Pete's Log: All Entries

Vegas, Paul, Springfield

entry #1381, Sat, July 09, 2005, 05:26 (Life in General)

I spent June 19 through 24 in Las Vegas, NV for the Cisco Networkers tradeshow. Concord, Spectrum, and netViz went in on a booth together, so Concord was a silver sponsor of the show. Computer Associates was a gold sponsor. This had all been set up before the acquisition, so we basically ended up with two CA booths at Networkers.

The result of this was a bit of confusion from attendees. The booth had Concord in big letters all over. The netViz station had netViz in smaller letters. We added the CA logo with stickers. And we all wore CA shirts. The strangest thing was that many people assumed that since everybody working the booth was wearing CA shirts, we must all be CA people, not Concord people. So we had to explain several times that no, CA had not come in and taken over, we were all still the same Concord people we had always been...

But despite the confusion, we had a good show. It was my first show working a booth, and I had a great time. I gave a lot of demos. I found a reliable conversation starter: just ask what sort of documentation strategy they have. Most people look guilty or embarrased and then admit they don't have one. From that point, netViz sells itself.

Beyond the show, I had a good time hanging out with the Concord and netViz people working the show. I ate some good food, rode a roller coaster, saw some casinos and did a little bit of gambling. I'm not really into the gambling thing, but I had to play craps once, just to say I had. Predictably, I lost the twenty dollars I put down, but compared to some people I was there with, I got off easy. I also made sure to keep my pockets empty of all the pesky spare change I kept getting, so I probably lost another ten dollars in the slots.

Paul Schermerhorn came to DC! He was giving a talk at a conference, and of course I've forgotten the name of said conference. But that's beside the point. After making more than a full revolution of Dupont Circle, we decided to have Ethiopian and went to Zed's in Georgetown. Then we hit a couple Georgetown bars. This was a Tuesday night. The first bar had a sign advertising live jazz, so we wandered in as the band was setting up. There were maybe half a dozen patrons when we entered. The band soon started playing, much to our delight. It consisted of three members: a drummer, a guitarist/singer, and a bassist/keyboard player. Now, the definition of jazz these guys were using was pop hits of the 40s/50s/60s. And they were using the keyboard (synthesizer, I guess) as their horn section. And they had a recorded applause track that they used after most songs.

Needless to say, Paul and I left that place after our first beer. We then found a piano bar with better music and better atmosphere. So we had a good night. Thanks for getting published in a conference in Washington, Paul!

Meg and I spent the holiday weekend at her parents in Springfield. We visited the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum (brand new!), saw Star Wars Episode 3 at a drive-in (I now understand why drive-ins died out), and spent a lot of time in the pool.

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Perk; copy-n-paste; acquisitions; comcast sucks

entry #1380, Fri, June 10, 2005, 13:56 (Life in General)

I'm beginning to really hate the design of my log webpage. I need to do something about it.

Perk came to visit! Well, he came to Baltimore for a conference, so I drove over there to see him. We went to the National Aquarium at the Inner Harbor and saw a large number of fishies. And we saw the dolphin show. One of the dolphins was pregnant. Perk's attempts to induce labor were not successful. Afterwards, we met up with Dave Rink who was also in Baltimore for the same conference and went to some crab place he found on the internet. It was supposed to have the best crab cakes in Baltimore. I ate pasta.

I was at an outlet of one of the large bookseller chains the other day, looking for books on Visibroker or CORBA. They had none. I'm not really surprised. But since I was just about to finish Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, I decided to check if they had the second volume of that trilogy. They did, but I only saw the hardcover, and I prefer paperback. So I went up to the little find-it-yourself computer and noticed that whoever had previously used it had stopped typing in mid-title. It was obvious from the context the next letter in the abandoned title was an 'n'. I tried to type in my title, "The Confusion" and quickly realized the 'n' key on the keyboard didn't work. But I found an 'n' somewhere on the page text and ctrl-c, ctrl-v did the trick for me. I feel ever so clever.

CA just announced that they will buy Niku Corp. So I guess we won't be the new guys for very long at all.

Comcast high speed internet is really disappointing me of late. I just wanted to let that be known.

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It's official

entry #1379, Tue, June 07, 2005, 21:27 (Life in General)

As of this afternoon, I am officially a CA employee.

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050607/nytu120.html?.v=11

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overdue update

entry #1378, Fri, May 20, 2005, 01:36 (Life in General)

I fought in the Yamasaki Academy BJJ tournament. I lost in my first round -- got choked out. But I'm still glad I did it. That happened a month and a half ago, so I've forgotten most of the details. But I can report that I did not sleep very well the night before.

At the end of April, Meg and I moved. We now live in Rockville, MD. We're about six miles from our previous house. Our new house has about twice the space of the previous one and is a 10 minute walk from the Rockville Metro station. There are still a good number of boxes that need unpacking.

I registered the domain name uiea.org today. Exciting content coming soon!

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entry #1377, Thu, April 07, 2005, 16:15 (Life in General)

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=8113984

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I'm a css 3 snob

entry #1376, Sat, April 02, 2005, 06:53 (Life in General)

I watched the scifi channel movie Alien Apocalypse the other night. It stars Bruce Campbell and Ren�e O'Connor (Gabrielle on the Xena series). It was phenomenal. It would have been perfect with the addition of Taco Bell, beer, and the old Saturday night TV crew.

I've played around with my webpage some lately. I've attempted to make it XHTML strict compliant. I succeeded in doing this for my main web page, but it's somewhat difficult for the log, because the entries all contain HTML markup, and I don't feel like going through and editing 1375 entries by hand. So I'm just going to aim for having all future entries be XHTML compliant and I'll maybe go back and fix the rest some time in the future.

I've also started using the css opacity attribute, which is introduced in css 3. So I'm not being very friendly towards browsers that haven't implemented css 3 yet. But I don't care for the following reasons: It validates as valid XHTML and valid CSS. It looks good in Firefox and Safari. It looks good in Lynx.

I still need to play with the color scheme some, though. But right now I need to go to sleep.

But before I go, I want to let you know that fuh2 made my day.

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the bmoore-inator comes to town

entry #1375, Thu, March 24, 2005, 03:15 (Life in General)

First, a correction: in my previous entry I stated that four out of my four computers at work run Windows. This was incorrect. Only three of my four computers run Windows. The fourth runs Linux. I apologize for the error.

Branden (bmoore) came to the DC area this past weekend. He had an interview in Crystal City. I was going to take the Metro to meet him at his hotel, but he called me just before I got on a train and told me his plane had run out of fuel and had landed at Dulles instead of at National like it was supposed to. So I drove out there and picked him up. It wasn't until we were getting onto the Beltway from Dulles that I realized I had no idea where we were going. I knew how to get to his hotel from the Crystal City Metro station, but not by road. So we drove around somewhat randomly, using what little knowledge I had of that area. But we found the hotel, so all ended well.

We met up with Tom Keeley, Kevin Landers, and an ND senior who was also out interviewing (he was in the Discrete class I taught, but I'm blanking on his name right now). Fun times.

I live just over 4000 miles from where I was born.

I signed up for the Yamasaki tournament. I've got a week and a half left to prepare. Four classes between now and then. We shall see how it goes.

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old habits...

entry #1374, Wed, March 16, 2005, 16:14 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

When I was up in Portsmouth for SPECTRUM training, we used Sun workstations. It took me mere minutes to become accustomed again to having the control key in the home row. Today is my third day back at work and I'm still hitting caps lock instead of control. I find it amusing that after just one week back on a Sun keyboard, my old brain wiring has taken such firm control again.

So obviously there is only one real solution: remap caps lock to control. I've got four machines at work, and four of them are Windows machines. So definitely need to figure out how to remap on Windows. A google search reveals many programs you can install that will perform this remapping for you. But I also found this, which I prefer over installing yet more software: you need to add a "Scancode Map" value to the "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout" registry key. The easiest way is to create a file called ctrl.reg with the following:

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,1d,00,3a,00,00,00,00,00

Then run that file. Of course, it's much simpler in Linux, and of course you have to reboot Windows after making the change to the registry...

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I'm still alive

entry #1373, Wed, March 16, 2005, 03:22 (Life in General)

Tony Hagale is in the DC area for work. Or at least he was a couple weeks ago. Meg and I had dinner with him at a great place near Tysons Corner. I think it was called Cafe Deluxe. Mr Hagale was as entertaining as always.

I did try to figure out the origin of the name "Tysons Corner" (and it is "Tysons," not "Tyson's"), but with little luck. The google search "Tysons Corner history" brings up a lot of pages with corporate histories of companies located around Tysons; lots of pages for hotels around Tysons; and several pages that claim the original Fairfax County Courthouse was built near the present Tysons Corner. Searching for "Tysons Corner" and "origin of name" or "origin of the name" don't reveal anything either. Wikipedia says "Tysons Corner is an unincorporated place located in Fairfax County, Virginia," but not much else. So sorry, Tony, I failed to answer that question.

Concord bought out Aprisma Management Technologies. So I spent last week in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, at Aprisma (now known as Concord SPECTRUM) learning their SPECTRUM product and talking with engineers up there. I missed my exit when I drove up there from Boston, so now I can say that I've been to New Hampshire and Maine! The hotel I stayed at had the lamest hotel fitness room ever.

And speaking of fitness, today was my first day back at Jiu Jitsu in two weeks. Last week I was in NH, and the week before I had a strained wrist. So I feared for the worst tonight, but actually did alright. One of my buddies there got promoted to a blue belt tonight, so kudos to him.

There's a tournament coming up on April 9 in Rockville. It's hosted by Yamasaki Academy, so there's some pressure to participate. Arguments against participating:

it's $65 to enroll
I'm scared of getting eliminated in less than a minute.

Arguments in favor of participating:

scoring points with Yamasaki's black belts
it's a great learning opportunity
I won a fight the last time we had a mock tournament in class

But if I decide to enroll, the real question becomes what weight class do I target. I would do better in the middle class than in the medium heavy class. But I've been bad lately and my weight is up to 187 or so again. The cut between middle and medium heavy is at 181 pounds. So I'd have two and a half weeks to drop at least 6 pounds. I'd rather drop 7 or 8, because if you don't make weigh in, you're disqualified. They won't let you change classes on the tournament day. This is the first time in my life I've even considered worrying about a weigh in. Oh, and you're weighed wearing your Gi, so I'll have to consider that, too.

So I've got that to think about. It's going to be a good tournament. They've got some big prizes for colored belts: ranging from $300 for the blue belt winner to $2000 for black belts. So it should be fun just to watch, since some big names are supposed to show up. White belts won't be getting any money, but I think you get a medal if you finish in the top three.

Moving away from Jiu Jitsu... (should I rename this to "Pete's Jiu Jitsu Log"?) ... Meg and I signed a lease on another house on Sunday. We're going to be leaving Kensington behind and are moving to Rockville. The new place is within walking distance of the Rockville Metro station, is probably twice the size of our current place, and is a bit more modern. So we're very excited. We'll be moving in another month.

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Valentine's Day and more Jiu Jitsu

entry #1372, Sat, February 19, 2005, 22:46 (Life in General)

Meg and I went adventuring in rural Maryland on Valentine's day. Sunday evening we drove to the Wood's Gain Bed and Breakfast in Linwood, MD. We had reserved a room in the house, but we got upgraded to their summer kitchen, a little cottage next to the house. On our way, we stopped at Johansens, a brew pub in Westminster, MD. Sadly, they were out of every single house beer! But we still had a good dinner. Then the Wood's Gain owners welcomed us with cookies, chocolates, and chocolate-covered strawberries. Very yummy. Monday did not go entirely according to plan. We had intended to go skiing at Liberty mountain. Sadly, it was raining. Not good skiing weather. But the breakfast we were served at the B&B made the trip worth it. I think it might have been the best breakfast I ever had. After breakfast we went to New Market, MD, an antiquing hot spot. Most of the stores were closed, but we still saw some interesting things. Then we went winetasting at the Linganore winery. They had some yummy berry wines. Back at home, we watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which came with my first batch of netflix movies. A very nice time, despite the lack of skiing.

My Jiu Jitsu schedule is Tuesday at 7:30 (beginner class), Thursday at 7:30 (beginner class) and Saturday at 11 (mixed class). The past two Saturdays we've been doing Judo. So I'm starting to learn some throws, which is cool. At the end of class today, we did a mock tournament. This was my second such experience. The first one was shortly after I started. That time I got submitted by a triangle choke within 15 seconds. Today I lasted the full two minutes and actually got a mount on the other guy (which unfortunately I couldn't maintain). Sparring like that is much different than regular sparring. For one thing, there's a lot more adrenaline. But the other thing is that everybody else is watching and yelling advice to both guys sparring. So I never really knew if advice was for me or for the other guy. The one time I knew the advice was for me was when I got the mount. Somebody yelled that if I maintained it for 25 seconds, I'd win. I think I'm going to create a Jiu Jitsu topic for my log, since I'm really getting into it.

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ouchy

entry #1371, Fri, February 11, 2005, 16:12 (Life in General)

I got my first Jiu Jitsu injury last night. I was sparring with another white belt who is better than I am. I was trying to pass his guard from a standing position, so I swept his legs to the side and tried to get around. Well, he was quicker than I anticipated in getting his legs back into position, so as I was moving to pass, my mouth collided with his foot. In simpler terms, I got kicked in the face. No serious damage, but my lip got cut, so there was blood. Now the thing I'm proud of is that I kept going, because despite the kick in the face, I had successfully passed his guard and got the side mount. The other guy made me stop, though, to check for damage. It wasn't until then that I actually noticed the blood. So that's my thrilling story.

The exciting thing is that I'm finally starting to feel like I'm improving. I've still got a long way to go, but my balance is definitely improving, and I'm doing fewer dumb things, like exposing my arms or turning my back.

So I've been reading lately about how employees have been getting in trouble for writing negative things in their blogs about their employers. So I figure I need to join in this trend: when one logs into Concord's intranet portal, there is a checkbox that says "remember me", which does not work. No matter what browser or OS I use, the portal never remembers me, I always have to relogin when I go there. It really annoys me. There, I said it. Actually, work is pretty exciting lately. Good things are happening.

OK, I'm going to see if I can find people to show off my injured lip to.

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Mamie!

entry #1370, Wed, February 09, 2005, 14:51 (Life in General)

Mamie moved to Pittsburgh a week and a half ago to start classes at Chatham College. So last Friday I hit the road after work to go visit her. She's now about four hours away. I arrived shortly after 10 that evening and found her sparse apartment. She'd been sleeping in a sleeping bag on a hardwood floor, since she flew out to Pittsburgh with only as much as the airline would let her carry. That night I gave her hardwood floor a try, and it was not comfortable. So Saturday I drove her to IKEA and loaded her up with cheap Swedish-designed furniture. Now she's living in high style. Or at least she's sleeping on a mattress. I also took her to Target so she could buy some other essentials. And we had lunch at Steak 'n Shake, which is always exciting. A trip into the Midwest (and yes, I'm now East-coast enough to consider Pittsburgh the Midwest) must always include Steak 'n Shake.

So yeah. I'm sure I'll be visiting Mamie plenty more while she's there.

Charlie Weis will be coming to ND with four Super Bowl rings, which I'm sure is a good thing.

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it's been a while...

entry #1369, Tue, February 08, 2005, 22:48 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

#include <stdio.h>
int q;typedef double z;char d(int xx){z x=(z)xx;return(char)(99+(-10.6+(8.65+(
1.65-1.6*x)*x)*x)*x);}char m(int _){char*k="hYezACdrivoNn";return*((137*_+31)%13
+k);}char g(int j){char l[]={0x20,0x75,0x6A,0x62,0x69,0xA,0x6D,0x6F};return j[l]
;}struct s{int n;char(*f)(int);}ss[]={{11,m},{3,g},{1,g},{-2,d},{7,m},{3,g},{1,
d},{4,m},{4,g},{-1,d},{0,g},{6,g},{7,g},{2,d},{7,g},{0,g},{-1,d},{1,g},{3,g},{2,
g},{1,g},{1,m},{0,d},{-2,d},{4,g},{8,m},{7,g},{0,g},{2,d},{7,m},{1,m},{1,g},{7,
g},{5,g}};int main(){for(q=0;q<34;q++){putchar(ss[q].f(q[ss].n));}return 0;}

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grrr, argh

entry #1368, Thu, January 27, 2005, 06:20 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

The MFC CDialogBar class is my nemesis. If you need to derive a class from it, you have to do a fake InitDialog procedure, and -- and this is poorly documented -- if a button on your CDialogBar doesn't have a command target, it gets disabled. This doesn't happen in regular dialogs. I just wasted an hour and a half of my life trying to figure this out. I was trying to create a menu button, so clicking the button didn't need to activate a command target, it just had to drop down a menu. So finally I figured out all I needed was an empty callback function hooked up to this button. Stupid Microsoft.

So I've now gone about 60 hours with caffeine. It's not fun. Perk motivated me to try giving up the poison again. I tried back in November, but only lasted two weeks. Perk found that you need to go 60 days before your body is fully free from the lingering effects of caffeine. We'll see how this works out.

I had other things I was going write about, but the caffeine absence in my blood stream is clouding my mind.

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log fixes

entry #1367, Sun, January 23, 2005, 00:51 (Life in General)

I know my journalling has dropped off during the past few years, but I didn't realize the degree to which it had. Today I added to my statistics page and determined that I wrote 13 entries in 2003 and 11 entries in 2004. For comparison, I wrote 585 entries in 2000. 74% of the 1366 entries in my log were written in 2000 and 2001. So that's kind of a bummer. My record of the past few years is going to be quite incomplete.

Pete's Log had its six year anniversary in december. Which seems incredibly hard to believe. But I feel motivated now to make 2005 a fabulous year in terms of journalling. Maybe not on the level of 2000 or 2001, but hopefully at least on the level of 1999 or 2002. And I'm already looking to do better than 2003 or 2004 - this is entry number 7 for 2005, and it's only been 22 days so far.

Also, I fixed the links to friends' journals on the front page. Of the 11 links, only two were still good. So I fixed those that I could, and moved the remainder to a new memorial section, hoping to encourage those ex-bloggers to pick up the habit again. I also moved a couple of links that were still good to that memorial section, because the most recent entries of those journals were quite old. So if you're in the memorial section, consider this some not-so-subtle pressure.

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The name's Bond. Covalent Bond.

entry #1366, Sat, January 22, 2005, 18:17 (Life in General)

Happiness is finding leftover mac-n-cheese in the fridge.

Last night I tried again to enjoy the new Battlestar Galactica series. But it's just not working for me. I just can't see past the cruddy cinematography. Oh well. I tried. And I had such high hopes.

My W4s came in the mail. I gave the government a whole lot of money last year. I better be getting some good services in exchange.

Concord's annual sales meeting happened this week, so I was in Boston Monday through Wednesday. I manned the netViz booth and showed off some of our recent developments, which was fun. Now I'm doing some performance profiling and am having a lot of fun doing 64 bit math using Borland C++ 5.01, which does not have a native 64 bit data type (other than double, which doesn't work for my purposes). But work is good. I feel 2005 is going to be great year for netViz.

Annie's birthday was yesterday, but I couldn't reach her because her phone has been disconnected. So if you read this, Annie, happy birthday!

And this final paragraph will be the only one with the slightest hint of segue -- continuing with the sister theme. Mamie has been accepted into a masters program at Chatham College in Pittsburgh. She starts in a week or two, so she's got to move in a hurry. I'll probably drive over there sometime soon to help her settle in. It's only a four hour drive, so it'll be nice to have her close-ish.

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my boring life

entry #1365, Sat, January 15, 2005, 03:16 (Life in General)

Our first week at netViz with a GM has been interesting. Everybody is really motivated and it's looking like 2005 will be a great year. I'm flying to Boston on Monday for Concord's 2005 sales meeting to man the netViz booth and show the Concord sales force how badass netViz is.

We had a fun gathering at work today to socialize with our new GM. We have a monthly award at netViz for somebody who has gone above and beyond the call of duty to do something excellent for netViz. I won this award a few months ago. Our new GM won the award today -- he's really impressed everybody during his first week. But I got a nomination. I was nominated this month "just for being Pete." This made me incredibly happy.

I'm watching the new Battlestar Galactica series on Sci-Fi. I watched the mini-series a few months ago and enjoyed it for the most part. But tonight I'm finding it pretty boring. And the cinematography is really pissing me off.

I weighed myself this morning. I was 177.2 pounds. This is significant because it's the first time I've weighed in under 180 pounds in quite a while. So I'm really happy. Of course, I fluctuate about 5 - 7 pounds a day, with especially large fluctuations on Jiu Jitsu days. So my average weight is still around 181-182, but still, this is a nice breakthrough.

I told Meg's Mom she should buy Apple before their Q4 '04 earnings came out, and now I feel vindicated: they're up almost $5 since their earnings report on Thursday morning. I find their iPod Shuffle marketing particularly amusing. The Shuffle has no screen, which is probably a result of its $99 price. But Apple markets the thing as being unpredictable and exciting. I like it.

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work and coding and stuff

entry #1364, Sun, January 09, 2005, 04:56 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

First, to appease anybody who doesn't find the rest of this entry interesting, I offer this goodness: virtual bubblewrap.

I had my annual performance review at the beginning of December and received an excellent rating. As a result of this, I've been promoted to Senior Software Engineer. Which is pretty cool, but having the word "Senior" in my title makes me feel sorta old. But I don't really mind. Especially considering the new title came with a 15% raise.

Concord has hired a General Manager to manage netViz as a semi-independent P&L company. He starts Monday. I interviewed him and I've talked to him since he accepted the job. I think things are going to get more exciting and more challenging, but we'll see. I told him I want to have more interaction with customers, and so he's going to let me take on some sales engineer duties, which should prove interesting. But I also told him I want my primary role to remain development. And of course I want to continue to dominate the netViz foosball table.

I also took on a small consulting project on the side, porting a program from Mac OS to Windows. I feel sort of dirty, like I'm betraying the Mac faithful, but I'm also learning something and getting paid. The biggest lesson coming out of this is that even though I'm only spending 8-10 hours a week on this, I really like my free time, and will think twice before doing another job like this in the future.

Today I had one of those nice breakthroughs on that project, though. It's where you get to a point where you actually see a result on the screen. I still love the feeling of seeing something finally work after hours invested without visible results.

Vince (a.k.a. Dr. Freeh) once told me a story of writing some huge program for a research project. Said program printed out dots as a status indicator. So a screen full of

..............................................

was quite exciting, since it meant something was working. Well, somebody who was backing this project came in to see how it was going, and just couldn't understand why the developers were so excited by these dots. That's why I enjoy writing programs with graphical front ends. At least you've got something that's easy to show off in the end.

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new year's resolution

entry #1363, Tue, January 04, 2005, 04:32 (Life in General)

It's been several months since last I wrote. So I made a resolution to blog more in 2005. Part of the problem was that the mail function was not adding date headers, and a certain subscriber complained about that. So I was sort of lazy about getting around to fixing that. But I finally did and so super, etc...

I noticed a problem while doing so, though. PHP and MySQL seem to think that the WOPR is in the GMT timezone. I fixed this for PHP by adding a putenv( "TZ=US/Eastern" ) statement, but I still need to figure out how to deal with MySQL. But enough of that.

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is going well. My arms are bigger than they've ever been in my life. I've taken the past couple weeks off for my vacation / the academy being closed. Tomorrow is my first day back, and I anticipate much pain.

We visited Meg's parents for christmas, had a nice time there. We did get stuck in a snowstorm in Ohio on our way out, though. But we made it.

That is all for now.

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unavailable entry

entry #1362, Tue, January 04, 2005, 04:19 (unknown)

sorry, this entry is not available for you to see.

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unavailable entry

entry #1361, Tue, January 04, 2005, 04:10 (unknown)

sorry, this entry is not available for you to see.

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grappling pete

entry #1360, Wed, September 01, 2004, 03:25 (Life in General)

I joined the Yamasaki Academy tonight. I took a free introductory course in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu there last Thursday -- my buddy Jason got me in. I was sore all weekend after that. Tonight was my second time, and this time I actually sparred. I imagine getting out of bed tomorrow morning will not be any fun. But right now, I feel good.

Jason told me to be prepared to be humiliated for about the first six months. I'm ready for it. It's very interesting, though. Especially the physics. Levers and moments of inertia and all. So yeah. It's sweet.

Saturday night, Meg and I saw Garden State, which I enjoyed. And I'm not even from Jersey!

Sunday night we went to the Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts. We got lawn seats to see BB King and Dr John. It was sweet. We brought a picnic and a bottle of wine. The full(ish?) moon was rising to the left of the stage, and the show was great. BB King was sure to let us know that he is 78 years old!

Also, this month has been good to me in a literary sense. I've been on a good reading kick. Of note are: Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, I, Robot by Isaac Asimov, and Kim by Rudyard Kipling. I also read some fun non-fiction, including something about a brief tour of human consciousness. I'm too lazy to go find the book right now to give you all details.

I've also got some exciting books in the pipeline: Scipio Africanus: Greater Than Napoleon by B. H. Liddell Hart, Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, and Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges. If anybody has any good recommendations of books they've read and enjoyed lately, let me know!

I must apologize to Mr Moore, for I have not fixed the headers in my blog mailing script yet, and am much too tired to do so tonight. Soon, I promise!!

Much love to everyone, I'm going to go rest my weary bones.

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stuff, other stuff, and olympics

entry #1359, Mon, August 16, 2004, 02:24 (Life in General)

I'm going to get this out of the way first: my best time for the expert level on minesweeper is now 114 seconds. I dream of dropping that below 100.

And of course, dreams are a perfect segue into the olympics. I watched the opening ceremony on Friday. I could discuss how annoying the commercialization of the games was, or how inane the commentary of Bob Costas and Katie Couric was, but in the end, I must say that there is some symbology that is just powerful, and the opening ceremony had it.

Now I'm enjoying watching sports I know little about. It's educational. I've become particularly intrigued by weightlifting and badminton.

I took Sergey and Veronica bowling today. Neither of them have ever gone bowling before. Veronica was unable to actually bowl, but gave Sergey lots of encouragement. We bowled five games. I broke 100 twice, with a high score of 102. Sergey showed me up in the last game and scored 119. I think we'll be doing this again.

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something

entry #1358, Fri, July 30, 2004, 03:02 (Life in General)

I posted a comment to Slashdot today for the first time since July 6, 2001.
I'm 26 years old.
Fun things that I should have written about, but never did:
- My parents, Diana, and their German foreign-exchange-ish student Lisa came to visit us in April.
- Sergey, Veronica, and I drove to Notre Dame and Detroit over Memorial Day weekend.
- Meg and I met Mamie and Annie in Chicago, drove with them to Springfield, IL, to visit Meg's parents, and then spent a weekend in New York City. We saw Avenue Q and Aida in NYC.
I need to become motivated to write again.
I should implement a preview feature for my log.

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Fahrenheit 9/11

entry #1357, Sun, June 27, 2004, 15:49 (Movies)

Meg and I saw Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 at the Landmark in Bethesda last night. The only show we could get tickets for was the quarter past midnight one. So after dinner we played cards at a coffee shop for a while to pass the time. We got to the theater maybe 20-25 minutes early and found ourselves pretty far back in the line to get into the theater. I've never seen this sort of crowd at a "documentary" before. I guess the controversial publicity Disney gave this movie didn't hurt.

I have to say one thing. This movie was incredibly entertaining. That said, I don't exactly know if it's going to accomplish much of anything. Moore is so up front with his bias and lays it on so thick in the opening minutes of the movie that anybody who doesn't already agree with him will probably be turned off right away. Which is too bad, because there are a few moments when Moore eases up on the propaganda and shuts up and lets the people in the movie tell their stories, which are incredibly moving.

I also was very unhappy to see Moore put dates on clips of the administration when it suited his point and leave other clips undated. I know this movie is less documentary than personal political rant, but I still would hope Moore could get his point across without these less than honest tactics.

But the scenes of Moore driving around DC reading the USA PATRIOT act over the loudspeaker of an ice cream truck or trying to get congressmen to enlist their children in the armed services are definitely amusing. And it was nice to see that Moore did not spare the Democrats from criticism.

The movie may help the Kerry campaign, but only because I think it will motivate more liberals to be active, not because I think it will change many minds.

Regardless, I still want to start my own country.

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hello airplane

entry #1356, Sun, June 20, 2004, 18:05 (Life in General)

I visited a friend in Glen Burnie yesterday. He lives near BWI airport. On the drive there, I drove by the edge of the airport and saw a parking lot with a sign that said "airplane observation area." I thought to myself "I should come hang out here sometime."

Later, when I drove home, an airplane actually flew over when I drove by that point again and I was amazed by how close it was. And again I thought "I should come hang out here sometime." At the last minute I realized I could actually just hang out there at that moment instead of at some unspecified later time. So I pulled into the parking lot. There were many families with young children there and I noticed they even had a playground to keep the children without an interest in aviation entertained. I watched a couple planes fly by, but really wanted to be under the planes. So I ignored a no trespassing sign (figuring that if it were really dangerous, they'd have built a fence) and positioned myself directly underneath the flight path.

Who would have thought that the roar of jet engines could be so peaceful?

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international what now?

entry #1355, Wed, June 16, 2004, 15:16 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

I read a study the other day that found that people who were "forced" to grow up bilingual are more likely to have their brains stay "young" for longer. This is happy news for me, since I was forced to grow up more than bilingual.

So given my background of internationality, one would think I'd be more attuned to the woes of international software users. My first mac ran the German edition of Mac OS. Version 6.something, I think. You know, back when the System and the Finder had separate version numbers and the multifinder was HOT!

But I find myself having more difficulty than I should with international coding issues. Take our recent patch to netViz 7.0, for example. I thought I'd be clever and optimize a table lookup by converting it from a linear search to a binary search. I figured we'd save on average 30-some string comparisons per lookup, and it seemed like a safe change to me. Well, not really. We got a complaint from somebody in Slovakia yesterday that this particular table lookup was failing ever since he installed the patch.

Well, I figured out that the string comparison was failing. As it turns out, not all languages consider "alphabetical order" to be the same thing. So much for this being a safe change. So now looking back with more than a year of real-world experience, I think if I would have liked to have one thing covered a little better during my education, it would have been internationalization. Because even if you think you know how to do I18N, there are always a few more gotchas lurking out there.

I guess I better get back to work.

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email woes

entry #1354, Wed, June 09, 2004, 17:00 (Life in General)

I promise I'll actually add a real entry soon. However, I want to use this real quick as a means of broadcasting to mis amigos.

I just discovered that some legitimate emails sent to my work email address are being filtered such that I never receive them and the sender does not get a bounce.

So if you've been using my work email address to contact me, please start using my personal address. If you don't know it, you can respond to this message and ask for it.

Gracias!

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the netViz Game of Life

entry #1353, Fri, March 05, 2004, 03:58 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

netViz has a rather full-featured API. I've had some chance to play with it, but I've been getting questions about it lately that I couldn't immediately answer, so I decided it was time I write a real netViz API app from scratch. And I knew just the thing.

I decided netViz needed an implementation of the Game of Life. So I created a project with a node type called "Cell". I gave the cell node a list field with "Dead" and "Alive" options. Then I created a visual override for that field so Alive Cells showed up bright blue and Alive Cells were almost invisible.

Then I wrote an API module that plays the game of life on a grid of these cells. It's cool. And it's reasonably fast. I'm happy. It's also a cool example of our API. I think we should ship it as one of our API examples. But that's just me.

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wisdom toothies

entry #1352, Fri, February 27, 2004, 18:13 (Life in General)

I'm on my couch, typing this one-handed. My other hand is holding an ice pack to my face.

Today I had all four of my wisdom teeth extracted. The top ones were somewhat impacted. The bottom ones were severely impacted. I guess I should have got around to this earlier in life, but better late than never.

It's definitely needed. The pressure in my mouth was getting bad enough lately to frequently cause me headaches.

I should be grateful to Concord. My dental plan paid 80% of the $1900 bill. And of course I'm plenty grateful to Meg who is taking care of my sorry ass this weekend.

So here's to a fun weekend on the couch!

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CCRD and Boston

entry #1351, Thu, January 22, 2004, 00:17 (Life in General)

Concord reports Q4 2003 results. Revenue increased to $27.8 million, up from $26.6 million in the third quarter of 2003, and $23.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2002. Operating Cash Increases $3.5M.

I returned today from Concord's worldwide sales meeting and awards banquet. It was held at the Seaport hotel in Boston. It was a great time. Many fun people work for this company, and everybody is excited about where the company is headed, so it was a great atmosphere. Good food and drink, too. And I got to shoot some pool.

I don't have much else to report. I didn't do any touristy stuff in Boston this time around.

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Dear Mojo Jojo

entry #1350, Sun, January 18, 2004, 16:51 (Life in General)

It has been a long time. Since my last entry some crazy stuff has gone down, but I have survived. But I'm not going to talk about that.

Instead, here are some less crazy things that may still be worth noting:

I checked my nd.edu email account today for the first time in many months. There were 1600 new message, of which about six were worth reading. So don't send me mail there anymore. Use prijks [at] esgeroth [dot] org. Thank you.
My linux box don't boot no more. It is safe to say that over the course of the past year my l33t linux skills have stagnated. Instead, I am now well versed in Windows API and can enumerate meta files with the best of them.
We bought a used nintendo 64 and a used copy of Zelda the Occarina of Time.
The internet bores me. Somebody fix it.
I'm flying to Boston on Monday and will be there until Wednesday morning. It's my first business trip. Funny thing is, my first trip to a conference in grad school was also to Boston.

I think that is it for now.

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I'm edgy. Really.

entry #1349, Sun, October 26, 2003, 16:29 (Life in General)

We have this fancy thing here. Digital cable. After I finally braved the triple digit channels, I found myself hooked on the New Wave music channel. It's all Paul's fault. Or Perk's. They can fight over who gets the honor.

Work is becoming all crazy and stuff. On November 13 we are having a netViz user forum at Tyson's Corner in Virginia. The main focus of this event will be to announce the release of netViz 7.0. The event will feature free lunch and free training on netViz 7.0. You can sign up at www.netviz.com. So anyway, the next several weeks promise to be somewhat chaotic. But it's a good sort of chaos.

Sergey, a crazy Russian I work with, and his wife Veronica had never experienced rollercoasters. So Meg and I took them to Six Flags America. A fun experience, albeit the park was somewhat disappointing compared to other amusement parks I've been to.

I don't know. There's not much else. My life has pretty much been my work the past few months.

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unavailable entry

entry #1348, Tue, October 21, 2003, 20:04 (unknown)

sorry, this entry is not available for you to see.

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unavailable entry

entry #1347, Tue, October 21, 2003, 19:42 (unknown)

sorry, this entry is not available for you to see.

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wopr and such

entry #1346, Sat, September 27, 2003, 22:24 (Life in General)

I went in on a co-located server with a group of friends. So now esgeroth.org actually has a legitimate home.

Unfortunately, esgeroth -- the machine in my house -- won't boot up, so I may have lost my most recent few log entries.

Luckily, that isn't too many entries. I've been a slacker on keeping my blog up to date of recent. So here's a quick summary of everything since the last entry I've been able to restore from backups:

I started working for netViz in april. In July, netViz was bought out by Concord Communications. My job is fun, though quite hectic. The people I work with are fun, our product is neat. I'll be proud to have my name on netViz 7.0 when it ships.

Hurricane Isabel hit a couple weeks ago. We lost power for about 30 hours, but suffered no other ill effects.

I shall attempt to keep better notes for future log entries.

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I've got a job!

entry #1345, Tue, April 15, 2003, 18:47 (Life in General)

I got a call today from the people I interviewed with on Friday. They had said I'd hear in one to two weeks, but instead I heard in two business days. So starting next Monday, I'll be working for netViz in Gaithersburg, MD.

In other news, Meg's mother is here. She's helped clean up the yard and plant a garden. So that's fun.

So as one might expect, I'm in an excellent mood.

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job hunt progress

entry #1344, Fri, April 11, 2003, 19:25 (Life in General)

Wednesday I got a phone call from a company I had sent my resume to several weeks ago. I called them back yesterday and had a phone interview that lasted about 30 minutes. At the end of it, they invited me in for an interview, which was this morning. The interview went very well, I felt. I was only asked one really technical question, right at the beginning of the interview. The guy apparently liked my answer since he said "That's a good answer," and didn't ask me anything technical after that.

So after that I went back to the temp job I'm working, and during lunch, Meg called home to check our messages. There was another message from another company I'd applied to a couple weeks ago. So I called them today and had a brief phone interview, and they might call me in for an interview next week.

So suddenly things seem to be going better with this whole job search thing.

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permanente

entry #1343, Sat, April 05, 2003, 02:57 (Life in General)

It's weird, you know, this whole life thing. As I write, I have one excited cairn terrier sitting on my lap and European hard trance blasting through my headphones.

Meg and I got ourselves Maryland driver's licenses last Saturday. The process took a couple hours, but I still found it to be fairly efficient, given the number of people -- many of whom apparently didn't quite grasp the English language -- that the place processed.

My new license has two distinct advantages: the picture actually looks like me and it is not falling apart. This, combined with it actually being a local ID, makes getting carded a much easier process.

Meg also got our cell phone numbers switched to the local area code. So I guess at this point I'm a Maryland resident for real. It all feels a bit strange still.

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Who cares about free will?

entry #1342, Sat, March 22, 2003, 11:07 (Life in General)

Happy spring time! Cherry blossom time is rapidly approaching in the DC area.

I've decided it's time to get my information situation under control. I am deluged by info I don't know what to do with. My primary storage solution is not up to the task, but I have little upgrade options for that. So what I want to do is improve the interface between primary and secondary storage. I've got more than plenty secondary storage, but it comes in so many forms.

Saved email, blog, stuff on laptop hard drive, stuff in afs, stuff on Meg's computer, stuff on various pieces of paper, stuff in books. Gah.

My goal is to solve this all for good. Or at least for a few days.

But first, I'd like to state that I would consider making an exception in my anti-death penalty stance for people who write "for all intensive purposes." I'm a snob, ok?

Last night I reduced the volume of my pine inbox from nearly 800 pieces of email to 350. The problem is there is still a lot of stuff in there that I want to save somewhere, but I don't quite know where. And there's email in there that I should have responded to months ago, but haven't. Because I'm an ass.

Sometime during my junior or senior year, I stuck a little note on my monitor that said "reply to email immediately" or something to that effect, possibly with cruder language for emphasis. For a long while after that, I was actually good about keeping the chain of communication going. Now, I fear, I am the weakest link. I hope to change that.

Also, I need to quit sending myself cryptic emails and then forget about them for months. e.g.

Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2001 01:20:32 -0500 (EST)                                     
From: Pete Rijks                                             
To: Peter William Rijks                                      
                                                                                
ae is definitely 5+++

Other emails make slightly more sense, but still don't seem quite like saving, such as the one that contains simply "setenv NOTPAUL 1"

So anyway, I'm investigating 'knowledge management' solutions. Particularly appealing to me are apple's tools. But in the meantime, I hope simply to catch up on some correspondence with people. So here's hoping you hear from me!

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worst economy ever

entry #1341, Thu, March 13, 2003, 17:42 (Life in General)

I interviewed with Lockheed Martin a week ago. I got a letter today saying they didn't want me. Oh well. I guess I'll just keep filing. The people I'm temping for told me I can give them my resume if I want a permanent position with them.

In more entertaining news, we've had a couple visitors. Meg's parents came last weekend and Branden was here the last couple nights. So that's been fun.

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stupid snowplows

entry #1340, Wed, February 19, 2003, 21:47 (Life in General)

Monday evening I spent more than an hour and a half digging out Meg's car. I'm still sore from all the shoveling. We went to the store and made it back without any trouble. I even managed to back the car back into it's spot surrounded by snow. Tuesday we made it to work. Normally there are about twenty of us temps working there; yesterday there were seven of us. But after work, we got home to find the snowplow had come by and buried the entrance to our parking spot. So more digging for me!

The roads are still pretty bad. They've become good enough now that there's a lot of people back on them. Which makes things worse, almost. But we manage. I've seen and heard many more emergency vehicles these past couple days than average. I've definitely seen more snow than this before, but never in an urban environment this unprepared for it. I'm pretty amazed.

In other news, Meg and I saw Rent Friday night. They announced a midnight showing at the last minute. We decided to see if we could get rush tickets. Initially, we'd wanted to go Sunday. Turns out, going Friday was a good idea, since they cancelled the Sunday performances due to the snow. They did the rush tickets in a lottery system, and I got lucky and won. So we saw Rent. I enjoyed it. I understood a lot more of the lyrics than my previous two times seeing it.

I'm having really disturbing mood swings these days. Meg helps me through them, though. I'm so lucky she loves me.

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Let it snow

entry #1339, Mon, February 17, 2003, 08:11 (Music)

The elevation of our national alert level to orange seems to have been a good call. Somebody has managed, using a frigid white powdery substance, to completely incapacitate our national capital.

The official measure for snowfall in DC at Reagan National is fifteen inches, which ranks this storm as the sixth biggest for Washington. Baltimore got 22 inches, making this the second biggest storm for them. When I measured last night in our backyard, we had about 17 inches. I think we've had another four inches or so since then. And it's still snowing.

I can barely see my car outside, it's nearly entirely buried. States of emergency have been declared in MD, DC, and VA. This is pretty fun.

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recap

entry #1338, Sat, February 08, 2003, 14:57 (Life in General)

My log (or blog, if you will) has experienced some lengthy downtime of late. So there's lots to catch up on. Let's begin.

The rest of December was filled mainly with holiday activities. We spent Christmas with Meg's family in Springfield. I recall there being a variety of good food. We got some fun gifts as well.

The weekend after Christmas we spent at Meg's aunt's place with some of Meg's extended family. We watched some football and I beat Charly twice in chess.

Nothing exciting happened on New Year's Eve. We stayed at home. The next day we went to Brian's family's place and watched some silly bowl game. I think the team I was cheering for lost.

Then we spent a week in Colorado. I taught Meg some basic skiing skills. She picked it up pretty fast. We also got to spend quality time with my family. Mamie returned to South Bend with us.

The next few days were spent packing, preparing to leave, and trying to hang out with people one last time. Unfortunately, I failed to see many of the people I wanted to see before I left. My apologies.

We rented a 20 foot truck and a car carrier. We completely filled the truck and both cars. My car got to ride behind the truck. Meg and Mamie drove Meg's car, I drove the truck. It was a stressful experience, in part because there was a big snow storm while we were driving through the mountains in PA, in part because the truck's windshield wipers sucked, and in part because I never did figure out how to back the thing up with the trailer attached.

But we made it. Mamie flew from here to Connecticut and Meg and I managed to unload the entire truck by ourselves. Just the two of us. I'm amazed we succeeded.

Mamie came back a few days later. Since then, I've been trying to find a job and such. There are still plenty of unpacked boxes around the house, but it's getting better. The house is smaller than our apartment was, but we fit. And the yard is huge. The dogs love the yard.

Since the tech companies around here aren't really hiring anyone without security clearance or at least a lot of experience, I interviewed with a couple temp places. The one place is going to get back to me early next week, but the other place found me something immediately.

So now I'm auditing files at a medical services/hmo sort of company. They have 27,000 or so files they need checked and 20 or so temps doing it. Meg interviewed at the same temp place and is working at the same place. It's tedious, but not too bad. Most of the other temps there have been working on this audit for three weeks now. On our second day, Meg is already the fastest. I'm trying to keep up, but there are still four or five people that are faster than me. We do this for another two weeks.

Last week we visited the Washington monument and rode to the top. It was neat. I definitely plan to see everything there is to see in the DC area. I don't want to be one of those people that lives in a cool place but never really sees the cool sites.

Life is pretty good. I could stand to have a better job, but at least I'm working. At my temp interview, I typed 77 words a minute with 0 errors. I know I can do better.

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Low Flow Toilets

entry #1337, Wed, February 05, 2003, 12:45 (Life in General)

OK, so Meg and I are now living in the Washington, DC area. In Kensington, MD to be precise. We're just north of the Beltway and just east of 270. Sort of between Rockville, Bethesda and Silver Spring.

I'll have lots more to share later, but I wanted to share this story, just because I want to ensure you that my log isn't completely dead.

When we moved in, our toilet was clogged. So the real estate lady called in a plumber. This guy was the greatest plumber ever. He replaced every part in our toilet in order to ensure that not only will it work, it will continue to work. The clog, it turns out, was because a previous inhabitant had tried to flush a toothbrush down the toilet.

Anyway, our toilet is a low water volume sort of toilet. 1.6 gallons or so. So the plumber, who had a very vocal hatred of low flow toilets, recommended we always flush twice. But then he decided to be nicer to us and installed a fancy piece of toilet technology. So now our toilet automatically flushes twice.

This is the greatest thing ever. Government is so stupid sometimes. They decide to make people use 1.6 gallon toilets to conserve water, and now people just flush more often. And best of all, there now exist gadgets to make toilets automatically flush twice. Take that, government.

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end of an era

entry #1336, Fri, December 20, 2002, 17:03 (Life in General)

I just turned my grades in. I filed for a leave of absense earlier today. I got my last paycheck today. All that's left is to finish packing up my office, and I'm done with ND. Well, sort of. I'm in talks with people to work on finishing my masters remotely. But I'm outta here. I'm leaving South Bend in a month.

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moving on

entry #1335, Tue, December 17, 2002, 02:33 (Life in General)

Meg and I flew to DCA on Wednesday. We spent the weekend in the Washington area, looking for a place to live. We feel we were successful.

We stayed with Mary and Chuck. It was fun seeing them again. They treated us very well. We saw our first couple houses on Thursday. The first was in Centreville, VA. It was a nice townhouse, but it was just way too far from the city. Next we looked at a place in Arlington, VA. It was real small and didn't have a washer and dryer. It was cute, though. The real estate agent couldn't get into the house we were supposed to see Friday, so the only productive thing we accomplished was going to the mall and doing some christmas shopping.

Saturday we saw three houses. The first two were in Bethesda, MD. First we saw the one we were supposed to see on Friday. It was cute, had a big yard and a screened in porch. It was pretty small, though, and the kitchen was real old. The second place we saw in Bethesda was just down the street. It also had a nice yard, and it had a finished attic, so there was lots of room. We really liked this place. Finally we went to see a place in Rockville, MD. It was a decent size, but sorta far, and not in great condition.

So we decided to apply for the second place we saw that day. We got forms filled out, forms faxed back and forth from Meg's parents, and after all that effort, we called the owner and she said the people who saw the place after us were applying and that she was going to take them. Well, boo.

Hope was not entirely lost. We had another appointment to see a place in Bethesda on Sunday. This place was a bit farther out, just North of the Beltway. It's a cute brick building, with a huge fenced yard. Enormous. The yard backs onto Rock Creek Park, so there's running/biking trails right behind us. The house isn't huge, but it's cute. The kitchen has just about all we could hope for. It's got a fireplace. There's a big attic. It's not finished, but it does offer lots of storage space. There's a bus stop right down the street, and the metro station isn't far. And a little farther down the street we found Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church, which is huge and exciting. They have a Go club and several choirs and a theater group and a social justice group and lots and lots more.

So we applied for that one. The real estate agent seemed positive about our chances. We should hopefully hear tomorrow.

So we're hoping to move out there in late January. It's gonna be an adventure.

Saw "The Straight Story" at movie night tonight. It was really good. Slow, but not boring. Funny and touching.

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sleepy

entry #1334, Wed, December 11, 2002, 02:32 (Life in General)

I'm sleepy. Caffeine in warm beverage format just doesn't seem to have the same effect on me that it does in cold varieties. I need a mountain dew soda fountain at home.

I've written most of my final for 210. I'm still trying to figure out some fun questions that combine material from different chapters. Like graph theory and recurrence relations. We'll see if I have any more luck with that.

All the animals went in to see the vet today, for various reasons. Gandhi now weighs seven pounds and five ounces. Little piggy cat, he is.

So sleepy...

I had a great idea while driving home today. I've found myself very frustrated for a while now trying to keep my online pictures organized. I've been using a php tool that does a decent job of things, but the problem is, you still organize pictures using a directory hierarchy. And that's just ridiculously confining. So I want to write some php/mysql thingum which will store in a database all sorts of info relevant to my pictures, such as time, location, description, keywords, who's in it, and so on. Then I can allow the pictures to be listed by when they were taken, or where, or why. Dynamically. Then I shall be content. Yes. I did a very brief search for such a tool, but found nothing that met my needs. Hopefully I will find some quality time to spend hacking php. I've not done so in far too long.

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more stuff...

entry #1333, Mon, December 09, 2002, 13:31 (Life in General)

I taught Meg how to drive stick. It was fun. My car still works. She learned quickly. We need to find more time for her to practice.

Friday marked Meg and I being together six months. Time seems to have flown. We went to LaSalle Grill to celebrate. It was very nice. After dinner we went upstairs and listened to some jazz. I love this girl.

Saturday we packed up and headed to Chicago. Holiday shopping and all that. It was a good time. Sunday night we saw Stomp. It was one of the greatest things I've ever seen.

Just one more class left and then I'm done. I'm gonna miss it, I've got some great kids.

I need to start taking notes. I know there were many other things I was meaning to write about, but I've forgotten what they were. I guess they'll come later...

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eight piggies in a row

entry #1332, Thu, December 05, 2002, 00:25 (Life in General)

The gratuitous Kirby dance (spotted on TMOL) is the greatest thing I've ever seen:

(>'-')> <('-'<) ^('-')^ v('-')v <('-'<) ^( )^ (>'-')> ^(^-^)>

Thanksgiving was fun. Meg and I drove to her Grandfather's place South of Springfield on Thursday. We were greeted with lots of food. Yum yum yummy yum. The dogs came too and got to run around outside a bunch. Without leashes. Terribly exciting. Friday we drove to her parents' place in Springfield and stayed there until Sunday.

I gave TCEs in class today. I told my students not to be too mean. I asked that if they write "this class was a joke" that they at least add "but it was a funny one."

I may have cyclothymia. More on that later.

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overcoming the aliens

entry #1331, Tue, November 19, 2002, 23:22 (Life in General)

I've had my alien implant -- a strange lump on the back of my neck -- for longer than I can remember. But yesterday it began to hurt, so something had to be done.

The medical professional I consulted was Ellyn Stecker of the Michiana Peace and Justice Coalition. She just happened to be on duty when I showed up at Medpoint. She informed me that the aliens had been clever enough to disguise their implant as a sebaceous cyst. Actually, she never referred to it as an alien implant, but we all know the truth. So anyway, my sebaceous cyst, which had lived on my neck peacefully for some number of years, had become infected. And thus it became an unwelcome guest. So I had it removed.

They novocained my neck, cut a hole in it, drained the cyst and removed the sac. Then gauze was left in the wound to keep it open a few days so it could drain. Now I'm on antibiotics and my neck hurts even more than before I went to the doctor. So we may conclude the following: that medical schools are not teaching doctors how to recognize alien technology when they see it and that medical treatment doesn't get rid of pain.

We'll see how things go from here.

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the next big thing

entry #1330, Tue, November 19, 2002, 15:27 (Life in General)

End of an era: The SSR machine room has been dismantled. All the machines are out, the raised floor is gone, and I watched construction workers knock down the two small walls in the room with big hammers. I've found a new career alternative.

Dear everyone: the internet is not a reliable source of information, you dumbheads. Gah. The AP is reporting that Studies Weekly, an educational publication read by 1.2 million kids in elementary schools nationwide, printed a story that stated "Every spring, the freshwater whales and freshwater dolphins begin their 1,300-mile migration from Hudson Bay to the warmer waters of Lake Michigan."

A teacher in Michigan was reading this to her students and immediately realized it was false. She called Studies Weekly and an editor defended the story! The company later posted a retraction on their web site, explaining the information was taken from a humor web page. I remain convinced that human stupidity is our greatest vulnerability. Hence the DMCA.

In other news, some Canadian artist is collecting pictures people were forced to take at airport security checkpoints to prove their camera is not, in fact, a bomb. www.insecuritiesproject.com. I only wonder how the security guards are able to tell that just because the thing said "click" and flashed that it's a camera. The New York Times reports that forcing passengers to take pictures is not official policy of either the American or the Canadian government and that such incidents are due to overzealous security guards.

I wanna start playing fun games with email filters again. procmail me, baby!

Meg and I spent more than two hours at Meijer Sunday night.

Rebecca took what may prove to be the greatest church sign picture ever. I need to scan it to add it to my collection. It's a sign in Madison, WI which says "COME TO CHURCH OR WE'LL SAY NI"

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oops

entry #1329, Wed, November 13, 2002, 17:04 (Life in General)

At some point Meg and I decided that we would celebrate June 5, 2002 as our anniversary, thinking that was the day I came back from Philadelphia to South Bend. Today we both checked our records and realized that I actually came back on June 6. Oops. There is an advantage to this, though. December 6 is a Friday, which will make it easier to celebrate being together half a year (or, as I roughly estimated, about 2% of my life -- I'm rapidly becoming more of a math geek than ever).

The time has come to seriously investigate hosting options for esgeroth.org. It just doesn't seem practical at this point to try to keep hosting it myself. Suggestions are welcome. Anybody know much about poe hosting?

There was something else. What was it?

I realized a few days ago for the first time just how old I am. I'm seriously an adult now. This is a healthy realization, even if I like to pretend I'm gonna be twelve forever.

I still can't remember what I wanted to say.

Teaching recurrence relations is no fun. I just have no idea how to make them even remotely interesting. At least with induction, I personally think it's cool and so I can at least enjoy giving the lecture even if students aren't as enthusiastic as I am. Recurrence relations don't excite me much. Can I just skip the rest of this chapter? Strangely, for the first time in my life, I know how to solve nonhomogenous linear differential equations -- I think. I've not actually looked at one in years. Something about nonhomogenous linear recurrence relations somehow clicked something in my brain.

I guess I'm not gonna remember what I wanted so urgently to record here. Such is life. The time is now to make a token effort to be productive.

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On the granularity of the continuum

entry #1328, Fri, November 08, 2002, 14:30 (Life in General)

I hit a deer. At least I think it was a deer. It may have been a large dog, or perhaps a very small elephant. Possibly even a gazelle. And it would actually be more accurate to say that the deer hit my car.

I was driving to the animal hospital last night to bring Meg some food and when I was just South of Douglas on 933, between ND and SMC, a deer-sized animal suddenly jumps out and hits the front side of my car. I was pretty shocked and just sorta kept driving in a daze. I pulled over as soon as there was a spot to do so and checked out my car. Big dent on the front right side, and all the lights on that side are out. When I drove back by later I didn't see any deer, so it must have run away.

Dad almost hit an elk yesterday. It jumped onto the road right in front of him. So the wildlife appears to be plotting against the Rijks. I told my class about the incident, and one of my students told me that there is apparently an overpopulation of deer on the SMC campus and that they've opened up the forests around SMC to hunters. I found an online story that confirms this. Crazy.

The remainder of our trip to DC was fun. We went to an idealist.org job fair. I met some cool people who deal with technology in the non-profit sector.

Flying in and out of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport is cool. If you ever do, make sure you sit on the left if you're flying in and on the right if you're flying out. We got lucky and were always on the proper side of the plane to have a good view of the national mall and all that fun area.

Washington National has this crazy regulation where you have to stay seated on the plane for the last 30 minutes of the flight on the way in and for the first 30 minutes of the flight on the way out. The plane we flew out on had a near emergency on its way in. Some deaf guy hadn't heard the announcement and got up to go to the bathroom, so the plane was nearly diverted. This was my first time flying since June 2001, so I was amazed by how much stricter security is.

Oh, and I think I've neglected to mention this yet: I've now got an interlocking ND tattoo on my right upper arm. It's neat.

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entry #1327, Tue, November 05, 2002, 21:08 (Travel)

Pete's Log now takes you live to chief political correspondent Pete, reporting from Washington D.C. on today's elections.

Good evening. This is Pete, in our nation's capital. The election results thus far are far from clear. What is clear, however, is that this is a fun city. I flew from South Bend, Indiana this morning with Meg and since getting here, we've seen various fun sites, such as the White House and the Washington Memorial. We also visited the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. We see the Eniac and the Univac, among other really cool things. Such as the American Flag that inspired our national anthem.

The weather this afternoon and evening has been rainy. We enjoyed dinner at a French restaurant in the Georgetown area. We've now returned to the D.C. youth hostel. More details to follow as they become available.

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the votes are in...

entry #1326, Sat, November 02, 2002, 19:09 (Life in General)

today officially sucks a big one.

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movies and linux

entry #1325, Thu, October 31, 2002, 16:44 (Life in General)

In my current quest to achieve enlightenment by looking for it in all the wrong places, I've rented more movies. "Tora! Tora! Tora!" is definitely a 'watch.' Now that I've seen it, I hate "Pearl Harbor" more than I did when I saw it. "Eight Legged Freaks" is also a 'watch.' This movie is totally sweet! Especially the ostrich farm scene. And if there's one thing I learned from this movie is that motorcycle safety is not something to be taken lightly. "Mr. Deeds" starring Adam Sandler is also a watch. It's pretty light, but amusing.

Matt Szulik, Chairman and CEO of Redhat is on campus for the BC game. He gave a talk today. I went. It was interesing. Not very much technical stuff, but more business oriented. He also had some interesting thoughts about IP. I stuck around afterwards to talk to him. I met him my junior year. I was working FAST at the LSU game and he was in my section. I was reading my O'Reilly Linux Device Drivers book and so he introduced himself to me, since he'd just been hired as President of Redhat. He remembered meeting me and even said he still tells people about how he met a Linux person at a Notre Dame football game. He then hinted that I should work for Redhat. I never did mention I'm a debian user. :)

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good news!

entry #1324, Sun, October 27, 2002, 23:26 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

It's funny how you forget stuff. For instance, I was taken completely by surprise when I noticed my web page has one of them bookmark icons associated with it. But that's not the point.

The point is: the latex special character guide is finally back on my web page! I apologize to all of you who have suffered from its absence, except Perk. Perk can bite me.

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somebody ought to shut me up

entry #1323, Sun, October 27, 2002, 02:55 (Life in General)

music, hardware, geek nostalgia, movies, football. Today I talk about all that and my cat!

iTunes now keeps track of how often I've listened to all my mp3s. And using its new smart playlist feature, I can generate a list of my top 25 most played songs. My collection is now 2365 songs big. That's 10.43 Gigabytes. Five days, nine hours, fourteen minutes, and fifty-two seconds of uninterrupted music. With the exception of maybe two or three songs, all my mp3s are ripped from my own CDs.

So here's the top 25:

Operation Ivy - Sound System
Sonic Youth - Beat on the Brat
The Clash - Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Operation Ivy - Here We Go Again
No Doubt - Underneath It All
Operation Ivy - Yellin' In My Ear
MxPx - Punk Rawk Show
The Pietasters - Higher
Reel Big Fish - Nothin'
Smile dk feat Saxomatic - Butterfly (Pikachu and the Pokemon)
Weezer - Island in the Sun
Against All Authority - Freedom
The Ataris - Angry Nerd Rock
The Clash - I Fought The Law
Hot Water Music - Remedy
Less Than Jake - All My Best Friends Are Metalheads
MEST - Fucked Up Kid
The Ataris - The Last Song I Will Ever Write About a Girl
The Descendents - She Loves Me
Minor Threat - I Don't Wanna Hear It
MxPx - Responsibility
Operation Ivy - Vulnerability
The Queers - Fuck The World
Rancid - Crane Fist
The Skadows - Twice

There are 1742 songs in my collection which I've not yet listened to (since ripping them -- I've listened to them on CD or when I had them as mp3s on my old laptop), 528 songs I've played once, 63 songs I've played twice, and 32 songs I've played three or more times.

I bought a CD by Hot Water Music the other day. I like it a lot. I saw them live last spring, but didn't like them as much as the other bands at that show (tough competition: Less Than Jake and Bad Religion). Anyway, I'm a poser, and some punk comic strip that Adam introduced me to called Nothing Nice mentioned that the new Hot Water Music CD was good. So since somebody apparently more punk than me liked it, I had to get it.

We've got wireless in our apartment now! It's the best thing that's ever happened to me. My memory may be failing, though. Anyway. It's good. I bought a Netgear wireless base station/ethernet switch/router thingy. It talks directly to our DSL modem and took maybe fifteen minutes to set up. Sweet. I love technology.

esgeroth is a dead box. It's sadness. Did I mention it got hacked? It did. Some stupid ass script kiddies found it last spring. Since it was on a slow dialup link, I never even considered it a target, especially since its IP changed every eight hours. So I never kept it up to date. And I got bit in the ass. But I noticed right away, so the bastards never got a chance (that I know of) to attack anyone from esgeroth. To my knowledge, that's the only time a machine of mine has been hacked. So since then esgeroth's been sitting around unused.

A couple days ago I finally tried to reinstall on esgeroth. Bonk. Hard drive is kaput. I remove it and try it in a different machine, no go. The SCSI controllers recognize it as a drive, but give a 'drive not ready' error. Sadness. That was the first hard drive I ever installed Linux on. It's a 4.5 gig ultrawide SCSI drive. It cost me like $500 or so in 1998. I went to Best Buy to get a new drive for esgeroth. I went with IDE and paid $120 for an 80 gig drive. That's obscene.

So further attempts to reinstall on esgeroth have met no luck, since the hardware in that box is all heretical. Debian doesn't seem to find it necessary to include support for my scsi controller on their installers. Which is a problem, since my cdrom drive is still scsi. And my network card isn't supported until the 2.4 kernel. So I borrowed an IDE cdrom drive from NDLUG, but it don't want to work. Blah. So I'm still esgerothless. You'd think that four and a half years later I wouldn't be having the trouble I did back during that first install.

That first install was ghetto. And it was before I kept a journal. I had to download slackware floppy images over a 28.8 modem to my mom's mac (a centris, I believe... I can remember when I would drool thinking of centris/quadra series macs). For whatever reason, I couldn't write those images to disk, though, on mom's machine. So I connected it to my old old laptop via a printer cable and transferred the images via appletalk. On my laptop I wrote the images to disks and then installed them on esgeroth. That was a lengthy process.

I'm feeling very nostalgic, suddenly.

I've also found myself in movie geek mode. So I rented several DVDs. Since I still despise the dollar-based system of ranking movies, and since my last attempt at an alternative was nothing better than a practical joke gone horribly wrong, I'm going to try a new approach. Movies will be rated as follows:

own. This rating means the movie is worth owning and watching repeatedly.
watch. This means the movie is worth seeing at least once.
wui. Short for "Watch Under the Influence." The movie is worth seeing if you're drunk, high, or otherwise in the right mood.
avoid. Don't see this movie.

There. Simple and to the point. And not subject to inflation. Actually, my biggest objection to rating movies with monetary values is that I'm much more concerned about the time I waste watching a movie than about the money I spent to see it. I detest being bored.

So three movies that shall fall victim to this new scheme: The Royal Tennenbaums: own. Comic Book Villains: wui. Clockstoppers: wui. Royal Tennenbaums was awesome. It was co-written by Owen Wilson, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite comic actors. It seems he's also got writing talent. Comic Book Villains was a smaller release film (Lions Gate) which had a good premise, but horrid writing. Bad bad bad. It starred several actors I've liked in other smaller movies, but none of them could overcome the bad lines they were given. I ended up hating all but one of the characters, though that may have been the intent of the film. This film also felt like it was trying to be a View Askew production, but it failed to be nearly as funny as Kevin Smith's works are. Clockstoppers is a silly teenage comedy film with a scifi twist. It stars Jesse Bradford playing a similar role to the one he played in Bring It On. The plot has more holes than whichever type of semiconductor has "holes" ... I forget if it's nmos or pmos. God, somebody stop me. So Clockstoppers was silly and cheesy. As the film progressed, I kept lowering my estimate of the target age of this movie. But I still enjoyed it, sorta. It's good if you're in the right mood.

ND football rules so much. 8-0. That's all I got to say about that.

Why does Apple rule? Because it took very little effort to get my laptop to print to Meg's printer that's connected to her PC. This despite my conviction that printing is inherently evil.

At Blockbuster I bought this card that gets me one 'free' movie rental a week for ten weeks. As a sign of gratitude for this purchase, Blockbuster is going to give me a free copy of Spiderman on DVD when it comes out. Good deal. And this way I'll have to watch more movies, which is good. I've come to realize again that I hate television.

Gandhi now weighs five pounds. He's growing at an absurd rate.

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great america and beyond

entry #1322, Tue, October 22, 2002, 10:12 (Travel)

Meg and I had ourselves a fun little trip. Sunday morning we drove through Chicago to Six Flags Great America. Their Fright Fest is currently in progress. So we went through one haunted house and did a bunch of rollercoasters. Yay, lots of fun. It got pretty cold by the end. Then dinner at a very good Italian place.

Monday morning we spent in downtown Chicago. We went to a spa and got massages and manicures. The manicure was an interesting experience. I didn't get any nail polish, but my nails are very shiny from being buffed. They also put on some pumpkin exfoliating stuff. All I could think about while this stuff sat on my hands was that while I was using food to make my hands smell funny, countless others had no food at all. The best part of the manicure was a really good hand massage. I don't feel any need to do any of the rest of it again, though.

We ate lunch at foodlife in the Watertower, then went up to the observation level of the Hancock Building. It's oh so tall.

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adventuring

entry #1321, Fri, October 18, 2002, 17:23 (Life in General)

I went on an adventure today. After class (yup, we saw Donald!) I drove to Culver and picked Cari up. We then drove to Plymouth and found the local license branch. Cari took the written test and passed! Yay! So she's finally got a driver's permit. Then, after a fast food lunch, I drove her back to Culver. I got a quick tour of where she lives and then drove myself back to South Bend.

Annie called me just as I was getting on US 31 North on my drive back. So I got to talk to her for the 40 or so minutes it took to get back to South Bend. That was excellent. And Anne called me yesterday, so I'm getting all sorts of fun phone calls.

I got curious and did a google search. I'm definitely not the only one who saw a connection between Signs and Owen Meany. Quite a few reviews of Signs mentioned the similarities in theme to Owen Meany. So I'm not just making things up. :)

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cogito ergo sum

entry #1320, Fri, October 18, 2002, 00:17 (Life in General)

I've just now realized that for the third week in a row, I've forgotten to get my five free dollars at the bookstore. All I have to do to earn this is get my picture taken. Blah.

Several weeks ago, when I was still in the habit of being a superstar model, I used some of the bookstore money I earned to buy A Prayer For Owen Meany by John Irving. I finally finished it a couple days ago. Before this book, I considered Irving to be one of my favorite authors. I think now he's got the top spot. I probably liked Garp better than Owen Meany, but Owen Meany was pretty damn good.

Tonight Meg and I saw Signs (written, directed, and so on by M. Night Shyamalan and starring Mel Gibson). I liked it. It had some fun faith and fate themes that made it complement Owen Meany very well. And isn't it a fun twist of fate that I finished this book and saw this movie so close in time?

Um. So class has been kinda silly this past week. We've been talking about probability, and I've been messing it up. I keep looking at the material I want to talk about and thinking "oh, I know this stuff, I don't need to prepare much," and then finding myself at the board, doing silly things like using permutations instead of combinations. Silly me. So tomorrow I'm gonna show them Donald in Mathmagic Land, and then I'll use fall break to get better prepared.

As part of my attempts to redeem myself, I went to the bookstore looking for a fun probability book. I wanted something with entertaining examples. I found a book of that nature, and also picked up three other math books. One called Zero, which discusses the history and such of -- you guessed it -- the number 0. Another called something like The Magical Maze which is a basic intro to the fun of math, written primarily for a youthful audience. It looked like a good source of ways to make math more fun. And finally, I bought a Dictionary of curious and interesting numbers.

I like math. I need to dedicate a significant amount of time to getting better at it, especially the calculusy stuff that I avoided learning when I was supposed to (through the clever technique of not going to class).

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exhibit b

entry #1319, Mon, October 14, 2002, 10:13 (Random Crap)

Oh Lord. Check this.

'The Daily Evergreen would like to sincerely apologize for an injustice served to the Filipino-American, Spanish-speaking and Catholic communities on the front page of Thursday's Evergreen. The story "Filipino-American history recognized" stated that the "Nuestra Senora de Buena Esperanza," the galleon on which the first Filipinos landed at Morro, Bay, Calif., loosely translates to "The Big Ass Spanish Boat." It actually translates to "Our Lady of Good Hope." Parts of the story, including the translation above, were plagiarized from an inaccurate Web site.'

Journalistic integrity really seems overrated these days. And that may qualify as one of the worst apologies ever.

Nobody liked my previous discussion questions, so here's one that's maybe a bit more controversial: does ND really deserve a #7 ranking?

And why, oh why did the Broncos lose last night? Human beings are strange things. Exhibit a:

public2-macc1-5-cust203.manc.broadband.ntl.com - -
[13/Oct/2002:03:03:21 -0500] "GET /log/viewall.php 
HTTP/1.1" 200 268765 "http://webster.directhit.com/webster/search.aspx?qry=Pics+Of+Cambodian+Prostitutes&meta=rs" 
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98)"

Exhibit b: I still haven't finished my lesson plan for class today. portalofevil will be my undoing.

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orgh blargh yarf

entry #1318, Mon, October 14, 2002, 08:04 (Random Crap)

I've not written much of recent. That's gonna have to change. I just don't feel inspired to write these days. I'm pretty uninspired in general.

I read yesterday that Israel and Turkey are both violating more UN security council resolutions than Iraq. Israel is violating 32, Turkey is violating 24. Iraq is only in violation of 12. I find this disturbing. I find the world in general disturbing. I find our president particularly disturbing.

Discussion questions: 1. how important is it to distinguish between predestination (or fate, if you will) and determinism? 2. Is indeterminism more of a threat to free will than determinism? 3. Would you like fries with that?

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funniest joke

entry #1317, Fri, October 04, 2002, 09:39 (Random Crap)

According to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, this is the funniest joke in the world:

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other man pulls out his phone and calls emergency services. He gasps to the operator: "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator in a calm, soothing voice replies: "Take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the hunter says, "Ok, now what?"

Another result of this British study of humor is that if you're going to tell a joke involving animals, your best bet is to use ducks. I guess ducks are funny.

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Can I kick it?

entry #1316, Wed, October 02, 2002, 18:52 (Life in General)

Some days ago, I saw an elderly woman walking across the quad wearing a breathing apparatus of some sorts. It looked like a gasmask, but was colored to look like it belonged in a hospital and not on a battlefield. I couldn't help but wonder if it would be appropriate to thank her for making my life more surreal.

Is this the moment in which I am supposed to live?

My new laptop is fun. It's fast. It is, however, not as stable as my previous one was. I'm regularly running into situations in which I need to reboot it. iTunes 3 is neat. It, too, has some bugs, though.

Ugh. I'm experiencing a definite lack of motivation and energy. It's depressing.

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For me? Aw, thanks!

entry #1315, Mon, September 23, 2002, 16:15 (School)

Teaching rocks. Here's another reason why: I've now received two free books in addition to several free copies of the book I'm actually using for the class. I'm using Rosen's Discrete book, fourth edition. I got a free copy of the fifth edition a few weeks ago, and today I got a free copy of an Addison Wesley Discrete Math book. AW actually sent it addressed to me. It said it was compliments of my AW representative. I didn't even know I had an AW rep. I knew instructors could get free books if they asked for them. But I've not even had to ask! Here's hoping for more free books to come!

I think there is no longer any doubt in my mind. I gotta teach for a living. Free books just make the whole deal too good.

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you tease me, apple

entry #1314, Mon, September 23, 2002, 13:09 (Life in General)

It's not fair. I got a shipment notification from Apple on Friday. It came with a FedEx tracking number. So I've been checking fedex.com regularly to see how my package was doing. I watched as it progressed from Taiwan to Anchorage to Tennessee to South Bend. Right before class this morning, fedex.com told me the package had been successfully delivered. Excited, I rushed to the office to pick it up. But to my dismay, it was far too small a package to hold a powerbook. It was only my extra power adapter I had ordered. My spirits crushed, I headed to class.

Now I've got a new tracking number to watch. My laptop has left Taiwan. It's on its way. I want it now.

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rock!

entry #1313, Sun, September 22, 2002, 21:32 (Life in General)

We spent most of this weekend in the Chicago area. Not downtown, though. We visited Meg's high school and saw the show choir she was in perform. Then we spent some time with her extended family. It was entertaining.

