Fartsauce

Recent lovely husband - wife exchange

Her: “James? Remember when I told you about tapping bumpers (NOT a euphemism, you twats!) with a truck this morning?”

Me: *playing with Ethan’s new DS, to make sure it works before we wrap it up and give it to him* “Yes dear?”

Her: “There’s something else I need to tell you….”

Me: *still playing with DS. As a matter of fact, it’s best that you assume that during this whole ‘conversation’ I’m focusing on the DS and not the wife, so I don’t have to keep typing this part* “err.. what?”

Her: “Well, yesterday, I, uhh, ran a red light, I need you to yell at me”

Me: *DS focus*. “Yeah, that’s bad dear”

Her: “No, YELL AT ME! There’s obviously something wrong with me!!!”

Me: “Yes, there is, dear!”

Her: “Can’t you come up with something better!?”

Me: “Not really, but the DS seems to work fine!”

Ethan REALLY pays attention to Mythbusters

Exchange this morning:

Jocelyn (pointing to my glass full of coke): “What’s that?”

Me: “It’s my coke, a type of soda” (my regular breakfast: 1 can of coke and 1 packet of Strawberry, NON-frosted, Pop-Tarts. And not the generic kind of Pop-Tarts, either, dammit!)

Jocelyn: “Oh.

Ethan: “They can make soda EXPLODE! on MYTHBUSTERS!!!”

I sense a diet coke + mentos purchase in our future…

Jocelyn playing guitar

NOTE: This has been sitting in my “Drafts” folder for quite some time.

Jocelyn found a guitar sticker or something this weekend and told me and her mommy “This is a GEETAR!”. So I decided to get out my guitar, which I haven’t played in 20 years, and is horribly, HORRIBLY out of tune. On the plus side, it’s only missing one string, so there’s that. Anyway, here’s the greatest guitar performance ever!!

This is a test of blog movage

Well, I moved the blog to a new host, and, unfortunately, the feed url has changed. Of course, I’m trying to get the 4 folks who were subscribed to the old feed to subscribe to the new one by posting about the new feed. Unfortunately I don’t know who 2 of the 4 people are, and they’ll never see this message.

Oh well. If you DO happen to see this message, please re-subscribe!

Not like it really matters. I never post, and noone ever reads

How NOT to seed your (pseudo-) random number generator…

This is how you write a function to generate a random number BEFORE you remember how PRNG’s normally work:


int randomGender()
{
  double rand;
  int gender; //if rand <= 0.6 then gender = 1, else gender = 0
  srand48( SEED );//SEED is defined elsewhere
  rand = drand48();
  ... determine gender based on comment, not really important for the purposes of this post...
  return gender;
}


Then you run your code, in which you call randomGender() 20 times.

Then you wonder why in the hell it’s returning the same value each time. (The head banging starts here, lasts about 30 - 40 minutes, I was pretty tired, and this was my first major C program in a while).

THEN, and ONLY THEN, do you remember how most PRNG’s work. You don’t TRULY learn your lesson until the head and desk are dented.

Here is how this particular PRNG does it. It uses something called the linear congruential formula¹, which is quite simple, really:

X_n+1 = (aX_n + c)_{mod m}   where n>= 0 ²

By DEFAULT (which is the way I used the PRNG):
  m = 2⁴⁸
  a = 5DEECE66D₁₆ = 273673163155₈
  c = B₁₆ = 13₈

To start, X₀ is the seed, which the programmer sets. As you start generating numbers, X₁ is the first random number generated, X₂ is the second random number generated, and so on and so forth (this is tracked internally, the programmer doesn’t have to worry about this part).

Once I remembered, my mistake became obvious. The PRNG needed to be seeded (call to srand48()) OUTSIDE of the function.

C: 1, James: 0

¹ I haven’t fully read this page yet, so perhaps it contradicts stuff in this post. Please be smart. Trust them and not me :).
² I took the form of the equation I used from here.

Money!

