Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Lost Season 2 Finale - Spoilers Ahead
May 25, 2006

Wow! Did you guys catch the season 2 finale of Lost last night? Now what are they going to do?

I just have a few comments on last night’s episode:

  • Clancy Brown - I dug this guy when he was on Carnivale. I think his role in Lost was well-suited, too. Still playing that kind of creepy guy.
  • What are you, stupid? - Ok, so you’re abandoned in the hatch by Desmond with only a scant semblance of instructions and a sense of imposing doom. What’s the first thing you do when he shows up off shore in a boat? Try to leave on the boat? Ask him what the heck the button is all about? Question what he knows about the island and the Others? No! You borrow his boat for a raid - that you know is a set-up - to save Walt, the crazy-man’s son, and then conspire with him to end the world with magnetic annihilation.
  • Boat shots - Yes, the island is pretty. The boat is nice. The waters are cool. I don’t care - stop with the scenery shots at the dramatic points and continue with the story already!
  • No reflexes? - I guess that they didn’t feel it when they were all shot with those stun darts. I would think that you’d reach to pull it out.
  • Not quite the Simpsons - Did anyone else fall into hysterical laughing fits at the TV when Sayid says “it only has four toes”?
  • Never any power - It’s a strong theme in this show that the survivors never have any power. The Others are always stronger. There is always something more powerful and unknown around the corner. Nobody ever has the strength to fight back meaningfully. That’s going to get old very, very soon.

I also have some stupid predictions for season 3 of Lost.

Cool Camp
May 24, 2006

I took the kids and a kite to the East Ward School field yesterday evening. We have a small parafoil kite that’s very easy to handle. Just a little wind and even the little one was holding the reel himself. There was enough wind to get the kite aloft, but not quite enough to keep it very high in the air. Abby and Riley chased the dangling tail around the lot, and we all had a nice outing.

On the way back, I was thinking about camp. When I was younger, I went camping many times with my dad, with Scouts, and once on the Appalacian Trail from Pennsylvania, through West Virginia, Maryland and Virginia to Harper’s Ferry.

Maybe it’s just my perception of things, and I could be completely wrong on this account, but I don’t remember any of the “cool kids” from school doing anything like this. What did those kids do instead of camp?

ScummVM DS
May 22, 2006

Check out this page for info on how to run a ScummVM on your Nintendo DS. Day of the Tentacle and Zak McKracken, here I come! (Sadly, no support for Full Throttle, which requires too much memory.)

Teaching IDE
May 22, 2006

A recent thread on Slashdot asks, “Should students be taught with or without an IDE?” In programming, an Integrated Development Environment is basically a souped-up editor for writing code. The author of the question wonders whether students who are learning to program will benefit more from learning with or without the extra features that the IDE provides. I agree with most of the opinoins offered in the comments of the post, but obviously I have my own take on it.

My initial reaction is that teaching a language using an IDE is a bad idea, but I have certain reservations that I need to think out. Primarily, using an IDE is a bad idea since it doesn’t insist that students type out important syntax structures that are necessary for learning the language. If the IDE closes every function call with the proper parenthesis, and automatically inserts semicolons wherever they are required, students might not learn the necessary elements of the language to be able to do without the IDE. Perhaps this concept is not as important in C++ as it is in HTML.