Category: Humor

Many of us wonder what comes after we leave this world. Does our existence end once we close our eyes for good or do we carry on as friendly ghosts or guardian angels of our loved ones? Sadly, the musician Cat Janice will get the answer way sooner than she should. As a parting gift to her son, she wrote a song that went viral on the internet, ensuring that her boy will be taken care of even when she’s gone.

More info: TikTok

Image credits: cat.janice

Young mother and musician Cat Janice was diagnosed with aggressive cancer

Image credits: cat.janice

People tend to remember significant days when something big has happened to them. The day they met the love of their lives, the day they adopted their fluffy dog or the day they received the worst possible news. Life separates into “before” and “after”. For 31-year-old Cat Janice, this day happened back in 2022, when she noticed a strange lump on her neck. The young woman to the doctors and heard the sad news – she was diagnosed with sarcoma, a rare type of tumor that grows within the bones and tissue.

Despite the diagnosis, Cat was determined to fight and after a long treatment, she kicked cancer’s butt. But cancer is a cunning disease, it can lay dormant in the deepest corners of the body, waiting to strike again. Tragically, it decided to return to Cat on a warm summer day in June 2023. This time, it seemed even more aggressive, attacking her lungs. Once again, the brave mother went to battle. After finding out that the cancer has returned, Cat posted a hopeful video to her social media, saying:

“I’m going to go back into treatment. I’m going to be really effing strong about it and I’m going to let you guys know what’s going on. And thank you guys so much for loving me.”

Image credits: cat.janice

In January 2024, she found out she was losing the battle and went into hospice. But she wanted to release just one more song before she passed

Image credits: cat.janice

With so much love and support from everyone around her, Cat had the best chances possible. A mother to a wonderful boy, a musician, and a scientist, working towards a master’s degree in coastal geology – it wasn’t fair of destiny to try and take her away. If only diseases cared about it. Sadly, they have no regards for future plans, they don’t listen to the prayers whispered at night, they do not care for the tears they cause.

Cat found some solace in her music; despite her diagnosis, she continued to create songs, write wonderful lyrics and produce tunes for others to enjoy. Every day, she would choose to create instead of wallow in her despair. But, this time, cancer was stronger than her. In January of 2024, she posted a heartbreaking update about her health, revealing that the tumors have “basically tripled overnight”.

On January 10th, 2024, while everyone was still busy making plans for the year ahead, Cat entered hospice. Due to her tumors, she could not breathe on her own.
The worried mother knew that she doesn’t have much time left; that one day she won’t be there for her boy to take care of him when he needs tucking in, cheering up or new trainers once his feet start growing seemingly overnight. But she was determined to take care of him anyway.

She signed all of her music rights to her son, hoping he will be taken care of even after she’s gone

Image credits: cat.janice

Image credits: cat.janice

The musician signed her entire discography over to her son, ensuring that all the royalties go towards his future. And, as a wonderful, bittersweet final present, she released one final track, “Dance Outta My Head”. The song is catchy, with fun and easily memorable lyrics and a beat that gets stuck for days.

Cat revealed that the song idea just “came randomly” as she and her son were just driving around. “We came up with some fun lyrics and a little ditty, I song banked it and made a little voice note of it and as time went on, we would bounce around in the car to it every now and then.”

She didn’t expect much, but the song quickly went viral with thousands of TikTok videos being made using that sound. Actors, influencers, and others encouraged people to use this sound so Janice’s son would receive profits. A lot of people came forward, dancing “outta their head”, sharing touching stories about personal experiences with cancer.

Much to her surprise, the song went viral, with thousands of people all over internet dancing to “Dance Outta My Head”, raising more money for Cat’s son

Image credits: julieevlorentzen

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Image credits: sadgasm2.0

This just shows that music brings people together, making the world a slightly better place. That’s the tragic beauty of human nature, finding hope in a losing battle, trying to help a stranger as much as we can. If only this was enough. But Cat doesn’t want her listeners to be sad. In her video, she wrote about her wish.

“I want my last song to bring joy and fun! It’s all I ever wanted through my battle with cancer.”

Her wish came true! One night, she woke up from the beep of her medical support machine and checked her phone. She quickly learned that that her song had charted.

