Mellow Mummy: My Daughter The Byte Stream : Taking life as it comes...

Thursday 15 September 2011

My Daughter The Byte Stream

The 15 minutes after Lara wakes up in the morning are the most entertaining of the day. This is the time of day when Lara cannot lie. Before she has properly woken up, the words that stream from Lara's mouth are the purest form of communication.

Words. Lots of them. With no conscious language discipline.

Lara will wander straight out of bed, along the corridor into our room and be half way through a sentence by the time she arrives at my side! Her dialogues can be very revealing and show just what is currently on her mind. Sometimes she will be talking in quite lucid detail about an event that happened many months ago. Other times she will be describing something she really fancies to eat.

As a software developer I like to think of Lara's early morning word soup as an output stream.

For the rest of the day my toddler speaks in simple console commands. One liners.




But, for those few minutes every morning, Lara is streaming words straight from her brain to her mouth with no validation, no logical processing and no network interference – if she were code, she'd be a byte stream. Raw bytes! There's some sort of buffering involved which means that the words come out as sentences and not as one continuous blueurgh.


public class LarasBrainDump {

    public static void main(String args[]) throws Exception {

        String source = MyBrain.getStuffImThinkingAbout();
        byte bufferedStuff[] = source.getBytes();
        OutputStream fos = new
          FileOutputStream("wordsthatcomeoutofmymouth.txt"); 

        for (int i=0; i < bufferedStuff.length; i ++) { 
            fos.write(bufferedStuff[i]); 
        } 
        fos.close(); 
    }
}





Somewhere about now she will breathe and then start all over again. I'm assuming this is the buffer flushing itself out.
Related Posts with Thumbnails