. The programs will perform the same task, although from a different philosophy, however the C version, being about a million kilograms lighter, will outrun the C++.NET version hands down.