The drive on Saturday was intense. We listened to the second half of the game on the radio. I think the Michigan State game is the one that matters most to me this season. I wanted to finally see us beat them. And we did. Barely. Other people on the road must've thought we were crazy, we got really excited when Arnez scored.

We went to a religious education class at the South Bend UU church tonight. It's going to be a ten-week thing. I expect to learn some interesting things about myself, but I'm equally excited about what I'm gonna learn about Meg.

Life rocks. ND Football rocks. My friends rock. Teaching rocks. Getting a new laptop is gonna rock. Meg rocks. Yay.

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in other news

entry #1312, Thu, September 19, 2002, 14:56 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

My understanding of the world has been completely shattered. Suddenly, everything is drastically different. When did this happen?

prompt-fu => tar tfj linux-2.4.19.tar.bz2 | head -1
linux-2.4.19/

Some professor in Turkey sent me an email today asking for my lecture notes for discrete so he can use them for his class.

The big news, however: thanks to the collective efforts of a great group of friends, I am able to afford a new Powerbook. Today I ordered such a beast. A Powerbook G4 (a.k.a. Titanium). Lots of neatness. I'm excited, I want it right now.

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I love tcsh

entry #1311, Thu, September 19, 2002, 11:23 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Hah! So while I was using Perk's computer in California, an idea struck me as I cursed his tcsh setup for not autocompleting wizard in an ssh command.

It goes a little something like this:

set hostnames = `cat ~/.ssh/known_hosts|awk '{print $1}' | cut -d, -f1`
complete ssh 'n/-l/(prijks root)/' 'p/*/$hostnames/'

Now once I've connected to a machine once using ssh, new shells will autocomplete the hostname for me. Oh yeah. I'm a god.

My only concern is that my known_hosts file could become to bankrupt. I don't want to have to type more than three characters for any hostname. We shall see.

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survey says ...

entry #1310, Wed, September 18, 2002, 13:30 (School)

Since this whole teaching thing is still a skill I'm learning, I decided to give my class a survey today to get some feedback on how the class is going for them. I was surprised to see the results were more positive than I expected. One of the questions was "Is the pace of the class too slow, too fast, or just right." I got twenty people saying just right, five saying too slow, and three saying too fast. I asked them how much time they spent on homework compared to their other classes. One person said the discrete homework took less time than homework for other classes. Seven said it took more time than other classes, and the rest said the homework load was average compared to their other classes.

I asked them what material we've covered they had seen before. There was a lot of variation here. Some had seen everything before, some had seen none of it. Most of them had seen some of the material before, but there was little overlap of what people had seen before. I guess the most common thing for them to have seen before was set theory. But it looks like I need to continue teaching as if none of the material has been seen before.

I asked them which material they were having the most difficulty with, and the answers were pretty uniform: pseudo-code and big-O (and big-omega and big-theta) notation. So I'll probably review that some.

Finally, I asked for any other comments. Some students gave me some really good ideas for improving the lectures, especially regarding the examples I give in class. So that's cool. I wore a shirt today that says "There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't." We covered binary in class Monday. Lots of students liked the shirt. Some commented on the survey. Several also asked how my cat is doing.

A selection from the comments: "I like your collection of shirts."
"Nice shirts -> always look forward to seeing them."
"I like your style. Good guy. Hope your cat is doing well."
"Keep up the same practices you have been using."
"That binary T-shirt is totally sweet. Very cool teacher. Need more jokes/talk more about stuff that isn't Discrete Math, like football or your cat. Good sense of humor, but rarely used."
"Good accessibility. Gnarly shirts!"
"Go Irish."
"A good job so far, but you don't need to spend so much time on the simple stuff."
"I like the way that you teach. I think you are doing a great job."

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dot dot dot

entry #1309, Fri, September 13, 2002, 13:46 (Life in General)

Some miscellaneous notes.

My bike has been missing for some time. I thought it had been locked up outside my castle point apartment, but when I moved out, it wasn't there. I've finally gotten around to looking in all the spots on campus where I may have left it, and it's not in any of those places. So I conclude that it was stolen from castle point. Boo.

Bush came to South Bend last Thursday to raise money for Chocola. A bunch of people protested, including a few ND kids. I went with the ND peace coalition. My picture got taken and was printed in the Observer. After class today one student came up to me and told me he'd seen my picture in the paper. Funny.

Blah.

Anti-Flag is playing in Chicago on Sept. 21. It's the Plea for Peace tour. When I saw them in Detroit, I think it was the Mobilize for Peace tour, with Against All Authority. Plea for Peace is Anti-Flag and Bouncing Souls. There's no home football game that weekend, and there is a group of ND kids going. Hmmm...

I'm tired. And my back is killing me.

Did I mention I'm being paid to have my picture taken? Well, sorta. The computer vision group will take your picture once a week and will give you in exchange, every time after the first, a $5 gift certificate to the bookstore. So far I've got $10 worth of bookstore money.

Yay. I actually got paid!

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Arrrr. Talk like a Pirate!

entry #1308, Mon, September 09, 2002, 13:42 (Life in General)

I love Dave Barry. And so when the word comes from him, I gotta help spread it.

September 19 is National Talk Like A Pirate Day.

See for yourselves.

I need to work on my pirate talk during the next ten days, just to be ready. Avast! Ahoy! Walk the plank, matey!

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warned by the cat

entry #1307, Wed, September 04, 2002, 20:57 (Life in General)

I'm currently holding my office hours for CSE 210. Nobody is coming. So I was having an IM conversation with Meg. At one point Gandhi decided it was his turn to chat with me, so he jumped from Meg's lap onto the keyboard. I got several messages of gibberish (well, they probably actually meant "Feed me!") and then suddenly a dialog box pops up, informing me I'd been warned. Somehow Gandhi actually managed to warn me. Silly kitty. What'd I ever do to you?

My office machine is now invincible. Sweet.

If people tear down your advertising posters in order to use them as decoration, you know you've got yourself a good advertising campaign and a loyal customer base. There's a bunch of Apple posters around Fitz that picture the titanium with the words "Sends other UNIX boxes to /dev/null." I stole one to decorate my office. Two days later, Jim knocks on my door and hands me another one of these posters. He thought I'd like to use it to decorate my office. I'm greatly amused.

I think I gave my best 210 lecture so far today. And it's the one I prepared for the least. I guess there's something to be said for improvisation. Dr Bowyer got me copies of a couple documents about lecturing. There's some interesting tips in them. I'm gonna be a good teacher yet.

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kitty pics

entry #1306, Wed, September 04, 2002, 09:48 (Life in General)

Pictures of Gandhi are online.

We decided we liked Gandhi best as a name for him. So he's now got a pretty big name to live up to. He did try to live up to the name by fasting for the first few days we had him. But we've now got him eating, so all seems well. We took him to the vet yesterday. Meg was working ERA, so she actually helped exam him. It sounds like he's pretty healthy.

We've introduced Gandhi to Penny and Janis. I think it was a traumatic experience at first, but while they're all not entirely friendly to each other yet, they're at least peaceful for the most part. Janis seems sad, since she's now no longer the baby of the household.

ND beat Maryland! Yay. It was a shutout, too. And now we're ranked #23 in the AP and #24 in the coaches. I'm happy with how this season is beginning.

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Kitten!!

entry #1305, Fri, August 30, 2002, 11:59 (Life in General)

Yay! Yayayayayayay! yay!!

Meg and I adopted a kitty last night! He's the cutest thing ever! He was born on June 28. He's "blue" (which actually means he's grey) with medium hair. And he's superfriendly. And since he's a little boy, I'm no longer the sole male in the household.

So talk about commitment, huh?

I had to sleep on the couch with Janis last night. We're not yet ready to introduce the cat and the dogs, even though both already have experience with the other species. So we closed the bedroom door last night, leaving the dogs outside. They were lonely, Janis especially. So since there was no way we'd get any sleep with them whining and scratching at the door, I volunteered to keep them company in the living room. Which means I didn't sleep particularly well, but it's all good. I'm used to that at this point.

After Meg left for work, I put up a barrier in the hallway so Janis and Penny couldn't scratch at the door. So I got to sleep with the kitty a couple hours. He's supercute.

We're still trying to pick a name for him. We're considering Sven or Gandhi. Or Alien Kitty Alfonso (AKA for short). Or maybe Gandhi Alien Kitty (Gak for short). Our options are limitless.

In other news, I've taught my class twice without getting arrested. And I'm losing my office in 355N, so my teaching office will be all I get. And Branden's not gonna be my TA anymore. And they're not paying me yet. So I figure I can teach anything I want. I could spend an entire class period talking about my new cat.

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professor pete?

entry #1304, Tue, August 27, 2002, 13:21 (School)

It's like this: people do strange things in bathrooms. But that's not what I want to talk about.

There now remain less than 24 hours until I teach my first class. Scary! Yesterday there was a little party at the CSE main office so that people could meet the new grad students. Several professors asked me if I was ready to teach. The chair even gave me a little lecture. So now the pressure's on. Alright.

I have a new office. I get this office because I'm teaching. I share it with Rich, since he's teaching, too. It's nice. The idea is that I tell students only about that office, and I hold my office hours there, so that I can have peace and quiet in my regular office. I feel special, though. There are now two doors in Fitz with my name on them.

I am also being encouraged, by the office of the registrar, to stalk my students. I've got access to a list of the students online, which includes their ID pictures. So I can start memorizing their names before I even meet them. This is incredibly convenient. I'd love to have this kind of thing at parties. I'm so bad with names.

I'm finishing up all the little details that remain, such as making a course web page. I think I'm ready.

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I don't get it

entry #1303, Fri, August 23, 2002, 16:23 (Life in General)

I'm going through my INBOX. I'm up to 532 messages. My philosophy is pretty straightforward. If it's more than a few weeks old, I probably don't need to keep it. This seems a pretty good basis of selecting email to save. Especially since much of what I'm coming across is messages concerning May 2002 graduation deadlines or stuff concerning my VLSI design group. I took VLSI during the fall 2001 semester. I'm pretty sure I needn't save those messages anymore.

So I have come across a few interesting emails. The most entertaining ones tend to be the ones I send myself. Sometimes I send myself email that contains information I needed to record in a hurry. Other times I apparently send myself email while on crack. Such as this one:

Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2002 02:37:56 -0500 (EST)                                     
From: Pete Rijks                                             
To: Peter William Rijks                                      
Subject: title                                                                  
                                                                                
"Clumsy Fumblethumbs" ... a tale of intrigue and desire ...

What's wrong with me?

I got contacts again. I've been about a month and a half without them. I finally went to the eye doctor this week and got my eyes all checked out. The doctor was very enthusiastic about the health of my eyes. "You've got very healthy eyes," he would say. Or something like that. There were also details about good blood circulation or some such. But it's cool, because with my new contacts, I now have 20/15 vision. Sweet.

I didn't fall asleep until six this morning. Boo.

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Meg and Pete go on vacation

entry #1302, Tue, August 20, 2002, 18:48 (Travel)

Monday, August 5, 2002 -- La Junta, Colorado
The train stops briefly for servicing and to change crews. Some cultures, I think, encourage a certain respect for ones ancestral lands. Perhaps there is reason for this. I don't know. I felt a strange feeling of being at home, though. Mom grew up here. I left the train and enjoyed the sensation of dry heat. No yucky humidity, just dry Colorado air trying to suck the moisture out of me. My silly brain was also comforted to see CO plates on most the cars. I felt like I belonged. I knew where I was. I saw the Picketwire Emporium and remembered the Picketwire, the Purgatory River. Frenchies had named the river, I think, and over time the French pronunciation of Purgatoire was bastardized to Picketwire. I love it. The strong sense of belonging was tempting a certain part of me to just let the train leave me behind. But then as I wandered the length of the train, experiencing the excited milling about of people, hearing the sounds trains tend to make at trains stations, I was overwhelmed by the romantic notion of train travel, I yearned to be moving again. And, of course, Meg was on the train and would probably have been pissed if I'd stayed behind in the land of my ancestors.

Wednesday, August 7, 2002 -- San Diego, California
I'm having a bad glasses day. It's 8:40 in the morning, Pacific time, and I've misplaced them somewhere outside the San Diego Civic Theater. (sorry. Theatre. It's spelled the British way on the building) I couldn't find them this morning either. Meg woke me at 6:20 so we could come to the theater and get in line for rush tickets to Rent. Unable to find my glasses and in a hurry to get in line, I wandered around San Diego blind, trusting Meg to find our way for us. She did. There's maybe six people ahead of us in line. Our spot secure, I head back to the hostel, hoping to find my glasses. I do, and while there I grab sleeping bags and books. Back to the theatre. I find a drug store along the way and pick up this notebook -- it's time to journal the old-skool way.

Sunday morning, August the fourth, Rich was kind enough to drop Meg, me, and a bunch of baggage off at the South Bend Amtrak station. Our baggage checked in, wondering if we'll ever see it again, we settle down for a three hour wait. Amtrak, we are discovering, is not so good at being on time. Lucky for us, we have a long layover in Chicago, so there's no worry of missing our next train -- the Southwest Chief. Again, we leave late -- two hours this time, and this time it's due to mechanical troubles with the lounge car. The delay on the South Bend - Chicago line -- the Lake Shore Limited -- was apparently because of freight trains. The freight companies own most of the tracks, so Amtrak has to yield to them.

The Southwest Chief took us, over the span of some 46 hours, from Chicago, IL to Los Angeles, CA. Overall, it was a neat way to travel. It's very relaxed, and even in Coach they give you plenty of leg room. Meals in the dining room were pleasant, though rarely on time. The cafe/bar in the lounge car seemed out of stock of just about everything on the menu -- except hard alcohol.

We had plenty to do, though. We had books to read, scenery to watch, and a rented laptop so we could play computer games. I am now addicted to Rollercoaster Tycoon.

When we finally get into LA, we've missed our connection to San Diego, the Pacific Surfliner. All is well, though, because this train runs every two hours. The Surfliner was the first train we took that left on time. It was also the first train we were on that wasn't full. With all the financial woes Amtrak is having, we had visions of empty trains, but it really doesn't seem Amtrak is lacking in customers.

So I'm playing Rollercoaster Tycoon again when Meg brings the view to my attention: the train has found its way to the ocean and the tracks go right along the beach. Beautiful! We arrive in San Diego, and are pleasantly surprised to find that our luggage has too! A quick cab ride later and we're at the downtown San Diego youth hostel. We check into a private room and take anxiously awaited showers. We then head to a Tapas place in the Gaslamp District that -- we were excited to see an ad for this in the hostel -- was giving free salsa lessons. So we dance a while. It's a rotating partner sort of deal, so I get to frustrate several women as I refuse to figure out the move they try to teach us. At least this way Meg gets a chance to dance with people who get it. Then Tapas for dinner before passing out in the hostel for a deep sleep that is far too short.

I've found my glasses again. Eight hours until tickets go on sale.

Wednesday, August 7, 2002 -- San Diego, California
Yay! We got tickets! Front row, too! After being in line all day, we've returned to the hostel for a quick shower before the show. Here we've discovered that our room was invaded by dozens of little flying bugs. Best solution I found was to close the window and fan them into the hallway with my towel. Always carry a towel.

Wednesday, August 7, 2002 -- San Diego, California
Rent was awesome! I picked up much more this time than last, which was cool. Meg's friend James met us for the show and we hit a restaurant on Fifth afterwards which featured live Jazz. City life is fun!

Thursday, August 8, 2002 -- San Diego, California
We've got a car! We rented a red Chevy Cavalier from National this morning. We'll have it for a week. Meanwhile, Key Bank is proving very incompetent. It seems I didn't submit my change of address to them on time, so a statement got returned in the mail. So they put a hold on my credit card. I called them Friday and they said they'd fix it and I could use my card by monday. No go. So I called again on Wednesday. Again they tell me the hold is because of my address, again they tell me it will be taken care of. At the car rental place, the card is again declined. Gah! So I call again and complain a bunch and am told my previous calls don't show up on their records. Grrrrr. But I think maybe this time it is actually sorted out. We'll see.

Friday, August 9, 2002 -- San Clemente, California
I was an exhausted Pete last night. Passed out immediately upon getting into bed. After getting the car yesterday, we checked out of the hostel, then shopped a little. We then took the trolley to the border and walked across to Tijuana. It was the first time in Mexico for both of us. We wandered around some, being harassed by children selling cheap candy and other things. They were really persistent, but none of them looked like they were starving. We walked much more than was probably necessary, before finally picking a restaurant to have dinner at. The place had a two-for-one margarita deal, so we ordered a margarita each, expecting they'd charge us for one. Instead, they brought us two each. After the margaritas, I had a Dos Equis, but shortly after ordering it, our waiter visited me with a bottle of tequilla. He tilts my head back and starts pouring it into my mouth. He then decides it's not flowing fast enough, so he takes off the fancy pouring lid and starts pouring more into my mouth. After about two shots worth I stop him, since he seemed to have no intention of slowing down. He then pours some of my beer into my mouth wipes off my face, and raises my hand in victory. Viva Mexico!

Entering Mexico, we had not been required to show any ID or anything. Returning to the US was slightly more complicated. We had to stand in line quite a while, go through a metal detector, show ID, and declare our imports (I had some tequilla in my tummy, Meg had a bag with chips and salsa).

After a final trip to the mall, we leave San Diego. We stopped at a couple state beaches, looking for a campsite, but everything was full. So we found a hotel and passed out in a hurry.

Sunday, August 11, 2002 -- Anacapa Island, Channel Islands National Park
Dolphins are cool. We took a ferry this morning from Oxnard to Anacapa Island. A pod of dolphins decided to take a break from feeding and surfed in the wake of our boat. It was neat. I'm now sitting on some rock overlooking the cove where the boat docked. I just saw a seal swimming around.

Friday we ended up in Santa Monica, where we spent some time on the beach before doing some shopping. We were supposed to stay with Meg's friend James, but couldn't contact him. So finally it got late enough that we just decided to drive to Santa Barbara and sleep at Chateau Rink.

Saturday we wake up around 10. Chris fixes pancakes for breakfast. We meet his girlfriend Sarah. George is also there. He had independently made plans to be in Santa Barbara at the same time. He brought his girlfriend Julia so we also met her.

After breakfast we head to a verizon store. We discovered Friday night that we'd left our cell phone charger in the hostel in San Diego. The verizon store doesn't have what we need, but Radio Shack does.

Meg spends the afternoon napping, reading, and going to the gym. I go with Perk, Chris, Sarah, George and Julia on a tour of UCSB followed by a trip to a neat spot in the mountains with a great view of the Santa Barbara area. We then watch Amelie, which was a lot of fun.

There's a barbecue at Chateau Rink for dinner. After that, we all go to the beach where we make a fire and have s'mores. Perk, George, Julia, and I also decide to jump into the cold night-time Pacific. Perk and I, who have a tradition of sorts with cold bodies of water, make several return visits, the last of which we dedicated lovingly to "LAKE!"

Monday, August 12, 2002 -- Anacapa Island
I'm convinced that Anacapa is a native word for birdcrap. The birds control this island, and it is only their generosity that has left us alive. The Park Service claims Anacapa is a Chumash word for mirage, but I think they're just trying to make it sound nicer for tourists. Birdcrap Island is what it will be in my mind.

So while I was enjoying the waves on our trip to the island, it turns out that they made Meg very seasick. So we took our first few hours on the island very easy. The island was full of daytrippers at the time, so it was probably better that way. We then found our campsite (one of only six sites on the island -- it's very solitary here at night) and pitched our tent. It was still very warm, so we napped a few hours until it got cool. Then we explored the island for real. It's only about a square mile in size, but it is home to several interesting species of plants that don't exist anywhere else. There's also lizards, disease-ridden mice, and lots of birds. We found a bench near the Western end of the island that didn't have too much crap on it and watched the sun set over the Pacific. Very nice.

Sunday, August 18, 2002 -- on board the California Zephyr
Our trip is coming to and end, and I'm actually looking forward to it. All I want right now is a good rest in a comfy bed.

After a little more hiking (I also got harassed by a seagull) we left Anacapa about noon on Monday. Once back on the mainland, we took our leave of Chateau Rink and drove north on 101 to San Francisco. We arrived at about midnight and found Em's place, where she was kindly allowing us to stay.

Tuesday morning I discovered our second parking ticket of the trip. We got our first in Santa Monica for letting the meter expire (by about a minute). This one was for parking while they were trying to clean the street. Doh.

We spent most of Tuesday in Berkeley, checking out the campus and wandering around Telegraph. When we returned to Em's place, we realized her cat Moses was missing. We decided the only thing he could possibly have done was jump out the window. Luckily, there was no way for him to escape the courtyard beneath the window, so after a bunch of searching, Em and I finally found him hiding under some bushes.

Moses safe back in the apartment (with window sill privileges revoked), we went to dinner with Em and Keith at an Ethiopian place. I've been craving Ethiopian food for some time now. After dinner we stopped by a mellow gay bar, because, I guess, that's what one does in San Francisco. It was a fun evening.

Wednesday we loaded the car, had some issues with our car and downtown San Francisco, and hit the road at about 12:30. We then proceeded to drive about 1300 miles in 19.5 hours. Meg and I are a good driving team, I think. We dropped the car off at the Colorado Springs airport on Thursday morning, where Mom picked us up. We drove to Crested Butte via Cottonwood Pass. Meg and I spent most of the ride asleep.

It was fun being in Crested Butte again. We had dinner at the Avalance on Thursday. Friday we checked out the town some. At some point Mamie's new dog, Juno, jumped off the balcony at the condo. I suspect Meg and I have some strange effect on animals that causes them to jump out of buildings. It's a good thing for Janis and Penny that we live on the ground floor. Friday night Matt and the Rozmans came over for dinner.

Saturday morning Mamie, Annie, and Diana drove us to Grand Junction where we caught the California Zephyr. It arrived three hours late. We're wising up to Amtrak and so we'd called ahead. So we knew not to bother showing up at the train station on time. We took Kebler pass to get to Grand Junction, so Meg came into and left Crested Butte on dirt roads. We did let her know, though, that there is one paved highway that leads into CB.

Tuesday, August 20, 2002 -- South Bend, Indiana
The trip is over. Our train from Chicago to South Bend was also a couple hours late. Branden picked us up at the train station. My suitcase hadn't made it, but the rest of our checked luggage had. Monday evening we drove to Wisconsin to pick up Janis and Penny. I must admit I missed them. Meg, I suspect, would have gone crazy if it'd been any longer before she saw them again. This trip has been the longest Meg has ever spent away from Janis since she got her. But now we're all back at home, and all is well. My suitcase was dropped off this morning.

The trip was a lot of fun. It was also very tiring, since it feels like we spent more time traveling than at our destinations. I think we spent just enough time at all our stops to know we wanted to spend more time there. Neither of us wanted to kill the other by the time the trip was over, which is a good thing. We had some good conversations, and I feel our relationship is in good shape. So I'm quite happy with life. Now I got to get ready to start teaching in a week.

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with humblest apologies ...

entry #1301, Wed, July 31, 2002, 15:00 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

George pointed out a shortcoming in that bit of code I posted. While the code pyramid was 15 lines big, the default size of the output pyramid was 16 lines. How silly. So due to popular demand, here's a patch to fix that:

--- t.c.orig    2002-07-31 15:01:07.000000000 -0500
+++ t.c 2002-07-31 15:00:36.000000000 -0500
@@ -5,7 +5,7 @@
                    char*v[])
                   {int x[5];0
                  [x]=aa>1?atoi
-                (v[1]):020;for(
+                (v[1]):017;for(
                1[x]=1;1[x]<=0[x]
               ;++1[x]){for(3[x]=1
              ;3[x]<0[x]-1[x]+1;++3

Also, I apologize for pine's silly behavior. If you read that previous entry with pine, you probably noticed that pine put the initial semicolon at the left of the line instead of centered at the top of the pyramid where it's supposed to be. Well, booooo.

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for great justice

entry #1300, Wed, July 31, 2002, 14:34 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

First, you gots to git in tha mood. You know, by playing some special music. "Du Hast" by Rammstein seems about right.

The sad thing, though, is that this is the best I'm able to come up with these days:

                       ;
                      int
                     main(
                    int aa,
                   char*v[])
                  {int x[5];0
                 [x]=aa>1?atoi
                (v[1]):020;for(
               1[x]=1;1[x]<=0[x]
              ;++1[x]){for(3[x]=1
             ;3[x]<0[x]-1[x]+1;++3
            [x]){putchar(32);}for(2
           [x]=0;2[x]<1[x];++2[x]){;
          ;putchar(46);putchar(32);};
         putchar(10);}/**/return 0;};;

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what the?

entry #1299, Tue, July 30, 2002, 00:07 (Life in General)

So I'm really starting to have my doubts about this candlewood apartments place. I went to let the dogs out a few days ago only to discover that their ropes and the stake they attach to were missing. What sort of evil is this?

Not to worry, Megan bought new ropes!

Right now I feel like I've got a voice but no message worth delivering. I ought to work on that.

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happy birthday to me

entry #1298, Thu, July 25, 2002, 12:10 (Life in General)

It is with great pride and satisfaction that I can now claim to have survived 24 trips around the great big daystar. The day started out pretty good, candlewood finally got around to installing a new dishwasher in the apartment. How thoughtful of them.

Then last night we got a group of people together. Because not only was it my birthday, it was Meagan Call's birthday too. She turned 21. So we went to brewco. Meagan, Megan, Cari, Adam, Mad Dog, another fencer (I think her name was Anna), Kyle, Branden, Arun, Mike, Tom, Rich, and Rich's buddy Nick. I like brewco.

Then a subset of that group hit Cheers. I like Cheers, too. I lost one game of pool and had a bunch of random drinks. Then a brief visit to Corbys, where some other buddies of Meagan's showed up. It was a good night. Being at Corby's was funny, because it reminded me of the fun night I had there last year with Andy. And I was even wearing the same shirt. I think it is now my official birthday shirt.

So there.

Oh, and Meg made me a cake.

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moving in

entry #1297, Mon, July 22, 2002, 01:51 (Life in General)

So in response to the imminent threat of Rich Murphey's arrival in South Bend, and thus the subsequent threat of him wanting to actually use his room in the apartment he'll be sharing with Branden and Arun, I've been forced to vacate my belongings from the premises. So now I'm actually moved in to Meg's place for real. Of course, all my stuff is just sitting, still boxed up, in a corner near the kitchen. Opening the boxes would be a bunch of fun. It's only been -- on average -- six weeks since I packed those boxes. Yet I have very little memory of what is in them. Opening them would be a lot like Christmas. I think there's a couple blankets in there, and I remember packing up my Belgian mining oil lamp. But what the contents of the other remaining boxes could be is simply beyond me. I thought I'd done a good job of getting rid of most of the things I wouldn't miss. But since I can't even remember what's in these boxes, it seems tempting to simply toss them while I have the chance.

The problem, unfortunately, is that I know of a few certain things that are in those boxes that I would like to hang on to. A wise packing job would have found all those items together in one box labeled 'stuff worth saving.' The rest of the unmarked boxes could sit around until I forgot what was in them, at which point they could be tossed or donated to anyone who won't ask a lot of questions.

All in all, though, I'm pretty happy to look at the pile of my stuff and see just how little I own, relatively speaking. Of course, there's still some more stuff in my car and in my office, but it doesn't add up to too much. A man could easily deal with that much stuff while being a homeless graduate student.

That's my suspicion, at least. It doesn't look like I'll get a chance to field test it. On Friday I gave the CSE department Megan's address as the place they can contact me. It's official. So if you want to know my new address and phone number, contact me. Homelessness was a cool concept while it lasted. Who knows, though. Perhaps I would have discovered that the concept is much more fun than the reality.

A few days ago I wanted to brush my teeth. So I went to look for my toothbrush in the travel kit I keep it in. But I found the travel kit to be empty. I confront Megan, anxiously worried in the back of my mind that she'd sold all my personal hygiene products on some black market in order to support some drug habit she'd yet to inform me of. Instead, I found out, she'd moved all my stuff into a couple unused drawers in the bathroom because she found it silly that I was still living out of a travel bag. I was quite surprised to find out that there had been empty drawers in that bathroom.

In reality, it seems quite convenient to be living with a girl. I feel that if I experience at any point a need for any sort of hygienic or cosmetic product, I will find it somewhere around here. And I get the impression Meg even knows what all the wide variety of chemicals she's collected are for. That, to me, is astounding. I remember at some point early in high school I was given a razor, some shaving cream, and some after shave and was basically left to figure things out from there on my own. And while I manage to scrape most of the hair off my face every day, I feel that I've missed out on some big secrets about proper shaving technique. I can't begin to imagine where one would learn how to wield such a formidable array of cosmetic weaponry as Meg possesses.

Honestly, though, I think there's only one thing I need to accomplish before I gain total harmony. I think I need to do some serious exfoliating.

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how do I get so lucky?

entry #1296, Fri, July 19, 2002, 23:26 (Life in General)

Meg and I spent Wednesday and Thursday at Cedar Point. It was my first time there. I loved it. The first day we spent mostly at Soak City. I've got such a sexy tan now, y'all best watch out. Then in the evening we did a couple rides: Mantis and Mean Streak. Both were fun enough. Then we got in line for Millenium Force, but the damn thing broke down and they never got it running again that night. Boo.

Thursday we got to the park just in time to get some of the last freeway stamps for Millenium Force. Then we rode Iron Dragon, Magnum, the down side of Power Tower (freefall from 240 feet is pretty damn sweet ... I think that was my favorite), some water ride to cool off, Raptor (I think this was my second favorite), and Blue Streak. We then returned to Soak City where we finished up the slides we'd not done yet. Then go-karts and mini golf. Finally back into the park for Gemini, Corkscrew, the up side of Power Tower, and then the Millenium Force. I was expecting more from that ride. I mean, it was pretty good, I rank it my third favorite at Cedar Point. It's just that I was expecting to be able to rank it number one. It did go really really fast. 92 miles an hour, is what they said. Wooooo!

Today I received word that a group of my friends got together and raised a bunch of money to get me started on buying a new laptop. Reading the email from Perk brought tears to my eyes. I've got the best friends in the whole world.

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doo wah doo wah

entry #1295, Mon, July 15, 2002, 16:50 (Life in General)

I love this damn planet. I've always joked around with people about having them take me with them in their luggage. Now, to my great delight, I find that somebody has actually tried this for real. A 23-year old Belgian woman was stopped in Italy after getting off a ferry from Greece. Customs officials had noticed her struggling with her bag. When they opened the bag, they found a 26-year old Kurdish man in her bag. Sadly, the Kurdish man was shipped back to Greece and the Belgian woman charged with organizing illegal immagration. But they tried. And is that true love or what?

Meg and I drove to Springfield, IL this weekend to visit her parents. We spent most of our time there in and around swimming pools. Fun stuff.

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coffee talk

entry #1294, Fri, July 12, 2002, 17:15 (Life in General)

While I don't normally hold myself to high levels of journalistic standards, I would like to apologize for a slight inaccuracy in my previous entry. When I said 'unsigned long int foo' I meant 'unsigned long long int foo'. My bad.

I can still remember how surprised I was when I realized that coffee can grow mold. Not coffee in a cup to which cream and sugar has been added. That would make sense. No, I was shocked the first time I saw mold growing on leftover coffee in the pot. I think I'd have been less surprised to see mold growing on distilled water.

It never occurred to me that coffee was capable of providing nutrition to any sort of living organism, especially not mold. At home, we never did anything with the leftover coffee at the bottom of the pot until it was time to make more. So naturally, when I found myself on my own, at college, the thought that I should clean out my coffee pot when I'm done with it never crossed my mind. Imagine my surprise, days later, to find that the coffee had not been left unchanged. I felt a certain sense of guilt, I think. Not the guilt of having failed to keep the dorm room at the high levels of cleanliness I demand. No, far worse. It was the guilt that comes from realizing that I do not consume enough coffee.

Lessons of that sort were common when I first got to Notre Dame. Independence was, I felt, a well-earned right, but it was not as simple as I'd imagined. For example, I was quick to notice that a guy who adored Pat Buchanan would not make a good roommate for me. Or that getting to know people in your dorm and in your classes had significant advantages: for one thing you could rely on them to make sure you're awake for tests. Or that the campus laundry service was much more practical if you actually picked up your laundry from time to time.

But this is all beside the point. The point, I think, fled long ago and is now undoubtedly already West of Boise.

Yesterday was July 11 -- 7-11. And so, to celebrate 75 years of being in business, the convenience store chain 7-11 decided to give away free slurpees. This, to me, was incredibly exciting. That is, until I got to a store with Branden and we realized that the free slurpees were being given away in special 7.11 ounce cups. Cute as that is, it's not really worth it. Especially when the new mountain dew slurpee flavor is -- contrary to strict slurpee standards -- rather liquid. But my woes are nothing. Because I just read that a happy couple, which met working at a 7-11, celebrated their wedding at the store they met at, on July 11, at 7:11 in the morning. My life, by comparison, puts the paradise myths of various religions to shame.

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intel performance register

entry #1293, Wed, July 10, 2002, 13:32 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

I gots to record this here, because every time I want to use it, I have to do a recursive grep through my entire cse directory tree to remember when I used it before and how I used it.

To access the intel performance register that stores the number of cycles executed so far:

  unsigned long long foo;
  __asm__ volatile (".byte 0x0f, 0x31" : "=A" (foo));

Perhaps there's a better way.

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multitasking

entry #1292, Tue, July 09, 2002, 17:44 (Life in General)

Megan, I've discovered, owns a large quantity of Dave Barry books. It is for this reason that I, of recent, have been reading a lot of Dave Barry. What effect, you are probably wondering, does this have on the short term possibilities of an economic upturn? Well, I'm still a broke bum, so I guess the answer is very little.

I got stuff done today. Annoying stuff. Stuff like getting vmware 2.0.4 to work under linux 2.4.18. A lot of compiling was going on. And while I like to think I spent most of that compile time doing other useful things, such as reading up on linux buffer caches and such, I must admit I also used some of that time to do stuff like IM people and start writing worthless things in this random log entry. So there.

I haven't shared this here yet, because it had me really weirded out, but I've gotten over it, so the time to share has come. A caucasian male in his mid thirties tried, a little more than a week ago, to engage me in activities that may have caused my girlfriend to feel jealous. I, of course, handled the situation brilliantly. I waited for him to take his hand off my chest and told him I had to use the bathroom. Which was true enough. Except after using the bathroom, I drove home. The wise thing would simply have been to let him know I wasn't interested. Because he's convinced, I've heard through my sources, that I'm "confused" and "scared of myself." And he knows I've got a girlfriend. Weird. I'm his type, though, is what he's told people, apparently. Which is somewhat flattering, I guess. I think everything will be fine, though, provided I avoid getting left alone with him again.

This guy did also tell me about his idea of converting the earth's magnetic field into a force to be used to propel vehicles. The magnetic field is, after all, everywhere, so we need only convert it to force, use the force to move ourselves, and then when we're done (huh?) convert the force back into magnetic field. He had all the math worked out, apparently, he just lacked the engineering know-how to implement this plan. He claimed we'd be able to get to Japan in about four minutes by this means. Sweet!

That whole adventure, I now recall, began with a really bad game of chess. So I guess you just never can tell.

I urgently need to start doing stuff like answering email, getting my stuff where it belongs, and so on. But today's work day is nearing its end. On a happier note, I was brave today and tried taking some Ritalin again. I felt no strange side effects, and for a while, at least, I was focused on my work. And I did get some useful reading done. So, as they say in educated circles, "Quien sabe?" Except if they really were educated, they'd have a fancy upside down question mark before the Q.

There were other things on my mind as I watched compiles fly by. But it's been a while since I first began work on this entry. And I've had my share of distractions.

I can tell you this, though. I'm less confused now than I've ever been in my life. And since it's time to head home, I can't help but think that a quote from the end of the movie Clue feels really appropriate right now. You know?

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ah, good times ...

entry #1291, Mon, July 08, 2002, 15:11 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Y'all remember back when Pete's Log used to be full of crazy computer science stuff? Back when geekiness was king and there wasn't any of this silly "I'm in love" or "I just want my life to feel normal" stuff? Yeah, me neither ...

It's been a while. But somehow ... somehow I'm sure I can remember what computer science is all about. Today my quest has begun. But first, a word from our sponsor:

"Sure, sometimes size DOESN'T matter, like when a Midget is Driving a TANK down your street! But get REAL, in the BEDROOM, size is CRITICAL."

In the immortal words of Crazy Andy J, "best penis insecurity spam ever"

So first order of business ... get my machine up to date. I'm all compiling kernels and stuff. And I'm reading kernel source code for flash memory device drivers. And I'm installing openafs for the new kernel version I installed.

And I'm drinking caffeine by the boatload. *smacks lips*

Arun, I believe, is the first person who shared this wisdom with me: after three days without coding, life becomes meaningless. Well, my life may have been meaningless of recent, at least by that definition, but for the first time in a long while, doing computer geeky things is lots of fun again. Super!

I'd write more, because I'll be doing more exciting geeky stuff real soon now, but I gots to reboot. So there.

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bla bla bla

entry #1290, Sun, July 07, 2002, 14:34 (Life in General)

It has been brought to my attention that during World War II, our government spent a couple million researching the possibility of attaching incindiary devices to bats and unloading the poor beasties over Japan.

With that in mind, I find myself yearning for a sense of normality. "But Pete," y'all is thinking, "you're the most normal person I know!" Well, I got a confession. Looking back over just about all of 2002, I can't think of any moment that felt particularly normal. Fun as the extensive periods of time I spent outside of Indiana were, they were not normal. And the times between trips were odd enough themselves. And living with Megan has yet to feel normal.

I suspect I've changed quite a lot this past half year. Grown up some and all that. I'm surprised, really, at how much I look forward to next semester. I'll have a schedule to stick to, responsibilities to a classful of young minds. It will be more difficult to run off on all the impulsive little trips I've been prone to. I don't feel some need to 'settle down,' so don't y'all worry 'bout me getting weak or nothing. I just want a break from chaos. Routine sounds like a fun change of scenery.

I'm tired. My brain kept me awake and worrying for most of last night. It seems like all the time I spent not asleep was good, though. Things seem to be somewhat more resolved. Right now I need to start getting paid. If I felt financially secure, things would probably improve a bunch.

Don't forget: Pete loves all of you. Now maybe if I could just get myself to sit down and write some code ...

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Taste of Chicago

entry #1289, Fri, July 05, 2002, 01:19 (Travel)

Meg and I celebrated America's birthday like only great patriots like ourselves know how. We ate fun food and we danced.

We took the South Shore to Chicago. We drove to the Michigan City station, because Megan is all like smart and stuff, and knows that at night that's as far as the train comes from Chicago. Many years ago, I went to a Skatalites show in Chicago with a group of people who did not know this, so we ended up spending the night at that train station. It was amusing to see the station again and remember being miserable there.

So we went to the Taste of Chicago festival and ate some good food. Yummy. We also went to the Chicago Summer Dance thing and got a free tango lesson. We're gonna be a dancing sensation one day. Just y'all watch out. We also got to witness some strange character dancing by himself with a book. We were rather amused.

Happy Birthday, USA!

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godamn burglars

entry #1288, Wed, July 03, 2002, 10:27 (Life in General)

Well, god fucking damn it all to hell. That's what I say.

Somebody got into Megan's apartment last night and stole her purse and my powerbook. Suckage.

I went to bed about midnight. I didn't lock the door, since usually we lock it when we get here. But the apartment complex has outside doors that are locked, you need to get buzzed in. Megan woke up at 5 or so and locked the door. We didn't notice stuff missing until she tried to find her purse when she left for work at 7. The dogs never made any huge fuss, though they had been barking at fireworks earlier, so we probably ignored them if they made a little fuss. Nothing else seems to be missing.

No estoy contento.

I called the police. They sent an officer by. He took down a bunch of information. I'm not very optimistic about ever seeing my computer again, though.

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nostalgia kick

entry #1287, Tue, July 02, 2002, 22:53 (Life in General)

Meg and I were reminiscing about games we used to play on our old Apple II systems. So we decided to download an Apple II emulator and play them games all over again. What fun! We've downloaded Below the Root, Escape from Rungistan, Spare Change, Lode Runner, Impossible Mission, and best of all, Dino Eggs. I'm getting a big kick out of these games. There's a huge archive at ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/ so there's plenty of fun to be had yet.

I've got a job. I'm doing research for Dr Freeh for the summer.

... I'm in love ...

Life is pretty damned good.

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catch a wave

entry #1286, Mon, July 01, 2002, 08:17 (Travel)

Cari and I spent last Monday through Thursday in Wildwood, NJ. Her aunt and uncle had rented a house in North Wildwood for the week, so we got to stay there. It was a good time. Wandering around the boardwalk, swimming in the ocean, lying on the beach, riding rollercoasters, and eating lots of ice cream.

Friday we drove back to South Bend. And so things go ... now I gotta find a job.

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back East and crazy Pete

entry #1285, Sun, June 23, 2002, 23:49 (Life in General)

Cari and I drove back to Philadelphia yesterday. So here we are. It doesn't look like we'll be staying long, though. We're driving to the Jersey shore tomorrow. We'll be there a little while. Then it looks like back to South Bend.

The drive here was interesting. We stopped near Cleveland to visit Emily, a friend of Cari's. That was cool. At her place I took out my contacts since my left one was bugging me. Then I realized I'd left my glasses in South Bend. So the solution I came up with was to wear only my right contact for the rest of the drive. That worked out well enough, I suppose.

I also spent some of the latter portions of the trip, while Cari was asleep, wondering just how sane I really am. It honestly seems to me that of recent my brain has becoming less functional. Or better yet, functional in less traditional means. For the second half of last semester I had to deal with regular auditory hallucinations. That was interesting. So I find myself repeating to myself facts I've heard about schizophrenia often setting in during the early twenties. I'm such a silly paranoid. At a bar a few weeks ago I had nearly convinced myself that somebody I'd been talking to hadn't actually existed. I then realized just how silly my thinking was and returned to reality. But while this is all mainly just amusing, it's slightly scary, too.

The hallucinations have gone away, though. Their end seems to match up chronologically both with a decrease in my stress levels as well as a change in diet -- I quit being vegan. So who knows what the deal there is.

Thursday night Megan went to sleep early. My brain was in overdrive and I wanted to give it some focus, so I took some Ritalin. First time in a while I'd done so. Then instead of writing like I'd wanted to, I played freecell. This one particular game it took me 21 tries before I beat it. Then I decided to try to beat it again, and it took another eight attempts before I was able to beat it again. So that was weird. Then I moved on to other freecell games, and while I had less trouble with those, I soon came to the realization that I was sorta tripping. And I knew it was the Ritalin. I mean, what the fuck? That had never happened before. And I'd only taken 10 mg. So now I'm pretty much scared of ever taking that stuff again. So I played a few more games of freecell, which proved very surreal. Then I went to bed and just held Megan while she slept. That seemed to make everything better. I never did fall asleep, though. Weird.

I'm happy, though, which is the most important thing, I guess. But my life is out of control, and as much fun as it is, I need to get control over it. Everything seems so overwhelming. I'll figure something out, though. I'm sure of that. Things seem to be getting better already.

Andy just made my night by using the term "geschlechtsverkehrbunnies."

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Rent

entry #1284, Fri, June 21, 2002, 15:27 (Music)

Meg and I spent five hours on the road in order to see the musical Rent.

We also spent many hours camped out at the theater. Let's see. So apparently the producers of Rent wanted to make sure that people without a lot of money could afford to see the show. So for every Rent show, tickets for the first two rows go on sale two hours before the show for $20. So we left South Bend at about one on Wednesday morning and got into Toledo at about 4:30 Toledo time. There were 30 rush tickets available. Showing up when we did got us in line for the 20th and 21st tickets. So we hung out all day at the theater. Meg brought a bunch of fun reading material. I read the Tao of Pooh and then a couple issues of The Nation and some foreign policy magazines. Liberal propaganda is fun.

So six pm finally rolls around and we get our tickets. Second row. Once we actually got into the theater and I got to see the set and how close we would be I got excited. I ended up enjoying the show a lot. More than I had expected to. I want to see it again! Meg's seen it 50 or so times. Crazy.

We also brought her dogs along. Driving is somewhat more entertaining when you've got a Cairn Terrier on your lap. Especially when trying to pay tolls.

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fantastic weekend

entry #1283, Tue, June 18, 2002, 09:02 (Travel)

Woo.

So let's see. Friday night Meg and I took her doggies and checked out the Summer in the City festival (formerly known as the South Bend Ethnic Festival).

Saturday evening we drove to Chicago. We stayed at a hostel right by State Street. After getting all checked in, we went to Gino's East for some Chicago-style deep dish. I'm not vegan anymore, but after Philadelphia, I consider it a triumph that I'm still vegetarian. Then we went to Buddy Guy's and watched some live blues.

Sunday we got up early and went to Chicago's Second Unitarian Church. It's a Unitarian Universalist place. Which means you get all the fun of church without any of the annoying stuff to believe in. After the service we had brunch at a fantastic creperie. We then wandered around the Belmont and Clark area. That evening we went to the Green Mill for the Uptown Poetry Slam followed by live Jazz. I drank vodka martini. It was fun. Some of the poetry was amazing.

Monday we hit the Nature Museum and wandered around the Lincoln Park area, then spent some time on Michigan Ave and hit the Cheesecake factory for dinner. Then we went to Delilah's for their Punk Rock Monday. We hung out for a while. I drank a Goose Island Honker, since it seemed somehow necessary that I drink a Goose Island beer while in Chicago. I didn't recognize any of the punk the DJ played, proving yet again how much of a poser I am. But it was all fun music. Then we drove back to South Bend.

This girl is kicking my ass. She's so much fun. She's from Chicago (well, ok, suburbs) so she was my tourguide. I like her. Yay!

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end of an era

entry #1282, Fri, June 14, 2002, 09:06 (Life in General)

So the 2217 Coachmans Trail era has come to an end. I'm proud of myself: while moving out, I was able to get rid of a ton of stuff. I think I now own maybe a third as much as I used to. Nice work, me.

The future is looking fun. I'm currently spending most of my time with a nifty girl named Megan. I met her about a month ago. She's the reason I came back to South Bend. I'm a happy Pete.

Oh, and it seems most of Colorado is on fire. I hope it's still there when I go back...

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midwest? Again?

entry #1281, Sun, June 09, 2002, 15:13 (Life in General)

Yeah, so on Thursday, I drove back to South Bend. As did Cari. It's funny.

Less funny is the $130 speeding ticket I got in eastern Indiana. Boo.

Now I'm busy having fun and trying to get moved out of my apartment.

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summertime

entry #1280, Wed, June 05, 2002, 00:03 (Life in General)

We drove to Atlantic City again today. Yay beach!

Alright, so I admit I'm a poser. And now I'm a sellout, too. I've always claimed to hate baseball. But Cari's cousin Brian got us tickets to a game. So tonight we saw the Florida Marlins beat the Philadelphia Phillies 5-0 at Veterans Stadium. And I'll admit I had a good time, even with the bad guys winning. I still wouldn't want to watch baseball on TV, though.

On the drive back, on I-95, we heard a strange loud noise from the passenger side door. I thought a rock had got kicked up and hit the door. But the car was still driving fine, so we kept on going. About ten minutes later, in a residential area, K2 began to handle poorly, so I pulled over. We quickly discovered that the front right tire was flat. Doh! So we replaced it with the spare. Some local resident came out and helped us out. I suspect the task would have been finished quicker without his help, but he was friendly.

So yeah. Life is pretty damn good. I like it!

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night life

entry #1279, Mon, June 03, 2002, 00:55 (Life in General)

It's not often that a social situation causes me to start singing NOFX's "Kill All The White Man" to myself. But a Philly club drove me to that. More on that later.

So yesterday was Cari's graduation party. That was quite entertaining. Among other things, I heard a joke about nuns. Wanna hear it? That's what I thought.

So these three nuns are cleaning the rectory. One of them finds a pack of condoms in the priest's bedroom. When she shows them to the two other nuns, one of them says "Oh, that's alright, I poked holes in them last week." The other nun then faints.

Ha ha. So yeah, it was fun. Then last night we decided to go out on the town with one of Cari's ex-roommates from ND. I almost wore a shirt I got in Atlantic City. It's a kids size shirt, so it's quite tight, but it's cut very well, I'm very happy with how I look in it. Cari and I both agreed, though, that if I wore that shirt, men would try to pick me up. Which would have been fun, but I decided against it. So yeah ... I picked the first clean shirt I came across, which was a black anarchy shirt. And I was wearing black jeans and black boots.

We then took the El downtown and began searching for the bar we were to meet her friends at. On the way there, some preppy looking guy made silly faces at me and made some prince of darkness comment. God, it's scary how tempting it was to punch him in the face. He was with a lot of friends, though, so it's probably wise that I didn't. But we arrived at the bar. I got a bad impression of the place right away. There were several limos out front. Inside I was confronted with evidence that the fact that white people are able to reproduce is a miracle. The place was so Notre Dame. So after a while, Cari and I ditched her friend in search of something more 'our scene.'

The first place, a bar we'd been in before, denied us access because Cari's ID is expired. Boo. So we found another place with pool tables. At first it seemed perfect. Very shady. Good music playing. And a couple cute punk girls playing pool. But due to some drunk jackass, it took forever for us to get a turn at the table, and then before we even finished our game, a bouncer threw us out, and it had only been like ten minutes since last call. Boo.

And then the damn El was already closed down. Boo again. So after a commando raid on a comfort inn to use their bathrooms, we walked around until we found another station at which we realized that there was a bus running. So we managed to get home. Except I was completely sober, due to the poor quality of the bars we went to, so it would have been easier to just drive. Which is what we then did. We drove back into downtown to get food. We're such crazy kids.

Why did I bother to cover last night in such exquisite detail? Because I felt like it. I want everyone to know that even I have trouble finding a good night on the town sometimes. Ain't nobody perfect. That, and a reminder to us all: shady bars are, as a rule of thumb, much more fun than trendy clubs. Speaking of the stupid trendy club, at one point they convinced several girls to get up on the bar and dance. Of the dozen or so that made it up, I'd say two of them had any concept of what it means to dance. But more fun was the sixtyish year old guy standing near me and the way he was staring at those girls. Shady! At least they had some fox police chase video show on TV at the club.

Today, after a bunch of supah-lazy doing nothing, I went on a Philadelphia driving adventure. I didn't make it too far, but at least I think I now have some idea of how this neighborhood works. And now I know I can find I-95 on my own. So there.

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New Jersey ain't all bad

entry #1278, Thu, May 30, 2002, 23:12 (Life in General)

Cari and I drove to Atlantic City today and hung out on the Jersey Shore. Very nice. I like the beach.

Other than that, we've mainly spent a lot of time being bums. My attempts to find work have been very halfhearted so far, and without success. I like Philadelphia a lot so far. I've been fed well. I've seen some of downtown. South street is pretty sweet. We scoped out the tattoo parlor scene there. I'm enjoying the diversity around here. Oh, and obviously, we've been playing some pool. I think I've finally figured out how to consistently break well.

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badass Pete

entry #1277, Tue, May 28, 2002, 10:18 (School)

hahahahahahahaha

How much did I study for the qualifying exam? Very little. I spent the week leading up to the test partying like a crazed maniac. The night before the test I went to Benchwarmers to see Lester play and then to the ultimate house. I got three hours of sleep before the test.

I scored a 6!! That's a perfect score, yo. You may all feel free to envy my skill. Go on ahead.

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east coast, yo!

entry #1276, Fri, May 24, 2002, 20:40 (Travel)

Yeah, I'm pretty sure "abandon" is the right word.

Wednesday afternoon I abandoned South Bend. Temporarily, but good enough for now. I drove to Philadelphia. Other than some issues with low quality fuel, I had no trouble finding Cari's place in the Juniata neighborhood of Philly.

Thursday afternoon we took off for Boston. Things did not go according to plan for one simple reason. Connecticut is an evil state. Evil. So instead of getting into Boston at about 22:00, we got in after midnight. We found a hotel, got a room, and headed out in search of someplace to buy a drink. We eventually found Bernie's Pub, which was super shady. Bernie checks out all potential customers through a window before unlocking the door to his place. Inside several old men were discussing how liberals had ruined the country. So we had our drink and left the bar and proceeded to get lost in downtown Boston. We finally found the hotel and got to sleep by 2:30.

We woke up at 6:30 and drove off in search of Peabody, MA. We managed to find the place, and even found Peabody High School, site of the world cup fencing tournament Cari was to participate in. Despite fears for the worst, Cari was allowed to fence. She went 3-3 in her first round, so she had to compete in a direct elimination to advance. She lost that 15-14, though she should have won it. It was ghetto.

So then we drove back into Boston, where we found some food and then passed out in a small park in the middle of town. Sleeping in the sun is great! Then we drove back to Philly. Connecticut was yet again evil. I suggest a boycott. But we made it back, so all is well.

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argh argh argh argh

entry #1275, Wed, May 22, 2002, 12:30 (Life in General)

Sprint PCS is the devil!

Don't ever ever do business with them!

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on y va

entry #1274, Mon, May 20, 2002, 18:33 (Life in General)

Well, let's see.

Interesting things have been going on. Right now I am both very happy and very sad. My self esteem is at least three times higher than it has ever been. My life is in transition. So many people are gone now. Some highlights of recent happenings:

I saw Lester play at Benchwarmers. Their last show ever. *sniffle*
I went to a "dress as your favorite biblical character" party. I went as Qoheleth.
I saw Star Wars Episode II. I liked it a lot.
I spent some quality time with my family.
I went to Mamie's graduation. Yay! At least one of us is finally escaping South Bend.
I took the qualifying exam. I'm pretty sure I passed.
I got my nose pierced.
I played computer games in Fitzpatrick late at night.
I took a bunch of pictures

Best wishes to everyone moving on right now. Keep in touch. Update your email address. IM me: prijks is my screen name.

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unavailable entry

entry #1273, Mon, May 20, 2002, 13:41 (unknown)

sorry, this entry is not available for you to see.

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stupid government

entry #1272, Wed, May 15, 2002, 20:23 (Politics)

yeah, so huh.

The Bush administration spent $180 million on a recent anti-drug advertising campaign aimed primarily at teenagers. Now a study has found that drug use did not decrease among teenagers that saw the ad. In fact, it found that among young teenage girls who saw the ad, drug use actually went up, because the ads possibly led them to believe that everyone was doing drugs, and so they wanted to try them as well. Nice work, government.

The best thing, of course, is that as a result of this study, John Walters, Bush's top drug policy adviser, is asking for more money for more advertisments. Does this seem crazy to anyone other than me?

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worst class ever

entry #1271, Wed, May 15, 2002, 18:10 (School)

Goodbye, 4.0. You were fun while you lasted.

I got an A- in I/O. I probably deserved worse. I couldn't help it, though. That class made me miserable. Boo. So now my GPA is 3.972. Which is good enough, I guess. It's still more than a full point above what my undergrad GPA ended up at.

Two more days till quals. I wish I cared.

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drumcircles and such

entry #1270, Sun, May 12, 2002, 15:17 (Life in General)

I received my last paycheck of the semester on Friday. I guess now I really ought to focus on finding a new source of income.

I've decided it would be a lot of fun to participate as a subject in psychology experiments. Now I've found out that frequently you can actually get paid to do so! I gotta get in on this action.

Brian's in town! He and I hit Mishawaka Brew Co last night. Fun stuff.

I went to a Cripe Street party afterwards. Good times. I spent a good portion of time with a cup duct taped to my hand. And I participated in a drum circle. And I had good chats with a few people that I've known for a while but never really got to know well. And now that I've bonded with them, they're all leaving. Such is life. There were also a bunch of philosophy and peace studies grad students there. Several people commented on how it was weird to have grad students at a party. I, in turn, would point out that I'm a grad student. Yeah, but I'm different than most grad students, is what I'm told. Which reminds me, I met a few people the other day that graduated the same year I did. They looked much older than I feel. Forever youth! Some girl at the party told me I give bad hugs. So I guess I need to work on that. Cripe Street flooded. There was about 3 to 5 inches of standing water outside the house. So when I left, Jonny drove me to my car, which was across the street. Haha.

After the party I went on a freight elevator date with Andy.

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death defying stunts

entry #1269, Sat, May 11, 2002, 01:41 (Life in General)

So the semester is over or something of that nature.

Last night a variety of engineers (and a couple non-engineers) were busy with last minute projects and such. So I decided to organize a study break. And what better way to have a study break than to party on the roof? So I bought some Amber Bock and invited folks to my domain (as I now like to call it). Andy, Meagan, Randy, Nicole, Joyce, Branden, and myself partied like only crazed engineers know how to. And then once the beer was finished, we all went back to work. Photographic evidence of our activities can be found on my webpage. Randy and Nicole used some of the pictures I took in their CSD presentation.

My left wrist hurts something awful. Yuck. This is interesting, though. My wrists haven't bugged me much at all this semester. Then suddenly I write a paper for class and my wrist starts hurting pretty bad. I think that right there proves how little I've accomplished this semester.

I've been reading "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind." It's fun reading. Interesting things to think about. The question that's been on my mind of recent, due to this book, is "is consciousness possible without language?" I'm just not sure. It's tough to think about, for me at least. One thing's for sure, though. This book is definitely helping reinforce my determinist view of the world.

Some time ago I picked up a key that I thought granted me access only to the outside doors of Fitz. Tonight I discovered that this key also gives me access to the freight elevator. I'm way too excited about this. If anyone wants a ride in the freight elevator, though, let me know. This key also can be used to lock the outside doors of Fitz. And some of the doorways in the stairwells. I could cause so much mischief. The only door it doesn't unlock that I really want it to is the door to the roof. Oh well.

Quals are one week away. I don't want to study at all. Because I just don't care no more. I think partying would be a much better use of my time this week. After all, lots of friends are graduating and leaving after this week. So partying it is. Besides, not wanting to sound too full of myself, but I think I've got a really good chance of passing without studying. So maybe I'll study just a little bit.

meow.

Oh yeah, I also need to start packing up. I'm losing both my apartment and my office space. So I need to get some storage space and put stuff there and get rid of stuff and so on.

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hahaha

entry #1268, Thu, May 09, 2002, 00:27 (Life in General)

It's a good thing I'm not afraid of heights ...

I've now also been on the top of the Cushing roof, not just the Fitzpatrick roof. The view of campus from there is fun. Especially tonight. It was foggy. The dome was shrouded in mist. And I was climbing around on the roof like a little monkey.

I feel so ... awesome!!

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urgh

entry #1267, Wed, May 08, 2002, 13:41 (School)

So yeah.

I found out on Monday that Dr Freeh is not getting tenure. I wasn't entirely surprised, but it's still very strange. The department has told him he can stay another year if he likes. Initially it seemed he was going to do that, but now I've heard he may be gone by the end of May.

So yet another phase in my brilliant graduate career at ND. Next year will be interesting, to say the least. Current motivation level: dead + epsilon.

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wacka

entry #1266, Tue, May 07, 2002, 04:22 (Life in General)

I've been to Cheers four out of the past eight nights. Woo! Party!

Tonight was different than most, though. Tonight was special. After leaving Cheers, I went on a mission to photograph more silly church signs. I got my first anti-evolution church sign picture, thanks to Paul pointing it out to me. Then after getting those pictures, I drove to campus. Well, I was going about 55 on Juniper. Of course, the speed limit there is 30. So surprise, surprise, flashing red lights go off behind me. Grrrr. And of course, I smell like a bar. So the officer had me do a little dance, count backwards, recite the alphabet, and then finally do the whole breathalizer thing. Mind you, by this point in the night I was completely sober. So that was an entertaining experience. But goddamn, I love the police around here. I only got a warning.

That's all for now. Hooligan Pete is out.

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boingy

entry #1265, Sun, May 05, 2002, 16:10 (Life in General)

"Well," I think to myself, "if nothing else, it seems my pool skills are improving."

My efforts to widen my "comfort zone" are not progressing as quickly as I would like.

I got my Lester CD. Only $5 for 13 tracks! It's good. There's even a track on which Jonny is responsible for some sort of non-percussion sounds.

I think it would be fun -- someday -- to walk across America, from coast to coast. From sea to shining sea, as it were.

I'm scared of my car door. For several days now, it has shocked me without fail every time I get out of the car. Now that has stopped, but I still hesitate to touch the door. Conditioning is fun.

I wanna break my rusty cage and run (Johnny Cash edition). Free will is a myth.

Oh, and I started a new project. Check it out.

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you're kidding, right?

entry #1264, Sat, May 04, 2002, 16:36 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Oof. And people wonder why it's so easy for computer systems to get compromised.

I was looking through the form to order textbooks for Discrete for the bookstore next semester (haha, I'm a teacher!) when I came upon this wonderful tidbit in the instructions on how to register with their online ordering system:

"(Hint: By making your hint the same as your password, the web site will cue you with your exact password!)"

You don't say.

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I can read, too!

entry #1263, Fri, May 03, 2002, 01:39 (Books, Writing, n such)

I admit it. I've got a problem. I enjoy trash sci-fi. But even more, I enjoy good sci-fi. So let's discuss that first.

Everyone should read H.G. Wells. He's great. In fact, I'm somewhat ashamed that I considered myself a sci-fi fan and hadn't ever read any Wells until last summer. But now I've read four of his novels: The Invisible Man, The Time Machine, The Island of Dr Moreau and War of the Worlds. His work is fun. First of all, it was written during the late 19th century for the most part, so it's quite different from modern sci-fi. But it's also neat because the stories are somewhat dark. As with most great science fiction, the sci-fi elements of the story, while good, are not its best feature. Instead what is truly great are the observations and statements about human nature, and Wells makes some good statements about some of our worse qualities as humans. Or something like that. Read it!

Let's move on. I finally made my way through "Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy" by Matt Ruff. It was a very fun book. Very strange. I may have to read it again. It took me the better part of this semester to finish it, primarily because I kept leaving the state but leaving the book behind. So I kept losing track of characters and subplots as there were many of each. The story is really quite absurd, but it kept me laughing. Weird futuristic genocidal conspiracies eminating from Disney world and such. And Ayn Rand in a lamp. Ayn Rand gets made fun of. There were many little interesting tidbits, many of them only loosely tied together. Over all, if you like absurd, read this.

And now: trash. I made quick work of "The Planet Wizard" by John Jakes. Definitely trash science fiction. The cover is a picture of a blond woman in some sort of futuristic metal bikini, strapped upside down to the face of some large lizard creature. In the background stands some ominous dude in a cloak. This picture is the only reason I decided to read this book. The plot was forgivable. Nothing notable, but good enough. Some futuristic time on a planet colonized by earthlings. However, scientific knowledge has been lost, yet some technology remains to be used. Of course, the technology is all now thought to run by magic. OK, sure, but how do people do maintenance work if they think stuff works by magic? So the main character is some wizard sort who figures out that it isn't really magic ... Anyway, what made this book true trash were the horrible characters. The single female character was a stereotypical weak female character, completely transparent and uninteresting. All the male characters were unreal, immature and apparently motivated solely by anger, despite the author's efforts to make it seem otherwise. I'm curious how this reflects on Mr. Jakes. His male characters are immature and angry, his female character is weak, he uses the term "wench" when discussing women more than is the norm, and uses phrases such as "he forgave Maya her womanly outburst" and "It's a woman's place to sob when circumstances bedevil her."

Oh well, the book kept me entertained (but not for the reason it thinks) and what more can I ask for?

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Hooligan Pete

entry #1262, Thu, May 02, 2002, 19:02 (Music)

I almost got kicked out of a bar last night.

Lester was playing their last big show at the State. So I went there with Pat and Branden. We got there at 22:00, because that's when we were told they were going to play. But they didn't play for a while. So we played pool. We were soon joined by some guy J.T. (I think that was his name). After a game, he bought us drinks. Then he decided I had to talk to these two girls. So that's what happened. They were very pretty and my first natural reaction was, as usual, to panic. But then I settled down and played a fun game of quarters with these girls. I didn't like them much, though. They didn't want Lester to play. Boo.

Then a bunch of other people showed up. Then Lester played. During the first song Al and I did some unintense moshing. A bouncer showed up and told us to stop. So we did. But we decided to mosh again during the last song, because then who cares if we get kicked out. So Lester played and it was really good, and I had a lot of fun dancing. Then the last song was announced, and Al and I got up on stage and moshed very briefly. Then the bouncer came up to me, grabbed me and yelled at me "I told you not to do that, you're fucking off the stage!" and he pushed me off the stage. Then the head bouncer guy grabbed Al and I and yelled at us. He said "If you really want to mosh, I can take you out on the street and we'll have our own private mosh pit. And I guarantee you will not win." Well boo for him. Jonny was happy to hear that we moshed. It's all about the love, really.

Then when we left the bar, I ran into J.T. again. He asked me about the girls. I told him why I didn't like them. He said "Fuck the band, those girls were gorgeous." Whatever. It's all about the music.

I wish ... whatever. That's all.

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Silly Pete

entry #1261, Tue, April 30, 2002, 19:10 (Life in General)

I thought of more crap to write.

I've wanted to write this down for a while because it sounds so stupidly pretentious and something.

Now I forget.

Oh, yes, the thing with the profound and stuff. Commence pseudo-depth!

What I meant to say was that I've been thinking that to me life has become like a large-scale psychology experiment. I'm both the experimenter and the subject. There's no control group and I won't be able to publish any results when I'm done. But it's fun regardless.

The last time that 'psych' shows up in my log is December 31, 2001. But that's all gonna change as soon as I hit the pretty "Add Entry" button.

I was just sitting here contemplating how sitting, listening to music, and staring at the ceiling isn't too fun by myself (it's not bad, I like music and all, but the situation could stand to be improved ... maybe a more exciting ceiling?), but perfectly nice with company. I'm so not into being alone these days, which is amusing seeing how anti-social I used to be when I first got to ND. So yeah, that's it. This log entry is lacking in value, but here it is!

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incredibleness

entry #1260, Tue, April 30, 2002, 18:39 (Life in General)

So, um, yeah. I've found that only half of ND's CSE faculty have been here longer than I have.

Tuesday is the only day of the week I have class. Yet somehow I managed to pick last night to stay at Cheers until late. I went there with Cari. Lindsey and Al and some guy with an ID from Chile stopped by for a while. We got free pool and a couple free drinks. Score. Some drunk truck driver from Tennessee told me I had a good eye for pool and could be good if I practiced. Yay!

Hitting things with rocks and calling it music is muy fun. I don't know if listeners would enjoy it as much, though.

I'm done with classes for the semester. Woo. Now all I gots to do is write a paper and study for quals. And party!

My hope is that while studying I will read fun stuff that will remind me why I got into this computer science thing.

Only 54% of Americans surveyed by the NSF this year were able to answer how long it takes our planet to orbit the sun.

I drove Randy to pick up his car. It got towed. Damn hobbits.

I think that's about all I got for now. Later, kids.

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esgeroth

entry #1259, Mon, April 29, 2002, 14:40 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

It looks as though I may need to investigate various hosting options for esgeroth.org for the summer. I need php/mysql. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd appreciate it. I am very lacking as far as funds go.

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unavailable entry

entry #1258, Sat, April 27, 2002, 18:15 (unknown)

sorry, this entry is not available for you to see.

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OK Go

entry #1257, Fri, April 26, 2002, 19:05 (Music)

In search of sunshine and fun, Branden and I happened upon north quad just as OK Go, a Chicago band, took to the stage. So we sat down and listened to the music. It was really good. The band was funny, too, they kept trying to get people to do things for free CDs, but ND kids are, well, lame. So people just kept walking by for the most part. Branden and I moshed to a couple songs. The lead singer pointed out he was pretty sure nobody had ever moshed to the song they'd just played before. Hope showed up as well. She got up on stage and sang some stuff in exchange for free CDs. I bought both the CDs they had, because I'm a sucker for music. And they were cheap. I got the band to sign the one CD afterwards. One guy dedicated his signature "Pete, my best friend at Notre Dame" ... there was very little crowd. I think there were about a dozen of us. Half the crowd was OK Go fans that had come from out of town. I had George, their merchandise guy, sign the other CD I bought. Because he was fun, too. My autographed CD will be valuable soon. OK Go signed a deal with Capital Records and will have an album out with them this summer. Woo! And I got stickers!

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the results are in

entry #1256, Fri, April 26, 2002, 16:16 (School)

I've decided to teach CSE 210 -- Discrete Math next semester.

Thanks to all my friendly readers who offered their suggestions. They were all quite valuable. Keep up the mad skillz y'all. Keep it real.

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ramble mumble ramble

entry #1255, Thu, April 25, 2002, 14:56 (Random Crap)

The lasting impression that the rational portion of my brain has shut itself off.

Or something about being ruled by emotion.

Balance.

A desire to create.

If I study computer science, how will I contribute to human endeavors? This is a fallacy. Computer science is a good thing. I am fairly good at it. I can best contribute by doing something I am good at.

Life is short. I should do what I enjoy.

Life is all I get, I should make something of it.

More hits back to back.

Repetition normally leads to ... something. I repeat things to myself, but still have trouble retaining them.

Greg Graffin says "PUNK IS: the constant struggle against fear of social repercussions."

I fear social repercussions.

I'm just waiting for the caffeine to kick in. Then I shall code.

The I-80 exit on I-55 is at mile 250 in Illinois. Repetition has led me to remember that.

Curiosity.

Heating up poptarts.

Vowing never to drive on I-99.

Oh God, here it comes. And I still have no idea what class I'm going to teach.

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another success

entry #1254, Thu, April 25, 2002, 00:27 (Random Crap)

Today I went on a pantyhose adventure with Cari.

I have been informed that it was well worth it.

What I mean to say is "mission accomplished."

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woah

entry #1253, Wed, April 24, 2002, 14:31 (School)

Help me.

Before anything else, let's get one thing straight: It's official. I'm going to be homeless next semester.

Or something along those lines.

Um.

What class should I teach? Discrete Math or Computer Architecture 1? Discrete will have 33 students, Comp Arch will have 53. Discrete is MWF, at 10:40, Arch is MWF at 13:55. Arch will also have a lab. Discrete is easier subject matter, but architecture is more interesting. Do I go for what is easier or for what will be more interesting? I'm scared. Hold me.

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Columbia

entry #1252, Mon, April 22, 2002, 13:23 (Travel)

K2 passed the 30,000 mile mark yesterday.

OK, so my previous log entry was intentionally misleading. Perk found me out, though:

"you cant fool me! I'm FROM Missouri! I know all about the small town, Mexico... MISSOURI!"

La la la.

So Columbia was fun. It was a mellow time. Relaxing. We watched movies and ate good food and shared music and had interesting discussions. And I finally gave into the temptation to decorate the back of my car.

We also made t-shirts. Sara made a shirt that said "I love monkeys, yes I do. I love monkeys, so should you." It has a cute picture of a little monkey on it. I made a shirt that says "Smile, there is no hell!" I like it a lot.

Now I'm back in South Bend. I'm not quite sure what to make of that. Somebody come entertain me.

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Viva Mexico!

entry #1251, Thu, April 18, 2002, 20:56 (Travel)

Wednesday afternoon I drove to Columbia, MO to visit Sara. Sara then drove me to Mexico. It was fantastic.

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roof

entry #1250, Sat, April 13, 2002, 20:49 (Random Crap)

So just in case anyone was wondering about this ...

The CSE wireless network reaches to the roof of fitzpatrick. So this log entry is being submitted from the roof.

Oh yeah. This is the good life.

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ponderliciousness

entry #1249, Fri, April 12, 2002, 19:46 (Life in General)

Nearly a week ago I had a scary dream about planes crashing into tall buildings. I'm not sure what to make of it. If nothing else, it's a sign that the world outside my life still affects me.

I ponder stuff. I suppose it's a good thing I enjoy pondering, because I can't help but do it. And the fact that I've accepted that many of the things I ponder turn out to be silly in retrospect makes the whole experience that much more fun.

Gratuitous punctuation? Yes, please!!!

My diversion worked!

So, like, I wonder how the imagination of others works. Like people are always trying to sound all deep and stuff be being like "dude, maybe we all see colors differently. Maybe what I see as purple actually turns out as brown to you." Well, good for them. But there's not really any way to ever experiment on such things. My big curiousness is about how other people imagine things. That is an area in which we can at least compare notes. For example, my imagination is entirely language-based. I don't picture things in my imagination. If I close my eyes, I can't picture things. All I get is black. When I remember dreams, I can only remember descriptions of them in words. I suspect being unable to picture things in my mind may be a partial cause for my lack of artistic talent.