“I was sitting there in the middle of the night looking at my phone. What the heck is going on here. I started yelling and my parents came down, they were like, what is going on?”

It inspired other people to share about their encounters with this cruel disease

Image credits: viktoria._sander

“You all loved me so hard and gave me that moment and I am forever grateful. Whatever God brings my way, I know I am loved,” shared the musician

Image credits: cat.janice

As of February 2024, “Dance Outta My Head” is still in the TOP 10 in the charts. I wonder how many listeners send their love and best wishes every time they dance to it or go for a drive with their loved ones just like Cat did? Luckily, Cat does feel the good vibes everyone’s sending her.

“YOU DID THIS! You all loved me so hard and gave me that moment and I am forever grateful. Whatever God brings my way, I know I am loved,” she shared on her socials.

Hopefully, Cat will be able to see even more crazy dancers to her song and find solace in knowing she has made so many people happy. Especially her son, who will listen to her last tune, knowing that mom loves him very much and she will always be there for him, even if he cannot see her.

Everyone loved the song and admired Cat’s incredible strength

Can you imagine the chaos if Valentine’s Day fell on January 3rd? It’d be like waking up to Christmas carols in June! People would be scrambling for heart-shaped chocolates right after they’ve just recovered from their New Year’s hangover. It would make no sense. February 14th is just fine.

As we saw yesterday, padding can be hard.

Jasmine received a set of tickets all complaining that the file download portion of an ASP .Net application took too long. Users frequently had to wait for up to 15 minutes before their browser finished downloading the output of the web application.

This particular module generated the file by doing a set of Response.Writes to build the file as part of the HTTP response. This particular line ran 200,000 times in the process of creating the file:

myResponse.Write("P;P#,##0." + new string('0', 2) + "_);;[Red]\(#,##0." + new string('0', 2) + "\)n");

I’m not entirely clear what they’re writing out here- it looks like some kind of format template. But the contents don’t really matter. The string concatenation operations look like they’re handling decimal places- 0.00. Given that the new string is hard coded to two zeros, there’s no need for string concatenation, they could have just put the 00 right in the output string.

But for fun, let’s count the strings that this operation creates, noting that strings are immutable in C#, so each concatenation creates a new string.

First, let’s give credit to the literals- C# is smart, and string literals get only one instance created, so we can ignore those. The new string operation creates two new strings. Then each concatenation creates a new string- four.

That’s a total of 6 new string instances, which isn’t a lot, but given that if they just did a literal there’d be 0 new string instances, it’s still a notable increase. But this line executes in a loop, 200,000 times, meaning we’re spamming 1,200,000 string instances in each execution of that loop. And this line is a representative line; the whole loop has many such lines, allowing this code to quite effectively stress test the garbage collector.

Without a single change to the logic, and just switching to string formatting and string builders, Jasmine was able to get this particular file generation down from 15 minutes to closer to a few seconds.

It’s been a minute since some bad date handling code. Wesley inherited this C# blob which exists to generate timestamped filenames.

char c0 = '0';

this.m_FileName = 
	DateTime.Now.Year.ToString() + 
	new String(c0, 2-DateTime.Now.Month.ToString().Length) + DateTime.Now.Month.ToString() + 
	new String(c0, 2-DateTime.Now.Day.ToString().Length) + DateTime.Now.Day.ToString() + 
	new String(c0, 2-DateTime.Now.Hour.ToString().Length) + DateTime.Now.Hour.ToString() + 
	new String(c0, 2-DateTime.Now.Minute.ToString().Length) + DateTime.Now.Minute.ToString() + 
	new String(c0, 2-DateTime.Now.Second.ToString().Length) + DateTime.Now.Second.ToString() + 
	"_" + new String(c0, 5-publication.Bipad.ToString().Length) + publication.Bipad.ToString() + 
	".dat";

The new String(c0, n-myString.Length) pattern is a perfectly cromulent way to pad a string- that is to say, completely wrong, even though it somehow communicates its intent. Even if you refuse to use a built-in pad method, writing a pad method would be good. Of course, there’s no need to do any of this, as C# has date formatters that will handle generating the string for you in a single line.

Still, I have to give this credit- I had to stop and ask myself “what the hell is this even doing?” It was only for a second, but I needed to read the code twice.