I Wanted to See Wanted

Last November when I saw American Gangster in the theatre, I saw a set of previews for movies that I really wanted to see.  The two that really stood out to me (enough to make a note of in my phone) were 21 (which I would now like to read the book before seeing) and Wanted.  So I marked my todo list with each of these, and back in April, I put June 27 on my calendar when I found out that it was the release date for Wanted.

Vinny and I went to see it this afternoon, and it was absolutely awesome!  Sure it’s not realistic (I’m pretty sure you can’t curve a bullet’s trajectory along the horizontal plane, and there’s no way Angelina Jolie could have spun that car with the door open to knock him in (I’m not trying to spoil anything – it’s in the preview…)), but it is such a fun summer action movie!  With sweet special effects, a terrific cast (Morgan Freeman is one of my top 10 favorite actors, Angelina Jolie really is gorgeous, and James McAvoy keeps getting better and better), a perfect soundtrack (when is Danny Elfman ever not perfect?), and a gripping plot, I am so very glad that I wanted to see Wanted as badly as I did.

(Also, last night I watched Definitely, Maybe with Max Power and Julie, and it was one of the greatest chick flicks I’ve ever seen. )

I’m Not Illiterate After All

Contrary to popular belief, I’m not illiterate!  Throughout my life, I haven’t really been much of a reader, and that is something that I’ve always regretted.  Sure I’ve read the Harry Potter series (and loved it!), the typical Dan Brown novels which swept the nation (Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, and Digital Fortress), and a few random things here and there (Vonnegut on occasion, and of course John Green’s books (http://www.youtube.com/vlogbrothers) — but I haven’t ever had a stretch where I’d pick up one book after another.

… until now.  With my bus ride to and from work, I figured reading was something that I could do to pass the time.  And so that’s what I’ve been doing.  I started off by reading Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, which is something that I’ve been meaning to do for a long time.  It was definitely a really good book, but because I’m not much of a reader, I don’t think I took everything from it that I was supposed to..  oh well – it was still a great way to pass the time.  After I finished that up, I moved on to the cyber-punk thriller Snow Crash.  It was a really fun read, and it was right up my alley with all the computery stuff and the futuristicness.

If anyone has any suggestions for what else I should read, I’d love to hear them!  I got started on Freakonomics and my manager suggested The World Is Flat, which also sounds pretty good.  But my reading speed has apparently increased, so I should be able to finish those two up in just a couple weeks and will be needing some more!

The Internet Amazes Me

A couple weeks ago, Mare convinced me to start using Google Reader.  I’ve been using it ever since and am in love (no longer do I have to go down a list of my bookmarks, remembering which blogs to check out, or even which YouTube channels I want to catch up on — you should definitely give it a shot).  So while perusing my unread items in Google Reader just now, I came across this item that Mare shared: Focused Practice, Not Everyday Work, Improves Your Skills.  It’s a great blurb, summarizing and linking to The Code Kata (on Coding Horror – a blog which I am now going to subscribe to in my Google Reader).

Now, the Code Kata was a fantastic read, but it also had some fantastic links!  Another wonderful article was Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (which discusses how all these “Teach yourself [insert programming language] in [insert short time period]” books aren’t what is needed in order to become a good programmer — it takes much more time and doing a whole lot more than just reading).  So while loving that article, I was reading near the end when he quotes Alan Perlis saying, “Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be taught how not to. So it is with the great programmers,” and so of course I had to go and read a bunch of those epigrams (I think my favorite may have been either that one, or “Most people find the concept of programming obvious, but the doing impossible.”).

Those epigrams were the end of that tangent that I went off on, but backing up two levels (to the Code Kata), there was a link to why You Should Write Blogs too.  After skimming through that, I said “Hell yeah I should!” and that is what led me here!

Now that I have passed along all of those links to you (come on – seven tabs in Firefox is nothing!  And if you’re using Internet Explorer, well then I’m glad I filled up your taskbar!  Shame on you!  Go download Firefox!), time for a brief original idea.

The internet is absolutely amazing!  By simply reading an item that a friend of mine shared with me in my Google Reader, I ended up finding two new blogs which I will be following, a great outlook at computer programming, and a list of very true (and some funny) epigrams related to computers!  The internet is a constantly growing and changing web, and I cannot wait to see how it evolves over time!

Get Smart is Fantastic

The last movie I saw in a theatre, I do believe, was American Gangster, back in November.  Before that it was Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix last July.   So in a year’s time, I have seen all of two movies in a theatre, and I have picked them very wisely (two fantastic must-sees).

