Erik’s Blog

In general, for just about any academic topic you want to know more about, you can find information on the internet to satisfy your curiosity. Luddites complain that “We know less these days because we can forget things and look them back up with such ease!”, but I think that’s a load of bollocks. Having more knowledge at our fingertips means we can learn more, and, even more important, we can recheck our current knowledge more often to keep it accurate.

Several times a day I find myself in a situation in which my understanding of a subject is unclear, so I look it up on the internet to clarify my knowledge. Over the past week, however, I have had the same rare experience twice: that the all-knowing internet was unable to clarify my foggy understanding.
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An oversimplified description of my job as a computer programmer goes something like this.

1. I get some requirements for a program from my boss or a client.
2. I write the program as perfectly as I can.
3. I test the program with all the cases that I think it will need to handle.
4. The program is done and people start using it.
5. For whatever reason the requirements change (or a bug is found), and I have to go back and modify the code. Inevitably less testing is done on these changes than the original writing.
6. Go to #4.

It’s pretty rare for the original writing of a program to have a significant bug in it after testing, although I’m not perfect. Almost all bugs are introduced in step #5. When you first write the program, the entire program and its relationship with other programs is in your mind. But when you go back to look at old code, it’s just not fresh in your memory, and it’s very easy to make a change without taking into consideration all the consequences that change will have.
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I’m pretty sure that I will never understand clothing fashion. It seems to be a futile conundrum of combining the desire to be like everyone else with the desire to be unique. But then I don’t get a lot of social customs. Every once in a while, however, a new style comes along that makes me think, “Wow, you are going to be so embarrassed in ten years to look back at photos of yourself wearing that!” In the last five summers in Spain, there has been an explosion in the popularity of capri pants, called “pirate pants” here, that I have successfully avoided. C’mon, people! Having trousers that stop at your calves is a ridiculous idea.

It was about one year ago, last August, that my wife showed me some new trousers she had bought. They seemed to me to be the most ridiculous thing ever, and I was unable to stop from laughing at the idea that someone would wear them. I’m not sure if I hurt her feelings or what, but she ended up giving them to her sister. The only way I could think to describe them is with the term “Aladdin pants”. Some googling, in preparation for this post, has revealed that they are actually called that! Perhaps the correct term is harem pants? Much to my chagrin, they are huge this summer.
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Today I walked into my local grocery store and said with a wink, “Hey, do you guys sell German flags? I want to hang one on my balcony.” (Hanging the Spanish flag on one’s balcony is a common way to show support for the Spanish World Cup team who will face off against Germany tomorrow in the semi-finals.) My grocer friend, Andrés, said, “Have you heard the story of Pulpo Paul (Paul the Octopus)?” I assumed he was about to tell me a didactic Aesop-esque fairy tale about why one shouldn’t be such a cheeky jerk, but he turns to the checkout computer and pulls up this internet video to show me…
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Last Saturday, Marga and I decided to take Nora down to a local optometrist to see if there were some sunglasses that fit her. Her previous ones got lost. Nora was having absolutely nothing to do with trying on sunglasses, so we left to head back to the car to go to the mall. On the way back home, Marga noticed a coin purse on the ground near a fruit shop. I picked it up and discovered a DNI (a Spanish national identity card), a credit card, and at least 50€ in it. Whenever I find a wallet, I am overtaken by empathy for its owner and do my best to do the right thing. The owner was a 28-year-old from Laredo. The fruit shop owner recognized her as a customer, but didn’t really know her. So we went to the Colindres police station, only to find it abandoned. On our way to the mall, we stopped by the Laredo Guardia Civil station to drop it off. They asked for all my details, including my name, cell phone number, and DNI number.
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When we were visiting my parents recently, my wife was looking through some family photo albums. Immediately she recognized her daughter in the baby pictures of her husband. I have to admit that sometimes looking at my daughter is a little bit like I have traveled back in time and am looking at my former self. It’s downright spooky sometimes. To bring this spookiness to my blog audience, I have asked my mother to scan some photos of myself during my first birthday, which unfortunately involved no spontaneous singing of 60′s pop hits that I know of. The resulting photos are downright eerie. Behold…
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The other day I noticed an interesting article in Spain’s sports newspaper, MARCA. The article starts something like this like this:

Yeste walks towards the corner flag for a corner kick after two attacks on goal by Athletic Bilbao. He hasn’t yet set the ball down when a shout is heard from the far end of the bar: Gooooooal!!! Seconds afterwards, Yeste kicks the ball, which deflects off Lass in the first row, and Llorente scores the goal.

All the excitement of watching a soccer match has been ruined. What just happened?
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The other day I received an email asking me to link one word in one of my posts to a website. In exchange, they offered me $50 per year. Now, my ad revenue from Google AdSense is about $7/month or $84/year. If someone (not you, Mr. SEO Marketer!) offered me $50/year to put a large bold ad on every page, I might consider it. But one ad hyperlink on one word on one post? No problem!

To be honest, I was a little doubtful, but I added the link and replied that I would remove it if I didn’t receive $50 in my PayPal account within 24 hours. Sure enough, the next day, there was a big fat Ulysses sitting in my PayPal account. Awesome.
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Yesterday, as I was digging through my coins to pay for a cool European lager, I happened to glance at the artwork on the heads (Or tails? Who can tell anymore?) side of the coin. At first I thought it was some kind of joke currency or bizarre token that someone had slipped me in mistake or trickery. So I saved it, pretty sure it couldn’t be real. But lo and behold, it’s a special 2009 commemorative 2€ coin. To quote the Official Journal of the European Union (PDF):
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My parents are visiting, and they brought a set of photos that I haven’t seen for a very long time. They are photos that I took just before and during my high school graduation from the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics on June 1, 1996. Needless to say, it was quite a blast from the past. There’s nothing like a photo of the dorm room you lived in fourteen years ago to bring back a flood of memories. My time at NCSSM was definitely the peak of my academic career. Everything (i.e. a four-year bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from NC State) after that was a slow glide downhill.
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