Harry Potter, Software Engineer

I realized something last night. Harry Potter knows Python! For that matter, so does Voldemort, and Salazar Slytherin.

Mixed company, at best, but still. Who knew we had such famous companionship in the industry?

Also, this is my 100th post on this blog. Woo-hoo.

Ironic error

I just saw this H&R block ad on a forum I frequent:

Awfully ironic that there's an error in an ad about finding errors.

Feeling good

I was talking to a friend the other day, giving some general relationship advice. At the end of it, she said:

[Yellow], that was the perfect thing to say.

Can I just say how awesome that made me feel? Million bucks, right there.

Mega Man 9

Sometime during the first week of January, I bought Mega Man 9 for our Wii. Having grown up on the original Mega Man, this was a serious trip down nostalgia lane. The developers of MM9 intentionally made the game feel like the originals in the series, right down to the flickering sprites when you get hit.

I've been at the final Dr. Wily stage for probably 3-4 weeks now, but I had no E tanks (special items that refill your life.) I didn't want to go buy some, because I'd have to go through a lot of work to get back to where I was. So instead, I worked on perfecting my strategies and working with what I had.

Today I beat the game. I can't tell you how satisfying a game it was. It was great; everything I could have hoped for in the latest contribution to the Mega Man series. I didn't end up using the Magma Man weapon much, which seems odd, since it's one that gives you nearly unlimited usage. I may have to play with it some more. But overall... man, what a game. Best $8 I've spent in a long time.

Pet Peeves: The Back-Button loop

Have you ever browsed to a website, attempted to go back to your previous page, and found that you stay on the same page you're on? And then, when you look at the back history, it turns out you have to jump back four or five pages in order to get out? (See here for an example.)

Why do people do this? Is there some advertising revenue that they gain by trapping people on their website that don't want to be there? I suppose they get additional impressions on their ads, but trapping me on a website when I'm trying to leave is not going to make me more likely to visit your site in the future.

Surely they must think me a scholar

I got a letter in the mail the other day. In it, I found the following line:

Sweet! I get to spend the next 5 years... uh... being poor!

Guys, life is awesome.

I'm happy

It's interesting how you learn things about yourself simply by your own actions.

...

Okay, that sounds incredibly obvious and utterly cliché. I'll just cut to the story.

I crossed paths with an old friend this morning, one I haven't talked to in months. We didn't have time for an extended conversation, just a brief exchange as we passed. She asked me how I was doing; I responded "Still alive!" with a smile. She said "Good!" and the conversation was over. As I walked away, I realized that my response expressed a somewhat pessimistic outlook on life; it suggested that one would expect there to be a question as to whether I was surviving school.

That's not my outlook on life; I'm quite an optimistic person. My response came from a habit I've developed: when I ask someone how they're doing, they usually say "Fine." That's a boring response, so I often follow up with "Surviving?" or "Still alive?" That usually brings out a little more information about how life is going, etc., and makes the conversation more intersting. Since most people are, in fact, still alive, they give me a response about how they're doing better than what I had asked, and the conversation is a positive one.

But when I responsed "Still alive," I wasn't expressing my inner optimism. I wish I had responded "I'm happy," not because of any particular effect that it would have had on the other party, but because I want to be the kind of person that is actually happy.

Okay, enough of the sappy self-analysis. Happy January 8th, everybody!

Dear iTunes haters

Dear iTunes haters,

I understand if you don't like the software. That's fine. But just so you know, as of today there are 8 million DRM-free songs on iTunes, and by the end of the first quarter, they'll all be DRM-free. Straight from apple.com/itunes/whatsnew/:

High-quality, DRM-free music.
iTunes Plus is the new standard on iTunes.
Now, you can choose from millions of iTunes Plus songs from all four major music labels and thousands of independents. With iTunes Plus, you get high-quality, 256-Kbps AAC encoding. All free of burn limits and digital rights management (DRM). So iTunes Plus music will play on iPod, Apple TV, all Mac and Windows computers, and many other digital music players. It’s also easy to upgrade your iTunes library to iTunes Plus. You don’t have to buy the song or album again. Just pay the 30¢ per song upgrade price. (Music video upgrades are 60¢ and entire albums can be upgraded for 30 percent of the album price.)