I'm good with words, though. Or at least I like to think so. This may be a good point to inform readers that this is another one of those entries where I refuse to go back and fix things. Any spelling or grammar errors that find their way into this thing are here for good. My brain runs solely on words. For fun, sometimes, I like to see how many simultaneous streams of words I can get going. The maximum I've achieved, as far as I can remember, is four. In order to reach four, though, a couple of the word streams need to be very simplistic.

I wonder if I'll ever achive enlightenment this way.

I'm really curious what it would be like to have a very visual imagination.

I wonder what life would be like if I had been less sheltered. I was somewhat sheltered as a youth, but I suspect that the sheltering effect of Notre Dame has been even stronger in its effect on me. I don't really mind havng grown up as sheltered as I did. I like me. And I like living a comfortable life. But I've reached a point where all I want is to poke at the edges and chase things and find new experiences and live in less conservative environs. Or something.

I'm teaching discrete math next semester. I'm excited. Someone told me I need to start thinking of what hair style I should wear to the first day of class to give the poor sophomores a good first impression of me.

Competitiveness is a good thing, in general. But I wish I could discard a good deal of the natural competitiveness in me. I'm stuck at just enough competitiveness to keep up with research to run along with all my smart buddies doing cool research, but with not enough competitiveness to really feel comfortable at all with the process of academic research.

I think it is a good process. Science is best off when it is under heavy scrutiny. And competition definitely helps to add to the scrutiny.

The two things I enjoy most, I think, as far as my academic career goes, are coding and teaching. One of the worst things that happened to me this semester was when I realized I didn't enjoy coding anymore. Luckily that only lasted a couple weeks, but it was scary. I really hope I enjoy teaching a class. It's certain to be quite different from TAing and lecturing an occasional class. I plan to put a lot of effort into making it a good class.

I need to start being responsive to email again.

Maybe I should give up on trying to become a computer science researcher and instead focus on the parts of computer science I like, which are coding and teaching.

Blah, blah. I don't know. On your marks, get set, go!

I started studying for quals today. I read the first chapter of the undergrad OS book.

The cycle goes on. I keep a smile on my face these days. And a song in my head. It's all good.

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Renaissance Pete

entry #1248, Mon, April 08, 2002, 22:41 (Life in General)

These past few days have been packed full o' fun. Let's see ...

Friday night I grabbed dinner with Cari and her mother, who was in town. We went to the Great Wall. It was yummy.

After dinner I went to Benchwarmers with Branden. There we met up with Pat Shea and some of his friends. Two bands played, both of them fun. And we played a lot of pool.

Branden and I got back to Fitzpatrick and played a little freeciv with a junior CSE type named Jim. After that, I took the two of them on a tour of the Fitzpatrick roof, since neither of them had ever been up there. I love the roof.

Saturday afternoon I went to watch Cari's singing recital. It was neat. I was impressed; I'd never heard her sing solo before. To my uneducated ear, she sounded very good.

Immediately after the recital I had food with Cari, her mom, Mad Dog, and Al. Then later I grabbed dinner at Elia's with Meagan.

After dinner we picked up Cari, drove to campus and grabbed Branden and Sordi, then drove to Castle Point and picked up Al. Those counting will have realized I had six people in my car at this point. We then went bowling. Pat, a friend of his, and Mad Dog joined us bowling. I scored a 117 and a 132. I even got two strikes in each game. Seeing how I've not bowled since high school, I was happy with that.

We then drove to senior bar (Mad Dog and Pat lightened up the load on my car some) where Jonny's non-Lester band played. We finished up the night at Cari's.

Sunday afternoon Meagan and I went to the Snite to see the B.F.A. and M.F.A. thesis exhibitions. Jeremy Renteria had a piece there and won an award! Some of the pieces were interesting, others just seemed silly to me. And there was one where I thought that what the artist said in his statement just plain wrong. But I'm not an artist, so who knows?

After the exhibit, Meagan and I went to the Thai place on Ironwood. Then I went to SMC and watched the Simpsons with Mamie. Then Meagan and I watched Disney's Hercules. Apparently watching this film actually had an educational value for Meagan.

Then tonight Katie and I went climbing at the Rock again. I'm definitely improving, but my arms are still very weak. But I climbed until I literally couldn't hold myself to the wall anymore. So much fun.

Oh, and somehow I also managed to read the entire archive of Schlock Mercenary over the weekend.

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IU LinuxFest 2002

entry #1247, Fri, April 05, 2002, 16:24 (Travel)

So Brian like tells me about LinuxFest 2002 at IU and that Ian Murdock (who is, like, the founder of Debian) is gonna give a talk or something. So I'm all like, "Dude, that kicks ass!" and decided to go check that out. So Katie's like "take me with you!" and I'm like "ok!" but then she's all "no, I have to do work." But then I'm like "do it on the road." But she's like "ok, I'll come ... but no, I gotta ..." and I'm like "I'm gonna check my email here for a moment, so you can have some time to decide" and then she's like "ok, I'm coming!" So we went to Bloomington.

We got there at 1:30 or so in the morning. We slept and then we went to LinuxFest. Actually, Brian first gave me a tour of the machine room they have by their lab. Then we went to LinuxFest. Murdock gave a fun talk. I won "Linux in a Nutshell" and a bottle of Bawls as a door prize. Yay me! Then some cool guy gave Dr Lumsdaine, Brian, and I a tour of IU's really big machine room. It was hard to not drool. Then Brian gave a talk about Oscar. Then we looked at LinuxFest a little more. Then I talked with Dr Lumsdaine a little bit. That was excellent. Then Brian, Katie, Jeremy, Jeremiah, Ron, Todd, and I went to dinner at a Tibetan restaurant (yummy!). Then Jeremiah and Ron left and the rest of us went climbing at Hoosier Heights. Ow, my arms! It was mucho fun. What a good day it was.

Then today we drove back. And I've been asked to teach a class next semester. That'd be fun.

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yay Mamie!

entry #1246, Thu, April 04, 2002, 02:26 (Life in General)

Had Indian food for dinner with Mamie tonight to celebrate her birthday. She's made us so proud, surviving yet another year. Yay! Happy Birthday, Mamie!

Oh, and after dinner I bolted. I'm yet again not in South Bend. And thus the cycle continues.

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happy happy climb climb

entry #1245, Tue, April 02, 2002, 22:24 (Sports and Athletics)

Yay!

So this is my sixth year at ND, and I just now finally paid a visit to the climbing wall at the Rock. But better late than never, I suppose.

It was excellent. Katie and I wandered over there, thinking we'd have to make appointments for orientation or something, but John, our climbing guy, was nice and just gave us a quick overview, since both of us had climbed before.

Then we climbed for about an hour until the wall closed. So much fun. I'm in such pitiful condition. But rock climbing may help fix that. The wall is pretty small, but it's free so I won't complain!

Yay!

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PIO ... lalalala

entry #1244, Tue, April 02, 2002, 16:06 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

From "Improved Parallel I/O via a Two-phase Run-time Access Strategy" by Juan Miguel del Rosario et. al. (IPPS '93):

"The goal of parallel I/O is to provide a bottle-neck free communication pathway between the processors and I/O devices."

Why couldn't it have been that simple?!?!

oh well.

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keeping it under 50%

entry #1243, Sat, March 30, 2002, 15:46 (Travel)

Last night at about 19:00, as I was about to miserably lose a game of freeciv, I got an IM from Meagan, asking if I wanted to go to Chicago. Within an hour, Cari, Meagan, and I were on the road.

In Chicago, we dropped Cari off so she could party with some buddies. Meagan and I went to see Monsters, Inc. We wanted to see the version with the outtakes. It was fun.

After the movie we wandered around Chicago a bit, then met back up with Cari again. We stayed at Dave Tyler's place. He's an ND alum, ex-fencer type. Cari was feeling a bit ... sleepy ... this morning, so we just drove back to ND. Fun times. Fun times.

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Fencing NCAAs & NYC

entry #1242, Thu, March 28, 2002, 18:39 (Travel)

So I travelled to New Jersey to watch the NCAA Fencing Championships at Drew University. Pictures of this trip are online. I got some really nice pictures of New York, in my opinion.

I drove out with Meagan. We stopped in Cleveland to have dinner with her "brother" and his wife. We arrived in Jersey sometime after 1 am. We stayed with Nicole, a friend of Meagan's who used to fence at ND.

Day 1 of fencing. We found our way to Drew and watched the women fence. After the fencing Meagan and I found we had to waste some time. So we grabbed some bagels and found a cemetery where we sat down and ate. After that we wandered around some. We then had dinner at a Japanese place. It was pretty good. Then we watched Ice Age. Then we went to the hotel where the team was staying. We hung out with Cari and Destanie for a while. I painted Destanie's nails blue. Then we decorated the doors of ND's women fencers. Then sleepy time.

Day 2 of fencing. The women finished up pretty strong. Cari got all-american! ND won women's foil and women's epee. ND's second foilist got second place. After the fencing Nicole, Meagan, and I went to a Thai place for dinner, then watched Blade II. Then we went to the hotel and partied with the team. That was interesting.

Day 3: NYC. Since I was so close, I felt I had to go take a look at New York City. So I did. I took a train into Penn Station ($6 round trip!). My plan at first had been to pick up a map and ride the subway around to various cool places, but once actually in the city, I just starting wandering. New York kicks ass! I had so much fun. All I did was walk around lower Manhattan. First I found Macy's, then Times Square. Then I wandered around the Theater District some. Then I walked East until I hit water. I came across the Public Library and Grand Central, and then the UN building. Then I wandered West back to 2nd ave and headed South from there to Houston. Followed that West until I hit Broadway again. Took that South through SoHo. Just as it was starting to get dark I chanced upon St. Paul's chapel.

I spent a while looking at the 9-11 memorials people had set up there. Then the Tribute in Light came on, so I wandered closer to that. I spent a lot of time wandering aimlessly around the perimeter of ground zero. Being there, the WTC attack hit me much harder than it ever did when I saw footage on the news. It was shocking. I finally tore myself away from that area and walked back to Penn Station and returned to New Jersey. I definitely need to visit New York some more. I could even spend a year or two living there, I think. There's so much there, and I had so little time to look.

When I got back I found out that the men had not fenced very well that day. Day 4 of fencing didn't go very well either, and ND ended up finishing third.

We left New Jersey at about 14:30. We picked up a couple more passengers for the trip home: Nick and Erin. We made really good time driving back, getting back into South Bend before 1. It was a good trip. NYC kicked ass, it was fun to watch the fencing, and New Jersey was pretty nice. I'd heard so many bad stories about Jersey, but I guess I lucked out and saw one of the nice parts of the state.

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LTJ

entry #1241, Thu, March 28, 2002, 18:06 (Music)

Tuesday, March 19, I went to a concert in Chicago with Nicole, Randy, and Tom Smith. We saw Hot Water Music, Less Than Jake, and Bad Religion. It was fun.

Let's see, we left shortly after class. Got to Chicago quite early, since none of us remembered the time difference. So we found a Vietnamese restaurant to have dinner at. It was great, all the signs inside were written in Vietnamese only, and many of the items on their menu were not translated into English. They had a vegetarian section on their menu, but no translations for any of the items. The waiter seemed unimpressed by my request for more information on the menu. So I simply chose something at random. That worked out pretty well, I got some dish with tofu and lots of veggies. It was really good.

On the way to the venue I bought a Bad Religion shirt for $10, since we'd gotten to park for free and thus I had extra cash. I went to the concert mainly for LTJ, but the Bad Religion shirt tempted me because I felt wearing it would be a fun way to cause trouble on campus.

The show was excellent. I wasn't terribly impressed by Hot Water Music, but they were decent. Less Than Jake, however, was amazing. They played a really good set and really got the crowd going (take that, no moshing rule!). Bad Religion was fun, too, though not quite as much fun as LTJ, I thought. I think they'd have been more fun if I'd have known more of the songs they played. It was fun to watch Bad Religion, though, because they're pretty old, so you get to watch balding, grey-haired guys playing high-energy punk. I hope to have that much energy when I'm their age.

So overall a really good show. yay.

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Everything's bigger in Texas

entry #1240, Thu, March 28, 2002, 17:56 (Travel)

So I spent part of spring break visiting Annie in Dallas. Mamie and I drove down there and Mom, Dad, and Diana flew in. So we had some fun family time. We stayed with the Sisson's in Dallas. They've been hosting Annie during her theater apprenticeship there. They have a huge house.

We got to tour the theater Annie worked at, meet her friends, and so on. It was fun. One of Annie's friends took us on a brief driving tour of Dallas. We got to see the spot where JFK was shot; grassy knoll, book repository, and all. Morbid tourism at its best.

We also saw a performance of "The Burnt Piano," a play put on by the interns of the Dallas Theater Center. Annie had a part in this play as a young boy. It was a good production, I thought.

Dallas roads are crazy. And I'm unimpressed with the drivers there. I also picked up a new power supply for my powerbook while there, because mine had decided to die ("Dear Apple: please, for the love of the gods, learn how to make powerbook power supplies that don't suck. Love, Pete"). And we got to eat at a California Pizza Kitchen. Yummy, yummy.

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mottomania

entry #1239, Thu, March 28, 2002, 01:03 (Random Crap)

Perhaps I should add another motto: always take the time to enjoy a full moon when you have the chance.

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Where's Pete?

entry #1238, Mon, March 25, 2002, 01:47 (Random Crap)

In the past 12 days I have driven about 3700 miles. I'm back in South Bend for a while, now. More later.

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happy happy

entry #1237, Tue, March 12, 2002, 03:14 (Random Crap)

Mormons visited me a couple days ago. I acted all polite and stuff, but they didn't give me their damn book. Instead I only got a lousy coupon that said I could get their book for free if I sent them my address. Yeah, right.

Today, driving back to campus after dinner, Branden pointed out to me that I had just changed lanes in an intersection, while the light was yellow. In response I pointed out that I had also been going 20 miles an hour over the speed limit, but that at least I had used my blinker. I'm a safe driver.

Back in the day (oh lord), I remember the Blue Ribbon Campaign being cool. I even had a blue ribbon on my web page. But that was so long ago, and now the things just look silly.

Happy happy. I suspect I may not be spending a lot of time in the South Bend area these next couple weeks.

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recent viewings

entry #1236, Sun, March 10, 2002, 14:38 (Movies)

I think it's time to summarize some of the movies I've seen during the past couple weeks.

Wag The Dog, 1997, Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman. This movie had an interesting premise: fabricate a war to divert the media's attention from a scandal right before election. The actual plot was a bit slow and a bit annoying at times, but funny enough. It had a somewhat surreal feel to it, which I suppose is to be expected. The acting was pretty good, though.

The Emperor's New Groove, 2000, with David Spade and John Goodman. I figured I should try and keep up with the evil Disney empire. This film started out somewhat annoying, but quickly became very funny. David Spade does a terrific job as Emperor Kuzco. The film manages to make fun of itself and of the genre in general. I watched it four times before I had to return the DVD.

Taxi Driver, 1976, with Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster. Directed by Martin Scorsese. This film was initially recommended to me back when I had a mohawk. As it turns out, it has more to offer than just De Niro sporting a mohawk. It's a very intense film, though a bit slow. De Niro stars as an insomniac vietnam veteran working as a night shift taxi driver. I was impressed. This movie is ranked #29 on imdb's top 250.

The Arena, starring a couple playboy playmates. A remarkably unimpressive film.

The Time Machine, 2002, Guy Pearce, Jeremy Irons. A new adaptation of H.G. Wells' science fiction classic. I was really excited to see this movie, but it turned out to be, in my opinion, depressingly stupid. It had a lot of potential, and it had plenty of good moments, but the story lacked any final redeeming value. The story was altered enough such that it didn't capture the strong social message I felt was present in the book. Instead, all I came away from this movie with was "don't wear the same style of hat that everyone else is." There were many things in this movie that I felt were too unbelievable, and the plot was not strong enough for me to be willing to suspend disbelief to that degree. It wasn't horrible, though. It had some fun effects and its share of entertaining moments. It just didn't live up to my expectations. I do think this version is better than the 1960 one, but that' not saying much ...

Druids, 2001. Made somewhere in eastern Europe, I think, for French Canadian TV. Maybe. The classic story of Vercingetorix. Except really poorly done. This movie lacked much in the way of a plot, was goofy, and had really awful music. And I don't have a clue why it is called "Druids." If you're interested in gallic history, I'd recommend reading Asterix instead.

Hackers, 1995, Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie. A classic. I've had a perverse desire to watch this movie again for several weeks now. So I finally did. It cracks me up, it's so bad.

American Pie 2, 2001. Yup, a stupid sequel to a stupid movie. I enjoyed it. It wasn't quite as funny as the original, but I laughed plenty at the stupid humor.

Empire Records, 1995. Another movie I've wanted to watch again for a while. So I did! I like it enough.

That's all I can think of.

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ranting? quando?

entry #1235, Sat, March 09, 2002, 06:48 (Life in General)

I think my current level of understanding of how the world works can be well represented by the level of amusement I take in reading this headline: "Guantanamo Captives Told to Behave."

It's 5:30 in the morning, and I have been awake for 12 hours. So it seems appropriate that I start making dinner now. Yummy jambalaya with fake sausage. While I wait for dinner to finish, I figure I'll pester the world with my silly views on nothing in particular.

OK, actually, it's time to think unhappy things for a bit. I came across this story a couple days ago, and it's been plaguing my thoughts since. A 25-year old woman in Dallas, under the influence of alcohol and ecstasy, hit a homeless man as she was driving home. The man smashed threw her windshield and became stuck there. She drove home with the man in her windshield, parked the car in her garage, and left it there. Over the next several days, the man slowly died of blood loss and shock. The woman checked on him several times during the course of those days, even apologized to him. But she did not help him, despite his pleas. After he died, she dumped his body in a park. Autopsy results showed that he had no serious injuries and would probably have lived if he had received medical attention. She's been charged with murder, but her lawyer is arguing that murder is too serious a charge, that she should only be charged with failure to stop and render aid. It seems to me that locking up an injured person in your garage so that nobody else can help is more than just failure to render aid. Yuck. I'm so saddened by this. I hate that people are capable of this. Is there any less depressing news out there? I must move on.

I'm not quite sure about what to make of a headline about the economy recovering being followed by a headline that Bush is going to sign an economy stimulus bill. Greenspan says the economy should be ok without such a bill. But government debt is a good thing! I mean, I'm no expert on such matters and don't know nearly enough facts to decide one way or the other.

One amusing excerpt from the article about Bush signing the stimulus bill: "... during his weekly radio address, which will be broadcast live for the first time since Bush took office more than 13 months ago, ..." what?

Hey, does anyone even know where Zimbabwe is? They're having elections there, apparently for the first time in a while. The line at one voting station stretched for more than a mile. Ah, to be that dedicated to democracy. It's amazing what we take for granted.

And what's the deal with the Swiss joining the UN?

I added some tabasco to my jambalaya. It's spicyriffic.

Oh, and apparently Bush has told the Defense Department to prepare to use nuclear weapons "on a contingency basis" against at least seven countries. I'm not sure what that really means, but it scares me.

And it seems that pictures of Chinese politicians yawning are somewhat popular among the crowd that email yahoo news items to people.

I'm pretty sure I was a better person before I did a google search for the phrase "braces fetish" .... and no, I don't have one myself.

I'll be driving to Dallas sometime soon. Mamie and I are going to spend part of spring break visiting Annie. It should be fun. It's a 1000 mile drive, so I'm hoping to somehow trick my body into not being nocturnal sometime before I leave. We'll see how that goes.

portalofevil.com is my friend. The nsync popup ad that has been haunting me today is not.

I'm gonna stop now, because I've already said too much. Except one last thing: "w3rd"

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uh oh

entry #1234, Sat, March 09, 2002, 00:50 (Music)

I've discovered an internet radio station that plays French hip-hop. For some inexplicable reason, I'm hooked. What next?

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evolution

entry #1233, Fri, March 08, 2002, 01:19 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

I'm playing God for fun and ... well, no profit yet. How, you ask?

I started playing with core wars again a few days ago. The premise of core wars is that you have a memory core (usually 8000 or so words in size) into which are loaded two or more programs written in redcode, a special assembly language. These programs then battle each other for control of the core. The programs are loaded at random locations, so they do not know where the enemy is. The way to win is to cause the other program to execute an illegal instruction. For more information, www.koth.org is a good place to start.

So I read that people were using genetic algorithms to evolve core war warriors. I thought that was a cool idea, and figured it was about time I learn genetic algorithms in more detail. So having only a basic concept of how genetic algorithms work, I decided it'd be most fun to write a preliminary version of my evolver without consulting any literature, just to see what happened.

A few hours of coding later, I've got something that sorta works. Happy me. My program starts out creating n random warriors, battles them against a variety of test warriors (some simple ones such as imp and imp-gate, as well as some more advanced warriors) and determines a score based on the number of wins, ties, and losses. The next generation then consists of the top 2/3rds of the previous generation (with mutations) as well as children generated by crossbreeding programs in the previous generation. To determine the score, losses are worth 0 points. Wins are worth 3 times as much as a tie. If a program wins all its battles, it scores 100. If it ties all its battles, it scores 33.

I've not run this for any huge numbers yet. In my biggest run so far I started out with 1000 randomly generated warriors. The lowest score among that population was a 0, the mean was a 2, and the max was a 77. After 25 generations the low was still a 0, the mean was a 73, and the max a 92. Detailed numbers at the end. It's fun to watch them evolve, though. I feel almost like I'm watching my kids grow up.

So now I want to actually go read some literature on genetic algorithms to get some ideas to improve my evolver. I figure I'll also look at some of the pages that deal with evolving core war programs in specific. I also want to run my evolver on some big data sets. I'm thinking about using MPI to feed the battles out to multiple nodes to speed things up. It's big fun. More later, maybe.

generation 0: min: 0, mean: 2, max: 77
generation 1: min: 0, mean: 4, max: 77
generation 2: min: 0, mean: 6, max: 84
generation 3: min: 0, mean: 10, max: 86
generation 4: min: 0, mean: 16, max: 88
generation 5: min: 0, mean: 23, max: 87
generation 6: min: 0, mean: 31, max: 88
generation 7: min: 0, mean: 34, max: 88
generation 8: min: 0, mean: 40, max: 89
generation 9: min: 0, mean: 48, max: 88
generation 10: min: 0, mean: 58, max: 89
generation 11: min: 0, mean: 68, max: 89
generation 12: min: 0, mean: 69, max: 89
generation 13: min: 0, mean: 70, max: 91
generation 14: min: 0, mean: 71, max: 90
generation 15: min: 0, mean: 72, max: 89
generation 16: min: 0, mean: 71, max: 90
generation 17: min: 0, mean: 71, max: 89
generation 18: min: 0, mean: 72, max: 91
generation 19: min: 0, mean: 73, max: 89
generation 20: min: 0, mean: 72, max: 91
generation 21: min: 0, mean: 73, max: 89
generation 22: min: 0, mean: 72, max: 90
generation 23: min: 0, mean: 73, max: 90
generation 24: min: 0, mean: 73, max: 92

I've had some runs where after a while the min became greater than 0, but this run was not one of them (I figure that with 1000 warriors, it'll probably take more than 25 generations to get rid of all the badness). Here's the winning program from that evolve session:

      dat.i  $ 3854 , $-1669
      djn.x  *   10 , * 2059
      spl.ab $    6 , {    8
      dat.i  $ 3675 , $ 2799
      sub.x  #    7 , $    9
      spl.a  $   43 , *    0
start djn.x  #   18 , <    7
      mov.ab >    1 , *    7
      spl.x  #   22 , $   15
      nop.x  } 2065 , {   10
      mov.x  }  128 , $   10
      sne.ba }    7 , <   10
      dat.i  $ 3113 , $ 1319
      dat.f  $  512 , $    0
      dat.f  $    0 , $    0
      dat.f  $    0 , $    0
      slt.b  >    1 , >    2
      mul.ab #   15 , >    2

Yes, redcode may possibly be the ugliest assembly language ever created ... it supports such things as pre-increment indirect addressing! And no, I have no idea how that winning warrior works.

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silly new feature

entry #1232, Sun, March 03, 2002, 01:22 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

So feeling a need to hack some php, I decided to add a silly new feature to my journal: Pete's Log entries can now be rated. So if you want to provide feedback on the entries you receive, you can now give entries a rating between 0 and 5. Of course, you have to be a registered user to do so.

I added to the stats page a top ten list for the highest rated entries as well as a list of Pete's favorites: all the entries which I've given a rating of 5. I still intend to incorporate the rating system into the search page so you can search only entries rated above a certain limit and such.

Ah, worthless use of my talents. I love it.

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unavailable entry

entry #1231, Sun, March 03, 2002, 01:02 (unknown)

sorry, this entry is not available for you to see.

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unavailable entry

entry #1230, Sun, March 03, 2002, 00:58 (unknown)

sorry, this entry is not available for you to see.

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The Forever War

entry #1229, Sat, March 02, 2002, 07:53 (Books, Writing, n such)

Despite efforts to return to a normal working life, I've managed to spend more time reading than I should. Oh well.

I had to contrast my recent experience with bad science fiction with some good science fiction. So I figured a novel which had won both the Hugo and Nebula awards would not be a bad bet. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman is such a novel.

Ultimately, I enjoyed the book. The premise was interesting and Haldeman managed to build a fun story upon the interesting premise. The characters were not perfectly developed, but they were likable enough to make the story work.

The story concerns a war being fought in space and the temporal effects caused by travel at close to the speed of light. I found the portions of the book dealing with military issues interesting. The social implications that Haldeman predicted I found to be less realistic. I was also disappointed by when Haldeman chose to have the story begin. Published in 1974, the book's interstellar war begins in the late 1990s. He must have been quite optimistic about our technological progress to think that we'd be able to travel at near light speed before the end of the twentieth century.

Despite my disagreement with some of the social predictions Haldeman makes, I enjoyed the book enough that I would recommend it to science fiction fans.

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unavailable entry

entry #1228, Fri, March 01, 2002, 03:44 (unknown)

sorry, this entry is not available for you to see.

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Days of Grass

entry #1227, Wed, February 27, 2002, 14:20 (Books, Writing, n such)

While I was home over break I was given the opportunity to take any books I wanted out of several boxes full. Most of the books I took I chose because they looked like good books. But I also chose a few books that were blatantly bad science fiction. And last night I found myself wanting to read some bad science fiction. So I read Tanith Lee's Days of Grass. It was 250 pages of trash and I worked my way through it as some sick exercise in who knows what.

The story was unbelievable, unappealing, and, I'm pretty sure, self-contradicting at times. The characters were unbelievable and unlikable. The writing was confused and generally poor.

I feel no reason not to share the plot here, so if you think you will ever want to read this novel yourself, you may want to quit reading now. The premise is that 150 years ago alien invaders forced humanity underground. Now Esther, a young woman whose parents died long ago, has found her way Above (yes, Above and Below are capitalized in this book) and begins making regular trips there despite a law forbidding it. After several years she is caught because people notice she has a tan. She is brought to the leader of their colony, and instead of getting in trouble, is taken under his wing. He teaches her the history of how they came to be underground and so on and eventually confesses to her he wants her to be the next leader. On her next trip Above, Esther sees one of the invaders for the first time and also runs into Cury, a man who has been living above ground. She returns Below with Cury to find the leader has died. So she makes herself the new leader. Cury is suddenly revealed as a traitorous dog-minded masochist with prurient vampirism habits. He betrays the colony to the invaders and they are all captured. The invaders take the poor humans to their city for who knows what purpose. Except Esther is kept separate from the rest of the humans. She then apparently spends several months doing little other than having sex. Then she gets to meet one of the aliens up close and personal. He turns out to look exactly like a human because obviously an alien race would only be interested in conquering earth if they were, physically, very similar to humans. What? So then more time goes by in which Esther is left to herself, then the alien guy has sex with her. Then she's left alone for a long while again. Then the alien tells her that he's actually the only alien left, that before her colony had been captured he had begun killing all the other aliens because he thought humans were better. The book ends with him telling her she should lead the newly free humans and asking her to kill him.

Tanith Lee, it appears, has a number of books published (another one of them is apparently titled Kill The Dead). If he was able to get this one published, I think there is hope for all who write science fiction. I marked a few of my favorite quotes in the book and will share them:

"The two were utterly opposed in character, goal and outlook, as if they viewed the devastated world each through a different pane of colored glass, one knowing everything to be scarlet, while the other asserted that everything was indigo."

"Everything was striped or latticed with shadow and light, white on black, black on white, white on black on white."

"All five [rats] were lapping, like picture-book kittens from a stream of spilled canned milk. Only the milk was red."

As bad as this book was and as much as I feel it should never have been published, for some reason I feel refreshed for having made my way through it. I'm now ready again for more real books.

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Bluebeard

entry #1226, Wed, February 27, 2002, 02:30 (Books, Writing, n such)

I read the entire text of Kurt Vonnegut's Bluebeard over a period of about 24 hours. Of those 24 hours I spent about ten sleeping and three or more at Andy's place where his mom prepared a delicious meal for us. I also spent some time on IM. But other than that, this past day has been all Vonnegut, all the time.

Bluebeard was a lot of fun. I like Vonnegut a lot, and this book added to my appreciation of his work. It alternated between being satirical and cynical and showing off some of the great things about us humans that make life worth our while. It was funny and touching. Rabo Karabekian is a truly likable character.

I did not read the back cover at first, and instead began reading it with no knowledge of what it was about at all. But then when I was about 50 pages into it, I read the back cover for some reason. I wish I hadn't. I think I may have enjoyed the story a little more if I had not. If you have not read this book, I recommend that you do and that you do not read the remainder of this log entry until you have.

Here is the synopsis from the back of the book: "At 71, Rabo Karabekian no longer paints. He wants only to be left alone. But now Circe Berman, a young widow, has invaded his Long Island estate, bullied him into writing his autobiography, and is trying to discover the secret locked in his barn. Bluebeard's wives once had a similar goal. What can the secret be?"

While I had already come across mention of this barn by the time I read the synopsis, and while I was already curious as to its contents, I think I would have enjoyed the book more had I not known that the contents of the barn was the big theme of the book, because much of the book deals with the life of Rabo and not with the mystery of the barn. The importance of the barn became clear enough in the end, I didn't need to know about it in the beginning.

I am becoming more and more convinced that the best way to enjoy good books and good movies is to go in without any idea of what is going to happen. Previews suck.

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urq?

entry #1225, Tue, February 26, 2002, 04:24 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Um, so yeah, whatever, I should be asleep.

Instead, I'm an internet gangster. I just gained access to Crested Butte Academy's online alumni email directory without having been given the password. Their security scheme was ridiculous. Not even Perk has done this poorly. Yuck. Maybe I'll contact them.

It's kinda scary, though, how I can't seem to figure out who some of the people I supposedly graduated with are. And I only graduated with 14 people ...

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delusions of something

entry #1224, Tue, February 26, 2002, 00:24 (Books, Writing, n such)

I've been leading a somewhat seclusive life of recent, which leads to a certain lack of fresh material to jot down in my online exposition of myself. But I feel compelled to spill literary filth into my electronic record of life, and thus my readers shall suffer.

I have a new subscriber today, and though I'm not usually prone to commenting on that fact (in part because I don't usually notice right away), today I will, because I feel I should comment on any hypothetical influence that may have on my writing. I have a sense that given enough scrutiny, one could detect a certain effect on my journaling style every time I noticed that I had a new subscriber. Such an undertaking is ultimately impossible, however, because I have failed to record when people subscribed. Except, perhaps, today.

Instead, today I know for a fact that my style is significantly influenced, because I feel a need to impress a girl who informed me, shortly before telling me she had subscribed to my journal, that I was "the smartest boy in the world!" I must, after all, live up to such praise. At least I need not outsmart any girls to live up to that praise, which makes this task a bit easier.

My train of thought was just derailed, so I will allow a tangent. I just received another email from crushlink.com. This one, however, was not sent to any of my prijks@* email addresses. It was sent to an email address @esgeroth.org that I explicitly made up for the purposes of messing with crushlink.com when I first heard from them long ago. I never made that email address public anywhere. I used it only once when I was trying to figure out just how evil the whole crushlink concept was. Well, it seems they have now proven themselves even more evil by sending mail to my fake address again. This means that in response to one person listing your email address as a potential crush, they may send you multiple notifications that someone has a crush on you. In this case, my fake email address is getting notification long (more than a year, I think) after crushlink was told someone had a crush on it. Like, whatever.

I decided to set a goal for myself of 1000 words a week of fiction writing. It does not have to be written for any particular project or anything. I just want 1000 (or more) words describing stuff that, well, ain't real. My first deadline is approaching and I've managed only 99 words. But they are 99 quality words. So we'll see how that goes.

I finished John Irving's The World According to Garp last night. Sometime between 3 and 4 I gave up trying to fall asleep and made some Earl Grey (decaf) and started reading. I was on page 492 when I started and I had the novel done when I finished (I think it's about 680 pages long). I didn't bother looking at what time it was when I went to sleep, but it was still dark out. John Irving's writing delights me. This is the fourth book of his I've read and I liked all of them. I think this may have been my favorite, though. It made me laugh a lot and it made me think a lot. I felt very strongly for many of his characters. And every time I sat down to read some of the book, I ended up reading a bigger chunk than I'd intended to. It's genius.

I don't think this entry knows what it wants to be, but it looks like I'm going to file it away under "Books, Writing, n such." I had some observations I wanted to make about working at the dining hall my freshman year (insomnia leads me to strange thought patterns), but I think I will save those for another time, since they are hardly literary in nature.

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weekend movies

entry #1223, Mon, February 25, 2002, 01:06 (Movies)

This weekend I watched Amazons and Gladiators, Chicken Run, 10 Things I Hate About You, Malena, Ben-Hur, Gattaca, and Stargate. I enjoyed all of them.

Amazons and Gladiators can only be accurately described as "Saturday Night TV: The Movie." Chicken Run was a very cute claymation movie done by the Wallace and Gromit people. 10 Things I Hate About You is Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew reset as a teenage soap opera. I'd seen it before, but wanted to see it again. Malena is an Italian movie about the misfortunes of a woman during WWII. Ben-Hur had less chariot racing than I expected, but I still enjoyed it. It is 222 minutes long. Gattaca is about the evils of genetic profiling in the not-so-distant future. Stargate is fun sci-fi. I'd seen it before, but it's still fun. It was a very good mix of movies, I feel. I also rented Lawrence of Arabia, but that will have to wait.

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entry #1222, Sun, February 24, 2002, 03:09 (unknown)

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entry #1221, Sun, February 24, 2002, 03:06 (unknown)

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ooc

entry #1220, Sat, February 23, 2002, 03:48 (Random Crap)

Arun just played my tortilla like a bongo.

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Queen of the Damned

entry #1219, Fri, February 22, 2002, 19:43 (Movies)

For some reason I was under the impression that I didn't like vampire movies. But Mamie asked if I'd go see this one with her, so I did. And as it turns out, I was right. I don't much care for vampire films. But then again, I suspect that even among those who do like vampire films, this one may not be a favorite. I found it to be silly and boring. I did enjoy the music, though.

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on the non-existence of God

entry #1218, Fri, February 22, 2002, 02:59 (Spirituality)

I promised some time ago to write a detailed journal entry about why I became an atheist. Since then I've put a good deal of time into further study of some issues, as well as figuring out how exactly to express my views on these matters. So now I present to you the result of that effort. I do not seek to offend anyone, I am simply stating my opinions on these matters. If you're not comfortable reading arguments against God, please proceed no further. However, if you're at all curious or if you have any wish to better understand my view of the universe, please continue.

A good beginning to such an enterprise would be to quote scripture. So I will share my favorite Bible quote: "What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun." Ecclesiastes 1:9. Much of what I present here comes from having put a lot of thought into the matter. Much of what I present also comes from having read a lot on the matter. But regardless of whether I came up with a particular argument myself, none of what I present is original. Many have come up with the same ideas. I simply am presenting what my view on God is, and why. Writing it down has helped me to understand it better. And this is an issue fundamental to my perception of life. What better thing than this to write in my journal?

Dismissing Christianity
The God I was raised to believe in is the Christian God. As I became more aware of how illogical the Christian faith is, it became harder to reconcile my beliefs with my observations of the world. In fact, once I had lost my Christian view of the world, there was little additional motivation to keep me believing in God. Yet, for a little while, I still somehow felt I believed in God, even after I could no longer accept Christianity. So what led to my dismissal of Christianity? Two things were the prime causes. First, the teachings and practices of the church (primarily the catholic church) were at times inconsistent with what I felt was the right thing to do. And second, study of the Bible led me to realize that basing a belief system on that book is a bad idea.

The Bible is little more than the fairy tales, legends, and moral codes of an old society that lived in the middle east. It is not the word of God, it was written by men. It is full of absurdities, atrocities, inconsistencies, and obscenities. I have found my share of passages that serve both to amuse and sadden me. And before anyone complains that I quote the old testament here, I'd like to point out that I quote the new testament as well and that the old testament is used to justify some of my least favorite Christian activities. You cannot claim that the Bible is the word of God and then excuse any odd behavior in the old testament simply because it's in the old testament.

Let's see.... "As in all the churches of the holy ones, women should keep silent in the churches, for they are not allowed to speak, but should subordinate, as even the law says. But if they want to learn anything, they should ask their husbands at home. For it is improper for a woman to speak in the church." 1 Corinthians, 14:34-35. That's the new testament for you.
"Those who are under the yoke of slavery must regard their masters as worthy of full respect, so that the name of God and our teaching may not suffer abuse." 1 Timothy, 6:1. Yup, that's right. The new testament endorses slavery.
"There she lusted after her loves, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses." Ezekiel 23:20
Deuteronomy 21:18-21 says that stubborn children should be stoned to death.
Matthew 1:16 claims that Jacob was the father of Joseph (Jesus' grandfather, sort of) while Luke 3:23 claims that the father of Joseph was Heli. In fact, the genealogy of Jesus listed in Matthew differs greatly from the genealogy listed in Luke. Basically, they made these genealogies up. If they made that up, who knows what else they made up?
"They observed the ban by putting to the sword all living creatures in the city: men and women, young and old, as well as oxen, sheep and asses." Joshua 6:21. This is the will of a loving God?
The thing I understand least, however, is that Jesus teaches that we should be forgiving and that we should love our enemies. Yet anyone who does not believe in him is going to spend eternity in hell? Is this not a bit hypocritical?
Here's some more fun with Jesus: Mark 11:12-14: "The next day as they were leaving Bethany he [Jesus] was hungry. Seeing from a distance a fig tree in leaf, he went over to see if he could find anything on it. When he reached it he found nothing but leaves; it was not the time for figs. And he said to it in reply, 'May no one ever eat of your fruit again!' And his disciples heard it." Mark 11:20-22: "Early in the morning, as they were walking along, they saw the fig tree withered to its roots. Peter remembered and said to him, "Rabbi, look! The fig tree that you cursed has withered." Jesus said to them in reply, "Have faith in God." Matthew 21:18-19 "When he was going back to the city in the morning, he was hungry. Seeing a fig tree by the road, he went over to it, but found nothing on it except leaves. And he said to it, 'May no fruit ever come from you again.' And immediately the fig tree withered." In response to this bit of scripture, I want to start producing bracelets that say "W.T.F.J."

Which reminds me of another occasion when I was at a soccer game played by young (pre-high school) girls. A father was at the sideline, very agitated, frequently yelling at the referees. I noticed he was wearing a W.W.J.D. anklet.

Here's some more fun: "Concerning his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh..." Romans 1:3. I thought Jesus was made without any seed.

There is plenty more. I simply cannot understand how people can base their religion off this book. It is so vague and at times offers so many contradicting moral teachings that just about any sort of behavior can be justified using the Bible. Is this vague book the best that an all powerful God can come up with to let us know his will? The idea that the bible isn't meant to be taken literally is also silly. Given the diversity of the bible, the book can be interpreted to justify any action you want. And once you say that you shouldn't interpret all of it literally, what reason do you have to interpret any of it literally? It's a fun circular argument. God exists because the Bible tells us so. And the Bible is a reliable source because God tells us so. Well, I don't buy it.

Also, the Christian God is supposed to be perfectly just, which is why sin is a problem. If he was just loving, he could forgive sins, no problem. But because he's perfect, and because perfection apparently means just, he's got to make a big deal about judging us for our sins. So my question is, what messed up system of justice is it when a perfect and loving God judges us for all eternity by our actions during our short existence on this planet. Actions which, I might add, are to a significant degree influenced by the imperfections of the minds we have. I have a hard time believing that that is perfect justice.

So in addition to my disappointment in the Bible, I am also disappointed in christian institutions. While I feel that many christians are good people, I can't help but notice all the bad things that have been done in the name of christianity. And even today the christian institutions fail to demonstrate that they are influenced by a wise and loving God. I simply cannot agree with the Vatican's teaching that condoms are evil and should not be used to help deal with overpopulation and disease in the third world. I also am appalled by how the catholic church seems to have been covering up sexual misconduct by its priests. And I won't even begin to discuss how much fundamentalists frighten and anger me. Instead I will now discuss a few of the arguments in favor of the existence of God that actually made me think a bit. There are plenty other arguments for the existence of God that are just plain stupid. I won't bother dealing with those. Then I'll look at some of the arguments against the existence of God. Then I'll finish up with what atheism means to me from a moral standpoint.

The Argument from Design
The argument from design basically says that the world is too structured and too complex to have happened by accident. Thus, there must be a God who created the whole thing. For a while I sorta bought into this thing. It was not proof of God for me, but I saw it as a valid reason for others to believe in God. But then I realized an inherent flaw in the reasoning. For it seems to me that in order to create a universe as ordered as this one, God would have to be even more ordered. And if the universe if so ordered that it must have been created, then what does that say about God?

Science is doing a good job of explaining how we came to be. There are still many things we don't understand. It seems silly at this point to use God to explain the things we don't understand, since we now understand many things that we used to blame on God. Why assume that we won't at some point in the future understand more of the things we don't yet? It doesn't matter how unlikely it is that we would exist. The fact that we do exist is enough to show that regardless of the odds, life happened.

But there's so many Christians ... that many people can't be wrong!
Religion through peer pressure? No thanks.

First of all, this argument lacks credibility simply because of how many differing views there are on what the divine truth is. But beyond that, there are simpler explanations for how many people have faith other than some mysterious person watching over us. People are religious because they fear death. God gives people a reason to live. However, I'd rather know the truth and be slightly less optimistic about my chances after death than spend my time lying to myself in order to be happier. And as it turns out, I wasn't happier when I believed in God.

Pascal's Wager
Pascal's wager is cute, I'll admit. But it is weak, and it is without merit. First, it relies on the assumption that the existence of God is as likely as the non-existence of God and that there is little or no cost associated with believing in God. Both of those assumptions are false. More importantly, it assumes that there is one easy way to believe in God that will get you into heaven. Unfortunately, there exist many different viewpoints on how to best worship God. And as it turns out, many of these viewpoints share the belief that worshipping God in any other way will lead to eternity in hell. So which means of worshipping do you choose? No safe choice presents itself. Finally, wouldn't God know that you're only praising him "just in case?"

The problem of evil
It is the problem of evil, I think, that caused me to really begin doubting the existence of a god. If God, as the general claim goes, is omnipotent and loving, then why is there suffering in the world? It makes no sense.

The only response I've seen to this point is that the reason there is evil in the world is that God gave us free will. I don't buy this. First of all, it seems to me that if God is omnipotent, he could figure out some way to give us free will without all the suffering. But more importantly, the evidence seems to suggest to me that we don't really have free will. We don't really choose most of what happens to us. And of the choices we do seem to make, it seems our actions are really determined by chemical reactions in our brain rather than by the free will of a soul.

Other than the free will response, which I don't buy, I've seen no other explanation for why there is suffering in the world. Until I see a reasonable explanation for suffering, I will have a hard time believing there is a god.

I have no soul
A basic premise of theistic worship is the existence of an eternal soul. Take away the soul, and the whole system collapses. I am no longer able to conceive of the existence of a soul.

The soul is supposed to be the part of us that survives death. It is the part of us that God will welcome into heaven (or banish to hell) when we're done with our time on earth. In order to survive death, it would seem that the soul must have some supernatural properties. The soul is something more than just chemical reactions.

But what part of us seems able to survive death? Certainly it isn't our physical body. Is there any part of our mind that is more than just chemicals that would be able to survive? Our memories certainly don't seem like they'd be part of our eternal soul. They are quite fragile. Time alone does a good job of destroying memories. But in addition to that, things such as disease, trauma, and alcohol can have significant adverse effects on our memory. Our memories have a hard enough time surviving while we are alive. How can we expect them to survive death?

Instead maybe our soul is in the emotions we feel? But I've discovered that emotions seem to be little more than the results of chemical processes in our brain. Physical things such as diet and exercise have a significant effect on my emotional state. Even greater is the effect of alcohol and caffeine. How can my emotions survive death if they are the result of physical processes?

Beyond my memory and my emotions, what else is there that could possibly be part of a soul? I can't think of any part of me that seems able to survive death. And thus it seems I have no soul. If I have no eternal soul, the whole premise of many religions is gone. And if I have no soul, it does not matter if there is a god or not, since once I'm dead, it's all over anyway.

The Final Step
All this brings us to where I am able to firmly say that I have no reason to believe in God. When I first reached this point, I was unwilling to label myself an atheist, preferring instead to consider myself an agnostic. Somehow it seemed that it was more rational to take the agnostic approach to religion, to consider as the basis of my belief system the fact that the existence or non-existence of God is ultimately unknowable.

And while I still cannot deny that the existence of God is ultimately unknowable, I have since come to the conclusion that atheism is, to me at least, more rational. While I do not believe that the non-existence of God can be conclusively proven, the same holds true for the non-existence of fairies, unicorns, and petelings (invisible beings that follow me around). Yet I do not hesitate to claim I do not believe in those things. Why then should I make an exception for God? How is the hypothetical existence of God different than the hypothetical existence of petelings? Based on my observations of the universe, there is no evidence for the existence of either. It would be frightfully inconsistent to claim that I believe there are no petelings but that I feel I can make no claim either way about God's existence.

And thus, in order to maintain a consistent approach to how I perceive the universe, I must, until presented with sound, scientific evidence to the contrary, believe that there is no God.

The Meaning of Life
But if there is no God, what is the meaning of life? As far as I'm concerned, there is none. Personally, I don't even believe there is a point in looking for a meaning in life. I feel it is remarkable that we came to be, and that we should make the most of our unlikely existence. In fact, looking to God for meaning in life is ultimately futile. For if there is only meaning for our lives if we were created by God, then what does that say about the meaning of God? Where does God derive meaning from? Does God need a creator to have meaning?

Believing in God in order to gain meaning in life seems, to me, to be pathetic. It is nothing better than wishful thinking. I prefer to face the truth, even if it is harsh, than to deceive myself in order to feel better. And, it turns out, I feel quite happy without God in my life. Let's investigate why.

The Basic Consequences of Atheism
After becoming atheist, I quickly became aware of three philosophical advantages that atheism has, in my opinion, over any religious views. First, if there is no supreme authority, then all our decisions on how to treat others become based on actual feelings of what is right and what is wrong, as opposed to being simply based on following the command of some creator. I find this very appealing, because I would much rather treat somebody with respect because they are a fellow human being than because I fear I will be punished otherwise. Second, if there is no creator, then the beauty of the universe becomes that much more astonishing. I would much rather marvel at the wonders of the universe and think how amazing it is that they exist and that I exist to behold them, than to attribute everything to a creator and waste my time worshipping that creator instead. And finally, if I realize that there is no afterlife to reward me for my suffering during life, then I will no longer want to put up with needless suffering. Instead, I should make as much of life as I can, because that's all I get.

Atheism is not evil
I am lucky, I think, to be in an environment where I do not get branded as evil (at least not yet) for confessing my atheism. I have, however, encountered many stories of atheists being labeled evil and informed that they will burn in hell. I do not fear hell, because I think there is no such place. Even when I still maintained some sort of belief in God, I was unable to conceive of a place where souls are sent for eternal torment. But regardless, I find the notion that atheism is evil hard to believe. First of all, I do not consider myself evil. But beyond that, I know a good number of atheists. All of them I consider to be good people. On the other hand, I have met plenty of people who claim to be christian, whom I would have a hard time classifying as good people. I'm definitely not saying that all christians are bad. Most christians that I know aren't. But from my personal experience -- which can hardly be considered representative, but is relevant to me nonetheless -- the percentage of christians whom I would consider to be lacking in moral qualities is greater than the percentage of atheists of whom I'd say the same.

My moral system
So to sum everything up, let's see what my moral system becomes, when I base it off my opinion that there is no God. Simply put, I think I am what one might call a humanist. Here are my basic premises:
1. I exist. I came to be through an unlikely chain of events. I have a very short time to live, and when my live is over, that's it. Nothing more will follow.
2. I enjoy living. I am lucky enough to have been raised in a wonderful family. I have never lacked in the basics needed for survival. I suspect that I will, for the most part, enjoy the rest of my life. 3. I enjoy the presence of other people. I am happier if the people around me are happy. The lives of those around me are just as short as my own. 4. If I want to survive death in any way, my options are to live on through children and to live on throuch achievements.

Those four premises are enough for me to base my moral views of the world on. I feel that the most important thing for me in life is to enjoy myself and to make the most of it. In addition, I feel I should do the best I can to help those around me enjoy life. The reason for this is both selfish (if I treat others well, they will probably treat me well in return) and unselfish (their lives are short enough, there's no reason for me to cause them any suffering I can avoid causing). Basically, what it comes down to is that I am in favor of anything, so long as it doesn't hurt anybody. I don't believe in victimless crimes. And I believe we should live for this life, not for some life after death for which we have no guarantee.

The world has made much more sense to me since I cast off belief in God. I will, of course, never claim to have all the answers, but I will go with what seems most rational. I gladly welcome any comments anyone might have.

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drowning my sorrows in soy ice cream

entry #1217, Thu, February 21, 2002, 18:17 (Random Crap)

yummy.

I am not making this up. The following quote comes from the online diary of a teenage girl: "I love the Backstreet Boys... I mean I LOVE THEM... not just an obsession... I care about them and their well being, it's actually sort of weird. AGAPE FOR BSB!"

I keep defeating myself in games of darts. I wish I was better so I at least had a chance against me.

I've been playing with HTML and PHP for the first time in a while. I'm thinking of making Pete's Log my primary webpage and just grafting whatever else remains into the log structure somehow.

I like Colin Powell. I kinda wonder what he really thinks of the administration he is a part of. But I've read several stories of recent in which his stance is not in line with the administration stance. Generally it seems that his opinion is more in line with mine than that of the administration. I hope he has a significant positive influence on our government.

Had I mentioned this yet? An ABC news poll on who was the greatest president found that 13% thought George W. Bush held that honor. What? Lincoln was thought to be best by 20%, and Kennedy by 14%. People are crazy.

Oh, and some study found that people that sleep an average of less than 8 hours a night (but more than 4.5) have a tendency to live longer than those who sleep 8 hours or more. Not only is my excessive sleeping a waste of my time, it could also be bad for me in the long run!

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entry #1216, Thu, February 21, 2002, 00:55 (unknown)

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entry #1215, Wed, February 20, 2002, 13:36 (Life in General)

All I want is a little anonymity ...

It should not yet be Wednesday. I am slightly concerned by my inability to sleep less than 10 hours a night. I really am trying to wake up. Last night I slept from about midnight until 12:45. That's more than half the day. Grrrr.

Cari took me to a lecture on/performance of Bartok's Sonata for Piano on Sunday. That was fun.

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Mobilize for Peace

entry #1214, Sat, February 16, 2002, 03:09 (Music)

Today I went to a punk show at St Andrews Hall in Detroit with Andy and Anne. It was the first show in the Mobilize for Peace tour. Virus 9 opened, followed by Pipe Down and then Thrice. They were all good. I think at least two of those three bands were from California. Then Against All Authority (the reason I came to this show) played. They're from Florida. I like them a lot. They played a good set. Finally Anti-Flag played. They're from Pittsburgh. They were pretty good. It was a very political show. In fact, Anne barely survived the amount of idealism presented. But I liked it.

I had some interesting new experiences today. First, I bought a pack of cigarettes for myself for the first time (I don't intend this to become a habit. It just needed doing today). At the show, I had my first ever crowdsurfing experience (which was fun) as well as my first ever getting punched in the face experience (which was less fun). I got nailed in the mosh pit while Thrice was playing. My vision just went bright white for a couple moments, and I couldn't open my left eye for a couple minutes. Now it's developing a nice bruise. It still hurts to blink. I think it was definitely an experience worth having, since now I know what it feels like to be punched in the face (and it's a fun story). But I can't say I would like to experience it again.

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fffffff ... I mean grrrrrr....

entry #1213, Fri, February 15, 2002, 03:17 (Life in General)

I can't believe how strong the cravings were tonight. But they seem to have subsided for now. Why is this happening to me?

Maybe I'm just showing my ignorance again ... but to me it just seems that calling other countries evil is poor diplomacy. Then again, perhaps it really is part of Bush's greater plan to encourage anti-America riots in Muslim nations. Perhaps it will all make sense someday. Perhaps we should follow the example in Saudi Arabia and establish a Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Evil. Seriously, though: wtf? International politics is not like D&D! The real question, I feel, is if this 'axis of evil' is chaotic evil or lawful evil.

I bought a dart board. Branden and I made good use of it last Saturday.

Anne was in town last weekend. Sunday evening I had dinner with her at Star of India. The waiter disapproved of my first two choices and ended up telling me what I was going to eat. It was funny. And what he made me get ended up being quite good. After dinner, we went to hear the Collegium Musicum (a.k.a. Andy and Cari and some other people) sing at the Basilica. It was pretty.

Last week I helped Rebecca install some stuff on the mac they have in her office, so as a reward, she made me dinner Wednesday night. She made pasta shells stuffed with tofu. It was really good. I will have to experiment with that idea sometime.

I then went to the State to see Lester perform. I ended up hanging out by myself, but Lester played a good set, so it was fun.

Mamie and I had our fourth viewing of Lord of the Rings. Yay. It was a bizarre experience, the audience was so annoying it was comical. Two people fell asleep and snored. One guy's cell phone rang and he answered it and talked for a couple minutes! A couple got into an argument and left. A bunch of people were talking. It was surreal.

Happy birthday to Andy!

George W. Bush also recently announced his goal to decrease domestic drug abuse by 10% over the next two years. I dislike the man enough that I want to consider taking up drugs, just to counteract his goal. I am increasingly upset about the drug commercials they played during the superbowl. The claim of these commercials was that by using illegal drugs, you may be funding terrorists. Granted, this is true, but first of all, I think the government should have to include a mention of how much money it has given to various terrorist groups over the years before accusing the public of funding terrorists. Second, if they really wanted to cut off drug profits to terrorists, all they need to do is legalize drugs, and suddenly the terrorists will no longer be able to subsidize themselves by selling drugs. Finally, I am disgusted that politicians are using a tragic event to further their own causes. Yuck.

The worst thing is that as far as the rest of the world is concerned, these politicians represent me. Grrrr.

At the State I paid $2 for a glass of ice with a dash of sprite. Not very fair, since much larger glasses of beer were only $1. But anyway, this got me thinking about yet another one of the little cultural things I've never become accustomed to after moving to the US. This whole ice thing. I mean, if the drink isn't cold, then it makes sense to add ice, because it'll make the drink cold. But if the drink is already cold, what's the point of ice? But a little bit of ice doesn't bother me. It's when they fill the glass with ice and then add whatever liquid will fit in the cracks. Grrrrrrrr. I mean .... yeah, I really did mean grrrrrrrrr.

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!!!!!!!

entry #1212, Wed, February 13, 2002, 00:40 (Life in General)

I found my keys!!!!

But what's more important is that I found the remote to the TV, which has been missing since the beginning of last fall semester. Both were hidden deep within the slippery couch, in a place whose very existence I had been unaware of.

Take that, entropy!

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For Great Different.

entry #1211, Wed, February 13, 2002, 00:27 (Life in General)

Relax. It's only life.

I gave a presentation in I/O class today. It went well. I had fun. And I was rewarded with a great ego boost. Yummy. Tastes kinda like tofu.

At some other point today, Andy and I were wandering around and found ourselves at Lafortune. I felt like watching people, but all the good tables for that purpose were occupied. So I decided that Andy and I should sit behind the table where various groups frequently hold information sessions or sign ups or whatever it is they do. I was hoping somebody would come tell us we can't sit there. Instead, it was fun to watch how people reacted to us sitting there with no materials to present.

For some time I've enjoyed the power trip that comes from running red lights when driving on empty roads in the middle of the night. But now I've finally found the courage to run red lights on campus at night. It's fun. Stupid lights should be switched to blinky mode after midnight anyway.

To clear up any of the apparent confusion generated by the sXe comment last time around, I offer my top ten reasons I've decided to quit consuming alcohol:

10. Aliens told me to.
9. Need to be in peak shape for D&D.
8. I'll be better able to keep myself in a state of cat-like readiness.
7. I'll probably sleep better.
6. Whenever possible, I desire to be more like Arun.
5. I can finally get one of those fashionable sXe tattoos.
4. I'll avoid unhealthy calories.
3. I'll save money.
2. I hope to better remember flirting with girls.
1. I'll have one less thing to worry about.

For those unaware, sXe is short for straight edge.

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BSB fan-fic

entry #1210, Sun, February 10, 2002, 06:43 (Life in General)

I just realized something. I think I could fall in love with a girl simply because she uses 24 hour time instead of the vastly inferior 12 hour time.

I now own Microsoft Office for Mac OS X. It should prove useful. But it has irritated me in one significant way so far: I can't seem to make it use 24 hour time by default.

I was visited tonight by a bout of the really bad sort of insomnia. Very unhappy stuff. Feeling helplessly alone. Feeling frustrated, feeling angry. Feeling very unstable. Needing to cry. All of it for no good reason. Ack. Luckily, experience actually taught me how to deal with episodes of this sorts. Get out of bed! So now I'm happy again, and eating jambalaya at 6:30. Yummy. I'm looking to finish the whole batch on my own. That's a lot of jambalaya!

I've been dealing with some strange revelations of late. Silly stuff having to do with discovering things about myself. The end result is that I'm nearly certain that I should switch to an sXe sort of lifestyle. I'm terrified.

All my concerns evaporate when I compare them to the concerns of fourteen year old girls. I'm reading the online journals of strangers. Tonight I am thankful for the fact that I don't have to worry about my Backstreet Boys fan-fic being subpar.

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Slow News Day

entry #1209, Sat, February 09, 2002, 16:21 (Life in General)

While I don't hide the fact that I am generally unimpressed with our current president, I feel I would have to make fun of this Reuters story regardless of which president it concerned itself with. The headline: "Bush Takes Walk in Wyoming Snow Near Teton Peaks." Is there nothing more exciting happening in the world than this?

"JACKSON, Wyoming (Reuters) - President Bush took a walk in the snow on Saturday, taking in some of the brisk mountain air in the pristine valley known as Jackson Hole near the Grand Teton peaks."

And later: "[White House spokesman Scott McClellan] said Bush was not using snow shoes." This seems almost like an Onion article.

But now I will move on to things even less exciting than our president's walk in Wyoming.

Thursday night Katie and I went to senior bar for some GSU-sponsored Mardi Gras party. It demonstrated, yet again, that I'm just not part of the grad student social scene. But there was free beer, and Katie and I managed to play two horrible games of cricket. So it was fun. However, after I got home, I must have placed my keys somewhere unusual, because I've been unable to find them since.

Luckily, I have a spare car key, so I am at least able to drive. If anybody has seen my keys, please let me know. I sorta need them.

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more happenings

entry #1208, Wed, February 06, 2002, 19:46 (Life in General)

A fortune cookie accused me of being responsible for at least 100,000,000 acts of kindness in my life to date. Playing with the numbers, that's about 8 acts of kindness every minute. Considering all the time I've spent asleep, reading, coding, and so forth, I fear that that cookie has overestimated my ability to perform acts of kindness.

The Keenan Revue was Saturday. Brian and George came to town to see it. It was a fun show, though the first half was definitely a good deal better than the second. After the revue several of us congregated at my place to watch movies and drink a few beers. It was, overall, an entertaining evening.

Sunday, after getting the tattoo (which I love!), I went to Rob's place to watch the superbowl. A large crowd of graduate students (mainly chemical engineering) was there. It was fun. I participated in some form of gambling on the game and lost $3. It was fun, though, since winning this pool was random, but it got everyone more interested in the game. This was good, since I think there were maybe two people there that cared about which team won the game.

I was especially argumentative and vocal in class yesterday. It was a lot of fun.

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blah blah what?

entry #1207, Tue, February 05, 2002, 01:03 (Life in General)

So instead of going to sleep at midnight like I told myself I would, I began harassing the internet again. I came across an article earlier today about "googlewhacking," a game of sorts in which you type queries into google consisting of two words, with the hope that there will be only one match. An interesting idea, if nothing else. I've been playing a similar game of recent in which I put together a few terms that result in slightly more matches. I then visit any personal homepages returned in the search results. It entertains me.

A few links away from one of my searches tonight I found myself at www.diarist.net/spark/, which offers little topics with which to begin writing diary entries. Well, I browsed through several of these and found most of them uninteresting until I came upon one question. At first I dismissed it as well, but I thought some more about it as I looked at other uninteresting sparks. The question is, if you had to lose one of them, which of your senses would you give up? And even though I still think it's a silly question, I've found myself unable to decide ...

I definitely know I don't want to give up hearing. And I feel almost as certain about touch. The problem with smell and taste is that they both affect how food tastes. Ack. I think I'd probably have to go with smell, despite the effect it'd have on taste. But who knows ...

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less

entry #1206, Mon, February 04, 2002, 17:58 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

So there is apparently a sequence of termcap initialization/deinit actions that various fancy terminal applications (such as emacs, lynx, pine, and less) use. The problem I've discovered is that on some terminal types, the deinit actions cause the terminal to be cleared (well, returned to the state it was in before the program ran). This is particularly annoying behavior with less, because often when I quit less (which is also my pager for man and such) I still wish to have the contents of the buffer I was looking at in the terminal. Since Eterm on malloc recently picked up the habit of clearing the screen when I quit less, I looked into this phenomenon.

I was unable to find a way to keep Eterm (or xterm) from clearing when termcap deinitialization took place, but I did find a way to force less to not do the init/deinit stuff. less -X will not clear the screen when I quit it, and that's good enough for me. In addition, less checks the LESS environment variable and considers the contents of it to be arguments passed on the command line. So instead of making an alias, I can simply 'setenv LESS -X' and now my man pages stay on the screen when I hit q. Yay!

In other news, the OIT is responsible for yet more amusement in my life:

Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2002 11:16:41 -0500                                            
From: Don Steinke                                             
To: [email protected]                                            
Subject: You have been added as moderator of IrishLink-urgent                   
                                                                                
Pam, Kim, Chuck, and Lora                                                       
                                                                                
        You have been added as moderators of the IrishLink-Urgent listserv. Any 
messages sent to the list will come to all of us for possible approval. If      
neither Harold or I are available to approve an urgent message any of you       
will now be able to use the "OK" reply to send a message. Even if multiple      
"OKs" are sent the message will only be distributed once. If you don't know     
how to approve a message see me and I will show you. DO NOT APPROVE THIS        
MESSAGE!!!! JUST DELETE IT. I just want to see if you are receiving             
messages sent to this listserv.                                                 
                                                                                
Thanks,                                                                         
                                                                                
        Don

Looking at the headers, it appears that Don himself is responsible for the message having been approved to delivery across the list.

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nishi!

entry #1205, Mon, February 04, 2002, 01:55 (Life in General)

Well, after about a year of thinking about it, I finally decided to go ahead and do it: I've now got a tattoo. It's on my left wrist and it is the Japanese kanji "nishi." It's about one square inch. I put a picture online. It's somewhat blurry. I hope to post a better picture later. I like it.

I got it at the Michiana Tattoo Emporium in Niles. The people were friendly. It only cost me $40 (+ $5 tip), which is a good deal less than I expected. The pain was very bearable. It really was just an annoying sort of pain more than anything else. But towards the end I got a really strange rush, and started feeling really light headed. "Rockin' Robin," my tattooist, told me I looked really pale and made me lie back for a little while. I'd had nothing to eat all day before getting the tattoo (at about 16:00) and she told me that it's a good idea to have eaten before getting a tattoo. It was kinda odd, but alright. I guess now I know for the next time. But regardless, I survived, and so far I'm quite happy to have it.

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huh?

entry #1204, Sat, February 02, 2002, 03:13 (Random Crap)

According to some German cgi script, which calculated my punkness based on my answers to questions I only mostly understood due to use of some German slang I was unfamiliar with, I am 70.5% punk.

According to some lame-ass American test, I am hardcore. But what do they know? Cuz really, I ain't nothin but a poser.

All's I know is that I've listened to my MEST cd more times today than the average american will in their lifetime.

Oh, and that while I feel perfectly comfortable spelling poorly on purpose, an unintentional typo in the previous paragraph made me feel very uncomfortable. So I KILLED it!

Be optimistic, but always keep in mind the worst case scenario. Or something something something something.

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view comments

featured selection

entry #1203, Sat, February 02, 2002, 02:39 (Life in General)

for what it's worth ... nakedorangutan.com appears unregistered.

I've been slacking about keeping my journal updated of recent. In fact, I've been slacking in about all areas of life of recent. I think the best way to sum things up is that I'm searching for meaning in life, despite having decided a while ago that ultimately there is none. But while I feel somewhat unmotivated, I'm still enjoying myself.

South Bend was, along with much of the midwest, pounded by a storm. Many parts of town lost power. Power went out in our apartment briefly yesterday, but most of castle point lost power for more than just that moment. It was still dark in most of castle point when I drove home a few hours ago. Tonight Brian stopped by to hang out a bit. While he was here the power went out twice. Fun.

I now know three guitar chords. That's all I need, right?

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Le Pacte des Loups

entry #1202, Sat, February 02, 2002, 01:36 (Movies)

I went to see "Brotherhood of the Wolf" with Mamie and a couple of her friends tonight. It was really good. It's a French film, and was shown in French, with subtitles. It takes place in the 18th century and is about a naturalist sent from Paris to investigate the killings of peasants by a mysterious beast in some rural province.

I don't think it was received too well, because I noticed at least six people leave during the movie (without returning ... and the theater wasn't too full to begin with). Mamie's friends did not enjoy the movie either. But Mamie and I thought it was great.

What appealed to me most was the visual style of the movie. I was almost constantly in awe of how beautiful the film was. The music impressed me as well. Often I get irritated when suspense is built up through music instead of through the events on screen. This movie at many times managed to build up some good suspense without any music at all. When there was music, it was subtle and very good. The story was fun, and managed to keep surprising me. There was a good degree of suspense and tension, and I never felt the story was too slow. The action scenes were very impressive and fun, and the effects were generally good, though there were a couple times that the CGI was subpar. I also felt the acting was very good. The film was a bit gory, but not excessively so. I only wish my French was less rusty so that I could have wasted less time reading subtitles. But say what you will about the French ... they've got a beautiful language.

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fruit stew?

entry #1201, Thu, January 31, 2002, 22:44 (Cooking)

So last night I felt like cooking something, but I also felt more impulsive than usual. So as a result, I just threw a bunch of things together into something which might best be described as fruit stew. It was pretty good, though. Here's how it worked:

I started off combining a can of coconut milk and a can of tomato sauce and warming that up. I then added a diced pear, a diced potato, and a can of pineapple chunks with juice. I then flavored it all up with ginger, mint, and cumin. I ate it with rice.

I really liked it. The concept is sound. I need to work on the details a little, though. It was a pretty shade of orange, too.

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all I know ...

entry #1200, Thu, January 31, 2002, 22:34 (Life in General)

Life is often humbling. But that's no revelation. So I'll go grab another Fanta before I bother writing down any more stupid observations.

The last time that I backed up my log database appears to have been a year ago. So I did so again just now, to ensure that my little writings aren't lost forever.

I need to spend at least a little less time pondering girls. As fun as it is, it's not helping me make any progress with my thesis.

I've a new song to add to my theme song collection. Here's the refrain:

Fuct up visions in my head
I'm a fuct up kid is what they said
but at least I know all the things that I want
and it's all the things I've got

It's by MEST. It's called, believe it or not, "Fuct Up Kid"

Monday I cooked dinner (tofu stirfry) for Andy, Lindsay, and Al. Afterwards we hit the student film festival. I didn't like it nearly as much as I have in previous years. But there were a few good films.

The chip design for VLSI has been shipped off for fabrication. Excitement galore.

I think that's all I got for now. Except for a fun recipe, which will be put in a separate entry so that it shows up in the cooking section.

Oh, yeah! Fanta!! I found Fanta at Meijer the other day! How bloody exciting!

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Ass, gas, or grass, nobody rides for free

entry #1199, Sun, January 27, 2002, 05:24 (Life in General)

um, hi.

I'm not certain where I last left off, but here's some highlights...

I've finally seen real life fencing. I spent portions of last Sunday afternoon and Monday morning watching fencing at the Century Center in South Bend. It was fun to watch. Brian came along on Sunday and we got to see Cari do some winning. I arrived too late to cheer for Cari on Monday, so I watched some other fencing action instead.

Brian and Anne were in town last weekend. It was nice to see them. We went to dinner at the new Thai place on Ironwood on Saturday night. The food was decent. The portions were too small. I was unimpressed. I liked the curry I got alright, but I think I've made curries myself that were at least as good.

Monday felt like a really good day. I got many things accomplished that I'd been neglecting for a while. I'm almost feeling caught up with life. I also for the first time saw an ND basketball game in person. Jane had a couple tickets to give away, so I grabbed them, and Andy and I watched Georgetown defeat ND. It was fun, though. I'd like to see more basketball live, especially if we win.

Sunday we played D&D. It was fun.

Andy gave me "The World According to Garp" by John Irving on Sunday. I like it. After D&D, I stayed up until 6 reading it. It's been a while since I got that into a book. I'd probably have it finished by now, except I'm trying to get into a habit of a better sleep schedule. So I'm pacing myself. Once I finish Garp, I think I'll read Cider House Rules again. I remember liking it a lot in high school (and I even got my copy signed by Irving!) and I figure I might as well continue this Irving kick.

Sunday was Annie's birthday. Nineteen doesn't quite have the excitement of granting new privilege, but I'm sure she managed. Happy birthday, Annie!

Life is strange. But I'm still winning. Tuesday I went to class for the first time this semester. I'm taking one 2 credit hour class. Its name is something long with the term "I/O" in it somewhere. It's looking to be good, I think. Especially if I show up prepared next time.

Wednesday was Cari's birthday. Happy birthday to her as well! I made dinner for her and Meagan. It was fun. After dinner, we dropped Meagan off on campus and headed to Cari's place where various other people had prepared more birthday fun. Oh, and while I was preparing dinner I took Cari and Meagan on in a short game of foosball. I won 5-1. I am champion of 2217 foosball!

PUNK ROCK!! Yeah! Yeah ... uh ... yeah. As much as I hate to admit it, I find that sometimes I still need to prove things to myself. And for that reason, I've realized I simply had to see H2O live. I'd been feeling slightly bothered in a few silly ways of recent, but that has now been alleviated. In my usual spontaneous fashion, I went to see H2O in Detroit on Thursday. I dragged Anne along. It was a lot of fun. Four bands played: Publicity Stunt (Detroit band, high school students. Cutest band ever. ("We're not a band that plays Weezer. Do we sound like a band that plays Weezer?") They were really good, too), Big Wig (from New Jersey. Pretty good. They covered Knowledge by Op Ivy, so I actually got a chance to sing along), Mest (from Chicago, also very good), and finally H2O (from New York. Very good. They played one (out of two) songs of theirs that I know). I now desire much more concert action. I hope to see at least five more punk shows this semester. Anti-Flag and AAA (and a couple other bands) are touring and play Detroit on Feb 15 and Chicago on Feb 16, so that's one option. Suicide Machines are playing Indianapolis soon, so that's another option. And I'm sure there will be more. I bought a bunch of punk music Friday. It seemed necessary, somehow.

Tonight I went to a party at Al's. It was interesting. ND girls don't impress me much these days, I'm sorry to say. Though there are some exceptions to that, none of them were at this party. It was a fun time regardless ...

