My Milwaukee

What am I supposed to make of this?

via: http://www.thisismymilwaukee.com/

P.S. Must watch the whole thing. There's payoff.

Greatest commercial evar

I dare you to find a better commercial.

"Famous" ventriloquism

Jeff Dunham is a "famous" ventriloquist. There's a few words in that sentence that send me into a rage.

First, there's "ventriloquist". You're one step below "mime". At least the mime has the good sense to not pretend somebody else is telling his unfunny shit.

Then, more importantly, there's "famous". This bothers me in two ways. First, it means he's actually making money doing this shit. That makes me angry at him. Second, it means there are people who like his antics. That makes me disappointed with America.

He's not funny, and he's not good at it. It's well known that there are tricks to speaking without moving your lips (replacing m's with n's, p's with t's), hopefully seamlessly enough. But, one would assume that after something like 2 decades becoming all famous at this, he'd at least be good at it... or funny.



I'm all for some good racial humor. ESPECIALLY some good terrorism humor. But this just doesn't even try to be funny... or good at ventriloquism.

This guy showed up at my high school senior party (or maybe it was sometime in college... I don't know... I've swiss-cheesed my memory a bit since then), but I distinctly remembering him bombing hard, except when his little Jalapeno buddy said "on a stick". And that marks the moment I started to hate this man and resent the entirety of his efforts in life.

I've seen better ventriloquists... but I've also seen more entertaining sleeping cats.

Guess who has another special on Comedy Central this weekend? Enjoy!

It's over!!!

It's Over!!!!

Or, is it? Good luck folks. I hope all the change and hope you get hopes the change you need to hope for the future of the changing hope.

I hung around with a lot of people tonight yelling "we won!!!!" It went so far as to the playing of Queen's "We are the Champions"... and it makes me wonder whether the quotes should go around "we" or "won"... "We"? Well, Obama, for sure, won. "won"? Well, something happened to this "we," or else they wouldn't be partying.

I live near Seattle, and hung out downtown tonight, moving from bar to bar. Everywhere I went, I heard the same thing... exhuberation. I was at one bar holding a Obama congratulations party where the Queen song came on. One man stood up in front of the screen during the McCain conceeding speech, thumbs down, trying to shut down John's last moments of the campaign. He was ushered away, but not out, and not exactly booed. At another bar, a couple were gloating over the victory. Driving from place to place, I heard honks and screams and howls... saw signs and dancing.

I voted for Bush twice. I think it's safe, at this point, to admit that. The first time was an understandably subdued reaction, bled out over a month, relief that the Clinton administration was over. The second time was merely a feeling of relief tht John Kerry wouldn't be taking over at a critical time. Never fist-pumping, high-fiving, horn-honking, party-throwing excitement. It's new to me to see people so personally vested in the success of a candidate.

I think what made the evening fun (aside from the amazing company I held) was the schadenfreude thought of the disillusionment they're going to be feeling someday soon. I can't seperate the feeling from that of your favorite sports team winning the BIG game. But your team leaves the field and goes to Disney World. This isn't a contest, it's an interview and a hiring. This matters.

I want to think that America will be a better place over the next 2 years. The natural business cycle should be swinging back during this time. And, I don't want to be in the position the liberals have been in for the last 8 years, where bad news for America meant good news for the party (though, it seems to have worked). But, I'm fully expecting some really bad policy decisions down the line here and I expect some scratched heads. Even Vice President Elect Biden agrees that we'll be left wondering.

Congrats, Obama. I truly hope your change is for the good, not for the change.

Cheese!

*hearts*

Don’t Mock Me

Michael and I came up with something pretty cool for mocking in unit tests.

So, you have a class:

public class Thing
{
    public int Do() { return 1; }
}

And you want to mock it because “return 1;” really means “call off to a web service that won’t be there during unit testing”.  Obviously, the traditional creating of that whole Interface/Class set thing so you can return a mock version of it sucks (maintenance).  Also, you don’t want to put code in your production code which is specifically test code.  So, how about we let our unit test project have its own derived version of the class?  Then it can override the methods that call out with some simple stubs.

public class Thing
{
    public virtual int Do() { return 1; }
}

public class MockThing : Thing
{
    public override int Do() { return 0; }
}

Getting closer, but now there’s still the problem of instantiating our class instead of the original.  How about we just get in the way of instantiating the class when in test mode?

public delegate Thing GetThingInstanceDelegate();
public class Thing
{
    protected Thing() { }
    public virtual int Do() { return 1; }
    protected static GetThingInstanceDelegate _getInst =
          () => new Thing();
    public static Thing GetInstance()
    {
        return _getInst();
    }
}
// located only in your unit test project
public class MockThing : Thing
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Temporarily used to force static constructor
    /// </summary>
    public static void Initialize() { }
    static MockThing()
    {
        _getInst = () => new MockThing();
    }
    protected MockThing() : base() { }
    public override int Do() { return 0; }
}

Now, to call it from your production code:

Thing thing = Thing.GetInstance();
System.Diagnostics.Trace.WriteLine(thing.Do().ToString(), "DoThing");

The cost you pay is a slight performance hit due to using delegation for instantiation (who cares?), a little more complexity and readability trouble, that Initialize method and opening up your design for extension where it probably shouldn’t be allowed.

These can be mitigated as such:

· The performance hit of a delegation is nothing compared to the hit of calling a service over the web.  Forget about it.

· Complexity can be commented, and the boilerplate stuff really can be in a base class of Thing if it requires no other base class.

· The initialize method can be skipped as long as there’s a way of triggering the static initialize… which can be done through a marker interface (or attribute) and forced in a method, using reflection, triggering all those classes.

· The opened up design can be mitigated somewhat using visible internals and some other trickery, but this is still a much smaller hit to the design than building all your objects as class/interface pairs.

Nifty?

WA Gov Race

Washington is clearly a pretty blue state.  It's known for its hackey-sack flacking douches, and its Pacific Northwest liberal attitude (which I'm coming to love).

It's undeniable that it's a liberal haven, and I moved right into the heart of it.

Though, my first sunlight day here, I went to the Issaquah Target for supplies, and I saw a guy wearing a Club Gitmo t-shirt.   It was comforting.  I even complemented him on it and he was very cordial.  I knew I could never get far from my people.  I even quickly found 3 AM stations playing nothing but conservative talk.

Fast forward a couple of years, and we're in the latest gubernatorial race between incumbent Christine Gregoire and  Dino Rossi.  It's one of the more brutal races in the nation right now.  You know how I know?  Because I watch Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy every night, and I have to see both groups' campaign's ads.

Here's a little sample of fucked up:

Dude... seriously... dude...

A couple of days ago, I decided to respond to this YouTube entry, and I was greated with this.  They never approved my comment.

Rossi's response:

This isn't the best response, but it at least underscores the dishonesty of one side...

President Bush only banned federal money supporting the destruction of embryos, but never made any prohibitions against private research.  There have been incredible advances in the use of adult stem-cells in the areas of disease research in the last year or so.  There's enough science here that embryonic should be pretty much off the table.  It's a very early field, but there's enough promise to stop demonifying somebody for holding out for a non-destructive method.