David’s Blog

Although I do indeed have a job at Software Management Inc. as an Imaging specialist, I am currently looking for a secound job doing some PHP & MySQL developing for some companies local to Louisville Kentucky. To aid in my endevours, I created a simple PDF resume with OpenOffice; however, only after I submitted it did I realize the flaw in standard resumes in my field of study. To make an acceptable resume for software development, one must present samples of their work. Thus I created an online resume with VisualCV that allows me to professionally present my resume and samples of my work. As you will notice on the right sidebar you will see a button to view my VisualCV account which will now be available. None the less, for your convenience i’ll provide the same button below:

When stumbling the internet, I came across this very humorous story. As soon as the anounser asked the question, I knew the answer was 5, yet I was surprised to see that the maths professor was working it out.

I’m telling you this story not just for your entertainment but to show you that you shouldn’t be afraid to embarass yourself … your teacher has been much more thorough at this than you ever will be.

We get a fair number of calls from the public on mathematical issues. Years ago I passed by the office and the secretary asked if I could answer such a question. I said sure, and we had this conversation:

Caller: Yes, Hi, this is Joe of Radio XYZ. We are on the air and we have this math contest, and there’s a question we can’t answer. Can you help us?

Me: I’ll try.

Joe: There’s this ladder, and it’s 5 feet long, and it’s leaning against the wall and it’s bottom is 3 feet away from the wall. At what height does it touch the wall?

Me: Oh, that’s easy, you just use the Pythagorean Theorem.

Joe: That’s what we thought, but just how does it work?

Me: Well, you square 5, that’s 25, and you square 3, that’s 9, 25+9=34, and you take the square root. I don’t know the square root of 34, but it’s just under 6.

Joe: So the ladder touches the wall at a heigh of about 6 feet?

Me: Yes!

Joe: That’s awfully high!

Me: Yes, but it’s just the Pythagorean Theorem.

Joe: What’s your name?

Me: Peter Alfeld.

Joe: Pete! Pete, can we quote you? Can we say that Pete of the University of Utah Math Department says the ladder touches the wall at a height of 6 feet?

Me: Sure!

So I hang up and realize that I just invented a five foot ladder that can reach a height of six feet. The savings in aluminum alone … But I don’t remember the name of the station, so I can’t call back. Presumably my folly was broadcast over the entire Salt Lake Valley! I avoided the streets of Salt Lake City for a few months, and to this day I make sure to mention in every course I teach that the greatest obstacle to progress in mathematics is the human inability to distinguish reliably between a plus and a minus sign. You may have heard me pronounce that in your class!

Well, first off, I’ve got A-LOT to post about, mostly websites I’ve found using a website called Stumble. Well this post is about something my grandfather loves: 2-dollar bills . Well here is the story from the site:

I am STILL laughing!! I think we need to quit saving our $2 bills and bring them out in public.  The younger generation doesn’t know they exist.

On my way home from work, I stopped at Taco Bell for a quick bite to eat. In my billfold are a $50 bill and a $2 bill.   I figure that with a $2 bill, I can get something to eat and not  have to worry about anyone getting irritated at me for trying to break a $50 bill.

Me: "Hi, I’d like one seven-layer burrito please, to go."

Server: "That’ll be $1.04. Eat in?"

Me: "No, it’s to go." At this point, I open my billfold and hand him the $2 bill. He looks at it kind of funny.

Server: "Uh, hang on a sec, I’ll be right back."

He goes to talk to his manager, who is still within my earshot.   The following conversation occurs between the two of them:

Server: "Hey, you ever see a $2 bill?"

Manager: "No. A what?"

Server: "A $2 bill. This guy just gave it to me."

Manager: "Ask for something else. There’s no such thing as a $2 bill."

Server: "Yeah, thought so."

He comes back to me and says, "We don’t take these Do you have anything else?"

Me: "Just this fifty. You don’t take $2 bills?   Why?"

Server: "I don’t know."

Me: "See here where it says legal tender?"

Server: "Yeah."

Me: "So, why won’t you take it?"

Server: "Well, hang on a sec."

He goes back to his manager, who has been watching me like I’m a shoplifter, and says to him, "He says I have to take it."

Manager: "Doesn’t he have anything else?"

Server: "Yeah, a fifty. I’ll get it and you can open the safe and get change "

Manager: "I’m not opening the safe with him in here."
Server: "What should I do?"

Manager: "Tell him to come back later when he has real money."

Server: "I can’t tell him that! You tell him."

Manager: "Just tell him."

Server: "No way! This is weird. I’m going in back."

