The Monday Post: What it's like to be a programmer

Ok so I'm a bit off on my timing for a Monday post. I'm knee deep in coding/homework and such. So here's a quick look into the mind of a programmer:

• UML (Unified Modeling Language) is a beautiful thing when used properly. When trying to hammer it out like I'm doing right now is frustrating. For those outside the fields I'm in, UML is a way to visualize code, networks, structures and such. Trying to remember how to make MS Visio show class models is one thing (it's like starting a word document with a template, in other words easy), it's another to remember how to have it show you want a c# bool and not a c++ int.
• Another thing, we talk in code. Don't understand the last sentence in the item above? Then you don't know programming and it's perfectly acceptable to ignore me.
• Speaking to us programmers can really cause communication issues when you use what you think are common words. Resolution is a good example. An artist on a project I program on asked my roommate (the project head) to ask me (the programming lead) what resolution to use. This was vague enough that having my roommate say the words exactly the same way to me led to a WTF? moment. It took meeting with her (the artist) before I realized she was basically asking how big we wanted her pictures drawn for the project. You know, so we know what screen resolution we all are shooting for *headdesk* Yeah, there's no unified language going on here.
• Speaking of that project, the answer I gave her was basically "Draw them however big you need for detail, we're going to have to scale anyways". The game will use an 81 by 81 grid to represent the game. Before you think that's big, most of it won't be seen. Why? That whole screen resolution thing. 81 times anything is big for a computer screen. A common resolution, say 1280by 800 (my laptop's screen resolution) means I can only fit pictures of about 9 pixels high on it to be able to show everything. 10 pixels would cut off the bottom row, but something that small is incomprehensible when trying to play a game. That makes it un-fun to play, if you could even play it. 
• Funnily I  had to calculate, before meeting with said artist, just how big I wanted her and her partner to shoot for in terms of size. I figured 300 by 300 works. Why? 300 dpi drawings at that size are 1 inch square. Funny how dots per inch works out like that.

Ok, now I'm just babbling, and I need to work. Bye!!!

PS: I nearly named this The (Sorta) Monday Post, but decided not to so I don't make it a habit.