So. No more complaining. And in case you're wondering about that funny "AAC" encoding, here's what Wikipedia has to say about it:

Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at many bit rates. AAC has been standardized by ISO and IEC, as part of the MPEG-2 & MPEG-4 specifications

And here's a list from Wikipedia of common portable media players that support AAC:

• Apple iPod/iPhone
• Creative Zen Portable
• Microsoft Zune
• SanDisk Sansa
• Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) with firmware 2.0 or greater
• Sony Walkman
• SonyEricsson Walkman Phones-W series, e.g. W890i
• Nintendo DSi (To be released in America mid-2009)
• Slacker G2 Personal Radio Player

So. No more complaining, you hear? I want none of it.

Just so you know, I have no problem with people buying music from other legal sources, such as Amazon.com. There are plenty of reasons to do so. But DRM-free-ness is no longer one of them. I find the iTunes store to be very conveninent, and I'll continue using it myself. You're free to do as you will.

Best of Spam: The Standing Light

I've always found spam fascinating, since so much of it is utterly unbelievable. I got this one today, and just had to share it.

Dear sir/mm,
I am sending you this e-mail with greetings to you and your whole
company. My name is Mr. James I would like to make an inquiry based on your
Standing Light . I would like for you to give me the price


If you do I want you to kindly get back at me at your earliest time with
the price for the products because I need the order for these Standing Light
to be placed as soon as possible. i am Ordering to my new company in Ghana
.And also i will lie to use my credit car for the payment and i have my
freight company that will sip to me .I will look forward hearing from you as
soon as possible with the price for the Standing Light.

Thank youveymuch...
SincereYours,
Mr. James

Let's see. Quirky capitalization, a nebulous request for "products" that are sometimes called "Standing Light," and they will "lie to use [their] credit car". Not to mention a freight company that will "sip" to them, the quirky line breaks, or the peculiar valediction "SincereYours".

Seriously? People respond to this?

I'm kinda prideful

I just finished taking an in-class test. There were eight short-answer questions on the test, two questions per page.

As I got to the last page of the test, I had to look up every time someone turned their page or rustled their test; I was worried that someone would finish before me. This is a silly and prideful thought, of course, because neither my learning nor my grade in the class is affected in the least by how long I take on the test. In fact, I would have been wise to take a moment to review all my answers to make sure I hadn't made any mistakes. I would have been wise to write more slowly on those last two answers, to make sure I didn't miss any key words instead of rushing to be first.

But I wanted to be first. Somehow this makes me think that since nobody finished before me, nobody's going to do significantly better than me, and thus my grade won't suffer.

Guess what.

I was first.

Error messages that make sense

I recently upgraded my Ubuntu installation from 8.04 to the newly-released 8.10. (The Ubuntu releases are designated as Year.Month, hence this is the 2008 October release.) For some reason the login won't complete after the upgrade, so I've been doing some investigation.

I dropped to a recovery console and told it to run a few basic checks. It chewed on that for a while and then came back with this information:

Your system is up-to-date

There are no upgrades available for your system. The upgrade will now be canceled.

Do you want to start the upgrade? [yN]

Umm...

Grad school

Do you ever have one of those days where you feel like you want to talk to someone, but you have no idea who and you have no idea what you want to talk about? I'm having one of those. But Dragon Lady's not feeling well and went to bed early.

So instead, I'll blog.

I've had in my mind for a few years that I would probably enjoy being a university professor at some point. As this necessarily implies grad school, I'd assumed that I'd eventually end up doing graduate work. I hadn't really made any immediate plans, though, figuring that if it ended up being something important to me, I could always come back and do it later. There was a career fair on campus a few weeks back for technical majors, so when went around talking to potential employers, I told them I was interested in a full-time position.

A few days later, I was in my Software Engineering class when it hit me that I really wanted to be a professor. I walked up to my professor after class and told him "So... I want your job." (Yes, I really said that. Though I then clarified that I was a job like his, and not necessarily his precise job. I would like to someday teach at BYU, though.) I set up a time with my professor to talk about the options, and after an hour-and-a-half worth of discussion, I was feeling pretty good about graduate school.

Of course, I believe in keeping my options open as well, so I'd been interviewing with a few companies as well, just in case. A couple weeks after I'd talked to my professor, I got a job offer from Amazon.com.

A really, really attractive offer.