The manager approaches me and says, "I’m sorry, but we don’t take big bills this time of night."

Me: "It’s only seven o’clock! Well then, here’s a two dollar bill."

Manager: "We don’t take those, either."

Me: "Why not?"

Manager: "I think you know why."

Me: "No really, tell me why."

Manager: "Please leave before I call mall security."

Me: "Excuse me?"

Manager: "Please leave before I call mall security."

Me: "What on earth for?"

Manager: "Please, sir."

Me: "Uh, go ahead, call them."

Manager: "Would you please just leave?"

Me: "No."

Manager: "Fine — have it your way then."

Me: "Hey, that’s Burger King, isn’t it?"

At this point, he backs away from me and calls mall security on the phone around the corner. I have two people staring at me from the dining area, and I begin laughing out loud, just for effect. A few minutes later this 45-year-oldish guy
Comes in.

Guard: "Yeah, Mike, what’s up?"

Manager (whispering): "This guy is trying to give me some (pause) funny money."

Guard: "No kidding!   What?"

Manager: "Get this .. A two dollar bill."

Guard (incredulous): "Why would a guy fake a two dollar bill?"

Manager: "I don’t know. He’s kinda weird. He says the only other thing he has is a fifty."

Guard: "Oh, so the fifty’s fake!"

Manager: "No, the two dollar bill is."

Guard: "Why would he fake a two dollar bill?"

Manager: "I don’t know! Can you talk to him, and get him out of here?"

Guard: "Yeah."

Security Guard walks over to me and……

Guard: "Mike here tells me you have some fake bills you’re trying to use."

Me: "Uh, no."

Guard: "Lemme see ‘em."

Me: "Why?"

Guard: "Do you want me to get the cops in here?"

At this point I am ready to say, "Sure, please!" but I want to eat, so I say "I’m just trying to buy a burrito and pay for it with this two dollar bill.

I put the bill up near his face, and he flinches like I’m taking a swing at him.    He takes the bill, turns it over a few times in his hands, and says, "Hey, Mike, what’s wrong with this bill?"

Manager: "It’s fake."

Guard: "It doesn’t look fake to me."

Manager: "But it’s a two dollar bill."

Guard: "Yeah?"

Manager: "Well, there’s no such thing, is there?"

The security guard and I both look at him like he’s an idiot, and it dawns on the guy that he has no clue.

So, it turns out that my burrito was free, and he threw in a small drink and some of those cinnamon thingies, too.

Made me want to get a whole stack of two dollar bills just to see what happens when I try to buy stuff. If I got the right group of people, I could probably end up in jail. You get free food there,  too.

For all of you who don’t know - most won’t - FizzBuzz is a programming test by a company to judge whether or not the job applicant can indead program. However, their is a catch, the applicant must develop this test in front of the interviewer on paper in a matter of just a few minutes. If found the test on Coding Horror and thought it was quite the great idea. Upon reading the comments someone attempted to write the code in PHP but it wasn’t quite what the scenario called for.

So without further ado, I present to you (rhymes!), my FizzBuzz coding in PHP in 1 min and 37 secounds:

<?php

for($i=1;$i<100;++$i)
{
	if($i % 3 == 0)
		echo 'Fizz';
	if($i % 5 == 0)
		echo 'Buzz';
	if($i % 3 != 0 && $i % 5 != 0)
		echo $i;
	echo "\r\n<br />";
}

There are quite a few ways to program this but I felt like doing it this way. I really don’t know what this means, but I just was bored.

First off, if I type something incorrectly and don’t notice it, it’s because i’m listening to Buckcherry and wearing a wrist brase because my curpel tunnel is really acting up today. Well, tomorrow’s prom and I’ll be out for a long time; planning on coming back around 6am. Whats really getting to me though is that it’s been a week or so sense I posted those essays and havn’t heard a word about them from ANYONE! Oh well, I have some news about something important but I’m wanting to take pics before I post about it so stay posted. Oh and I’m working on a neat little un-ethical project to try to make some money.

For nearly two decades, professional literature plagued my life in an exponential manner. Waking up, I’d face another day of perpetual torment struggling to understand these “marvels” of classic literature, Hatchet , The Scarlet Letter , and whatever else the teacher found in her smoking, black-leather book all English teachers seem to continuously study.

Growing into my (relatively) old age, I’ve realized books are boring and lack any interest while magically sucking the enthusiasm out of me on contact. That’s my opinion on the larger scale of books, and I catch heat from many teachers for that, but regarding the other small percentage, I seem to become consumed into the pages of the cover floating in the cold, deep-blue sea – bullets whizzing by my head like rain.

