I’m not sure how my mind works or why it thinks of these things. Maybe I’m thinking of work too much. Thing is, I’ve had to explain this “Navigation Service” class that we’re working on more times than I care to count. (The Navigation Service is a class that helps in providing navigational menus, breadcrumb trails, and other navigational artifacts by maintaining an object hierarchy representing the site… basically.)

So I was on the way home last night and decided it might be described best by Adam Sandler’s “Cajun Man” character:

Presenter: The Navigation Service provides an object-oriented view of the site map, related links, and quick links for a site. You can use it to display, for example, a tree-view of the available pages for a site.

Cajun Man: Hierarchical presenta-shawn.

Presenter: The Navigation Service is accessed through a property available in the base page class. You could cache an instance of the Navigation Service class and then access that cached instance through the property on the page.

Cajun Man: Single-tawn.

Presenter: When getting a reference to the Navigation Service, you don’t actually create the instance directly. Instead, call the static “GetNavigationService” method and it will get an instance for you.

Cajun Man: Factory crea-shawn.

Presenter: What the Navigation Service does is it takes the navigation.config file and reads it into an object model based on the file schema.

Cajun Man: XML deserializa-shawn.

Presenter: Then it does some manual processing to make the objects just a little bit “smarter” than that, filling in calculated values and such.

Cajun Man: Initializa-shawn.

Presenter: If you have a bunch of, for example, “Item” elements in the “Site,” those will come out in the Navigation Service as a…

Cajun Man: Strongly-typed collec-shawn.

Presenter: Right. And if there are no elements in a collection, you end up with…

Cajun Man: Empty collec-shawn.

Presenter: Well, no… actually you get a null value, though the Navigation Service could be updated to make any null collections be empty collections. That way you could just iterate over the collection rather than having to check for null all the time.

Cajun Man: No NullReferenceExcep-shawn.

…that’s as far as I got before I made it home and my train of thought was lost, but I think you see how it goes. While I’m nowhere near as funny as Adam Sandler, maybe I can use this to explain (in a memorable fashion) how this thing works. Heh.

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I was headed to the hockey game last night and noticed I had a flat tire before I pulled out of the garage. On further inspection, all four tires were totally bald. Time to get new tires.

Went to Les Schwab this morning and picked up some new tires. $681 later, I was on my way to work. (Admittedly, I bought some pretty decent 65,000 mile performance tires, not your stock generic tire.)

Damn, tires are expensive.

Saturday morning at 8:00 my dad showed up, and by 8:30 we were starting the first episode of the second season of 24.

Over the course of the rest of the day, we watched, back to back, the entire season.

We took breaks, of course, to go get food, sit and talk, and so on. We lost a little time on those, but considering there are almost 20 minutes of commercials in every episode when it airs, it only takes about 16 hours to see all 24 episodes.

Dad left a little after midnight, skipping out on the final four episodes of the season (those were the ones he had originally seen when they aired; he hadn’t seen the rest), but I watched them, finishing up a little after 3:00a the next day.

It was a blast. I love hanging out with my dad, and getting a chance to watch a great story over the course of a day with him gave me the same feeling that you have when you’re a kid having a sleep-over with friends: sort of giddy… and a little sad when it’s time to go home.

We ate junk food (donuts, candy bars, pizza, pop… you name it) and did nothing but watch the show. It ruled. No responsibility, no jobs, no problem solving. True decompression.

I noticed an interesting thing after finishing the show. After spending basically a day with the characters in the show, you get to know them and like them. You see how they interact with each other, you see how they live their [fictional] lives. After that day with them, it’s hard to believe they don’t exist, and it’s hard to see the story end because they’ve become your friends.

That happens to me after reading a good book, too, and it makes me realize how people can get attached (and even lose touch with reality) after watching soap operas and other long-running serials for years on end.

Then again, I don’t know it would have happened had I watched on a week-by-week basis the way it’s broadcast. As it was, I had a hard time keeping track of all of the subplot threads going on and occasionally had to watch the “last time on 24” summary at the beginning of the show to keep it all straight.

It also makes me wonder what would happen if I watched some other show back to back like that. Alias, maybe. I already know those characters; would it have the same effect, or would it anything change at all?

I just scheduled - and got approved - my week of luxurious paid time off duing the first week of November for…

Wait for it…

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas!

That’s right! The entire first week of November, my vacation in San Andreas begins. I will be sitting on the couch, eating junk food, sitting next to my 16-pound fat cat (who likes to lay around next to people playing video games - it’s my Tubby Game Cat), doing drive-by shootings and robberies. Living the life of Grand Theft Auto.

I seriously can’t wait.