Michael Wheeler

Hate is a very strong word, which is why you need to use it to balance out anything good you say. Sometimes you just need to find something to hate to keep your ratio of good / bad at 1:1. I choose to hate canada for a few reasons. Here’s a list of why you should hate canada.

I was helping a friend out with his IPT assignment, which involved creating a educational game in Visual Basic .net 2005. He decided that he wanted to create a simple hangman game, which I thought was a good choice. Oh how wrong I was.

The last time I programmed in Visual Basics was about 3 years ago, and it was in VB 6. This was a big shock to me. The first step was to load a word list, and select a word randomly. Don’t get me wrong there are lots of information on the net about VB .net, but when your searching, it’s easy to pickup bits of information from VB 6. They changed Open filepath #1 as blah to FileOpen(1,filepath, blah) or something, why make the stupidest change.

Next was arrays, I wanted to put every line of the file, as a word in an array. Simple create an array, load the file by line, and append each line to the array. Not so simple, you first have to make a dynamic array, then tell it to resize to the size 0, then add an item, resize it one larger, add another line ect… Just silly, wheres the append function?

Ok, now we can make an control array of labels to display each letter. Oh, no control arrays. A bit of googling says everything is done in code now, and it’s better. Actually for me it was worse. I didn’t want to dynamically create controls, I just wanted 20 label boxes as an array. Now the websites were correct saying it was easy, but it wasn’t easier, and they neglected to say how to make the array. It took me several minutes to find the information required to make them.

The problems just kept coming and hangman took several hours to get to a very light version (no hangman yet).

So here I am thinking, I’m struggling, how is anyone else in this class gonna get this assignment done?

Silly VB .net, there is a really good reason I use python.

I like to be all good and nice when I register my domains, and put in valid information (unlike 99% of all domains registered), and one thing I do is setup an email for the domain.

Usually I set it, and usually within the hour I get spam on that account, but that’s alright because GMail usually catches the spam and does what ever GMail does with spam.

Yesterday GMail failed me. What? GMail fail. That’s what I said. It’s amazing I got a spam yesterday and today I got a spam message.

GMAIL WHY WHY OH WHY. Oh well, it stopped the other 2000 odd spam messages a get daily.