Tonight, I tallied my first one of 2008, with Steve Carell’s Get Smart, and oh my gosh – it was absolutely amazing!  I love Steve Carell in the Office, but some of his movies have been a little “Meh” in my books, so I was hesitant going into this.  But I gave it a chance anyway, and am so very glad I did!  I typically am satisfied with chuckling a little bit during a comedy, but it is rather rare that I see something in a theatre which is laugh out loud funny and Get Smart actually made me guffaw.

This movie is actually great fun for everyone — it’s a comedy which I think could please just about any sense of humor; there are quite a few neat action scenes for the action junky; Anne Hathaway was drop-dead gorgeous, so that definitely makes it nice for about half the world; there was a little bit of political humor which appeals to the Meloys of the world; and there are quite a few fun cameos throughout (mixed through a pretty well-known cast to begin with).  All-in-all, I would most certainly recommend Get Smart to anyone looking for a great movie to see!

My Recent Music Tastes

I’ve been finding myself putting MTVHits on “swap” on my DVR (it allows you to have 2 channels recording at the same time, so you pause something on swap while watching something on the other swap and then at commercial breaks, you pause and swap).  There are two main reasons for me enjoying MTVHits:

1. Metro Station – “Shake It” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpU78IeTx_c
2. Coldplay – “Violet Hill” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IakDItZ7f7Q (though it’s really “Viva la Vida” that I’d really like to listen to…)

And then a third guilty pleasure of mine is Fall Out Boy’s “Beat It Concept” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI-0Hgu8mUk).  That’s just an addicting song, but I think it’s the awesome cameos that they have in the video that really make it for me (John Turturo, Turk (from Scrubs), and Buster (from Arrested Development)).  Ooooh Fall Out Boy.

I Love My Family

Quick post here —
I really love my family.  They mean the world to me.  I rely on them for so much, and I am always here for all of them.  I consider myself a very family-centric person, and that is something that I’ve always enjoyed about my life.

That being said, it’s story time!  Just now, Vinny was telling a story about the other day with an unmarked white van pulling past the house (delivering phonebooks).  He mentioned that he had his phone at the ready (in case they were kidnappers or whatnot), and Mike asked, “Who were you gonna call?”  Vinny, Mom, and I all said simultaneously, “GHOST BUSTERS!”

My family rocks. :-)

I’m a Workin’ Man

Last Monday I started my internship at the Bank of New York Mellon (last July, the Bank of New York, and Mellon Bank merged – hence the Bank of New York Mellon).  This internship is absolutely perfect for me.   I am designing a front-end for a database of technical documents on different technologies that they have available.  In case you don’t know – I love computer programming in any flavor, but PHP and MySQL have been my specialty for the past 2 years because of my involvement in THON.

When I got my computer on Wednesday and my manager told me to try to install PHP and have at it, I was in heaven.  I had my test setup up and running and had my typical development tools (Notepad++, Firefox, and Xampp (Apache+MySQL)) installed and ready to go within half an hour.  Then I hit the road running.  My project is coming along very nicely, and I do believe I’m going to be getting this done much much sooner than he was expecting.

Other than the nerdy stuff – my office is pretty fantastic.  I have a window desk, from which I can see a good chunk of downtown Pittsburgh (including the two tallest buildings – US Steel and One Mellon Center (I’m in Four – right across Ross)) and it’s gorgeous.  Also, I’ve got a whole ton of desk and drawer-space (of which I’m hardly using any).

The only complaint that I have is that the commute is killer.  With gas prices as high as they are right now (I’ve seen $4.09 all over the place..), and with parking being ridiculous in Pittsburgh, I’m doing the whole Park and Ride dealy.  Since the parking lots fill up by 6:30, I’ve been having Julie drop me off for the 6:54 bus (which gets me to the office just before 8), and then mom picks me up when I get off the 4:10 bus around 5 and I’m home by 5:20.  So the first 12 hours of my day are taken up by getting ready for, getting to, doing, and coming home from work.  And then the next 5 hours I’ve typically been useless, and then I sleep and repeat.   But this is the real world, and I must wet my feet before jumping in next year.

Oooouch Chaaaarlie!

In case you haven’t seen this yet, it’s my favorite Youtube video of all time – Charlie Bit My Finger.  Hhhhilarious.

Anywho, the reason I’m saying ouch is because I finally ventured out into the sun today, and being the nerd I am, my pasty whiteness got really burnt.  Now, I’ve mowed the lawn shirtless a couple times and I’ve played one set of tennis shirtless twice so far this summer.  But today, I made the mistake of playing more than two sets and then almost immediately cutting the grass.  To add insult to injury, this all took place between 11 AM and 3:30 PM (and if I remember correctly, 11-2 are the worst possible hours to be out in the sun).  And because I’m macho (and by macho, I actually mean forgetful), I didn’t put sun block on.