Let’s be honest here, I have a small attention span for non-technological things. If a book lacks action and suspense or goes into too much detail, my mind, in an act of self-preservation, switches gears and begins thinking about the first noise or object in sight. If a reasonable and nice teacher did exist, perhaps the wonderful result of some bio-engineered science experiment, they’d present me with books that’d captivate me with action, while holding a knife to my throat for just a tad of suspense.

Never being introduced to my definition of “good” writing, my literature wouldn’t even be worthy to hold your squeaky, unstable kitchen table stable. My writing always seemed to remind me of that cliché phrase “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” not in the way you’d expect either, that single cliché phrase was better than my entire piece of writing.

It wasn’t until I had a small series, well two, teachers who introduced me and supported my lacking endeavors to find my literary voice that my writings started gaining lives of their own. Mrs. Fennessy, that gray-headed witch she was, must have thought I was Hansel at her gingerbread house thinking she could just “eat me up.” I had her just one year; she retired; nonetheless, that was the hottest year of that school. She kept me in that boiling kettle until she thought I was “ready.” The second teacher, a typical busy-bodied superwoman, Mrs. Mather, during my senor high school year, understood my lack of literary personality and a major need for a variety of viewpoints. Throughout that last year of middle school, my writing improved radically becoming a style of which this piece endorses.

I will definitely profit off my personal literary development during my times of redundant, mentally stressful actions to make money for the American government, also known as an occupation to the larger population. Software engineers are not battling the English language as much as the unfortunate journalists; however, we software engineers are largely required to document our source code and the burning, evil, bureaucratic paperwork. Granted, employers do not encourage a substantial amount of personality in any type of writing, such as people hired for administration positions; nonetheless, individuality harmonizes a warm, fuzzy feeling for the uninterested readers.

It has been publicly acknowledged we, the American citizens, will be known to our successors as “The Age of Information.” With the mass-public acceptance of computers and their other technological counter-parts, we as a generation have embedded these innovations into our everyday lives. While our reasons vary, from medical practice, productivity, or maybe just to ease our workload, we base our everyday life around technology, pieces of powered metal and wire. While the trend seems to indicate that the more successful we become, the more we integrate technology to improve our lives – the more vulnerable we become.

Everyday new technological advances, aimed at easing the lives of millions, are developed. Recent publicly-accepted evolutions such as Paypal and Online-Banking make financial planning and management quick and easy. Computers offer additional services such as entertainment, shown best with recent phenomenon, YouTube, allowing community members to share videos with friends and family. It is inventions similar to these that conveniently enhance our personal standard of living.

Personal profit is not the only benefit to come via this technological era. Businesses such as FedEx and UPS are offering paid on-online shipment tracking. While other companies are finding that they don’t even need to own property to develop a business, all they need is a website and consumers. E-bay, Amazon, and similar sites have made a business out of just selling services or products via the web; some even offer to supply the consumer with the cheapest place to purchase from. This ability currently is taken for granted; lower expenses provide us more comfort in our lives and helps raise the focal point of businesses.

Online services and companies are not the only ones using technology to their advantage; think about your kitchen. Your stove, microwave, and coffee-brewer are all there because of technology. Cell-phones, automobiles, even lights use energy and depend on technology. Without this technology, the nation will confront a major relapse in productivity and the standard of living will decrease exponentially.

Being so dependent on technology, the nation will severely suffer from any major technological catastrophe. If the nation ever had a major power-failure, how would we recover? We would be unable to call our families and loved-ones; the ability to purchase any item at any store would be gone. The best solution we would have is to wait, and hope our power would recover so we may continue with life. Currently most major retail chains and a percentage of home-owners own a backup power generator to combat a short power-outage. These methouds are quite suitable for black-outs ranging from secounds to a few days; however, these alternative power sources become expensive for extended periods of time.

Power is not the only woe on the “back-burner” for many computer users; one single virus, engineered correctly, has the power to cripple the entire technology era. A virus, according to Merriam-Webster, is defined as “a computer program that is usually hidden within another seemingly innocuous program and that produces copies of itself and inserts them into other programs and usually performs a malicious action (as destroying data).” If such a virus was engineered with care, infiltrating any networked and numerous off-line machines will be possible; even the ability to stealthfully manipulate government data.

As technology advances, security auditors play a game of “catch-up,” releasing security patches and strong security systems along with their accompanying protocols. Technology will never be truly safe; the best precaution any consumer can take is learning how to properly setup firewalls and routers to protect and monitor their networks’ traffic. The more secure the nation becomes in technology, the easier we can live our lives, as the threat to the modern inventions contracts.