I'd decided on grad school at that time, but they offered me about 30% more in salary than what I'd been planning on turning down. Plus a signing bonus, and some other great benefits. I hadn't planned on having to turn down such an offer. It really makes you evaluate your priorities when you realize that you could take a job right now for which the starting pay is more than what you plan on making after 5-6 years of graduate school.

It makes you think a lot.

One of the things my professor had said during our discussion was that the Lord often has an opinion on life-altering decisions such as these, and after all the planning and evaluation we can do, it ultimately comes down to the Spirit. While he personally recommended graduate school, he took care to point out that if the Spirit says otherwise, you should always follow the Spirit.

Good advice.

As you might expect, I've been praying about this a lot. If I do jump straight into grad school, we'd likely be staying here in Provo. While I'd like to do a internship this summer to help pay for grad school, circumstances are such that we'd really like to stay here in Provo this summer if we're not moving permanently. Thus, I couldn't do an internship with Amazon either. (They've already informed me that I could convert the full-time offer to an internship offer if I so desired.) This means that if I do grad school, I'll need to find work for next summer. So it's a complex issue, and in a lot of ways it makes sense to just take the job.

After praying about it for a while, though, I really feel like grad school is where I need to be. So despite the attractiveness of the Amazon offer, I've turned it down. We'll continue to live like paupers, but that's what feels right, so that's what we'll do.

Sometimes trusting in the Lord is a little scary, even when you know it's right.

A complaint, with gratitude

Our culture has a wonderful tradition at marriages in which many well-wishers bring gifts to the wedding reception. These gifts are especially appropriate as they often come from those who are more established in life, and for whom a moderate gift will not represent a significant hardship. Likewise, the recipients of these gifts are generally quite grateful for these gifts, since newlyweds are often working with an extremely small budget and wouldn't otherwise have the means to furnish a home. I'm aware of some young couples who have received gifts from over 250 people. These gifts, while usually only a small sacrifice for any individual giver, represent a great blessing in the life of the recipient.

Our culture also has a tradition that when a gift is received, it is polite to send a card thanking the giver for the gift. Furthermore, many would consider it rude to not send such a card. After all, having received such a gift, could one not do the basic courtesy of acknowledging the gift? Isn't this what the Parable of the Ten Lepers teaches us: that we should seek to thank those who bless us with gifts?

There's a problem here, though. A single young couple having received 250 gifts will now have to write 250 thank-you cards. Generally, these cards are to be hand-written and individually addressed. Writing a personal thank-you card takes time, and is made even more difficult by the fact that the young couple often does not even know the person who gave the gift. (Friends of parents, etc.)

But this time is something that couples often don't have! I'll be honest: I'm busy with homework, organizing a house, taking care of a wife, fixing the car, working, other responsibilities (The Board, for example), etc. I could handle writing one or two gift cards, but while each person who gave us a gift only had to take a short amount of time to select a gift, we have to do all of that times hundreds.

Let's take a look at current trends in computing. These days, most CPUs have multiple cores; they can essentially do two things at once. It's not at all uncommon to have 4 or 8 cores in your home desktop anymore; as a result, programmers have to learn to write programs in parallel. They break a problem down into many sub-problems so that each core can work on it individually. Then all sub-problems are combined into a single problem. This many-to-one pattern works well because the bulk of the work is done in parallel, and in the end there's only a small amount of work to combine the results.

Many-to-one is what we see when all our friends went out and bought us gifts. We genuinely appreciate it, and our lives are much better now because of it.

But on the other hand, one-to-many doesn't work so well. This is seen in computing when one processor tries to solve many problems at once. Have you ever tried to run 30 programs at once on your computer? It doesn't work so well, because the computer gets so bogged down trying to keep track of where everyone's at that it can't get as much of the real work done.

One-to-many is also what we see when a single young couple is asked to send thank-you notes to each person who gave them a gift. Not only do we have to write the notes, we also have to make sure that notes get matched up with envelopes, we have to track down addresses for people we've never heard of, we have to look up what each person gave us, etc. There's a whole lot of overhead that's going on that's separate from the actual expression of thanks.

