zacharyc

I thought it would be worthwhile to publish my expenses for my college team last year. This is useful for anyone who is interested in calculating whether or not you can afford to an open cheerleading team. I cheered for CheerGyms.com. They were a good team and I will talk about my pros and cons a bit lower, but first lets look at the expenses.

This is just the hard numbers and I’ve gone a little soft on the miles and gas price. The point, however, is still relatively strong: I spent nearly $2,000.00 no an open team last year. I had a good time, but that is really expensive, so I’ve decided not to cheer again next year while I try to get my finances in order.

I’d also like to list some of the pros and cons of my experience at CheerGyms.com so that others can decide if it is the correct place for them:

Pros

• Great History – CheerGyms.com has been around for many years and is a staple in the local cheerleading community. Even those programs that are run by other coaches normally have some connection back to CheerGyms.
• Great Administrators – My experience with the administrators of the program was great. Morton and Danny are the co-owners of the gym and all my experiences with them were very positive. They are strong leaders and GREAT coaches
• Great Facility – CheerGyms have two gyms, one in San Jose and one in Concord. They are both relatively large facilities as cheerleading space in the bay area goes. Their gym in Concord is the biggest gym I’ve been to within comfortable driving distance. Both gyms have full cheerleading floors with relatively high ceilings. Both gyms have at least one tumble track and a crash mat.
• Good Teammates – Throughout the year we had our disagreements, but in general the team was full of good people. I wasn’t best friends with everyone, but I felt that everyone cared about the program, and I was very excited to be a part of it.

Cons

• Lack of Skill Practice – This is part of the way that CheerGyms work, but they don’t get a chance to factor in skill growth into practice. We only met for about 2 hours a week, so this is acceptable, but it is really something I enjoy doing.
• Lack of Consistent Leadership at Practice – Throughout the year, we shifted coaches. It was not entirely avoidable as our head coach had his hip replaced, but still it would have been good to have a strong coaching experience. I do not feel I had one. I also think that this doesn’t persist to other teams at the gym, I think it is unique to the college team.
• No Coed Nature – this team is very small coed, despite the fact that we had 7 to 9 guys on the team. Guys did not do any direct toss stunts. While this is the nature of the business of most teams in the area, it was in stark contrast to what I was looking for.
• Lack of Team Togetherness – I never really felt part of the team. There did not appear to be too much team bonding and it made for a very disjoint feeling. This is something I’ve had on my previous All Star teams and I missed it sorely. Again, I think this is unique to the College team due to the distances that people live from the gym, and how often practices are.
• Distance – This one isn’t really the gyms fault, but mine for joining the gym. It was way too far for me. Nearly an hour every sunday morning each way. This was just too much.

All of that measured, I’m glad I had an opportunity to be a part of that program. I wish them all the best, but for me it just doesn’t work.

zacharyc :: Jun.21.2009 :: Cheerleading, Personal :: No Comments »

Daring Fireball has a link to the a study of the computer statistics for the student body of the University of Virginia. You can find the article here. The most interesting chart for me is the last one about the number of Macintosh users versus Windows users. The table is interesting, but I would also like to see the percentage of user population, not just the hard numbers. So here is the same data put in percentage of user base using Mac OS and Windows.

While the table is interesting its hard to really see the trends. The Bar charts at the original site are useful, but I found a line chart much more conclusive. It cleary shows the trend of macintosh percentage as it climbs. If you’re a fan of Windows, this might be a little disheartening as it very clearly demonstrates that while Macintosh use is on the rise, Windows use is on a significant downturn.

zacharyc :: Jun.10.2009 :: Apple :: No Comments »

I was reading this cheerleading blog today when I came up to a quote that I have to pass on. The article is part of One Two Down Up, a blog for a cheerleading coach who doesn’t make their identity easily known. (I could probably find it, but I’m too lazy)

One of the articles is about Cheer Parents,

The Ups and Downs of a Cheerleading Coach: Those Crazy CHEER PARENTS.

