Kitchen quiet

Most if not all appliances can be muted. Look in the manual to squelch all those annoying bloops and bleeps.

Now that's a big fly

 

The Best Places to Live (and study)

You've seen the articles. They take a bunch of data and crunch it, and then proclaim Ames, Iowa; or Burlington, Vermont; or Eden Prairie, Minnesota as the best place to live in the whole country. Invariably, the places where people actually live end up far down the list: San Francisco, New York City, Dallas, and so forth.

That disconnect from reality convinced me long ago what the true value of these analyses are: they quantify precisely the flaws in their algorithms. I'll be the first to say that people are not rational, but people get mighty rational when tens of thousands of dollars are at stake. That's the difference each year between living in somewhere like Brooklyn vs. Overland Park, Kansas. Why would anyone choose to live in a closet that costs $2000/month when they could live in lovely Fort Collins, Colorado?

If all the data they have point to Nowheresville, the obvious conclusion is that their analysis is flawed. They're missing out on what matters to people. Yes, cost and schools and safety and big houses are important to people. However, if they are willing to pay thousands of dollars extra to live somewhere that has mediocre schools, relatively high crime rates, and small dwellings, that tells you there are factors that compensate.

And so I chuckle every time I see one of those articles. I'm sure that there are many undiscovered gems out there, but to rank so low places that compel so many people to deal with so many quantifiable disadvantages is ridiculous. The further down the list they put places like San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and New York City, the more obvious it is to me that they are missing the point. They've got these models that reach such wildly different conclusions from reality that it simply emphasizes how bad their models are. They say those are awesome places to live, but nobody lives there. You do the math.

Anyway, so I've had that bouncing in my head for a while. Today I saw a thing that I realized was similar. The Parade insert in our newspaper had a run-down of colleges. "No disrespect to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, but you don't need to attend a fabled Ivy to get a big-league education." Just like the articles about cities, they take a bunch of numbers and some arbitrary formulae, and then spit out a list of names you've never heard of.

As much as higher education in this country is screwed up, I just don't see people getting things wrong so consistently for so long. I'm sure those schools they name are excellent schools. And I'm sure that the schools that everyone knows about are better. I'm sorry, but Rice University is not equal to Princeton. If my kids were admitted to both Princeton and Rice, I know which one I'd rather they attend.

Just like with "Best Places," they act like they've discovered some truth that all the rest of us have been missing this whole time. But their so-called truth is wildly different from the decisions that millions of Americans make each year. People will make all kinds of foolish and irrational decisions, but when so much money is at stake, they actually behave pretty sensibly. Really, it's kind of embarrassing that the Excel jockeys got it wrong. I feel sorry for them.

Big freakin' spider day

 

 

 

At least the second one wasn't in my house. Both were at least 2 inches stretched out, probably more.

Some kind of import?

 

SELECT blades FROM fan WHERE color='nickel'

 

Someone at Prostar doesn't think soap is exciting on its own

 

Gotta be extreeeeeeeeeme.

A poorly-placed sticker

 

Southern Style

 

C-4. Don't expect any collard greens.

Unit tests for laws

You read a lot about how vague many laws are. That's a real problem, because it makes people afraid to do legal things for fear of breaking the law. It also puts far too much power in the hands of prosecutors, because they can probably find some way to pin anything on anybody. Legislators aren't induced to think about these things when they draw up their laws, which is how vague laws get passed. Then later it's difficult to infer the original intent of the legislators, which magnifies the problem.

This exact situation happens in software. Lots of times we end up writing tricky code. Sometimes it needs to be tricky, sometimes it's because we're too lazy to write it neatly. A good thing to do with tricky code is to write more code to test the feature code. The test code sets up a particular situation, executes the feature code, and then verifies that the outcome was as expected. Verifying the outcome involves not just testing successes but also making sure that the code fails appropriately and gracefully when it it applied incorrectly.

A key part of a code test is making sure to check the boundary conditions, the points at which something distinctive changes. For example, if you have an accounting function that does different things based on when the tax rate is more than 8%, you would test its outputs with a rate of 7.99%, 8%, and 8.01%. That way you could make sure that the difference applies to "more than 8%" rather than "at least 8%," a mistake that could have potentially significant consequences. Another way of looking at it is to say that you should test that every different clause is applied appropriately and works correctly.

The obvious benefit is that this kind of testing verifies the feature code is correct. Less obvious benefits happen over the long run. Writing test code is often more work if the feature code is poorly specified or excessively complicated. The prospect of writing a long, complicated test motivates us to look harder for a simpler solution to the original problem. Long, complicated tests can highlight silly preconditions or consequences, which provides a similar motivation. Finally, the test code itself can serve as documentation of how the feature code is intended to work. You can see that A, B, and C1 are necessary to achieve result Y, and if C1 is replaced with C2 the result is Z instead because the test says that explicitly. That's often more illuminating than trying to parse the code.