It's just a huge mess, and really, for not a whole lot. Most people who receive these thank-you cards will briefly read them, smile, realize that the card doesn't really mean a whole lot (since we didn't have time to intensively personalize each one) and throw it away. It just seems like a waste to me. Can't we just let people feel good for having given a gift, without the expectation that every gift will be acknowledged with a hand-written, personalized expression of heartfelt gratitude?

Now, let me be clear. I am grateful for these gifts and the thoughtfulness and generosity behind each one. I am appreciative of the sacrifices that these people made. I'm not trying to say that we somehow deserve all these gifts without any obligation to feel grateful. We are grateful.

But really, would it be so bad to just make a mail-merge somewhat-generic thank-you card and send them all out that way? Or even just an e-mail? I mean, really, if we're just trying to get the message across that we're grateful, why all the other mess. If we'd only received five gifts, I'd happily write cards to express my gratitude. In that case, I could actually take time to write something meaningful. But as we've been writing our thank-you cards, I've found that I usually end up saying the same thing on each one, with little variation. The card isn't meaningful, and it's not because I don't want it to be. I just can't take the time to make each one meaningful; I'm busy trying to keep my head above water. Remember how the young couple is usually not as well established in life? Why then are we putting a huge burden upon them?

So anyway. That's my complaint. I think that the social expectation that every wedding gift must be individually acknowledged with a thank-you card is burdensome and doesn't really do anyone much good.

Well, except for the card-makers and the postal service. I'm sure they love the status quo.

The end.

Feel free to add comments about how ungrateful I am, etc. I'm just frustrated at the daunting task that still remains.

In good news...

In good news... the peeling just started. Like, just 3 minutes ago.

That means I'm done itching. Hopefully, only the worst part (right under my sternum) will actually peel, but either way, the worst is over.

[relieved sigh]

How to go insane

Last weekend Dragon Lady and I went to Seven Peaks with some of her good friends. I don't know why, but I've always had a slight "macho" complex when it comes to sunscreen; I delude myself that I'll just get a nice tan despite my pasty-white hasn't-seen-the-sun-in-a-year skin. In case you were wondering, it's not true. I got burnt like a redneck piece of toast.

Having a sunburn is never fun, but the first couple days were at least bearable. I mean, it hurt when I slid my arm into my backpack, and my shoulders protested whenever I reached for a glass from the cupboard, but it was bearable as long as I was careful with it. On Monday night, though, as I was just about to go to bed, things got a whole lot worse.

It started with a sharp itch in my shoulder.  Since scratching a sunburn isn't a whole lot of fun, I left it alone, hoping it would go away.  It didn't.  It spread down my upper arm and started crawling down my chest.  I decided that it was definitely time to go to bed, before things got any worse.  I put some aloe vera on, hoping it would help the burn stop itching, and crawled into bed.

Getting into bed didn't really help anything, though.  The sheets of my bed were just scratchy enough to aggravate the rest of me, and before long my entire upper body was itching.  And this wasn't just a light itch; this was a jaw-clenching, teeth-grinding, back-arching kind of itch.  I tried to lie still, since any movement started a new fire on my skin, but even breathing was too much.  After about 20 minutes of agony, I jumped into the shower, hoping that water might calm the itch.  It calmed it a little, but not enough for me to be anywhere near comfortable.  At about 1:00 AM I decided that I couldn't justify staying up that late anymore, even if I did itch like crazy, so I got out.

The problem with taking a shower while you're sunburned is that you have to use a towel afterward to dry off.  And hotel towels, being washed and rewashed, are not known for their softness.  Within 30 seconds of getting out of the shower, I itched worse than ever.  I was pacing back and forth in my hotel room, trying to hold in a scream as there was simply nothing I could do beyond praying for relief.  (Which I did, don't worry.)  I finally got back in bed, (since pacing wasn't doing any good,) and steeled myself to bear the awful burning.  I tried to focus my attention on some non-itching area of my body (my big toe), but it didn't help much.  I was burning, itching, dying for relief.  If you've read Stephenie Meyer's Breaking Dawn, you'll understand what I mean when I say that I felt about like Bella did during a certain rather-painful event in the middle of the book.

I nearly went insane.  I would have given a lot to be able to get out of my head for a while.  It was just that excruciating.  I told Dragon Lady I'd been itching, and she told me that it was good.  That it meant I was healing.

"Good."