This Article is particularly interesting to me because of one quote:

As a coach, we make decisions based on what is best for the team. Parents make decisions based on what they feel is best for their child. As a parent myself, I understand that sometimes a parent’s love overrules logic or reason.

This is very true. Now, some parents think outside the benefit for their own child, but that is hard. In the end we always protect what is best for our family.

What I think is sad, is that often times the two conflict. Often times what is best for the team is not what is best for you. Working as coach and convincing someone to do something that might not be best for them is very hard. Add on the fact that now parents will take the side of the kid and it makes a coaches life very difficult.

This is the part of coaching that they don’t teach you while you cheer. I learned tons of technique, tons of tips and tricks, but this is a skill I was never taught. I’m still working on handling these items, and if you look at my last year of coaching, this could really be my largest struggle, but I feel I’m making progress. This post provides a couple of suggestions for handling this, worth the read if your a coach.

zacharyc :: May.18.2009 :: Coaching :: No Comments »

These are my links for April 23rd through April 24th:

• The Skeptical Hypochondriac :: Worrying About Health News Since 2009. –
• Category Inflation at the Webbys – Waxy.org – Remind me never to partake in this nonsense.
• NEW MATH by Craig Damrauer –
• Fluid Images — Unstoppable Robot Ninja –
• Our Favorite Typefaces of 2008 | Review Feature | Typographica –

zacharyc :: Apr.24.2009 :: General, Links :: No Comments »

These are my links for April 22nd from 21:01 to 21:01:

• Deaths, injuries raise alarm at cheerleading's dangers – The Boston Globe – This post talks about the importance of Cheerleading safety especially in the state of Mass. It is an interesting piece, but I feel that people who advocate safety for cheerleaders sometimes go to the extreme and over regulate the sport. My classic example is the double full, which used to be legal in college, but due to safety restrictions has now been made illegal. Many people were landing it fine, some weren't. Better training would be a better solution than complete restriction.

zacharyc :: Apr.22.2009 :: General, Links :: No Comments »

Last night a friend invited me over to her place for a get together to celebrate the ending of passover and the ability to eat leaven bread. I, being only quasi Jewish, have been eating leaven bread for the entire passover period, but my religion is a story for another day.

I end up in this room, and she has a bunch of friends over, and we get to talking and somehow it comes up that my father was the president of J.Crew for a couple of years in the 90s, and she sparks up, stares at me and says “We must be cousins!”. Honestly, I was a little put off at first. I don’t know how to act. I’m not particularly close to my family, which is something I wish I could change, but finding random family across the country is weird, to say the least.

We went through a bit of history and by the end of the night we had solidified that we were indeed cousins, related through my grandmother on my father’s side. This was a very happy surprise, and while I wasn’t captured by it at the moment, the more I think about it the cooler it would be to have more family out here (3000 miles away from the rest of my family).

And while this is really cool, this leads in the rest of this post which is about the Small World theory. You better know it is as Six Degrees of separation. In which Stanley Milgram found that through an average of 6.1 mailings, someone in the middle of Nebraska or Kansas could connect to a person in Boston. You can read about the full experiment on the Wikipedia page.

My argument today is that world was much smaller than 6 degrees during the time of Milgram’s study, and that the world is only continuing to shrink over time (thanks mostly to technology).

First premise, the world was smaller when he did the study. The parameters of the Milgram study said that you should send the letter to the person you believe to most likely to have a connection to the Target. My belief is that people don’t know who is in each other’s address book. We might have a vague idea, but we are not the best at knowing how all these connections exist.

Sue, in Kansas, might have sent the mail to Paul in Pennsylvania because he is geographically closer to Boston. What Sue doesn’t know is that her friend Emily, two blocks down the road happens to have met the Target at a conference in New York. Paul doesn’t know the guy and has to forward the note on. Thus what was a one person connection is now greater than 1 connection.

Secondly, the world is getting smaller. With the invent of commercial air travel, I can easily move to California while still having a connection with my family in CT. I now know a ton of people in different parts of the country. I’m a one level connection to all my friends and family in CT.

