William Reardon’s Blog

How to get in and out of Costco, inside of 30 minutes, even on a busy Sunday:

1. Know exactly what you need.
   Don’t browse. Don’t wander down every aisle. Determine what you specifically need, plot out the shortest path in your head, and go. Granted, finding the shortest path is NP-complete, but you should be able to handle it.
   
2. Avoid getting a cart.
   Unlikely if you are tiny or planning on a big-ass boatload of stuff, but if you’re getting a big-ass boatload of stuff, you’re screwed anyway. By ditching a cart you can manuver around the others in the store, who apparently never learned the lesson of how to play nicely with others.
   
3. Get in the line with the lowest cart density.
   Most people just get in the shortest line. Fools. Five people buying 30 things is going to take a heck of a lot longer than 8 people with 10 things. See those people with fridges and grills on flatbeds? They’re your friends. They take up a lot of room in the line, making it look longer, but come check out time it’s a simple scan & pay.
   

Today was the first day of tutoring a class of 5th graders in math. It went well, and at the end the kids asked me how old I was. I told them to guess. Their guess? 43.

Glad they didn’t say 42 or I may have found meaning in that.

There’s a minor tweak to my homepage today (after not changing for a long, long time). I hacked together a Perl script to show a random photo from my gallery.

I kinda like. Fun to just sit & reload to flip thru some of my favorite photos of people, places & things.

It’s hard to explain why Truck Dismount is so cool. Well, no it’s not. Flinging around someone, seeing how bad of an accident you can put him, is well, pretty self-evident. The best I’ve done is have him fly out the windshield of the truck, bounce off the wall & the fall under the truck to have his head crushed.

As I said, cooooooooooooooooollllllll.

Cascading Style Sheets are starting to scare me. Look at some of the things you can do.

And it works flawlessly in Mozilla & IE to boot.

It’s kinda cool CSS/HTML 4/Javascript is finally reaching a point of maturity that they are usable. Web applications will be significantly better if the some of the tasks currently handled server side are pushed out into the client. No more server round-trips for simple things like collapising or moving an element on a page. Perhaps the day when servers simply provide XML data & clients (browsers) handle the real-user interaction isn’t too far away.

Chicago opens against the Niner’s today at 1:15! A chance to watch the Bears!

Bear down, Chicago Bears!
Make every play clear the way to victory!
Bear down, Chicago Bears!
Put up a fight with a might so fearlessly!