For the longest time (many, many years) the wife and I would handle money like this:

if ( money in bank account ) { useDebitCard(); } else { useCreditCard(); }

Needless to say, after several years of doing this, it gets you into a tad of trouble, money wise.

HOWEVER! We’ve finally decided enough is enough. We’ve worked out a monthly budget (using a piece of software called YNAB), and have a plan to pay down the debt we’ve incurred.

And you know what?

It feels GREAT.

I no longer worry about whether the debit card is going to be rejected (which was especially embarrassing at Costco). I no longer feel bad about buying a little something for myself (since it comes out of my “mad money” that’s budgeted each month), since I know it’s not going to affect our grocery budget, or gas budget, or force one of us into using the credit card for something and thereby incurring more debt. I haven’t even touched the credit card since we started doing this.

Really, though, the most important part is there’s a hell of a lot less tension in the marriage when it comes to money. We talk a lot more about it, and are planning a lot farther ahead for stuff. We’re saving for Christmas. We’re budgeting for birthdays months ahead of time. We need some car stuff done (new tires for me, new clutch for the wife) and that’s in there as well.

It also helps with the “emergencies”. Just this past weekend, the wife took her 4runner in for an oil change, and asked them to check out the brakes. We were guessing it was going to be pretty bad, and it was, to the tune of, well, more than $1, less than $1000 :). But part of this whole budgeting thing is to plan for stuff like this. When you have a plan set out beforehand, it’s a whole hell of a lot less stressful.

I’m hoping we can stick to it, and I think we can. It feels good. It feels like we’re finally making a difference and doing the right thing. We’re still tweaking it a little bit since we just started, but we’ll get it down. It’s still a bit hard, especially with the “mad money”, seeing as how I like to buy expensive things. That RC helicopter I got a few months ago isn’t going to pay for it’s own parts, dammit!

I’ve coined a new term, and I’d like you all to use it

The term is “anecdotal failure rate”, and it’s quite important. It’s a term for the “I’ve heard lots of people say their whatever has broken”.

I’ve been weighing the options of either an Xbox 360 or a Playstation 3.

360 Positives (in no particular order):

1. Game selection
2. Uhmmm…

360 Negatives:

1. lack of hi-def dvd format player built in.
2. And, the crux of the issue, the number of people I know who’ve had their 360’s give the “red ring of death”. It’s a lot. One of my friends has has BOTH of his red ring on him. A demo unit at one of the Target’s around here has a nice red ring of death.

PS3 positives:

1. Gran Turismo (it’s a HUGE deal for me)
2. Blu-Ray player

PS3 negatives:

1. Overall game selection (although there are plenty of games I’d like to play, but it would be nice to have Bioshock or Mass Effect available)

Both systems will stream audio and video from my mac and windows machines, so that’s a wash.  But the failure rate, that’s what really did it.  It doesn’t really matter what the actual overall failure rate is, but when you know more people who have red-ringed 360’s than have 360’s that haven’t red-ringed, that makes a difference.

Sony’s getting my money, and I’ve coined a new term, so you’d better fucking use it.

Ethan only wants to play HALF of T-ball

We’ve signed Ethan up for T-ball this year, and this morning he said to me (as we were getting into the car) “Daddy, we need to play some t-ball outside so I can practice!”. Of course, it’s only 22 degrees out. Perfect baseball weather.

I then told him that we’d need to get him a glove (and one for me, too), but he replied with “I don’t need one, daddy, I only want to hit”. “Honey, everyone has to hit AND catch in baseball…” and he said OK.

I almost added “except for those wimpy designated hitters and pitchers”, but I refrained.

Twitter Updates for 2008-01-24

• top gear isn’t top gear without jeremy, james, and richard. Top Gear SHOULDN’T HAVE STUPID AMERICAN HOSTS #

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Twitter Updates for 2008-01-23

• anyone want a tremendously whiny cat? #
• my lovely wife made spaghetti last night, but she didn’t make enough for leftovers. FAIL #
• question: are there any "Jim"s out there whose real name is actually "Jim"? #

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