If we are willing to allow connections to be electronic (working professionals who live in different countries but communicate via email), the computer industry has opened up our connections to many different networks. This doesn’t even include people who have met because of their online connection (online dating sites is an example).

I’m not going to venture a guess at the number of links between people, but I wonder if you started with Kevin Bacon, and counted the AVERAGE connection to him, you might have a better guess. Just a thought.

zacharyc :: Apr.17.2009 :: Personal :: No Comments »

Okay, so this video is old, and I can’t believe how young I look, but this was me back in the day. I’m glad my friend Jon was nice enough to make it for me so that I could have it to remember that I was good, once.

zacharyc :: Apr.17.2009 :: Cheerleading :: No Comments »

This is ridiculously funny, yet potentially also cruel. Either way, I agree with Jon Gruber, this is totally what happened in Caddy Shack.

Daring Fireball Linked List: Spokane to Detonate Squirrels Tearing Up Parks.

zacharyc :: Apr.15.2009 :: Personal :: No Comments »

Today I decided to create a Facebook account as woodside’s cheerleading coach. The benefit of this account is that it keeps its distance from my personal Facebook network, but still allows me to create events and groups for Woodside cheerleading. Anyway, I wanted my name to “Coach Zack”. Facebook rejected the name. So I tried to create ‘Zachary “Coach” Cohen’, again, Facebook automatically rejected it.

Now I have been a big Facebook fan in the past, but of recent, I’m more dissapointed with them. I feel like they have started to remove the “fun” aspect of the application. Facebook used to be more about the network, and it is has turned into almost a twitter status message board. I’ve gone from checking Facebook twice a day, to checkign it once a week, if I get an email.

Please Facebook, bring the fun back.

zacharyc :: Apr.03.2009 :: Technology, Usability :: No Comments »

After 12 years of training cheerleading, I retired yesterday. I soft retired last year, but I found myself really missing it and wanting to get back involved. I joined the CheerGyms.com open team and cheered for them throughout the season. While I enjoyed cheering for the team, the logistics of the situation didn’t work out for me. The team originally said they would be splitting time between both gyms. One in San Jose and the other in Concord. San Jose was 30 minutes away, Concord was about an 70 minutes away. I decided to do the team anyway. The drive meant that I was up before 8 most Sundays. I couldn’t go out late with friends on Saturday for fear of being to too tired at practice. On top of the cheering aspect I coached a local high school. Coaching would take up Friday nights with football games, which meant that I really didn’t have a weekend.

So, I’ve made a decision, and this time I’m going to try to keep to it. I’m going to retire from cheering myself. I’m still going to coach. I don’t think I’ll ever be removed from the sport completely, but for now I’m a coach and not a cheerleader. I feel I can be a better coach then cheerleader as this point. If it ever comes back to the point where I feel in shape enough to cheer and find a team convenient enough to be on, I’ll revisit it. For now, however, stick a fork in me, I’m done.

zacharyc :: Mar.30.2009 :: Cheerleading :: No Comments »

We went up to Napa this past Saturday. On the way back, after the majority of the car had consumed a significant amount of wine, we stopped off at Taylor’s Refresher for a burger before the drive home. One member of our crew decided that we should get a full bottle of wine. Just so we are clear, I don’t really drink, I had a few tastings that day, but had already consumed more than I had wanted to, so I was out on the bottle. The three remaining members decided to attack a bottle of red wine in one lunch sitting.

The wine of choice, something interesting, called “The Climber”. A nice red, with a mix of various different types of wine. Sounded interesting, so they got it. Once we got it to the table, we realized, with some shock, that the wine was made by Cliff. The same company that does the amazing Clif energy bars. Needless to say, after they were thoroughly “happy” off their wine, the bottle was rinsed and the cork was wrapped and packed along for the trip home.

