Thursday, February 01, 2007

Keys

Tonight I went to a presentation on model-view-presenter at the Microsoft offices in Bloomington. It was interesting - more about patterns than programming. MVP is a pattern where you throw out an interface for your model (data layer), an interface for your view (ui layer), and then implement the interfaces so that you can centralize almost all of your logic into a presenter object, basically eliminating business logic from the UI. It looks as though it might be confusing with an extremely large project, but it would allow you to separate out the UI in such a way that you could throw out a Windows Form or an ASP.NET interface on the same code with very little work.

However, I should have known the night was going to go down hill when I ripped open my wet nap, only to discover it was a packet full of parmesean cheese. Not that it was a contaminated wet nap...I'm just too damn stupid to read the package. Of course, being covered in parmesean cheese makes me smell not so different from the guy in front of me with the dirty sweatshirt that looked like he'd worn it when I went to high school, the guy next to him with the collar that was up, down, sideways, rinkled, and dirty, or the guy next to me who had a beard that I could smell. Seriously, if you're a good developer you have to work within nose distance of someone, so take a damn shower.

When everything was done and I walked out into the parking lot to get in my car, I found my keys absent. Absent from my pocket. Absent from my backpack. Absent from my other pocket. Absent from upstairs where I'd just been. Absent from anywhere near the car. Absent from take everything off and out of my backpack and shake it all about and listen for clinking noises and nothing. What bothered me was that I had been sitting in the car and had distinctly noted to myself that I should take them out of the ignition and, looking in the car, I could see that I had. So, I called Pooteewheet and walked around outside in the 0-degree weather so I could give her directions, because I've never looked at the street signs on the way to Microsoft, I just know where it is. When she and Eryn picked me up and dropped me off at my car, the keys were indeed not in the ignition. Nor on the floor, nor on the ground, or under the car. And they hadn't been between the car and the Microsoft offices. And I hadn't left them where I was sitting. So now I suspect the guy who was weirding out on me before the class started.

I was sitting in the lobby downstairs, doing some work (reading), and this guy kept circling back to where I was, in these tight little 3' pacing circuits. Not circling once or twice, but half a dozen times (actually, I think it may have been as high as eight or nine), and we were the only two people there. He was circling enough, and so close, that I finally moved my Blackberry to where it was directly in front of me, instead of where I could only see it out of the corner of my eye (and where he kept hovering most closely). So he circled in closer. Now I'm wondering if the wanker didn't grab my keys. And then he probably couldn't find the right car because if you're going to steal a car, you start with the nice ones, not the 8 year old Saturn SL full of junk.

1 comment:

MeanMrMustard said...

And this, Scooter, is why I stick to Java and open source. Open-source people don't steal your keys; they hotwire your car. And then they write a wiki entry on how best to hotwire an eight-year-old Saturn.