English papers

I decided that I'm going to post the papers I write for English online. Eventually, I will update my site because it is pitiful, and I will put links to the papers I write on it. For now, I will post the link here, like this one that is six pages and about my first half marathon. I am only going to post the corrected papers, and no one has any sort of obligation to read them.

Programming

Ever have several days in a row that each have some freak coincidence? That's happening to me right now; the last incident was about 30 seconds ago when I read my brother John's blog. He and I had a conversation about a week ago concerning the exact same topic as his lastest post (the one titled "Old programs." It's not the fact that he wrote about the same thing we discussed; that's not a coincidence, but actually makes a good deal of sense. The incident was that in English class today my professor stated that writing is 80% thinking skills and 20% writing skills. She was referring to books and stuff, but I have held the same belief for computer programming for years. John's post reminded me about that and the conversation we had, and then my thoughts sped back in time about seven years to my high school Computer Science class, which was the reason that I started believing that computer programming is more of a thought process than knowledge of an actual programming language (my percentages were a bit off, I said 90% and 10%, respectively). The story goes like this:
Mr. Davidson, my computer teacher, asked me to help Beth Zehner(sp? who cares?), a fellow student, with her computer program. Reluctantly, I obeyed and walked over behind Beth as she sat at her computer. I looked at the Pascal code she had displayed on the screen and I felt like wretching (I probably would have, but I had great respect for that class and the teacher and, of course, the computers themselves). What I saw was probably the worst example of programming code that was actually intended for a purpose, not just gibberish (the kind that might be written by a person who doesn't know the language at all). Now, I've seen some horrible specimins of code and even worse style, but even Braddock doesn't compare to what I saw that day. (For a programmer's example: she was using a recursive function that could have just as easily been replaced with a while loop. That's one of the easier-to-accept errors. My brain almost immediately removed any memory of the real issues.) Then, as I sat there fixing whatever other problems there were, I learned that she wanted to be a computer programmer. "Aha!" I thought, "THIS is why programs crash." My next thought was that programming languages can be taught, programming can only be learned through experience. This led to my current 90%/10% belief.
So, yeah, that was kind of long, but I had to make a point, which was actually a sub-point of my main point, of which I still haven't given sufficient evidence. Well, maybe I'll give more later, but probably not. The freakish coincidences really don't seem as freakish in telling, so I'm just going to change the theme of this post to be that programming is 90% thinking and only 10% actual programming. I'd go back and rewrite it so that is the focus, but that requires effort, something which almost all programmers despise.

It's not the fall that hurts...

it's when you hit the ground. OK, so I really despise it when people do that. You know, that thing where they start a sentence in the title and finish it as the first line of the body of the post or email or whatever. I just decided that I should try to see it from their points of view, so here it is. I'm giving in and trying it their way. I still don't like it.

Now that that's out of the way, I'd like to say that it really isn't the fall that hurts. The fall is actually quite fun. You get that empty feeling in your stomach as it tries to leap out of your mouth and take a majority of your intestines with it. Of course, it can't fit so you just end up unable to breathe until you get that little devil under control. Falling also gives a nice adrenaline rush. This is most likely because your brain is trying to tell you that you are about to hit the ground, and that part does hurt. Falling can be a lot of fun. I fell through a cloud once. It wasn't all soft and cushiony (I was going to write "cuhsy" here, but I couldn't bring myself to actually use that word.) like clouds seem like they should be. No, it was cold and stinging. Cold because that H₂O is really high up in the air and it's cold up there. Stinging because that same cold factor also has a side-effect; it turns the H₂O into ice. Consider that I was falling through the ice at around 100mph and you might understand what I mean by stinging. Next time it's hailing, get on the freeway and stick your head out the window. Then you can really understand what I mean by stinging.
Ususally, though, falling is fun, and it was that time I fell throught the cloud, too. Hitting the ground will get you every time, unless you have a parachute, then you'll be just fine. Today, I didn't have a parachute. I was supposed to have a spotter, but he happened to be on the wrong side of the railing. If you are confused, please take a minute to download and view the Fall.mpeg (for those of you who don't have DivX 6.0; sorry, but the raw file is 5MB) or Fall.avi (for those of you who DO have DivX 6.0; good job, everyone should always have the newest version of DivX cuz it's free and makes this video only 384KB).

Now that you have some form of a frame of reference, I can conclude this proclamation. I have a couple pictures (higher quality, but taken later) of my head afterwards, but I won't post anything of that graphic nature. If you want to see them, ask. Anyway, my head hurts and I think I'll just go and have a little lie down for a while.