Maybe it was healing, but you'd think my body could come up with a less-agonizing method of repairing skin damage.  Having healed skin wouldn't have helped much if I'd gone insane and jumped out the window.  And really, it wasn't that far off.

Moral of the story: Use sunscreen.  Really.

URU is coming back!

Most of my readers probably know that I'm a big fan of the Myst series. There was a time when I lived and breathed the game. I was in a Myst fan chatroom when my parent's house caught fire. There were times when I considered attending a Myst fan convention. (Heck, there are still moments when I consider it, if I'm honest with myself.) Dragon Lady and I played Myst 3 together for quite a while back when we were first dating. It's one of those things that I grew up with, and it will be forever a part of me.

Due to my mission and such, I have never played Myst V (the last in the series), nor URU (the online multiplayer game based in the Myst universe). I'm working on Myst IV right now, and plan to play Myst V once I have a computer that will handle the graphics decently. I was quite disappointed, though, when URU was cancelled in 2004 for business reasons. I felt like I'd never quite be able to finish the series; there was some part of this obsession of mine that would never be fulfilled.

URU came back in late 2006 on GameTap, but was then cancelled again earlier this year. Naturally, all this back-and-forth availability has been rough on Cyan Worlds, Inc (the developer of the game), and there was a time in September 2005 when they actually laid off all but two of their employees before promptly re-hiring them when a deal was worked out with a third party. Even now, though, they seem to be limping by, despite creating the number-one-selling PC game from 1993 to 2002. When URU was cancelled this last time, it seemed like my hopes were lost.

So you can understand my excitement when I ran across news that GameTap and Cyan had worked out an agreement under which the license would return to Cyan. They didn't release all the details, but it sounds like neither GameTap nor Cyan was making money in the current state, so they figured it didn't hurt to let Cyan try at it. That's my understanding, anyway. The new agreement is really for the fans; Cyan is planning to only charge enough to maintain operation; they're not looking for profit right now. Content creation will be opened up to fans as well, so Cyan is essentially creating a quasi-open-source MMORPG to be run at cost only. Naturally, if it takes off, we can expect prices to rise, but I'm perfectly fine with that; anything that helps Cyan get into the black is good in my book.

So. If any of you have any interest in the Myst series, I encourage you to keep an eye on it. It's exciting for me, and hopefully by the time they get it up and running, I'll have a computer with a better graphics card than an integrated chip on my motherboard.

This is so cool. :)

Ridiculously pleased

I'm a nerd.

I know it. You don't need to tell me so. In fact, I kinda get a lot of enjoyment out of it.

Anyway.

I was sitting at my job, and I heard another one of the students mention that he was about to go home to play Riven. I immediately perked up, as Riven is the sequel to Myst, and as dedicated readers know, I love the Myst series.

Naturally, I asked him how far along he was. He told me he was stuck at a particular part, and was actually planning on looking it up online. He felt he had the correct solution, and it just wasn't working. I'm not a big fan of using online help sites for puzzle games like Riven, since you tend to see more than you were looking for, so I offered to give him a hint or two. We talked, and he was able to figure out what he was doing wrong. Hooray. I asked if he'd played Exile (Myst III), which he hadn't, so I told him to look forward to it. A few minutes of conversation later, he was gone.

I then elated for the next 5 minutes that I'd talked to someone about Myst.

[elates]

...

Yes, I know it.

I'm a nerd.


Did anyone notice the slightly chiasmic structure of this post? I did!

Magic Numbers

In programming circles, there's an evil phenomenon known as "magic numbers". This describes the practice of using a number in the program's code whose meaning might not be clear to others. For example, if I wrote:

x = t/(60 * 1440);

you might not be sure what the code did. On the other hand, if I wrote:

SECONDS_PER_MINUTE = 60;
MINUTES_PER_DAY = 1440;
x = t/(SECONDS_PER_MINUTE * MINUTES_PER_DAY);

it's easy(er) to see that I'm calculating days from seconds. 60 and 1440 were magic numbers that hid the meaning of the code. An additional benefit of programming with named constants (like those found in the second example) is that if for some reason I need to change one of the constants, I only need to change it in one place. So, for example, if by divine decree all minutes are now 61 seconds long (maybe the earth is slowing?) I only need to change it in one place and all my calculations are updated. Nice.