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don't read this, it's worthless

entry #1198, Wed, January 23, 2002, 00:15 (Random Crap)

If you are responsible for the email I just got from sendacrush.com, go away. I want nothing to do with that.

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chemistry

entry #1197, Sat, January 19, 2002, 04:01 (Life in General)

It's a strange thing, this consciousness we experience.

I think this last week can be best described as chemically imbalanced. Now that I've accepted that I am no more than the physical process of interacting chemicals, life is much easier to comprehend and manipulate. This past week I've spent thinking too much about girls. But I noticed that I felt imbalanced and I've been adjusting my eating habits accordingly, and now I feel very universally loving again. Friendships again feel more urgent than the girl of the week.

It's a crazy world that I'm mixed in with. But when I can truly appreciate a hug given in friendship, then there's little else I can ask for.

Screw anyone that disagrees.

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caffeine

entry #1196, Thu, January 17, 2002, 18:15 (Random Crap)

oof, watch out. I'm emptying my inbox. And in the process of doing so, I'm going to come across a bunch of things I saved because I'd want to be able to reference them later ... so I'm transferring all said information to my log instead, which is where it belongs, really ...

We'll start this process off with something fun, namely some caffeine info Perk emailed me long ago.

According to the National Soft Drink Association, the following is the caffeine content in mgs per 12 oz can of soda:

                                                                                
      Jolt                    100.0                                             
      Sugar-Free Mr. Pibb     58.8                                              
      Mountain Dew            55.0  (no caffeine in Canada)                     
      Diet Mountain Dew       55.0                                              
      Mello Yellow            52.8                                              
      Tab                     46.8                                              
      Coca-Cola               45.6                                              
      Diet Cola               45.6                                              
      Shasta Cola             44.4                                              
      Shasta Cherry Cola      44.4                                              
      Shasta Diet Cola        44.4                                              
      Mr. Pibb                40.8                                              
      OK Soda                 40.5                                              
      Dr. Pepper              39.6                                              
      Pepsi Cola              37.2                                              
      Aspen                   36.0                                              
      Diet Pepsi              35.4                                              
      RC Cola                 36.0                                              
      Diet RC                 36.0                                              
      Diet Rite               36.0                                              
      Canada Dry Cola         30.0                                              
      Canada Dry Diet Cola    1.2                                               
      7 Up                    0

By means of comparison, a 7 oz cup of coffee has the following caffeine (mg) amounts.

      Drip                    115-175                                           
      Espresso                100mg of caffeine                                 
      1 serving (1.5-2oz)                                                       
                                                                                
      Brewed                  80-135                                            
      Instant                 65-100                                            
      Decaf, brewed           3-4                                               
      Decaf, instant          2-3                                               
      tea, iced (12 ozs.)     70                                                
      tea, brewed, imported   60                                                
      tea, brewed, U.S.       40                                                
      tea, instant            30

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longer than a short stick, thinner than a rail

entry #1195, Wed, January 16, 2002, 04:05 (Life in General)

My tummy hurts. I've come to realize that at this moment, I really kinda miss having Mom around to make things better. Instead, I'm drinking ginger ale, which is helping some.

Today has been strange. I can't quite describe how. I apologize to use a term some readers may be unfamiliar with, but it's been a major plate of shrimp kinda day. There have been at least four incidents I can recall. But it's gotten to the point where the day just has that feel to it. It's become surreal, even.

I've been horrible about responding to email of recent. In fact, Rebecca sent me an email today which remarked on how I seemed MIA. I apologize. I'll try to catch up soon.

One of my fun new words I learned today was Antipode. I don't recall ever seeing it before. But now I'm reading some quotes at positiveatheism.org and I saw it used. I was very excited.

Emily asked me why I found my online journal to be inhibiting. One big reason is simplistic: I can't carry it around. My memory's not so good, and while I can generally remember my actions, I find it ever so hard to remember thoughts in order to record them later. It's delightful to jot them down as I think them. In addition, I try, to some degree, to keep my online journal inoffensive. I don't afford myself that luxury in my paper journal.

Anybody talking about lust and erections as much as Saint Augustine appears to have been has got to be hiding something. (So much for being inoffensive ...)

Arun has prepared a D&D campaign. So far Branden, Andy, Shelece, and I look to be the players. We created characters a few nights ago. It's all very exciting. I created two characters: a female elven fighter named Aghanashini (which means destroyer of sins) and a female half-elven magic user named Rohini (which means a star). Both these characters have chaotic good alignment.

Yesterday was interesting. Many hours were spent at the ND bookstore, though nothing was purchased. I wrote a bunch in my book (as my paper journal is called) and was able to talk to, for varying lengths of time, Andy, Pat, Doc, and Rosemary Gibney. But the best of it all was just watching girls. There were lots of them.

After the bookstore, Andy and I went to eat lunch at subways. On our way there, we saw an older biker type of guy standing on the side of the road with a sign that said "Need work or help. God Bless." We pulled over and asked him if he was hungry. He was. We offered to take him to Subways with us, but he declined, because he had forgotten the combo to his bike lock. He pointed to his bike in order to further elucidate his point. Whatever.

In contrast, after bw3's tonight, Andy and I were approached by a black guy. Andy asked if he needed a ride. Among other things, he did. So he got in the back seat and we talked with him. We were searching for the gas station at which he had left his family. He had just moved to town with them, as he was starting a new job. But they had to stay in a motel tonight, and needed $13 more in order to afford a room. So I ended up giving him $20. I like to trust strangers. I believe his story. He explained to us how he understood why people were uncomfortable when he approached them. After all, he explained, he was a black guy and it was dark out. He explained this as though that's just the way it was, there was no sense of anger or sadness in his explanation. I knew not how to respond. So I didn't. I suck.

Ack. I just now (3:53 in the morning) finally realized the greatest problem inherent in the argument by design. How on earth did it evade me for so long?

Today was the first day of classes. I had one class at 14:00. I did not go. I woke up to late to make it on time, and instead of showing up late, I played air hockey at Lafortune with Meagan. She beat me 7-6, 7-3, 7-5, if memory serves. It was fun. By missing class today, I've missed class for the entire week. I'm a slacker.

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worst log entry ever

entry #1194, Tue, January 15, 2002, 01:47 (Life in General)

Andy insists, threatening my life, that I must write. So I shall.

My skill has been destroyed by a tiny 19 year old punk rock girl. And thus it is.

I've begun a paper journal of sorts. It's much less inhibited than this electronic journal thing.

That's all there is. Except it isn't.

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Die Gedanken Sind Frei

entry #1193, Sun, January 13, 2002, 17:49 (Music)

This is a song I learned sometime in elementary school. I liked it then, I like it now. I'm not certain, however, why it suddenly surfaced in my thoughts again, but I found the full lyrics online. It's an old German song of protest, dating back, apparently, to the 16th century. It was also popular, apparently, during the Third Reich.

Die Gedanken sind frei!
Wer kann sie erraten?
Sie fliegen vorbei wie naechtliche Schatten.
Kein Mensch kann sie wissen,
kein Jaeger erschiessen
mit Pulver und Blei.
Die Gedanken sind frei!

Ich denke, was ich will
und was mich begluecket,
doch alles in der Still
und wie es sich schicket.
Mein Wunsch und Begehren
kann niemand verwehren,
es bleibet dabei:
Die Gedanken sind frei!

Und sperrt man mich ein
im finsteren Kerker,
das alles sind rein
vergebliche Werke,
denn meine Gedanken
zerreissen die Schranken
und Mauern entzwei:
Die Gedanken sind frei.

Drum will ich auf immer
den Sorgen entsagen
und will mich auch nimmer
mit Grillen mehr plagen.
Man kann ja im Herzen
stets lachen und scherzen
und denken dabei:
Die Gedanken sind frei!

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followup

entry #1192, Fri, January 11, 2002, 18:48 (Books, Writing, n such)

I've been thinking about it some more. It seems I've gone word crazy.

For the most part, it is entirely possible to convey information clearly and concisely without the use of fancy words. In fact, fancy words often get in the way of the efficient transfer of information. And in addition to potentially frustrating the reader, their use carries the risk of making the author sound pretentious.

Why then do we have so many words? And why do we choose to use big words when smaller ones would suffice? Certainly, one wants to ensure an understanding by the reader. And more specifically, why do I like words so much? My vocabulary is more than adequate, I'm sure. Yet I still encounter, often enough, words with which I am not familiar. Generally, I am not frustrated by them. Often I am glad to encounter them, for I am prone to look them up and learn them. I like learning new words.

In part, I think, it is an aesthetic thing. In certain situations there will always be one word that looks or sounds better than another. But that hardly justifies our wealth of words, does it? Is it possible that we feel such variety of emotion that we desire an adequate supply of words to capture our sentiment? Or is it, in the end, a reflection of our competitive nature, that we've created so many words in order to vaunt the size of our vocabulary?

The best explanation I can come up with is this: I'm silly. :)

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word mess

entry #1191, Fri, January 11, 2002, 18:25 (Life in General)

Last night, in a combined fit of silliness and insomnia, I sat down and wrote a couple poems. They really aren't very good.

But thinking on the matter, I enjoy the craft of combining words. And poetry is a format which allows words to be combined in manners not becoming of ordinary prose.

reticent haze
twenty-some days

I like words. The other night I subscribed to four or five word of the day mailing lists. The only new word I've learned so far is euphonious. I like it though.

The world continues to amuse me. A board member of the European Central Bank has warned people that eating excessive quantities of Euro notes is a bad idea. Apparently, if you eat more than 400 notes, the ink used to print them begins to have toxic effects on the body. Delicious.

A token: the world is not all careless diversion. The USA has begun transporting prisoners from Afghanistan to Cuba. The reason the prisoners won't be held at a base on American soil is, in part at least, to ensure they don't have all the rights they would be afforded on our soil. And while I am all in favor of us being tough on terrorism, this seems somewhat hypocritical at best. I don't like it.

I wish I could properly transfer the word mess in my head to a permanent medium. A skill I will never attain but continually strive for.

Pumpkin pie.

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mottos

entry #1190, Wed, January 09, 2002, 21:00 (Life in General)

Reflecting on life ... blah blah blah ... I've decided to compile a list of mottos or guidelines or whatever that represent my outlooks on and philosophies of life as they currently stand. It'll be interesting to see how they change as time passes.

Choose happiness.
People are more important than location.
Don't diss South Bend, IN.
Whatever happens, happens.
Have no regrets.
Girls are people too. They're just prettier, in general, than guys.
Unreasonable things often aren't.
Life's short. Live it up.
Listen.
Hugs are double plus good.
Don't be jealous, hypocritical, or excessively competitive.
Be polite, patient, and forgiving.

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return

entry #1189, Tue, January 08, 2002, 18:32 (Travel)

I meant to write stuff about stuff yesterday. That, as well as a few other things on my todo list were neglected. Instead, I spent two hours chatting with Sara (Perk's buddy I met in MO) on AIM. Then I left campus. I am the very model of a modern Pete at productivity's peak. Foo'.

So I'm back in South Bend. I'm not certain how much of the events between my last log entry and now I am able or care to reconstruct. Details of past events are little more than fun trivia, so ... what's wrong with me? This stupid paragraph is over!

OK, so I spent most of New Year's Eve hanging out with Annie and some of her high school friends. It was an amusing evening, though certain silly bits of me find I should not admit to hanging out with underage people for New Years. Screw the silly bits.

Um. I went skiing on January 3rd. That was Diana's birthday. I went skiing with Diana, Annie, Annie's friend Robin, and Matt, Mark, Jane and Clay Peacock. It was fun. I decided to pay extra to get a pair of demos, and it was hella worth it. The skis I got were amazing. I had an instant understanding with them. I'm not certain, but I'd guess they were Super G skis. 193. Someday I want to try a pair of 200s. I quickly found the sweet spot and was carving beautiful turns all day. They were fast, and well tuned, so I was leaning far into my turns. It made me so happy. Clay asked me after a few runs if I used to be a ski racer. :) :) :) :) No, I just used to train with some. Ack, long term goal: increase my annual percentage of skiing days. I only skied one black run, and it sucked. Icy and rocky. Speeding down the blues was much more fun. Fantastico! I wish my legs were still as strong as they were in high school. I didn't ski hard enough this time to tire my legs, but I had a few issues. I kinda think the inside front edge on my left ski was tuned too sharp, it kept catching. But it's more likely I just wasn't strong enough to control it properly. Skiing skiing skiing skiing skiing. Skiing makes me happy.

Afterwards we celebrated Diana's birthday. Yay!

While home I got to see the Rozmans and the Peacocks, which was nice. I also saw various academy folks: Dave Mac, Brian Krill, Dave Rothman, and Dan Rubinoff. I was kind of disappointed that Eric Ross wasn't around when I stopped by the academy. I'm on a John Irving reading kick and would've liked to talk to him about it.

I left CB on January 4th at 9:30 MST. Drove south on CO 135 to Gunnison, then took US 50 East to Newton, KS. I hit Lamar, CO at 15:15 MST, and got to Newton sometime after 9 EST. Had some brief issues finding Branden's house, but I got there. Branden and I then drove into Wichita and hit the River City brewing company. Their beer was pretty good. Nothing exciting, but still good.

Slept in the next day. Branden decided to head back to ND early, so we fit his stuff into my car and hit the road at some time. Maybe noonish CST. We drove to Kansas City, KS. I wanted to visit Martha Gibney there. Well, after a detour through Kansas City, MO, we finally found Martha's place. So we saw her house and met some of her housemates. She's in KC doing ACE. She then gave us a bit of a tour around KC. Then dinner with her and one of her housemates. Branden and I then helped replace light bulbs at their house. We finally got back on the road sometime after 19:00 CST, I think. One uneventful drive later we arrived in South Bend at about 6:30 EST. Arun was still awake, so we stayed up until after 7 doing who knows what.

I've brought a bunch of fun stuff back to ND. In addition to gifts, I have books, trains, and a guitar. The Diamonds left a bunch of books with my parents when they moved, and my parents weren't too interested in most of them, so I got to look through them and take whatever I wanted. I think I ended up grabbing 40 or so books. Mostly sci fi and fantasy. Most of it seems kinda silly, but it'll be fun. Some good stuff, though. An Asimov, a Vonnegut, two Irving, a few books which claimed to have won Hugo or Nebula awards, the first few books of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series ... I think I'm set as far as fiction reading goes for a while ... I also finally got my model railroade set (HO scale) out of storage. It's been in storage since we moved from Germany, but I finally decided I'd had enough of that. I found a European to American power converter at radio shack, so it's up and running. Finally, Mom let me take her acoustic guitar since she's not used it in some time. I've felt for some time now a need to play an instrument again, so now I'll learn the guitar.

This semester, we've decided, we're gonna geek out. D&D, model railroads, and so on. Nothing's gonna stop us. Watch out. In fact, I'm not even gonna proofread, cuz it's time to go to bw3s!!!!

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VLSI

entry #1188, Mon, December 31, 2001, 03:53 (School)

Yesterday I was playing around with QuarkXPress. I found myself very amused when I wanted to zoom in on a particular area of the screen. My instinct had been to use the middle mouse button to perform a mentor style stroke to zoom in. Unfortunately, the mouse had no middle mouse button and Quark had no concept of these sort of strokes.

VLSI was the only course I ended up completing this past semester (the 600 level math course I signed up for proved too time consuming to be worth my while). I really enjoyed VLSI. Or at least, I really enjoyed the final project. The class itself was somewhat slow at times, and the final project may have worked out a little better had we been given more advance knowledge of what we were to do. But such complaints achieve little. All I know is I became addicted to playing with adk_ic.

The interaction between the digital logic design, the analog circuit issues, and the cmos layout rules made for a very interesting puzzle that I really enjoyed solving. A common feature of ADD, I'm told, is the ability to hyperfocus on certain things. VLSI, I discovered, is one of the things I am able to hyperfocus on. I fully intend to put more time into our design when I return from break in order to ensure it is functional when we put it on that rocket. I will be content with nothing less.

I guess I also did well enough in the class to get an A, preserving my 4.0 GPA as a graduate student. I'm happy about that. Additionally, as Arun pointed out to me, VLSI was a 4 credit hour class. This means I only need 2 more credit hours for my masters. Which means I can take the I/O class offered next semester. I'd wanted to take it, but was informed it is only 2 credit hours. I'd assumed VLSI was only 3, and thus thought the I/O course was not an option if I wanted my masters by May. But now it seems I can get away with taking only one course, which meets only once a week, and still have a chance for a masters by May. I'm psyched.

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Happy Birthday, K2!!

entry #1187, Mon, December 31, 2001, 03:41 (Life in General)

So December 18 marked one year since my purchase of my car. However, since I wanted to be able to claim 20,000 miles during the first year, I decided the observed birthday should be once I returned to Colorado, since I'd bought K2 just after arriving for Christmas break a year ago.

After a year, I must say that the purchase has been well worth it. Before buying my car I was very worried about finances and other such things. But since then I've realized that those concerns pale in comparison to the benefits of having a car.

The freedom has been simply amazing. I've driven through at least 18 states with K2 (Colorado, Utah, Nevada, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi are all I can think of off the top of my head). I've enjoyed the luxury of being able to simply take off whenever I felt like it. I've found comfort in knowing that at any point I could get in my car and, on average, drive 200 miles before needing to stop for anything.

Beyond being happy to own a car in general, I'm very happy with the specific car I chose. K2 is a 2001 Chevrolet Prizm with manual transmission. It is a delight to drive this car. The clutch is the friendliest I've ever encountered, the engine responds well considering its small size, and the gas mileage is incredible. More than once I have driven K2 more than 900 miles in a single day, by myself. I'm quite happy to say that even after such length of driving the driver's seat is still comfortable and the sound system still sounds terrific.

I'm also glad I decided to buy a new car. I can deal with the monthly payments, because they are regular and I can budget for them. Had I bought a used car, my monthly payments may have been significantly lower, but the chance for unexpected expenses would have been higher. And it's nice not having to worry about the car. It's presented me no trouble at all so far, and based on the consumer reports ratings, it should prove reliable for some time to come.

At times I try to pretend I'm not materialistic. But realistically I am. And my car is the ultimate proof of that. I love K2. I really do. My car makes me very happy.

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The Beginning

entry #1186, Fri, December 28, 2001, 02:27 (Travel)

The days grow longer yet again. The cycle starts anew.

Cari and I celebrated the equinox at Cheers, listening to some live music. The first band playing while we were there was quite good. After their set they handed out free CDs. I grabbed one. I continue to be impressed by the quality of the CD, not only in terms of music, but also in terms of production value. Definitive Elements is their name. I've been unable to find any information about them online. The CD came with an email address, though. I should send them email. Without a doubt, though, this is the best free CD (other than gifts, maybe, but those aren't free in the same sense) I've ever received.

Saturday morning I woke up ridiculously early. I Finished packing (i.e. I threw a bunch of dirty clothes into my car) and then had breakfast with Cari. After breakfast we had a few adventures. We went by a liquor store so I could buy some good Belgian beer for my Dad for Christmas. We also went by the fencing place in the JACC, which was interesting. By 10:00 or so I hit the road.

I stopped at a gas station in Farmersville, IL. After purchasing gas and some munchies, the attendant told me "See you next time" as I was leaving. I was amused.

I arrived in Columbia, MO at about 16:30 local time. To my surprise, as I was driving along in Columbia, Perk jumped out at me from behind a tree! Granted, it wasn't extraordinarily surprising, seeing how I'd given Perk fair warning of my imminent arrival and he in turn had given me directions to the tree he would hide behind.

As is rapidly becoming our tradition, Perk and I managed to show yet another Missouri town who's boss. I met Perk's friend Sara, whom I immediately judged to be cool based on the simple fact that she drove a stick. As it turned out, my quick judgement proved true. I had a great time with Perk and Sara.

We started out with dinner at a Thai place, followed by a visit to Flat Branch, a Columbia microbrewery. This place had free samples of their beer, which was cool. I sampled several. I had full glasses of their IPA (which I would deem to be the best IPA I've ever had) and their Honey Wheat (which sucked). I also bought a half gallon of their green chile beer for consumption at home.

After the brewpub we ended up at Sara's apartment. The evening was enlightened by Malibu rum. It started out with talk of determinism and free will, mockery of middle class hippies, and so on. But by the end of the night I had several unexplained wounds and the name "Andrew Hall" stamped all over my left arm and my stomach. Certainly we can be said to have kept ourselves entertained. Beyond that, I can say little more. According to Perk, "we were all in rare form and Sara's apartment was now a seething den of filth and iniquity."

The next morning I departed at about 10:30 Columbia time. I then drove a bunch. I kept myself entertained for a good portion of the trip by listening to Christian radio. Some of it made me sad. I was also amused by Kansas. K2 hit the 20000 mile mark just as I crossed from Missouri into Kansas. I found myself very amused by all the small Kansas towns along I-70 that had signs announcing which famous people had been born there. One common trait of all the famous names I saw was that I doubt any of them are still in Kansas.

Since I'd managed long enough without looking at a map, I took my leave of I-70 and headed South somewhat earlier than originally planned. My map of Colorado as a guide, I haphazardly chose highways, alternately going South and West, until I hit US 50. From there I knew my way again. My chosen route was not optimal, though. I hit US 50 too early, dropping me farther South than I wanted to be. Alas, a lesson for next time. After 930 miles I finally arrived in Crested Butte at 1:30 local time. Since the moon had set just before my arrival and seeing how my eyes were already adjusted to the dark, I spent some minutes gazing at the clear Colorado sky after getting out of my car. I cannot describe the beauty, but I certainly enjoyed it.

I know not how I spent my first full day at home. I think I did some last minute Christmas shopping (less than usual, however, because I'd actually started feeling the Christmas spirit early this year and had bought many presents while still in the midwest). Beyond that, who knows.

Christmas day I awoke early to join my family at mass. After that a brunch, followed by a trip to GUC to pick up Annie, who was flying in from Dallas. At the airport we ran into Father Jim. I was wearing the anarchy shirt Perk had given me, and Father Jim asked me if I was wearing satanic symbols. Hmmm. We returned home, the family complete again at last, and opened presents. I got some fun stuff, the most memorable of which is a Mickey Mouse waffle maker given to me by Annie. I'll have to try it out soon. After that we had some food, some of the beer I'd brought home (Delirium Noel, a special Belgian Christmas beer, is really good), and played cards.

The following day (known to some as Boxing Day, but I'll call it yesterday instead) was rather unfocused. I'd left my glasses in South Bend and saw no reason to wear contacts (until the evening, when I had to drive my sisters around). It was quite nice to wander around with things a little blurry, knowing that that day would not demand the full capability of my vision. Instead I sat around reading a bunch. Arun lent me Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World, and I finished that up quickly. I rather enjoyed it. It definitely had no profound effect on me, mainly because it was "preaching to the choir" in my case, but I really enjoyed it, it had a lot of great content. The day ended with a trip to the movies. I had my second viewing of Fellowship of the Ring. I still liked it a bunch, though not as much as the first time, simply because the screen was much smaller. I intend to watch it again when I return to South Bend.

Today I read a bunch more, this time Dune. I figure I'll have it done in another day. Plenty more reading remains scheduled for break. I also visited the Gibney's briefly, mainly to help them with a computer problem.

As I write, I've been sipping on a Henry Weinhard's Private Reserve. It's a good beer. Dad found it somewhere. I'll have to look for it in the future.

I know not what the rest of break has in store. Mayhap I will ski soon. Beyond that, sleep and reading are my pleasure. To everyone in Pete's Log land, I hope you had a good Christmas and I hope you can enter into the new year with hope and joy. Until next time, this is crazy euro-pete-o saying "so long, drive safe, and keep the glass cleaner out of reach of the kids!"

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The End

entry #1185, Fri, December 21, 2001, 16:46 (Life in General)

Last night: Mamie, Cari, Brian, and I and some good wine. It was a good time. We also had some vegan snacks. Fake buffalo wings, soy ice cream (yummy yummy yummy -- peanut butter & chocolate flavor), chips, salsa, and a little bit of vodka (which, surprisingly enough, is not made from faces). We "watched" Labyrinth and The Last Crusade.

I just got my oil changed and my tires rotated. My car is ready to hit the road. I wish I was. I'm playing with some VLSI (because I want to plot the chip before I leave, and I want to finish a few details before I plot the chip). I had a meeting with Dr Freeh today. A few more details remain to be taken care of. Then I'm off to Missouri. If all goes according to plan, I'll head to CO after a brief stay with Perk.

Steve Miller Band rocks!!!

Fellowship of the Ring rocked!!! I wanna see it on the big screen a few more times, then I'll dedicate an entry to the film. Arun, Shelece, Andy, Cari, Brian, Mamie and I had a group appearance at the film, after a good Indian meal at Star of India. Yummy veggie vindaloo.

VLSI grades aren't posted yet. Oh well.

I think that's about all for now. The next few weeks of log entries will not be coming from IN. I need to remember to turn sshd on malloc back on, just in case ...

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Dear World

entry #1184, Wed, December 19, 2001, 03:11 (Random Crap)

Dear Pete, you're nothing but a damned hippie. Love, The World.

Dear World, so what if I am? Love, Pete.

Dear Pete, you say you love everything, but you're far from an idealist. Love, The World.

Dear World, you're far from being an ideal place. Idealism is nonsense. Love, Pete.

Dear Pete, but if I'm not an ideal place, how can you claim to love everything? Love, The World.

Dear World, I claim to love everything, because I've accepted that things are not perfect and that if I want to enjoy the good I'll have to take it along with the bad because I lack the power to separate the two. I can't acknowledge only half of you. Love, Pete.

Dear Pete, are you sure you're not confusing loving everything with accepting everything? Love, The World.

Dear World, I can never be sure of anything, but right now I feel that the life you have given me so far is a good one, and thus I must love my life and love all the factors that add up to make it what it is. Love, Pete.

Dear Pete, don't you find that this attitude makes it more difficult to become passionate about trying to change me, to make me a better place? Love, The World.

Dear World, I am sure it can be argued that an excessively optimistic view of you would cause me to be less concerned about making you a better place. Indeed, I cannot claim to be a great activist. But I would also claim that my view is not excessively optimistic. I already said I was not an idealist. I simply try to live life the best I can, try to be a good person. I'm certain I could do more to improve you, and I feel I try a little harder every day. Just give me time. So while I claim to love you entirely, I don't claim that I don't think you could be made better. Love, Pete.

Dear Pete, I don't see how you can claim to love me entirely if you also feel there are ways I can be improved. Awful things happen, they are part of me. Certainly I would be a better place without them. How can you claim to love me entirely while those things go on while also claiming you would work to remove those things from me. Love, The World.

Dear World, I feel it is possible to know sorrow and still be happy. Loving you is not the same as thinking you are a perfect paradise. Instead, I love you because I am exactly the way I am because you are exactly the way you are. I can love everything about you and still strive to change you. I love the fact that I can aim to cause change. Love, Pete.

Dear Pete, don't you find it somewhat presumptuous to write letters to yourself and sign them "The World"? Love, The World.

Dear World, I find it very presumptuous. It's a lot of fun. Take it easy. Love, Pete.

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I really like your peaches, want to shake your tree

entry #1183, Wed, December 19, 2001, 00:52 (Life in General)

Tonight. Tonight. I can't begin to describe the magnificence of this night.

Ok, nothing I write could possibly live up to that introduction. So if you're disappointed by this log entry, screw you. I had fun.

Tonight was a good night for the simple fact that I went to Mishawaka Brewing Company twice. First I went there for dinner with Branden. I think we spent well over two hours there. We had a good talk over some good beer. I then returned to fitz and found that Brian was back in town. So what else? He and I headed over there and hung out. More good beer, more good talk. I love my life.

I should elaborate. I've long given up on summary log entries. I've already written down everything I intend to, so no need to summarize. Anyone too lazy to read the whole semester worth of log entries doesn't deserve a summary. However, I'd like to state the following: I'm happy. In fact, I'm very happy.

To pick a somewhat haphazard period of time, I'll chose the time between last May and now. I feel that between then and now I've grown a lot as a person. At this point in my life I can say I am genuinely happy with who I am. I like me. That's not to say I'm happy with every single aspect of my life. I just feel that the person I am is a person I can truly respect. There are still improvements to be made, and I continue to strive to become a better person. But I've found a solid foundation from which to base my struggles. Low self esteem is a thing of the past.

Above all else, it is the journey that matters. Life is short. I will make of it as much as I can. I will not stress over things I cannot change. I will appreciate the good and accept the bad. I will love my friends.

Peace out. My most sincere thanks go out to all who have helped me grow. I'm pretty sure anyone currently reading this falls into that category. If in doubt, assume you matter to me. I love you all.

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entry #1182, Mon, December 17, 2001, 17:33 (Travel)

This past weekend found me in Bloomington, IN, hanging with some of the ex-LSC crew. It was a fun trip, very spontaneous in many ways. The quick summary: I had fun, ate good food, saw some movies, shopped a bit, and hung out with some cool guys. The long version follows:

So this weekend Katie was making one of her regular IU trips, and this time I decided to tag along, since it sounded much more fun than staying in South Bend and I had nothing to do here. So Friday we drove south. We got to Brian, Jeremy, and Ron's place around 17:00. Brian was not there yet, as he was still on his way back home from Oak Ridge National Labs. So I went to dinner at Upland Brew Co (a place I'd heard many good things about) with Ron, Jeremy, Katie, and Todd. Todd's another member of their lab. I'd heard stories about him. He seems like a cool guy.

After dinner I went ice skating with Katie, Jeremy, and Todd. It was fun, though I ended up with blisters on both feet. Brian got back about the same time we got back from skating. So Brian, Jeremy, Katie and I went to see Ocean's 11. It was an entertaining film, very funny and it actually managed to surprise me a few times.

Saturday I got to see the lab that the ex-LSC guys work in. Saw a little of the IU campus as well. Had lunch at a good sandwich place near campus. Brian and I then wandered around town some and hit a few shops. At one store I bought two shirts and 20 sticks of incense for $8. I also bought three cheapish CDs. I love college towns, and from the looks of it, Bloomington's not a bad one.

After that we went by Todd's place where Jeremy and Katie were helping Todd make a gingerbread house. We hung out there a while. Todd made us Blueberry tea, which is very good and has no blueberries in it. Brian and I then went to an Indian restaurant (it had Bombay in its name) which was excellent. Then a few movies at Brian's place: Requiem to a Dream (or something like that), which was depressing but interesting, followed by Tomb Raider. Brian and I had picked Tomb Raider, Ron and his girlfriend had picked the other one.

Sunday was a lazy day. We watched Godzilla versus Monster Zero on AMC. Yay! Then Brian and I hit the Siam House for lunch. I got a really good vegetable curry with tofu for only $5. We then hit the IU student union so I could see more of campus (and the Apple ipods for sale there). Then we went to Todd's again to watch more gingerbread house making. I got to have more blueberry tea. We actually got to assist when the house began experiencing structural instability. Dinner at Upland again. Upland has some good beer. I was impressed. Jeremy, Katie, and I returned to Todd's for a little while, then around 21:00 Katie and I hit the road and got back to South Bend shortly before 1.

It was a fun trip. Bloomington's a neat town. I'll have to return. I still need to try more Upland beer, and there's some more neat restaurants I want to visit. Hanging with the ex-LSC crew was a bunch of fun. They're good guys.

I should now tend to all the email I've neglected these past few days.

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IPP

entry #1181, Sun, December 16, 2001, 14:05 (Random Crap)

I have decided to begin accepting applications for membership in the Insane Pete Posse. A successful applicant will have at least two years of experience doing crazy things and a desire to work with likeminded individuals in a posse format. Currently there are only openings available in the South Bend, IN area. Future openings may become available in other markets as operations expand.

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sleepy sleepy sleepy pete

entry #1180, Thu, December 13, 2001, 14:04 (Life in General)

yay! I just had my first all nighter of my graduate school career. I definitely remember all nighters being easier than this. I'm really tired.

I've little more to share right now, so instead I'll quote an excerpt from Arun's journal that amused me:

"Pete is my hero. why? Because last Monday night, we were watching a movie and he was hungry, so he decided to eat a small bowl of brown sugar.

For all those youth out there who are being told 'Being young is great, its the free-est time of your life' remember this - You, unlike pete, cannot stay up late and eat a bowl of sugar whenever you want."

That's it, I'm going to sleep.

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Crush with Eyeliner

entry #1179, Wed, December 12, 2001, 11:52 (Life in General)

Silly me. Last night demonstrated that my emotional maturity has yet to reach the level I'd like it to. I allowed certain members of the IPHF (Intellectual Peace Hippie Front, my new favorite name for my new favorite people) to frustrate me towards the end of the party last night, diminishing my perception of how much I enjoyed myself. Had I simply left the party half an hour earlier, my review of it would have been generally more positive. So we shall pretend that I didn't let the IPHF get to me, and write a new, more positive entry about the events of last night.

I decided that I wanted to look goofy for this party. I made myself a couple duct tape arm bands, and wrote "OP IVY" in duct tape on the back of my shirt. I then had Meagan make a duct tape smily face on the front of my shirt. Then I had Cari spike my hair (she did a good job, it looked cool). Later I even had Cari put eyeliner on me. I've now worn eyeliner twice in my life.

Meagan had pictures to show off, including the ones she had taken of me. They were good. Meagan also brought pickled green beans, which were the cause of much controversy.

Though the level of dancing was generally too low for my liking, there was some good dancing, including a bit of swing dancing for a while, as well as the usual variety of skanking and other silly stuff. A certain Sean later told me he likes watching me dance. I have yet to decide what to make of this. All I know is I was wearing eyeliner when he told me this.

I got to butt heads with Adam and the Dropkick Murphys guy I butted heads with last time. I learned that his name is Dave and that he's a sophomore engineer.

And, like I said before, I got many many hugs. I don't remember much more, so we'll leave it at that.

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The semester ends

entry #1178, Wed, December 12, 2001, 03:31 (Life in General)

Classes are officialy over.

Tonight, for the first time ever, I can say I'm glad to be home after having left a party at Cari's. One would think that a party thrown after the last day of classes would kick ass, especially at Cari's house. But this one failed to do so. Very little dancing occured, despite my efforts to get more people dancing. Cari was nice and danced for a while, as did a few other people, but not enough, and not for long enough. The party ended with me sitting around, waiting to be sober enough to drive home, while listening to people I hardly knew talking about lesbian folk singers. All my buddies had disappeared.

I need to throw a hardcore punk rock party some time. That'll show them all. The good news about the party is that I probably got upwards of 30 hugs, from at least 16 or more distinct people.

My conclusion: yay hugs, boo lesbian folk singers.

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today

entry #1177, Tue, December 11, 2001, 00:22 (Life in General)

After snoozing my alarm several times this morning, I managed to take a quick shower this morning and get to VLSI only five minutes late. In class, Arun delighted me by handing me the soundtracks to Josie and the Pussycats and Get Over It. Class ended with TCEs. I was generally positive on the TCEs, though I noted that more information on the project should have been given to us at an earlier date.

After class, Tom (the rocket guy) and I wandered to Fitz and briefly discussed our project. At this time Andy left the lab to go to sleep. Apparently he'd not done so all night. I then headed upstairs and consumed a couple poptarts. I read my daily selection of internet comics, checked some news headlines, ripped the two CDs Arun had given me (Josie proved to be a much better CD than Get), chatted with Brian on AIM a little, failed to track down Dr Brockman, talked some with Paul and then finally sat down to do some work on VLSI. Around 3:30 I got an IM from Meagan asking if she could take some pictures of me. I agreed and shortly afterwards she came to fitz and took a bunch of pictures of me. What evil purpose she intends to use them for, I do not know. I then went to work with Tom downstairs. I finished laying out an analog comparator cell. Two analog signals go in, and a digital output is either high or low, depending on which analog signal is greater. A quick debugging session yielded only a stupid mistake (I had forgotten, yet again, to connect power to something) and simulations proved my circuit to be accurate to within 0.02 volts. Good enough for now.

I then went home to grab some dinner. I made a bean burrito with fake cheese. It was tasty. After food I made some tea and took a quick look at the copy of Guns, Germs, and Steel that Arun had left lying around. I intended only to glance quickly at its content, but soon found myself 60 pages into the thing with no desire to quit. That's when Arun arrived. So I put the book down and made tomato soup, because I felt I should eat more.

Having made quick work of the soup, I returned to campus. I had some brief IM contact with Cari and Anne before going to movie night. Dazed and Confused was shown. I think I enjoy this movie more every time I see it. It's quite funny. Turnout for movie night was low: Arun, Shelece, Rebecca, Pat, and some friend of Pat's. A brief debate was held as to whether or not the 70s had been a cool decade or not. I don't believe any conclusion was reached on the issue.

I'm now listening to the Sailor Moon theme song and am about to head home for the night. So while today was not an excessively exciting day, I still enjoyed it.

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a confession

entry #1176, Mon, December 10, 2001, 01:26 (Spirituality)

but first, a message from grammar nazi Pete: It's spelled "definitely" ... there's no 'a' in the damn word.

I think the time has come to make a confession to the readers of my log. My fall from grace seems now to be complete. I have decided to adopt a fully atheist point of view from which to base my entire philosophical and moral belief system. This is not to say that I believe for certain that there is no greater being. I have simply chosen to assume, for the sake of any moral decisions I make, that there is no such greater being. As far as my actual religious view goes, I'm going to call myself agnostic, not atheist.

More details on reasons for this decision as well as the results of it will be added at a later date. I made this decision some time ago, but have been putting off writing about it. I'm sorry I'm renouncing your religion Mom & Dad. I still value the moral beliefs you taught me, I just no longer accept the religious basis for them.

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... 6.5 of the other

entry #1175, Sun, December 09, 2001, 02:06 (Life in General)

"Your lack of monkey knowledge is astonishing." -- Rob to Paul.

Yet another reason not to grow up: living spontaneously is too fun to give up.

So what have I been up to? A bunch of VLSI and a bunch of other fun. The sensible thing to do Thursday night would have been to go to bed early. But I've learned that sometimes the rational thing to do isn't the right thing to do. So instead Andy and I hung out until about 5:30. First we drove to Niles, Michigan and wandered around there a bit. Then we went to Cheers and hung out there a while. After they had had enough of us, we returned to Andy's place. It was a good night, we just talked a bunch about life.

Friday night Anne showed up. We made vegan pizza. It was very good. I was surprised. I'll have to make it more often. We then found Pat Shea and went to Oscar's Pool Hall with him. It was a fun time. We ended the night with a brief visit to Andy's place where he and Nicole were hanging out.

Saturday did not go according to plan. Anne and I had decided we would wake up early and drive to Madison, WI since neither of us had ever been there. Unfortunately, we didn't wake up until about 11. So we decided to drive to Chicago instead. We had fun there. We ate lunch at a California Pizza Kitchen (I had a really good eggplant pizza), went up to the observation deck of the John Hancock tower, checked out various fun shops, and who knows what else.

We returned to campus just in time to see Lester leave the stage at senior bar (doh!). There was a benefit show going on for Amnesty International. The next band up was The Begin Again. We stuck around briefly before returning to my apartment. There we watched some movie that was amusing. One of its titles was apparently Strike. I'm sure Arun's journal will have any important details about the film.

We returned to senior bar around 11 for more music action. We saw some of a bluegrass band. They were really impressive. Then the Skammunists and finally NRQ. It was a good time. I was worn out by the time the show was done. Lots o' good dancing. Anne's a slacker, she didn't dance much at all.

Oh, and I guess I neglected to mention that my hair is an unusual shade of blond these days. I cut it, bleached it, and dyed it all on my own. I'm quite happy with how it turned out.

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audiophile?

entry #1174, Thu, December 06, 2001, 14:27 (Music)

I generally don't consider myself an audiophile ... I don't think I need an excessively fancy setup in order to enjoy music. But over the years I have discovered that I am somewhat picky about audio quality. And my pickiness has become evident again of recent... I hate mp3s.

Since I'm now using OS X (and liking it quite a bit) I decided to begin playing with mp3s again. Apple's iTunes is a neat program, I really like it. I've used it to rip about 400 megs worth of songs into mp3s of recent, bringing my total mp3 collection up to 1.31 gigs. And since I've only got one OS on the hard drive of my laptop these days, there's plenty of room for more mp3s. There's certain advantages to mp3s, and I'm content listening to them for now, but there's certain songs that just don't sound remotely right as mp3s. One such song is Sk8 Rock by Against All Authority. This song can be divided into three distinct phases: violent guitar music, violent guitar music with vocals, and (relatively) slow ska beat with horns and vocals. No matter how much I mess with equalizer settings, I can't get the violent guitar music with vocals portion to sound good. And I know it sounds good in CD form. After spending a bunch of time finetuning the eq in custom mode, it's become evident that the poor sound quality is due entirely to the mp3 encoding. At least I was able to get the rest of the song to sound decent, using (who'd have thought) the piano equalizer preset. One of the next best eq settings for this song was classical. Silly punk rock.

So one neat feature of iTunes that I really like is the ability to specify a unique equalizer setting for every song. I think I'll be making a lot of use of this feature. Playing with equalizer settings is a fun way to procrastinate.

So despite my dislike of how mp3s sound, I'm sure I'll continue listening to them, because they're almost good enough, and they're damn convenient. Besides, I'm listening to them while doing work, so I don't need great quality. Though I think I'm going to rip Sk8 Rock again. The mp3 I currently have is only 112 kbps, I'm gonna try it at 192 kbps and see what happens.

Today was supposed to be productive. Events have so far conspired against me. I will force myself to make do with the current quality of my music and avoid playing with the equalizer for at least a few hours ...

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I'm a punk rock prom queen

entry #1173, Thu, December 06, 2001, 00:45 (Life in General)

I've failed of recent to keep track of what I'm doing. I can report one thing, though. Preliminary findings suggest that for the time being, I'm back on a diurnal schedule. A more in depth study will be needed to determine how accurate this result is, but I am cautiously optimistic.

VLSI this morning was very fun. I figure I allocated the time during class in the following manner: 50% writing (of the recreational sort), 40% goofing off with Arun, 10% paying attention. Yet, during my brief moments of paying attention I managed to do the sorts of things that you do if you want to impress professors. I feel I can (and should) claim victory over the class (and perhaps even the entire educational-industrial complex) this morning.

After that, today just got silly. And it is quite a feat, I feel, for today to have gotten more silly than VLSI was. After all, Arun did in VLSI say the following to me: "Dude, you're stabbing the rat, not poking it."

I went to lunch at Friday's with Andy, Andy, Randy, Branden, and Nicole. It was an entertaining event, though somewhat disturbing ... Next I wasted away the afternoon. I went to some talk by some woman from MSU about some kinda software engineering stuff, but I had trouble appreciating her talk because 1. I'm not well versed in that field and 2. I'm not particularly interested in that field. So then I finally made my way home and decided I should unneglect Pete's Log.

So let's leap backwards in time and see if anything of interest has gone on before today.

I attended an interesting lecture yesterday by Dr Bowyer, our rad new department chair. It was very informal, he simply presented two open problems in his area of research. The idea was in part that new graduate students in search of advisors/projects could come to such presentations and see if they see anything interesting. The biggest flaw in the plan was that word didn't get out very well, and so very few people showed up, none of whom were in search of an advisor or a project. It was still neat, though. So far I like our new chair.

I've been reading a good amount of The Economist of late. It makes me happy.

Rebecca and I hung out at senior bar for a while tonight. It was a good time. The bar was rather deserted. That didn't stop us from partying, though.

Today has been a pink day.

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Valdemar commands it

entry #1172, Sun, December 02, 2001, 05:52 (Life in General)

It's cold tonight. Cold and slippery.

I wonder if I lost a tooth without realizing it. The toothfairy appears to have visited me. I found $300 under my pillow. Must've been quite a tooth.

I might have made it. I might have been asleep by 4:30 ... but I was in bed, mind in overdrive, but determined to stay in bed, even if I wasn't going to fall asleep anytime soon. But sometime between 4 and 4:30 somebody knocked on the apartment door, so I got up to see who it was, but whoever it was didn't wait around long enough...

So I decided it was time to give into food cravings and hit Meijer. A couple unfrosted poptarts (the type without bones in them) and a couple soy burgers later, I feel content.

On my way to Meijer I discovered a great sense of liberation when I ran (in a responsible manner) a silly red light. I'm fighting the power in my own ridiculous little way.

During another stage of the drive I had a thought I wanted to record. I was almost to Meijer, but wasn't sure the thought would last long enough without some help. So I decided I'd put the pen I keep in my car in my mouth, so I'd remember to write it down. Well, it happens I was singing along to MxPx as I was driving, but the part of me that wanted the pen in my mouth figured I could stand to give up on singing for a little while. Once I had the pen in my mouth, though, I discovered that the singing part of me had no intention to be quieted, and I found myself, to my surprise, trying to sing with a pen between my teeth.

It's getting foggy out ...

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party time

entry #1171, Sun, December 02, 2001, 02:32 (Life in General)

Last night was the CSE department end of semester party. Faculy, staff, and graduate students converged at the department chair's house for several hours of fun. It was an interesting time. I had my first chance to meet the new chair. Upon introducing myself he tells me "oh, I've heard a lot about you." Upon seeing my reaction, he quickly reassures me that it was all good things. He then asked me how long I'd been here. When he heard this was my sixth year and that I was still working on my masters, he seemed kind of skeptical until I told him I'd done my undergrad here as well.

Tonight Cari and I went to Lula's to see one of Jon's non-Lester bands play. They were relatively newly formed and not well rehearsed, but it was an entertaining time, despite their musical shortcomings. After that Cari and I decided it was Clint time, so we rented Fistful of Dollars. We then picked up Meagan and enjoyed a quality Clint western. I'd be very happy if I was asleep by 3:30 today.

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It's 5 am. Why am I awake?

entry #1170, Sat, December 01, 2001, 05:08 (Life in General)

I just discovered that my belief that all games of freecell are theoretically winnable was not true. It has been proven that certain freecell games cannot be won. My belief system is rapidly collapsing.

Wednesday I found myself attending a lecture which was, I think, attended by more women than men. It's been a while since I've experienced such an event. Additionally, the person talking was discussing differential equations and such. Granted, it was in the context of the field of psychology, but it was interesting nonetheless. I feel I should hang out near the psych building more often.

My sleep schedule is, for lack of a better term, fucked up.

A few nights ago, sitting in my office in fitz, I suddenly came to the realization that I had absolutely no idea how I had spent the past five minutes. It was spooky. I couldn't even remotely guess at what I had done during those minutes. I was relatively certain I'd been in my office the entire time, but beyond that, nothing. A very strange sensation it was.

Training the Mongoose is the new Frosting Mount Baldy.

I uninstalled Linux from my laptop. I now run MacOS X exclusively. I like it.

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existential overdose

entry #1169, Sun, November 25, 2001, 05:06 (Books, Writing, n such)

An opium den is my new home. I am surrounded by the remains of burnt incense. Fragrance that I all too quickly become accustomed to. The smoke looks cool, but the scent of it escapes me. I leave the room for a moment. Return. Ahh, there it is. But now it's gone again.

You should, I tell myself, write something. A story. Yes. It's 4:20 (OK, 4:19, but 4:20 is more fun) in the morning, and you're not asleep. Nice work, mister. So do something with yourself. Write. (It's now 4:20 for real.) Write!

Character development. An idea that once occurred to me as a great means for character development would be to begin a journal for a fictitious person. I enjoy writing in my little web log, and I don't even do anything terribly exciting. Imagine what fun stuff you could write if you just made shit up. Today, on my way home from work, I was attacked by mutant zombies. Normally I'd have simply knocked them out and returned them to the zoo, but this time I knew they were on their way to corrupt young children with talk of individual responsibility. Such evil I could not allow. So I killed them all with my trusty spoon.

Alas, my life is less exciting than that. While certainly enough happens to keep me entertained, I've yet to reach a point in my life where thinking about whom I'd most like cast as myself in the movie they're gonna make about me is a reasonable use of my time. Instead, I try to get lost.

The problem is, I'm no good at it. Or maybe I'm just too scared to do it properly. I am hindered, in most of my attempts, by a few things. First, I know where I started from. Second, I'm pretty decent at keeping track of which direction I'm facing. Simply given those factors makes getting lost difficult. And beyond that, I've got maps of South Bend and Indiana in my car, though I've never had to use them during any of my driving adventures. And finally, I'm lucky, patient, and I enjoy not knowing where I am.

Some 97 years ago, apparently, I created a file on my laptop called blah. Accounting for the fact that my hardware clock is slightly out of synch, this file is one I created sometime last week. Most of its contents is silly and not worthy of concern, but the first two paragraphs are somewhat nice, so I'll share them here:

"Incandescent happiness. I picture this as a sort of state in which the happiness internal to me is so bright, so energetic, that it radiates energy. The happiness becomes clearly visible to others, a bright source of light in a vague world of shadows. Energy to be harvested and reused.

I didn't feel like writing anything structured just now. I wanted freedom from the responsibilities associated with fancy text editing capabilities. In order to gain some of this freedom, I'm writing using "cat > blah". While I am still subject to the ability to hit backspace to fix typos, I am free at least in that I can edit no lines other than the current. I can't go back. I must go on. Freedom from structure. Freedom from random access. I wish I could enjoy it more."

I think beyond all else, the reason I most like writing in my journal is that I enjoy reading my own writing. Not all of it, but enough of it. When bored I can easily amuse myself by playing with the random log entry feature of my log. So I write more, so that I may read more. A vicious cycle, except it's not vicious.

It should be noted, I think, that the file blah that I quote above is four paragraphs in length, and I chose only to quote two of those four. The other paragraphs are not poorly written or embarrassing, they are simply boring. They don't seem like they'd be worth my while to read years from now.

I just realized that Pete's Log celebrates its third birthday in less than a week. Three years of journaling. That's quite a few. And yet not nearly enough. I greatly wish I had started earlier. I look forward to decades from now (if God, the universe, James T. Kirk or whatever it is that controls such things allows it) being able to read the wealth of material I've collected in my log database. After three years, I seem to have about 1.6 megs of log data stored. Note to self: I've not backed that up in a while.

As I sat down to write, I was trying to convince myself I should write a story of some sorts. But brainstorming led to stream of consciousness, led not to a story. Fiction has occurred to very little degree tonight.

Last Sunday I found myself writing as well. I wrote an email to myself. Upon reading it the next day, I discovered that it lacked any real substance, but it is sort of pretty. So I'll quote it:

"strange circumstance, and I am still awake. My wisdom, my knowledge, my ability to speak coherently is demanded of me in mere hours. A countable number of breaths stand between me and the lecture, I suppose, given somebody willing to count them. An automated means of counting could be used, I'm sure, but that would take away from the sense of time that a manual counting by a fellow human soul, capable of boredom and the errors of impatience, would offer. I'm better off, I think, with only the impression that my breaths could be counted, and not, after all, with an actual number. I should sleep, I think. I also felt an urgent need for a paragraph break just then, but this is a story that desires the monotony possible only when empty lines are not. I am not asleep because my mind is racing, bringing to the foreground stories once told and stories perhaps imagined. The seventeenth floor stands prominently in my conscious thoughts, overwhelming me with the realization that everything is yet again as it always has been. I stand back to survey my situation and discover, with no great surprise, that if I try to grasp my current state of mind, I find only whispers of past feelings slip between my fingers. A fog, perhaps, of thought that obscures the wisdom of immortality, veils whatever absolute truths may reside in our universe. I don't think they're there anyway. A chance to peek behind the veil may offer little more than the realization that the veil was never there in the first place. A tour through ominous caverns, the tour guide reminding us that flash photography is prohibited. A stalactite, product of centuries of dull growth, may find salvation in the sudden catastrophe a bright explosion could offer, but we must preserve the slow change of nature, so that it will look exactly the same when our offspring decide to chance a trip. The fog lifts eventually. As mysterious as the landscape was, it's better off without vapor hugging it, unsure of how to act, but clinging as long as it has a chance. Smoke is by far superior. The smoke brought on by the smallest of reactions can exploit its new freedom to react in surprising ways to its environment. An intent student of smoke could learn a thing or two from observing it, if only the commercial break on TV were not about to end."

Silly me. I wish I had the patience, the experience, the motivation, the discipline to write something real. I just realized that I used the word real in an unusual manner, because when I say I want to write something real, what I want to write is fiction. Real writing, or at least the sort I consider real, is writing about stuff that is not real.

Reality is an absurd concept anyway, or so I've always said. Or at least I'd like to pretend right now that I've said that on occasions prior to the current.

I do have a couple stories floating around in my head and to some extent on a few pieces of paper I've lost track of. The more recent is one in which I've lost interest. It was born out of frustrated emotion, and while playing with it I had a good place to vent that emotion. But that emotion is gone now, I've moved past it, and thus the motivation for that story is gone. I'm almost sad about that, because some elements of the story were somewhat interesting. Perhaps someday I'll find reason to revisit and record it.

The other story, the one that's been captive within my mind for several years now, is a silly science fiction epic. I have only vague ideas of the overall plot, but certain scenes exist very vividly in my imagination, and the prime deterrent keeping them off paper is my desire to research good scientific background for what I picture happening. I am, after all, an engineer, and I desire to offer explanation for the future wonders I envision. It is only a matter of time, I suspect, before this story can no longer be contained.

But tonight, at least, I think it is still safely contained inside my skull. The world is safe, but for how long?

Sleep beckons.

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vlsi fun

entry #1168, Sat, November 24, 2001, 03:03 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

So I'm playing around with some VLSI stuff. I figured out today how to run mentor graphics remotely, which means I can play with it from my office without having to go downstairs. Mentor actually makes life pretty easy in this regard, it comes with a shellscript called mgc_font_collect that copies all the mentor fonts installed into a specified directory. All you need to do then is copy the fonts in that directory to your local system, add them to your font path, and mentor runs remotely like a champ. Well, almost. There's a small issue with it not liking to refresh the screen automatically if the window was hidden, but it's easy to force a refresh, so that's no big deal.

So we were given a few basic cells to use in our project so that we didn't have to design them ourselves. Among other things we were given inverters, adders, and flipflops. Well, I'm becoming somewhat frustrated with the cells we were given. The first issue, which really isn't a problem at all, is that the cells use metal 2, and one of the fab processes we're targeting doesn't support metal 2, so the cells need to be hacked up a bit to get rid of all the metal 2. The second issue is that the cells don't pass ic layout rule checks. The flipflop cell, I think, had 30 some errors. Granted, I have little clue as to what I'm doing, so it may turn out that I'm not using the proper rule file or something, but I think I'm doing things right... so I'm fixing all the errors and in the process I'm both figuring out how IC Station works and how the cells we were given work. I'm curious to see if fixing these errors will prove to have been unnecessary ...

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pictures

entry #1167, Fri, November 23, 2001, 01:17 (Random Crap)

Another thing I meant to mention was that I finally got around to uploading a bunch of pictures to my webpage that I've taken during the past however many months. My two favorites are American Reflections and strange industrial thing. There's a bunch of other good stuff, too, including Poptart Man.

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recent happenings

entry #1166, Fri, November 23, 2001, 00:58 (Life in General)

Ack. Let's see. Much has happened that I have yet to record. Since I seem not quite ready to fall asleep yet, I'll write some.

Let's start out with a Happy Thanksgiving to all log readers! Mine was excellent. I hope yours was as well.

So last weekend was interesting. George came into town for the Navy game. He got here around 22:00. We went to a party at Cari's house. I dressed up all punk, because, well, I felt like it. It was an entertaining party. A lot of fencers were there, so George ended up knowing more people than I did. Highlights of the evening for me include eating pickled green beans, butting heads with a guy in a Dropkick Murphys shirt four times (I'm no expert on head butts, but he claimed they were all pretty good), smoking three cigarettes (yuck, what's wrong with me?), jumping into a bush (hedgedive!) with the above Dropkick Murphy guy, dancing with several girls wrapped inside the suspenders I had been wearing, and being given the nickname "Tyger." I talked with various interesting people and danced a bunch too. A fun night, though I felt some premonition of things to come.

Saturday: Navy game. The game was fun, it's always good to end the home season with a (relatively) strong win. Afterwards Arun, Shelece, George and I went to Taste of India (because it's a tradition!). George and I later hit Corby's. At some point we decided we'd go try to see the Leonid meteor shower. It was very foggy in South Bend, so we headed south east to see if we could escape the fog. We had no luck, despite driving for quite a while. But it was an adventure nonetheless.

Sunday started out very lazy. George took off sometime in the afternoon and I eventually wandered to campus. Meagan invited me to go watch the Harry Potter movie, so I went to go hang out with her. She informed me that we're just going to be buddies. I'm pretty cool with that, though. This is probably a better idea in the long term. So we played some air hockey and then saw Harry Potter. It was a very fun movie. The story was fun, the acting quite good, it was funny, and it was visually very pretty.

Monday night I learned that one sign that somebody is a good friend is that he'll get drunk with you if that's what you need.

Tuesday was Adam's 21st birthday and was a fun time. We took him to Corby's and McCormick's. At one point towards the end of the night I maneuvered my way out one window of a moving car and back in through another (into Cari's lap, woo!). Not to worry, though, the car wasn't moving too fast.

Wednesday I got my VLSI midterm back. Yuck. I did not do so well, I made a variety of stupid mistakes (including not reading part of a question, and thus not answering it). So I got the hell away from school and went on my shopping adventure with Mamie. Wednesday night Mamie, Branden, Jeff Stine and I went to see Harry Potter. It was still good the second time.

Today was the best vegan thanksgiving of my life. I woke at about 12:30 and quickly made my way out to pick up Branden and Mamie for food. After getting Mamie from SMC, we were driving north on 933 and I saw Cari walking along the road, so I pulled over and discovered Cari was planning to spend thanksgiving alone. Since this was unacceptable, I forced her to come with us. Branden and I prepared quite the feast. The food was excellent. I ate very much and found myself stuffed beyond comprehension. After the food I returned Cari to her home. Mammie, Branden and I watched A Knight's Tale, which continues to be a wonderful film. We then dropped Mamie off and hit Blockbusters. We picked two movies from the "stupid, amusing, with hot girls" category: Sugar & Spice and Tomcats. They both lived up to the standards I had set for them...

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yay food!

entry #1165, Wed, November 21, 2001, 16:42 (Cooking)

Today was happy food day. Mamie and I went shopping and I forced her to come to a bunch of fun places. We went to the Saigon Market, the Garden Patch, and Harmony Market. We also went to Walmart so Mamie could pick up food for break. We then feasted. We had some yummy ramen noodles, followed by soy ice cream. Reed's ginger brew, soy jerky, nuts, and crystallized ginger were also part of the fun. I bought a bunch more fun stuff.

Tomorrow is happy thanksgiving day. I'm excited to prepare a vegan feast. Cooking and eating make life good. I think I'm gonna do some baking tonight. Bread, and maybe waffles too.

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stupid ...

entry #1164, Wed, November 21, 2001, 03:48 (Life in General)

Woohoo! I'm fairly drunk. We went out tonight for Adam's 21st birthday. And I've ended up intoxicated. I cannot claim that I am unhappy, however, the past few days have definitely found me fairly ambivalent towards the world. I've had a hard time these past few days caring about anything. But that's ok, since there seem to be few things worth caring about anyway. I'm certain, however, that soon I will return to my hippie liberal self and feel plenty of passion for issues in the world. I just need a few days to sort things out.

I'm all outta angst ...

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psycho-killer

entry #1163, Tue, November 20, 2001, 02:20 (Random Crap)

qu'est-ce que c'est? ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba

ok, at some point I'll add a real entry.

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life

entry #1162, Mon, November 19, 2001, 01:56 (Life in General)

As I see it right now, life may try to throw some crazy things my way, but in the end, it's nothing that watching "Josie and the Pussycats" can't fix.

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Driving Adventure

entry #1161, Fri, November 16, 2001, 01:58 (Life in General)

Weird. So tonight I left fitz feeling somewhat funky for no good reason. Well, one easy way to deal with such a funk is to drive around aimlessly. Or at least that's the case for me, I do so semi-regularly. But this time my drive was eventful enough to be worth recording.

So it started out pretty good, I had a Clash CD for companionship, and I had things to think about. My initial goal was to find out where the Mishawaka exit of the toll road is. So I headed east and kinda pretended like I was looking. But driving around on dark country roads proved to be more fun, so I stuck to that. I enjoy driving with only a general sense of where I am and no idea of where I'm going. So to my surprise I found myself in Elkhart. There I picked a random road and turned south. I had fun being lost on little streets in Elkhart for a while, but eventually found a big road to follow south. I figured I'd run into US 20 eventually and be able to follow that back to South Bend. Well, just as US 20 made itself visible, I saw a sign that said Nappanee 16 miles. So I went that way. It proved to be worth my while. On the way to Nappanee I apparently crossed the continental divide. Twice. I need to figure out what the rivers around here do... Nappanee itself was a cute little town that was completely dead. But in Nappanee I discovered US 6, which was another road from which I knew how to get home. So I headed west on US 6. Shortly afterwards, I almost died. Very suddenly I noticed that a rapidly approaching set of headlights was definitely in my lane and definitely not showing any signs of wanting to leave my lane. So I pulled over in a hurry. It was very surreal. After that I didn't feel too adventurous, so I got to US 31 and made my way home from there.

Miles driven between leaving fitz and getting home: 76.

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Multithreading in the commercial world

entry #1160, Thu, November 15, 2001, 22:28 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Dr Freeh likes messing with my head. At this point, I'm considering it a good thing.

I was encouraged to devote some time to perusing relevant literature in hardware multithreading, with a particular focus on what interesting open issues there are for us OS types to look into. So I've been doing that. Preliminary results seem to indicate that little has been published about issues surrounding the interaction of the MTA and the OS. This is somewhat encouraging, because it means this is likely a field that can provide me with plenty of research to do.

Dr Freeh agrees with that to an extent. He decided to mess with me, though, by taking a pessimistic approach to the situation. There may be a good reason, he argues, for why so little seems to have been done in this area. It could be that people have tried to do this work, but failed because there is no good solution. Or it could be that nobody has done this work because nobody cares. The latter scenario is particularly frightening. After all, I care.

So my newest task is to prove that this is something worth caring about. I learned long ago that "This is cool" is not a valid argument for graduate level research. In fact, Dr Freeh is very market driven. Not in a sense that he wants to make money off this research, but in the sense that he wants this research to apply to the mainstream. As OS people, we should not hinder our own success by targetting a platform that will never be used. It will be difficult enough to convince people our OS ideas are worthy of acceptance if they apply to real situations. Why should anyone take us seriously if we target an architectural concept that may never become more than a collection of abstract research projects or worse yet die out alltogether?

So now I need to find evidence that hardware multithreading is a trend that will be around for a while. As frustrating as I want to find this situation, I really am pretty glad for it. I should be forced to justify what I want to do. Eventually I will have to, so I might as well begin now. So what have I found so far? The results are mixed.

First, a brief summary of MTA pros and cons. The big pros: cheap context switches, easy facility for masking latency. Cons: more cache conflicts, increased memory bandwidth utilization, issues in memory protection models, lack of software support. Is multithreading worth our while? I honestly don't know right now. It's a question I need to answer for myself sometime really soon. There's various ways by which I hope to come to an answer to that question, and one of them is looking at how much interest there is in MTAs these days.

First, there's the academic world. How much is multithreading being looked into these days? Multithreading seemed a big deal at one point. It seems that MTAs were of great interest in the late 80s and early 90s, and most of the papers I've found seem to be from that time frame. There is at least some active work still going on, though. A couple searches on citeseer seems to indicate that within the past few years there have been at least some publications related to multithreading. One area in multithreading that seems to be getting particular attention is Simultaneous Multithreading. So the academics haven't given up on multithreading yet.

More important, in my opinion at least, is the commercial world. What use, if any, is currently being made of hardware multithreading? Well, the most obvious answer is probably the Tera MTA (well, now known as the Cray MTA). They seem to have managed to justify work on this architecture for more than a decade now. Of course, I don't think they've yet proven the commercial viability of their MTA, but their continued presence gives me some hope. It will be interesting to see what happens to them.

While reading up on Simultaneous multithreading I discovered that Compaq had in late 1999 announced that they were going to use simultaneous multithreading in the Alpha. Given the current status of Alpha, I'm not sure how much this means, but the fact that a company was considering using an MTA technology in a general purpose processor is cool.

IBM actually released a multithreaded PowerPC processor (the RS64 IV) in the fourth quarter of 2000. The processor is used only in commercial servers, so when designing the chip, IBM carefully considered what kind of workload they expected the processor to see and chose a multithreaded design based on those considerations. The interface presented to software is of a multiprocessor system. Minimal changes were needed to the OS in order to make it treat each thread like a processor, and no changes were required to userlevel code. The RS64 IV only supports two threads, but based on their results, IBM claims that the implementation of multithreading they added to their chip yielded, in comparison to other techniques, a good ratio of performance cost to implementation gain. I need to figure out how well this chip did on the market. But it is encouraging to see that a big company implemented multithreading on a chip they released to market.

I also found a paper on dynamic multithreading which was coauthored by somebody at Intel. So I looked around the Intel research web page and found their Microprocessor Research Lab page. One group in this lab is looking into advanced concepts to incorporate into future generation IA-32 and IA-64 designs. The first project they list is "Multithread Microarchitecture" and they state they are researching "various flavors of multithreading," including simultaneous and dynamic. So that's encouraging too.

Another thing worth considering is that from talking with Arun I've heard that multithreading might make a lot of sense in a QCA architecture. So there may be future use for MTA research.

One thing I've noticed is that a lot of the multithreading work from a decade ago was coming from a parallel perspective, where systems would consist of multiple nodes, each of which was an MTA. The more recent work seems to look at multithreading as a means of improving single processor efficiency. The older work seemed more interested in providing new programming models, while the recent seems to try to support the current programming models without too much modification.

I gots to think about this stuff some more. We'll see what happens ...

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yay perk

entry #1159, Tue, November 13, 2001, 23:53 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Perk has managed yet again to achieve the honor of being my hero of the day.

Feeling a little frustrated trying to understand some transistor issues, I wrote a song and emailed it to Perk:

sometimes I wish I was a smoke packer
I'd sit around and pack all day
I'd understand transistors
and fabricate them too
yes, that's what I would do

So impressed, apparently, was Perk by my song that he sat down and enlightened me. I finally have an understanding of transistors that should do well to serve me in any situations I'm likely to find myself in anytime soon. At the same time, however, I feel inspired to find a good physics book to read up on electric fundamentals.

So anyway, Perk rocks.

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just to be annoying

entry #1158, Mon, November 12, 2001, 22:10 (Random Crap)

Mrs. Dammit, its Todesfee as the closing of Verhaltendarn to us maintained finished

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Waffles!

entry #1157, Mon, November 12, 2001, 00:53 (Cooking)

Long have I promised to record a recipe for vegan waffles in here. Well, after some experimentation I figured out a pretty good recipe, but I never bothered to determine exact amounts for the ingredients, so I didn't have anything to contribute here.

Well, last night I had two successes in one waffle making session. First, I managed to figure out a new recipe that used oil instead of margarine in order to eliminate hydrogenated oils from the mix (hydrogenated oils may be further discussed in a future entry), and second, I managed to actually record how much of what I used so that I can share that here.

Here's what you do:

In a largish bowl, mix 2 cups flour, 2 teaspoons double acting baking powder, 8 teaspoons Ener-G egg replacer and optionally a dash or two of nutmeg. Put the dry ingredients aside for a moment
In a small sauce pan heat one cup vegetable oil (I used soybean oil)
Add 1.5 cups sugar and allow sugar to dissolve into the oil somewhat
Add 1.5 cups soy milk and a tablespoon of vanilla extract (or more if you like)
Now add the oil mixture to the dry ingredients and blend very well.
Add flour, about half a cup to a cup at a time, blending well, until the batter is thick and doesn't run off a fork

The batter is now done. Heat your waffle iron as hot as it gets and cook the waffles until they're golden brown. These waffles are meant more to be eaten like cookies instead of like a breakfast food, and I think they are actually at their best after they've been allowed to cool and sit for a little while.

The only egg replacer I've used is the Ener-G sort. I found it at a health food store and it was actually a pretty good deal (I think the equivalent number of eggs may actually have cost more). I don't know how the recipe would work with any other sort of egg replacer ... if you come across any problems or discover any improvements, please let me know, this recipe, though pretty good, is definitely not out of the experimental phase yet ...

This recipe made 14 waffles for me, and I think I calculated them to run about 370 calories per waffle.

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Simultaneous Multithreading

entry #1156, Sun, November 11, 2001, 22:30 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

I've finally gotten around to reading some papers on Simultaneous Multithreading. It's an interesting concept. Until reading these papers, just about all talk of using MTAs was in the context of using them as part of a larger multiprocessor system. I was curious to see if anyone thought it worthwhile to analyze the benefits of hardware multithreading from a single processor perspective.

What does hardware multithreading give us, anyway? From my perspective, the basic idea is that by replicating the hardware associated with the state of a task, we can keep more than one context live in the processor, thus allowing us cheap context switches. Among other things, cheap context switches allow us to more readily mask latency. This is particularly useful in a multiprocessor system where internode communication can be a significant source of latency. But isn't latency a concern in a uniprocessor system as well?

What do we achieve by masking latency? The latency-inducing task will generally not execute any faster if we mask its latency (scenarios can be built in which masking its latency will make it execute faster, but generally I think it is easy to argue that for the most part, masking latency increases the total execution time for the particular task whose latency we are masking). Masking latency allows us to increase processor utilization. Or put another way, masking latency can increase throughput.

So current commercial processors make heavy use of superscalar designs to increase performance. A superscalar processor takes advantage of instruction level parallelism (ILP) in order to increase throughput. But for the most part, superscalar processors only execute one stream of instructions, so data and control dependencies cause a lot of underutilization of processor resources. "Traditional" MTAs can have the processor executing multiple streams of instructions, but at any given point, instructions are only being issued from one thread. The idea in simultaneous multithreading is to take a superscalar architecture, make it multithreaded, and then allow instructions from multiple threads to be issued simultaneously. This way hazards that would prevent one thread from issuing enough instructions to keep all the functional units busy will not leave the processor underutilized, because we hope to have enough active threads to be able to issue instructions to all functional units in every cycle. It's definitely a neat idea, and I should probably learn more about the work done in this area. There is one particularly exciting thing I found while looking for simultaneous multithreading papers: somebody wrote a paper analyzing operating system behavior on a (simulated) SMT machine. I also found it interesting that at some point in late 1999, Compaq announced they were going to use SMT in future Alpha processors. I'm curious as to what became of that.

Simultaneous Multithreading: Maximizing On-Chip Parallelism
by Dean M. Tullsen, Susan J. Eggers, and Henry M. Levy. 22nd ISCA, 1995

I had indirectly heard bad things said about this paper before reading it, but I tried to keep an open mind anyway. I'll start out with some positive commentary that applies to this and the next paper. Having read three papers co-authored by Susan Eggers, I've found that they have features I really like. They have a lot of references, which makes finding further reading easy, and they have a lot of graphs and give generally good interpretations of what the data in the graphs mean. Also, all three papers dealt with simulations, and I think I learned a little about simulating architectures from the papers.

This particular paper begins by explaining what Simultaneous Multithreading is. It then describes a simulation environment used to gather data on the effectiveness of SMT. They use the SPEC92 benchmark suite as their simulation workload. At first the bottlenecks in a singlethreaded superscalar architecture are discussed (with simulation data to show where those bottlenecks are). The 8 issue superscalar processor they simulate manages on average to execute only 1.5 instructions per cycle, despite 8 way issue. They then model several SMT architectures to see how they perform. With 8 threads and an 8 way issue, they see issue rates of more than 6 instructions per cycle in an ideal SMT configuration, and more than 5 ipc in more implementable configurations. So this seems to indicate that SMT should increase processor throughput.

Next they discuss cache issues, since more threads means more memory pressure and more cache conflicts. They talk about a few design ideas, primarily revolving around using private per thread caches. They show a graph with some data, but despite their discussion of the results, I was disappointed. For the most part, if there were fewer than the maximum number of threads executing, the original cache scheme won out by quite a bit, and even with the maximum number of threads, the performance numbers for all the cache schemes were within a percent or two of each other. So I really didn't agree with their arguments in favor of one of their other cache configurations. I was particularly amused by their use of the sentence "Private I caches eliminate conflicts between different threads in the I cache" to explain why private I caches performed better than private D caches, since the statement would hold true for private D caches as well. I can imagine why there would be more interthread conflicts in the I cache than in the D cache, but that's not something that their explanation addressed.