I’m going to write a post soon on The Brand Gap: Expanded Edition, but one interesting part of the book talks about the relevance of products used to extend a brand. I’m not sure that wine has a strong correlation to the core clif bar business, but if my friends are any indication of the clif consumer, they were ecstatic when they found the bottle and this might just work.

Note: I did not actually try this wine, by this point I was done drinking, so I cannot comment on the taste. Those who were drinking it said they somewhat enjoyed the taste, but that the novelty of the item might have had an impact on that enjoyment.

zacharyc :: Mar.23.2009 :: Personal :: No Comments »

I’m not much of a PHP guy, but I chose Wordpress for this blog because I feel it is the most stable, well refined, yet easy to use blogging tool out there. Once the platform was decided I started looking for themes that worked well. I finally found something that I really liked when I stumbled on Ciaran Walsh’s blog. The theme is called JustSimple.

It’s a great theme, and I enjoy it on my site, but there areas where it has come up short. Mostly in styles for certain elements. I started a simple github project for my changes to JustSimple Project. One such change I’ve made is to add support for Definition Lists. Terms are bold and definitions are padded left.

If you want, you can download the theme from github (with a shameless use of the definition list):

Zip Format

Zip File

Tar Format

Tar File

zacharyc :: Mar.20.2009 :: Projects, Web :: No Comments »

Almost two months ago I went to a CocoaHeads meeting during Macworld. They had Mike Lee talk. His presentation was about “Pimping Your App”. There were a bunch of interesting points, but one thing really stuck in my head. Mike was talking about how is a messy person in his life. His car is messy. His room is messy. His desk is messy. Everything is messy, except his code. HIs code is crystal clean, squeaky even. As a programmer you need to make sure your code is consistent and clean. Ever since I have been thinking about standardizing the way I write code. This is the first post in hopefully a stream of posts about quality code.

Yesterday, there was a discussion in the office about code quality. There were many points discussed, topics like line length, white space, and my personal favorite “if” statements. I have a track record of being incredibly inconsistent with my “if” block. The basic if block is the following:

if(foo) {
  //...
}

The “if” statement by itself is really not that big of a deal. It’s when you start adding “else if” and “else” clauses that it becomes complicated. The problem for me is twofold. Firstly, I’m inconsistent. The type of blocks I use on larger sections of code is different from the blocks I use on smaller sections of code. Secondly, my desire for consistency is at odds with my crazy, cooky desire to have code look aesthetically pleasing.

The Condensed If Block

I sometimes use the following style of the if statement:

if( foo ) {
   //...
} else if( bar ) {
   //...
} else {
   //...
}

This block is very condensed. You throw the braces for each clause on it’s own line. I feel that it this type of statement makes it clear and easy to really make the if statements a smaller part of the code. On trivial if blocks, I really like this approach. Where it suffers is in more complex if statements. If the ifs and else ifs fit really just blend into the code, sometimes making it easy to miss them. Okay, so if I’m looking at the code in detail, not a big ideal, but if I’m just giving it a quick glance over I might miss something. Also, if the “if” statement line is long enough, it could easily blend into the line below it.

The Almost Condensed If Block

This one is a take on the Condensed If block. It is actually just really poorly formatted “if” statements, but I often find myself using this one:

if( foo )
{
   //...
} else if( bar ) {
   //...
} else {
   //...
}

All we are doing here is moving the opening brace from the end of the if statement to the next line. The rest of the code follows the condensed. So, I really like this approach because the first “if” block is clearly separated from the rest of the code. It’s clear that we are are entering an “if” statement line. The remainder of the statements don’t take up too much space. The closing brace, the else if/else, and the following opening brace are all on the same line.

The downside of this approach is that it looks inconsistent. Why does the initial “if” statement get one extra return, and all the subsequent lines statements get jammed into one line? It’s not functionally different, and it might in general be more appealing to me, but consistency is also important. I have started to shift away from using this style.

