The longest part of the day came for the two on-camera hours. Having lived through the two-hour taping, I admit only a faint interest in seeing the twenty-minute edited product; any important words I might have said stand little chance of correlating with the production crew’s sense of what they want to display to viewers. This, of course, is the way of the media world; I knew that going in. I participated without a vivid expectation that the producers would ultimately sustain the focus of a message that diverges from the messages they quite reasonably anticipated. And one-fifth of a twenty-minute panel doesn’t constitute much time to get across a nuanced version of an unfamiliar possible way to think about the Bible.
I should emphasize that the production crew has been tremendously cordial, friendly, attentive, accommodating. It almost makes one believe that they really think you are what they call you: “talent.” I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with them, every minute, from Sonya who applied my make-up (“so you’ll look more Californian, not so pale”) to Sean and Austin and Tom and Susan and Elaine and Rosa Lee and of course Jonathan. They’re terrific, and bless them for the effort they’re putting into this project.
It would be a lovely surprise if I sound, on the video tape, like the kind of theologian I try to make myself when somebody else isn’t producing me; and creation is full of surprises. If, however, I sound like someone else — someone more predictable, with an off-the-shelf story of how we might interpret the Bible, I sensed it coming, I cooperated (knowing full well that these circumstances wouldn’t bend to accommodate the terms of my preference for self-presentation).
Posted by AKMA at December 15, 2003 08:29 PM | TrackBackYou might be delightfully surprised by a good production. I am guessing the essence of AKMA will shine through all the editing.
Posted by: Pat at December 16, 2003 06:01 AMI'm guessing that Pat's correct; hard to imagine otherwise.
So the remaining question becomes: when is this epic production scheduled for the public airwaves? You will let us know, right?
Posted by: Jane Ellen at December 16, 2003 06:52 AMPlease do let us know, AKMA. We will have to pop popcorn and have the friends over for a viewing.
Posted by: Tripp at December 16, 2003 08:50 AMBeing able to understand that basic idea opens up a vast amount of power that can be used and abused, and we're going to look at a few of the better ways to deal with it in this article.
Posted by: Polidore at January 13, 2004 04:13 AMThat gives us a pretty good starting point to understand a lot more about variables, and that's what we'll be examining next lesson. Those new variable types I promised last lesson will finally make an appearance, and we'll examine a few concepts that we'll use to organize our data into more meaningful structures, a sort of precursor to the objects that Cocoa works with. And we'll delve a little bit more into the fun things we can do by looking at those ever-present bits in a few new ways.
Posted by: Griffin at January 13, 2004 04:13 AMThis variable is then used in various lines of code, holding values given it by variable assignments along the way. In the course of its life, a variable can hold any number of variables and be used in any number of different ways. This flexibility is built on the precept we just learned: a variable is really just a block of bits, and those bits can hold whatever data the program needs to remember. They can hold enough data to remember an integer from as low as -2,147,483,647 up to 2,147,483,647 (one less than plus or minus 2^31). They can remember one character of writing. They can keep a decimal number with a huge amount of precision and a giant range. They can hold a time accurate to the second in a range of centuries. A few bits is not to be scoffed at.
Posted by: Lettice at January 13, 2004 04:13 AMWe can see an example of this in our code we've written so far. In each function's block, we declare variables that hold our data. When each function ends, the variables within are disposed of, and the space they were using is given back to the computer to use. The variables live in the blocks of conditionals and loops we write, but they don't cascade into functions we call, because those aren't sub-blocks, but different sections of code entirely. Every variable we've written has a well-defined lifetime of one function.
Posted by: Benjamin at January 13, 2004 10:28 AMThe Stack is just what it sounds like: a tower of things that starts at the bottom and builds upward as it goes. In our case, the things in the stack are called "Stack Frames" or just "frames". We start with one stack frame at the very bottom, and we build up from there.
Posted by: Theodosius at January 13, 2004 10:28 AMBut variables get one benefit people do not
Posted by: Godfrey at January 13, 2004 10:28 AM