Next, the paper compared SMT with single-chip multiprocessing. This was somewhat interesting because their numbers showed that generally SMT can achieve better performance with fewer resources than single-chip multiprocessing.

So their section discussing cache issues disappointed me. Beyond that I found the paper interesting and educational. I am not, however, convinced of how useful their raw numbers are. The data was explained well enough, and the results are well explained. But I don't know how much of the simulation environment they describe I can trust. They explained the SMT architecture they assumed and how they chose to simulate it, but at times I was less than convinced as to how appropriate their decisions were. I felt that more justification for their decisions would have been in order. But regardless of that, I still enjoyed the paper. I'll need to further investigate the negative comments I heard about it, though.

An Analysis of Operating System Behavior on a Simultaneous Multithreaded Architecture
by Joshua A. Redstone, Susan J. Eggers and Henry M. Levy. 9th ASPLOS, 2000

This was a fun paper. And it addresses issues that I am directly interested in. What they did was adapt an alpha module for SimOS to simulate an SMT alpha architecture. They then modified Digital Unix 4.0d to run on the SMT alpha they were simulating. They then compared the performance of SPECInt95 with and without simulating OS calls on both the SMT and the regular alpha. They also compared the performance of apache on the two architectures. The reason for the SPECInt95 simulations was to see if not simulating OS interaction was having a significant effect on other simulations, since for the most part, most performance numbers for simulated architectures don't factor in OS interaction. The apache simulations then showed that SMT sees a big win when OS heavy applications are considered. For SPECInt95, the SMT saw only a 5% decrease in performance when the OS was factored in, but the non SMT architecture saw a 15% decrease in performance, indicating that OS considerations really are important when arguing the benefits of a proposed architecture. For the apache simulations (the authors determined that apache spends about 75% of its cycles in kernel mode), the SMT architecture outperformed the non SMT by a factor of 4.2, which is apparently the biggest improvement an SMT architecture has seen over a non-SMT relative in any benchmarks. So not only is the OS an important consideration, but the OS is actually an application that can see significant improvement in an SMT architecture. The paper provides a lot of detail on specific areas and causes for the results they saw, and those results are interesting. It seems that cache and TLB considerations are among the most significant. Of course, they probably have less influence on PIM considerations, but I'm investigating the big picture beyond only PIM right now.

This paper definitely confirms that the interaction of OS and MTA is an important consideration and that the amount of work done in that area so far is remarkably small.

A Simulator for SMT Architectures: Evaluating Instruction Cache Topologies
by Ronaldo Goncalves et. al.

This paper was rather difficult to read since it was written by researchers in Brazil. Additionally, it proved less interesting than I thought, because it was mainly a description of their SMT simulator they had written on top of SimpleScalar, and didn't really seem to offer me anything new at this time. I wish, however, that I was more patient with poor English in situations like this, because I'm certain there is plenty of good work being published by people who do not natively speak English. But I'm plagued by this notion that if they're going to publish in English, they should probably find a native speaker of the language to proofread for them. I'm not very nice sometimes.

netscape hates me, so I'm just gonna post this now without much proofreading.

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Party at George's

entry #1155, Sun, November 11, 2001, 19:35 (Life in General)

This weekend was a good one. George was throwing a party at his place in Ann Arbor, and had been kind enough to send the invitation to a bunch of ND kids as well as a ton of Michigan people. So Andy and I decided to take George up on his invite.

Unfortunately, things didn't quite work out as planned, and communication went askew, and so instead of being on the road before 16:00, we didn't leave South Bend until about 18:30. So by the time we made it to Ann Arbor, the party had already started and we were still starving. So we met up with Anne and grabbed some dinner before heading to the party. We went to a place called Azure's Mediterranean Grill. It was pretty good, I had some amazing Tabouli. So we finally got to the party, and had a great time there. I spent most of the time talking with George or Anne, which was fun, it was nice to talk to them. But I also had some interesting conversations with other Michigan people. I got to spend some time translating and explaining the lyrics of Rammstein's "Du Hast" and I got into an interesting discussion with an older, somewhat bitter grad student. His basic philosophy appeared to be that computer scientists were worthless. He was an ex-cs who had switched to EE sometime after his masters. But his basic point was that computer engineers had come up with all sorts of amazing architectural schemes and such, and that computer scientists had failed to take advantage of them. For the most part he wasn't taking my observations too seriously (I did actually agree with a lot of what he had to say, I simply felt that his point was no valid reason for me to give up on CS myself, but instead a reason for me to be motivated to work harder) but at some point he mentioned Arvind, and when he learned that I had not only heard of him, but read several papers of his, he began taking me more seriously. It was entertaining.

Sometime after three the party died and Andy and I went to Anne's place where I quickly fell asleep. The next morning we woke up, contacted George, and made for downtoan Ann Arbor to find food. I enjoyed wandering around Ann Arbor, it seems to be a cool little college town. There looked to be a lot of fun little restaurants and shops. After our downtown excursion the four of us hung out at Anne's place for a while before Andy and I hit the road back to South Bend.

It was a lot of fun to see George and Anne again, and it was neat to see their places in Ann Arbor. The party was plenty o' fun.

Last night I slept really really well. It was amazing. Today I watched the Bears Packers game at Paul's house, which was fun. Plenty of good fun was to be had. I brought waffles. Packers won, which made Rob happy and Paul sad.

Now I've been hanging out at fitz reading and such. But I was distracted from my work when I heard something at the door. I went to investigate and discovered that the little block of wood we use to prop the door open had vanished. I wandered down the hall and found a couple people just about to use it to prop open another door. They were amused to have been caught and were friendly and gave it back. I successfully defended the honor of the SSR, I feel. Back to work.

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How effective is multithreading, really?

entry #1154, Fri, November 09, 2001, 17:04 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

I had a really good talk with Dr. Lambert Schaelicke today. He's a new professor in the department and seems like a really nice guy. He gave me a bunch of good pointers in several areas. First he provided me with some useful tips about how to go about doing research in general. Second, he gave me some good advice about writing architectural simulators (something he's done a fair share of, and something I'm likely to dedicate a lot of time to myself). Third, he gave me some good places to look at for hardware multithreading stuff. He also agreed with my observation that in the realm of MTA, too little focus has been placed on operating system support. He also confirmed some of my recent doubts as to how useful hardware multithreading really is. He made some good points against it. Not that he was against the concept, he just played a good devil's advocate. I certainly still like the idea, but it definitely is not without problems.

So from some of the pointers he gave me, I found several promising papers. The first that I read is The Effectiveness of Multiple Hardware Contexts by Radhika Thekkath and Susan J. Eggers, published in ASPLOS 1994. First I just want to mention just how well written I thought this paper was. The authors did a fantastic job of explaining what their process was, presenting detailed results, and properly explaining what their results meant. I was quite impressed.

The paper basically presents the results of running a bunch of simulations in order to determine how effective hardware multithreading really is. The main problem they address is that hardware multithreading generally decreases cache effectiveness, because with multiple contexts, the working set addressed by the processor becomes larger. So the authors ran various programs through a bunch of simulations in which they varied the number of processors, the total number of hardware contexts, and various cache attributes. Some of the programs they used had been optimized for data locality, others had not.

The results were interesting. The locality-optimized programs generally saw improvements when additional contexts were added, while the unoptimized programs usually increased a little when the number of contexts per processor was increased to two, but generally saw decreasing performance if any additional contexts were added.

The authors then played around with cache organization. While they were able to find some improvements with cache organization, it generally wasn't very large, though there were definite exceptions. What everything basically came down to was that performance gains from adding processors were usually much larger than gains from adding contexts, and in some cases adding contexts decreased performance. On the other hand, adding new contexts requires less cost than adding new processors. And in some cases, more contexts on fewer processors does compare favorably to more processors. So multithreading is only a means to gain modest performance improvement, but it's cheap. Cache organization is important in multithreading.

Granted that cache organization probably has less effect on PIM ...

This paper does however fit into the category of what I wanted to see in my entry yesterday, and it has a lot of good references I want to chase down. So I'm quite happy.

must flee to Ann Arbor, no proofreading will be done to this entry.

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Multi-tasking on a dataflow-like architecture

entry #1153, Thu, November 08, 2001, 20:23 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

I still have a backlog of summaries to write up, but in the meantime I am going to start adding summaries as I read things since things are more easily summarized while fresh in my mind. A quick note to those who didn't like the number of summaries posted yesterday: it's Pete's Log. That's me. It's my log, for my benefit. You chose to subscribe and it's easy enough to delete entry mails you don't want to read. *grin* onwards...

Multi-tasking in a dataflow-like architecture
by Kattamuri Ekanadham, IBM tech report RC 12307 (#55198) 11/12/86

My first comment is that I would have expected an IBM tech report to be less poorly written. It was at times very frustrating to read. Beyond that, this paper was interesting. It described an idea that I've seen plenty of times before, which is to merge concepts of dataflow architectures with concepts of traditional von Neumann architectures. Somewhere in the middle, it seems, we'll find our holy land. This starting point is evident in figure one, which is easily described. It's a simple DAG. On the left side, we start with a node marked "imperative program" which points to a node marked "explicit parallel threads" which points to a node marked "von Neumann multi-processors." On the right side, we start with a node marked "functional program" which points to "implicit dataflow graphs" which points to "dataflow multi-processor." In the middle, we have a node labeled "???" which is pointed at by both "imperative program" and "functional program" and which in turn points at another node labeled "???". This middle ground approach labeled simply by question marks has been the topic of quite a few papers I've read. This figure does a good job of summarizing the approach, though I don't like its implication that there is an architectural middle ground, but not one at the programming language level. It's quite possible, though, that the implication is unintentional and I'm reading into the figure too much.

So anyway, what new insight does this paper offer? An abstract architectural model is presented. I desire a name for these sorts of architectures. "Paper architectures" works well enough, but I want something wittier.

Yuk, I'm rambling. Where was I? So this abstract model proposed is supposed to support both von Neumann programming models as well as dataflow graph programming models. So the abstract model is described (global memory, multiple processors, programs are divided into blocks, blocks are divided into tasks, special instructions are used in addition to a traditional instruction set to enable task management. tasks are run-to-completion, but if made fine grained (small number of instructions) then we find ourselves near the dataflow end of the spectrum. the machine has only one register set ... task context switch time is thus an issue). Then means for "compiling" both dataflow graphs and imperative programs into code for this architecture are described. Finally ideas and issues for implementation of such a machine are given.

I will abstain from making too many negative comments about this architecture, because it provides one really cool thing that justifies most of the features I don't like about it. This architecture was designed for experimentation. The whole point of the model is that it easily accommodates dynamic adjustment of the grain size of parallelism exploited. Given this ability, one is almost presented with a knob that can be turned from "100% von Neumann" to "100% dataflow" (well, realistically the model probably can't make it to 100% on either side, but whatever). I like this idea. I'm definitely approaching a point where I've read enough to realize that this middle ground approach seems reasonable, and I'm definitely liking the benefits of MTA more every day, but I've yet to see any significant work which experimentally played with any of the tradeoff variables present in MTA design in order to argue one design is better than another. Seeing how I'm not even remotely close to being well versed in the field, however, this doesn't mean that such experimental results are not out there. I've simply not come across them yet. And it is also apparent that certain approaches have had better success than others. The approach taken by Tera has certainly proven implementable and promising (though I lack any recent news on how Tera is doing, my Tera knowledge is at best two years out of date). But at the same time, all the Tera papers I've read don't offer clear arguments for why the approach they chose is the right one. For the most part, the Tera papers just say "we did it like this" but without too much detail. Sometimes they say "we did it like this, and here's a reason why." But given how many design decisions there are, it seems that better justification needs to be given. I want to see "we considered this approach, but decided against it for reasons x, y, and z and instead went with this other approach, because issues x, y, and z didn't affect it and additionally, reasons q, r, and s suggested it to be a good approach." or "experimental data obtained from simulating these two alternative approaches indicate that in situations X this approach wins, but in situations Y the other approach wins. Given our design goals, we feel situations X are more likely, so we are choosing to take the first approach."

I just realized that this can no longer be accurately describes as a summary of the paper I just read. If anyone knows of any papers that do what I just described, please let me know. Otherwise I rather like the idea of doing such experimentation myself.

Let's see, what else is there to take from this paper. The compilation techniques were unexciting, though my desire to take an advanced compiler course was yet again reinforced. The implementation section was somewhat interesting, though my main impression was that the implementation seemed excessively complex. One interesting idea was that they were describing a resource management unit (RMU) that would be part of the architecture. At first the RMU was described as a separate processor which ran a resource manager program (a.k.a. system code!!!) from memory. I found this interesting because having system code run concurrently with user code is an issue I must deal with. Unfortunately, I was not happy with their further description of the resource manager. Although it was initially described as a separate processing unit, they then went on to talk about how there was overhead involved in switching into the RMU, which made little sense to me if it's supposed to be a separate unit of the processor. So most of the rest of what they said pertained to having the RMU preallocate blocks in big enough chunks so that it would not be called too often, and using caching techniques to find those preallocated blocks when a new block is requested.

Final thoughts: interesting paper, but not so much for any technical reasons. Also, interlibrary loans are cool. I love libraries. The librarians in the engineering library have become some of my favorite people of recent.

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I like reading! part 7

entry #1152, Wed, November 07, 2001, 14:49 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

A Model and Stack Implementation of Multiple Environments
by Daniel Bobrow, Ben Wegbreit, CACM, Oct. 1973

This paper rocked. I wish to read it a few more times (I've already read it twice). It kind of saddens me, though, that the Communications of the ACM used to publish stuff this cool. The communications of recent that I've looked at didn't seem interesting to me at all. So basically this paper addresses the problem of using a single LIFO stack for procedure linkage and such when an application may not access context frames in a LIFO manner, such as in a parallel processing environment where several procedures may be called at the same time.

The scheme introduced is fascinating. I think having read it, I have gained a greater understanding of various issues of runtime execution models in general, as well as a better understanding of some of the issues I had trouble with while taking Programming Languages. The model presented is useful for various things such as backtracking, coroutines, and parallel processing.

Basically what they do is use a data structure resembling a stack, but which is no longer strictly LIFO. Dynamic and static links are used for tracking the enclosing control and naming environments. Stack frames are divided into two parts, the part that holds local variables and the part that holds return address, links, and such. If control inside a frame is "split" (due to a fork or something) then the second part of the frame (return address, links, and such) is duplicated, but the first is not. Reference counts and such are maintained to keep track of when different frames are no longer in use. Since the stack is no longer LIFO (so it's no longer really a stack, though it behaves exactly like a stack if no parallel activity takes place) techniques such as compression and such need to be used ...

As far as implementation goes, the model seems designed for very dynamic languages, and seems intended to be implemented in an interpreter. So the actual model itself seems unfit to be adapted to our needs. But the ideas and issues presented in this paper are worthy of plenty of consideration when designing runtime models in the future.

From PLANNER to CONNIVER -- A genetic approach
by Sussman, McDermmott. AFIPS 1972 FJCC

This paper presents PLANNER and the problems inherent to it and then introduces CONNIVER as a solution to those problems. The main problem with PLANNER, they say, is that backtracking is generally a poor programming paradigm. Forall loops should be used instead. Kind of interesting, and definitely a good source if I ever need to argue that backtracking is bad. The real reason I read this paper is that the title it was cited as having was "Why conniving is better than planning" and with that kinda title, I couldn't resist...

Very Long Instruction Word Architectures and the ELI-512
by Joseph Fisher, 1983 ISCA

This paper wasn't too exciting. I just happened upon it while looking for something else, and I want to learn more about VLIW at some point, so I read it.

The work presented is definitely compiler intensive. It has an introduction to the use of trace scheduling to find parallelism that can be scheduled for VLIW machines. Comparison of VLIW with vector machines and other horizontal machines. Description of the Bulldog compiler for VLIW. Description of the ELI-512 architecture, which uses 512 bit instructions (f-in' huge! ELI = excessively long instruction). How to deal with jumps. How to deal with loop unrolling. etc.

Recursive Programming by E. W. Dijkstra, in Programming Systems and Languages, 1967

Wow. Dijkstra rules. This paper describes the use of a stack to implement recursive function calls. It describes static and dynamic links, and describes the use of this method in algol. Basically, this paper is the introduction of a technique that is now used everywhere. yay Dijkstra. I didn't really learn much from this, I just enjoyed reading it.

I think that's it for now, there's more that needs adding, but I'm taking a break.

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I like reading! part 6

entry #1151, Wed, November 07, 2001, 14:34 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

*T: A Multithreaded Massively Parallel Architecture
by Nikhil, Papadopoulos, Arvind. 19th ISCA, 1992

This paper presents the *T (pronounced Start) architecture. It is a proposed architecture for a massively parallel system. The paper presents some general problems in MPA (latency of remote loads, idling due to synchronizing) and proposes solutions.

The main component of the solution is multithreading, since multithreading can be used to mask latency. Split-phase transactions are also vital to make such a system work. Efficient message passing and handling is also necessary. The authors also decide to have separate processing elements on each node: a main processing unit, a remote memory processing element that handles requests from remote nodes for loads and stores, and a synchronizing processing element which handles responses returning to the node.

The authors' reason for the separate processing elements is that they want competitive single-thread performance, and with that goal, they don't want the main processor to be interrupted by network activity. At the same time, simple requests such as loads and stores should be handled quickly. Hence separate processing units.

The actual instruction set is very similar to the P-RISC instruction set.

I should go over this paper again sometime. The idea of putting multiple processing units on a node is interesting, but unfortunately not applicable to what I'm doing in the short term. The authors do have a bunch of code examples, which may prove enlightening as well.

Cilk: An Efficient Multithreaded Runtime System
by Robert D. Blumofe et. al., 5th Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming

Since searches including "Multithreaded" and "Runtime" tend to pick this one up a lot, I came upon it pretty quickly. Unfortunately, it is about software multithreading, and as such does not apply very directly to what I'm looking for.

Cilk is basically an extension to C. Cilk programs get preprocessed into C programs and are then linked against a runtime library.

In Cilk, threads are nonblocking C functions that get run to completion. If a thread wants to spawn a child thread and then wait for a result from that child, it has to spawn a successor thread that waits for the data from the child, since the thread itself can't block.

The way that a successor thread gets scheduled is through continuations. The meaning the authors have chosen for the terms they use are poor. A successor thread should itself be called a continuation. The objects the authors call continuations would more appropriately be called futures. But anyway, the parent will spawn a child, specifying to that child a continuation where it should store the value it computes. It then spawns a successor which depends on that continuation as one of its input values. The successor will not be scheduled until the value of the continuation has been computed. Bad choice of terms. But it makes sense enough.

The Cilk scheduler tries to keep processors busy by employing a work-stealing technique. This sort of technique may be interesting to look at when doing internode scheduling, but right now, this paper really didn't offer me much.

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I like reading! part 5

entry #1150, Wed, November 07, 2001, 14:28 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Parallel Symbolic Computing
by Robert Halstead, Jr., Computer Magazine, August 1986

This paper introduces the Multilisp languages and the "future" language construct. In Multilisp, a future is the only means by which a new thread of execution can be started. Its use is simple: (future X) spawns a new thread of execution which begins computing the value of X while returning an object of type future which can be passed around. When X is computed, the thread computing it dies and updates the value of the future. If any thread tries to touch the future (i.e. directly use its value) before the future has been computed. it is suspended until the value of the future is known. A means for lazy evaluation of futures is provided by the "delay" keyword which causes a future object to be generated, but no thread is spawned to compute the value until a thread touches the future object.

This paper was worth reading because it offers a brief introduction to Multilisp and the future construct, both of which are mentioned frequently in MTA literature, especially in dataflow literature.

In addition to presenting Multilisp, the author also presents some other interesting observations and facts. A comparison of the needs of numerical and symbolic computation is given. Numerical code frequently lends itself to simple parallelization techniques, particularly using SIMD techniques. Vectors and Matrices are frequent datatypes in numerical code, and divide and conquer algorithms generally work well on them. Symbolic computing, on the other hand, does not lend itself so easily to SIMD techniques, requiring other means of finding and exploiting concurrrency. Futures are the solution provided by the author.

Also discussed is the issue of scheduling parallel programs. The distinction between mandatory work and speculative work is made. Given sufficient mandatory work, a scheduler should be able to make efficient use of resources. In some cases preference may need to be given to work units known to be on the critical path, but in general, scheduling work known to be mandatory for a computation to end is always going to get you closer to your goal. However, if there is not enough mandatory work to spread across all processing resources, then speculative work may be employed to increase system utilization. In the speculative approach, we eagerly spawn tasks, before we even know if we will need the results of those tasks. If we do end up needing the result, then we've won, because it's now already available. If we never need the result, we've wasted cycles. However, if the wasted cycles would have been spent idle instead, we've not lost (unless speculative scheduling introduces too much overhead ...).

Another interesting topic is that of nondeterminism. We don't want nondeterminism, so the author's solutions to dealing with nondeterminism are of little practical value.

How do you handle exceptions? In Multilisp a task computating a future may generate an exception. But the future object may have already been spread far and wide, and the task that initially decided to create the future object may be gone. What to do? In Multilisp, the future object is given an "error" value, and any task that touches the future will generate an exception of its own.

When the paper was published, the results available indicated that Multilisp was generally pretty slow. Not surprising. But the idea of a future is still cool.

Finally, the author suggests that research efforts in parallel computing, and in symbolic parallel computing in particular, should take into consideration all aspects of development: language and runtime environment design, algorithm and application development, and hardware design and implementation.

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I like reading! part 4

entry #1149, Wed, November 07, 2001, 14:24 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Implementation of a General-Purpose Dataflow Multiprocessor
by Papadopoulos, MIT Press, 1991

This book is apparently just a published form of Papadopoulos' PhD. It presents motivation for dataflow architecture, describes the ETS architecture and its implementation in Monsoon, and covers a few other interesting issues.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of multiprocessing and presents issues in efficient parallel programming and motivates the use of dataflow as a solution to those issues.

Issues:

shared memory v. message passing
synchronization costs
context switching costs

Parallel programming is not easy. Programmers must generally find parallelism by hand and use difficult mechanisms for synchronization and sharing data. This should be easier. Shared memory is particularly appealing because it allows programmers to manipulate shared data in a manner they are more familiar with.

There are numerous models of synchronization, including producer-consumer, fork-join, and mutual exclusion. However, in most systems these means lack good hardware support and are implemented in system or library calls.

Task state transitions (context switches) are costly. Traditionally a task is in one of four states: running, ready, waiting, or terminated. Costs associated with switching between states are the cost of creating a task, cost of switching a task (ready->run), cost of blocking a task (run->wait), synchronization cost (wait->ready), and exit cost (run->term).

In order for a parallel task to execute efficiently, it needs to be spend enough time in the run state to make up for overhead from switching between other states.

dataflow machines can generally eliminate the create, switch, sync, and exit costs, and incur only mild overhead for block costs.

Another issue is how blocking is implemented: do you poll or suspend? polling wastes cycles, but suspending requires some mechanism for unsuspending.

The concept of a tree of frames is also covered as a convenient runtime environment for parallel execution. One thing to beware of is the potential for increased costs for function calls when a tree of frames is used instead of a stack of frames. Stack of frames is easy, but in the tree of frames situation, frame allocation becomes a vital issue.

Chapter 2 describes the Tagged-Token Dataflow Architecture, from which ETS grew. TTDA grew out of earlier static dataflow architectures. It addresses the problem in static dataflow architectures where recursive and dynamic procedure calling is not possible. It accomplishes this by introducing contexts that specify activation frames for code.

Interesting issues regarding tag efficiency are raised in section 2.2. Of particular value are probably discussions of deadlock when the context space is exhausted, and the ideas of context constant space, further subdividing a context for iteration, and offsetting code from a base address specified in the context. Keep in mind that here context is used in a dataflow sense, and that in the TTDA there is no physical memory corresponding to a context, the context is simply a part of the tag.

As usual, the big problem with TTDA and similar architectures is the requirement for complex token matching schemes, requiring either fully content-addressable memory or complex hashing algorithms.

Chapter 3 introduces ETS and describes how it is designed to solve the problems of TTDA by considering the context to be less abstract. Instead of using the context simply to generate unique names for tags, the context now addresses some portion of physical memory. This eliminates the need for complex matching hardware. Instead, when a token arrives, presence bits at the location specified by the context (and the offset in the current instruction) are used to determine if the token is the first or second required for an activity to take place. If it is the first (and the activity requires two operands) the value of the token is stored in the location and the presence bits toggled to full. If it is the second, the value of the token and the value stored at the location combine to form the inputs for the activity and teh activity is executed.

Some interesting ideas and issues are discussed. Of special interest are probably the details on data movement between contexts. And though I've seen it in many other papers discussed already, I don't think I've specifically mentioned split phase memory operations. They are also a good idea, and relevant to global memory accesses in PIM.

Chapter 4 describes techniques for compiling code for ETS, in particular contrasted to compiling for TTDA. I skimmed through this chapter, since most of it seemed of little interest to me. However, there are a few things that may be worth revisiting, especially the section on resource management.

Chapter 5 was a brief description of how to view an ETS machine as a multithreaded von Neumann architecture. Nothing new or exciting.

Chapter 6 introduces Monsoon as an implementation of ETS. Not too much that I've not seen before, so I did a lot of skimming. One interesting thing covered in greater detail than I saw before was talk of using "subdomains" to distribute data structures among nodes. There was also a discussion of how to distribute code among nodes.

Chapter 7 gave more detail on Monsoon from a programmers perspective with code examples and such. Again I skimmed.

Chapter 8 concluded.

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I like reading! part 3

entry #1148, Wed, November 07, 2001, 14:16 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

MASA: A Multithreaded Processor Architecture for Parallel Symbolic Computing
by Halstead & Fujita, 15th ISCA, 1988

I was surprised to find this paper more useful than I anticipated. The architecture described in this paper is one optimized for Multilisp, and so I did not expect to find much in it that applied to my interests. Additionally, the architecture described has been developed "on paper" only, there is no simulator or any other validation of the ideas described.

However, the authors did put significant thought into context allocation, which is of interest to me because it is similar to frame allocation. It also describes runtime environment isues such as procedure linkage, and the ideas presented are probably of some value for further study. Also, the need to swap out frames if the system become overloaded is discussed.

On the other hand, I skimmed over some other parts of this paper. Architectures for functional languages of this sort are not of great interest to me right now. I also felt that the instruction set proposed was somewhat ... silly. But it had some features that I should not immediately discount.

Monsoon: an Explicit Token-Store Architecture
by Papadopoulos & Culler, 17th ISCA, 1990

This paper presents Monsoon, an architecture that attempts to simplify the hardware required to support dataflow programming models.

Dataflow is cool. It allows for easy toleration of delays, simple synchronization and good parallel stuff. Unfortunately, in a "pure" dataflow machine, all incoming tags must be compared to all the tags in the token store, requiring complex matching hardware. The authors suggest the Explicit Token Store (ETS) architecture, which allows for dataflow programs to be run without the complex matching hardware. Instead of comparing an incoming tag to all stored tokens, incoming tokens instead indicate locations ... a token consists of a value, an FP, and an IP. The instruction at the IP indicates an offset from the FP. The location at that offset is inspected to see if the presence bit is set. If it isn't, the value from the token is stored at the location. If it is, the value is read from the location, and along with the value from the token serves as input to the instruction at IP. The result of the IP will then be new tokens, consisting of values, FPs and IPs.

Monsoon is an implementation of the ETS architecture. It is fairly simple, but seems to work well.

I've not yet decided what I think of this. I think it's a cool idea. But I don't know exactly how feasible it really is. The paper does describe a running prototype system, so this is more than just a paper architecture. I'm not really sure how this applies to me though. I think mainly it's good to have read this so that I can better understand dataflow and its implementations.

One really cool idea in Monsoon is that the tokens stored as execution units on a processor are the same tokens as are sent across the network to invoke remote execution. So inter and intra processor communication is achieved by the same means.

Multithreading: A Revisionist View of Dataflow Architectures
by Papadopoulos, Traub, 18th ISCA, 1991

This paper extends upon the previous one, detailing additions made to the Monsoon architecture that gave it characteristics of a traditional von Neumann architecture while still leaving the general dataflow infrastructure of the machine in place.

Added to the architecture were fork and join capabilities. The fork is very similar to the fork in P-RISC, while the join is not a separate instruction, but instead an extension to existing instructions. While this feels somewhat burdensome in a CISCy manner, it is an idea not without merit, as it saves on instruction count and such. However, I don't know how well this join implementation could be adapted to an architecture that is less dataflow-oriented ...

The section on procedure linkage (3.4) is really cool. I don't think it presents any radically new ideas, but it explains very well how procedure calls might work in a multithreaded continuation-based architecture. It is definitely worth considering when designing a PIM runtime model.

Another interesting topic in this paper is the talk of critical sections. Instructions that do not generate new threads or such are able to take a "short circuit" path directly back to the first pipeline stage when they have completed. This allows for a thread to run "uninterrupted" (other than by threads in other pipeline stages, which by design would have to refer to other frames). While the concept of a continuation being able to so easily enter a critical section is appealing, I am somewhat worried by the fact that any thread can apparently enter such a critical section and not worry about being preempted. No mention was made of any means to prevent threads from taking over (long-term) exclusive use of the processor in this manner.

The main argument the authors provide for implementing support for such critical sections is that system code such as resource managers would require such capability. I agree this to be true, but facilities must exist to ensure that not anyone can gain exclusive use of the processor. The authors mention as well that in dataflow literature, the topic of support for system services such as resource management is poorly addressed.

One issue I have with the design of Monsoon is that all addresses consist of a PE address and an offset into that PE. So if a continuation is referenced on a remote node, a PE knows the offset of the code and frame on that node, which smells of poor abstraction to me.

But beyond that, Monsoon -- and especially the modifications to Monsoon described in this paper -- has proven an interesting architecture to consider to me.

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I like reading! part 2

entry #1147, Wed, November 07, 2001, 14:09 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Ok, web browsers can blow me. There are gonna a decent number of entries today. The first item here isn't something I read, but I found it amusing enough to include.

Tera MTA Progress Report
summer 1999

This was an mpeg video on a cdrom that Arun gave me. It was very fun to watch, but contained little content beyond corporate marketing talk.

must ... buy ... tera !!!

Can dataflow subsume von Neumann computing? by Nikhil and Arvind, 16th ISCA, 1989

This was an excellent paper, I wish to read it several more times. Since writing the summary that follows, I've read up a good deal more on dataflow architectures, so I now have a better understanding of what this paper is trying to do then when I first read it. But the summary below is still worth something.

This paper describes P-RISC (parallel RISC), an architectural idea for combining ideas in dataflow computing with a RISC instruction set. Dataflow provides a new (and in many ways very elegant) means for synchronization and parallelization for code. But current compiler and software technology is geared more towards traditional von Neumann architectures. By taking a traditional instruction set but adding support for some dataflow ideas, good tradeoffs are achieved.

This paper is good. This paper is relevant, especially to PIM. Much of the current PIM architecture is based on ideas found in this paper, in particular the instruction set and the idea of continuations. The large difference between PIM and P-RISC is that in P-RISC, the memory is for the most part off-chip. P-RISC calls only for a small amount of local memory for code and frame cache, whereas PIM nodes, by design and definition, have memory onboard. In P-RISC, the authors describe separate Processing Elements (PEs) and Heap Memory Elements. In PIM, the two are combined into one unit.

The two remaining significant differences between PIM and P-RISC are the vector instructions of PIM and the tighter integration of message passing into PIM (although the paper does suggest a START instruction which serves a message passing purpose).

Unfortunately, PIM Lite adopts a very broken implementation of the ideas described in this paper. The authors of this paper took great care to describe the run-time environment as trees of frames and such. However, in the PIM Lite model, user code has no means of accessing frames other than its own. The whole idea of a frame in P-RISC is that a frame serves a similar purpose to a traditional frame (or activation record) in a singlethreaded environment. So for function calls and such, a thread would write arguments into a new frame, and then execution would start in that new frame, in the same manner that a conventional program writes arguments onto a new frame on the stack and then adjusts frame and stack pointers. Frames in PIM Lite have lost this concept, and serve simply as register sets.

A good deal of thought *must* go into the execution and runtime model of PIM. This paper brings up interesting ideas and is well thought out, I think. It should be taken into consideration when thinking about the PIM runtime model.

The paper also briefly discusses the idea of a frame manager, which would be a vital part of a PIM runtime system. There is a reason that PIM Lite does not allow a continuation to access a frame other than its own. Different tasks can be running simultaneously on a PIM node. Allowing a continuation to access other frames could allow malicious or broken code to overwrite the frames of other tasks. However, completely cutting off access to other frames is too crippling. One possibility may be to implement special instructions for writing to other frames. Some bits in the target frame could indicate what continuations are permitted to write to that frame. Things to think about.

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I like reading!!!

entry #1146, Wed, November 07, 2001, 13:27 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

So it used to be that reading technical literature was something that bordered on the impossible for me. I had a hard time remaining focused on reading, and even when I forced myself to sit down and read something, my retention of what I read was generally low. All very frustrating. But thanks to a little help from medical science, those problems appear to be a thing of the past. So I've read quite a lot lately. The amount of reading I'm doing is probably excessive, but now that I can actually read and understand papers about subjects that interest me, I'm addicted to it. I've also decided to start summarizing papers that were of interest to me and storing those summaries (where else?) in my log. I'm hoping to generate a lot of these summaries.

Currently I'm trying to add summaries of everything I've read recently. My first attempt failed miserably, ending up with malloc needing a reboot. For attempt number 2, I'm breaking this up into several log entries. Most of what I've read is focused around my desire to better understand MTA concepts, as well as to discover how much focus in MTA research has been put on system software issues. So far I've found very little on system software issues in MTAs. The big things that interest me most from that perspective are as follows:

Scheduling
Resource Management
Runtime models, environments, and support libraries
Compiler support
Protection
Internode communication

Each of those topics could be broken down into many smaller pieces, but that's something for a later entry. This entry is about stuff I read. Let's begin.

Multithreaded Architectures: Principles, Projects, and Issues
by Jack Dennis and Guang Gao

This is chapter 1 of the "MTA: A Summary of the State of the Art" book. It was valuable in that it listed several of the reasons for MTA as well as issues in implementing MTA. It covered in detail several MTA projects: HEP, Dataflow, and Monsoon. It also summarized several other MTA projects. I tracked down many of the references listed in this paper as a next step in figuring out what is out there.

Very little was mentioned in this paper, however, of system software issues.

Another issue that I thought of a lot while reading this paper is just how poor the naming conventions in this research area are ... threads, processes, programs, tasks, continuations ... none of these words ever mean the same thing. This seems especially unfortunate from my perspective, since I am currently residing in the funny area between architecture and operating systems, and it's rather common for a term that means one thing in one of those areas to mean something non-trivially different in the other. Any future writing I do is likely to require brief summaries of what exactly I mean when I use a given term. Or maybe I should just make up new terms instead.

An Object Oriented Architecture
William Dally et. al., 12th ISCA, 1985

The idea, as usual, was to design an architecture that would allow some cool but slow language to be efficiently implemented. In the case of this paper, our language is SmallTalk. The architecture is COM, the Caltech Object Machine.

First, this paper states only ideas, really, and indicates that not much in the way of implementation had yet happened. Some performance numbers are given, but they were collected on a simulator for a precursor to COM, not on COM itself. I suppose I could try to figure out if any more work was done on COM, but I don't really care right now.

However, some of the ideas are interesting. In SmallTalk, all methods are invoked by sending messages to objects. This sounds similar to the OO approach in PIM. Also, in COM (and this probably is inherited from SmallTalk) there is a concept of a "context" which is very similar to a "frame" in PIM. One of the major proposals in this paper is a context cache which is intended to speed up method calls and such. This part of the paper seems very relevant.

The two other primary proposals in the paper for the COM architecture are "abstract" or "virtual" instructions, and "floating point" virtual addresses. The abstract instructions are of no interest to me (other than as an amusing idea) and I feel "floating point" virtual addresses is a deceptive name. More appropriate would be a term such as "Variable Length Segment virtual addresses" or something like that. It is an interesting idea, though, but of little interest to me right now.

Architecture of a Message-Driven Processor
by William Dally et. al., 14th ISCA, 1987

An MDP is a processing node for a message-passing concurrent computer. It is PIM like in that memory is on the processor chip, it is designed to support an OO programming model, and message passing is integrated into the processor.

Like the COM described in Dally's earlier paper, strange caching strategies are used to support the OO model. Much of this paper talked about memory layout and such, and I didn't bother to try to fully understand what they were doing. I don't think I'm interested in providing this much hardware support for dynamic type checking and method lookup and such. But it may be something to think more about later.

The other thing discussed in detail is the message processing unit. Things can definitely be learned from this part of the paper. I should read over it again later.

The MDP is sort of multithreaded, in that it has two sets of registers, one for high and one for low priority. So if a message comes in, the processor can handle it with one set of registers without having to back up the other set.

This paper seemed to me to fail to address the subject of protection. In particular, I was intrigued by the priority concept they used for their two sets of registers. The impression I got was that processes could choose their own priority. Granted, there are plenty of systems in which this is acceptable behavior, but I was disappointed that the priority scheme was not elaborated upon.

Fine-Grain Message-Passing Concurrent Computers
by William Dally, 3rd Conference on Hypercube Concurrent Computers, 1988

This paper discussed the J machine. Its motivation is as follows: the natural grain size of a program tends to be short, measured in tens of instructions. However, the grain size of parallel computers (of the time, at least) is large, due to various overheads: network, context switch, etc ... So in order to achieve good utilization, programs must be written at a coarse-grain level, so that overhead is amortized. Dally argues (and I agree) that concurrency can be better exploited if architecture overhead is reduced so that finer grain programs can be executed without incurring huge overhead. To this extent he offers two solutions. Improved networking, and improved context switch handling.

I skipped over the networking half of the paper, because I don't care.

The second half of the paper discussed the Message-Driven Processor (MDP) discussed in the previous paper. This paper didn't really cover anything not mentioned already in the previous paper. However, some things were summarized better than in the previous paper.

One thing I've come to be curious about after reading this paper is if code is interruptible in the MDP. Code can be interrupted by higher priority code, which will use the second set of registers. However, I didn't catch any notion of code at the same priority level being interrupted. In fact, one thing mentioned in this paper that was not mentioned in the previous is that message sends are broken up into several instructions. The "SEND" instruction issues the destination address. The "SEND2" instruction is then used repeatedly to send data. Finally the "SEND2E" instruction indicates that the message is complete and can be injected into the network. I have a personal bias against stateful things of that sort, and am curious as to what happens if code gets preempted in the middle of such a send sequence of instructions ... quien sabe. maybe there is no preemption or interruption of code.

Stay tuned for part 2.

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stupid freaking debian ppc

entry #1145, Tue, November 06, 2001, 22:22 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

ugh. I'm not going to explain, I simply need to store this somewhere where I will easily find it.

rtc adb keycodes linux

\ -> shift
e -> delete
r -> tab
caps lock -> space
option -> caps lock

esc -> /
` -> m
1 -> e
2 -> r
= -> o
3 -> t
5 -> i
n -> x
enter -> j
y -> q
. -> v
o -> s
, -> \

don't push s!

I've now had to experimentally determine the above mapping twice. ugh. I wish I'd saved it last time around.

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Epigrams in Programming

entry #1144, Tue, November 06, 2001, 16:26 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

I enjoyed reading Epigrams in Programming by Alan J. Perlis (Yale University): http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html

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Monsters, Inc.

entry #1143, Tue, November 06, 2001, 00:48 (Movies)

Tonight Meagan and I went to see Monsters, Inc., Pixar's latest offering. I really enjoyed it. The animation was delightful. I was especially impressed by the rendering of Sully's fur. The movie was worth watching simply for that. I also liked a lot of the lighting in the movie. I thought it was well done. Beyond the technical merits of the movie, I also enjoyed the plot. I thought the story was really cute. I enjoyed it. And there were plenty of laughs. The short that was played before the movie was also very cute, I laughed pretty hard at it. I also got to see some fun previews. The Star Wars Episode II trailer has me at least somewhat excited to see Episode II, though I really don't like the name. And Ice Age looks like it could be a lot of fun. There were some other previews that looked interesting, but I can't remember at all what they were.

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huh

entry #1142, Sun, November 04, 2001, 14:57 (Random Crap)

So what I've now found myself wondering is, was anyone ever expecting the French inquisition?

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crazy me

entry #1141, Sat, November 03, 2001, 18:42 (Life in General)

I currently have a 60 game winning streak on the freecell installed on malloc. I also really like Reed's Premium Ginger Brew. It's good stuff.

My occasional ability to give up anything resembling will power amazes me. Last night was very fun. The good time was preceded by a frustrating day, which is probably what led to the evaporation of any good sense I may keep stored away in my brain somewhere. The reasons for my frustration can be reduced to the following: I'm a silly person and windows sucks. The two are not related.

So sometime after 18:00 yesterday I fled Fitzpatrick in defeat and picked up Mamie and Beth from SMC. Andy joined us at my place shortly afterwards and we watched "Ranma 1/2 the Movie 2: Nihao my Concubine." It was a very entertaining film, Ranma 1/2 continues to amaze me. I then dropped Mamie and Beth off at SMC since they weren't interested in going out with us.

Andy and I then both drove over to Cari's. I brought my car since I figured if I drive, I won't drink much. However, after a short while at Cari's I realized the night had the potential to be very fun, so my car got left behind and Andy drove us all downtown. We went to Benchwarmers to see a benefit show. I think the money was going to leukemia research or something. But three campus bands played. NRQ, the Skammunists, and Lester. It was a good show, each band played for about an hour or so. Unfortunately the crowd was kinda lame, there was little dancing for most of the time. But I did my part to compensate for that. I also bought a $3, 5 track NRQ cd they had for sale. After NRQ finished playing I got all the band members to autograph the liner notes. I think they enjoyed that. Very fun show.

After the show we headed to a party at castle point. The way there was a lot of fun. I chatted with some Tennessee fans on the street (I was polite, I'm a good ND fan) and I generally made a fool of myself. I also was named an honorary Kenso by some of Cari's friends who were visisting. The party was fun for a while. I had fun talking to various people. Later it got kinda annoying, though, so I took off.

This morning I woke up feeling very sore. It's been a while since I've been sore like this from dancing. My neck really hurts, and for about the first hour after I woke up, I could barely walk, my right leg hurt so bad. So feeling the way I did, I skipped the first half of the game, instead watching it on TV with Meagan. I got to the stadium for the second half, and just in time, too. I got into the stands right before the interception ND ran back for a score. The game went better than I was expecting. We actually gave the Volunteers a run for their money. But in the end, we made too many silly mistakes and that cost us the game. Oh well.

I don't remember what else there was. So I guess I should go get my car from Cari's house now.

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unavailable entry

entry #1140, Fri, November 02, 2001, 14:13 (unknown)

sorry, this entry is not available for you to see.

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cool talk, empty ndlug room

entry #1139, Thu, November 01, 2001, 19:07 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

I really enjoyed the talk given today by Amy Murphy, titled "Enabling disconnected transitive communication in mobile ad hoc networks." A lot of the stuff they're doing is pretty preliminary, but it was interesting just to see their ideas and their plan of attack. Dr. Murphy seemed uneasy when asked for justifications for her work. She listed a few applications, which seemed to me (and to Dr. Kogge) to be enough to justify further research, but she seemed to lack confidence when trying to justify her work. I found that unfortunate. Talks are always better when the speakers are confident that what they are doing is worth their time. But beyond that, I liked what she presented.

I took a piece of paper and a pencil along with me and jotted down a bunch of random thoughts, some related to the talk, and some not. Some of them are very short and on paper lack anything resembling context. So I decided it'd be fun to write some of them down here, keeping their context to myself.

play with numbers
person area network
network etymology
beacon
quasi
economics in artificial systems
efficacy
merge
shadow
your values will change

Actually, I should probably provide context for the last one, since it's pretty funny. Dr. Murphy was talking about applications for her work at the end of the talk, and mentioned that she could probably get a lot of funding for the military applications of her work, but that she was not willing to go that way. Dr. Bowyer told her "Your values will change." I thought that was funny.

The engineering open house was today. The college is trying to convince the current freshmen that engineering is for them. NDLUG participated by having the NDLUG room door propped open and a few of us sitting there, ready to answer questions. We had four people stop by, three of whom were actually interested in Linux. Not a very exciting turnout...

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Halloween fun

entry #1138, Thu, November 01, 2001, 00:42 (Life in General)

Meagan and I set out today to wreak some trick-or-treating havoc. But by the time we actually started making our way to houses, it was nearly 21:00, and we quickly found out that the trick-or-treating hours had been limited to 17:00-19:00. So we knocked on a few doors with little luck. We did get some candy at Rebecca's, and later we stopped by Paul's since he had promised me vegan cookies. Max was dressed up as Buzz Lightyear, he was very cute. After all that, we watched Rocky Horror Picture Show with Adam (a fencer) and some other people. It was an entertaining night.

The moon was definitely very cool tonight. It was the first full moon to fall on halloween in 46 years. Or so I've been told. Very neat.

So I've gotten some complaints about the lack of entries lately. I offer no apologies or excuses. But I have been taking notes of my doings, and if you're lucky, I may share some of them with you. But to sum everything up, life has been very good of recent.

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good weekend

entry #1137, Sun, October 14, 2001, 17:24 (Life in General)

Friday was a good day. I didn't wake up until about 13:30, having stayed up late making waffles the night before. I made some slight changes in the preparation method, and so while the waffles ended up tasting about the same as usual, they were definitely a little softer than normal. I was happy with those results.

Friday evening I prepared dinner for Andy, Cari, Meagan, and myself. I made a chickpea and tomato stew. It turned out decent, though I had expected better, since the recipe had been hyped up a lot. We then went by Cari's for a while before returning to my place to find that Branden, Brian, and Arun had appeared (and been shocked by the cleanliness of the apartment). We then watched "Nothing to Lose" which was amusing, though I quickly realized I'd already seen it.

After the movie most people took off, so Meagan and I ended up hanging out and talking for a long while. Meagan is pretty cool. And her birthday is the same as mine. I finally escorted her back to Farley at about quarter to six in the morning.

Saturday was also a good day. The football game was lots o' fun, and I got soaked. So after that I curled up under a warm blanket for a while, read some Tolkien and drank some green tea. Very nice. Then I headed to a party at Cari's house. I ended up spending most of the night talking to Meagan. We ditched out of the party to go to Nick's Patio some time around three (my first trip to Nick's as a vegan). After a brief return to the party, I dropped Meagan off at Farley sometime after four am.

Lastly, Sunday's been a pretty good day so far. I woke up at about 13:00. Went to campus to play soccer at 14:00. Maig Foley, Tim Brick, and Joe Smith were there. So we kicked the ball around for a while. At about 15:00, three students show up with a group of Croatian and Serbian refugees, and ask if we'd like to play soccer with them. Maig and Tim took off, but Joe and I joined them. It was a really good game. I wore myself out pretty good. I may get to play soccer with these people some more in the future, which would be excellent.

So to summarize, this weekend kicked ass.

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Lester

entry #1136, Fri, October 12, 2001, 01:01 (Music)

I followed Andy to senior bar tonight to see a show by a band called Lester. Cari's roommate John is their drummer. So we got there at 22:30 or something and hung out a bit. Various fun people were there, including some of the NRQ crew. Eventually the music started. It was pretty good. It was sort of your typical college alternative variety of music. It was energetic. It was fun. I approved.

I need to get back into the campus music scene. I completely ignored it last year ... I think the only live music I saw on campus last year was at the Hawaii Club Luau, and that's not nearly enough.

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like a banshee

entry #1135, Wed, October 10, 2001, 15:06 (Life in General)

Certain aspects of my life these days are beginning to remind me of middle school, and it's not simply the fact that I'm speaking more German of recent than I have in a while.

I'm rather enjoying myself. Unfortunately, I'm really tired right now and thus I've found myself unable to focus on doing any work today. So instead I'm writing down (some of) the results of whatever random thought processes are currently coursing through my brain.

I definitely appreciate that the latest VLSI homework I did allowed me to draw pictures with crayons and colored pencils while pretending I was doing some sort of serious mental exercise.

I desire a greater understanding of punctuation rules in English (or American) grammar.

I've finally made my way through one of the most boring parts of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. As much as I appreciate Tolkien's storytelling, there are parts that just drag on forever. I remember having difficulty with this bit last time I read the books. But my rate of progress has increased again as I have found myself back in an interesting part of the story. I'm nearly done with the Two Towers. I watched a new trailer for the movie yesterday and am more excited than ever for it to come out. In the words of Mr. Sordi (who is wise in the ways of Hobbit-lore), "December 19 can't come quick enough."

Last night Andy, Cari, Meagan and I watched "The In-Laws" with Peter Falk. It was a zany comedy, and I would have enjoyed it simply for what it was, but the fact that it included a "like a banshee" reference turned it into a superb film. And I always did like Peter Falk.

Number of times I proofread this log entry: 4. Sadly this isn't really above average.

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quien sabe

entry #1134, Tue, October 09, 2001, 13:40 (Random Crap)

- What is "Dammit woman, your banshee-like behavior darn near got us killed!"?
- Correct for $200.
- I'll take "Phrases I'd like a valid excusse to use someday" for $400, please.

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new feature: graphs

entry #1133, Mon, October 08, 2001, 00:45 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

So, being the generally envious person that I am, I simply had to have a log feature to match Arun's blood sugar count thingy. So I wasted a little time hacking together such a beast tonight. It's really kind of independent of the main body of the log, but it is another means of logging stuff. Basically, I can store data points in the db, and then create graphs on the fly of those points. It's kinda cool. Thing is I've not yet figured out too many cool things to graph. I was only able to come up with two things so far for which I have sufficient records to graph them: my weight and the mileage on K2. So if you're curious, you can visit the Pete's Log page and find the graph pulldown menu in the navigation bar and choose a graph to look at. The graphs are generated on the fly, through the wonders of php and gnuplot, and bezier approximations are computed and shown for the data as well. I don't have any plans currently to integrate the graphs with the email features of the log. But I am looking for suggestions for things to start tracking and graphing.

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Tribe Called Pete represent represent-sent

entry #1132, Sun, October 07, 2001, 13:55 (Life in General)

Recently, a girl asked me "uh, do you always talk this much about demons?" It's been an interesting week. The inhabitants of the campus hobbit hole stole K2: my car was towed. But they gave it back. I also helped hang tapestries at Cari's house. That was entertaining. Later I got to see Andy get breathalized. He wasn't even remotely intoxicated. And at some point I made a mean vegan chili.

Last night I ended up at a party in the enchanted forest. I ended up drinking yummy green stuff. The NRQ crew was there, so I bugged them some. I made them promise to inform me of their next show, or face dire consequences. I was worshiped for being the vegan overlord that I am. It was a fun time.

Arun has "agreed" to answer to the name "la longue voie d'acc�s"

The bad news is we have no more cable. The good news is we have no more cable.

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pim thoughts

entry #1131, Wed, October 03, 2001, 20:12 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

programs do not randomly segfault. there must be a race condition in pilsner somewhere. It segfaulted on me under unusual circumstances today, and try as I might, I can't reproduce the segfault. But since the unusual circumstances under which the segfault occured were circumstances I didn't want happening anyway, I simply modified the code to not allow those circumstances.

I've resigned myself to the fact that PIM Lite is going to be slower than an intoxicated walrus. That's just the way it's gonna have to be, and that's ok, since it's a prototype system anyway. So I'll plug away at slow prototype OS code, but I will also focus on the future and attempt to get involved in the ISA design of the real PIM chip in order to ensure it doesn't find itself as crippled as PIM Lite is. The number of system calls that PIM Lite programs will have to make in order to accomplish anything reasonable is going to be absurd.

I'm becoming frustrated with the lack of communication that seems to be going on in our department. My biggest gripe right now is that PIM seems to be a lost soul, wandering through the post-apocalyptic world that the apparent demise of HTMT has left us in. PIM knows it has potential, but without a guiding force to steer it towards a specific goal, PIM is having a tough time figuring out what it wants to be. This irritates me. It's hard to weigh tradeoffs when you have no ultimate motive. But alas, I still enjoy it. Cuz I've got PIM fever!

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puma?

entry #1130, Mon, October 01, 2001, 13:10 (Random Crap)

Strange events led to the creation of this mp3. First I posted my pumaflop idea. Then Perk suggested alternate pronounciations for the word "puma" and directed us to m-w.com where we downloaded different pronouncations of the word. Arun then began using his mad mixing skills, and puma.mp3 is the result...

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Star Trek: Enterprise

entry #1129, Sun, September 30, 2001, 00:06 (Movies)

So initially it looked like none of the stations around here would be playing the new Enterprise series. But as luck would have it, I discovered that the local ABC channel was playing the premier tonight, so I got to see it.

I rather enjoyed it. The story was fun, the effects were cool, the eye candy was good. I thought the acting was good enough. The series definitely had elements of the typical Star Trek cheesiness, which is acceptable, but it wasn't overwhelming, which is good. I didn't have any trouble distancing Bakula from his Quantum Leap role, and I felt he did well. I really like quite a few of the characters, and I'm thinking this show has good potential for growth. The Star Trek franchise seems to have found itself a future for a while longer.

The only real problem, and it was a bad problem, was the theme song. It sucked. A lot. They need to change it.

But beyond that, it was quite good. I'll enjoy adding it to my geek lifestyle.

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Notre Dame 3, Texas A&M 24

entry #1128, Sat, September 29, 2001, 17:38 (Sports and Athletics)

Blah. Notre Dame has now started a football season 0-3 for the first time in its history. This time we didn't manage a single touchdown. And we injured a bunch of our players. Oh well. At least we have women's soccer.

But at least some fun things are happening in the world of football. I made an interception today during a scrimmage we held in football practice. It was fun.

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pokemon party

entry #1127, Fri, September 28, 2001, 22:09 (Life in General)

Tonight Mamie and I had a pokemon party. We watched pokemon 3. It was sorta disappointing, but I'm not a huge pokemon fan to begin with. Andy joined us for most of it. I also made a good curry. Coconut milk, curry paste, brown sugar and veggies. A tasty and easy to prepare treat, cooking time less than 30 minutes.

So the test results from yesterday told me more than just if I had ADD or not. They also held other general information about me. So other than the ADD thing, the results said I'm mentally healthy, which is a good thing. I am, however, borderline narcissistic. But that's no big deal, because, hey ... I like me!

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news of the world

entry #1126, Thu, September 27, 2001, 20:17 (Life in General)

Hallo! Du da! Was machst Du?!

I've found an incredible webpage that will empower me to become even more of a hypocritical grammar/spelling nazi than I already am. I am delighted.

I've also decided that I must abuse the word "bankrupt." Phrases such as "That keyboard is ergonomically bankrupt" and "That passage is grammatically bankrupt." Eventually I'll reach the point where "bankrupt" has become so overloaded that I'll have to say "financially bankrupt" in order to convey its original meaning.

I want a girlfriend on the ND women's soccer team. If any members of said team read this log entry, please spread the word and let me know if any of y'all are interested.

I've been reading through the latest issue of the Economist. I'm enjoying it, but it is also making me realize just how inadequate my previous news sources have been. I just read more about Belarus in a short article than I ever have in my entire life. Arun and I are investigating splitting a subscription. It'd be an excellent change in my life if I began regularly reading the Economist and shunned all the mainstream American news sources.

So the results from my tests on Tuesday have been presented to me. So I guess I kinda decided to try to figure my life out to a greater degree than I already have. For a long time I've had a variety of problems that have made life, and especially academic life, more difficult than it should be. A short list of the biggest issues: general trouble focusing, impulsivity, difficulty falling asleep, more difficulty waking up, difficulty budgeting money and time, absentmindedness, and an inability to read technical writing without my mind wandering. So far I've managed to cope with these troubles, but I've come to the realization that I won't be able simply to cope with them any more, now that I'm trying to do research at the grad school level. Projects are simply too big and too lengthy and require more focus and concentration than I've been able to muster so far. So I sought out the university counseling center, and after an initial session, they referred me to some guy off campus to be tested for ADD. Well, those results are in, and I've been told that I am most likely ADD, but that the other possibility is Bipolar disorder, though that is unlikely. So it was recommended to me that I begin treatment for ADD and if treatment works, then I have ADD, and if it doesn't work, it looks like bipolar is the problem. So now I'm going to talk to the UCC people some more and try to figure out what course of action to take now. But I definitely want to do something, I really do like computer science, and I want to do better at it than I am right now ...

I was pretty impressed by the tests, though. When I was taking them, I really didn't expect them to tell much about me, they just seemed kinda silly. But from the results the psychologist guy was able to tell me (accurate) things about myself I never would have guessed he could tell just from the questions asked. So I guess brain doctors deserve more credit than I previously gave them.

Somebody in Australia discovered my frisbee page and emailed me pictures of an actual AOL frisbee. Coolness. I added those pictures to the page. I love the internet.

I have had an idea that will revolutionize the computer industry. I call it the Pumaflop. The idea is to build a supercomputer entirely out of pumas, or mountain lions if you will. A healthy puma will indicate a "false" signal, while a rabid puma will indicate a "true" signal. In order to propogate a true signal, rabid pumas will bite other pumas to pass the signal along. I'm still working on how to propogate false signals, but it may involve either inoculation or maybe some sort of reproductive activities on the part of the pumas. But those are simply details. The main idea, I believe, is sound.

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ugh

entry #1125, Wed, September 26, 2001, 18:29 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

I am the biggest idiot in the world. There I am, adding some more stuff to pilsner. Some, but not nearly all, of the new stuff occurs within a critical section of code. So halfway through implementing this stuff, I decide to go ahead and test that which I've already got. Well all of a sudden there's a huge race condition in my code. So I just wasted a good hour trying to track down this stupid race condition, only to realize that the race condition is simply occuring because I added a while loop inside the critical section I was modifying, but never got around to writing the body of said while loop, leading to infinite loops, leading to locks remaining unreleased. Oof. Stupid me. Moral of the story: don't add while(1)-equivalent loops to critical sections of code. And finish implementing a block of code before you try testing it.

I think it's been rather a while since I've written anything into this section of my log. So the story these days: I've written a simplistic PIM Lite assembler, I'm still working on pilsner, and I'm putting a lot of thought into the PIM runtime. Currently my main focus, other than finishing this simulator, is figuring out the exact semantics for all the privileged instructions we're going to need. The opcode field of the PIM Lite instruction has been changed from 5 to 6 bits, so there are now 32 new instructions that can potentially be added. I'm pretty sure that shift instructions are now a certainty, since they make people happy. And I also think I'm going to try to redefine the semantics of the jump instructions, since right now they're less useful than they could be. Hopefully I can get those changes implemented. And then the big one right now is the "trap" or "int" or whatever you want to call it instruction. How do you context switch? I need to figure out what other multithreaded architectures do as far as privilege and context switches and such.

But now the time is near for this year's first NDLUG meeting.

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Good Ramen

entry #1124, Wed, September 26, 2001, 16:57 (Cooking)

I just had the best ramen of my life. Paul gave me a package of the variety of vegan ramen he's favored of recent. It's a Vietnamese brand that can be found at one of the Asian markets in town. From the outside, the package looks similar to American Ramen varieties, except the English ain't so good, and it says something about being made in Ho Chi Minh city. But open it up, and it's a bit different. The noodles are there and look like what one might expect. But instead of one packet o' flavor, there are three! One packet of spice, one of dried veggies, and one with some oil. Mix all these, add boiling water, and you've got quite the treat. This is Ramen of a most fancy variety. And it is not cheap, mind you. Expect to pay upwards of fifty cents for a package of this stuff. But boy is it ever worth it. yum yum yummy.

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Industry Day 2001

entry #1123, Wed, September 26, 2001, 13:44 (School)

So I made my token appearance at this year's industry day. I even updated my resume a little and dressed up in a blue camouflage shirt. There were very few companies there this year. The numbers I heard were that last year they had 130 companies and this year they only had 60. There were no free tshirts and very few free toys. But I picked up a couple Scitor bouncy balls, an IBM pencil and light and a CIA pin (and, most likely, listening/tracking device). The companies who were there seemed like they were doing less hiring, with the exception of government and government contractors. Several armed forces seemed to be recruiting strongly, as well as the CIA. And Scitor seemed like they were ready to do a lot of hiring. I got to see a few ND alums I knew, Walt Tuholski was at the Scitor booth, Paul Krasicky was at the Lutron booth, and Kevin Brennan was at the IBM booth. So all in all, I guess I can say I'm glad I'm not looking for a job right now. But industry day was still kinda fun.

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crazy juniors

entry #1122, Tue, September 25, 2001, 11:36 (Life in General)

Silly juniors. They've been coming by all day, dropping off comp arch assignments. Apparently their professor told them to drop them off at 355N by noon. Well, it seems that nobody in our office is even remotely associated with that class (except maybe Tony, who is taking the class), and we keep telling them that if they turn the homework in here, it is unlikely to make it to the professor or anyone in charge of the class. Well, apparently lacking the ability to think independently, they all say "Well, I was told to drop it off here" and put it on the couch. Somehow I expected that students at Notre Dame would be capable of taking a more proactive role in ensuring their homework gets turned in at the correct place. So we put a note on the door telling them to go away.

I subjected myself to a battery of psychological testing this morning. It was amusing. I'm curious to see what the results are.

Oh, and after sending all those juniors away, we find out Nadir is a TA for the class and he was supposed to collect them, but failed to inform any of us or to be around to collect them. But regardless, the juniors were still being stupid. I'm pretty sure if I was told to drop my homework off elsewhere or risk not getting credit for it, I'd find that elsewhere. Either way, all this has made for an amusing morning ... luckily we knew of a grad student in another office who is a TA for a course and sent all the people we sent away to her, so all should be well.

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Rat Pack 0, other team 12

entry #1121, Mon, September 24, 2001, 20:32 (Sports and Athletics)

Well, our second game went better than our first. This time we played a team of older MBA's (compared to last weeks MBA's). Our defense did fairly well, we actually forced them to punt and contained them on the 4th down conversions they attempted. But our offense started out pretty weak. But halfway through the game we made some changes on offense, and managed to actually get a few first downs. Of course I only play on defense, so I can't say too much more about how the offense is working. But we're definitely improving. Yay.

I'm very sore. I got beat up a bit during the game. Ouchy.

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Denver 38, Arizona 17

entry #1120, Sun, September 23, 2001, 22:45 (Sports and Athletics)

Today was a strange day in the NFL. The Browns beat the Lions and the Bengals beat the Ravens. Wow. But still, the Broncos shouldn't have a problem against the Cardinals, right? Should be an easy game. Well, I became worried when the Cardinals came out dominating early, going up 10-0. But the Broncos slowly began building something, closing the gap with three field goals. They were helped when the Cardinals gave up two turnovers in rapid succession.

By the end of the first half, Denver finally began to build some momentum. A very nice drive led to their first touchdown, putting them up 15-10. So they go for two points, and totally fake out the defense, making for a very easy conversion, so at halftime the score was finally in Denver's favor: 17-10.

Momentum seemed to favor the Broncos in the second half. After an unsuccessful first drive for the Broncos, the Cardinals fumbled early in their first drive of the half, setting up a beautiful Denver play fake touchdown pass on their first possession after the fumble.

From then on, the Broncos dominated. Final score, 38-17. A fun game.

Brian Griese is looking really good. John Elway would be difficult to follow, and I think between injuries and inexperience, Griese had to struggle a bit during his first few years, but he's coming into his own, and his quarterback ratings these days are amazing.

So Denver has made me happy. The weekend hasn't been a total loss as far as football goes, but I am still somewhat upset about how poorly ND did yesterday. I checked and my suspicions were confirmed: this was the first home opener that ND has lost since I got here. Doh!

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thought by now I'd be on MTV

entry #1119, Sun, September 23, 2001, 16:33 (Life in General)

If only I could travel back about twelve minutes in time. If only ... you know what I'd say?! You'll have to check the bottom of this entry.

Reel Big Fish lyrics floating around in my head: "And someday, maybe she'll come back to me. And I'll say 'why don't ... '" I suppose I'll stop there.

It's been quite the weekend. Brian, George, and Anne all came into town for the MSU game. They got here Thursday evening. So most of us went to Heartland. Friday I was very tired so I did little other than hit the Drummer's Circle, which was cool. Saturday I failed to wake up until after noon. The game sucked. After that I went out to a neat Indian place with a few people. George and I then had us some taco bell and picked up some fun beer, Beck's and a German Hefe-Weizen, and just watched tv for a while. Now everyone is gone again. Broncos play tonight. So hopefully I'll see some football that'll make me happy.

It's 4:20!!!

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Notre Dame 10, Michigan State 17

entry #1118, Sat, September 22, 2001, 21:36 (Sports and Athletics)

This game made me sad. Our offense was horrid, and our defense, though decent, allowed too many big plays. I don't know what more to say. We looked bad. At least our previous two games, Oregon State and Nebraska, we lost against teams that looked good.

At least the band is cool. The pre-game and halftime shows were fun and very patriotic. Everyone was given a printed American flag as they entered the stadium, so during the national anthem and such at the beginning of the game, everyone held the flag high. It looked cool. And for the end of the halftime show, our band and the Michigan State joined forces to play more patriotic music.

Increased security, what? Several news sources were telling us to expect heightened security as we entered the stadium, but I saw none of that. I've definitely had harder times getting into the stadium than I did today...

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what's going on?

entry #1117, Tue, September 18, 2001, 21:25 (Life in General)

The Nimdia virus needs to leave me alone.

Algebra is destroying me.

Waking up at a reasonable hour is becoming increasingly difficult. I need a better alarm clock.

I'm beginning to actually like tofu (I used to feel only ambivalent towards it)

I recently discovered that Travis, the drummer for Blink 182 was previously a drummer for the Aquabats.

Cats are cool.

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humiliating defeat

entry #1116, Mon, September 17, 2001, 21:40 (Sports and Athletics)

So I'm playing on a RecSports Grad/Fac/Staff flag football team this fall. We practiced a few times last week and had our first game tonight. We lost, by quite a bit. I'm not even sure what the final score was, but we didn't score at all, and they scored four times, I think. Doh. And at practice yesterday, I jammed two fingers on my right hand, so typing has become rather painful. But the good news is the team we played (a bunch of MBA's) were supposed to be the best team in the league. So hopefully we'll do better next time.

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S-cubed, v.1

entry #1115, Sun, September 16, 2001, 22:56 (Cooking)

So I have a mission in life. A mission that surpasses all other goals I may strive towards. And it seems appropriate that I discuss this mission in the inaugural entry of the new Cooking topic.

My mission in life is to perfect a sweet and sour sorta sauce. But I've decided the sauce I want should not only be sweet and sour, but also a little spicy as well. And thus my project is s-cubed. I've made sweet and sour sauce before, but I always followed recipes to some degree. Friday night the project began. I was going to combine ideas from several recipes as well as improvise on my own thoughts I've had. So here's what I did for version 1:

Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil
Brown 1 clove garlic and 1 quarter sized slice of ginger in the olive oil
Reduce heat to low or medium low
Add 1 teaspoon "Better Than Bouillon" vegetable base,
juice from an 8 oz can of sliced pineapple in its own juice,
1/4 cup brown sugar,
1 tablespoon ketchup,
1/4 cup white vinegar,
1 teaspoon soy sauce,
A few drops of lemon juice,
1/8 teaspoon of ground black pepper,
1/4 teaspoon of crushed red pepper,
1 1/2 teaspoons of cornstarch

I then fried some sliced green bell pepper, carrots, sugar peas, water chestnuts, and pineapple for a while and added the sauce to that. And served it with rice. Andy and Nicole approved of the end result, but refused to give me any constructive criticism, so I have only my own: the sweet component was quite good, and the sour was decent. The spicy component was too low. Next time around I think I would use a little more ginger, a little more lemon juice, and maybe more vinegar. I'd also like to play around with other vinegars, maybe a red wine vinegar. More spice must also somehow be added.

A few notes: the "Better Than Bouillon" is a jar of stuff I found at meijer. You're supposed to mix it with boiling water to make soup stock. I instead used it in concentrated form. It's potent and is made mainly of various concentrated vegetables (such as carrot, celery, onion, tomato, potato, and garlic) as well as some spices. I may actually try using more of it next time to try to enhance the spicy component, though it will also contribute to sweet.

Proper cooking time is key. When the vinegar is first added, it is overpowering. But it quickly cooks off, and at some point a good balance is struck. But cook it too long and the sourness begins to wear off too much. I think on this attempt I let the sauce cook a little too long.

But overall, I enjoyed the result. So the road to perfection is already starting from a positive position.

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I'm down with OPP!

entry #1114, Sun, September 16, 2001, 04:25 (Life in General)

Yo, which way to bouncyland?

So I got back from a semi-productive evening at fitz at about 1:45 am. On the apartment answering machine I found a message from Randy inviting us to a party at his apartment. So I turned right around and headed to turtle creek. I got there at about 2 am and the party was still going strong, though thinning out a little. Randy was dancing on a keg when I got there. I found out that they were out of beer, but I'd not planned on having much to drink anyway. So I found about half a dozen people I know. Branden and Sordi were there, but left immediately after I got there, and most of the rest of the people I knew filtered out pretty quickly. But I found a corner by the stereo to dance in, with Nicole and some girl whose name I've unfortunately forgotten. Randy joined us regularly, and by 3:30, the four of us were the only remaining partiers. I kept going until 4. It was a bunch of fun, just two hours of dancing. The music was primarily of the Rap/Hip-Hop/R&B variety, and I was amazed that I knew probably 90% of the songs played, and could probably have named the performer for at least half of them. I'm becoming so much more in tune with pop culture.

yeah, you know me.

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stuff and more stuff

entry #1113, Sun, September 16, 2001, 01:21 (Life in General)

"Yes, this is the 7-Eleven, I want to report some juveniles sucking on the Slurpee machine." ... I have no idea where that quote comes from. All I know is I found it as a log entry I postponed some time ago.

I've found it very hard to pry myself away from the news channels on TV these past few days. It's strange. I also discovered that Meijer is all out of American flags. Normally they've got a fairly large selection. And I now know what smelling salts smell like. Paul asked if we could smell some smelling salt when we were at the blood bank on Tuesday. Them things is potent. Paul, Rob, and I each had our heads snap back when we took a sniff of the thing.

So last night I cooked up some veggie stir fry with sweet and sour sauce. And since I am trying to develop a perfect sweet and sour sauce recipe, I wandered to Andy's place to ask him to come give me a second opinion on the sauce. Well, Nicole was there, so she came along and I got positive second and third opinions. After that, I went to a party at Cari McCullough's house with Andy and Nicole. I think we got there at 11ish. We started out playing cards, Andy, Nicole, Cari, Megan (?), and I. We played a game called, I believe, Napoleon, which was quite interesting. After a while that ended, and Andy wandered off to mingle with other partiers. I instead chose to hang out with three very cool girls. I was informed that I am the fourth-hottest guy on the planet. Andy is number five. So 3 am rolls around to my surprise, since I'd figured the party would go kinda slow for me, since I'd slept about three hours the night before. But it turns out I had a lot of fun. I ended up driving us back. Andy's car is interesting, the clutch is quite unlike mine. I like mine better.

Which leads to another interesting thought I had recently. Automatics seem very strange to me now. Not only do I drive a stick, but most of the people who I catch rides with drive sticks: Arun, Andy, Paul, and Rob are all wise and realize the superiority of manual transmission. So when I recently got a ride from somebody driving an automatic, it was kinda strange. And supposedly automatics make up more than 80% of cars on the road. Well, not in my universe they don't!

So hopefully this log entry will arrive properly in the mail boxes of those who wish to receive it. These past few days I've had a hard time trying to focus on real coding I need to do, so in order to at least do some sort of coding, I've hacked in a bunch of new features for my log. Most of them will be transparent to anyone but me, but there is one very prominent new feature users may be interested in: digest mode. If you don't want to get an email every time I add a new entry, you can now choose to get an email for every several entries. And best of all, you determine the criteria for when you get mailed: you can choose to get one email for every x entries, or you can select a minimum number of days that must pass between mailings, or you can choose to receive an email every time (at least) y Kbytes of entry text has been written. As usual, these settings can be changed at http://prijks.esgeroth.org/log/admin/subscribe.php. So with digest mode finally implemented, I am now more likely to write more, shorter entries, since anyone who doesn't want that many emails can simply switch to digest mode.

