World's Suckiest Job

President Trump's Press Secretary. Poor Sean Spicer. Anyone remember Baghdad Bob?

Game Over, Man! Game Over!

Bill Paxton dead at 61. Private Hudson, you will be missed.

Special My Ass

When I am Earth Overlord, TV shows advertised as a special episode airing on a different night must be called what they are: reruns.

Lost and Found

On the lam for 15 days. Thank goodness for animal traps and canned fish.

Affordable Health Care 2016

Blue Cross/Blue Shield HMO wasn't horrible, but it wasn't all that good either; lots of doctors switching out of the system so it was a bit of a hassle finding a PCP in the medical center. I switched over to Kelsey-Seybold for 2017. It's still an HMO, but all the doctors are in the same building just down the street. For me, having to buy insurance on the individual market, the best part of Obamacare is being able to easily switch between plans; at least for now since there's still more than one carrier in Texas. Too bad the other parts aren't working that well. The big question now is what Trumpcare will bring.

Karma

So birtherism's most ardent cheerleader is now going to have the Russian election interference forever hanging over his presidential legitimacy.

What goes around, comes around.

All Hail Trump.

CLIPS Year in Review: 2016

A great deal of work this year on version 6.4 focused on redesigning the APIs that have accumulated decades of cruft. I think the simplification and streamlining will make embedding CLIPS much easier.

Version 0.2 of CLIPS iOS was released. It included the Wine Recommendation example program. Significant progress was made on version 0.6 of CLIPS JNI. Support for I/O routers and user functions were added and an IDE for development was created. For version 0.2 of CLIPS .NET, a console application supporting UTF-8 was created.

Plans for 2017 are to complete release versions of CLIPS 6.4, CLIPS JNI 1.0, and CLIPS .NET 1.0. Working on updating the Advanced Programming Guide is already under way, and the Basic Programming Guide and Interfaces Guide will also contain some major updates. My stretch goal for the year will be to develop an IDE using the QT cross-platform application framework. Microsoft dropped support for MDI applications, so creating a .NET IDE would be much more difficult than it was for MacOS or Java/Swing. Using QT looks like a much better alternative than using expensive third party extensions for .NET.