Credit is Time Travel for Money

Credit is like time travel for money. When you take out a loan, your future earnings travel backward in time so you can spend them in the present. As time passes and you arrive in the future, you find that you have less money available because you are paying back the loan, in effect sending the money back to your past self.

Some people look at today's "credit crisis" and ask "but where did all the lost money go then? What happened to it? Does that mean it never really existed?" I prefer to think of the time travel analogy and imagine that the lost money disappeared into the past.

(This is just a metaphorical story of course, not a technically accurate explanation.)

Silly String

Coworker 1: Should the code check whether the value equals null, or should it check if it equals the empty string? Or both?

Coworker 2: It should check whether it equalsIgnoreCase the empty string.

Me: Right, because that way it still works even if the user had Caps Lock on when they typed in nothing.

Crash

The global financial markets are in big trouble. The funny thing is, the first time I heard about some of the dangers that contribute to this, it was in a book called The Death of Money by Joel Kurtzman. That book was written in 1993. I got my copy off the shelf to look at it this morning, and I noticed that the blurb on the cover said this:

"The message in this well-organized, lucidly written book should not be ignored." -- Publishers Weekly

I guess it was ignored.

Longboard dance

I made this video a few days ago, just goofing around with the skateboard and my camera. I tried to include a few longboard dancing moves that I haven't seen before. The kneel-down stance swap is a move that I worked out just minutes before I recorded it.