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sad day

entry #1102, Tue, September 11, 2001, 21:41 (Life in General)

Today I spent several hours at a blood bank, only to be informed that I am ineligible to donate blood because of the vaccination I got a couple weeks ago. But I can give blood in a couple weeks. Paul, Rob, and Adrienne were all able to give blood, so the journey was not in vain. It was amazing how many people were there to give blood. It was definitely an experience to be in a waiting room full of people eager to give blood, watching coverage of events on the waiting room TV. A shuttle from SMC showed up at the blood bank several times.

There's some kinda crazy gas crisis going on in South Bend. Every gas station we drove by was full of cars, with traffic backed up outside the entrances trying to get in. We heard a variety of people talking about gas prices being up to $5 a gallon already, although the signs we saw at stations all advertised costs under $2. So who knows ...

It's been weird listening to people around South Bend talking about this thing. I've heard a lot of people talking about being worried they're going to get drafted.

I've heard many people describe this as a second Pearl Harbor. I do not think they're far off the mark.

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this is fucked

entry #1101, Tue, September 11, 2001, 09:49 (Life in General)

I am in utter disbelief. I've been watching news coverage for about an hour now. I am terrified of what has been happening. Two planes have hit the world trade center and both towers have collapsed. A plane hit the Pentagon. A car bomb went off, apparently, at the state department. All airports nationwide have been shut down, all federal office buildings in DC have been evacuated. The planes were all apparently hijacked planes. Apparently there is another hijacked plane believed in the air near DC somewhere. As Lisa said, "terrorism is bad."

I am horrified that human beings are capable of such actions.

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Broncos 31, Giants 20

entry #1100, Mon, September 10, 2001, 23:40 (Sports and Athletics)

The first Monday Night NFL game of the 2001 season found the Broncos playing their first game at the new (Invesco Field at) Mile High versus the New York Giants.

So first of all, I gotta say Invesco field looks cool. And I'm happy they kept "Mile High" in the name.

So the Giants should be a pretty good team, seeing how they made it to the super bowl last year. But the Broncos looked pretty good, I think, and just dominated the game for the most part. Terrel Davis was playing again and looking good, he had a 101 yard game. Ed McCaffrey was pretty amazing, but then got nailed while going up for a one handed catch and broke his leg ... but he hung onto the ball. Badass. But it sucks that he's injured.

The replacement refs didn't do too good, they missed quite a few calls and made a few bad ones. But most of the calls went in favor of the Broncos, so they got a little lucky.

The end of the first half was fun. Seven seconds left, the Broncos have Jason Elam attempt a 65 yard field goal. He is tied for the NFL record at 63 yards. So he goes for it, and the kick is long enough, but just barely wide. Too bad, it was an awesome attempt. The Broncos need to give him a few more chances, he's sure to break the record. So with one second left, the Giants decide, hey, we can play this game too, so they try a field goal from the same spot, 63 yards in their direction (which would tie the record) ... but they miss by quite a bit.

It was a fun game. Go Broncos!

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Roughnecks

entry #1099, Mon, September 10, 2001, 02:04 (Movies)

When a movie comes with a warning "CAUTION Contains Computer Animation that ROCKS!" you know you're in for a treat. Arun somehow found himself a copy of "Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles: The Pluto Campaign." From what he had heard, this was supposed to be an animated adaptation of Heinlein's book that was much closer than the recent Starship Troopers movie. Tonight we watched this. I knew we were in for trouble when I saw that Paul Verhoeven was the executive producer. Although the computer animation was decent, the movie was in no way a good adaptation of the novel. It generally made little sense and was delightfully inconsistent. We were asked to believe that the humans were fighting horrible battles, outnumbered and such. This concept was difficult to buy, seeing how not a single human character was harmed throughout the film. By the end of it, we found ourselves wondering just how much longer we were to be tormented. So it was pretty awful, but worth a few laughs.

"Lieutenant's insane" - "We're fighting giant bugs on freaking Pluto. We're all insane."

But the best came after the movie ended. Arun decided to play with some of the fancy dvd settings. We discovered we could watch the movie in French with Korean subtitles. This was fun for a little while, because not only could we mock the movie, we could mock the French at the same time...

FF: 0/14, FR: 4/9 (uwuwuwuwu), l: 1000, TTR: 0.6, HT: 5, AE: 3/5, PL: 0.8

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praise the lord and pass the ammunition

entry #1098, Sun, September 09, 2001, 21:14 (Life in General)

I now own my third DVD: Princess Mononoke. This makes me happy. Mamie gave it to me as a late birthday present. Mamie rocks. Most of Mamie's stuff is now finally out of the apartment. Andy and I did discover, however, that the way to impress SMC girls is to carry a large purple and white pegasus around their campus.

This weekend I had two people independently point out to me that they were in Colorado and I wasn't. Perk did so in a friendly way, via email. Hagale did so in a mocking way, via a voicemail. Tony shall suffer. I wish I was in Colorado.

I am waging an epic battle in order to get my laptop booting linux again. The most recent kernel installed won't boot at all, it gets stuck when it tries to set the system clock. This kernel used to work. Other older kernels boot all the way, but the key mappings are all messed up so I had to experiment in order to figure out which keys map to what. I still haven't figured out how to type a space or a '.' ... but I got far enough such that I could bring up an external interface and ssh into the machine. But during my various attempts to get into the machine, it had to be hard rebooted several times. And eventually I got bit by that: extensive file system damage. After a manual fsck, I now have 350 entries in /lost+found. Luckily it seems most of the files in there are either random unimportant documentation or entries from my netscape cache, but I've not gone through all of them ... we'll see how things go. It's been several weeks now since Linux quit working on my powerbook, and MacOS 9 is simply not adequate as a developing environment.

I'm out of shape. I played soccer today with five other guys. I lasted about an hour and a half, but just barely. ugh.

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Nebraska 27, ND 10

entry #1097, Sat, September 08, 2001, 23:03 (Sports and Athletics)

Well, my sixth football season at ND has begun in a manner none of the others have: with a season opener loss. Today ND was defeated at Nebraska by 17 points. At first glance, this loss is really frustrating. At times our team looked really bad. But thinking about it a little more, we ended the first quarter down 17-0, but then managed to be even with Nebraska over the remaining three quarters. I think after being shook up a little bit at first, our defense actually managed to look decent for the last three quarters of the game. Unfortunately, I don't think the same can be said for our offense. We had one good drive that ended in a field goal. Other than that, I think our offense did not look so good. Our touchdown came after a blocked punt that left us inside the Nebraska ten. I was especially unimpressed with LoVecchio, he made quite a few poor passing decisions. But I am optimistic. Our next game we will go into with a bit more experience, and I think we should do alright for ourselves. I just don't understand why somebody thought it was a good idea for our first game to be at Nebraska, especially with them already having played a couple games. Oh well, at least I got some really good food while watching the game at Paul's house.

Oh, and while I'm on the subject of college football: I'm rather enjoying watching Fresno State this season. They are now 3-0, which seems completely unexpected, considering whom they've played so far.

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Strictly Ballroom

entry #1096, Sat, September 08, 2001, 01:51 (Movies)

heheheh. Arun enlightened me with another great film from his collection: Strictly Ballroom. This movie provides an entertaining look at professional ballroom dancing in Australia. It's definitely kinda surreal, and I found it quite funny.

FF: 1/14, FR: 6/9 (wwwuuwwwu), L: 900, TTR: 0.9, HT: 5, AE: 2/5, PL: 0.6

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walk without rhythm and we won't attract the worm

entry #1095, Thu, September 06, 2001, 21:13 (Life in General)

The tradition resumes, but on a brand new day: yesterday was the first wings night of the semester. We had a decent turnout: eight people were on hand to begin again our weekly patronage of BW3's.

I had a lot of fun at senior bar last night. Perhaps a little too much fun. I've been told the soy milk afterwards was a bad idea. But I did get to hang out with a bunch of cool people, so I was happy.

End of an Era: I no longer reside in 355S Fitzpatrick. After two and a half years, they've finally evicted me. My office is now 355N Fitzpatrick. I'm pretty happy with how the new office is, but it's going to take a while to get used to. Katie Moor moved into 355N with us, and rumor has it Jin Xu may be moving in soon as well... It's kinda weird, though, since Rob, Paul, and I are now spread out as far from each other as we can get, so goofing off may be a little harder, but on the other hand, we're at an ideal distance from each other for office football.

Katie, Dog, and I hit the Great Wall for dinner. I had a yummy tofu dish as well as more soup than any one person should eat before a main course.

More advantages of the new office: my bookshelf is now closer, such that I can reach the important books without moving. I have a new table which is lower, and thus better for typing. Also, while cleaning my old desk, I found my Sugar Ray Floored CD, which I've been missing for a while. I'm very happy to have been reunited with it. It kicks ass.

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O Brother, Where Art Thou?

entry #1094, Tue, September 04, 2001, 02:21 (Movies)

"Them sireens loved him up and turned him into a horny toad."

From the Coen Brothers, makers of Fargo and The Big Lebowski, comes a brilliant comedy: Oh Brother, Where Art thou? Starring George Clooney and a bunch of other cool people, this movie is a surreal and loose adaptation of Homer's Odyssey placed in the Mississippi during the Great Depression. My primary concern with the film is that frequently the lines are delivered so dramatically and with such strong accents that I have a hard time making them out. But that doesn't matter much, since the scenes are pretty disjoint, and the overall feel of the movie loses little from a couple missed lines.

Beyond that, I quite enjoyed this film. It was kinda surreal and very funny. I appreciated the acting a lot, and really liked the soundtrack. Beyond the fact that I am sure I would enjoy it again, I really want to watch the film again, just in the hope that I'll catch more funny lines that I missed the first time through.

"Oh, George, not the livestock."

In response to my growing frustration with the spreading of Arun's $-based approach to rating movies (nothing personal, Arun) I've decided to come up with my own movie rating system. It is for my own personal benefit and not intended to enlighten my readers. I figure this movie is a good enough place to start with the ratings:

FF: 1/14, FR: 7/9 (uwwwwwwuw), L: 150, TTR: 1.0, HT: 7, AE: 5/5

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does priceline sell lions?

entry #1093, Fri, August 31, 2001, 22:16 (Life in General)

I've fixed up my log some. Mostly a few bug fixes that affect nobody other than myself. But I also implemented a new feature: the option to automatically be subscribed to all topics. Previously if I added a new topic, a user who wanted to be subscribed to all topics had to manually add the new topic. However, now users can simply select "subscribe me to all topics" and automatically be subscribed to new topics as they are added. As usual, to update your subscriptions, visit http://prijks.esgeroth.org/log/admin/subscribe.php

I was an integral part of a scheme concocted by some of my crazier office mates. Paul was going to pay me $150 to go to a blood bank, let them draw a pint of blood, then tell them I'd changed my mind and take the blood back from them. Paul would then cover himself in my blood and allow a $2000+ thinkpad, which Rob was to purchase for him, to try to eat him. Afterwards, I would get to keep the $150, Paul would get to keep the thinkpad, and Rob would get to keep the unique memories of having witnessed this. It all fell apart, though, because Rob didn't think he was getting a good deal.

I have a new roommate: Sahib Sabbar. It is one badass African Cactus. I think I have given him the best possible name an African Cactus could have. It's Arabic for Sir Cactus. I think. Sometime last night, strange pen circles surrounded the cactus. The cactus worshippers are already at work, and they are swift and silent.

Brian's in town! Brian, Arun, and I went to Elia's for dinner, then returned to the apartment. Branden has joined us, and we are watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

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soybeans make me happy

entry #1092, Fri, August 31, 2001, 17:56 (Random Crap)

this is a test entry that should not affect most people, I think only Arun and I should receive it. I apologize if anyone else gets it by mistake.

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excuse me, you're standing on my neck

entry #1091, Thu, August 30, 2001, 00:38 (Life in General)

The first senior bar trip of the year was tonight. It was entertaining. This year's cups are bright yellow and really kinda ugly, but I had to buy one just out of principle. It was kind of sad, other than the people I was there with, I didn't know anyone there. Back in the day, I used to run into many familiar faces. But I guess that's what's bound to happen now that I am a senior no more.

I now have season tickets for 2001 ND home football games. Section 31, Row 46, Seat 22.

I was wasting time today looking at the online diary of some angst-filled girl, and she had a bunch of little icons and such for webrings she was a member of. One was a Daria webring. Another was an I Hate MTV webring. I sense some kind of internal inconsistency.

while at senior bar, arun and i used our cell phones to call George and Perk, respectively, so that they could, at least in spirit, participate in the first senior bar trip of the year.

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unclean! unclean!

entry #1090, Tue, August 28, 2001, 16:03 (Life in General)

Saturday night we watched Princess Mononoke again. I still like it a lot. Mamie enjoyed it as well. Sunday night Arun, Shelece, and I watched Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, which was juvenile and stupid. I loved it, I laughed a lot. Monday night we held the first Movie Night of the school year at Shangra-Pete's. The movie we showed was Back to the Future. We had a peak attendance of 19 people by my count, but I think total attendance was 21 over the course of the night. A bunch of fun was had. Branden brought some Shiner Bock, I made a bunch of waffles, and Tab was on hand for the brave few willing to taste it.

Stupid ND administration. So being a grad student, I've gotten into the habit of darting at the last minute, as most grad students seem to do. So yesterday I tried to register for two classes, but the system informed me that there was a Registration Hold on my account and that I had to contact the Registrar's office. OK, whatever, so I wander over to the Registrar's office and contact them. I have to talk to a couple people and show each of them that the system will not, in fact, allow me to register. Finally they realize "oh, there's a hold on your account" (which is exactly what the error message said in the first place) and so they go look up who put the hold on my account. It turns out to be health services. Well, ok, I wander over to the health services center. I get sent back forth between a few people, each of whom fills me in on a little bit of information. What I was able to find out was that Health Services had put a hold on my account last october and never bothered to inform me. Apparently you get one free semester after a hold is placed on your account, which is why I was able to register for classes last spring. But the reason for the hold on my account is that somebody suddenly decided that I was not sufficiently immunized. I'm not sure how they let me go for more than four years without telling me this, but oh well. Already I had wasted too much time and had to go to a social gathering at the CSE office to meet new faculty and grad students.

Today the battle continued. I wander to health services again and have to try to figure out what exactly they want me to do. After some back and forth, I have gotten conflicting answers on whether or not I've had enough MMR vaccinations. If I have had enough of them, I still need to provide more detailed dates, but if I haven't, I need to get another shot. I finally just told them to give me another shot, since either way that should allow them to take the hold off my account. So now my right arm is slightly sore, but it now looks like the system is going to allow me to register for classes.

Classes I am registering for this semester: VLSI and Basic Algebra (math 601)

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Shangra!

entry #1089, Sun, August 26, 2001, 17:18 (Life in General)

Arun and Shelece have arrived. Crazy things have been happening. Friday night I made the one of the best batches of waffles I think I've ever made. And their vegan, too! I've added a new topic to the log: "cooking" where I shall share recipes such as the vegan waffle recipe. Subscribe if interested.

So I made waffles and then Arun and Shelece arrived at about 2 in the morning. Arun brought a bunch of tea, which is excellent, since I recently decided to begin consuming more tea and less soda. So I had just bought a tea kettle. The apartment is currently in a great state of chaos, but slowly it is becoming manageable. More than half of Mamie's stuff is gone, Sordi picked up his stuff, and slowly the place is beginning to look less like a storage unit and more like an apartment.

I don't remember what else I've been doing, but life has felt kinda hectic lately. So I shall end with the following: 81 years ago today, the 19th amendment was passed, giving American women the right to vote.

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I'm reading too much Tolkien

entry #1088, Thu, August 23, 2001, 14:22 (Random Crap)

A storm has been brewing. Long have I felt it in the air ere it ever showed itself on the horizon. Quickly now it is descending upon us: Fall semester is near and students are returning in droves to campus. It began as a slow trickle, a few students returning early. Athletes returned to begin their training. Then RCCs and RAs and other such peoples began moving back onto campus. Apartment complexes near campus have witnessed the intrusion of many a moving van. Quickly parking is becoming less available at Castle Point. Today the full might of the storm hit us for the first time, I believe. Long were the lines of traffic making their way onto campus, and campus is bustling with more activity than I have seen in many a fortnight.

Run not for shelter, say I, for long shall this storm last. Instead, embrace it! Embrace the storm and all that it brings. For now the time is near to go scouting for freshman chicks.

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Mamie!

entry #1087, Wed, August 22, 2001, 00:08 (Life in General)

Mamie has returned to South Bend. I picked her up at the airport this evening. We went to Elia's for dinner. Yummy Falafel.

I made my first attempt at vegan waffles tonight. I basically took the recipe I learned from my Dad and replaced all the animal-based ingredients with vegan ones. They turned out decent. They taste kinda strange at first, but once you've gotten used to them, they taste a lot like the non-vegan ones I used to make. I still have a little time to perfect the recipe. I promised to make waffles for movie night next monday, but I don't intend to make vegan ones unless I've perfected a vegan recipe. We'll see how that goes. I don't think I can become strictly vegan until I can be sure that I can continue eating my favorite waffles. One thing, however, is for certain. If I do figure out how to make vegan waffles, they will be much healthier than the ones made by the old recipe ...

While I've been busy about the kitchen, Mamie's been playing Age of Empires. I think I've gotten her hooked.

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Seventeen

entry #1086, Mon, August 20, 2001, 23:38 (Life in General)

Strange things are afoot in this land. Change has settled as a shadow among us, and many things once taken for granted are no more. A long silence (at least by my standards) has befallen my writing, and much has happened that should be recorded. I present, thus, a collection of thoughts, facts, and observations. Explanations are attached to most, but beyond what is written here, no further clarification shall be offered. For on these matters, I have said all that I intend to.

flavorice is ghettofabulous.

It has now been recorded.
I now know how to play euchre.

Andy, Nicole, and Mark S. taught me a few nights ago. Cribbage it ain't, but nonetheless it's fun.
I now own a cell phone.

I like it. I have free long distance and more minutes than even the great Buddha could use in a month, so if you would like a call, let me know. I will not be posting the number online, so if you want it, email me. I named my phone Mononoke. I smile whenever I see my favorite princess' name on my phone's display.
I now have purple hair.

It's not extraordinarily purple, but it's definitely purple. Paul dyed it for me. Paul rocks. It's purple black, so it's rather dark, but in the proper light, one can see the purple. I dig it.
I am now officially vegetarian.

When Andy and I were at the mall the Saturday before last, we saw a bumper sticker that said "I don't eat anything with a face." Our lives were changed forever by this sticker. I have not consumed any meat for a week, and intend to never eat meat ever again. My primary motivation for becoming vegetarian was health reasons. My diet sucks, and by becoming vegetarian, I am forcing myself to think about what I'm eating. And actually, I am strongly considering going all the way and becoming a vegan. Already, I have replaced milk with soy milk, and I do not see myself having any trouble removing all animal products from my diet.

I think moral reasons factor into my decision a little as well. I do not have any trouble with the fact that humans eat animals, this is something that seems natural to me. However, I am somewhat appalled by how industrial agriculture treats livestock. And Paul (who has been vegan for a long time) brought up a really good point: even if something only seems a little wrong, or if you feel that it is only maybe wrong, if it is easy to avoid doing that thing, then there is no reason not to.

And I have discovered that it is really easy for me to cut animal products out of my diet. I do not miss them at all. Granted, I've only been at this for a week, and I'm not yet strictly vegan, but I really doubt that I will ever miss meat or dairy products. Having known Paul for a while now, I know that he eats better than most people I know. The lunches he brings into work always smell incredible. And my first week has been full of delicious foods. My first dinner of my vegetarian life was at Paul's house the night he dyed my hair, he made an amazing Indian meal. Since then, I've discovered, among other things, Elia's Mediterranean Cuisine on 933, as well as some excellent soy jerky at one of the local health food stores.

I hate to go on about this, but I'm really quite happy I made this choice. It has been something that's been on my mind for a while. My freshman year at ND a girl convinced me to become a vegetarian, but that only lasted a few weeks, because trying to switch to a vegetarian diet didn't work too well when I had to live off dining hall food. But now that I'm more independent, it's working rather well. I'm really actually kind of excited by all the new styles of cooking I now want to explore.
Belvedere Vodka is for the devil.
Oscar's is the most amazing place in South Bend.

Andy, Nicole, Mark and I went to Oscar's Friday night. It was excellent. It's a pool hall near Corby's with a great atmosphere. While there, we played some awful pool. Not since the days when the High Elves still roamed amongst men has the world seen pool of such low quality. It was funny.
Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

Some time ago, I decided to reread The Hobbit/The Lord of the Rings before the movies come out. Progress was slow at first, but Brian took his TV out of the apartment some days ago, and since then I have finished The Hobbit and made great progress on The Fellowship of the Ring. I love these books. But now that I'm reading a lot again, I have realized that TV has rotted my brain and starved my soul, and that I am better off without it.
Brigadoon is a cool word.

I only wish I could somehow rewrite the lyrics to the Spiderman song to use the word Brigadoon.
I really like girls.

Girls are the coolest thing in the world. I made the sad realization, however, that, not counting my sisters (whom I love most dearly), there are only about a handful of girls with whom I am really good friends, and of these, only one is currently living in the same state as I. I need to do something about this.
I hate girls.

Not really at all. I love girls. But they make my life much more complicated than it ever needs to be. There is one particular girl whom I had rather a serious crush on, and whom I have been trying to get over for some time now. And I'm finding it incredibly difficult to do so. I've found myself wishing there was some other girl right now that I could be interested in, just to give me someone else to think about, but then when I do notice someone else, I feel bad, because I hope to God that I am not interested in her simply because she's somebody else. Ooof. See? Too complicated.
Some experiences are unobtainable.

I think I would enjoy spending a day as a fourteen year old girl, at a Sugar Ray concert, screaming my heart out at Mark McGrath. Unfortunately, being the twenty three year old heterosexual male that I am, I shall be unable to even come close to experiencing anything like the above during my lifetime.
Feet are beautiful.

I think I've started developing a small foot fetish, and I know exactly who is to blame.
Football season is upon us again.

And much joy is in my heart, for football makes me happy. Saturday I watched some of the Bears/Chiefs preseason game at Paul's house, and Tonight I saw the Broncos play the Packers at Rob's place. Unfortunately, the Packers beat the Broncos 22-7. Oh well, it's only the preseason ...
My left wrist is in bad shape.

The damage my computer-intensive lifestyle is causing to my left wrist is now visibly evident. It's gotten bad enough that it is nearly in constant pain. I visited Health Services today and have been informed that I have Extensor Tendonitis. Yuck. So I'm supposed to keep it wrapped in an ace bandage when typing, I'm supposed to ice it regularly, and I need to either get a lower desk or taller chair.
I'm opening up.

Walls I built up around myself long ago are beginning slowly to crumble. My heart is glad for it.
The Sugar Ray song Even Though makes me smile.

For the simple reason that I can't help but picture a cute little alien singing background vocals.
My inbox is overstuffed.

I have not expunged my inbox since before August began. I've not been good at all at keeping up my email correspondence. I hope to improve. I shall begin by expunging and dealing with all that remains.
Iron Chef South Bend strikes again.

I find it hard to motivate myself to cook anything fancy if I'm only cooking for myself. So I've not put my culinary skills to good use at all this summer. But last night I was given the chance to show off. I cooked an excellent vegan meal for Andy, Nicole, Michelle (whom I had just met) and myself: a potato/tomato soup, white rice, fake chicken in a red wine sauce, and Andy grilled some Portabella mushrooms. As reward for a meal well cooked, I received, in addition to the satisfaction of having eaten an extraordinary meal, a kiss on the cheek from each of the delightful young ladies present. I should cook more often.
I enjoy abusing language.

I possess neither the ability nor the justification to mould language into the beautiful things it is capable of becoming. Yet as is evidenced by this log entry, I still enjoy abusing it for my vile purposes.

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hanging at the mall

entry #1085, Sat, August 11, 2001, 23:48 (Life in General)

Beware world, Pete Rijks is an entirely new person. Due to the influence of Andy, I've realized that unless I'm wearing boots, Ankle Socks are the only real way to go. So I now own six pairs of ankle socks and will begin making those my primary sock variety. Ankle socks are far superior to other socks (unless boots are involved) ... first of all, they are more comfortable, second of all, your feet get less warm (which is probably the main reason they're more comfortable), and third of all, I think they look better when I'm wearing shorts. I think I have very sexy ankles.

Andy and I easily made it past 22:30 tonight. We went shopping at Meijer. Then we encounted a major rough period, but we escaped by going to the mall. We went to the mall with the primary goal of just hanging out there. I don't know if I've ever before just hung out at a mall. But I ended up buying ankle socks, so it turned out to be a practical mall trip after all. It was entertaining.

I have decided that I need to begin saving up a clothing budget. I really need a few good pairs of pants (I need to branch out from just wearing jeans) and I wouldn't mind picking up a few more shirts ...

I've been very emotional the past few days, ever since I showed up in Dayton, I think. It's been strange. I'm still dealing with it, but I've now found myself feeling very content. Which is good.

I think I've also begun feeling a greater appreciation for hugs.

I'm deliriously tired. I should quit before I start sharing more than I want to. Good night world!

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we're just a minor threat

entry #1084, Sat, August 11, 2001, 17:14 (Life in General)

An excellent quote from my Dad that I heard second-hand through Annie: "The only thing tea is good for is if you're really sick and cognac hasn't worked."

I paid somebody to cut my hair on Friday for the first time in five or so years. I'm happy with the cut I got, so I suppose it was worth it.

I talked to Annie on the phone for more than an hour on Friday afternoon. She leaves Sunday on her great adventure to Dallas, so I had to wish her well and give her brotherly advice. I think she'll have a lot of fun.

Rebecca has lent me a couple undergraduate algebra books so that I can be somewhat prepared for math 601.

The apartment is now cleaner than it has been in a number of months. It needed cleaning, and I'd intended to get it done before Arun returned. The cleaning only happened to coincide with a girl visiting later that same day. (yeah, right!)

My sources inform me that Ryan and Ashley Sisson will both be playing varsity soccer at Eldorado. Go them!

Anne visited last night. She's visiting a friend in Chicago today, so she stopped in South Bend for a night. The night didn't start out too great for me, but by the end of it, I was having a ton of fun. Brian, Anne, and I headed to Coaches for a little while. We then went and procurred a couple sixpacks and returned to my place. After a some time, I wandered over to Andy's apartment and found him. I can't offer much in the way of details for the night, but highlights include gymnastics in front of my apartment, me singing along to country music (poorly, I should add), Anne painting Andy's fingernails bright red, me passing out on Andy's floor for fifteen minutes (bringing out Andy's maternal instincts), Anne, Andy, and I heading to Fat Shirleys for breakfast (my first time there), and much more. I finally headed to sleep around 7.

Anne took off at noonish. Andy and I are spending the rest of today attempting to stay awake until 22:30 (just over five hours to go!) so that our sleep schedules don't get too messed up.

oof. I'm tired.

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Music Madness

entry #1083, Fri, August 10, 2001, 20:16 (Music)

So I found myself with some extra cash. Between another cse 232 paycheck, birthday money from parents and grandparents, etc ... I decided that I'd be responsible with most the money. But I spent a decent chunk on entertainment: I bought SLC Punk on DVD and I purchased six new CDs that should help expand my collection in a variety of directions.

Dance Hall Crashers - PurrIf it is possible to fall in love with a girl based simply on her voice, then I have done so. In fact, I've done so twice. The Dance Hall Crashers feature two female vocalists whose voices simply blow me away, they're extraordinary. The Dance Hall Crashers grew out of the ashes of Operation Ivy. Tim Armstrong and Matt Freeman were founding members but left within weeks of forming the band and went on to form Rancid. But Berkeley-based DHC continued on. Their music is an energetic, yet sort of mellow variety of ska-punk. The reason I chose Purr as my first DHC album to buy was the song Cricket, which is the only song on this album I thought I had heard before buying it (turns out there's another track I'd also heard before). Cricket is a simple acoustic song that I find simply beautiful, the vocals amaze me. So overall I'm very happy with Purr ... more DHC will eventually have to be purchased.

Sugar Ray - 14:59Before I begin discussion of this CD, we're gonna rewind back to the beginning of summer and take a look at how Pete became a Sugar Ray fan. I bought a used copy of Floored by Sugar Ray while I was in California. Before then, I was only familiar with the pop hits Sugar Ray had had. I liked those songs enough, and since there were several cheap copies of Floored, I bought one, figuring my CD collection couldn't be hurt by the addition of a little Pop. As it turns out, the CD kicked ass. There were two tracks on the CD that were of the pop variety I was expecting, namely Fly and a remix of Fly. The rest of the CD was very energetic hard rock, but with an entertaining experimental twist. I can see why there were so many used copies of Floored for sale: anyone who had been hoping for a CD full of pop music similar to Fly would have been disappointed. But turns out I wasn't, I was thrilled. So I've now purchased my second Sugar Ray CD. My first impression of the CD was good. Though there is a greater pop element in this CD, it still features a good mix of heavy music. Sugar Ray seems to have diversified even more for this CD. There's several mellow pop songs that I like, there's a couple heavy tracks similar to the music of their first CD, there's one track that's very punk, and there's a hip hop track which features a guest appearance by KRS-ONE. There's also an excellent cover of Steve Miller's abracadabra. I've decided I really like Mark McGrath's voice. I also really appreciate the Sugar Ray sense of humor. The album's name makes fun of the fact that everyone thought they were a one hit wonder after their previous album. Thus 14:59 ... their fifteen minutes of fame are coming to an end.

Minor Threat - Complete DiscographyMinor Threat is a straight edge punk band from the early eighties. In fact, as far as I know, Minor Threat coined the term Straight Edge. The CD is a compilation of all their released music. It's angry, it's youth, it's energetic, it's punk rock. I'm quite happy with it, though I'd heard all of the music on the CD before buying it.

Blink 182 - Take Off Your Pants and JacketThe latest release from Blink. I really like the song Rock Show which is getting a lot of airplay these days. Beyond that, the album has a similar feel to their earlier Enema of the State. I like it, but I think I like Enema better. And I can appreciate that the album still features the Blink 182 sense of humor.

Dixie Chicks - FlyI figured it's about time I add to my country collection again, so I decided I'd go with some very mainstream country. Before buying this CD, I thought I knew (and liked) three songs on it. It turns out there was a fourth song on this album that I knew (and liked), but didn't know was by the Chicks. Overall this is a fun album. The music is good, and I dig the Chicks' voices.

New Order - The Best of New OrderOnce upon a time, I liked New Order. Then came a period of time when I couldn't stand hearing them. Now I'm back to loving them. I was introduced to New Order by Goose (so/jr year roommate) who was quite into them. I liked them for a while, but he overplayed them to the point that I was sick of them. Then I didn't hear them for a long while until I was at Paul's house earlier this summer and heard some New Order there. I realized that I like them again, so I bought the CD. Listening to it, when each song begins I think ... "I know this song ... I really like this song!" So I'm glad I bought this CD. I'll just have to be careful not to play it too often.

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damn, I need some something awful

entry #1082, Fri, August 10, 2001, 02:51 (Life in General)

So, let's see, where do I begin?

My car currently still has half a tank of gas remaining. Which means I managed to go about 270 miles on half a tank of gas. Which means that if my gas gauge is at all accurate, I've achieved gas mileage of about 50 miles per gallon. woah.

What else? Well, Brian is in town. We had lunch today, and we hung out this evening. We went to see Cats and Dogs, which was a ridiculously stupid movie ... it was quite funny, silly, stupid, and targeted at 8-year-olds. Exactly what I needed. I really enjoyed it.

Brian and I spent the rest of tonight drinking Amber Bock and discussing life, primarily girls. Details of Brian's saga can be found at his journal. But needless to say, both of us are slightly frustrated these days. But we had an entertaining night. I got Brian hooked on some new music... and Brian has attributed the following quote to me: "One of them sings while the other one moans"

I helped move stuff into Andy's apartment this morning. But that's not terribly exciting.

Turns out that Dr Freeh was not at all upset about my missing the meeting on wednesday. So I guess the real moral of the story is that I should not get so stressed out about things.

Tomorrow promises to be interesting. We shall see.

ohhhh ... I completely forgot! Congratulations to Paul and Alice! They now have a second son, Will Schermerhorn. Everyone is healthy, life seems to be great at the Schermerhorn place, so I'm really psyched for all of them. Again, congrats!

and finally: u-haul? u-crawl!!

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Dayton?!?!!

entry #1081, Thu, August 09, 2001, 00:59 (Life in General)

The details are boring, but internal dialog less so: Why the hell did I spend last night in Dayton, Ohio? I'm pretty stupid. Whatever, Andy's a good guy, I don't regret helping him, but I am sorry I missed the big ssr meeting, I honestly did not intend to do so. End of story.

Moral of the story? I need to think a little more before spontaneously driving 250 miles away from where I'm supposed to be. But it was an entertaining trip.

So now I have seen the great state of Ohio, and let me tell you, it is, on first impression, not too different from Indiana.

There's been other stuff going on of late, too. But I don't remember most of it. Monday, Andy, Sarah Frost (new grad student type) and I saw Memento. I really liked it very much. More thoughts on it may follow someday, but I need to watch it again. Andy and I also began playing cribbage. He had learned over the weekend, I used to play in high school. I still have a cribbage board. So there it is.

Monday also found me taking inventory of the SSR. I found a bunch of interesting, worthless items.

I think my brain chemistry is starting to get out of whack. My strange sleeping habits of late are likely to blame. I'll take care of that soon.

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Weekend in St Louis

entry #1080, Mon, August 06, 2001, 04:13 (Travel)

Woo! This weekend found me in St Louis, Missouri, hangin' with my buddy George. I had a killer time. Thanks George, you rock!

I departed from SBN at about 13:00 friday afternoon. Traffic on I80 sucked, due to construction I managed to drive only 100 miles in the first 2.5 hours I was on the road. yuck. But I arrived in STL shortly after 20:00. George and I grabbed dinner at Rizzo's, an italian place. The food was excellent. We then spent several hours watching sci-fi channel shows. I wish I got sci-fi at castle point.

Saturday began at the St Louis Bread Factory. Good stuff. We then went downtown and checked out the Arch and the old courthouse. We then hit the St Louis Science Center, which was a lot of fun. We checked out a variety of their little exhibits and then caught a couple shows at their planetarium. The planetarium kicked ass. I asked them how much their projector system cost. 3 to 4 million dollars they said. I guess I'll have to start saving up if I want a planetarium of my own.

Saturday night we went out. George has been hanging out with Helen, a British Au Pair staying in the St Louis area. Helen's sister Louise was visiting her. So we picked the two of them up and then drove into downtown St Louis to the Landing. We hit a few clubs, it was quite fun. One of the places we went was a brewpub, I had their honey wheat beer. I really like unfiltered wheat beers. They're yummy. At some point we ended up back in George's basement, where we hung out and talked about a variety of worthless things. I think I fell asleep about 6, as George and Helen were debating whether whoppers come with mustard on them or not. At some point I awoke, Louise was asleep on the couch, George and Helen had disappeared. So I took out my contacts and went back to sleep.

Sunday, after dropping Helen and Louise off, George and I had an early afternoon breakfast at Denny's. We ate so much food. We then spent the afternoon playing Age of Empires. Dinner was had at a mexican restaurant. 21:00 I departed. I arrived back home at 3. Now I should go to sleep.

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what you say?!

entry #1079, Thu, August 02, 2001, 22:01 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

well, I suppose an assembler for Pim Lite would be a useful thing. So guess who's writing one!

I wish gnome had a GNOMEUIINFO_ITEM_STOCK_DATA macro. GNOMEUIINFO_ITEM_STOCK doesn't allow you to specify data to be passed to the callback function.

Since it reawakened at the beginning of August, Code Red has requested default.ida on malloc 48 times.

PIM lite instructions are 16 bits. 5 bit opcode, 5 bit source, 5 bit destination, and one bit left over for future use. Well, now that I've become involved, it's looking like that extra bit is gonna be added to the opcode, since with the new instructions I'm requesting, PIM Lite will find itself with more than 32 instructions. #1 instruction Pete wants added to PIM Lite: some sort of atomic test and set instruction. How like a system programmer.

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happy birthday, CO!

entry #1078, Thu, August 02, 2001, 08:10 (Life in General)

August 1, 1876: Colorado was admitted as the 38th state. Happy 125th birthday, Colorado!

The South Bend area is apparently suffering some sort of cat epidemic. From what I've been told, one humane society in the area is brought about 20 cats a day. Unfortunately, on a good day, they'll maybe get 10 cats adopted. So they have to put a lot of cats to sleep.

Sometime wednesday afternoon I got an email from Andy telling me to call him if I want to do anything. So evening rolls around and I try calling him several times, but am only able to get a busy signal. So bored and with nothing better to do, I drove to turtle creek and found Andy and Randy outside, trying to do something to Andy's car (his tire's flat). The busy signal seems to be somehow related to the fact that their phone line seems to have been disconnected. So we drink some beer and play some rummy (though with rules I've never heard of before), then later hang out on their deck after their roommate Mike gets back. Finally we hit Corby's. It's rather quiet, but we got to admire our favorite bartender again. We drive around a bit, in search of something happening. August 1 was, after all, the last day of summer session classes. People should be out partying. But we have no luck, so we end up at Baracho Burrito. The night ends, yet again, with me falling asleep at turtle creek while watching Princess Mononoke in Japanese without subtitles.

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Arun Rocks

entry #1077, Tue, July 31, 2001, 18:00 (Music)

Arun, a.k.a. the omnibenevolent, rewarded my 23 years of survival with two CDs: Devo - Greatest Hits, and NOFX - So Long and Thanks For All the Shoes.

I've been familiar with the music of Devo for some time now, I think it's some of my favorite mainstream 80s music. But after Arun brought a Devo tape back from Berkeley, Devo became forever music I associate with Arun. For a while, any trip in Arun's car was accompanied by Devo. And now with this gift, the association between Devo and Arun has been permanently engraved in my mind. Since I'm already familiar with the music on this CD, all I really have to say about it is Devo rocks! I love every song on the CD.

NOFX in many ways embodies punk to me, and ranks highly among my alltime favorite punk bands. Yet despite this, I'd only owned one NOFX album until now. Most of the songs on So Long are similar in nature to the music on Punk in Drublic, the other NOFX CD I own. Angry punk rock full of political and social commentary. Very good stuff. There are a few very fun tracks, though. The song "All Outta Angst" features a quick, fun ska beat and very funny lyrics. One verse talks about moving to Pakistan ... "It's difficult to think about getting laid when you don't even get to see her face" ... the next verse considers moving to Mongolia. The song "Eat the Meek" is funny in a disturbing kinda manner and features a funky reggae beat ... But best of all is the cover of "Champs Elysees." When I was very young, One of my favorite albums in my parents' record collection was a record by Joe Dassin which featured this song. The cover manages to capture the musical essence of the song well, but infused with punk attitude. However, the french pronounciation is pretty bad. It's hilarious. I love it. Thanks Arun!

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oh, you're the guy!

entry #1076, Mon, July 30, 2001, 21:35 (Life in General)

I went to the ND post office today to put some pictures in the mail. When it came time to pay, I pulled out my wallet. The postal clerk woman then says to me "ohhh, you're the guy!" ... I wasn't quite sure how to respond until she pointed out that my duct tape wallet was apparently becoming notorious around the place. All the clerks in view stopped to take a look. I guess looking back a previous clerk who had helped me there recently had been impressed by my wallet. My life is now complete: I have a reputation at the Notre Dame post office.

I have become addicted to fla-vor-ice. I love it.

I forget what else I had to say. But I will add that women should not be putting curlers in their hair while driving. Neither should men, for that matter.

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cellular phones

entry #1075, Sun, July 29, 2001, 23:15 (Life in General)

So, various events and circumstances over the past few months have led me to believe that a cell phone would be a worthwhile geek toy for me to have. So I've begun researching these small gadgets of black magic.

I guess there are a few things I need to figure out. First of all, how many minutes a month would I realistically use on such a thing? Certainly I don't tend to spend a lot of time on the phone, but then again with friends moving off to various corners of the country, who knows...

I could also go for one of the plans with free long distance. That could definitely be worth my while.

Another issue is roaming and such. I do spend most of my time in South Bend these days, but I do make the occasional escape from the area, and I could easily imagine trips being times where cell phone use would be especially convenient.

I guess another important thing to figure out is how much I'm willing to spend every month.

On an entirely different subject, I just saw a preview for the new "Enterprise" series of the star trek franchise. It looks interesting. Who knows.

So anyway, anyone with experience or opinions on the cell phone issue, I would appreciate your words of wisdom.

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damn telemarketers

entry #1074, Sat, July 28, 2001, 21:18 (Life in General)

Last night, at about 20:30, I figured I'd lie down for a little while. I didn't even plan to fall asleep. I woke up again at 6:30, thought to myself "wow, I've been asleep for 10 hours" and proceeded to fall asleep again until 9.

I've been getting messages from AT&T on my answering machine lately. They all go basically like this: "Hi, I'm calling from AT&T to let you know about some new low rates we're introducing in your area. Now would you say you spend more minutes on in-state or state-to-state calls? ... hello? ... hello? Thank you for talking to AT&T." Now, first of all, why on earth would I want service from a phone company that doesn't even understand the concept of answering machines? But secondly, I am amused by the fact that they always say "Thank you for talking to AT&T" after realizing nobody is talking to them. Moral of the story: have a really short outgoing message on your answering machine. It messes with telemarketers.

While on the subject of telemarketers, I got a call some days ago from the Chicago Tribune, asking me to subscribe. I told them I was not interested, and they asked for a reason why. I said something stupid about reading news online or something, but as I was saying that, I realized I should have instead said "I'm illiterate" ... now I'm hoping for an excuse to say that.

I've discovered there's a new Pascal book on my bookshelf at work. My office mates are crazy.

My legs are more sore than they've been in a long while. Today we had record attendance for soccer: there were five of us. So we played a bunch of 2-on-3, and I found myself running harder than I have in a long while. We had a bunch of quick people: Virgil, Ed Kang, Scott Hampton, and math-guy Mark. We also threw a frisbee around some. And since I had ridden my bike in, I had to pedal myself home afterwards. Must stretch some more before going to sleep.

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silly pthreads

entry #1073, Sat, July 28, 2001, 14:52 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

I found myself rather worried today that I was leaking threads in some unimaginable fashion in the pilsner. But then I discovered it was all just due to an oddity in the linux pthreads implementation. please forgive the fact that I'm synchronizing with sleep statements, and consider the following code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <pthread.h>
#include <unistd.h>

void* foo(void* f)
{
  printf("now 2\n");
  sleep(3);
  printf("now 3\n");
  return NULL;
}

int
main()
{
  pthread_t t;
  printf("now 1\n");
  sleep(3);
  pthread_create(&t, NULL, foo, NULL);
  sleep(6);
  pthread_join(t, NULL);
  printf("now 4\n");
  sleep(3);
  return 0;
}

If you compile this code and call the binary threadfu, for example, and then run it and do a "ps aux | grep threadfu" each time it prints out a "now #" ... you may find the same odd results I did. At "now 1" there was one threadfu process. At "now 2" there were three. At "now 3" I see two threadfu processes, and at "now 4" I still see two threadfu processes. At every point, other than "now 1" there was one threadfu process more than I expected. Odd. But at least this should indicate that I'm not leaking threads. The linux pthread implementation seems to be doing that. But at least if I throw more pthread_create's into the code there's only one extra process and not one per thread. I'm guessing the extra process probably serves some useful purpose, such as reaping dead threads.

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ayso national championship

entry #1072, Fri, July 27, 2001, 19:13 (Travel)

So, as previously stated, Ashley Sisson's soccer team, the Rio Vista Elite, won the far west regional championship in the u14 age group. So they went to the nationals, which this year were in Indianapolis. So yesterday I drove down there to watch a few games. When I got there I was informed that the Elite had tied their first game against Kansas City. There were four teams total in the age group, they all play each other, and the top two teams advance to the championship game. The game I caught Thursday was against a team from Georgia. The Elite won 2-0. Friday morning they played against a Virginia team. They needed a win or a tie to advance to the championship game. Unfortunately, they were defeated 4-0. They still had a chance to advance if the Georgia team beat the Kansas City team, but fate would not have it, Kansas City won. But though they didn't make the championship game, it's pretty cool they made it as far as they did. It was fun to watch them play, and I got to see a bunch of family while in Indy.

On the drive to Indianapolis, I picked up a bad sunburn on my upper left arm. Silly me.

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happy birthday to me

entry #1071, Wed, July 25, 2001, 10:15 (Life in General)

Woo. I have survived twenty three revolutions around the sun. I think I'm beginning to get the hang of this crazy trip. I had rather a fun day. I woke up late and headed to campus where I hacked on pilsner a bit. Something odd was afoot on campus, there was some "twirling" competition at the JACC, which I'm sure is to blame for the strange goings-on.

Early afternoon I ditched Fitzpatrick and headed to Bad Andy's place. Andy, Nicole Lopresto, and I watched Magnolia, which, though rather long, I really enjoyed. It was depressing, funny, and delightfully bizarre. I shall have to watch it again sometime.

After the movie we tried to find a sushi place that was open but failed. So we went to Meijer and picked up frozen burritos, ice cream, and beer. We ate a feast fit for the gods and caught some of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Then Andy and I headed out. We went to Corby's. I'd never been there before, but it seems like a fun place. It was fairly uncrowded though. We drooled at the hot bartender and then hung out a while, watching people. There was this punk guy wearing a Clash shirt who had a skateboard and was visiting all the tables, bumming beer off people. He was amusing. After some time, a bunch of Andy's friends showed up. They were cool people to hang out with. We grabbed a table, and just hung and chatted a while. Some token crazy old guy joined us and talked politics with us. At some point we left Corby's and headed to the Ultimate House. Crazy Old Guy followed us there on a bike.

Sometime after 4 Andy and I made it back to his place. We had some more beer and smoked stogies while seated on the Turtle Creek turtles. We then watched Princess Mononoke again, but with subtitles turned off, in pure, unadulterated Japanese. I crashed on his couch well before the movie ended. About 9:30 I woke up, sober, but with an urgent need to get my contacts off. So I headed home. Now I think I shall go sleep some more.

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I dream of Pilsner

entry #1070, Tue, July 24, 2001, 15:17 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

I just realized, while hacking on some Pilsner code, that I had a dream last night in which Dr Brockman told me something about PIM that proved very enlightening and solved an issue I was having. Now I can't remember what it was he had told me. I wonder if it was something that was actually relevant. I think it had something to do with the call instruction and synchronization issues.

I decided it wasn't worth my time to relearn gnome-- and so the pilsner gui is being written in straight c-style gnome which detracts a little from the great object orientation of the project, but decreases R&D time necessary for the GUI. Seems like the right choice to me.

writing simulators is fun. I wonder if I could find a job as a professional simulator-writer.

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Mononoke Hime

entry #1069, Mon, July 23, 2001, 22:20 (Movies)

I spent this evening at Andrew "Bad Andy" Janiszewski's place. He's been telling me about this film "Princess Mononoke" (or Mononoke Hime in the original Japanese), so today I finally got to see it. It was an excellent experience. I learned that Turtle Creek has a pool, I had a superb college-style meal prepared by Andy, and I got to see Mononoke Hime.

This movie was an amazing piece of anime. The animation was quite good, as was the music. But most of all I enjoyed the plot. It was rather involved, and I'm sure I'd have to watch the movie many more times before I could truly understand it. There are a variety of factions involved, and it's hard to tell what the true alliance of some characters is. It's intriguing. And Andy and I agree: a girl that chews your food for you is hot. San (the princess Mononoke) is a true badass. As is Prince Ashitaka. I need to watch this movie several more times.

And as if life wasn't good enough, Junkyard Wars is on tv now.

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adventures

entry #1068, Mon, July 23, 2001, 15:18 (Life in General)

Saturday night at about 2 am (well, so technically it was Sunday morning) I realized I needed a barwarming gift for Rob, and that I wouldn't be able to buy one in Indiana on Sunday. So I drove to Meijer and picked up a 12 pack of Coors. On my way back, as I was driving north along Grape I got to thinking how poor my geographical knowledge of South Bend was, and I realized I'd never followed Grape Road North of Cleveland, I'd always turned West on Cleveland. So I went straight, since I should really know my surroundings better than I do. And I hardly know the area North of Cleveland at all. I mean, I know that that's where they keep Michigan, and I know how to get to a few places on 933 that are North of Cleveland, but beyond that, I'm clueless. Well, Grape turned out to be rather boring once you get North of Cleveland. It immediately turns into a two-lane road and goes through residential areas. The highlight on Grape was that I almost ran a four-way stop because the car ahead of me drove straight through it without slowing down. Then Grape came to an end. I was unwilling to turn around, though, since I was on an adventure, and what kind of adventure doesn't take you across a state line? My first impulse was to turn left, and find Ironwood and follow it into Michigan, but then I decided that I need to discover a new route into Michigan, in case the others I know go bad in an emergency. So I turned right. After a few turns I ended up on a windy road. I'd had to make turns since the roads I was on kept dead ending. After a while I realized I had no idea where I was and only a vague notion of which direction I was headed in. I found it relaxing, driving at night with the windows open, with no destination and only a vague idea of where I was, listening to Gorillaz and the occasional clanking of the beer bottles on the passenger seat. But then, after a while and to my great surprise, I ended up on 933. I actually didn't realize it was 933 until I'd been driving on it a while, so I'm not even sure I made it into Michigan, but it's likely that I did, since I was pretty far north on 933. So that was my adventure.

Rob and Adrienne have built, with the help of Rob's brother John, a bar in their basement. Sunday night was the grand opening. We had a fun time. The bar is built quite well, I was impressed. Darts were played, and I didn't pull Rob's dart board off the wall once! A record for me. I was designated driver for myself and Paul, so I quit drinking after a few beers, but Rob and Paul were fairly drunk, and John got wasted. It was funny. The night ended with Rob, Paul, and I hanging out in the tree house in Rob's yard. I think previous owners of the house must have had kids.

A few days ago, I stubbed three of my toes against the bathtub wall while getting out of the shower. It really hurt. One of the toes has turned a bit blueish and I think the nail may come off. I share this only because this is the worst thing that's happened to me in some time. Life is pretty good.

Bob Sisson and family are in Indiana for the week. Ashley's soccer team made it to the nationals, which are in Indianapolis later this week. Today they came to ND to visit, since Ryan is considering ND. So I had lunch with them at South Dining Hall (it's been a while...) and wandered around with them a bit. Fun stuff.

So it looks like Annie is going to be in Dallas this next year, doing an apprenticeship with a theater. That should be a lot of fun for her. I'll have to drive down there sometime and visit. Alexandra Trifone will be at SMU, so I could see her too if I make it down there. I'm thinking maybe fall break.

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stuff

entry #1067, Sat, July 21, 2001, 22:49 (Life in General)

happy birthday, route 66! Mother Road turns 75.

played some soccer with Virgil and Maig today. We mainly just kicked the ball around, but we were out there about 90 minutes until our activities were interrupted by the sprinklers around us turning on. So then we played in the sprinklers a little while.

I watched at least two episodes of The Real World today. I'm ashamed to say I kind of enjoyed watching the show. Something must be wrong with me.

I just got some spam from "Hush Communications Corporation" which opened with the following line: "Hackers/big brother/even the government are all spying on you!" ... now maybe I'm wrong, but I'd always thought "big brother" generally referred to the government. But if it doesn't, and since I don't have any actual brothers, I must ask "who is Big Brother?"

I discovered a "sleep 1" statement in my afs .logout. It's been there a long time, since I was totally accustomed to the delay when logging out. I even have suspicions as to why I put that line in there. But there's no longer a point to it. So I've removed it. Now I get confused by how quickly I get logged out.

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Gorillaz

entry #1066, Fri, July 20, 2001, 20:18 (Music)

Since substitute teaching 232 has provided me with some unexpected extra income, I decided it was time I finally buy some new music. It has, after all, been like a month and a half since I've last done so. I ordered the Gorillaz CD on monday. It arrived today.

Gorillaz is an interesting concept. I first encountered them on June 14, watching MTV late at night. I saw their song "Clint Eastwood" and wasn't drawn in as much by the music as I was by the animated video. I soon discovered that Gorillaz is a "Virtual hip-hop group". The group is the creation of Blur's Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, creator of the Tank Girl comic. A group of apparently well-known musicians, most of whom I'm unfamiliar with are responsible for the actual music. But Gorillaz is said to be composed of four cartoon characters, animated by Hewlett. They are 2-D, the cute but spacy singer/keyboardist, Murdoc, the spooky, possibly Satanic bassist who is the brains behind the group, drummer Russel who is equally inspired by "Farrakhan and Chaka Khan" and is possessed by "funkyphantoms" that occasionally rise up and provide some zombie-style rapping, and last but not least, Noodle, a ten-year-old Japanese guitar virtuosa and martial arts master. As far as concept goes, this band is pretty original, it seems to me. So I ordered the CD.

Before ordering it, I got addicted to the "Clint Eastwood" song. On occasion I would stay up late watching MTV, hoping they would eventually play the song. Though I have seen Gorillaz categorized as Rap and Hip-Hop, most of the CD is a mellowish pop sort of music. But it's full of interesting sounds, scratching, horns, flutes, sampling and more. Only a few of the songs actually feature rapping, but I like the rapping it does feature. Though mellow, the sound isn't boring, and after a few more listenings, I think I'll really like this CD.

"Clint Eastwood" still stands out among the rest of the songs, though. It's likely to get stuck in your head, it's already spent plenty of time stuck in mine. And if you get a chance, watch the video. I really dig the animation.

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oh yeah ...

entry #1065, Fri, July 20, 2001, 19:55 (Life in General)

I remember now ... I taught cse 232 again thursday morning. I gave them a quiz, covered strings, and was then available to answer questions since they've a test coming up soon.

I find it strange and mildly disturbing that there's more traffic at 7:30 am than at 12:30 am.

Somebody needs to invent some sort of nail clipping device which can guarantee the bit of nail you just clipped won't go flying into the distance, only to blend in with the carpet and be rediscovered days later when you step on the pointy bit of it.

I've noticed recently that occasionally there is ash on the floor in one of the stalls in the bathroom near my office. I'd been wondering if somebody is smoking in there. Today I found an empty cigarette package with chinese (I think) writing on it in the stall. Since the bathroom has good ventilation, this doesn't bother me, but I do find it silly.

I have never programmed with threads because I thought it would make my program run faster. I've always programmed with threads because it was a better paradigm for the particular program I was writing.

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email trouble and beyond

entry #1064, Thu, July 19, 2001, 22:11 (Life in General)

The OIT needs disbanding. Their primary and backup dns guys both went on vacation at the same time. hrmmm. In their absence, all dns entries for wizard (wizard.cse.nd.edu, cse.nd.edu, www.cse.nd.edu, etc ...) got deleted. Not only that, they disappeared twice more after the OIT supposedly fixed things. So mail was bouncing and such. But things seem to have returned to normal.

string of the day: "GET /default.ida?NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN N%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%u7801%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%u7801%u9090 %u6858%ucbd3%u7801%u9090%u9090%u8190%u00c3%u0003%u8b00 %u531b%u53ff%u0078%u0000%u00=a HTTP/1.0" ... malloc's gotten 24 such requests today, and that represents a microcosm of what the real world is experiencing. The people responsible for this one certainly did a "good" job.

My bike seems to be functional again. There still remains an issue with the front brake, I hope to resolve that soon enough.

I'm totally drawing a blank as to what else happened this week.

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Pilsner

entry #1063, Tue, July 17, 2001, 13:11 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Pilsner: The Pim Instruction Level Simulator (ner). This shall be my life, at least during most weekdays, until it is usable. Why am I writing a simulator? Because it's hard to write system code if there's nothing to run it on. It's gonna be cool. First, it's gonna be multithreaded, such that it can simulate multiple PIM nodes at once, if necessary. Second, it's gonna have some kinda fancy gui, because there is going to be much information that needs visualizing. Now I just need to find the focus to write the thing.

So I'm also going to write this in C++ and ensure I have well defined structure. I did write a multithreaded, gtk-based simulator in C++ for Forth in programming languages, so at least I've done this kinda thing before. Just not quite on this scale.

I think the biggest issue I have to deal with is the fact that there is a lot of architecture still undefined, and so basically, I'm going to have to make stuff up as I go. So I need to ensure that any decision I make is easily reversed. I may yet start drinking Mountain Dew again, Dr Pepper might not suffice for this task. Or maybe I should drink only Pilsner.

Another issue is statistics. We're going to want to gather a lot of statistics. For example, how many cycles did a particular (architectural) thread execute? PIM threads consist of only an FP/IP pair, but at the simulator level they may consist of more state such that statistics may easily be gathered. hmmmm.

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I like weekends

entry #1062, Mon, July 16, 2001, 01:11 (Life in General)

Friday afternoon I defeated Rob at a network game of Age of Empires by building and defending a wonder. I rule. Friday evening I went to dinner with Rebecca and her parents, along with Maig, Miriam, Todd, and various math people. It was entertaining. Then George and I went to see Final Fantasy. It was an extraordinary and beautiful movie. The animation was simply phenomenal.

Saturday I went camping. Woo. Paul and his family, Rob, Adrienne, Rob's brother John, and I went to Beaver Ridge campground, near Potato Creek State Park. We hung out at the park and rented a canoe and had a bunch of other fun. It did feel kinda silly to be camping 30 minutes from my apartment, but that's ok.

Tonight I saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon at the dollar theater. It was an amazing movie, very beautiful. I think I need to watch it a few more times just to understand it better. The music was wonderful and did well to accent the fight scenes, which were amazing.

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yummy AmberBock

entry #1061, Fri, July 13, 2001, 00:14 (Life in General)

I awoke bright and early at 6:30 this a.m. Extraordinary! Ramzi Bualuan asked me yesterday if I could teach cse 232 for him this morning. I agreed and was then informed the class was at 8 am. oof. I mean granted, I'm pretty diurnal these days, but not that diurnal. But I made it and all went well, I covered the 'this' pointer and operator overloading.

My early afternoon was rather frustrating, somewhere along the line the expense report I filed for USENIX got messed up, so I had to redo it. However, Dr Freeh had me write it up in a spreadsheet this time, and the template I was given was a StarOffice template. So I spent several hours trying to get StarOffice installed on my machine, to no avail. "Dear StarOffice: You Suck! Love, Pete"

I finally gave up and ran it on a sun and eventually got a new expense report filed.

I soon thereafter gave up on accomplishing anything today so I wandered over to Rebecca's office. I ended up wasting away several hours in the math building, I went to the afternoon tea the math grad students do and met several more math grads. Rebecca had made plum bread for this event, it was superb, I had three pieces. We also explored the HHH roof.

I rented Independence Day over the weekend. For quite some time now I'd had a desire to see it again. The DVD ended up being the special edition: it had both the regular version and a director's cut. I'd forgotten how much I like this movie, I find it quite entertaining. The director's cut was typical: some of the unseen scenes were good and some weren't so good. There was an entire new subplot dealing with Russel's family that was not so good, I'm glad they cut it from the final release. But there were some funny scenes that I think would've done well in the final release.

George showed up at 19ish. He's on his way to Michigan to get an apartment and is spending the night here. We had dinner at Hacienda (yummy yummy wet burritos) then tracked down Lisa at her apartment. That ended up being kinda shady. Later we hit Heartland for a little while. They were having some kind of bikini contest sponsored by wrbr, which was entertaining. On our way home we stopped at the new Taco Bell in Roseland. We weren't really hungry, but it was a new Taco Bell, we had to initiate it.

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new area code

entry #1060, Wed, July 11, 2001, 21:14 (Life in General)

South Bend is getting a new area code. The 219 area of northern indiana has been split up into three regions. The northwest is keeping 219, north central (including South Bend and Notre Dame) will now be 574, and the south east will be 260.

The changes won't take effect in a hurry, but soon my area code will become 574.

funky. our area code in Crested Butte changed from 303 to 970 some time ago. my life is suddenly exciting again.

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stupid exterminators

entry #1059, Wed, July 11, 2001, 15:46 (Life in General)

I woke up this morning and found the following message from Paul in my inbox:

"So, that's six penguins, at $30 apiece, and one monkey at $100, for a total of $280. But since you're a friend, we'll throw in one of the penguins for free, bringing your total to $250, payable on receipt. Thanks for doing business with R&P Exterminators."

I knew immediately that today would be an interesting day...

I finally ran into Martha Gibney and gave her the gift her family left for her in May.

Each graduate student is supposed to have 50 square feet of space. We've calculated, and we think our office is about 288 square feet. There's six of us in here, which gives us 48 square feet each. And that doesn't even take into consideration the fact that the several square feet in front of the two doors in here can't be used by any one grad student, so we're definitely getting less than our fair share. We're thinking of annexing some of the hallway and charging tolls.

Oh, and I am the official victor of the great chain fight of summer 2001.

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technological craftsmanship

entry #1058, Tue, July 10, 2001, 17:14 (Life in General)

My CDNOW wish list has grown significantly in the past week or so. Two reasons are apparent: I've been discovering new music through fat free radio, and I realized I can save DVDs to the wish list. I only hope CDNOW stays in business long enough for me to find a job that pays well enough for me to be able to buy all the things on my wishlist. Or maybe I should isolate myself from the outside world so I quit discovering new music.

I think over the past year there's been an exponential growth in the number of dreams I remember. Through the end of my undergraduate career, I rarely remembered dreams, maybe once a year at most. But it's been picking up, during the school year it gradually increased to about once a month, and over the course of the summer it's slowly been approaching the point where I remember a dream almost every night. It kinda creeps me out, I'm unaccustomed to it, and many of the dreams of recent have been of the variety where it takes me a while to realize it was a dream after I wake up.

I've had several meetings with Dr Brockman over the past week. I'm quite excited about this pim runtime stuff I'm getting into. I feel like I've been given this huge block of clay and been told "go have fun" ... basically, at one end I have an ISA I'm coding for which is not yet strictly defined (I can request changes in the ISA) and I have a vague API on the other end of how the system will communicate with a PIM node, but again, I can influence the design of this API. This is most excellent. It's also looking like I've found my thesis material. I'm cautiously optimistic about that last statement.

Sunday I finally dragged my bike home; it's witnessed a prolonged stay on campus. Today I went and bought a new inner tube. Hopefully I'll be biking again soon. I've polluted enough this summer already.

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fogginess, soccer, memory

entry #1057, Sun, July 08, 2001, 22:31 (Life in General)

Pete's Log has a fog index of 7.619, according to the php translation I made of a perl script Arun wrote. Basically, I cater to the common man.

Saturday I showed up at Stepan fields for some soccer. Virgil was there as well, but nobody else. It was still fun to kick the ball around for an hour, but Virgil is getting frustrated with nobody else showing up. He may give up on trying to organize Saturday soccer. I need to begin looking into the weekday soccer options this summer.

I've started working on pgtc again. It's basically most of what I did this weekend. I'm hoping for a version 1.0 release sometime this summer. I've already added a bunch of cool new functionality. If anyone out there still has use for pgtc and would like to beta test v1.0, lemme know.

I've been amazed by memory usage of late. Let's take realplayer as an example. Most of the internet radio channels I've found use realaudio. But I kept running out of memory. So watching realplayer's memory usage while streaming audio, I saw that realplayer's memory usage increased by about 100K every 15 or so seconds! That's insane! That's awful! And it starts out at like 70 megs, so it runs out of memory in a hurry. I'm not even going to get started on mozilla's memory wastefulness. Luckily fat free radio streams mp3s, and xmms doesn't seem to leak any memory on my system. So it looks like fat free radio is going to become my internet radio stream of choice.

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internet radio

entry #1056, Fri, July 06, 2001, 12:08 (Music)

I have rediscovered internet radio. I'd tried the whole internet radio things years ago, but was frustrated by various factors, including the lack of linux software for such things at the time. But yesterday I brought a sb16 I had lying around at home to work and installed it in malloc and went and found a bunch of cool internet radio channels. Very addictive stuff. fat free radio is a channel run by fat wreck records and plays a bunch of non-mainstream punk stuff. spinner.com has a bunch of cool channels, including a classic punk channel I'm really enjoying.

internet radio: it's like real radio, except it doesn't suck!

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yet another update

entry #1055, Wed, July 04, 2001, 23:44 (Life in General)

What has Pete been up to of late? Let's see...

Tuesday night I ended up at Rebecca's where she had a few people over. It was entertaining, we played a variety of games, including a 1981 edition of trivial pursuit.

Wednesday, a.k.a. Independence Day, I drove with Rob, Paul, and their families about an hour into Michigan to a beach on Lake Michigan. It was a very nice beach, though I was actually confused by the lack of saltwater taste when I jumped in (yes, I know I shouldn't drink the water). It's a shame, now that I've seen how nice the Lake Michigan beaches can be, that I've been here five years and just now made it there. The day was absolutely gorgeous. The water was rather cold, but that makes it all that much more fun.

Wednesday night I sought out the fireworks. I spent a while on Debartolo Quad, where the view was superb: Mars was still bright in the south, the Moon was full or nearly full, and fireworks were visible regularly. I've also been able to see (but especially hear) fireworks from my apartment.

Dr Brockman chased me down in my office Tuesday. He has some PIM microserver work for me. It sounds like really cool stuff, I need to go talk to him some more. Basically, they've figured out a lot of the low level stuff, and they've figured out a lot of the application level stuff. But they need the stuff in the middle ... a.k.a. system software. This is exciting, there's gonna be a lot of fun things to figure out.

I also forgot to mention a fun story from the USENIX vendor exhibition. We stopped by the Zzyzx Peripherals booth. They had a rack of whatever sort of stuff they make sitting in their booth, blinking prettily. I noticed among all the green and red lights, there was one row of blue lights. Intriguing. I take a closer look and ask the guy if those are really blue LEDs. You see, knowing all these cool EE types, I've heard that blue LEDs are really hard to make or something. He says they are. So I ask if they really are as expensive as I hear. He says they're not all that expensive, they only add $200 (!!!) to the cost of the system, which they feel is worth it. I never asked how much the system cost, but I'm guessing if they're willing to spend $200 on blue LEDs, the system is beyond my budget. But I gotta admit, the blue LEDs did look cool.

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grrr

entry #1054, Mon, July 02, 2001, 22:15 (Random Crap)

I think I shall begin an intensive lobbying campaign to ensure that commercials with singing belly buttons are made illegal. ugh. what is wrong with marketing people?

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Usenix 2001

entry #1053, Sun, July 01, 2001, 15:58 (Travel)

Once again, I am back in South Bend. For this log entry, "we" will generally refer to Paul Schermerhorn, Rob Minerick, and myself.

Wednesday morning we departed from South Bend airport to Pittsburgh, and from there to Boston. An uneventful trip. We checked out the hotel a bit: huge. It had a mall on the second and third floors, as well as a pedestrian bridge from the second floor to another mall across the street. Huge conference areas on floors 2-4, several restaurants, and then 30 some odd floors of rooms. We quickly discovered that the elevators sucked (they had 9, but there were still absurdly long waits), but luckily we were on the seventh floor and thus the stairs were our savior.

We met up with Dr Freeh for dinner, ended up at an Indian place. I had the chicken vindaloo, it was quite good, but not as spicy as I expected.

Thursday: first day of the conference. I saw two general track talks: "Virtualizing I/O Devices on VMware Workstation's Hosted Virtual Machine Monitor" and "Magazines and Vmem: Extending the Slab Allocator to Many CPUs and Arbitrary Resources" which were both excellent. I also saw two Freenix track talks: "The Design and Implementation of the NetBSD rc.d System" which was less interesting, it mainly dealt with the politics of implementing the change. And "User-level checkpointing for LinuxThreads Programs" which was decent, but not great. We also checked out the vendor exhibition.

We had lunch at the California Pizza Kitchen, which was an interesting place. I had a Thai Chicken pizza, it was excellent. We had dinner at a Thai restaurant, I had sweet and sour pork, which was also very good. We also explored some of Boston, we found the Boston Tea Party ship and museum, which was very disappointing, and then wandered around the Beacon Hill area and the Boston Commons.

Friday: we ran into Mad Dog Friday morning. That morning I caught two Freenix track talks: "Improving the FreeBSD SMP Implementation" and "Page Replacement in Linux 2.4 Memory Management" which were decent. For lunch we went to a Sushi bar inside the hotel, good stuff. After lunch it was time for Paul's (Freenix track) talk: "User-Level Extensibility in the Mona File System." Paul talked well, but I really hope I'm done with Mona forever now. I then caught another Freenix talk: "The Design and Implementation of a Transparent Cryptographic File System for UNIX" which was quite good. Mad Dog and I then set out into Boston again (Paul and Rob didn't want to walk anymore) and found our way to the USS Constitution (a.k.a. "Old Ironsides") ... very cool. Friday night also featured the Usenix reception. Free beer and tons of excellent food. Mad Dog joined Paul, Rob and I for dinner there. We also finally ran into Seva at the reception (he was supposed to share my hotel room, but we'd not shown up the first two nights). After the reception, Paul, Rob, Seva and I decided to check out the Boston club scene. We wandered towards the Fenway park area, and after scouting a few options ended up in a bar which featured "Dualing Pianos" ... it was a ton of fun, the pianists were excellent, and the place had a good crowd. I proved to be retarded when Paul and Rob tried to get me talking to this really cute blond, but beyond that, a great night.

Saturday we had some issues waking up. I barely made it to a General Track talk I'd really wanted to see, "A Toolkit for User-Level File Systems" which ended up being a decent talk. For lunch we went to a Middle Eastern restaurant which proved to be mediocre, despite a "Best of Boston" award hanging in the window. I then checked out "The Future of Virtual Machines: A VMware Perspective," an invited talk. It ended up being more of a marketing talk than I had hoped for, but it was decent, there were some good questions asked at the end. We then checked out the "Usenix Quiz Show" which was the last event. It was quite amusing. For dinner we found a Vietnamese place, I had a beef curry which was excellent.

Saturday: the trip back. Uneventful, though I took a bunch of pictures from the plane.

Opinion of Boston: Boston was very ugly at first, due to the ongoing Big Dig, which covers much of the city in a layer of construction. I found the amount of honking in traffic irritating, and I was disappointed at the large amounts of trash littering the Boston Common, which was otherwise a beautiful park. But there were many neat buildings, the people were friendly for the most part, and we found a bunch of good food.

oh yeah: Free Stuff. I got two t-shirts, a hat, a Usenix bag and a Usenix frisbee-like thing. Some weird sticker thing. That's all I can think of.

Rob brought an age of empires cd. Since all three of us had powerbooks with airport cards (Paul had Dr Freeh's G4 titanium) we played a bunch of networked age of empires ... on the flights, in the pittsburgh airport, and in the hotel. A very fun game. Wireless is the coolest thing ever. I really enjoyed the wireless network the Usenix people had set up.

pictures available online

Usenix 2001 rocked. Usenix 2002 is in Monterey, CA. I definitely wouldn't mind going there.

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hello from usenix

entry #1052, Thu, June 28, 2001, 13:21 (Life in General)

So we (Paul, Rob, and I) are now in Boston, along with Dr Freeh, at the 2001 USENIX technical conference. It's tons o' fun so far. Detailed notes may follow later. They have airport base stations scattered about the levels the conference is on, so I've got wireless internet access through realloc. Excellent.

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worthless

entry #1051, Wed, June 27, 2001, 04:21 (Life in General)

today witnessed the success of the great ioctl merge of 2001. ... it's been an absurdly long day, but at long last, we posted mona on the ssr webpage. scary. with any luck nobody will download it.

I've realized that there is a small part of me that really wants a corvette.

popcorn shrimp has become my new favorite junk food.

yummy yummy popcorn shrimp.

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stupid strtok

entry #1050, Tue, June 26, 2001, 01:38 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

I hate strtok. I need to rid the monad of it. The monad was, at one point today, "silently failing" ... actually, upon closer inspection, it was segfaulting on a line doing strtok stuff. figures.

mona export transformations work! at least the simple ones. I also got rid of a bunch of the hardcoded values in monad. there's still some remaining, but I'm working on it. uid/gid of the monad is now also set to a proper (I hope -- need to doublecheck what inode I'm looking at) value, instead of to the hardcoded uid of what used to be Rich Kendall's uid on his machine here. heheh.

