Archive for May, 2006
Today, while Courtney and Geoff were here visiting, we discovered that one of our cats – Chester – was missing. I found him under the bed. I thought he was sleeping, so I left him alone. Ann went in to investigate, because he’s not known to frequent under the bed. Unfortunately, he was dead. He hadn’t been dead long because he was still warm and just beginning to stiffen up. It was very unexpected. He gave no signs of not feeling well or anything. He was on the bed snuggling with us this morning as usual, he ate his morning food as usual, and he was following me around the house as usual. There appears to be no foul play. It seems to be a natural death. Ann says that he was known to have a heart murmer, so he must have had a heart attack or something. At any rate, it was very sad. He will be missed. He was a very good cat.
shototiger and his counterpart Courtney came over to Columbia today for a visit. It was nice to see them. He’s looking great after his double lung transplant. When they arrived here, it was sunny and around 90 degrees. We went in search of food, which didn’t work out too well. All my favorite restaurants in Columbia were closed for the holiday, so we went to the old standby: Old Chicago. About halfway through our meal, we noticed the sky was getting dark. Shortly after, it started raining like mad. Unfortunately, it was raining so hard that we weren’t able to show them anything of Columbia. So, we headedback to the house for some good conversation. After the rain stopped, Geoff and I went out on the back deck and discussed karate, and I showed Geoff some of the kata we’ve been learning. It was a pretty good time. Ann and I really miss hanging out with them. We’ll have to do it more often since it’s only 1.5 hours away.
Ann and I just got back from boating on Thomas Hill Lake up north of Moberly. Man is that lake huge. It’s 4,500 acres in size. I’d forgotten how much fun it is to get out on a boat for the day. Our next door neighbors bought a nice Bayliner 19ft boat this year, and they invited us out with them. I got to wake board and tube again. It’s been almost 10 years since I’ve had the opportunity to do that again. I actually got up on the board on my second try. That’s amazing when you consider it took me like 3 days to do it the first time I tried. Ann water skied, wake boarded and tubed. We had a blast. I didn’t get a sunburn either. I used plenty of sunscreen, and stayed under the canopy mostly during the hottest part of the day. Unfortunately, Ann didn’t fare so well. I can’t take her to Red Lobster for dinner, because they might try to cook her. That’s really unusual, too. Normally I’m the fried one and she’s fine. Anyway, I’m exhausted and need a nap.
I didn’t go to karate tonight(Monday). I had a really bad headache. It only the second headache, and a bad one at that, I’ve had since I went on my new medicine. I attribute it 100% to stress. When I left Illinois yesterday, my dad seemed to be doing ok. He was awake and relatively lucid. I told him that I loved him, and that I would see him this weekend. Unfortunately, that won’t be the case.
My aunt called me at work around 8am this morning. I didn’t get the voicemail right away, because I was away from my desk. I called her back as soon as I could, and she informed me that my dad had taken a bad turn. His bp was really low, he was having difficulty breathing, and he was non-responsive. As you can imagine, I didn’t get much done at work today. I spent most of the day thinking about him. I called my step-mom about 6:30 tonight, and she told me that he was hanging in there. He had started responding a bit, but still wasn’t good. She put the phone up to his ear, and I said, “Hi Pa,” to him. She told him it was me, and he responded to her with, “Hi Pa.” That tells me that he heard me.
My uncle called me a little after 2 this morning (Tuesday) and told me that my dad was gone. He passed about 1:55am. It’s only been a little over 3 months since he was daignosed with cancer. The initial prognosis was 4-8 months. I guess they were wrong on that one. The strange thing is that it’s actually kind of relieving. I loved my dad, and I didn’ t want him to die; but it was so hard to watch him suffer like that. He was in so much pain, and he was nothing more than a shell of the man he used to be. I am only glad that his suffering has ended.
Much kata was had on Saturday. I managed to squeak out about 18 sochin kata with 
Additionally, John was watching carefully and interjecting when he felt necessary.
Doing only 2 kata in an hour may seem pretty simple, but I know I was sweating like a pig by the end. I think it was a good workout, and I think D got something out of it. He seemed like he did. I was even further humbled when John thanked me after class for teaching him things he didn’t even know. It’s a pretty good feeling. I love having good friends!
Karate didn’t happen tonight(last Thursday at this point, since I forgot to post this). I meant it to, but the wheels of fate didn’t work that way. It’s about 25 miles from work (point A) to home (point B). It’s about 5 miles from point A to karate (point C). I left A with every intention of going to C. I was driving along, thinking about things when I suddenly realized that I was about 20 miles into a 5 mile trip; in fact, I was about 5 miles away from point B. It seems I forgot to set my autonav computer for the correct waypoint. I guess I must have just needed a rest tonight.
Today at work, I came across some interesting code. I looked at it for quite some time before it occurred to me what was wrong with it. Below is a simplified synopsis of the code.
The following code uses a database query I will call Q and a boolean function I will call F.
function F(): boolean;
begin
try
if (Q.Active) then
begin
// do some stuff
result := true;
end
else
begin
result := false;
ErrorMessage := 'No results found';
end;
except
on e: Exception do
begin
Q.Close();
Q.Open();
F();
end;
end;
end;
//
// Main method
//
Q.Open();
F();
If you can’t see the problem, it was really twofold. First, god help you if an exception gets thrown. If so, you could go into an infinite recursion loop if the issue was an error occuring on the database side. Second, if the connection cannot be opened, the function would return false and tell the user that there were no results in the database. In truth, there very well could be a million results and the function would effectively be lying. Although the code isn’t horribly written stylewise, I cannot believe someone would do something like this. It absolutely amazes me.
The first problem that I have with this code is that, IMO, you should never retry something when an exception is thrown. You should recover, clean up, and report the error to the user. If you truly wish to try over, you should do that from the calling location and not inside the exception. The second problem I have with the code is that the function is returning a result based on whether the database can be contacted, not the results of the query. I can see the function returning false when it fails, but the error message should tell the user that the database wasn’t open, or couldn’t be connected to, or was closed; anything other than flat out lying to the user. geesh.
Tuesday night’s class was really fun. We did lots of Chinese style, sticky hands drills. For almost a solid hour. I was paired with the assistant instruct. He’s REALLY good at that stuff. He’s pretty amazing. I outweigh him by about 100 lbs, and he just controls me like I’m a ragdoll. He throws me around, has me wincing in pain, and gasping for air almost constantly. I must me a masochist, cause I love it.
It was an awesome class!
Last Saturday’s workout was really fun. I did a decent amount of kata, then we moved into sparring. I got to spar with John,
Against John I managed to foot sweep him to the ground, hook kick him in the neck, and backfist him in the temple area. Against dante8, I got in a sweet hook kick to the back of the neck, and the same backfist; which was a bit hard and made me feel a little bad. I also managed to pull of an arm bar on him. I was actually able to take him all the way to the ground with almost no effort. That was a first with me. Against Mike I got more of an ass-kickin’, but I got my licks in as well.
Also, on the kata front, I felt a little bad. I was trying to help
All in all, it was a really good workout.
I really need to start posting more regularly. I keep waiting so long to post that the excitement is missing from my posts. I’ll have to remedy this. Anyway, Last Thursday nights class was a good solid class. We did a pretty fair amount of high intensity partner basics. We followed up with some kata. Nothing spectacular to report, but it was quite fun. Those of you who know me know how much I like doing partner work. That’s one thing about this dojo, we do partner work just about every class. I’m a firm believer that practice is important, but partner work is the key to good karate. Distance/Timing (maai) is the secret to karate, and that can only be trained effectively with a partner.
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