Collections of socks

By hopping over to India this year for a wedding and missing Christmas, I also missed the one gift that really excites me. Socks. I’m not kidding. Though repeated inexplicable twists of fate, I can never find good socks in stores and it’s a miracle if I can retain a pair intact once they have been gifted to me, which only happens once a year on the day that Jesus was born. So now having missed Christmas, I’m basically screwed to endure cold feet until summer comes along and I can transfer to sandals.

Which brings me to my point regarding the System.Collections namespace in .NET (my feet are cold so bear with me). I always thought the collections libraries in .NET were excellent until I moved away from web application development and started writing thick clients, where efficiently handling ridiculous amounts of data in memory was of the utmost importance. The lack of a simple Hashlist in the libraries made me wonder whether something was missing from the libraries, or whether it was a conscious decision to leave out a programming construct that was not efficient. Wesner Moise’s entry on the topic helped clear up that issue for me, although I’m not sure how I wound up so far back in his archives. Maybe I was distracted by argyle.

The Bourne Identity and Doug

I just finished watching The Bourne Identity, the first movie that arrived on my new Netflix account. Even though I'd seen it before and was duly impressed, I was pleasantly surprised that Doug Liman's directorial skill also managed to win over Saint Peg, who is not known for being an action film aficionado. I think that Doug deserves a lot of credit for his work as a filmmaker to date.

Also, although I am aware of the weird familiarity with which everyone feels comfortable addressing the famous, I feel comfortable calling Doug by his first name because I went to a seminar he spoke at back when I was at NYU, and he pretty much opened up his life to everyone who was there. It's hard to address someone by their last name who's told you the blatantly selfish side of their life story, so Doug is Doug, the man who got his directorial start by moving in with two hot chicks so he could start playing softball with the men who tried to bed them. He just happened to be lucky that Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau slept over, and although I'm not sure what the life lesson is there, I'm sure that there is one.