I think I should make clear that I’m really not a fan of university, and have never been considered myself as a good student for my entire schooling life. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to bias my stance here and there, because I have had some good moments at university as well!

My first year first semester at uni began last year. I looked at my university as if it was a playground for all the smartest kids in the world. But then after the first year, I started to think hmm, perhaps it doesn’t really fit my desired path. Here’s why.

I did totally 8 units (or courses) up until now. I would say most of them were rather interesting, yet I found some of the units were far from being necessary for me. My experience shows that there are 3 inevitable (bad) things that you would probably face when you find yourself new to colleges:

1. Not knowing which courses to choose. It’s not (entirely) your fault when you encounter this problem, because you can never have a clear picture of what you will be doing in the future, and what you will be deeply interested. It happened to me when I took random courses in my first year (those that had attractive descriptions) and eventually found that they weren’t what I’m looking for. Facts: I withdrew from my Graphics course because I didn’t see myself into this discipline, and that my lecturer couldn’t make this course become more interesting to those come from non-graphics background like me. I wasted $3500 on this.

2. Misjudging your talent and your desired area of expertise. This embarrassingly happened to me (because I usually take pride of my sense in talents and potentials). Facts: I thought I was good at Human Resource Management so I took a course called Employment Relations to gain some basic grounds of HRM. Though I didn’t quite ruin my academic record with this unit (I got a credit actually) but then when I went to my second year, I found myself making a big mistake there because this unit basically has nothing to do with my future. I wasted another $3500.

3. Having to take basic courses. You can never ask your university for permission for not taking basic courses (that usually are prerequisites of higher-leveled courses). Facts: I’m attending a basic marketing course this semester and I feel like I’m wasting my time and money because most of the materials are already too familiar to me. I must admit that there is a few interesting things around this course, but it’s still a bit too expensive to spend dearly $3500 just to learn a few new things.

So in combination, I think I didn’t get what it takes for nearly $11,000. If I was lucky enough to have that much of money for an investment, I could make a yummy ROI! However, in facts, it’s not that bad when you jump into a college life because some of you may find the courses help build a strong and reliable basement for your career, in addition with socialising on campus is an experience without equals.

Well, what can I say? That’s life! I can never complain about this since it’s not just me individually facing this world. But if I had another option I wouldn’t want to see my parents’ money burnt unnecessarily down.

Here is the link: http://www.appsumo.com/jason-kehrer-one-hour-marketing-action-video/

The opening sentence is: “Jason Kehrer shows you how to build your marketing plan (and a bunch of other stuff) in an hour. Don’t spend weeks on stuff that should take hours”. I don’t know whether most of the people fall convinced by this headline, but to me it sounds really weird in terms of seriousness. My definition of a marketing plan is something that would take you weeks to accomplish if you’re making a serious go about your own business. Believing or not, I do agree that this title is somehow attractive and easy to get people convinced, and this is part of advertising as well. However, critically, do you really want to prepare a marketing plan in just a few hours?

No, I suppose.  Actually, (I guess) what they want to ship to you is more about how to efficiently write a marketing plan, that cuts off some of the bottlenecks while developing it. They might also teach you how to structure the plan and all the different yet useful techniques. And that’s it. That holds true. However, what’s also true is the fact that all of the dot points that they listed would probably take you days and days to get them done, not just a structure itself. What I mean is the title of this deal seems a bit ambiguous to the readers and the way the authors attract them (the readers) is by making a marketing plan appear less serious than it really is, which is less or more not very useful.

It reminds me of the time I was in high school SIC. My favorite business teacher Keith Kirchner spent a lot of his effort to get the most out of our marketing lessons. I also remember that we had to develop a simple marketing plan as a course’s major project, and it lasted for 3 weeks (we covered executive summary, cost estimation, distribution and networks, profiling, pricing strategies and a few more). We all were excited to get the idea onto papers, and to thoroughly discuss it in a student manner. It has been proven to me that a real marketing plan doesn’t seem to be that easy to get it done in one hour (even an unrealistic high school project did last for 3 weeks). Only those who are not serious about what they’re doing, will think the way that I don’t.

Hence, the motive of making the deal is alright, but the way they title it is not as ok, at least in my opinion.

I know developers hardcode all the time just to keep things organized in their ways, but our coding world has been deemed to be much universal these days, and every single snippet of code can be delivered or passed along the line for the sake of reusing it. So writing portable, clean and clear code doesn’t only help you maintain it easily, but can also reflect your ability to work collectively or your mentality and approach to code-professionalism.

Too much of the introduction though I know I should keep it simple in this post, but I’m gonna talk more about keep-it-simple or keep-it-simply-organized later on if I have enough time.