The Intermediate If Block

This one has more white space:

if( foo ) {
   //...
}
else if ( bar ) {
   //...
}
else {
   //...
}

This approach has gives you a little bit more separation of the control statements from the code. For some reason, though, I just feel it looks weird to write the close brace on its own line but then incorporate the opening brace on the same line as the control statement. Still feels inconsistent.

White Space Heaven If Block

The following block is the last if style I’m going to talk about:

if( foo )
{
   //...
}
else if( bar )
{
   //...
}
else
{
   //...
}

This block takes up a very large amount of space, everything gets its own line. It is probably the clearest of all the examples above, but the trade off is that your code is now three lines longer for each else statement. This extra space means that you can theoretically fit less code in the same amount of screen space.

Additional Concerns

There are a couple of additional concerns when working with if blocks. For example, if you are chaining “if” blocks, how much space should you provide.

// What I don't like
if(foo)
{
   //...
}
if(bar)
{
   //...
}

// What I prefer
if(foo)
{
   //...
}

if(bar)
{
   //...
}

I have run into some people who prefer the first option above with no space between each block. The reason I dislike this so much is that depending on the method of “if” syntax you use, you second if block could look identical to your else blocks. As your code gets large and complex, it is important to make it as easy to discern different control paths that might be executed, and in this case, white space is really your friend.

Another concern is the ternary operator. This operator is basically a simple “if/else” block which fits on one line.

double number;
if(foo)
    number = 3.1415;
else
    number = 2.71828183;

// As opposed to
double number = foo ? 3.1415 : 2.71828183;

Ternary operators are great for doing assignments as in the one line above, but be careful with trying to do too much in one line. My general rule is the line is getting really long, or I’m doing multiple clauses in my condition I tend to shift away from ternary operator.

Conclusion

The problem with all of this is that my mind changes depending on where I am in, what I’m working on and what I plan to be doing with my code. I’m learning towards using the condensed form of the “if” block in the future for the simple reason that I can fit more lines of code in less space (not to mention that some pointed out it was the K&R way, too). Bottom line, whatever method you choose, you should really stick to it as best you can for each project. If you open up a file in a project that was edited by someone else, you should probably follow their precedence.

zacharyc :: Mar.10.2009 :: C/C++ :: No Comments »

Today I made my first post to Vimeo. I found this old video of my gymnastics. It’s old, not completed, but was fun to find and fun to post. Enjoy

Partial Sampler 2006 from Zachary Cohen on Vimeo.

zacharyc :: Mar.06.2009 :: Cheerleading :: No Comments »

In an amazing post on Daring Fireball John Gruber quotes the technology directory for a public school in Massachusetts:

However, even iLife has its drawbacks in an educational setting. It simply hands so much to the students that they struggle with software (whether Windows, Linux, or even pro-level software on the Mac) that isn’t so brilliantly plug and play. Yes, iLife rocks in many ways, but the level of spoonfeeding it encourages actually makes me think twice about using it widely, especially at the high school level.

To which Gruber responds

So the problem with Apple’s iLife apps is that they’re too good, and kids never learn that they need to struggle with technical issues before using software to express themselves creatively.

I agree with Gruber. However, I don’t think we should limit the discussion to just creative Apps. Modern day software is built on complexity. A consultant at my company once said that if we made the software too easy to use, then the consultants would be out of work; our product wouldn’t sell because it would to be too easy to use. I don’t necessarily agree with the argument, but the fear is common, and not unique to my current company.

Would easier software put people out of work?

I don’t think so. I think it would change the focus. If we started designing our software with a greater attention to user experience, the access time could be spent on further improving that experience, instead of support calls. Apple’s iLife wasn’t easy to create. Each of the apps has had millions of reviews, UI meetings, discussions, arguments and refinements. This wondrous amount of work has lead to an incredibly intuitive suite of tools. It would be fantastic if we could switch our focus (as an industry), from simply providing more tools, to providing better tools. Perhaps than our software will “too easy” for them to teach in school.

zacharyc :: Mar.03.2009 :: Apple, Apps, Technology, Usability :: No Comments »