So yeah, my shoulders are really rather red, and my forehead somehow got red (I am yet to get a haircut since THON (don’t worry.. I’m getting one this weekend..), so my hair typically covers my forehead…).  In other news – my foot has two separate decent-sized blue spots!  It’s most likely from the blue shoes which I cut the grass in, but maybe I am turning into a smurf..

Notepad++ Rocks My Socks

If you enjoy being super productive, I strongly suggest you check out Notepad++ (download).  This program is absolutely amazing.  It’s a free text editor (like Notepad or Wordpad that each come by default in XP) which has so much functionality and extendibility.  It is especially useful for programming, but I use it for editing regular text files as well.

The first thing that Notepad++ has which should be required in every program these days is allowing multiple files to open simultaneously via tabs.  Each of the main programs I use (Firefox, Notepad++, and Pidgin) have tabbed windows and it really makes life a whole lot easier for a multi-tasker.

Next up, the easy-to-record easy-to-use macros in this program are rather solid.  Let’s say you want to separate every single line in a document with an extra line: all you have to do is press the magic little “Start Recording” button, hit the end key, hit return, hit the down key, and then press the “Stop Recording” button.  Now whenever you press the “Playback” button, it will go to the end of that line, add a new-line character, and go down to the next line.  But it gets better!  You can “Run a macro multiple times”, specifying either the number of times to run it or to run it to the end of the file.  How cool is that?!

An amazing capability which I saw was there previously, but didn’t have a reason to use until just recently is the use of regular expressions in the find and replace.  I always have a difficult time defining what a regular expression is, but it’s basically a way to match patterns.  I think the best way to describe them is to just use an example:

Let’s say you have a file which has people’s names in the “LastName, FirstName” format, and you want to replace it with a “FirstName LastName” format instead.  You can open up a find and replace, finding “([A-Z][a-z]*), (.*)” (without the quotes) and replacing with  “\2 \1” (without the quotes).  The find there is a regular expression:  inside square brackets [ ], you can put a range or set of values, so [A-Z] finds a capital letter between A and Z inclusively; the * after the [a-z] is called the Kleene Star, and what it means is that it will match an element in that set 0 or more times (similarly, a Kleene Plus would match something 1 or more times); the “, ” will match exactly a comma followed by a space; and finally, the “.*” will match the remainder of the line (the . is the wildcard character, so it will greedily find the rest of the line’s wild characters).  The replace uses the variables stored from inside the parentheses: the first set of parentheses “([A-Z][a-z]*)” gets stored in “\1” and the second set “(.*)” gets stored in “\2”; so by simply putting “\2 \1” in the replace, it puts the first name first, and the last name second.  Pretty cool stuff, huh?

Also, the syntax high-lighting is phenomenal in Notepad++.  With tons of programming languages’ syntax already built in and more available to install yourself, you can use Notepad++ to program in just about any language imaginable!  It’s pretty awesome.

And finally, there are three great additional views available:  you can view FTP folders (allowing you to modify files through FTP with seamless downloading and uploading (you just open it like it’s on your computer.. and then every time you save, it gets re-uploaded)); the Light Explorer lets you browse your files without having to have a Microsoft Explorer window open (very handy when you’re working on multiple files in the same folder; and you can view a console dialog, having your very own command prompt built-in (for a command-line compiler for example).

All-in-all – Notepad++ is a really useful program, especially if you’re doing any sort of programming.  If you give it a shot, you won’t be disappointed!

Penguins Win Game 5!

Down 3-1 in the series, tonight was a do-or-die situation for the Pittsburgh Penguins.  We started off looking really strong, scoring twice in the first period and Fleury making some terrific saves.  However, the Red Wings got back into their normal perfection for the rest of the game.  When we were down 3-2 in the last 5 minutes, we had to make something happen, but it wasn’t looking too fantastic.  But with just over a minute left, Fleury came out of the net for an extra attacker, and Maxime Talbot was our man.  With just 35 seconds left, Max put the puck into the back of the net to tie it up and take it into overtime!

I was on the edge of my seat for two and a half extra periods while the players’ fatigue was becoming more evident every minute.  Although we got a few lucky calls with penalties against Detroit, we weren’t able to capitalize on them until Peter Sykora (the man who told the announcer in-between the benches that he was going to score the game-winning goal during the first overtime) took a beautiful wrister while a Red Wing was in the box for a high sticking double minor.  The Pens won it after just about 110 minutes of play, and now we get to bring it back to Pittsburgh for a game six which is sure to be exciting.