Last night we attended a Tigers game. We had gotten the tickets because I’d complained to Fox Sports Detroit, which airs Tigers games. I hadn’t been seeking anything by way of remuneration in my complaint, but the tickets were offered by way of “Sorry that we can’t actually fix the issue, would you like some…
Month: June 2010
Atlas Shrugged: My prejudices
Before I begin reading, I want to set out some of my own biases and perspectives. No reader enters a book without already having some sort of expectations, even if they’re indirect. Those expectations color the reader’s experience with and interpretation of the book. Politically, I call myself a liberal, a classical liberal, or a…
Atlas Shrugged: Prologue
My wife (let’s call her Miranda, because it amuses me to do so) was looking at me like one would a man about to descend into madness. “It has 1000 pages,” I’d said. “Ten pages a day would take, what? 100 days. About three months. I could blog about it as I read it.” I…
Welcome Season books
As a father of a toddler with concerns about not getting my son wrapped up in traditional gender role stereotypes, I’m attracted to books that provide a positive or balanced gender view. Even in his baby books, gender messages can appear in subtle or not-so-subtle ways. I was particularly happy to find Little Scholastic’s Welcome…
minefields
we are minefields walk daintily around the ruts you find each day, we lay out more and bury them just under the surface of the loam we are minefields stretched out across the barren landscape beneath a killing moon asleep, still sleeping, beneath a killing moon — ptkh 06.12.10
It’s the little things…
Doing some code clean-up on Battleships this morning, I was reminded of a detail of C# logic precedence that I’ve used to my benefit elsewhere (including within the program), but which caused a brief hiccup in one instance. Specifically, while the logical and and or operators are transitive, that’s not strictly true of && and…
Programmatically adding XAML elements in C#
I had originally hard-coded the grid in my Battleships program. This resulted in very repetitive code, since there were 100 cells that contained the same basic information, but I didn’t want to get too bogged down in UI programming matters until I was satisfied with the program overall. Since I was happy with the Battleships…
Including external files in a C# ClickOnce deployment
The first version of my Battleships program is done. I’ll be releasing it into the wild today or tomorrow. One hurdle I stumbled over was on how to include XML files as external files in the ClickOnce deployment. My normally strong GoogleFu is weak on matters of C#; I’m not sure if that’s due to…
Battleships in C#
My current C# project is to create a Battleships program that would allow easy input of grids and on-screen solving. I find myself strongly preferring online solving of this sort of puzzle to doing it on paper. Conceptis has an online solver, but I wanted to also be able to solve the puzzles in Games…
Rubik’s 5x5x5 (Professor) and TouchCube
I’m old enough to have been around during the first release of the Rubik’s Cube, back in the 1970s. I was something of an aficionado at the time, owning a Rubik’s Cube, the 4x4x4 Rubik’s Revenge, and a drawerful of other Rubik inventions and inspirations. Eventually, I moved on to other interests, and the drawer…