My current mission is to remove dead code from mona. there is much. I discovered that one point in the code, instead of calling memcpy, calls a function cp_mem2xform, which was defined earlier in the file and is called only once. it is exactly memcpy, but unoptimized. brilliant. I quickly replaced that call with memcpy. But I think Rob loves mona as much as I do, his comment on the matter:

I have no idea why. However, be sure to remain true to the Mona way when        
removing the extraneous code. That is, remove the function CALL, but            
leave the cp_mem2xform prototype and definition.

I was quite amused. ugh. oops. monad process leak. should likely look into fixing that.

In a binge of removing unused and unecessary code, I just removed about 20 variables, 3 macros, 3 functions, 1 struct definition, and well over 100 lines of code. The term bloat is one that, I feel, describes mona well. Of course, removing mona bloat is, at this point, kinda like shooting fish in a barrel.

oh, and word has it I won't be working on mona all summer! haha. not that I was planning to. But once I get back from Boston, mona shall hopefully be a thing of the past. there's rumor of some cool pim stuff Dr Brockman wants me to look into. we'll see how that goes.

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silly weak typing

entry #1049, Mon, June 25, 2001, 16:33 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

This is interesting... the following bit of C code compiles without any warnings, as best as I can tell. I've compiled it using KCC and gcc -Wall.

int main()
{
  void *p;

  p = (struct foobar*) 0;

  return (int) p;
}

I suppose it kind of makes sense that it would compile, seeing how a pointer is a pointer is a pointer, but the lack of warning is silly, in my humblest of opinions. I was messing around within mona, and found several spots where a variable was being cast to a (struct mona_k2u*) but was having a difficult time figuring out what this mona_k2u struct actually was, until I discovered that it actually wasn't defined anywhere. Silly mona.

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Mars, soccer, transmissions, milk

entry #1048, Mon, June 25, 2001, 08:13 (Life in General)

stupid clouds. So Thursday evening, we converged at Paul's house. Rob has a telescope, and we were going to check out Mars. But it was very cloudy Thursday night, whenever Mars was brightest. Oh well, we had plenty of fun anyways. I had a great amount of fun checking out Paul's music collection, which is mainly fun 80s stuff.

Friday I watched Mars a bunch (mainly during kernel compiles), but Rob was out of town so no telescoping...

Saturday I got to play some soccer with Virgil and a friend of his. Great stuff.

I am rather reassured and amused to have found standardshift.com. I wasted some time Saturday evening reading up on how transmissions work and how clutches work and such. Clutches work sort of like I had thought, though there are some things I didn't quite realize. I now finally understand the concept of doubleclutching. I was also kind of surprised by just how vastly different automatic transmissions are from manuals.

At about 3 (Sat night/Sun morning) I got bored of what TV had to offer, and since I'd been wanting a milkshake for several days, I made the trek to the Scottsdale Steak n Shake, visited Lisa, and had a vanilla shake.

Sunday evening I went to a bbq event at Rob's place. Quite entertaining. We played some darts. True to my style, I managed to pull the dart board off the wall a couple times. This is quite amusing, Rob claims nobody else has ever pulled the board off the wall, but every time I've played darts at his place, I've done so. It's because I rule.

During the past week, I've consumed two gallons of 2% milk. I think that's a personal record.

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stupid mona

entry #1047, Sat, June 23, 2001, 00:44 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

well, on the one hand, I really deserve punishment for the following line of code:

if ((pid_file = fopen("/.monad.pid","w")) == NULL) {

but on the other hand, I did write it like two years ago, when my system programming knowledge was still ... pathetic. So I'll forgive myself. besides, it's mona. It's meant to have things hardcoded to absurd values.

oof. Well I finally got mona compiled and running. woo. and then I wasted time adding a non-export-related feature I thought would be useful: a /proc/fs/mona directory containing a file that lists the kernel transformations available. Much easier than poking through the mona source to figure out which kernel transformations exist. woo.

It makes me sad to look at system code I wrote two years ago. It makes me even sadder that it's more readable than most of the export code that wasn't written by me.

hmmm. either I'm just not getting something, or I have discovered the stupidest thing ever: so the monad at some point is given some information by the kernel. It then creates a pipe, fork()s, and then writes the information it got from the kernel, through the pipe, to the child. the child never does an exec() or anything. So what's the point of the pipe? The child should have the information, since it was read from the kernel before the fork() occured. huh what? maybe it's some kinda efficiency thing. ha!

I've consumed 2.591 liters of mountain dew today.

I just got my first kernel panic of the night. Time to go home.

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stupid pete

entry #1046, Fri, June 22, 2001, 18:23 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

I find it necessary, from time to time, to prove to myself that I'm just not that bright. Today the time had come again. I did, however, prove that the 2.4.5 kernel recovers very well from running out of swap space. Much better than the 2.2 kernels that I intentionally ran out of swap space for experimental purposes.

I think the way I treated malloc today can only be described as "abusive" ... the term "beating the crap out of the machine" comes to mind as well. First of all, I had both netscape and mozilla running at the same time. Wasteful, but fair enough. Then I had dozens of eterms open, as well as emacs. Not a problem, usually. Then I was running a kernel compile inside of vmware. Stupid, stupid Pete. But that in and of itself wasn't too horrid. I then proceeded to run dselect and perform debian updates at the same time. Stupid, stupid, stupid Pete. The machine chugged along slowly, swap space nearly exhausted. At this point I decided it would be a good time to switch virtual desktops, forcing a bunch of programs to be loaded back into memory, as well as a new desktop background to be loaded. Oof. malloc hung for nearly five minutes before the kernel decided to kill off vmware and mozilla in order to reclaim some memory. vmware did not die particularly cleanly. ugh. But the system returned to a stable state, and I promptly rebooted it, as a precaution of sorts. I consider myself lucky that my vm linux install still functioned when I launched it again. The moral of the story: I have a swap meter in my gnome panel for a reason. I should pay more attention to it...

So anyway, that's the excitement for today. I've been spending my time of late working on Mona. We had a Mona code review yesterday. And I've been battling to get Mona installed in a linux vm. It's not going as well as I would have hoped. Then once I get that working, it is my assigned task to get the "user" or "export" transformation working. We need this working by Wednesday, when we leave for usenix. So this shall be my weekend. It's amusing that in the code it's called the "user" transformation, but all the Mona papers refer to it as the "export" transformation. Who needs consistency anyway?

Oh, and I saw my advisor today for the first time in about a month. Heh.

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solar eclipsography

entry #1045, Thu, June 21, 2001, 09:39 (Life in General)

August 21, 2017: the next time a total solar eclipse will be visible from the continental united states. I plan to be in its path.

So I went to sleep at like 1 or so, but awoke at 4, and was unable to fall back asleep. Probable cause: my massive intake of mountain dew yesterday. But alas, it is all for the best, I think: I got to watch some awesome live CNN coverage of the total solar eclipse that went on over Africa this morning. Mad props to CNN, they had some excellent footage. I am now so determined to witness a total solar eclipse in person. It will happen, God willing.

Also, Mars is the closest it's been to Earth in 13 or so years. Tonight it will apparently be at its brightest. So y'all go have a look, it'll be in the southern sky.

And though not nearly as cool as a total eclipse, an annular solar eclipse should be visible in most of North America as soon as this coming December. Beware the Belt of Darkness!

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log statistics

entry #1044, Wed, June 20, 2001, 17:39 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

heheh. So since I wasn't having any luck getting back into the whole coding thing through kernel-level C code, I decided I'd hack on some php instead. The preliminary result amuses me to no end (well, there's likely an end, I've just not found it yet): Log Statistics.

It seems that 21.8% of all log entries are made between midnight and 1 am. And the average length of a log entry is 932 characters, with a standard deviation of 1418. Longest entry: 31902 characters.

suggestions for additional statistics are more than welcome.

oh, and yes, statistics are computed on the fly. So after I add this entry, the values given above will likely no longer match those on the page... =)

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oil changes and downtown south bend

entry #1043, Tue, June 19, 2001, 17:55 (Life in General)

Today's been almost a waste of a day. Hopefully I'll find motivation to be productive tonight. I did however get K2 in for service at Gates Chevy World. While they were working on the car, I wandered around downtown South Bend a bit. I really know very little of the downtown area, I know how to get to BW3s and Gates Chevy World, as well as the kerasotes theater way down south, but beyond that, I know little. So I explored. I didn't find much. I discovered a lot of big bank buildings, several parking garages, a large number of health-care related buildings, various restaurants, and a bunch of law offices, and a few other stores that didn't much interest me. So I've not been missing too much in my years of ignorance. I did find the South Bend Public Library, and hung out in there a little. They seem to have a good selection of fiction books (including a bunch of sci-fi titles I've been wanting to read), and it was air conditioned. Maybe I'll return some day.

I was informed that K2 is in good health. So I went to a car wash and gave K2 a bath. Shiny shiny.

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crazy monkey business

entry #1042, Mon, June 18, 2001, 23:35 (Life in General)

The people I share my lab with are criminally insane. This is the kind of stuff I have to deal with: http://prijks.esgeroth.org/pictures/albums/Notre_Dame/SSR/monkey1.jpg (see also monkey2.jpg). It's sick. I love it.

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la la la

entry #1041, Mon, June 18, 2001, 00:03 (Life in General)

I've found myself very bored lately. Slowly I've been getting ready to actually spend the summer here. Over the weekend I actually purchased food, cleaned out my car, cleaned up the apartment some, etc. But it seems that of the few people I know around here this summer, just about all of them are gone for the weekend. So I was finding myself increasingly restless hanging out alone in the apartment.

So Saturday night I tracked down Lisa. She's working at the Steak & Shake by the Scottsdale Mall (thanks to Anne for the info) so I figured out when she was working there and found her. Grabbed a snack at the Steak & Shake and chatted with Lisa a bit ...

Driving back, I had the windows down and was listening to Sum 41. I must've looked hip or something: at a stoplight, a car pulls up on my right. The girl driving gets my attention, and she and the guy with her ask me where I'm headed. "Home," I say. "Are you sick or something? It's still early!" I was no longer worth talking to, they pulled up closer to the car in front of them, out of communications range. Hip no more. But how did they know I wasn't headed somewhere after I got home?

Not that I was ... I went home and watched a few hours of quality tv, including Sheena and Relic Hunter.

I saw something interesting: a 1-800-flowers.com (an interesting name in and of itself) commercial with a woman using a laptop that was obviously a G3 powerbook. But I couldn't see the apple logo on the back. So I looked closer when they showed the front of the laptop, and I could tell that there was electrical tape or some such covering the little apple logo above the screen. Kinda just makes me wonder. That's all.

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Tomb Raider

entry #1040, Sat, June 16, 2001, 01:03 (Movies)

Being trendy, I made it to a movie on its premier night. I saw the new Lara Croft Tomb Raider movie tonight. So I guess the first point to make is that I never played the Tomb Raider games, so I lack that background. But the plot of the movie seemed self-contained, so all was well.

I thought this movie was a lot of fun. And that's just about all I was expecting. So observation the first: this may come as a surprise to some of you, but I think Angelina Jolie is hot! And the Lara Croft character is a badass, so Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft alone is about enough to make a movie worth watching. But I read an entertaining quote by Jolie about taking on this character. Something along the lines of her cup size being a C, the game's Croft being DD, so they compromised and made the Croft in the movie a D. I'm amused.

The action sequences and computer animations were excellent for the most part. Some bits were kind of odd, I'm not entirely sure what they were trying to accomplish at parts. But the shots of the planets lining up were definitely cool.

Let's see: plot. This movie actually managed to have a plot. Nothing extravagant, intricate, or complex, but enough to be fun. The elements of the fantastic definitely appealed to the 12 year old inside me. There were plenty of "yeah, right" moments, but Bond movies are full of those too, and I like those. There were a few odd supernatural moments (beyond the obvious statues coming to life sorts of supernatural moments) that never seemed to be explained in any way, and that kind of bothered me, or would have, had the plot been of more importance to me.

But overall, it was the perfect sort of "turn your brain off and enjoy" kind of movie.

I had also intended today to make my way to the dollar theater at the Scottsdale mall to see "Josie and the Pussycats" which is playing there. Unfortunately, it took me much longer to find the place than I thought it would (I'm retarded) so I missed enough of the movie that it wasn't worth going in late. But at least I now know where the place is. So I can try again later. Josie and the Pussycats looks like a silly movie, and worth a dollar.

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worthless observations and the springfield conspiracy

entry #1039, Thu, June 14, 2001, 02:28 (Random Crap)

"I don't hate mainstream Americans. Mainly, I think I just pity them."

Funky little me. I feel so proud of myself for coming up with observations like that. I'm as deep as the ocean. You could drown in all my thought. But as you're gasping for a final breath that won't come, you'll be thinking: at least it's beautiful. Thank God for that.

Incoherent Mudslide

With frequency great enough to be appreciated, I hear the following statement: "That would be a great name for a band." But what I wonder is why don't I ever hear any of the following?

That would be a great name for a book.
That would be a great name for a river.
That would be a great name for a street.
That would be a great name for a disease.
That would be a great name for a reality TV show.
That would be a great name for a apartment complex.
That would be a great name for a strip mall.
That would be a great name for a spreadsheet program.

We have come to expect oddness in band names. It's the industry standard.

While on the topic, a quick note to myself: check out a band called Gorillaz.

I got curious again. Uh oh. So I'd often heard that there's a town called Springfield in every state. Time to verify how true this statement is.

As best as I can tell, there is not a town called Springfield in every state. However, there are 34 states that have a town called Springfield: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. Also Delaware does have a town called Springfield Crossroads.

For contrast, 36 states have a town called Oakland (two more states have towns with Oakland in their name), 8 states have a town called Miami (5 more with variations of that name), 3 states have a town called Happy (27 more states have towns with Happy in their name), and only one state has a town called Crested Butte.

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trip pictures!

entry #1038, Wed, June 13, 2001, 16:32 (Travel)

Pictures of my great excursion have been posted: http://prijks.esgeroth.org/pictures/index.php?pageType=folder&currDir=./Trips/AYRTABTU ...

enjoy, there's lots!

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All Your Road Trip Are Belong To Us

entry #1037, Wed, June 13, 2001, 03:03 (Travel)

Or: "the American (south-) west for the attention deficient"

Replenishment of the Soul ...

Over the past twenty days I have driven 6507.2 miles through 13 states, checked out four national parks and various state and city parks, become a Sugar Ray fan, visited a bunch of friends and family, spent some quality time with Annie, taken over 200 megs of pictures, and overall had a ton of fun.

I've witnessed the varied beauty and wonder of nature on a small corner of God's earth, and I've witnessed the diversity of human activity thereupon. And I've taken detailed notes.

Pictures for the trip will be posted as soon as I make it to campus and can upload them at a reasonable speed.

Day 1 (Thursday, May 24, 2001)

Miles: 740.8; Trip Total: 740.8

The plan was simple: be on I-80 by 10:00, and follow it west until Omaha, Nebraska, then find B.J. Rozman. What happened instead: I was on I-80 by 10:45, then took a detour: I80 -> I294 -> I90 -> I39 -> I88 -> I80. Due to construction and congestiion in Chicago, I missed the spot where, in order to stay on I80, I had to exit the road I was on. Oh well.

In Iowa, I felt that the state of Michigan had been evacuated, I saw so many cars with Michigan plates. There was a while where I was seeing many more Michigan plates than Iowa plates. Something must have been afoot.

I Arrived in Omaha at about 21:30 and easily found Offutt Air Force Base, where I met up with B.J. Met several of his friends (Jerry, Andrea, Michelle, and Romeo) who seemed like very fun people. B.J. was leaving for Turkey for a couple months friday morning, so he was going to stay up all night, and sleep on the plane. The remaining details of my visit there are unimportant, but I had an entertaining time. At about 2:15 I was still wide awake, so I decided I was going to make it west of Lincoln, NE. Then about 3:30, my halfhearted attempts to find a motel room fail, so I drive another couple dozen miles, then pull over to a rest area and curl up in the back seat.

Day 2

Miles: 708.8; Trip Total: 1449.6

At 9:30 I awakened from my five hour power nap. I hopped into the front seat and off I was again. But I was actually surprised at how well I slept, given the circumstances. Good to know for future reference. I had but one goal: to be in Crested Butte by 20:00 mountain time, for the premiere showing of Annie's movie "The Pudding Project" ... I knew it was going to be close. The drive across Nebraska was uneventful, other than a switch from central time to mountain time, but I got all emotional when I crossed the Colorado border, and then even more once I could first see mountains on the horizon. It doesn't take much to make me happy, just huge piles of rock, really. I tried to take some pictures out of the car window while driving, but most of them didn't turn out too well, so I discarded them. But a few of the later ones turned out pretty good. I took I70 west out of Denver since I wanted to get home quick. I'd never driven that road in K2, it was exciting. Having only driven that route in cars with big engines before, trying to convince K2 to climb those hills really made me appreciate just how big the climb right out of Denver is. I had a fun game: just how high can I take fourth gear? Not that I got to really find out, there were times where even fourth gear wouldn't be able to get above 55 miles an hour. But I was definitely reminded as to why I'd bought a manual transmission (other than the obvious fact that they're more fun).

Oh and I noticed that I was passing Buffalo Bill's grave right outside Denver, after having passed by some other big Buffalo Bill site somewhere in Nebraska. You'd think I was taking a Buffalo Bill tour or something.

I no longer buy anything about the economy going downhill. Just about every truck I saw had a sign on the back saying they were looking for drivers. Driving a semi doesn't seem like a bad fallback career option to me: I like driving and have no problem sleeping in the back of my vehicle.

Then I almost took Cottonwood pass across the divide, before remembering that I'd probably abused K2 enough for one day. So I took Monarch pass instead.

Made it to Crested Butte just in time for Annie's movie. It was a very entertaining film, I'm proud of Annie, it's apparent a lot of work went into the movie. My only suggestion would be that they should've spell-checked the credits. But there was a pretty good turnout, they didn't completely fill the Center for the Arts, but there was a good crowd.

Then I ended up hanging out at Danica's house with Annie and Danica for a while. That was amusing. Danica had a Me First and the Gimme Gimme's cd. We listened to it. It rocks.

Day 3

Miles: 22.7; Trip Total: 1472.4

I slept in today. It was great. Then I got into town just in time to see Pearl Harbor with Mamie, Annie, and Clay. I thought it was a good movie. I felt that the love story was overdone, at times it detracted from the movie, but overall the film was very enjoyable. The action sequences were definitely pretty amazing, I thought. I don't think it lived up to my expectations, though. But that's ok. One thing I definitely liked was the way I felt they tried to show the human side of the Japanese, that the Japanese were not simply a force of evil.

After the movie, Clay ditched us, but we ran into Danica. After grabbing some pizza, Annie, Danica and I came to the condo, where Annie showed me where my Less Than Jake "Greased" cd was. I'd been missing it for some time, and was ecstatic to be reunited with it. We then listened to the cd. It was as good as I remembered.

Then Annie and I met up with a bunch of other family and friends at the Rozman's for a celebration of birthdays for Mark, Evelyn, and Richard. I got to see a bunch of people I've not seen in a while (at least not since the last time I was in CB). I let Annie play with my camera, so I've got a bunch of pictures of people. While there I also watched Game 1 of the Stanley Cup series, Avs won 5-0. Woo!

Then Annie and I headed to town where we threw a football around in the streets in the dark. After a while we got tired of the dark, so we threw it around inside the post office for a while. Then we found Danica yet again, and she threw the football around with us for a while, before we decided to play hackey sack instead. So we played hacky sack in the dark on the streets of CB. Various people (most of whom knew Annie) stopped and played with us a little. Good stuff. Fun day.

Oh my God, I love the stars. They're so beautiful. I need to live someplace where I can regularly see the stars.

Day 4

Miles: 35.3; Trip Total: 1508.3

Today I went to mass, where the graduating seniors in the parish were recognized. Then we went to Annie's graduation, which lasted longer than I'd have liked, but that's the way these things usually work. Then a reception afterwards at the Depot. So congratulations to Annie, she's now all graduated and stuff. Then we ended up at Moon's house: cousins Mark and Clay; Annie and her friends Moon, Danica, and Nina; and Nina's friend Emi (sp?) from Brazil (who spoke excellent English, and who wants to go to Notre Dame). An entertaining time was had.

I got a lot of good pictures today. Many of these pictures were gotten by letting other people play with the camera.

Day 5

Miles: 36.2; Trip Total: 1544.5

I think the highpoint of today was watching "A Knight's Tale." This movie kicked so much ass, it was everything I was hoping for and more. This movie was one blatant anachronism. Basically a teenage soap opera type of movie, set in medieval times where jousting has become the national pasttime. This movie blended all the best elements of your typical teenage romantic comedy with elements of NASCAR, professional wrestling, and fake medievalism. It rocked. I laughed so hard, so often. "Well, the Pope may be French, but Jesus was English!" And I have to admit, considering what this movie was, I thought the acting was more than decent, and the action sequences were definitely cool.

Before the movie, I went by the Alpineer and bought some camping supplies. I'm psyched to own some of this gear myself now.

After the movie, we went to the Rozman's for dinner. A fun time.

Day 6

Miles: 566.2; Trip Total: 2111.1

Early departure from Crested Butte. Got K2 serviced at John Roberts, had breakfast with Mamie, Mom, and Annie, went shopping, paid my car insurance, and then Annie and I hit the road. We took US 50 west out of Gunnison, stopped briefly at the Black Canyon, then caught I-70 west out of Grand Junction. Stopped in Green River, UT for lunch at a nice little campground. Also played some hacky sack there. Then we drove all the way to the west end of I-70. I always thought it went all the way to the coast, turns out it just dead-ends somewhere in Utah. We then grabbed I-15 south and made our way to Zion National Park, where we are camping tonight. On our way to Zion from I-15, we drove through a little town called Virgin, which we found quite amusing, especially Annie, and especially when we passed a store called "Virgin Goods".

I discovered today that K2's cruise control will give up if it falls below ten miles an hour lower than it was set to. While this definitely makes sense, I still find it kind of irritating, since if you're going up a hill, you may not notice that you're gradually losing speed, until all of a sudden the cruise control turns off and the car slows down in a major hurry as the engine suddenly finds itself with no gas.

Day 7

Miles: 281.3; Trip Total: 2392.4

Zion: a Hebrew word that means "A place of refuge" or some such. Zion National Park is one of my favorite places of the world. In the middle of the desert of south-west Utah, the Virgin River has cut a deep canyon into the earth. The Virgin River is, I believe, the steepest river in the U.S. and the Zion Canyon is filled with a great diversity of ecosystems and life. Truly an amazing place.

It has been far too long since I slept outside. Woke up at 8:30 after a great night of sleep. We had breakfast, packed and cleaned up our campsite, and began a busy touring schedule of Zion National Park. They've added a convenient shuttle system to the park since I was last there in order to cut down on traffic. We took the shuttle up to the Zion Lodge and hiked the full Emerald Pool trail, about three miles. We then had lunch at the Lodge. After lunch we rode all the way to the last shuttle stop, and did the Riverside Walk up into the narrower canyon. After that, we rode the shuttle back down, stopping at most stops to look around. At the Weeping Rock stop we hiked up to the Weeping Rock. By 16:30 we left Zion.

We arrived in Las Vegas at about 18:30 local time (which is now Pacific time), grabbed some food, then drove down the strip right as it was getting dark. We parked somewhere near the southern end of the strip and walked up one side and back down the other, spending about 3.5 hours admiring the various shows going on in front of casinos.

We finally left Vegas and took US 95 north for about 66 miles before finding a place to camp: a rest area near Amargosa Valley, NV.

Day 8

Miles: 549.6; Trip Total: 2942.0

The tent got far too warm, far too early for a good night of sleep. I ended up waking up after maybe four hours of sleep. So after breaking down camp and such, my first order of business was to buy a map of California. I had decided to take US 95 north out of Vegas because I knew San Francisco was generally northwest of Las Vegas, and US 95 was the only major road out of Vegas going northwest.

Once I had a map of California, I was able to formulate a better plan of attack of how to drive west from Amargosa Valley to get to San Francisco. I ended up deciding to take US 6 into California, then catch US 395 to CA 120, which led through Yosemite National Park. So we lunched in Yosemite and looked around some as we drove through. CA 120 was a really fun drive, not just through Yosemite, but also up to Yosemite and down again afterwards. Interstates are cool and all when you're in a hurry, but the smaller highways have so much more character.

CA 120 dumped us into the San Francisco area interstate system, I think we took I 205 to I580 to CA 13 into Berkeley. Then without map assistance I managed to find my way to the UC Berkeley campus, I was impressed. After that, however, I had some issues finding Fort Awesome, since nobody there was answering the phone and since the sun was low and making it impossible to read street signs. But I found the place, and then found Perk and Frick, who went to dinner with Annie and I at a Persian Restaurant, which was quite good. We then met up with Arun on Telegraph and wandered around a bit before returning to Fort Awesome, where we lounged briefly, before all those with real day jobs decided to go to sleep.

Oh, and I'm not entirely sure I approve of how CA and NV do mile markers. It seems like they may be more informative, but I've found the markers to be harder to read, especially in the dark, than the standard white on green. Also, I don't like the fact that the mile counts reset in every county instead of only at state borders.

Day 9

Miles: 41.6; Trip Total: 2983.6

Today we slept in, which was nice. Nobody was around when Annie and I woke up, so we got into the car and drove to Alameda. I was actually impressed by my own city driving and navigation skills, I found my way without much trouble. I've improved much since my first haphazard attempts to drive in traffic. From Alameda we caught the ferry to San Francisco. There we ate lunch before wandering around Pier 39 and such. Then we took the tour of the USS Pampanito, a WWII submarine I'd toured the last time I was here. Still fun. Then we looked into catching a ferry to Alcatraz, but they were all sold out until after the last ferry back to Alameda, so we simply returned to Alameda and drove back to Berkeley. Nobody was at Fort Awsome, so we bummed around town a bit, I am working on improving my understanding of Berkeley geography. Then we found people. Arun brought Emily to the kommune. So we all went out to dinner at a brewing company on Telegraph. They had some good beer, and the food was pretty good too. And we played some foosball on a Tornado foosball table! Then we just hung out at the kommune for a while.

Day 10

Miles: 39.7; Trip Total: 3023.3

Upon waking up, Perk, Annie and I headed to UC Computer on Telegraph to help Perk with some ppp issues on his computer. I got ppp working, but the modem was not being consistent, so Perk's gonna get a new modem. Afterwards, we had lunch at a Thai restaurant, then bummed around Telegraph a bit. I bought a Sum 41 and a Sugar Ray CD at Rasputin. Then we headed into San Francisco, and bummed around Golden Gate Park a bit, playing on the playground equipment, playing hackey sack, and watching a large drum circle, among other things. Then we picked up Katie Moor from a BART station, then met Arun, Julia, and Frick at Amoeba Music on Haight. I bought another Sum 41 CD there, since the one I'd bought in Berkeley didn't have the song I really liked. We bummed around Haight a while, then went to Kan Zaman for dinner, where Emily met us. After dinner we headed to Golden Gate Park again and did some massive group hacking. We even had some passers-by join us. Fun. Then we returned home for the night.

Driving in San Francisco was interesting. Starting a stick, when on a steep hill at a stoplight, with a car pulled up right behind you is definitely interesting. I stalled K2 for the first time of the road trip in San Francisco. But not on a hill. In a perfectly flat area with no traffic: I had left K2 in third gear after stopping at a stop sign. Doh! But I managed all the hills just fine. I can see, though, how if you lived in a city like San Fran, you might want to drive an automatic.

Day 11

Miles: 251.7; Trip Total: 3275.0

Today got off to a slow start. After sleeping in again, Annie and I headed to Telegraph once again, where we bought stuff for Mamie at an anime store. Then after a lengthy departure process, we finally were on the road again. We drove north of the bay where we caught CA 1 (or 101) across the Golden Gate bridge. We then just stayed on CA 1 south for a while, driving right along the ocean most the time. CA 1 is a very fun road. We stopped in Monterey and watched Shrek. I was expecting a funny movie with excellent CG animation, and that's what I got, though the humor was more subtle and intelligent at points than I would have expected. Good flick. We then drove south a while longer and at about midnight pulled over into Kirk Creek campground in Los Padres National Forest, right by the ocean. The moon is nearly full, the stars are out, and we can hear the ocean. Beautiful.

Oh, and K2 passed the 10,000 mile mark today. Yay K2!

Day 12

Miles: 483.4; Trip Total: 3758.4

On the road again. We continue south on CA 1, with frequent stops to check out the scenery. We stop at this place "Hearst Castle" since we'd seen lots of signs for it. It turns out to have a huge, full parking lot, and a giant visitors center, crowded with people. Tour buses are filling up, and we're without a clue as to what this place is. But the visitors center has nice bathrooms, so already the stop is worthwhile. We finally discover that way up the hillside is a huge castle, built by William Randolph Hearst, some wealthy publisher guy. We left without actually seeing the castle, but I've added this to my list of places to return to and explore some day. We had lunch at Hearst State Beach.

Back on CA 1, I had an odd encounter: there was some construction going on, and I pulled up to a flagger who was pointing a stop sign in my direction. After some time, during which no cars came from the opposite direction, he flipped his sign to say slow, and I proceeded. After a couple curves, I encounter a red convertible going the other way, in this one-lane area. The flaggers had failed us! Can nothing in this world be depended on?

We stopped by the UCSB campus when we drove through Santa Barbara, and Annie talked to the UCSB people briefly.

In Santa Monica, we stopped by a friend of Annie's, Jesse Zwick, son of Ed Zwick, who is apparently a film person of some note, having been involved in the production of Traffic and Shakespeare in Love, among other things. Apparently Ed Zwick was actually nominated for an academy award recently.

After a brief drive around downtown LA, we headed east, away from our friend, the pacific. We made our way to Joshua Tree, which is now apparently a National Park, and no longer merely a National Monument, as it was the last time I was here. The moon appears to be full and is quite bright, which is cool, since the last time I was in Joshua tree was during a full moon as well, and the place certainly is memorable at night during a bright moon.

Day 13

Miles: 491.4; Trip Total: 4249.8

I had some issues today with my left knee: all the clutching I've been doing over the past two weeks has led to a bit of soreness in my knee. But a little stretching seems to have fixed the problem.

This morning we bummed around Joshua Tree a little bit before heading towards Arizona. I had a fun time looking for route 66, since it's not anywhere on the maps I have and I didn't want to try and look for it on my way out of LA. But in Needles, CA, I found route 66. Trying to follow it, it seems it consists only of brief sections of pavement at a time. So we stayed mainly on I40 instead, but had constant encounters with route 66. Some day I'll download directions on how to actually stay on route 66, and will attempt to follow it in its entirety. For now, it's fun just to get a general idea of what it does.

We arrived at the Grand Canyon sometime before 19:00, so we got to see it in the evening sun. I must say, the Grand Canyon certainly lives up to its name, the thing is enormous. It's cool. I think the Grand Canyon National Park is also the most developed National Park I've ever visited. It's extraordinary. But I guess the place probably does get a good chunk of visitors...

We camped at Ten-X campground in the Kaibab National Forest, right outside the Grand Canyon National Park.

Day 14

Miles: 31.2; Trip Total: 4281.0

Haha! Friends, I have seen the Grand Canyon, and let me tell you, it is Grand! Today we just bummed around on the South Rim, taking the free shuttles to various points along the rim. I quickly gave up trying to capture the canyon in pictures, though I still ended the day having taken a decent number of pictures. The canyon is simply one of the most breath-taking, awe-inspiring, and especially humbling sites I have witnessed. Words can not do it justice, and simply spending one day at the edge just isn't enough. I really want to come back some day and hike down to the Colorado river. Someday I will return and give the Grand Canyon a proper visit. But for now, I'm glad simply to have seen the thing.

We also got some quality hackysack time in, while waiting for the shuttle at the many stops we got off at. I think I may actually be improving a little. At the end of the day, we stopped by the visitors center and bookstore, and I bought two silly items: A National Parks Passport, which is a very touristy thing, but still cool to have, and "Desert Solitaire" by Edward Abbey, which is a silly thing for me to buy, since Abbey's political views kind of frighten me, but it's been good reading so far ... more on that at some later date, hopefully.

After dinner and reading a little, we headed into Tusayan to see if there was anything exciting going on. The best we could find was a McDonalds, which actually turned out kinda interesting. It was almost like a fancy restaurant inside, with antique decorations everywhere, and a fake fireplace. From where we sat it didn't even feel like a McDonald's since we couldn't see the counter and such. Crazy. We got McFlurrys as a dessert of sorts. Then the bathrooms were interesting too, the toilets had signs attached to them saying "reclaimed water -- do not drink" which is definitely an odd thing, it makes me wonder how many people consider drinking the toilet water at McDonalds ...

Day 15

Miles: 432.0; Trip Total: 4713.0

We departed from the Grand Canyon at about 9:00 this morning. At Flagstaff, AZ, we again encountered our friends Route 66 and I-40. We took I-40 east to Albuquerque, stopping for a while at Meteor Crater, AZ. Definitely a neat place, it's a huge hole in the ground, the crater of a meteor impact some 50,000 or so years ago.

Though privately owned, the Meteor Crater site is run very well as a public site. There's a museum, free lectures and guided tours, and, of course, the crater. And apparently all the Apollo astronauts trained at the crater.

We got into Albuquerque before 17:00. We were greeted by Oma and Papa, and Annie was promptly informed she had to go shopping: Mom had set up an interview for her at some school in Santa Fe, and she'd need proper attire. So we went to the mall. I hung out at a bookstore while Oma and Annie shopped. After that was successfully completed, we returned, had dinner, and then I had my first shower since leaving the Bay Area. It was luxurious. Then Annie and I headed to Bob's place and hung out there for a little while, then we found Brian's apartment and hung out with him for a little while.

Slowly, the trip is coming to an end. Already, I'm done camping. I miss it already.

Day 16

Miles: 4.4; Trip Total: 4717.4

We got up bright and early this morning to visit the College of Santa Fe. Oma and Papa drove us down there, we toured the campus, and then Annie spoke with some people there. Seems they've got a good program for theater and film stuff, but I'm not really the person to judge such things. The campus was kind of interesting. Their main building and library and dorms were kind of the typical thing I think one would expect at a small college like this. Then they had this really impressive new art building that was really neat architecturally. Then behind that they had old army barracks and trailers that they were using as the rest of their buildings. Apparently the land the school is on used to be an army base. Definitely an odd contrast of architectures.

Once we got back into Albuquerque, we stopped by Zuna and checked out the new equipment they got since I was last there. We stopped by the Sisson's again later that evening, so I got to see Ryan, along with the rest of the family again. Then we found Brian again and went to a Denny's and had a good meal there.

Day 17

Miles: 418.3; Trip Total: 5135.7

Took off this morning from Albuquerque, leaving Annie behind. She's been fun to have around on the trip. A last minute decision was made to call Isabelle Howe, and I ended up driving to Lubbock, TX to visit her and spend a night. Very cool, Isabelle is a neat person, it's always fun to visit her, and I think it's been at least three years since I've seen her.

I stopped in Tucumcari, NM for some supplies, and had a fun conversation with a woman from Georgia who was on her way to Reno for some kind of bowling competition. I also saw that the Tucumcari High School cheerleaders were having a car wash. I was tempted to pull over for this, but opted not to. Probably for the best.

Arrived in Lubbock at about 16:30. Isabelle, her brother, and his wife were busy in the backyard putting a new roof over her patio. I got to witness (and provide trivial aid to) this process.

Later, Isabelle took me on a tour of the Texas Tech campus. I must say, it is a beautiful campus. Most of the buildings are architecturally similar, and just look very nice. The campus also featured a large engineering area, each engineering discipline with a building of its own, all of them clustered together.

When we got back, game seven of the Stanley cup playoffs was underway. Colorado won, 3-1. Go Avs! Isabelle's brother and his wife live near Denver, so the three of us were cheering for the Avalanche.

I've had a great time visiting with Isabelle. I'm really glad I came this way.

Day 18

Miles: 975.2; Trip Total: 6110.9

Wonder and beauty are everywhere, sometimes you just need to stop and take the time to look. Since it was recommended by both George Coppinger and Isabelle Howe that I take a look, I stopped at Palo Duro Canyon, near Amarillo, TX. Quite a remarkable place. Driving through the grassy plains of the Texas Panhandle, you encounter some slight hills and suddenly find this fairly large canyon opening up before you. I didn't stay long, just long enough to marvel at nature.

Today was for the most part an uneventful driving day. Drove from Lubbock to St Louis, MO. Left Isabelle's at 8:00, stopped at the canyon, took a detour between Oklahoma City and Tulsa, had some issues finding George's place, but in the end I was victorious.

George and I went in search of beer or taco bell, but failed, so 7-11 merchandise it was. Then we watched Dungeons and Dragons, a silly, but amusing movie.

Day 19

Miles: 0.0; Trip Total: 6110.9

The first day in a long while that I've not driven at least a few miles. Quite nice. I woke up sometime in the early afternoon, then after grabbing food headed into downtown St. Louis, where George and I toured the Anheuser-Busch facilities. George had never done the tour, despite living in the area for many years now. It was quite fun. The tour was free, and they give you two free "samples" of beer at the end of the tour. The samples were actually generous, probably 8 oz cups. A fun outing.

We then rented a couple movies, following a Matt Lillard theme: SLC Punk, which is just a great movie, and Wing Commander, which is silly and such, but amusing in that way. We also watched an episode of voyager and went to a bar called Harpo's for a little while.

Day 20 (Tuesday, June 12, 2001)

Miles: 396.3; Trip Total: 6507.2

The End. I'm back in South Bend.

George's Dad took us out to lunch. It was fun meeting him, he's an interesting person. After lunch, we returned to George's place, where we watched the Series Finale of Star Trek: Voyager. George had it on tape. It was kind of neat. I'm glad to have seen it.

I left at 16:00 or so. During my first hour of travel, I managed to drive 25 miles. I never want to live in a place where rush hour is a regular part of life. The apartement is more or less the same as when I left it. Except now there's a large pile of mail (the physical kind) for me to sort through. And I have several hundred email messages to deal with. I think deletion shall be my savior.

You just can't mess with a man's salad. Word up.

K2 K2 did very well. I came pretty close to doubling the mileage on my car. I'm very happy with how the trip went. Of little use to others, but of interest to me is K2's gas mileage, so I'm recording that here as well:

                    odo    gallons   price    sale     mpg
Mishawaka, IN:      6882    9.363    $1.869   $17.50   37.59
Williamsburg, IA:   7292   10.901    $1.779   $19.39   37.98 *
Alda, NE:           7681   10.262    $1.949   $20.00   35.28 *
Keensburg, CO:      8035   10.031    $1.919   $19.25   40.76
Gunnison, CO:       8453   10.254    $1.999   $20.51   39.60   
Joseph, UT:         8830    9.520    $1.799   $17.13   36.24
Las Vegas, NV:      9153    8.912    $1.899   $16.92   34.62
Tonopah, NV:        9397    7.047    $2.049   $14.44   40.30   
Berkeley, CA:       9805   10.125    $2.099   $21.25   28.85
Carmel, CA:        10085    9.704    $1.999   $19.40   38.54
Los Angeles, CA:   10460    9.731    $2.239   $21.79   40.31
Needles, CA:       10798    8.385    $2.259   $18.94   35.94
Tusayan, AZ:       11137    9.433    $2.099   $19.80   39.97
Albuquerque, NM:   11551   10.358    $1.699   $17.60   37.13
Amarillo, TX:      11888    9.076    $1.719   $15.60   40.16
Shamrock, TX:      12254    9.113    $1.759   $16.03   39.62   
Joplin, MO:        12654   10.095    $1.589   $16.04   39.26
Pontoon Beach, IL: 13036    9.729    $1.799   $17.50

mpg for a particular tank is the distance travelled on that tank,
divided by the amount of fuel added the next time

* these two numbers are slightly off, since the tank wasn't entirely
filled in Alda, NE

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entry #1036, Wed, May 23, 2001, 23:11 (Life in General)

this entry contains several days worth of musings. Normally I'd proofread it before submitting it, but I'm feeling lazy, so if it doesn't make much sense, such is life ...

I saw some news thing about gas prices. They were listing the average price for a gallon of gas in a bunch of different countries. Most of them were well over $4. The average price in the US: $1.70 or something like that. And people are complaining about the high price for gas in the US? Huh?

So this is interesting ... recently I added a new module to my "My Yahoo" page called the "Buzz Index". Basically, it has the top five searches overall, and the five searches that have had the largest increase. Now, I find a certain comfort in the fact that Dragon Ball Z has been sitting constantly at the number one overall spot (other than a brief stay at number two while "Mother's Day" was at number one). But I noticed today that the number one mover was "Sylvia Earle" and out of curiosity, I checked out what this "Sylvia Earle" thing was about and apparently Dr. Sylvia Earle is a noted scientist in the field of oceanography. But it seems odd she'd become such a popular search all of a sudden just for her works in oceanography. Well, turns out, there was a question about her on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" this past sunday. So people apparently are looking her up after having seen her name on the show. I like this Buzz Index thing. It allows me to keep track of what popular culture is up to without actually becoming part of it.

Something in my room is ticking. I'm pretty sure this is a new thing. Must be something in one of the boxes stored in my room right now. It took me a while to realize that the ticking was happening, Mamie's stuff has been here like a week and a half or so.

I signed a new lease with castle point today. It's for a full year, so it's gonna be $25 less a month than it has been, which is nice.

I also went by Rebecca's new office in the new math building today. It's a nice office, and she's even got a window! I'm so jealous. Of course, the view out the window is of the side of a building, but at least she can tell if it's light or dark outside. We chatted for a while about various random things, and in the end, I was left with the image of somebody picking up a cat, pulling it real close to their nose, and sniffing real hard, and that's been cracking me up.

I've completed a bunch of other errands that needed doing before I left town, and I bought a power inverter from radio shack. It converts 12 volt DC to 120 volt AC (60 hz) with a sustainable output of 140 watts, the ability to do 200 watts for 5 minutes, and 400 watts for like .1 seconds. Should be very useful on the trip.

I just renewed my registration for esgeroth.org. It's kinda hard to believe I've had my own domain name for two years now.

Now I need to do some packing, then tomorrow morning, I'm off. Chances for any entries between today and June 12 or so are low. So enjoy the break. I know I will.

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wireless!!

entry #1035, Tue, May 22, 2001, 15:11 (Life in General)

This is soooo cool. I'm sitting here, typing up this entry, and there isn't a single wire connected to my laptop. That's right, I've got wireless! Dr Freeh bought an airport card for me to use in realloc. I could wander around the halls and still be online ... how cool is that? I love technology.

So today I actually woke up at noon, which is a good couple hours earlier than the previous few days. Went to lunch with Anne, which was nice, she's getting ready to take off. Now I'm going to try and get work stuff accomplished today, and then spend tomorrow getting ready for the trip. I still have plenty of details that need sorting out. I especially need to figure out what I'm going to do on the way from Albuquerque to South Bend. What I really need is a map of Texas.

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oh goodness

entry #1034, Tue, May 22, 2001, 03:19 (Life in General)

as the result of a brief telephone conversation, my heart is pumping so extraordinarily hard right now. Life makes so little sense sometimes, but it's a crazy ride, and I can only hang on tight and see where it takes me.

oof.

I picked up a hitchhiker in indiana for the first time ever today. He was a big black guy who was missing a few teeth. I didn't figure anyone else was gonna pick him up anytime soon, hitchhiking seems very uncommon in indiana. It was raining. I had a pleasant conversation with him about Colorado and manual transmissions.

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silly stuff

entry #1033, Mon, May 21, 2001, 04:02 (Life in General)

I should use the word anachronistic more often. Actually, I think it'd be even more fun to misuse it: "That there is one anachronistic melon." ...

Tonight's another night o' insomnia. There are two primary reasons: first, I didn't wake up until after 14:00. Second, I was drinking caffeine as recently as midnight. So I'm watching MTV, VH1, and CMT. It amazes me how often the three of them manage to play commercials at the same time. Must be a conspiracy.

There's this commercial I've seen a few times that is trying to sell a compilation cd called "Monster Booty" ... the commercial actually promises that owning this CD will get you friends. It saddens me to think that there are probably people out there that believe this.

I'm also entertaining myself by reading online diary's at diaryland.com. Written by people I don't know at all. Sometimes I think it would be fun to start an online diary for a fictional person and take this person on all sorts of crazy adventures. But then again, I should probably just take myself on crazy adventures instead.

Congrats to all my ND buddies that graduated today. Don't y'all forget to keep me updated with your new email addresses.

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huh?

entry #1032, Sun, May 20, 2001, 15:39 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

I'm slightly upset by this: I just noticed that when I'm in MacOS on realloc, I can't set the number of colors to below 256. Now why would I want to set it to below 256? Because Beyond Dark Castle can only run in black&white mode. And I want to play Beyond Dark Castle!

It really makes no sense to me at all that they don't let me go below 256 colors. Normally I'm all about removing legacy from a system, but not when that prevents me from playing my favorite computer games from days long past ...

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More DA Tributes

entry #1031, Sun, May 20, 2001, 02:11 (Random Crap)

The latest Internet Oracularities (#1218) had two oracularities (4 and 5) that were in tribute to the late, great Douglas Adams. I found them both amusing and appropriate. Read them at IU's oracle page.

I wonder how long I've been subscribed to the Internet Oracularities. I think since sometime my freshman year. It's a brilliant concept.

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calories and freeciv

entry #1030, Sat, May 19, 2001, 05:36 (Life in General)

I've been taking in a lot of calories of late. Thursday Jeff, Siek, Brian, and I ended up going to Fridays for dinner. Friday lunch at Steak and Ale with the cse department. More taco bell tonight. I can't say I mind it.

I also went by a party at Rebecca's thursday night. Saw George Coppinger, Tim Brick, John Schmiederer and that whole squad there, which was nice, since I dunno if I'd have seen them before graduation otherwise. After that, some people congregated at our place and we watched Saving Private Ryan. I regret agreeing to watch the movie, we didn't start the movie until midnight or so, and I was very tired, so I found myself getting annoyed at the movie for dragging on, and ended up not appreciating it nearly as much as I should have. I'm sure it's a movie I really would've liked under other circumstances. One thing that amazed me while watching the movie was just how desensitized I've become to violence in movies. I'm kind of frightened by that.

Tonight George and I had a marathon freeciv session. At 19:30 or so, we picked up taco bell, and then began our gaming. We played until sometime after 4. That's a good chunk of freeciv time. It was tons o' fun. As usual, we played cooperatively, against 5 computer opponents. We got much further into the game than we usually do, I think we were well into the 1800s before we decided to call it a night. Since it is a network based thing, there should be no problem continuing freeciv games next year ...

it's starting to get light out. I'm gonna be very unhappy with my body if it wakes up before 13:00 tomorrow.

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algorithms final problem

entry #1029, Fri, May 18, 2001, 19:28 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

So sometime on Wednesday I went to ask Dr Chen if I could get back my algorithms final. He couldn't give it back to me, apparently due to some university regulations, but he let me make copies of it, which is more than good enough for me. I goofed up on two of the problems, resulting in a 106/120 on the final. Dr Chen spared a little time to inform me of the proper solution to the first problem, which I found rather interesting.

The problem was as follows: given that the 2-partition problem is NP-complete, prove that the i-partition problem is NP-complete. My solution was simply to reduce the 2-partition problem to the i-partition problem as follows: just plug the input set of the 2-partition problem into the i-partition problem with i=4, then group the 4 resulting partitions into 2 partitions. Well, this don't work so well for two reasons, it turns out. First, this won't always work, since there are sets for which there exist 2-partitions but for which there are no 4-partitions: {1, 1, 2} is an example. Second, this would only prove the 4-partition problem to be NP-complete, but not the i-partition problem for an arbitrary i. So the real reduction to use is to set x = the sum of all the numbers in the input set, divided by 2. Then, create a new set by adding (i-2) copies of x to the input set. Then use that as the input set for the i-partition problem. This will give you i partitions of size x. So now all you need to do is remove the (i-2) of these partitions that consist only of the number x, and then you've got your solution to the 2-partition problem. Very cool. I don't know if I could have come up with that solution on my own during the time we had for the test. Algorithms is cool.

so after all that was said and done, I thanked Dr Chen again for an excellent class, and he proceeded to inform me that I'd been an excellent student and had gotten the highest score in the class. My ego does enjoy a good feeding from time to time.

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woo!

entry #1028, Fri, May 18, 2001, 15:54 (School)

So I got invited to this free lunch today with a few other grad students and some of the faculty. This was excellent simply on the basis that it was a free lunch. But I wasn't informed why I was invited until during lunch: I received this year's Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award. I'm pretty psyched. It also came with a $250 check, which definitely makes life a little easier ... so cool. I think my first year of grad school's gone well. I've maintained a 4.0 and I got an award. I'm happy.

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digital camera fun!

entry #1027, Thu, May 17, 2001, 13:30 (Life in General)

Let's see. It's thursday. Life's been interesting of late.

Tuesday I woke up at like 7 am. All on my own. I don't know why. So after Brian woke up, we went to Best Buy and looked at the digital cameras there again, then Circuit City to look at their selection. Then we did a little more web research, and then I headed to Best Buy to buy me a camera. They didn't have the one I wanted in stock. So Circuit City did, so I bought it there. Woo, I now own a digital camera. It's a Sony DSC-P1, 3X optical zoom, 6X digital zoom, 3.3 megapixels. It can take pictures in resolutions ranging from 640x480 to 2048x1536. It can store images in JPG, TIFF, and (I think) GIF format. It can also take movie clips up to 15 seconds long and store those in MPEG format (including sound!). It has a whole bunch of other fun features, but the main thing is it takes high quality pictures.

Later that same day, Brian went and bought himself the same camera. Copycat.

Then I headed to campus and hung out there a while, before George and I went off to conquer Taco Bell. We ordered a Grande Meal with Nachos Bell Grande (that's two Grandes!) and finished it up between the two of us. That's five items each, plus half an order of nachos each. Never have I been as full as I was then. Then we watched tv, including an episode of Dark Angel in which Max was in heat. What a great concept.

Later that night Brian and I ran into Arun at Meijer, and like a duck in its imprinting stage or something, Arun followed us home.

The next day (a.k.a. Wednesday) began way too early. I woke up at 9:30 or so in order to help Arun move stuff. I spent several hours lifting and moving heavy things. There's now more furniture in the apartment. So after that I barely made it to a meeting with Dr Freeh in which we began discussing plans for the summer.

Then ran into Squyres, who's in town, and ended up going to the outback steakhouse with him and a bunch of other people, mainly LSC types. Good food. Then Jeff, Jeremy Siek, Arun, Brian and I ended up at our apartment, with a bunch of beer. Very entertaining. I talked briefly to Siek about math 601 and got some encouraging information from him, so it looks like we're definitely 'GO' on that one for next semester.

I created a picture page on my webpage for storing all the great pics I take with the new camera: http://prijks.esgeroth.org/pictures/. It features evidence of George and I's taco bell accomplishment, proof of just how much junk Mamie is storing in my apartment, and lots of other fun stuff. Anyway, I think that's it for now.

oh yeah, I got invited to a free lunch courtesy the cse department tomorrow. It's some "special graduate student recognition" thing ... looks like I was one of five students invited. Should be interesting ...

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mmm... beer...

entry #1026, Thu, May 17, 2001, 01:24 (Music)

This log entry may be a bit incoherent ... I'm in the process of finishing up my eighth beer of the night...

There is much to tell about the last two days, but in my current state, I would be unable to do the events justice. I must apologize to George now, since I just checked my email for the first time since like 5 pm, and we just now checked our voice mail... Jeff Squyres was in town, it's all his fault ...

Yes, I'm drunk, and yes, this is a worthless log entry. so sue me. I'm off.

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success!

entry #1025, Wed, May 16, 2001, 10:11 (School)

oh, yeah, it looks like I managed to pull off another 4.0 semester. Which means as a grad student I now have 18 credit hours of 4.0. This makes me happy. I rock. It amazes me how well I can do when I'm motivated. I wonder what my undergrad GPA would have been like had I been more motivated during those years...

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and thus it ends

entry #1024, Mon, May 14, 2001, 15:56 (School)

as of 15:30 this afternoon, my responsibilities for the spring 2001 semester have all been taken care of. Finally.

Also, I managed to spend less than 12 hours awake yesterday, thanks to waking up late and taking some carefully arranged naps. Life owes me some back sleep. I plan to do a lot of catching up this week.

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sheena quote

entry #1023, Sun, May 13, 2001, 15:54 (Random Crap)

Quote from Sheena last night: "I need Hillary Clinton to quit asking me for paper towels in my dreams, but that ain't gonna happen."

Some advice for anyone in a class I TA: if you're going to include my name in your answer to a question, spell it right.

I'm about halfway through the stack of finals I need to grade by tomorrow.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

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night falls ...

entry #1022, Sat, May 12, 2001, 23:17 (Life in General)

I keep thinking up brilliant observations on human nature while driving. I can't record them while on the road, and by the time I am in a position where I could write them down, I have forgotten them. Humanity is at a great loss, I fear, due simply to the fact that nobody is willing to hire a secretary to follow me around everywhere and record my every thought.

I've found myself getting sick again, I felt pretty miserable yesterday, and today't not been much better. I've gotten sick like three or four times this semester. Unusual. And not good.

We finished up the comp arch paper, a little behind schedule. It ended up being 42 pages long. 20 of which were code. Woo.

Spent a good chunk of last night moving Mamie out of her room in SMC. That girl has a lot of stuff. My room is now full of Mamie's stuff, and I have a huge stuffed horse with purple wings in my closet. Woah. I got her to the airport this morning and she's off to home.

Tonight is a world of fun. Grading compilers finals and watching tv. Excitement beyond belief.

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noooo!!

entry #1021, Sat, May 12, 2001, 17:44 (Books, Writing, n such)

Douglas Adams is dead. He apparently died Friday of a heart attack at the age of 49. That's so young. He left us with such great books, and it seems a great loss that we'll never get to see the end results of his current projects.

The Hithhiker's trilogy is definitely among my favorite books ever. I don't know how many times I've read the books, but it's been several. And The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul is brilliant as well. The man was a comic genius. He'll be missed, I'm sure.

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exams are done

entry #1020, Fri, May 11, 2001, 14:43 (School)

I've never been this hungry in my entire life ...

Graphics test this morning. Luckily Brian woke me, my alarm clock failed to. Got to the test a couple minutes late. Finished after about 36 minutes. Pretty confident that'll be an A.

I was up way too late last night doing stuff for compilers. Hopefully it will all be over soon.

I really don't have anything worth saying right now... so I'll go finish up the comp arch paper.

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weapon of choice

entry #1019, Thu, May 10, 2001, 04:50 (Music)

I don't particularly like the song "Weapon of Choice" by Fatboy Slim, it's ok, I guess, but not really my sort of music. But I find extreme delight in the music video for the song. The guy dancing around is awesome. To me, he embodies zen.

Also, Weezer seems to have realized a new album. The song MTV plays is pretty good. Add that to the list.

I should go to sleep...

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comp arch graph-o-rama

entry #1018, Thu, May 10, 2001, 03:34 (School)

Ah, yes, the joys of computer architecture.

I think we've been sitting in this lab for five or six hours now, just collecting data. Lots of data. Tables upon tables of data. We've taken some of this data, and turned it into a variety of pretty graphs. We've got bar graphs, 3d bar graphs, logarithmic graphs, pie charts, and 3d pie charts. And to add flavor, we've stolen frames from some of the better phd comics out there that make reference to graphs and their goodness.

So my goal has been to find a case in which scoreboarding wins over pipelining. I've come close. For a SAXPY loop, scoreboarding performs almost as well as pipelining. But I've tried adding functional units, increasing latencies, and all sorts of other fun, and scoreboarding fails to outperform pipelining. I ran one test for which scoreboarding outperformed pipelining, but was unable to reproduce the results, since I forgot to note the exact conditions. I know it was something to do with high memory latency (small cache), but for the life of me I can't reproduce it. I really wouldn't care too much, since scoreboarding really just sucks, but Dr Uhran seems to have a fetish for the thing, so I want at least one case in which it performs better, just to satisfy his odd views of the world.

This project has actually been kinda fun. Implementing the scoreboard simulator was kinda challenging. Not hugely challenging, but enough so to be entertaining. Scoreboarding is an interesting concept. It just doesn't work too well in practice, and I already covered it in Dr Kogge's class last semester. But working with Katie on this project has been fun, we've got the coolest presentation ever. 10.5 hours remain until presentation time ...

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gettin' there

entry #1017, Wed, May 09, 2001, 21:01 (School)

Comp arch final tuesday morning. It was definitely better written than the comp arch midterm. I hardly had to make any assumptions at all. Of course, the grammar was still very poor, and it would have made more sense as a final for an MIS class than as a final for a graduate cse course, but whatever. I think I pretty much kicked its ass. But we'll have to wait and see.

Algorithms final was this afternoon. The final is worth 30% of the total grade. Up until the final, I think my score is pretty much perfect. I got a 100 on the midterm, got mostly 100s on the homeworks, and only missed one class, so I should get most, if not all, of the 5% extra credit for attendance. So really I only need to get like 20 out of the 30% the final is worth. Anyway, the final was much harder than the midterm. It was out of 120 points, had 6 problems each worth 20. The first three I'm very confident about. The next, I kinda wrote two pages of stuff that should suffice for me to get at least 10 of the 20 points. The last two problems I feel pretty good about, but maybe not full 20s. So I think I should get at least 100/120 on the final, which should be enough for an A in the class. Woo.

The last of the compilers presentations were today. I got to see a few good presentations and a bunch of mediocre ones. Now all that's left for compilers is to grade the final.

Now it's time to finish up the comp arch project. And tomorrow I might even study a little for graphics...

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madness

entry #1016, Tue, May 08, 2001, 23:41 (Random Crap)

I am disappointed that none of the following domain names are registered:

sillytoaster.com
ironicnightmare.com
undeadgoldfish.com
shinkickers.org

If I ever become an eccentric millionaire, I shall buy those (or similar) domain names and develop unique web sites for them.

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life, liberty, and cheap energy?

entry #1015, Tue, May 08, 2001, 18:07 (Politics)

Why do people believe that electricity and gas are a basic human right?

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irony

entry #1014, Tue, May 08, 2001, 00:53 (Random Crap)

From Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary:

a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other's false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning -- called also Socratic irony
a : the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning b : a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony c : an ironic expression or utterance
a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity b : incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play -- called also dramatic irony, tragic irony

I find this ironic: www.destruction.com

But I find it even more ironic that I'm still not sure I really understand what irony truly is.

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underwater living

entry #1013, Mon, May 07, 2001, 20:15 (Life in General)

there's been some strong rain today. And skipping over the details in between, we now have various pots, pitchers, and buckets strewn about the living room, collecting rain water. Castle Point says they're going to look into why there's no gutter on the roof above us. Luckily it seems to be leaking only in the living room.

I've begun the process of entering the storage industry. I transported a load of Mamie's stuff to my place this evening.

I got to sit through four compilers final presentations today. Four more tomorrow, and two on wednesday.

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shrimpy-shrimp

entry #1012, Mon, May 07, 2001, 01:37 (Life in General)

I like shrimpy-shrimp
I like shrimpy-shrimp
shrimp, shrimp, shrimp, shrimp
shrimp, shrimp, shrimpy-shrimp
I like shrimpy-shrimp
I like shrimpy-shrimp
meow, meow, meow, meow
meow, meow, meow, meow

My log entries would be much cooler if you all heard them sung like I do inside my head. inside my freaking head! But only Mojo Jojo can hear that.

I threw some more popcorn shrimp in the deep fat fryer tonight. This is looking encouragingly like a possibly regular thing. I mean, sure, it takes the fryer a while to get warm, but that's a background process, and then it only takes two minutes of actual frying... you know, I think that true luxury would be to live somewhere where I have ready access to hot oil at any time. None of this having to wait for the oil to heat up. I want to live at McDonalds! And eat shrimpy-shrimp!

I'm very disappointed. the subtitles on the DVD version of The Mummy don't mesh well with my perception of reality. Instead of saying "gwahhr" the subtitles on the DVD claim that the mummy says "[growls]" ... what now?

oh yeah, I discovered that the comp arch final project is due a week from tomorrow, and not tomorrow. But we got the simulator finished. So that's good. Now need to get some work done. I've been slacking ever since I found out comp arch wasn't due tomorrow.

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subtlety and scoreboarding

entry #1011, Sun, May 06, 2001, 17:14 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

My life can be summed up as a sequence of subtle transitions: from christian ska to country to japanese punk to hip hop. But a day like today calls for such subtlety.

I am implementing a scoreboard simulator in shade. It's an interesting adventure. It's not an adventure I'd choose to take, given the choice, but it has its value. The good thing is all that is needed is statistics. So all I need is enough functionality to get a CPI. I think I'm actually doing it in a much less hackish manner than I expected to. Soon I shall have completed the simulator, and then all that's left to do is run simulations to get numbers.

I will never fully convert to being a C++ person. I am unlikely to even transition to being a mostly C++ person until there is some kind of linking standard for C++. C++ has its uses, and I use it frequently. But C is still my language of choice. If I could have only one programming language, it'd definitely be C.

I have consumed nothing today other than (green) mountain dew and double stuf oreo's. I'm living healthy these days. Must be finals time.

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license plates

entry #1010, Sun, May 06, 2001, 14:35 (Random Crap)

I like the fact that I can walk out of a room, humming along to a song or something, and then when I come back into the room, discover I'm at the exact same point in the song that the song itself is.

so my log contains occasions where I discovered the answers to mysteries, such as this one that plague my curious nature. So one thing I've been wondering about a while is how many states require front license plates. Colorado does (and thus k2 has them). But states like Indiana and Michigan don't require front plates. Requiring front plates makes sense, since if you wanna be able to read the plates on a car, it's likely easier if you've got them on both sides. But anyway, what I'm wondering is how many states require front plates. So instead of wasting time actually researching this myself, I'm going to exploit the interactive nature of my log and encourage anyone who knows of states that require front plates to follow that little link below and add comments to the entry listing states you know which require front plates.

Thank you for your cooperation.

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huh?

entry #1009, Sat, May 05, 2001, 19:53 (Random Crap)

The United Nations is apparently desperate for my approval. I just saw a commercial in which they attempted to convince me that they do things worth my while. Then they gave a url where I can find out in what other ways the United Nations works for me.

well, I'm convinced.

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The Mummy Returns

entry #1008, Sat, May 05, 2001, 18:48 (Movies)

Here's how I would sum up this movie in one word: "woooooooooooooooooooo!"

I don't think I liked this movie as much as the original Mummy (of course, I've not seen it with subtitles), but it stilled rocked. Mamie and I went with Katie Moor and Jeremy Siek. I don't think I've ever been to a matinee that was so packed before. Amazing.

Brian and I rented the original mummy last night, so I had the original fresh in my mind watching this one. Now I'm rather curious as to what the third one will bring. May this be a movie legacy that lives a long time.

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take two

entry #1007, Fri, May 04, 2001, 19:49 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

ok, this time around I tested it on platforms other than linuxppc. it seems ridiculous that I have to do portability tests for this kinda code.


unsigned int rs;int U=50,V=50,S=50,P=2;unsigned int r(){return(rs=(rs*


6197)%100001);}char *_S_="/+\"[TR&17\023}\177m\201wr0tzt\2065@7\210"


"\220\214\215\213\225y|@^B\236.";void _(int i){putchar(i);}void _n(int


i){_(i/10+'0');_(i%10+'0');}void _h(int i){ _((i>9)?(i+55):(48+i));}


void _b(){_('\t');_('c');_(32);_('#');}void _e(){_(34);_(',');_('\n');


}void m(){int H,Z_32,q,Z;for(q=0;q<37;++q)_(q[_S_]-q);_(34);_n(V);_(32


);_n(U);_(32);_n(S);_(32);_n(P);_(34);_(',');_('\n');for(H=0;H<25;++H)


{if(P==1){if(H>=S)goto ______;_(34);_('a'+H);_b();_h(r()%16);_h(r()%16


);_h(H%16);_h(r()%16);_h((H*r())%16);_h(r()%16);_e();}else{for(Z_32=0;


Z_32<4;++Z_32){if(H*4+Z_32>=S)goto ______;_(34);_('a'+H);_('a'+Z_32);


_b();_h(r()%16);_h(r()%16);_h(H%8+r()%8);_h(r()%16);_h(r()%16);_h(r()%


16);_e();}}}______:for(H=0;H<U;++H){_(34);for(Z_32=0;Z_32<V;++Z_32){if


(P==1)_('a'+r()%S);else{do{q=r()%25;Z=r()%4;}while(q*4+Z>=S);_('a'+q);


_('a'+Z);}}_e();}_('}');_(';');_('\n');}int main(int c, char* v[]){rs=


((int)v[0])%6197;while(rs%2==0||rs%5==0)++rs;if(c>1)U=(v[1][0]-'0')*10


;if(c>2)V=(v[2][0]-'0')*10;if(c>3){S=(v[3][0]-'0')*10;if(v[3][1])S+=(v


[3][1]-'0');else S/=10;}if(S<25)P=1;m();return 0;/* by PWR (2001) */}

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unavailable entry

entry #1006, Fri, May 04, 2001, 13:24 (unknown)

sorry, this entry is not available for you to see.

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new obfusc8ion

entry #1005, Fri, May 04, 2001, 03:30 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

woah. I just realized I've not used imake (or xmkmf) in a long time. And yet I remember a time when that was a much more common than the now-standard "./configure; make; make install" way of doing things. Not that I miss imake...

anyway, for your enjoyment:


int rs;int U=50,V=50,S=50,P=2;int r(){return(rs=(rs*6197)%100001);} char


*_S_ = "/+\"[TR&17\023}\177m" "\201wr0tzt\2065@7\210\220\214\215\213\225y|"


"@^B\236."; void _(int i){putchar(i);}void _n(int i){_(i/10+'0');_(i%10+'0');


}void _h(int i){ _((i>9)?(i+55):(48+i));}void _b(){_('\t');_('c');_(' ');


_('#');}void _e(){_(34);_(',');_('\n');}void m(){int H, Z_32, q, Z;for(q = 0;


q<37;++q)_(q[_S_]-q);_(34);_n(V);_(' ');_n(U);_(' ');_n(S);_(' ');_n(P);_(34);


_(',');_('\n');for(H=0;H<25;++H){if(P==1){if(H>=S)goto ______;_(34);_('a'+H);


_b();_h(r()%16);_h(r()%16);_h(H%16);_h(r()%16);_h((H*r())%16);_h(r()%16);_e();


}else{for(Z_32=0;Z_32<4;++Z_32){if(H*4+Z_32>=S)goto ______;_(34);_('a'+H);


_('a'+Z_32);_b();_h(r()%16);_h(r()%16);_h(H%8+r()%8);_h(r()%16);_h(r()%16);


_h(r()%16);_e();}}}______:for(H=0;H<U;++H){_(34);for(Z_32=0;Z_32<V;++Z_32){


if(P==1)_('a'+r()%S);else{do{q=r()%25;Z=r()%4;}while(q*4+Z>=S);_('a'+q);


_('a'+Z);}}_e();}_('}');_(';');_('\n');}int main(int c, char* v[]){rs=((int)


v[0])%6197;while(rs%2==0||rs%5==0)++rs;if(c>1)U=(v[1][0]-'0')*10;if(c>2)V=(


v[2][0]-'0')*10;if(c>3){S=(v[3][0]-'0')*10;if(v[3][1])S+=(v[3][1]-'0');else S


/=10;}if(S<25)P=1;m();return 0;/* by PWR (http://prijks.esgeroth.org/ */}

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"Extreme" Pattern Matching

entry #1004, Thu, May 03, 2001, 21:42 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

So I finally made it to a seminar today, for the first time in rather a while. It was a talk by Kevin Bowyer about pattern matching for very large datasets. It was a great talk, one of the best seminars I think I've been to at ND. Basically, what it came down to was that they had this huge dataset, like 3.7 million data points (something to do with proteins and amino acids, but that doesn't matter too much), and they had a classifier they had trained with the entire dataset. It had a prediction accuracy of about 78%. They tried classifiers trained with only 1/8 of the dataset, and those classifiers got an average of about 74% accuracy. So they created committees. They got 8 classifiers, each trained with 1/8 of the dataset, and had these classifiers vote. This committee performed better than the classifier with the whole dataset. Like it seems almost kinda counterintuitive at first, but it's really cool. So they then made committees of 16 and 24 and 32 classifiers (but each time they gave each classifier 1/8 of the dataset, they just broke it up different ways with data repeated) and got even better accuracy to a point. I think accuracy plateaued after 32 classifiers. But also cool was that in addition to the improved accuracy, the whole committee model made the whole thing more parallel and stuff. It was a hella cool talk.

now it's algorithms time. woo!

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a sigh of relief

entry #1003, Thu, May 03, 2001, 16:15 (Sports and Athletics)

I now feel more comfortable playing soccer:

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010503/sc/health_soccer_dc.html

actually, that's a lie, I'm being sarcastic. Heading the ball has never been a health concern for me...

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unavailable entry

entry #1002, Thu, May 03, 2001, 03:10 (unknown)

sorry, this entry is not available for you to see.

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1001 baby!

entry #1001, Wed, May 02, 2001, 17:24 (Life in General)

So I kinda almost missed a landmark: the last log entry I made was log entry #1000. (This is #1001!) Amazing.

George: "Code Red or I punch you in the head!"
Me: "Code Green or I punch you in the spleen!"

Though unfortunately, I must admit, the taste of the code red mountain dew is beginning to grow on me. We'll have to see if I can keep up the pretense of a being a faction.

So anyway, 1000 entries. Man, that's a lot. quadruple digits, baby! I realized I've now been keeping an online journal for half my career at ND: five semesters. It seems so long ago that I first discovered Alan Cox's Diary and was thus inspired to create my own. Granted, I still don't do anything nearly as cool as Cox does, but I'm still glad I started this whole wacky adventure. Pete's Log is now on its third generation backend, is currently powered by 2485 lines of php code, most of which was written last august, but some of which dates back to spring 1999, and the rest has been written this past year whenever I need procrastinating.

Rob's trunk can apparently hold 3.56215213358 barrels of oil. Or at least that's what it says on the white board in the ssr.

It's funny. Log entry #500 was made on October 10, 2000. #250 was made on April 5, 2000. #125 on October 21, 1999. #1 on December 1, 1998. I'm not gonna graph the frequency of entries over time (at least not yet, maybe Arun will show me how) but I definitely started updating this thing much more regularly as time went on. I think automation played a big part in that. And, of course, there still remains the mystery of the empty log entry.

enough of this. time to go do something else.

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the end draws near

entry #1000, Wed, May 02, 2001, 14:44 (School)

and thus I'm done with classes ...

algorithms was miserable today. I sit next to the window (and thus next to the heaters) and they still had the heat on today. So though I've really enjoyed this class most of the semester, today the heat was just too much, and I just wanted out. Luckily Dr Chen wasn't covering anything I hadn't seen before.

Our last comp arch class yesterday was interesting. I'd been looking forward to TCE's since I had a few comments I wanted to make. Instead of the traditional approach of giving TCE's at the end of the class, Dr Uhran handed them out at the beginning of class, and then stood there watching us. One would think that an assistant dean type would know how TCE's are supposed to work. Afterwards I was talking to Katie, who had been given the task of carrying the TCEs to debartolo, and we looked at the instructions to the teacher, and it clearly said "Leave the Room" ... but both Katie and I wrote at the top of the form that Dr Uhran was watching us. He also didn't give us nearly as much time as I wanted to fill out the form. Oh well.

Graphics is also over. Jon and I handed in our final project. After class we were playing with it a little more in fitz, and Jon asks me what happens after you run out of lives. I realize I have no clue what the answer to that question is. So we commit suicide repeatedly, and watch the life indicator: 4 ... 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... 0 ... -1 ... -2 ... doh! Oh well, such is life.

it seems people are beginning to do work on the compilers project, I'm getting questions. Of course, I don't quite know what to think about people who ask to meet me during times which are during class. Kinda shady if you ask me.

