There’s a phrase I never expected to find myself using.
As you might guess from a previous post or two, I’m generally of the opinion that Paris Hilton is just another drunken party-girl. (To be fair, the magnifying glass lens of tabloid sensationalism might leave some people with a less than entirely favorable impression of me too.)
But despite her rather shameless public foibles, recent events have caused me to raise my opinion of Ms. Hilton by a notch or two.
Not being much of a TV watcher, I missed the ad (now viewable on YouTube), but apparently John McCain released an ad drawing a negative comparison between Barack Obama and party girls Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.
So now comes the part where I end up with some respect for Paris Hilton.
Sometime in the past 24 hours, Paris Hilton released a short video responding to the McCain ad. It’s brilliant! Now obviously there were a few other people involved in writing and producing the video, but the fact that she not only responded to being included in McCain’s ad but also went along with poking fun at her own celebrity status… I have to respect her for that.
But there’s more. This short (1 minute, 51 seconds) video also includes the Hilton campaign’s proposed energy policy. Frankly, by addressing both long and short term needs, it makes a hell of a lot more sense than anything that’s come from the two major political parties in recent memory. (The fact that I generally don’t care for Paris, but like her plan more than those proposed by the Republicrats and Democans, should give you some idea of the esteem in which I hold those two groups. (If you’re not sure how high that is, I suggest you get some mining equipment. A shovel won’t get you low enough.))
I’m not entirely certain “President Paris” would be a good idea, but given the alternatives, maybe she could be Zaphod’s running mate?
Admittedly, I’m not very good at coming up with names for things. If it were left up to me, the street in front of my house would simply be called, “The Street” and the street over by my friend Jeff’s would (at best) be called, “Jeff’s Street.” (It’s also quite possible that this other street would be called “The Other Street.”) But in some odd way, it’s still good to know that I’m better at names than some people.
For the longest time, my standard for poor naming conventions was a set of classes for managing the transitions between modules in a web application. The classes were named, “TransitionType1”, “TransitionType2” and “TransitionType3” which didn’t really convey much information about how they differed from one another. (The same developer was responsible for a set of login functions named “LoginType1”, “LoginType2” and so on up to “LoginType6.” By a not-so-amazing coincidece, that was also the order of the different types in the requirements, so it was slightly better, but still not particularly descriptive.)
Today I encountered the Holy Grail of interesting names. The names were completely descriptive, but still caused me to do a doubletake.
A blogging package I’ve been evaluating exposes a set of events you can capture for specialized processing as a user edits a post. You can’t capture the update event itself, but before and after the update, you can capture the delightfully named PrePostUpdate and PostPostUpdate events.
I’d love to be that creative with my own confusing names.
A discussion at work today turned to how my most recent project (currently in testing) may be the first one moved to dotNet v3.5 as a pilot for the 2008 versions of Visual Studio, SQL Server and Windows Server. Once we find out what it takes to move a simple project to the new platform, we’ll start looking at moving the more complex systems over.
One of the new technologies being considered is LINQ. None of us have any hands-on experience with it yet, but this conversation led us to realize there are three distinct phases all projects go through when adopting a new technology:
- Refactor the entire system to heavily overuse the new technology, especially in manners where it was never intended to be used and/or is completely ill-suited.
- Refactor the system again in attempt to remedy the problems caused by the previous refactoring.
- Refactor the system with the next hot technology.
The planning to assure that this will be the time you finally break out of that cycle is spread across all three phases.
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