Month: October 2011

I was born and raised in sunny California where at an early age I was blessed with the opportunity and the ability to hone my golfing skills.

So it is not hard to understand that the approaching winter and inherent lower temperature is something I find very difficult to appreciate let alone accept.

The air is colder and the ball becomes hard and untrustworthy. The normally massive drives will stutter and fail in midair, diving downwards prematurely and hitting the fairway tenfold meters shorter than usual.

The swing of the club is frigid and cramped, the muscles in your arms and legs stretching uncomfortably at best. You reminisce about that snap-of-the-whip crack of the club striking the ball but feel an awful muffled thud instead.

I guess the part I dislike the most is that my hands are frozen and stiff, despite the fancy new winter gloves I bought. Just grab onto the club and hold on tightly, hoping for the best.

The good thing though is that mother nature hardens you and helps you mature into the better golfer you were always meant to be. Challenged by the difficult winter conditions, like cold gusts of wind and icy-hard fairways, you are hardened into a truly hero-like golfer.

Good-bye nice golfing season, see you next year. In the meantime, I will try and remain an avid golfer by bearing with mother nature and its inclement conditions.

Later on I will really appreciate the nice warm weather again.

My father passed away exactly eleven years ago to this day. Eleven has always been my lucky number and was also the number in green on the back of my baseball jersey when I played shortstop for Ghent Motors. Today also marks the fifth birthday of our dog Luca who is a brown Labrador Retriever, making her thirty-five years old in human years. The last time I left the hospital where my father lay dying, the sunlight reflected so brightly from the cement sidewalk that it hurt my eyes; I had to turn my despondent head sideways and look the other way. In the meantime, it is slowly but surely getting colder outside as winter approaches with bursts of icy winds. Eleven is also the day of the month and the minutes past the hour on which I was born. The golfing season will return again next year as always meaning that this is a time of smooth patience and spiritual awakening.

It can be quite a chore wrapping your head around some of the new-fangled concepts inherent to JavaScript. But the mental struggle is more often than not more than worth it.

The essence of understanding and becoming enchanted by JavaScript's wow factor is well illustrated by the following fragment. Seemingly short and trivial, but it nonetheless carries quite an amazing punch.

Fortunately, it is easy to create an operator that implements true prototypal inheritance. The object function untangles JavaScript's constructor pattern, achieving true prototypal inheritance. It takes an old object as a parameter and returns an empty new object that inherits from the old one.

Finally being able to ride the gentle quantum leap to higher levels of awareness gives one a good feeling. There's still hope for this little brain of mine, for it is being kept fit and in good form with abstract concepts and constant mental gyrations.

function object(o) {
    function F() {}
    F.prototype = o;
    return new F();
}

Make sure that you understand this perfectly before daring to proceed further in life as a so-called professional software engineer.