Open Questions

I have questions!
This is where I keep my questions until I can find answers for them.

1. I often leave that last drop of tea in the bottom of my cup. Over the weekend it tends to grow things, and when I come in to work on Monday there are little floating tufts of mold in there. Mmmm, mold tufts, gooood to the last drop. The question I have is, "Why does the mold always grow in a perfect circle?"

iBATIS In All Its Glory

The greatest thing since sliced bread
If you have ever had to write an application in an object oriented language that communicates with a relational database, then you understand the word tedium down to its very core. There is nothing more mind-numbing than writing lots of 'for' and 'while' loops to populate an object from a result set. It is a trivial exercise that takes lots of time and is prone to errors. When I first started writing web applications it took me less than a few hours of using the JDBC api to realize that populating an object from the DB was a job for a peon, not a mighty software engineer. Thus I was quite motivated as I jumped on Google in search of a solution. The coding gods were smiling on me that day because I quickly stumbled upon iBATIS SQL Maps. It took me an afternoon to get comfortable with their api, and soon I was writing all my sql into XML files. Here is what I am talking about.

Pastitio

This image is Bacchus before Pastitio. Click for after.
Food of the gods (The Greek kind).
Pastitio is a layered dish with bechamel and meat sauce covering bread crumbs and pasta. A treat with a long history, there is evidence of the Greeks enjoying pastitio since before the times of the Trojan war (1200 B.C.). Original Greek recipes describe pastitio as stale bread covered with a rich meat sauce. A base filling disguised as a heavenly offering. No doubt this was a clever ploy Greek mothers invented to get leftover bread eaten up. It is said, the night Odysseus thought up the Trojan horse he supped on pastitio. If this dish was his inspiration then I suppose generations of Greek mothers should get the credit for winning that war.

Airzooka!!!

Did somebody say airzooka?
Somebody brought an airzooka to work today. "What the heck is an airzooka?" you ask. Good question. In fact, an airzooka is essentially a plastic flower pot with a rubber diaphragm inside. That sounds pretty boring until you stretch the diaphragm out and let it go. Air gets forced through a 6" dia. hole in the bottom of the pot. This creates a fast moving vortex of air (picture a smoke ring) that can travel 30 feet or more. Trust me, it is awesome. Don't trust me? Picture yourself throwing a ball of air across the room at someone. If you just nick them they will feel like someone has thrown something tremendously large and fast past their head, if you hit them it feels like getting hit in the face with a thousand extra fluffy cotton balls moving at high speed. It is awesome I say! The perfect workplace toy for everybody, unless you work around delicate architectural models or houses made of cards.