As applied to laws, my hope is that anyone who draws up a law would also describe numerous scenarios of how one applies the law. Then those considering the law could see if those examples made sense. For example, in a law covering shipments of alcohol, one might have one scenario regarding shipment of wine in-state vs. inter-state, or beer sent by plane rather than by truck. They would also

Unlike software tests, which a computer checks, they would also need to make sure that the law as written actually does do what the examples say. They'd need to verify that the examples are actually useful. If someone writing a bill provides useless or inadequate examples, it'll be obvious, as legislation is a far more visible activity than writing software.

In a sense, you could argue that judicial precedent establishes a body of tests and descriptions of how a law should work. However, this takes years to happen at great cost, not just for the parties directly involved in the suit, but also for anyone who suffered from the problems with the law before the establishment of the precedent. It's like fixing a bug only after you've wiped dozens of people's hard drives.

You could also argue that this would slow down the legislative process. Well, you could argue that, but you'd be wrong, both in premise and conclusion. Slowing down the legislative process isn't necessarily a bad thing; it's not like we have too few laws. Additionally, it may add a step to the process, but it'll also cut down on debate, delays in implemepoliticsnting laws as various interest groups seek injunctions, and so forth. The net result would be a system with fewer laws, but the laws that we had would be better.

The healing power of Jesus

 

Desperate signs

 

That old house

The old house is sold. On one of our last visits, I took pictures to highlight the changes in the almost seven years we lived there. Check out my ugly gallery. Click the pictures to switch between 2003 and 2010. There are previous and next links at the bottom that might be hidden if you have a smaller screen.

Also, those crappy neighbors? They got evicted, but not before they cost me a few thousand dollars (I estimate).

She's really excited about her gasoline

She's not even the driver.

Those wacky neighbors

I have no idea what's going on here. Well, okay, that's not true. I have some idea. There's a hose connected to the exterior faucet that's set up to go through an open window into a bedroom. So how come I don't feel enlightened?

Truckvertible

Caught that a few weeks back.

Like dyslexics don't have it hard enough

Raised letters? Really?

Murphy's law (for moving)

On top of the normal moving difficulties and stresses, we got a bunch of other whammies:

• Kieran got sick Wednesday (day before)


• Uma got sick Thursday (day of)


• Flooring was only half completed when the moving truck showed up, so the movers we hired couldn't do the other half of what they were hired for: putting everything where it belongs


• Discovered flooring on site was damaged, as well as flooring in Austin warehouse and flooring in Houston warehouse. Eventually had them finish installation with the damaged flooring, which happened on Saturday. As a result, we had to dig through the garage box piles whenever we needed something for 2 days until the flooring installers put most things roughly where they were supposed to go.


• Wore out my back moving stuff that the movers should have moved (though it seems to be recovering).


• I checked in a bunch of bad code at work earlier in the week because I was distracted by the dozen things I had to do. That caused a bunch of problems when the site got updated, and I was in no position to clean up the mess.


• Discovered that the house didn't have a gas line for the dryer when the movers asked how to hook it up. Hopefully today will see the arrival of our electric dryer so we can have clean clothes.


• House was full of dust from work on flooring, filling everyone's sinuses with junk, and making everything grimy.

Note that much of this happened when we needed to be fixing and cleaning the old house to prep it for sale. We did as much as we could, but not as much as we should have been able to do.

Re damaged flooring: the agreement is that they're going to rip it all out and replace it in a month or two when they can get undamaged replacements at their cost. I personally think they need to do better than that, as this caused us huge problems.

A neighborhood mystery solved?

I may have mentioned that we have some crappy neighbors at the old house. My pal Samir moved out in the summer of 2008, and it was purchased for use as a rental. The first round of tenants were painfully hip and occasionally rowdy, but generally tolerable. Their replacements.... well, they're something else. They've had a car up on blocks since they arrived in November. They used to pile up garbage and junk outside. They've got some weird pavilion set up on the front lawn. It's the sort of thing that makes you want a HOA (which the new neighborhood has). They have 2 adults and 6 kids between 2 and 14 living in a 1700 sf 4-bedroom. It's nuts.

Anyway. That's not the mystery. For a few weeks, we've been hearing some kind of engine coming from their garage. I've been wondering what it is. Since the man of the house is something of a fixer, I figured it was an air compressor for running pneumatic tools. Still, it was strange how often it was on. At night, for instance, or when nobody seemed to be home. How much compressed air does one man need?

The other day, as we were cleaning out the old house, I heard a clue, perhaps the only necessary clue. A friend of theirs that I'd seen before came to visit. As I was throwing away trash (trying to set a good example) or something like that, I overheard the friend ask a single question (imagine the appropriate Texas redneck accent): "So whaddya'll gotta do to get the electricity turned back on?"

Moving day disaster

Short version: flooring wasn't completed when it was supposed to be, so the movers couldn't put most things inside. They finally finished the flooring today. The installers moved some stuff in, but we're still lost in a sea of boxes. At least I have my interwebs, my precious precious interwebs.