Day of the Hoobajoob: Prelude

Today I opened the box of Moviprep and carefully read the instructions. It sounds benign enough – something you would use to prepare for a movie, right? And that’s exactly what it is.

There are only two problems: Where the movie will be shot, and what is required to prepare for it. Moviprep requires a prescription, and unless there’s something pretty crazy going on in there, it’s not likely to be playing at a theater near you.

Yep, you guessed it. I turned fifty a couple of months back, an age at which men must become more vigilant, which includes letting strangers stick fiber optics where there is no ambient light.

My doctor said, “I’d like to tell you it’s not so bad, but… It’s pretty unpleasant.” Not as unpleasant as discovering cancer too late, though, so here I go.

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Numbers, English, and Lazy Programmers

While doing research for an episode you will likely see shortly, I went to YouTube and did a search. This is what I got back:
Screen Shot 2014-06-11 at 10.46.47 AM
Note that it says I got “About 1 results”. Obviously, “results” is incorrect. There’s only one result! And About? What’s the standard deviation on that result?

This from a company that was bought by Google for a billion dollars or so. You’d think they’d have someone who could spend five frickin’ minutes to put in

if (results.count == 1) {…

and to only include the word “About” when the code rounds off the number of results (which it does for very large result sets). Neither of those things should be difficult, and I’d be embarrassed if my program were so sloppy. Yet there it is on one of YouTube’s most oft-loaded pages.

MapMyRide.com made a bit more of an effort, but didn’t test all the cases:
Screen Shot 2014-06-08 at 5.13.22 PM

11st place! The rule that works for 1 and 21 doesn’t work for 11. Crazy English and the words we have for the low teens. I sent off a friendly report to MayMyRide letting them know; the bug was in a new feature, and MMR doesn’t have the resources that YouTube does. We’ll see if they fix it before I fall to 13rd place.

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