Weekend Sundries
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Weekend Sundries Thursday October 27
(Ed. note: This was written six days before this post, but was not posted for lack of an Internet connection.)
I made Ma Po Tofu tonight for the first time (#42 at the China Palace in both Rockton and Roscoe, for those who are in the know); it worked out well. I received the package from home with all of my winter clothes. Said package also included two lamps and my MP3 player AC adapter. Last, but not least, were two unopened bottles of Sirracha hot sauce. I went to the store, got a light bulb, and installed my favorite lamp; it works well.
However, what has not worked out well tonight was following a classmate's recommendation and watching a particular drama on TBS (not affiliated with the American TBS) at ten o'clock.
In fact, I want the last forty-five minutes of my life back. I think I'm going to bill my time out to the person who recommended it. I should have known better when she said it was "based on a manga". And I could have been reading the cultural anthropology book I just borrowed from the IUC library... this is why televisions are bad, and I wouldn't even have one if I wasn't trying to learn a new language.
Occasionally, we are assigned to watch the news as homework; we have to report on what we learned. I cried "foul" at first because I didn't have a TV, and didn't feel like I should be required to buy one simply because I needed it for a three-minute assignment twice a week. I eventually caved when I saw the $45 used TV (with free delivery) at the shop where I bought my table.
Random: Japanese light bulbs use about one-fifth of the energy of their American counterparts. The sockets are the same, but unlike the States, where 90% of the market is dominated by "regular" bulbs, Japan only has fluorescent bulbs (or at least, the supermarket only carried fluorescent bulbs). I have learned the hard way, though, that my 8-watt "40-watt" light bulb is not strong enough for reading. Good for the ambient feel, bad for the eyes.
Tomorrow's agenda includes: another light bulb (this time we'll try the 12-watt "60-watt"), an all-you-can-eat lunch buffet birthday celebration at Shakey's Pizza (yes, the same Shakey's Pizzas that dot the southern Wisconsin landscape), making okonomiyaki for the first time, and listening to the music on my MP3 player (now that I have the AC adapter for it, at last).
Warning: the following paragraphs are all nerd, and it's pretty much for personal notation. Read at your own risk. Normal readers may stop here safely.
I also installed IIS, PHP, MySQL, and phpMyAdmin on my laptop. Now, I can do development work without an Internet connection. I've started using PHP 5.0; I'm enjoying the extended OOP functionality (er, maybe, "complete", considering that C++ had thisfunctionality a decade ago). The first thing I wrote was an application framework for new projects I design.
I've noted a few major limitations in the User Request » Function » Page Output design that I had been using (with large 'switch' statements). First of all, each execution could only execute one function, and each execution could only display one page. Nine times out of ten, you can get by with this. However, I want to stop thinking in this way: I want to take a modular approach to everything I design.
The more modules I write, the faster the next program will be developed; by abstracting the modules into basic class functions, I can essentially extend the functionality of PHP to meet my own uses. Before I had helper functions, certainly, but not to the extent I am now envisioning. Also, the new framework should help reduce debug time significantly, and it should help reduce versioning inconsistencies.
