Where Dustbunnies Go To Die

Not much has happened so far this week with the exception of writing my Visual Basic final exam last night. I would have posted immediately upon getting home, except that after I'd made dinner, and watched House and Boston Legal, it was after 1 o'clock in the morning and I had to collapse into bed.

I think the exam went well. It was ridiculously simple in concept - the instructor gave us the necessary files, including a Windows form layout, and we had to write the code to make it work like the sample application he provided. Some of the code was pre-written for us, which is what made it so simple - except that even after I followed all of the instructions, my version didn't quite work perfectly. I think he left a few things out on purpose. :) Anyway, I managed to fix all of the bugs and get it working by about 9:15, 15 minutes early. The instructor said it would be a couple of days before he had them marked.

Speaking of bugs, don't the rest of you programmer types just love it when you fix something that apparently has nothing to do with a bug you're trying to solve, and the bug goes away anyway? That happened at work today, just before it was time to go home. I didn't believe that fixing the seemingly-unrelated bug had fixed it, but I took my change out and the bug popped up again, so I guess I fixed it after all without meaning to. :)

Anyway, the only outstanding item I have is to clean up my assignment that was originally due last night, but for which the deadline was extended to Sunday morning. I think that all I have to do is make sure that all of my functions and subs are laid out within their respective files in alphabetical order (the instructor likes that, even though Visual Studio has a facility that allows you to jump directly to any method).

So yeah, as I said, when I got home last night I watched House and Boston Legal while eating dinner. House was outstanding as usual, and watching a new episode reminded me that I'd promised kosst_amojan that I would write up a panel on the show for Polaris 21 a couple of weeks ago, but I hadn't gotten to it yet. I'm thinking that maybe a discussion of the House/Wilson relationship (slashers, get your minds out of the gutter :P ) might be interesting. I'll have to dig out my old programme books and see what I gave him last time I provided him with a House panel for the con - all I can remember is the title ("Our House Is A Very Very Very Fine House" :) ).

Boston Legal was equally outstanding, I thought; they did something extremely interesting. For those of you who didn't see it, the office was held hostage along with a former defendant of Denny's, and they were forced to relive the former defendant's murder trial. Doesn't sound all that interesting, but the hostage-taker was the now-adult son of the victim. Denny (William Shatner's character) had defended the accused killer as his first case 50 years ago in partnership with his father. Every so often, Denny would get a dreamy look on his face and there would be a flashback to him and his father, 50 years ago. Still sounds dull, right? Except that they used clips from an old black-and-white movie or TV show in which a very young William Shatner had played a lawyer. I want to find out what those clips were from, but I don't really know where to start - he guest-starred on a lot of anthology shows back in the 1950s, and it could have been any of them, or a film. The actor playing his father looked a little like Spencer Tracy, I thought, but he looked too old to have been Tracy in the 1950s. Maybe someone in the weekly thread on the show at TrekBBS knows the answer, if nobody who's read this far does.

I have to pop over there and change my signature anyway, to reflect the new guests we've just announced for Polaris 21: Teryl Rothery (Stargate SG-1's Dr. Frasier, as well as the upcoming Babylon 5 movie) and Tanya Huff. (I guess this means I really have to make an effort to find time to watch Blood Ties before the con...) I'm kind of missing the place, though I can imagine what TNZ has been like over the past week or so just from reading the newspaper.

Oh, and the other thing I should mention is that the nomination period for the Constellation Awards is fast coming to an end (the deadline is April 15). The nomination ballot is available from the nomination guidelines page, here.

First, though, I want to get caught up and see what you lot have been up to over the past 48 hours. Later.