slip.stream.stitch

My team and I spent almost four hours straight yesterday afternoon making gloriously inappropriate deck jokes amongst ourselves and then eventually the rest of our cohort and laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe or speak or see (due to the tears streaming from our eyes). Because we were building a web app for flashcard studying, so we were working with card models and user models and study round models and guess models and, god help us all, deck models. Our app had to handle decks. We were performing complicated functions on decks, pulling decks out of large arrays and shoveling decks into user objects, raking and seeing databases with our decks, increasing deck size and then making decks smaller, discussing whether a session could handle the load of a big deck and what the app should do once a user had finished with a deck and the deck had emptied itself of cards. Whether a user could play with a deck for more than one round or could swap decks at any given moment. How to make sure our app could support multiple (or even unlimited) decks. And more. Oh, so much more.

Granted, there was a steady half-hour stretch toward the end where we actually got our code written (we kept accidentally breaking our deck methods and the decks weren’t performing to spec), though we had to make some changes to our testing environment because our original deck was too hard.

Then again, this burst of productivity came hot on the heels of at least one full hour of giggling uncontrollably.

(Meanwhile, the other cohort kept busy trying to solve Sudoku boards by stuffing random digits into tiny boxes.)

cardboardlife:

Crochet character head (modeled by Luke).

The way I made this was to make a balaclava and then start from the bottom again and build up a big cat head around it, joining the front onto the eye and mouth holes as I went along. The mouth hole is hidden under the face-flaps.

I lost count of how many things about and in this photo I LOVE SO MUCH.

Margaret Atwood (via biscodeja-vu)

I adore Margaret Atwood, but Bruce Lee > Madam Mags:

“Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless— like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup; you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle; you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

And Lao-tzu > *

Tao
is the way of water.
There must be water for life to be,
and it can flow wherever.

And water, being true to being water
is true
to Tao.

Those on the Way of Tao, like water,
need to accept where they find themselves;
and that may often be where water goes
to the lowest place, and that is right.

Like a lake
the heart must be calm and quiet
having great depth beneath it. 

The sage rules with compassion,
and his word needs to be trusted. 

The sage needs to know like water
how to flow around the blocks
and how to find the way through without violence.

Like water, the sage should wait
for the moment to ripen and be right:

water, you know, never fights
it flows around

without harm.

(Chapter 8, Tao Te Ching)

(via outofcharactersuburb)

rachelisaflameprincess:

bendydicks:

considerthishippie:

Instead of just looking up into the sky, you’re actually gazing down into the infinite cosmic abyss, with only gravity holding you onto the surface of the earth.

oh

i was not prepared for that

(via katedanley)

Something Jen occasionally does during a session is remind us to “always come back to the breath”. While I am poetically fond of the prepositional phrase “back to” in and of itself, I especially like the sound and feel of this particular saying. Breath is such a fundamental, elemental thing. Coming back to the breath is coming back to the thing that keeps us alive. Coming back to the breath is coming back to existence, to the simple act of acknowledging existence without the complicated philosophical undertaking of identifying a “why”.

Recently I had a dream in which I was writing Ruby code for sex. And not like code for a game about sex, but like actual human sex. Like, if humans were actually just computers running programs— I was writing the program we would be running when we wanted to get down and dirty.

The point here, though, is that I woke up seriously disturbed. And not because I was dreaming about coding (this is hardly the first time). And not because I was dreaming about coding sex functions that were surprisingly well-formulated and accurate. But because there was one line, a method call parameter, I think, that I knew was wrong but the program was running fine in spite of that, and code that runs when it should be breaking is something that pisses me off to no end.

[Edit: see also (via Yannick)]

writersprocrastinate:

Hi, I’m a writer. My hobbies include not writing. 

Also occasionally writing about not writing.

(via katedanley)

Notes from the Squirrel girl of the first graduating class of the Chicago Dev Bootcamp program.

My head hurts and I don’t have the patience to figure out Tumblr’s inner workings right now. If you’re looking for or are interested in following my Dev Bootcamp notes, they’re on the account linked above, not this main one.

neil-gaiman:

FALLS CHURCH, Va. — E.L. Konigsburg, an author who twice won one of the top honors for children’s literature, has died. She was 83.

I loved “From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler”. I loved reading it as a boy, and I loved reading it aloud to my kids.

Oh. “Mixed Up Files” was a favorite of mine for so long. When I finally went to New York for the first time as an adult, my only motivating factor to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art was to see if the things described in that book— the bed the kids slept in, the sarcophagus where the music cases were hidden, the smug Egyptian cat statue— were still there, and I was beyond disappointed that the only day we were able to go to the Metro, I got sick and couldn’t make the trip.

Of the *other* books of hers I’ve read, though “The View from Saturday” is the most cherished. When we saw “Slumdog Millionaire” in the theaters, I was convinced it was based on “The View from Saturday” (it wasn’t a derogatory conviction; I actually really like that movie). I still hold that there is no fiction more necessary and powerful and poignant than well-written children’s literature.

I grew up drinking only skim milk and for some reason, 1% and 2% milk gave me the creeps. One time, however, I found myself in a house that only had 2% and I wanted cereal for breakfast, so, no joke, I poured ~1/8 of a cup of the 2% over my cereal and then filled the rest of the bowl with water.

(Source: mrgolightly, via thatsnotwatyourmomsaid)