So what is the point? I’ve been reading some of my friends’ code at uni, and some of the real-world coders, and some of them have some of the common ways of dealing with coding situations. One of these situations is what I’m trying to stress in this post, which is to deal with switching boolean value efficiently (actually more simply).

Imagine that you have to write a function that checks and switches a certain task from not-completed state to completed state (i.e. FALSE to TRUE). You can have up to two options: 1) switch from not-completed state to completed state and 2) (1) or vice-versa.

For 1) You only want 1 outcome, which is isCompleted holds true whenever you call the method.

public void setComplete() { //switch from not completed to completed
     isCompleted = (!isCompleted) ? !isCompleted : isCompleted;
}

Does it look clean in just a line? Yes it is, and indeed tricky too. I don’t really recommend this way since you can write it  much cleaner and better (to understand) by using if statement, so you won’t play around with assigning variable to itself.

public void setComplete() { //switch from not completed to completed
     if (!isCompleted) isCompleted = true;
}

For 2) You want to have 2 outcomes, depending on the input, as a meaning of switching

public void switchComplete() {
    if (isCompleted)
        isCompleted = false; // if it is completed, then switch it back to be not completed.
    else
        isCompleted = true; // if it is not completed, then switch it to be completed.
}

It looks pretty ordinary and easy to understand. But you can write this in only 1 line instead of 4 lines (with check-style rule applied) or 2 lines (without check-style rule applied). Thus:

public void switchComplete() {
    isCompleted = !isCompleted;
}

I bet a few of you have probably heard of the song Poker Face by Lady Gaga. It used to be one of my most played songs in the period of 2009-2010, and I still keep the habit of turning this song on every time I want to dance, either at home or in a party.

I wanna hold em’ like they do in Texas Plays
Fold em’ let em’ hit me raise it baby stay with me (I love it)
Love game intuition play the cards with Spades to start
And after he’s been hooked I’ll play the one that’s on his heart
…
Can’t read my, Can’t read my
No he can’t read-a my poker face (she’s got me like nobody)
Can’t read my, Can’t read my
No he can’t read-a my poker face (she’s got me like nobody)

But it happened to me (ridiculously) that I didn’t even know what is a poker game, though I had heard several times before that this game is the world’s most favourite gambling game. I tried to look for it and got to know it recently. Personally, I don’t find this game as addictive as other people claim, and I don’t have a strong feeling about it as well (or maybe I don’t know enough). At Trinity, my residential college, I have quite a few friends who are keen on playing poker, and we have some casino nights organized on campus during a year as well. Of course those casino thingy and gambling games are held for fun, we don’t use heaps of bucks on it.

For those of you who don’t know what is poker, here is a brief introduction that I took from Wikipedia:

In most modern poker games, the first round of betting begins with some form of forced bet by one of the players. In standard poker, each player is betting that the hand he has will be the highest ranked. The action then proceeds clockwise around the table and each player in turn must either match the maximum previous bet or fold, losing the amount bet so far and all further interest in the hand. A player who matches a bet may also “raise,” or increase the bet. The betting round ends when all players have either matched the last bet or folded. If all but one player fold on any round, then the remaining player collects the pot and may choose to show or conceal their hand. If more than one player remains in contention after the final betting round, the hands are revealed and the player with the winning hand takes the pot. With the exception of initial forced bets, money is only placed into the pot voluntarily by a player who, at least in theory, rationally believes the bet has positive expected value. Thus, while the outcome of any particular hand significantly involves chance, the long-run expectations of the players are determined by their actions chosen on the basis of probability, psychology and game theory.

You can try playing poker online (of course, you have to do some betting with real money) at this website: http://hu.partypoker.com/ . I haven’t checked it yet but the steps prior to playing should be the same to online shopping’s procedure: get your account registered, connect it with your bank account (via Visa, Mastercard or Paypal) and play. My recommendation is to spend your time and money wisely for entertainment purposes only, don’t get too addicted, it does you no good at all, friends.

Hopefully after reading this. you can now decide whether to dance on Lady Gaga’s Poker Face in your free time or get online for some real poker games, or both at the same time if you can. Let’s entertain yourself!

A programmer started to cuss
Because getting to sleep was a fuss
As he lay there in bed
Looping 'round in his head
was: while(!asleep()) sheep++

2 * b || ! (2 * b)

 class Employee {  

     long lunches;
     short hours;
     double pay;
};

Apple naming function:

function name($product){ return ‘i’.$product; }

Google naming function:

function name($product){ return $product.’ beta’; }

Microsoft naming function:

function name($product){ return name($product); } // what??? recursive

bikini.ToString();

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/660972/what-is-your-best-pseudo-code-phrase/661043#661043

So it’s been installed.