The other day, though, I found a whole new meaning to the phrase "Magic Number" in a computer sense. I use Adium as my instant messaging client. It's an OS X-only program which allows me to talk to users on AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Jabber, Bonjour, Google Talk, (etc. etc. etc.) all in the same program. Adium has an emoticon replacement feature, fairly common to such clients that turns :) into an actual smiley. Of course, it doesn't just cover your generic smiley face; it has hundreds of smileys available through various arcane and unexpected character sequences. Occasionally I'll run across one unintentionally, but looking back, I can usually see how the text might be construed as a face of some sort.

I was chatting with Dragon Lady the other day, and she was telling me about some problems she was having at work. She was running a query on a database and getting inconsistent results. She then told me this:

How many records???

I clicked on the smiley to see the underlying text. This is what I found:


Oh. 1414. I see.

If that's not a "magic number", I don't know what is.

P.S. Okay, okay. It's a lame analogy. I know. But it's still what I thought of when I saw it. And if any of you Adium users are curious and want to verify it, just make sure you're using the "Default" emoticon set. I understand that this will be fixed in the 1.3 release, so you have only a short time to enjoy your magic-number-ness. In the meantime, if anyone knows how to get "sarcastic" from 1414, please let me know.

Why I Love Norberta

Well, I got engaged recently, so I figured I should probably post something on here about it. I mean, it's a significant life event, right? Probably blog-worthy, I suppose. The problem with trying to summarize your fiancée in a blog post is that you've spent so long growing to love her that anything written seems shallow and inadequate. So, with apologies in advance for the inherent failings, here's why I love "Norberta."

(Oh, and if you're already groaning from sappiness and such, please feel free to skip this one.)

I first began to be attracted to Norberta as I read her blog entries during her time at the Jerusalem Center. I first read them just out of curiosity, but I was increasingly impressed by the spiritual applications to her own life that she made while visiting the various sites. She didn’t just talk about how she liked visiting the Garden Tomb, or how she felt for the people in a land torn by conflict; she wrote about what it meant to her and what she could change in her own life because of it. She wrote about her growing love for the hymns of the Church, for the city of Jerusalem, and for the people she met there. I especially remember being very impressed by her love for the Gospel and her caring attitude toward those around her.

Norberta is always striving to become a better person. She’s got a list of things she doesn’t like, but instead of staying away from them, she works on learning to like them. She makes active decisions about the kind of person she wants to be, and then she works toward becoming that person. She makes delicious meals all the time, and is constantly trying out new recipes to become even better. She’s always watching out for me, and has taken care of me when I was sick or needing help on numerous occasions. She reads books for the joy of reading, she quilts for the joy of quilting, and she gardens for the joy of gardening. As far as the “domestic housewife skills” category goes, she’s got it well covered.

More than all that, though, I love the way that Norberta and I can communicate with each other. All those things that you just don’t know quite how to describe, we understand implicitly. There have been so many times when I wanted to say something but didn’t even know how to start. Before I even said a word, she filled in all the words I was struggling to find. I don’t think a week goes by when we don’t tell the other to “stop reading my mind!” We make the same side comments, we think the same thoughts, and we even try to tell the same jokes at the same time. (It doesn’t work so well, as we end up laughing at each other before the joke ever gets told.)

I love that I never have to wonder about Norberta’s priorities. She loves the Lord and actively seeks to grow spiritually and draw closer to her Father in Heaven. She recognizes the great calling and responsibility that is motherhood, and desires to be a full-time mom. Her heart is set on the things of the Spirit, and nothing comes before that. She’s served as Relief Society President in our ward for the last year, and though it’s been difficult for her on a number of occasions, I’ve never heard her wish she didn’t have that responsibility. She’s been called to serve the Lord and so she does. It’s as simple as that.

I could go on for a while about the many ways that Norberta and I are similar. We met with our bishop the other day, and he reminded us that our children will be “as different from each other as the two of you are.” We turned to each other and laughed, because if that’s true, we might as well get a cookie-cutter mold for people. We joke that we’re really the same person, just inhabiting two bodies. Everything just feels right. Everything feels like it’s meant to be. I honestly love her, and couldn't be happier.

The problem with watermelon

Watermelon is, without a doubt, one of my favorite fruits. It just doesn't keep very well once you've cut it up.

It kinda gets rubbery and loses most of its flavor.

Sad.