Hey everyone, I'm back in the passenger seat doing my best to give off the impression of a trusty co-pilot while secretly plotting to subvert the trip. As part of this facade I have served up some This American Life on the car stereo while I type to you, my readers, or reader, as the case may be. The exciting news from the past hundred miles is that we are no longer in Nebraska. What this means is that while the vegetation has not really changed all that much, it is now found on a setting of lightly rolling hills and occasionally outlined by little peaking hills miles off in the background. My only regret is I was too busy tending to my co-pilot duties to snap a shot of the Entering Colorado sign.
We've gotten on to i76, which is exciting because it was just about the second turn we've made all trip.* We'd been on i80 for roughly 500 miles and though it was good to us, I'm glad to be off. For starters, 76 is a superior number to 80; it has the higher prime factor. 76=2*2*19 while 80=2*2*2*2*5. At any rate (particularly 82mph) it's good to be making progress and pushing on. Out with East, in with the West, that's what I always say.**
Jacob and I have begun to write a program together that we will pair program for the remainder of the trip. The program is a simple enough idea; we want to create a todo list that acts more like a tree than a list. The basic principal here is that when you have something you need to do, you often divide the task up into subtasks in order to make it more manageable. This can clutter your to do list and also prove disorganizing if you forget to check of children tasks when completing a large project. To combat this in our daily lives, Jacob and I are creating a very simple web service, todotree, that will allow users to do just that.
Todotree will have two views, a complete-tree view and a fringe view. While the complete-tree view shows all tasks in the tree, the fringe shows only those tasks that have not been divided up into subtasks. This encourages you to only look at the things you can accomplish in the immediate future. In the event that there is a large project in the fridge, it encourages you to think about how to subdivide that project.
That's all for now, I need to get back to programming. I hope you're all having an absolutely lovely Friday.
* Excepting a multitude mini-adventures for the purpose of gas, food, and lodging.
** The above comment in no way reflects jacobandtheamazingtechnicolorskippy's view on any global conflct of political power or cultural diffusion
6 comments:
76, it might also be observed, also has the much coveted, rarely attained 1-less-than-a-palindrome property.
And has a song titled after it, which I hope you will listen to at some point while driving on it.
Mike, I think if that whole "programming" thing doesn't work out for you, you could have a fabulous career as a professional road trip companion / trip blogger. Something to consider...
:-P todotree is good idea. I played apples to apples last night with a deck of photo cards in a Gazeebo. BEAT THAT with your...FANCY video blog trip..
I miss you.
The trombone song, you mean?
Yeah, 76 trombones was very nearly mentioned in the post. But I figure the high prime factor ought to be enough for any rational person.
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