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Vote for dope?

Posted In: Everyday life — October 30, 2005 @ 8:31 pm — Peter

This coming Tuesday we’ll be heading to the polls to vote on a series of referendums that will impact the city and state quite significantly. The referendums attracting the most attention are C and D, which loosen the belt on Colorado’s state government budget. Without getting into the gory details, C and D will allow the state to dip into excess funds that would otherwise be returned to taxpayers via refunds. The appropriations of these funds appear to be well intentioned and will be destined for improving education, road work, and contributing to pensions of state workers. While there are suspicions that the funds may never actually make it to their intended destinations, I’m willing to give the state the benefit of the doubt.

A referendum I was completely unaware of, until my father asked my thoughts on it, is the decriminalization an ounce or less of marijuana. For starters, I’m a supporter of legalizing marijuana for medical purposes. However, I’m not keen to the idea of patients having to obtain marijuana through the current organized crime channels of distribution. I’m more interested in the big picture of legalization. Legalization should be handled at the national level so that stringent laws of distribution, quality control, and enforcement could be legislated without ambiguity. What Denver has on its ballot is an effort to decriminalize a “personal” amount of marijuana that would hardly address the larger issue.

The marijuana decriminalization campaign is using questionable advertising messages that make some rather hasty assumptions. Over the past few weeks as I come home from work, I’ve see people standing on the corners waving various political signs supporting some referendum or another. One of these signs bears the message “Make Denver safer, vote Yes on 100”. Naturally, I assumed this referendum was addressing increased numbers of police officers on the street or something similar. After doing some research, it appears their slogan has a different message behind it. The group behind the referendum is asserting that marijuana should be decriminalized because it may lead to less incidents of domestic violence. This seems like a reasonable theory, but it is completely unfounded and backed by nothing more than assumption. Should we assume that all wife beating alcoholics will put down their drinks and start smoking joints, transforming them into passive couch potatoes who love their mates? I don’t think so. Since the decriminalization effort will likely make it easier for organized crime groups to rake in dough, I’ll be giving this referendum a big NO on the ballot. Show me a real legalization effort that will keep marijuana smokers from having to cruise shady neighborhoods to score a bag of weed and I’ll be sure to support it.

http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_3132729

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My newest obsession…

Posted In: Everyday life — October 28, 2005 @ 3:49 pm — Stephanie

…is checking out what’s going on at the Ole’ Watering Hole! For those who haven’t seen it or heard of it yet, a web cam was rather ingeniously placed near a watering hole in Kruger National Park in South Africa. I have been checking back over the last few days and finally had my first spotting! YAY!

For your own sightings, check out the cam here:
Kruger Cam

Post ‘em here if you find something good!! I am especially keen to use lions, hyaenas, and giraffes.

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Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?

Posted In: Technology, Editorial — October 27, 2005 @ 10:52 am — Peter

http://charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.html

I came across an essay/talk (linked above) via Slashdot.org the other day and it really hit close to home since I’ve become increasingly familiar with the Visual Studio development environment at my new job. While I’m by no means a code purist, I do however, like to know the function of every line of code in an application I’m responsible for. In previous environments I’ve worked in, you start with a blank workspace and start building a program via whatever approach you chose. However, like the author of this essay mentions, Visual Studio forces you into the approach that Microsoft deems to be the best practice. Along with the guidance offered by Visual Studio comes a volume of generated boilerplate code that obfuscates the intricate details of the program you’re implementing. A perfect example of this behavior is web service development using Visual Studio. While I enjoy the rather painless implementation of web services via the .NET framework, you’re out of luck if you’d like to see the actual SOAP messages being exchanged. Sure there are convoluted hacks that can add tunnels and listeners to the environment stack, but their configuration isn’t exactly straightforward. Even the SOAP trace tool from the MSSOAP Tookit 3 is crap. I’ve ended up using Etherreal to capture HTTP packets generated by web service calls to reassemble a SOAP conversation in a way that satisfies my debugging needs. I’d love to hear some suggestions on a better way to inspect the raw XML content of the <soap :fault> element when using .NET. Anyway, the point of my rant is, the Visual Studio environment hides vital details of web services that could be useful during the debugging of interoperability issues and such.

Regarding Intelisense (aka code insight), I’m quite fond of this feature. I’d love to know all the members and methods of my most frequently used classes, however, I simply don’t have room for this type of information in my brain. Also, code insight has been a feature I’ve grown to love long before using Visual Studio. Eclipse, for example, does a lovely job of when building Java application. To be quite honest, the thing I love most about code insight is the amount of typing is saves me. Unfortunately, when using Visual Studio’s Intelisense to cruise through coding, it tends to insert annoying spaces between things.

One issue that wasn’t raised by the essay is the visual debugging component of Visual Studio. I’m convinced that this “feature” has resulted in a culture of hack and debug programmers that are unable to think through a problem start to finish. I’ve witnessed developers throw together a minimal amount of code and logic and immediately being stepping through the code using the debugger to determine what the next logical steps should be. Not only is this approach time consuming, it often results in a program that just barely works. Forget data validation and exception handling… just make the code work under ideal circumstances!

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Congress Pulls Plug on Viagra Subsidies

Posted In: Editorial — October 25, 2005 @ 11:09 am — Peter

http://www.louisianaweekly.com/weekly/news/articlegate.pl?20051024k

Wow, I had no idea that the U.S. government was subsidizing the cost of Viagra, and other crap, via the Medicaid program. How absolutely appalling, many citizens go without basic healthcare, while slime ball men are getting their rocks off using our tax dollars. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a strong supporter of taxation for providing a strong social network of assistance for those flirting with poverty. However, subsidizing sexual dysfunction drugs is a flagrant waste of money.

One can only wonder how long these subsidies would have continued if it were not for the redirection of funds required to support those affected by hurricane Katrina.

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Yum!

Posted In: Everyday life — October 23, 2005 @ 9:55 pm — Peter

We’ve been cooking up a storm this weekend! I got up early Saturday morning and made a batch of blueberry pancakes. Stephanie says I’m great at making pancakes, but I don’t think I do anything particularly special. Perhaps I’ll post the recipe when I find the time…

We went for a walk in City Park to check out the pretty fall colors. Here is a snapshot of the path around the lake:

Before going to the park we visited the farmers market and picked up some lovely organic apples grown in Palisade, Colorado. Stephanie cooked these up into an apple crumble, Yum!

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