I'm one algorithms assignment, one comp arch project, three finals, and some compiler grading away from being done with the semester.

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yielded warred replacement Aarhus

entry #999, Wed, May 02, 2001, 00:14 (Life in General)

"I am searching for the scent of optimism" -- "Have you tried my armpit?"

I got another crush email today. This time from crushlink.com. They actually encourage you to enter anyone you can think of when trying to guess who your crush is. What's the point of trying to link two people. The subject for the email they send should be "Somebody knows you" instead of "Somebody has a crush on you." Either way, I refuse to take part in the scheme.

I wore my Hawaiian shirt today. It was spontaneous. I didn't think much of it. But many commented on the shirt, and I was asked by several people why I'd chosen to wear this shirt today. I've realized I don't like having to explain my choice in clothing. But thanks for noticing. And for the record, I don't think it's really hawaiian, I bought it in Florida.

By means of explanation, this is where today's title came from:

tail -111 /usr/share/dict/words | head -1
tail -1111 /usr/share/dict/words | head -1
tail -11111 /usr/share/dict/words | head -1
tail -111111 /usr/share/dict/words | head -1

That's it for now.

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Pete the Great

entry #998, Tue, May 01, 2001, 01:26 (Life in General)

I find a certain comfort in knowing I have enough clean underwear to last me until after finals.

I promise this is tonight's last log entry. And I promise I will implement digest mode for the log mailing list once the semester ends. It also seems I had a few more observations I wanted to make, but I forgot what they were. So we'll move straight into really worthless stuff:

I found an interesting artifact from high school a few days ago. It's a 9.5" by 6" notebook (Sparco brand) labeled "Pete's Journal" ... the inside cover has the following warning:

"To the brave reader,
This is kind of a journal, kind of a notebook, kind of a scratchbook. If I am dead, it will reveal a lot about me. If I am famous, and you're writing a paper about me, this will be a great source for you. If I'm alive, you most likely shouldn't be reading this, unless we have sex on a regular basis, or I have given you permission.
Laters,
Pete"

I was a silly kid, and the content doesn't get any better from there. Mainly just a few short stories (not very good), some ideas I had for a country to start (founding countries seems to be something I enjoy), some notes I was taking when making a mixed tape, and some other random junk. Nothing nearly as exciting as I would've hoped to find, considering the warning. In fact, the notebook is about 80% empty.

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trippy

entry #997, Tue, May 01, 2001, 00:57 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

So I've been putting some good time into the grafix final project. After a good hacking session last night, the game is now definitely playable. While messing around with triangle fans and strips I managed to get some trippy effects. Without texturing, with hardware acceleration, I'm getting peak frame rates of 70 fps, averaging at about 30. With texture, the frame rate tends to be around 10 fps, and under 3 without hardware acceleration. Next time I buy a computer, it's gonna have some phat hardware grafix support.

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SUM 41

entry #996, Tue, May 01, 2001, 00:28 (Music)

SUM 41 -- another band to look into. I saw the video for their song "FAT LIP" on MTV last night. I like it when MTV actually plays music. They have a punkish sound, kinda an Offspring sound, I thought, but with a definite influence of hiphop and such. The video was also quite fun. Very punk appeal. And at one point they showed this cute girl having all her hair (except her bangs) shaven off. I found evidence on CDNOW llinking SUM 41 to Blink 182 and to MxPx and those are bands I like. Unfortunately, I've forbidden myself from buying any new CDs until after this summer. I'll just have to add them to the list.

Another punkish band I discovered on MTV last night: New Found Glory. W was not as impressed by their song as by the SUM 41 song I saw, but they did seem like they were worth looking into at some point.

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some worthless thoughts

entry #995, Mon, April 30, 2001, 00:46 (Random Crap)

I once tried (unsuccessfully) to convince a vegan friend that chickens were really vegetables.

The process of doing laundry should not include the following step:

Buy gummi dinosaurs at the huddle mart

I should work the term "hella" into sentences more often. That'd be hella cool.

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Fire IS the cleanser!

entry #994, Sun, April 29, 2001, 19:59 (Life in General)

Today was another beautiful day that I spent mostly indoors. ugh. So I'm really glad I spent (at least some of) yesterday outside. But it's that time of year where I get to start developing really bad tanlines. I got a bit of sun yesterday, my head is kinda red. doh! So yesterday during the Blue and Gold game, they had about two million cheerleaders from area schools. During halftime they lined up half of them in one end zone, the other half in the other. I was so ready for them to charge the center of the field for an epic battle. But as usual, cheerleaders disappoint my expectations... they just wandered onto the field and did their usual cheerleading thing.

As odd as it may sound, I really love the Britney Spears pepsi commercials. Mainly, I think, because of Bob Dole.

Last night I witnessed the weirdest episode of xena ever. Xena and Gabrielle were cloned and did battle in the future. I can't even begin to claim I understand what happened.

I've gotten my maze program to peak at 70 fps (with texturing turned off). At the cost of certain walls not getting drawn at times. My goal is a constant high frame rate (70 fps was a peak, the average was still around 30 or less) and proper rendering. We'll see how that goes. the 90 minute simpsons marathon is over, and thus I now return to campus.

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blue, gold, I'm the guy with the gun.

entry #993, Sat, April 28, 2001, 17:47 (Sports and Athletics)

So I've been at ND for five years now, and today I finally made it to a Blue and Gold game. Went with Rob, Adrienne, Paul, Alice, and Max! Max recognizes me now and can say my name. Little kids are awesome. The game was fun. It was a beautiful day, it was nice just to sit outside and watch some football. Gold (defense) won. It seemed like the points system they had going on favored the defense. And on top of that, whoever was in charge of the score board wasn't doing a good job, we know of at least three points they failed to mark for the offense. But we got to see some good plays. Arnez looked pretty good, as did this Mcnair guy that I've never heard of before. Hopefully we'll have a good season next fall. I love football. It's good stuff.

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"You didn't count on my loyal army of prostitutes, did you?"

entry #992, Sat, April 28, 2001, 02:28 (Life in General)

I just returned from a late-night Meijer trip. I bought 12 bottles of Coors, 18 bottles of Mountain Dew, and a bottle of contact fluid. What more does a guy need? well, since you're asking, I really would've liked to have found new batteries for me laser pointer. But I didn't. I did, however, hit snooze on an alarm clock that was going off in Meijer's electronics aisle.

Beyond my Meijer adventure, nothing worthwhile has happened lately. At all. I've been wasting my life away.

So some time ago I received an email from some website or other. It offered an interesting proposal: someone has a crush on me, it claimed. Here is what I had to do in order to find out who it was: I was to go to their site and enter the email address of anyone I thought might have a crush on me, and if I entered the email address of the person who had the crush on me, they'd inform both of us. I considered playing this game for a little while, but it seems really just to be a self-perpetuating nightmare. Since at some point, somebody probably legitimately typed in the email address of their crush, but I'm guessing most of the email generated by this site is due to people who received email from this site, and just typed in the email addresses of everyone they know in the hopes of figuring out who listed them. And I don't want to perpetuate that. So I deleted the message. But I'm still kinda curious.

What am I doing?! I should be sleeping or something.

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context switch: sysadmin to kernel hacker

entry #991, Thu, April 26, 2001, 21:19 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

This was odd: after restarting X, a gnome message popped up, informing me gmc had segfaulted. oh well, I hit ok. Another message informing me of the same thing (but different PID) popped up. I kept hitting ok, I kept getting new segfault messages. Hrmm. I restart X and the problem goes away. Odd.

I've spent a good chunk of time lately playing sysadmin. It's cool. I can now connect from malloc directly to any of the machines in our cluster (they're on a private network, protected by a firewall, so this was non-trivial, especially since I had to learn ipchains syntax...). I also now have my home directory nfs-mounted off of switch, so that my home directory on malloc is the same as my home directory on the cluster machines. That is sweet. I also now have the empty 3gig partition I found on malloc some time ago mounted and in use to store vmware stuff. I've also been doing some work on the cluster machines of late to make them more friendly. So now life seems to have returned to a stable condition. Now real work can begin.

Now apparently some of the statistics the linux kernel gathers about itself are pretty inaccurate. Seva has added this profiling stuff to the kernel, it seems, which seems pretty cool. The tricky bit, however, is that you have to be smart. Say you're entering an interrupt handler. Well, you don't want time spent here to count as part of some other counter, you want it counted only towards time spent in interrupts. So you gotta have masks to keep track of what's going on, and you need to save all that fun stuff. So now begins my fun job of tracking down where to add counting in order to get accurate numbers for what we want. For example, let's say we want to count the amount of time spent in user time or in kernel time. Well, in order to accomplish this, we need to set/reset/whatever our counters every time there's a context switch. Seva said his first attempt failed: the number of times the system entered kernel mode did not match the number of times the system entered user mode. badness. And the kernel is a huge mother. Tracking down all the context switches within may prove to be a formidable task. And thus my evening begins.

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huh

entry #990, Thu, April 26, 2001, 14:51 (Politics)

Somehow I am amused when I hear the U.S. referred to as "the world's sole remaining superpower." Sometimes it makes me feel all patriotic, other times it worries me, and usually I just wonder what that really means in the long run...

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endowed chairs and such

entry #989, Thu, April 26, 2001, 14:19 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

wow. It seems I've now got an endowed chair of sorts. endowed for 30 cents. Woo. Now the acm club just needs to fill it.

A little behind schedule, but as promised, I've finally gotten the problem set and my solutions for the spring 2001 programming contest posted. Have at it if you like: www.cse.nd.edu/~prijks/contest.

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truly random log entries

entry #988, Tue, April 24, 2001, 22:14 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Oh yes. Now I've gone and done it: the random log entry feature now provides truly random log entries, instead of those stupid pseudo-random log entries from before. This is possible thanks to www.random.org, which collects atmospheric noise and gives it to people as random data.

If atmospheric noise isn't good enough for you, you could also get a random log entry where the random number is generated by radioactive decay, courtesy of hotbits.

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adventures on juniper

entry #987, Tue, April 24, 2001, 21:36 (Random Crap)

I saw the oddest thing today: there was a large group of ROTC types walking along juniper as I was driving home, all in camoflauge fatigues. Seems ordinary enough. But on top of their camoflauge, several of them were wearing bright orange "notice-me!" vests. Now I'm sure there was some good reason for them to be wearing said vests. But I find it hilarious to see people wearing clothing meant to make you as noticable as possible on top of clothing meant to make you as undetectable as possible... Life continues to amaze me.

On my return trip to campus, I was about to turn off juniper to go park, when Wind of Change by the Scorpions started. I wasn't about to interrupt this song, so I kept driving. Drove up ND avenue and around the main circle and such. I thought it'd be awesome if I drove up to the gate and told them I had to drive around until the song was over, and if it'd be possible for them to let me drive around on campus, but as usual, I didn't go through with it.

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Pete, destroyer of dreams

entry #986, Tue, April 24, 2001, 02:01 (Life in General)

They should call me "Pete, destroyer of dreams" ... and the weapon I use to destroy dreams? Math. It seems to me the hopes and dreams of many people are possible only because they didn't work through the math. This is why casinos and lotteries make money. There's also the flipside to this, something the media exploits. Like this measles vaccine deal. A report was just released saying there's no association between the measles shot and autism. But apparently there's just been tons of people who are refusing to have their children vaccinated because there were a few cases of autism that people thought might be linked to the vaccine. People just don't seem to understand how the odds work in cases like this. And I can't wait until I hear a tv news program with the following story: "Child dies mysteriously. Authorities believe child may have been breathing oxygen at time of death!" ... but now I've left my topic of math behind. But I really have a lot of fun working out the math to prove how absurd some things are sometimes.

I just finally realized: Gas is getting expensive. I filled K2 up tonight. They've been announcing it on the news and stuff, but it didn't hit me until I paid almost $20 to fill my tank. Luckily a tank will give me 300 city miles (or 400 highway miles), so it doesn't really bother me too much.

Sometimes I think that I can fit a large majority of people into two categories: those I'd like to punch in the face, and those that I'd like to kick in the shin. I know that's not very christian-like of me. And I'm only really kinda kidding. But it seems like as good a way to categorize people as any other.

word up... tonight God saved me from myself again.

I wonder. Have there been 10^7499988 minutes since the beginning of the universe? I doubt it. A year is 5.256 * 10^5 minutes. A billion years is 5.256 * 10^14 minutes. Huge numbers are so incredibly fun.

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oil changes n such

entry #985, Mon, April 23, 2001, 16:41 (Life in General)

I did not sleep well last night. It was weird. But I made it to campus for algorithms, and then, instead of focusing on all the work I should be doing, I went and did other things instead. But they were useful things: I finally opened up a savings account with keybank. My finances are going to be kinda interesting these next few months. But I'm young, and I've got future earning potential. So I feel justified in a little financial irresponsibility. Besides, if I carry a credit card balance for a little while but make regular payments, that should boost my credit rating in the long run. Need to talk to Jane about when I'm getting paid during the semester->summer transition, and how much.

Then I took K2 to gates chevy world. K2 now has almost 6300 miles, so I was a little behind schedule, but then again, my 3000 mile thing didn't happen until 3200. But now the tires have been rotated and the oil has been changed and all such fun things. And it cost a good deal less than expected. So I'm happy. And it was nice to get away from work and just sit in their customer lounge, reading popular mechanics. And they gave me a free napkin holder that attaches to the sun visor thingies! Free! With two free packages of napkins! I have a feeling the thing will sit empty once I use up the free napkins, but it may be a while until I use those up, since i've managed to go 6300 miles without needing any napkins... but it's the thought that counts, right?

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Regan!

entry #984, Mon, April 23, 2001, 01:48 (Life in General)

So today for some reason or other I decided to go to www.tcu.edu and search for Regan Vermillion's email address. It took me about five minutes to find it. I mailed him and heard back within a very short period of time. So basically, the question is, why didn't I think to try this earlier?

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O(nlogn + n + n*n + n + n*n)

entry #983, Mon, April 23, 2001, 00:03 (Life in General)

woo! allright!

So I turned on the A/C in K2 for the first time ever today: it was raining out, but it was very warm and humid in the car. So I finally gave in. But the A/C works very well. It got cold in a hurry. Very nice.

Woke up later than planned, but still made it to campus in time to finish up details for the programming contest. Due to a lack of advertising, only one team showed up to compete, a group of two sophomores. They solved two of the four problems in the problem set. Dr Sepeta also decided to work on the problems and solved one of them. I'll probably post the problem set and my solutions laterish.

Dog and I worked on algorithms tonight. Finished them up in a decent amount of time, especially considering we spent a good deal of the time goofing off. I also realized there's not going to be too many people around here this summer to hang out with. But there will be a few good people here.

I've felt rather blah-ish most of today. It's been one of those days where I just have to realize that the crappy emotions aren't real, they're just a byproduct of what my brain does sometimes, especially when I'm tired. So I got over that... I keep getting better at it. Now it's time to go home, have ice cream, type up my algorithms solutions, and read a couple research-related papers. Then sleep.

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wusa

entry #982, Sun, April 22, 2001, 16:38 (Sports and Athletics)

Notre Dame grads playing in the WUSA:

LaKeysia Beene (Bay Area CyberRays - founding member)
Shannon Boxx (San Diego Spirit)
Meotis Erikson (Boston Breakers)
Monica Gerardo (Washington Freedom)
Jen Grubb (Washington Freedom)
Kelly Lindsey (Bay Area CyberRays)
Anne Makinen (Washington Freedom)
Jen Mascaro (San Diego Spirit)
Kate Sobrero (Boston Breakers - founding member)

... this could be an incomplete list.

it seems Denver doesn't have a wusa team yet.

I like soccer.

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ice cream!

entry #981, Sun, April 22, 2001, 01:55 (Life in General)

the funniest thing ever: Sheena apparently owns a copy of "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" ...

I decided it wasn't worth my while to put any more time or effort into a hairstyle that wasn't working and that I was finding increasingly uncomfortable. So now I'm bald again.

I made a token appearance at Arun and Perk's Hell party tonight. It was an interesting concept. My sin was "cricket foul" or some such. I showed up in black and wearing my Darth Maul mask. Stayed long enough to have a beer. Entertaining as it was, I miss the parties of freshman and sophomore year. We used to have great parties in Keenan where the music was awesome and we would just go crazy dancing. And a lot of those parties were before I drank much. It's been a long time since I've done any fun hardkore sorta dancing with a group of people really into it. What I should do to remedy this is to start looking into going to punk and ska shows. Or something. Ain't nothing in life quite like music.

So most of today was spent on graphics. Made some good progress. More on that later, maybe. Then I worked to get the programming contest environment ready. Need to finish that up tomorrow. Right now I'm writing up a problem set for tomorrow. And watching Relic Hunter. woo. Oh, and we bought ice cream.

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yawn

entry #980, Sat, April 21, 2001, 04:13 (Life in General)

I'm kinda tired. I'm gonna go to sleep...

said goodbye to the family this morning. It's been nice having them here, but now I'll hopefully have more time to work on all the stuff I should be working on. Then we had TCEs in algorithms today. I wrote "Dr Chen is my hero" on mine. Then I spent most of the afternoon trying to figure out the networking on some of the machines in the ssr's cluster. That was a pain. But it seems functional now, so hopefully I can begin doing the work on those machines I'm supposed to be doing. Then I slacked off for a while: went to Rob's place and played some basketball with Paul and Rob (and Max!) and had some beer and some wet burritos and watched lone gunmen. Then I returned home and spent the rest of the night working on graphics. Made some good progress. Still have some issues that need working out. But that'll probably go better after I've gotten some sleep...

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maps.yahoo ...

entry #979, Fri, April 20, 2001, 16:37 (Random Crap)

this is how yahoo says I should drive in order to get to Rob's place from mine:

Start out going West on I-80 W/I-90 W by turning right (Portions toll).
Take the US-31-BR/US-33 exit, exit number 77.
Keep LEFT at the fork in the ramp.
Merge onto US-33/US-31 BR.
Stay straight to go onto US-33.

As nice as those directions are, they're not very useful, since 1: I don't live on the toll road and 2: Rob doesn't live on US-33. But thanks for trying, yahoo.

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wieso ist es noch nicht sommer?!

entry #978, Thu, April 19, 2001, 18:05 (School)

Mon Dieu. I want it to be summer already!

So where was I? Oh yeah. So I got Annie safely returned to the family this morning. But then by the time I got to campus, comp arch was already beginning, so I skipped it and worked on some other stuff. Got tired of that and kicked a soccer ball around on the grass for a while. Despite a difficult time initially finding people, there were actually six of us out there in the end. Excellent. Soccer should always have a higher priority than schoolwork.

Got my second graphics test back today. Got a 75/80. So not the perfect score from last time, but still apparently one of the highest scores, and my test had "Very Good!" written underneath the score. And underlined twice. But I'm becoming extraordinarily perfectionistic, since I'm very angry at myself for three of the points I missed, those were due to a very stupid mistake.

After that I had to give a presentation to my comp arch class on shade. So I did that. Went well enough. Comp arch is looking ridiculous the rest of the semester. Dr Uhran has scheduled the rest of the semester with presentations by students on such things as "the latest greatest computer architecture you can find on the web" ... and he's not going to cover chapters 6 & 7, which will be on the test. Awesome. I'm not too worried, but others in the class are very unhappy. I'm just kinda frustrated by the time I'm wasting on this class.

Onwards. much remains to be done.

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Annie's glorious arrival

entry #977, Thu, April 19, 2001, 01:32 (Life in General)

So Annie has made her way to South Bend. Her flight from Chicago to SB got cancelled, so she had to take the united limo bus. And we got misinformed as to when the bus was to arrive in SB, so Brian, Dad, and I waited at the south bend airport for an hour. But in the end, Annie arrived. So we went to the Mishawaka Brewing Company with Mom, Dad, Brian, Annie, Mamie, Glenn and I. Very fun time. Then Brian, Annie, and I returned to our apartment, Annie's sleeping on one of our couches tonight. So since Annie had never watched a DVD before and had never seen American Pie before, we watched that. Then Annie and I spent some time hacking in my room. It's been a while since I've used my hacky sack, so Annie had to refresh my memory on all the little rules of hacking etiquette. I definitely need to work a little on the whole coordination thing...

Oh, and proving again he's the coolest man alive, my Dad bought me a new soccer ball (size 5) to replace my current one that no longer holds air properly. Yay! Now I just need to convince people to kick it around with me.

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eins, zwei, drei, vier!

entry #976, Wed, April 18, 2001, 17:14 (School)

I can't even remember the last time I used atof(3) ... not that it looks like I'm going to be using it anytime soon, it kinda just occured to me ...

So I thought I totally tanked the last algorithms homework I handed in. I didn't really start it until a few hours before it was due. And it was worth twice as much as the usual assignments. I thought I wasn't going to get above a 70 or so on it. We got it back today. I got a 97. I am both extraordinarily lucky, and superbly awesome.

la la la

I think there are two good reasons I don't get any work done during regular office hours. I shall label these reasons "P" and "R" ...

I'm just kiddin', I love those guys, I just wrote that to irritate them. And it worked. There is a little truth to it tho...

Katie Moor just saved my life: she came by my office to ask a comp arch question about the homework due tomorrow. Due tomorrow?! Ok, I guess I should do that tonight. Looks easy, just another one of them comp arch word problems. They really should teach this basic comp arch stuff in middle school, it makes for great word problems...

I volunteered to organize a programming contest this Sunday. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Now I'm realizing just how much stuff I have to do these next few weeks. But it's all part of the fun, right?

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my cat can eat a whole watermelon

entry #975, Wed, April 18, 2001, 02:33 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

dagumit. I can remember the days when I understood trigonometry. These days I have to draw everything out on paper before I can figure out what I want to do. I'm having a particularly difficult time figuring out viewer orientation in opengl for my graphix final project. what's wrong with me? I just can't seem to figure out what axis I want to spin about. And it's not helping matters that I don't yet have a sensible-looking environment with a sensible frustum (heh heh heh) set up, so things look unnatural to begin with, so it's often hard to see how stuff is spinning. I should just go to sleep and deal with it tomorrow.

wo haben Sie die Eier versteckt? Was ist los? Wo bin ich? Warum sind meine kleider nicht hier? Hilfe! Konichiwa!

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ping pong, running, flags

entry #974, Wed, April 18, 2001, 00:20 (Sports and Athletics)

So today was mostly uneventful. I did join my family at LeMans for some fun. Played ping pong for a while, including several doubles matches between myself, Dad, Glenn, and Laura. I suck at ping pong. The last time I played ping pong, I lost 21-3. Before then, I think the last time I played ping pong was in europe. But it was tons o' fun. Then later tonight I decided it was time to abuse my feet. So I went Running (capital R. running outside the context of any other sport) for the first time in forever. Various things, but mainly several weeks of illness have kept me from running in a while. But I decided to go running on stepan field in cleats, since my cleats still need breaking in, and my feet need to develop tougher skin. Need to do that regularly, I think, in addition to the sort of running that is less abusive of my feet.

unrelatedly, it seems Mississippi voted to keep the confederate emblem in their state flag. By an overwhelming majority, too, it seems. The claim by the pro-confederates is that it's a symbol of southern heritage, and thus they should keep it. Well, that's fine by me, I suppose, it's not my state. But it seems to me that anytime a symbol of your heritage is adopted by various hate groups, including the KKK and various neo-nazi groups, then maybe it's time to find a new symbol? But also of interest is the fact that of all the southern states that recently had to decide if they wanted to change flags, MS is the only state that decided by popular vote. It is also the only state that kept its old design. So I wonder what would've happened in the other states that changed their flags had it been up to a popular vote.

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where am i?

entry #973, Tue, April 17, 2001, 13:22 (Life in General)

It's incredible. I slept from 1:30 to 9:30 last night. That's the closest I've come in a long time to a normal sleeping schedule. Weird.

Jon Furgeson and I had our first meeting today for our graphix final project. I think I may begin hacking on that today.

I was determined last night to remember to bring a lunch with me today. That determination didn't make its way back into my mind until noonish today when I realized I was hungry and hadn't brough a lunch. I'm amazing.

There was some real reason that I started a new entry, but I don't remember what it was. So screw it, I'm gonna read the xscreensaver maze.c to figure out how they do mazes. It's cool, maze.c is based off code originally written in 1985. I was 7 then and was just learning to code. And people were doing cool stuff like this.

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a quote, no context

entry #972, Tue, April 17, 2001, 00:30 (Random Crap)

me: "Are you reading my powerbook manual?"
Brian: "backwards!"

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Charlie's Angels

entry #971, Tue, April 17, 2001, 00:27 (Movies)

today's not been as productive as I had hoped ... did a little work this afternoon. then dinner with family at olive garden to celebrate mamie's birthday. again. fun time. very good food. afterwards Brian and I rented Charlie's Angels. This has to be the bestest movie ever. Ever! First of all, you start out with Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, and Lucy Liu. Already you've got a brilliant movie. Then you add a hilarious plot, fun action scenes, explosions, and so on. And a good soundtrack, too! I want to own this movie. In the end, I think this movie succeeded because it had hot chicks and because it didn't take itself seriously at all.

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tsm rocks

entry #970, Mon, April 16, 2001, 15:04 (Music)

so I like the tsm cd I created so much, I burnt another copy of it, so that I can have one copy in my car and one copy for other use. Now I should get back to work, since I've not done any of that in several days.

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happy easter!

entry #969, Mon, April 16, 2001, 02:20 (Life in General)

So I awakened after noon sometime today. Woo. Family showed up at my place, brunch was made, then consumed. It was good. We had chocolate egg things. Diana and Kelly hid them around our apartment. Certain restrictions were made upon where they were allowed to hide them. They hid 40 eggs. We found about 36 of them. So there may be some interesting surprise egg discoveries in the future. Then I spent the rest of the evening ... um... who knows.

I'm beginning to think the dreadlocks may not make it until summer. They're not really locking up. But the biggest problem is I've realized that my hair is breaking. I now have a lot of short hairs that used to be connected to dreads. Not good. And the ends of some of the dreads are beginning to loosen up. So we'll have to see how they do over the next month. But I fear the dreads won't be accompanying me on my summer trip.

Brian and I have discovered the greatest show ever: Special Unit 2. Crappy name, hilarious show.

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catholicism

entry #968, Sun, April 15, 2001, 21:16 (Spirituality)

I think there is a necessary disclaimer to this log entry: I was born a hypocrite, and I will die a hypocrite. Please take that into consideration as you read this (and, in general, anything else I write or say). Onwards.

I did not enjoy the Easter Vigil at the Basilica this year. I'll admit that in part this is due to my short attention span. But there's more to it than that. I did go to the Vigial at the Basilica my sophomore and junior years, and wasn't nearly as bothered as I was today. The first problem is that I've never liked mass at the Basilica. First, the Basilica never impressed me the way I've seen it impress some of my peers. I grew up in Europe... that's what churches look like. But my real problem is that you're there, surrounded by people dressed in "good" clothing, worshipping before a shrine that is (or at least seems to be) made of gold. Something about the whole affair seems very wrong to me. I'm a much bigger fan of informal masses with smaller congregations.

Then the first reading. Genesis, Chapter 1. I guess this makes me unorthodox, but I find it an insult to my intelligence to be expected to sit through this reading and believe it. Genesis 1:7-8 says "God made the dome, and it separated the water above the dome from the water below it. God called the dome 'the sky.' evening came, and morning followed -- the second day." Seriously, I know about the whole idea that we're not supposed to literally believe this, it's symbolic of God's creation of the world. I've heard plenty of talk about how I should not take it literally. I don't care. It's the creation myth of a people long ago who lacked the scientific tools to figure out any better explanation for their existence. How is there any better symbolism in this story than there is in simply saying "God created the world. Yay!" There's plenty of good symbolism in the creation myths of other ancient cultures, yet I'm not expected to sit through those. And this wouldn't even bother me so much if it wasn't for the fact that I spent nearly four hours in the basilica yesterday. It's the fact that I feel the Church was wasting my time instead of somehow teaching me a valuable lesson or helping me feel the presence of God or helping me better understand the miracle of Easter. Forgive me, God, if it really was your will that I sit through the first chapter of Genesis, but I honestly can't believe that it was.

Since I had a lot of time during the Vigil, and since the Vigil did a good job of highlighting the parts of Catholicism I don't believe in, I spent a lot of time thinking about my faith. I'll detail some of my thoughts. I doubt they'll be too interesting to anyone, since they're the stupid products of a silly mind, but I would like to have them on hand to look back on in the future.

I was raised Catholic. I was raised very Catholic. My Mom comes from a Catholic family. Of the seven children her parents had, six of them went either to Notre Dame or Saint Mary's. My Dad is from Belgium, which is, I think 90% or so Catholic. Until we moved to the US, my Dad was working for Aid to the Church in Need, an international Catholic relief organization. In fact, he was their financial director, and thus had even met Pope John Paul II on several occasions. I became an altar server immediately after my first communion, and remained one until we moved out of Germany. In Germany I was also involved in various Charity projects, most sponsored by Catholic organizations. I was very Catholic.

Then came our move to the US and high school. Though I continued to go to church regularly, I think I really felt agnostic for most of high school. I never felt atheistic, I felt that atheism was as much a belief system as any other religion. The only belief system that makes logical sense is agnosticism. I think I wanted to believe in God, but Christianity quit making sense, I began to realize how self-contradictory much of the Bible was. Since then, I still refuse to accept the Old Testament as "the word of God" or any such nonsense. To me the Old Testament is nothing more than the religious text of a religion I do not believe in. However, there are some parts of the Old Testament I like, like the book of Ecclesiastes, or some of the psalms. Those I treat as "Ancient Words of Wisdom" more than anything else. I also pretty much tossed out the whole Revelation thing.

Somehow I managed to avoid getting confirmed. I'm not sure how I pulled that off. I think it's partly due to the fact that I skipped a grade during high school. It was not an intentional act of rebellion, I would have gone through with it if asked to, but somehow I came out of high school unconfirmed. And now I'm kind of happy that I'm not confirmed. I'm catholic, I've been baptised, been communionized, and so on, but I've never had to come out and say I believe everything they say I should.

I don't know when I started believing in God again, but I did. I don't know why either. It just feels right. I feel a presence, and there have been events in my life that lead me to this belief. But it is a belief. I will never claim God's existence to be absolute fact. I claim God's existence as my personal belief.

I'm still not sure what the rest of my beliefs really are. I believe in God. That's about all I can say for certain. I'm not sure why I still claim to be Catholic. I have not seen an adequate solution to the problem of evil, so I can't believe that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. God may be two of the three, but not all of them. But I don't claim to know anything about God. I just personally can't believe that God is all of the above. So already, we've only covered one third of the trinity, and I think I'm already being blasphemous. So let's move on: Christianity. I guess I'm kind of Christian. I like Jesus. There are lots of lessons in the New Testament that I find to be worthwhile. I wish people would listen to them. There's a great song by REM on their "New Adventures in Hi-Fi" album: New Test Leper. It starts out "I can't say that I love Jesus. That would be a hollow claim. He did make some observations. And I'm quoting them today. 'Judge not, lest ye be judged.' What a beautiful refrain." At times I feel kind of like that. Some of the lessons of Jesus are wonderful things. Beyond that, I don't know what to think about Jesus. I can find comfort in his teachings. And I feel if he was willing to die for his beliefs, to die for the rest of us, then he deserves my love. Was he the Son of God? I don't know. Have I accepted Jesus as my savior? I'd be lying if I said I did. But I do think of him, and I do find strength in him and his teachings. So I guess the real answer to that question is "kind of."

Why do I still go to mass? Mainly because it is calming. I feel better after mass. I don't like fancy masses. I like simple masses in small congregations. I really like dorm masses at ND. I find myself much less stressed afterwards. I feel calm, I feel good, I feel faith in humanity. And I do feel closer to God, and closer to the people there with me. There's something about ritual and the human mind. This is, I think, probably, at least in part, why there is religion. Ritual seems to be something many of us need. Perhaps it is a weakness. Perhaps not. But the ritual of Catholic mass, in an informal environment, is extraordinarily calming to me. So I guess, basically, that I'm a hypocrite. I participate in rituals that I don't fully believe, because I gain a sense of calm from them. But I guess there's worse things I could do.

So I guess I still consider myself a Catholic because

I believe in God
I love Jesus and have kind of accepted him as my savior
I enjoy Catholic mass
I was raised Catholic, so it's kind of part of me

Will I ever get confirmed? Unless there are any drastic changes to my belief system any time soon, I'd basically have to lie in order to get confirmed. So unless my beliefs change or there's a good enough reason to lie, I don't see it happening anytime soon. I hear you have to be confirmed to be married in the Catholic church. So if I ever want to get married in the Catholic church, I may have to go through confirmation. But I'd hate to get confirmed without truly believing in the stuff.

Oh, I would like to point out that there were a few parts of the Vigil I did enjoy. The Liturgical Choir, as usual, was awesome. I've always enjoyed listening to them. And I do like the whole spreading the easter light around thing. I think I'm done.

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beer beer beer church

entry #967, Sun, April 15, 2001, 00:55 (Life in General)

ok, so there's two possibilities: whoever told me that the Mormons had shortened their name to "The Church of Jesus Christ" was lying to me, or the people in charge of tv advertising for the Mormons were not informed of the name change. I just saw an ad for the "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints" ...

Dear Mojo... I like saturday night tv. "a football game without iced beer is like a soccer game without warm beer" ... oh lordy. I worry that tonight I may write things that may offend some. You see, I just got back from the easter vigil, and therefore lent is over, so I kinda have a buzz going off of one beer. Six weeks of abstinence have lowered my tolerance, it seems. And I've some religious issues I want off my chest. If I was smart, I'd wait till tomorrow when I'm feeling clearheaded, but as I may or may not have already told you, I'm not particularly intelligent. So I'll have another beer and begin a rant. I doubt if it will make much sense.

So I went to the easter vigil mass at the basilica with mi familia. It was absurdly long. I cannot imagine that an omnibenevolent God would expect anyone to sit through that. But the church seems, as usual, not to share my opinion. I actually found myself thinking today that I'm glad I'm not confirmed. The Catholic church and I just have too many differences of opinion. I also decided that the old testament just isn't part of my belief system.

ok, I just realized I'm too tired to continue whatever trains of thought I had going, since I've been staring at this log entry for a while now. Maybe I'll continue this later...

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entry #966, Sat, April 14, 2001, 01:36 (Life in General)

Dear Mojo Jojo,

I have decided I should begin addressing you as "Mojo Jojo" because "Dear Log" sounds stupid and the use of "Dear Diary," I fear, would threaten my masculinity. I know, I'm silly. But I did decide that I want to write as to an imaginary listener, and really, seeing how you're an evil monkey bent on world domination, who better to listen to my silly observations? Exactly.

You know, I've frequently found myself wishing I'd started some kind of log/diary/journal thing much earlier. Often I wish I could go back farther than 28 months (I think that's how long it's been). It's so much fun to read old log entries. So I've decided that anytime I have random flashbacks or whatever, I'm going to record them, because chances are that I'm more likely to remember them now than I will be in the future. So here goes.

I don't know why I started thinking about this last night, but I did. I remembered this one girl I knew in Germany. She wasn't originally part of our class, but moved to Steinbach at some point. She developed early and quickly, and I remember how we used to enjoy watching her run during gym class. In part because she was an amazing athlete, but mainly because we were witnessing the wonders of the word "boing" ... hey, we were in middle school, that's what we did. So I used to hang out with her ... and developed a crush on her. So this one time we were studying French together (yes, I did take four years of French while living in Germany) and I confessed to her that I liked her ("Je t'aime.") She responded by telling me she knew. ("Oui, je sais.") We then continued studying. Girls are extraordinarily confusing, and this was one of my first encounters with that fact. Nothing ever happened after that, though we remained friends. I think she later developed an eating disorder, she spent a while in the hospital, and when she finally returned to classes, she was really horribly skinny and looked really weak. It was really sad, since she'd been so pretty and such a great athlete, and now she was so helpless. I've no idea what's happened to her since moving away. But it's amazing how vague the memories are, considering how I felt.

But while on the subject of Germany, I've also been thinking about my accent and such. While in Mississippi, John Trifone pointed out how I'd completely lost my accent. Used to be that I couldn't talk English without a German accent, and I couldn't talk German without an American accent. But now it seems I've lost that accent. I dunno, I still sound the same to me. But I no longer have people ask me where my accent is from. I guess I've been indoctrinated.

Do you enjoy impulse shopping, Mojo? Brian and I just returned from a trip to Meijer that was pure impulse shopping. I had a sudden desire for apple sauce, so off we went. We came back with quite a bit. We're good impulse buyers.

Oh! I almost forgot to tell you! My family's in town. They arrived today, as did the Decker's. So I spent some time with them today. I gave up alcohol for lent, and it's really been pretty easy to abstain so far. But tonight I think I was faced with more temptation than in the rest of lent combined, all coming from my family. My Dad even tried to convince me that lent ended on wednesday! My family cracks me up, I love them.

I cleaned my room today and did laundry. I don't even recognize my room anymore, it's even vacuumed if you would believe it! And then I find out that tomorrow Mom is gonna spend some time helping Mamie clean her room and do laundry. If I'd have known that was an option, I sure wouldn't have spent time doing it today! Actually, I would've, since I'm all independent and stuff...

OK, I can't think of anything else to write right now, so I'm gonna go eat some more random food. Cuz food is good 'n stuff. I hope your attempts at world domination are going well.

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hoopstars

entry #965, Fri, April 13, 2001, 00:35 (Sports and Athletics)

I wrote a poem:

I wish I was a playah
I wish I had game
I wish I had the kinda skillz
That would bring me fame

So tonight, Brian and I joined George C. and crew for some basketball. It was funny, cuz first we wanted to play at rolfs, but that was closed, so Barrett and I ran over to the rock, but that was closed too, and we didn't have a ball at the time, so I grabbed my football and we headed over to stepan fields and threw the football around there, but then George finally made it over to stepan with a basketball, so we played some ball. Much fun. I sucked, since I've never really learned basketball, and cuz I generally suck at sports that require me to use my hands. But it was fun. Brian was modest, but he impressed me. Tons o' fun.

I am going to hurt sooo much tomorrow...

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nameplates & graphix tests

entry #964, Thu, April 12, 2001, 16:49 (School)

The SSR group finally got name plates for the door. My name was spelled wrong: "P. Rijiks" ... silly them. Now I have a deliciously shallow excuse for leaving.

Didn't kick quite so much ass on this graphics test as I did on the last one: Instead of finishing it in under 30 minutes, it took me a good 35 minutes this time. Oh well.

I am really sore. Ow.

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ow. yay! ow! yay!

entry #963, Wed, April 11, 2001, 23:08 (Sports and Athletics)

So given the choice between 1. studying graphics, 2. doing some preparation for comp arch tomorrow, or 3. playing soccer in the rain, the obvious choice is 3. So got to Stepan field at about 8. Pretty soon, there were 13 of us. Yay! So we played for at least two hours. I hurt so much. I am so out of shape. But it was so much fun. I love soccer. I had three or four goals. So aggression was released in a controlled fashion. I was pretty worthless on defense, though, mainly because I had a tough time getting my ass from one side of the field to the other. And to think I used to be good at midfield. And I made a big realization today. I suck at communication on the field. Need to work on that.

So this is probably the first time I've played soccer against a girl wearing a dress. That was interesting. I played with George Coppinger and his crew, so there were several people there I didn't know. It was fun. But getting up tomorrow ain't gonna be easy...

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experimentation

entry #962, Wed, April 11, 2001, 18:39 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

woo! fun stuff. I just added the coolest (well, after the random log entry) feature to Pete's Log: I can now postpone log entries. At the bottom of my add entry page is a little "postpone" button, which will store the entry I'm working on in the database so that I can come back and play with it later. I'm so proud. Yeah, I know. I should be working on graphics.

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so maybe we could hang out sometime?

entry #961, Wed, April 11, 2001, 17:10 (Life in General)

I love the disney channel. "Zoog Disney" is my afternoon redeemer. The shows are so delightfully shallow, I can watch them without them even registering with most of my brain functions. Is it wrong that I watch shows geared towards 14 year olds?

Beyond that, I'm studying for my graphics test tomorrow. I feel little worry. Calm and unworried. That's me. I also need to do some comp arch stuff tonight. I came home because it was absurdly warm in the

Wow! they just shot a lead-filled stuffed dog out of an airgun! It broke a door!

Ok. I came home because it was absurdly warm in the ssr. It's nice in my apartment. Heat itself doesn't bother me too much. But I find myself unable to do work when I'm excessively warm. So I came home and spent an hour and a half not doing work. So proper temperature isn't all I need. Onwards.

Oh, and this didn't work out exactly as planned, but here's today's vocab word: apothegm: a short, pithy, and instructive saying or formulation. I also find it particularly shady that www.webster.com is the Merriam Webster online dictionary, while www.websters.com redirects to www.dictionary.com. I'm not sure if vocab words will become a regular feature. It's unlikely: I'm lazy.

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and my parking spot was still there when I got back

entry #960, Wed, April 11, 2001, 03:36 (Life in General)

Mission accomplished: I now have a stapler and a bunch of staples on my desk at the ssr.

So the problem with waking up at midnight is that there's not many people around once I finally get to campus. But that's ok. So since I've not been on a regular sleep schedule in a long while, I decided now wasn't the time to start. So I went home and went to sleep at 18:00. Slept till after midnight. Watching tv, took a stapler to campus, wondering if I'd fall asleep if I tried now. History channel is doing a show on the mutiny on the bounty. To my dismay, I realized that mutiny.esgeroth.org no longer resolves. Perhaps I should fix that.

I really want to add a digest sort of feature to the log mailing list thing. Give people the option to receive individual entries, or to get a digest once a day or once a week, or to get a digest after xyz K of entry text has amassed.

So I've been reading random diaries at diaryland.com, finding them amusing. And I realized, the biggest problem with the terms "log" and "journal" is that it really just kinda sounds silly to start out an entry with "dear log," or "dear journal," ... not that I'd really want to start out entries with "dear diary," but it's just a thought, right?

I would like a subscription to "Cat Fancy" magazine. But I'm unwilling to pay for one.

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bouncing round the room

entry #959, Wed, April 11, 2001, 02:13 (Random Crap)

from a slashdot link:

"The University of North Carolina has finally found a network server that, although missing for four years, hasn't missed a packet in all that time. Try as they might, university administrators couldn't find the server. Working with Novell Inc. (stock: NOVL), IT workers tracked it down by meticulously following cable until they literally ran into a wall. The server had been mistakenly sealed behind drywall by maintenance workers."

My question is, why did they go looking for it? And why did they wait four years before deciding they needed to find the thing?

Sorry, Tim, but this sounds funny taken out of context: "Time to staple stuff together and mail them off." I should buy more stamps. The possession of a plentitude of stamps would facilitate my desire to staple stuff together and mail it to random people. I think I'd need a stapler too.

You know, I think I own a stapler. I shall now go find it, and then take it to campus where it belongs.

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comp arch notes

entry #958, Tue, April 10, 2001, 12:33 (Random Crap)

disenfranchised. I wonder if I could franchise myself. The concept seems particularly absurd cuz right now I'm at the proper level of sleep deprivation for words like "franchise" to sound ridiculous. Franchise. Baptize. Outside. Spork. Petaflop. Words are funny. Sometimes I wonder if I'm a mental hypochondriac. Not really, but the thought itself is delightfully amusing to me. "I think I have this mental condition that causes me to think I have mental conditions." Recursive recursion. The best kind, obviously.

I feel better now.

Materialism. I am a materialist. I own things, and I like owning things. In many ways, much of what I own is junk. Objectively, my quality of living would not be affected much (if at all) if I were to rid myself of a large portion of the things I own. And, in fact, most of what I own is really a burdern. If I want to take off and move, I'd have to pack all this stuff up to take it along. I should get rid of it all. But I like it. I'm a materialist.

I wonder how much a job at CBA would pay.

"job" ... heh heh heh ... words are funny.

But the issue of franchising is still unresolved. I wonder how much people would be willing to pay for the rights to behave like me. "For a one-time fee of $200, you, too, can be an attention-deficient geek-boy! Dreadlocks sold separately."

I'd love to see a movie in which, during an excessively dramatic scene, some guy, on his dying breath, begs a friend "Please ... tell my wife ... I always thought of her ... while masturbating."

God loves me. I'm just not sure why.

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comp arch misery

entry #957, Tue, April 10, 2001, 02:32 (School)

I'm not even going to bother pointing out the small things that bother me in the description for this comp arch assignment. Instead I shall present the description as a whole:

"Look through the literature/web and find as much as possible about the Pentium III and the latest Intel product with particular reference to the processor. Sort out the details as to how the speedup is being accomplished in each. Do a comparison as best as possible and then write a short paper on your findings using as many diagrams as possible to elucidate details."

Now maybe it's just me, maybe I'm being petty or something. But somehow it seems to me that this is a really stupid and worthless assignment for a graduate level computer architecture course. ugh. And who the hell says "elucidate" ?!

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random thoughts.

entry #956, Mon, April 09, 2001, 22:05 (Life in General)

I don't have much in the way of memories of first grade, but two things do stand out in my mind: 1: I got a concussion and spent a week in a hospital. 2: on at least one occasion (and it seems it happened more than once, though I'm not sure), girls would drag me into the girls bathroom at school, and then try to steal my pants. I wonder if this may be a contributing factor to some of the self esteem problems I've occasionally had to deal with. But now it's really just a humorous concept. Heh. In fact, these days I think I wouldn't mind girls trying to take off my pants.

kessaku. It's an interesting word. Look it up sometime. The problem with dictionaries is they don't tell necessarily tell you which word is best for certain circumstances. Which do I want?

nishi wa sairyou desu.
nishi wa saizen desu.
nishi wa mogami desu.
nishi wa mujou desu.
nishi wa kokonmurui desu.
nishi wa kantaru desu.
nishi wa kanmuri desu.
nishi wa kan desu.
nishi wa joujou desu.
nishi wa ittou desu.
nishi wa honba desu.
nishi wa daigomi desu.

Now I'm sure one of those phrases works much better than all the rest. I even have a suspicion as to which it might be. But who knows. And is the "wa ... desu" construct even appropriate in this case? I really wish I knew japanese.

Odd as it may seem, this little bit of research into japanese is being done for my graphics homework... I don't know what brought about the memories of first grade.

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kanji kawaii

entry #955, Mon, April 09, 2001, 20:40 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

The assignment: write a simple java applet that has some kind of "scene" which in turn incorporates some kind of "motion" in response to mouse events. Fair enough. So I spent some time trying to come up with ideas that would work well for this "scene" thing and would be fun at the same time. I quickly ditched the decapitation idea, and then also ditched the idea of doing anything pornographic (in part because I'm not qualified to judge such things for accuracy). So the next idea was to do some kind of silly japanese-themed thing. So we check, of course, the silly cse341 java program I wrote to figure out how to import gifs into java. Fair enough. Suns webpage plus an old java book that mysteriously showed up on my bookshelf one day also help.

Unless it is a loop variable in a tight loop, a variable should never have a one-letter name. Never. Because otherwise doing a search to figure out where the variable is used just becomes impractical. Obviously obfusc8ion is an exception to this rule.

So I spent a long time debugging some simple java code, because, as it turns out, java's fancy applet getImage function doesn't follow http redirects. And for some reason I'd given the url as http://www.nd.edu/... instead of www.cse.nd.edu ... badness, man, badness. So finally I fixed that and now life continues happily.

One of the biggest issues I'm having with java is I keep forgetting to recompile. It's like, hey, I'm editing this thing in emacs, and I'm viewing it in netscape. Years of habit have thus led me to ctrl-x-s, alt-shift-downarrow, alt-shift-r. Habit leaves no room in there for javac blah.java... and every time I look at the unchanged applet, I sit there for a second, wondering why. I should be using appletviewer instead of netscape, then at least I'd feel closer to the traditional edit, compile, run cycle and maybe I'd be less silly.

netscape has crashed several times on me today, yet it hasn't crashed since whenever I began writing up this entry, which was more than several hours ago. What's the precise definition of "more than several?" that depends on the precise definition of several. arrrrrh! Anyway, since I don't trust netscape to keep this window in a stable state (I am, after all, using it to debug java code I wrote), and since I'm too lazy to paste this into an emacs buffer like I usually do when journal entries become long-term affairs, I'm just gonna submit this to the belligerent masses now. And thus my command: Belligerate!

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country

entry #954, Mon, April 09, 2001, 03:39 (Music)

The song "Goodbye Earl" by the Dixie Chicks just plain old rocks. I love it. There is one very big reason I like CMT more than MTV or VH1. They actually play music! You see, there are many ocassions where I find myself needing background noise, and "music television" usually fits that bill well. But MTV and VH1 just regularly fail to meet that specification, and we don't get MTV2. So CMT it is. Another advantage to CMT. The chance of them playing something I dislike is low. When MTV and VH1 are playing music, they're much more likely to play something I really like than CMT. But they're also much more likely to play something I don't like. Country is a much more narrow musical genre than the "pop" category which MTV and VH1 pull their selections from. And most country songs fall into just above neutral territory for me, so good background noise.

So in alabama I picked up that Trent Summar CD. I knew only song on it, but liked that song a lot. So I bought the cd after spending a lot of time in the music store debating. But in the end I felt I needed to prove something to myself. For various reasons I'd been feeling I'd been fooling myself (and others) about what my musical tastes were. I wanted to know that I could listen to a country cd and enjoy it for what it was, and not for any other reason. Trent Summar proved to be a good choice for this. First time through, I definitely liked half the songs, and felt fairly neutral about the rest, but upon subsequent listenings, the cd definitely grew on me. So after that experience I've now found myself with several more country cds on my shopping list. I definitely gotta get me some old-skool Johnny Cash, I mean come on. It's a crime that I only own one Cash cd, and a newer one at that.

So in other musical avenues, I've found myself reluctantly accepting the fact that I like the new Shaggy song that I'm hearing a lot recently. It kind of irritated me when I first heard it. Alexandra had a tape with two recent Shaggy songs that got played several times on the drive from Mississippi to Alabama. But I keep hearing it, and it now gets stuck in my head. I pretend to be broadminded as far as music goes, but I still find myself reluctant to accept that popular culture can have overlapping tastes with my own. What can I say? I'm a hypocrite. I wish I had money. There's so much music I want to buy. Yet another reason to go into industry... cuz it's all about the music.

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k2m volume 2: tsm

entry #953, Sun, April 08, 2001, 16:58 (Music)

So today I got around to creating volume two of the k2m collection. It is called tsm. Its track listing is as follows:

MxPx - Responsibility
Crazy Town - Revolving Door
Sublime - Caress Me Down
Queen - I Want It All
Smash Mouth - Let's Rock
Operation Ivy - Sound System
Ataris - Boxcar
Hi Standard - Wait For The Sun
Offspring - Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)
Skankin' Pickle - Fakin' Jamaican
NOFX - Don't Call Me White
Inner Circle - Bad Boys
Scorpions - Wind Of Change
Blink 182 - Whats My Age Again
Aquabats - Play Dough
Shonen Knife - Cookie Day
Reel Big Fish - Beer
Save Ferris - Under 21
Suicide Machines - Someone
The Queers - Born To Do Dishes
Voodoo Glow Skulls - Revenge of the Nerds
Against All Authority - Sk8 Rock
The Specials - Rat Race

I need to get more of these made before summer, since with all the driving that'll be going on, I'll need some good music. But alas, now I must get to work, comp arch needs doing...

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esgeroth lives!

entry #952, Sat, April 07, 2001, 20:25 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

woo. So yesterday (I think [*]) I bought a new power supply for esgeroth. This reduced some of the noise, but we then discovered the cpu fan was no longer in prime condition either... so more work needed doing. But the new power supply apparently gave us cleaner power, so now there's no annoying loud hum when esgeroth's sound card is plugged into the receiver. And today Brian picked up a new cpu fan for esgeroth. So esgeroth is now extremely quiet. It's eerie. So esgeroth is now on its fourth power supply and second cpu fan.

[*] I've been on a really messed up sleep schedule. I've honestly lost track of time.

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nm pete | grep responsibility

entry #951, Sat, April 07, 2001, 16:37 (Life in General)

So Rob achieved the status of being my hero of the day on friday. He helped me figure out how to get 2.4.x to boot on realloc and recognize the trackpad properly. Next I had to figure out how to do mouse button emulation for buttons 2 & 3 in 2.4. Now my next goal is to get some form of power management functional...

Looking at digital cameras. I'm now determined to buy one before I go road tripping this summer. Cuz damnit, I've got a credit card for a reason. I'm considering the Sony DSC-S50. Seems to have more than enough image quality for me, plus people have been able to use linux to connect to it via USB. Which is key for me, since I want to be able to hook it up to my laptop and get pics off it. It's $600, but I think I'm willing to assume that much cc debt. I should have no trouble paying that off.

So I invited Annie to join me on the westernmost portion of my trip this summer. She seems psyched to come along, she's never been west of four corners. And it'll be good to have a driving companion. So the preliminary plan is that we'll leave CB after she graduates, hit zion, vegas, and whatever else on our way to the bay area. Hang out there a few days, then drive south along the california coast, and catch route 66 east. check out the grand canyon, meteor crater, and more and eventually get to albuquerque. I'll drop Annie off with our grandparents, and she'll somehow make her way back to CB from there, while I follow route 66 the rest of the way back to chicago and then return to south bend. The plan is to camp wherever is convenient, and hopefully bum some floor space off the kommune while we're in that area for a few days.

K2 hit 6000 miles yesterday. It now has more miles than Brian's car. heh heh. And my summer driving plans should add at least another 5500 miles to that. So I definitely need a digital camera before I do that. And I want to get a good sleeping bag. I'll also need to start saving up gas money.

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entry #950, Fri, April 06, 2001, 02:49 (Life in General)

The assumption was that seeing how I'd gone for 32 hours without so much as a wink of sleep, I should easily be able to sleep more than 4.5 hours. That assumption was proven wrong. I slept from 19:30 to midnight and then found myself wide awake. So now algorithms time will start a little early. I've got 10.5 hours until the sucker is due. Woooo doggy!

So I got my graphics project turned in and such. I definitely think I exceeded the requirements for the project, but I don't think I met my personal goals for the thing. I had a long list of fun features I wanted to add and never got around to implementing. But oh well, I shall focus that energy into the final project now. You know, with as much cool code that I personally think I write, most of it really fails to generate results that would impress anyone who doesn't know what the code is doing. There is very little I do that I could, for example, show my parents and have them say "cool!" ... so it's nice from time to time to do stuff like this graphics project where I actually get a result I can show off. But the scariest thing is I'm pretty sure that during the brief time I spent asleep, I dreamt in openGL.

So in procrastination mode yet again, I did a little bit of research and discovered that my tattoo design doesn't resemble any racist symbols I could find, so that's good. I don't think I'm really worried if it resembles any other sort of symbols. I also drew up a really basic rendition of it: tattoo.jpg. Of course I still haven't actually decided to get the thing. It's just always fun to have silly ideas to ponder when you should be doing algorithms instead. But if I did get it, I'd get it on my left wrist, W pointing towards my arm. Various things are symbolized by the thing, but I hope the main idea is obvious...

esgeroth is now turned off. The fan in the power supply gave out completely, so I decided it'd be for the best to leave esgeroth turned off until I get a replacement power supply.

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get back to work!

entry #949, Thu, April 05, 2001, 01:51 (Life in General)

ok, as odd as it may sound at this point, I think I've come up with a tattoo design I really like. Now granted, I've long had this philosophy of not making any permanent alterations to myself (just in case I ever find myself on the run from the law ... right...) but this idea I think is really cool. And it's something that actually means something to me. I drew a really poor implementation of it on my skin, and even though my drawing really sucks, I still like it. It's a nice geometric shape to, so it should be easy to come up with a good-looking version of it. Alright, back to graphics. Enough procrastination through drawing on myself. And who knows, maybe someday I'll decide to actually get this thing etched on myself...

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outside? where's that at?

entry #948, Wed, April 04, 2001, 20:36 (Sports and Athletics)

oh yeah. I am a slacker. It's wonderful. Today I spent three hours outside in front of fitz throwing a football around. First I went outside with Anne and Chris. We threw the football and a frisbee around for a little while but then they ditched me. But then I found George, Perk, Branden (and Chris again) willing to join me outside, so I went out again. When all those people ditched me, I came inside and found Tom Smith and George Coppinger were willing to throw the football around with me. Of course I spent the entire time barefoot. It was an afternoon that was good for the soul. I'm psyched for warm weather. And since my graphics project is football-related, I can consider the three hours wasted as "research" ... woo. I can't wait to get healthy so I can start running again. I also realized that my arm strength (tho never spectacular) is currently very pathetic, my arm was rather sore by the end of three hours. Need to work on that. Back to work...

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graphix progress

entry #947, Wed, April 04, 2001, 01:53 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

So I had an interesting time adding lighting to the field. The field looked quite allright without lighting. But then I enabled lighting and things got a bit odd. Finally I realized I'd not specified a normal vector for the field. So I fixed that and got a nice grey field. So I finally figured out material properties for the field and proper positions for the spotlights to make everything work right. Then things got just a little bizarre. Yes, that is a10 foot tall utah teapot sitting on the field. So after enough of that silliness, I finally sat down and just defined some simple goalposts. They look better from the field. I think I'm now gonna add menus for changing the viewpoint. Onwards goes the grand struggle.

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mamie's 21!

entry #946, Tue, April 03, 2001, 20:35 (Life in General)

So Mamie turned 21 today. She's already been up to all kind of troublemaking, including an (unsuccessful) attempt to buy alcohol at meijer at 11 pm last night. So I went to friday's with Mamie and a bunch of her friends. Entertaining time. I finally got around to trying their jack daniels steak. Very good. We got the friday's staff to do a good job of humiliating Mamie. But now I'm back at home and my graphics project beckons...

so it's been a birthday-filled several days. Branden on the 1st, Brian yesterday, Mamie today. And there's more coming up... so much to be keeping track of... now I just need to convince Mamie to come to senior bar tomorrow...

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football project continued

entry #945, Tue, April 03, 2001, 14:01 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

"If you trust the floating-point unit on your machine to do this right, the authors have a bridge they'd like to sell you...." -- from the OpenGL Programming Guide by Neider, Davis, and Woo. Hahaha. I need to read this book, it seems very good.

I did something extraordinarily stupid this morning... for some reason when getting ready to head to campus, I almost packed my laptop. Then I thought "oh, I don't need this, I wrote all that gl code in afs last night." ... wrong! it's all on realloc's hard drive. Oh well. So ist halt manchmal das Leben. At least I was smart enough to remember my football so as to have a basis for modeling one in opengl...

thoughts on rendering a football: first, render a simple football-shaped object using NURBS or some such. second, figure out texture mapping to add detail to the football.

one final note to self: turn on anti-aliasing on the field, the screenshots from last night are lacking anti-aliasing...

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graphix-o-rama

entry #944, Tue, April 03, 2001, 03:08 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

and thus ends day one of hacking on my graphics project. My accomplishment today: A definition of the football field. I actually went and found the official NCAA rule book online (in PDF format!) so as to place markings on the field in the proper location. The field doesn't look too bad: seen from above and a perspective from on the field. OpenGL is cool. We're supposed to document our progress and write a report about how we went about doing the whole thing, so I'm taking screenshots of intermediate results... Tomorrow I shall add goalposts to my field... and I also still need to add the little arrows next to the number that point at which way the goal is. According to the NCAA, those arrows should be exactly 18" by 36" and should be 9 yards from the sidelines. Then once all that is done, add the kicker and the football, and then maybe add a stadium to surround the whole ordeal. But now sleep beckons.

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yay drugs!

entry #943, Mon, April 02, 2001, 21:46 (Life in General)

woo! I'm now on antibiotics. Turns out I'm really not healthy right now, but drugs shall fix the problem. I definitely look forward to finally being healthy again. mmmmmm... die bacteria, die!

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ugh

entry #942, Mon, April 02, 2001, 16:30 (Life in General)

today has so far been another one of those days that is just utterly unenjoyable. Last night I had the worst insomnia I've had in a while. Went to bed at 2:30, didn't fall asleep until well after 5:00. Didn't sleep very well when I did finally fall asleep. The afghan conspiracy was responsible for some very restless sleep. So after I woke up I checked my email to find some very disappointing news that significantly reduces the probability that I'll want to stay at ND much longer. Then I lectured compilers. I still feel rather ill, and talking for an hour definitely did not feel good. So I gave in and started having caffeine again, despite my intentions of lasting until tomorrow before I start into my habits again... so mountain dew and brown sugar cinnamon poptarts are helping cheer me up. Now I must begin looking into the gargantuan graphics project I have due thursday...

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woo!

entry #941, Sun, April 01, 2001, 21:51 (Sports and Athletics)

So the ND women's basketball team are the 2001 national champions! What a game. They beat purdue 68-66. Again, ND was down at the half, and again, they came back. I think I spent the last 5 minutes of the game at the edge of the couch... and in the end, all was well. Now baseball season begins. Baseball sucks. But we'll forget about that. Go Irish!

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no man's timezone

entry #940, Sun, April 01, 2001, 01:37 (Random Crap)

in about 23 minutes we shall enter "no man's timezone" ... well, ok, it'll still be EST, but at 2 am, the people on EDT will move an hour ahead of us, but the people on CDT will not switch to the same time as us until 3. So for an hour, we'll be in a timezone all our own. Anything could happen! Anything! So I'm gonna go to sleep.

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grrrrrrr

entry #939, Sun, April 01, 2001, 00:30 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

esgeroth's third power supply seems to be preparing to die. Frustrating. All other parts have held up well, but esgeroth seems to eat power supplies. So I'll need to look into purchasing a new power supply for esgeroth. I should buy a quality power supply and hope it holds up better than the previous three...

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luau 2001

entry #938, Sat, March 31, 2001, 22:16 (Life in General)

today was another lazy day. Woke up feeling not so good, but a regimen of watching tv and drinking lots of water and grapefruit juice helped me feel up to the task of going to the hawaii club luau. Differences between this year and last year: I will not end up getting wasted tonight and I don't have to put on a programming contest tomorrow. I think I enjoyed last year more just because 1. I wasn't tired and 2. I hadn't seen it before. But it was still fun.

My new goal for life: to write more self-fulfilling prophecies. Them is fun.

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beware the ska robot army

entry #937, Sat, March 31, 2001, 02:03 (Life in General)

Chewbacca! Chewbacca! Lake Titicaca! Chewbacca's on a scooter, man! Holy crap!

But you know, while I'm on the subject of the aquabats, they've got a new album (well, ok, it was released in 2000, so not entirely new) that I don't own. As do Against All Authority. Those will both need to be added to the to buy list with a highish priority...

So today has been rather a miserable day, since I've decided to avoid caffeine for a few days. So I've had a pounding headache since early afternoon (which is about when I woke up). But it's been a productive day. I got paid, so I paid visa and rent. I took care of my IN taxes (they only owe me 42 dollars). Did some things for compilers. Upgraded malloc to kernel 2.4.3 (from 2.2.14 -- quite a jump, need to upgrade afs and vmware to work on the new kernel). Unsubscribed from a few more low-volume mailing lists. Did laundry. Wrote a rot13 program to have in my path, since there wasn't one in my path called rot13.

I also attempted to upgrade realloc to the latest ppc kernel. This didn't go so well. 2.4.3 seems to work for the most part, except for the mouse bit. So I wasted many hours today trying to get mouse support working, with no success. I plan to spend a little while longer battling that tonight. But I got disgusted with the whole affair after a while and so went home to do laundry. At home I watched Lone Gunmen (still a brilliant, hilarious show) and then the second half of the ND NCAA womens final four game. I'd seen bits of the first half during Lone Gunmen commercial breaks and knew it didn't look good. ND was down by as many as 16 points at one point in the game. But the second half of the game featured an amazing comeback, much fun. ND ended up winning by 15 points. Right on.

After the game I returned to campus and immediately went to taco bell with George, who consumed 8 tacos and a burrito. He's a madman, I tell you. Mad!!

And now I've returned to the ssr for round two of Pete v. realloc, widely billed as the match of the year. So I've got me some punk rock playing ("punk rock, shell toes, horns and halos" ... say what?) and will soon begin this battle. But first a few more observations...

I am tired of being tired. I think I've pretty much been sick for the past two weeks straight. But I think it might actually be two separate illnesses. Let's analyze:

s |
i |  **
c |    *          **
k |     *       **
n |      *    **  
e | *     ****    
s |*              
s +-|---------|----|
   3/16      3/26  3/31 (today)
         time

the above figure shows level of sickness versus time for the past two weeks. It's always been at a non-trivial level, but since monday or so, it's been on the rise again. And the early peak around 3/17 was more of a nose/head cold. The current illness bugging me is more of a sore throat kinda deal. Ugh. Normally I wouldn't go into this much detail over a cold, but I think this is the longest I've ever been sick in my entire life! And I'm always tired. I slept 13 hours last night and am still tired today. This whole being tired thing needs to go away, since a tired Pete is an unhappy Pete. But alas, what can I do? The plan for this weekend is to sleep a lot, have no caffeine, and drink lots of OJ and water. We'll see how it goes...

So email levels have definitely been decreasing. Today I got about 65 emails. Yesterday 62. Wednesday, when I had unsubscribed from plex86 and pgp-keyserver-folk, but not yet bugtraq, I got 85 messages. Before then I wasn't keeping track, but daily average was definitely above 100. So looking at today's mail, we see the following breakdown:

email from computers: 25
mailing lists: 12
"mass" mails from friends: 3
compilers related: 7
other people's journal entries: 7
research related: 1
other personal correspondence: 9
spam: 1

I did do some more work today to cut down the amount of mail I get from computers (I think that number should at least halve by tomorrow) and I unsubscribed from a few more mailing lists. Beyond that, I think I've gotten email to about the level I want it, so I'm happy, I suppose.

So anyway, it's two am. Time for the battle to begin.

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action movie fun

entry #936, Thu, March 29, 2001, 22:41 (Movies)

oh yeah. Tonight we rented "True Lies" and "Legend of Drunken Master". Much fun. True Lies was just a hilarious action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Haha. I laughed so hard during this movie. Legend of Drunken Master was another wonderful Jackie Chan movie. Not much in the way of plot (even for a Jackie Chan movie, I thought) but some great action sequences. Jackie Chan is my hero. The choreography for some of the fighting in this movie was just amazing, so much fun to watch.

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brilliant!

entry #935, Thu, March 29, 2001, 16:19 (Life in General)

yay! I have swapped the evil restrictive desk I used to work at for a liberating table. I can't say for certain just quite yet, but I think my productivity should now be increased by a factor of at least pi. Of course, I'll need to rearrange my wall decorations, as some of them have now become unviewable from where I sit... and that is unacceptable.

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the end of an era

entry #934, Thu, March 29, 2001, 10:27 (Life in General)

Today I unsubscribed from BUGTRAQ. Kinda sad, really... I think I'd been subscribed to BUGTRAQ since my sophomore year... I think Marty Rose told me about it in a logic design lab... but although BUGTRAQ posts are frequently fun to read, I've found myself with a distaste for email of late, so I'm trying to minimize the amount I get. So now I've unsubscribed from plex86, pgp-keyserver-folk, and BUGTRAQ. I think those should account for a combined total of at least 40 messages/day. The BUGTRAQ unsubscribe request took almost a day to go through. Must be a busy mail server if it handles 30,000 subscribers or so. But when I confirmed my unsubscribe request, there was the normal confirmation, plus an automated message signed by Elias Levy (a.k.a. Aleph1) asking me to please email him if there was any particular reason I unsubscribed that he could work to improve on. You gotta admire the guy... I can't imagine the volume of mail he must deal with...

Other things I should probably unsubscribe from are the LAM mailing list (I've not actually written an MPI program in a year or more) and I should probably next try to minimize the amount of email that computers send me...

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Zodiac

entry #933, Wed, March 28, 2001, 03:03 (Books, Writing, n such)

Just finished up the Neal Stephenson book "Zodiac" which Arun was kind enough to lend me. Very fun read, typical Stephenson, highly entertaining, very cool technical detail. This was yet another one of those books where I read the first half over the course of a week or so, a chapter or two at a time. Tonight I plowed through the second half. A definite sign of a good read. Next: several H.G. Wells novels. My favorite quote from Zodiac: "I don't like sewing machines. I don't understand how a needle with a thread going through the tip of it can interlock the thread by jamming itself into a little goddamn spool. It's contrary to nature and it irritates me." ... this amused me to no end, because I feel the exact same way. And this book was cool if for no reason other than the fact that the main character is a badass and a professional asshole.

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The K2M collection begins

entry #932, Tue, March 27, 2001, 22:50 (Music)

So for quite some time I've been meaning to make a set of cds that would have a permanent home in K2. Today I finally created the first CD of this set, titled gpm. The track list is as follows:

Lit - Over My Head
Weezer - Buddy Holly
Crazy Town - Butterfly
REM - Losing My Religion
Trent Summar - It Never Rains In Southern California
Blues Traveler - Run-around
Cardigans - Lovefool
No Doubt - Spiderwebs
Mighty Mighty Bosstones - The Impression That I Get
Reel Big Fish - She Has A Girlfriend Now
Smash Mouth - All Star
Blink 182 - All The Small Things
Shonen Knife - Cookie Day
Offspring - Why Don't You Get a Job
Rancid - Time Bomb
Sublime - What I Got
Spin Doctors - Two Princes
Queen - Another One Bites The Dust
KLF - Last Train to Trancentral
Orgy - Blue Monday

71 minutes of goodness. Other volumes planned for this set: avm, drm, prm, cbm, dhm, tsm. We'll have to see what else I think of. Hopefully I'll have enough time these next few weeks to make them.

Much thought is going into the song selection for these CDs. I'm having fun.

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ggghhhh!

entry #931, Mon, March 26, 2001, 23:00 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Sometimes God gives you very clear signs that it's time to quit working for the night. Like tonight when I rebooted malloc and was greeted by the friendly "LI" prompt that means the lilo boot sector's become corrupted. Haven't seen that in a while, and never on non-floppy media. ugh. So I made boot floppies and got lilo reinstalled and thus got malloc to boot properly again. So I went to start xwindows, and that failed. Apparently debian overwrote my XF86Config-4 file, but luckily I found an emacs turd from the last time I updated that file and was able to get X working. But I lost quite a bit of time to this whole ordeal, so I gave up and went home.

But I did get rather a scare whenever malloc wouldn't boot, so I think I'm gonna have to figure out what all on malloc's hd needs backing up to afs. There's probably a good amount...

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tables

entry #930, Mon, March 26, 2001, 20:13 (School)

When writing reports for various classes, there always comes a point where you compile the latest version of your LaTeX report, look at it, and realize "I've got a table." ... and at that point an incredible sense of calm settles over you, because, hey, you've got a table, they've got to give you some credit now! But what this all really means is that finally, I am almost done with this stupid comp arch project. It's a big table too, fills an entire page. So now I just need to type up a little more explanation (the filler around "look at my table!") and then it's done. Then I shall move on to bigger and better things.

I'm very content, my brain seems to be working again. It was pretty much completely useless last week. I think I'm finally getting over this stupid cold.

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graphical goodness

entry #929, Mon, March 26, 2001, 01:42 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

I like my new Offspring cd.

So I finished up homework 6 for graphics. It was fairly easy, but very time consuming. But I had fun. We were supposed to make a 3d N and a 3d D which were supposed to spin if certain mouse buttons were pressed. So I got that part accomplished. Then I decided that the parallel projection mode wasn't good enough: I wanted perspective, gosh darnit! So I spent a long time messing with glFrustum and gluLookAt. I'm either a complete idiot, or the graphics book didn't explain frustum quite right. But finally through experimentation I figured out how it worked and I now have cool 3d spinning ND in perspective! During my experimentation I encountered a variety of trippy results. OpenGL is cool.

So the next move: turn this into a screensaver. First off, figure out how to interface with xscreensaver. Not much in the way of documentation, but I was able to hack up the gltext module and add an interlocking ND that floats around the screen and rotates and stuff. Nifty. Tried running it on the suns. It works, but xscreensaver-demo doesn't work on the suns, because suns xserver sucks. But who cares, it works under linux. Of course, the nice thing about the suns is the hardware opengl. The frame rate is definitely higher on the suns. But it's high enough on linux and xscreensaver-demo works on linux. So now I wonder what an easy way to distribute this would be...

I'm very disappointed about not playing soccer today. Stupid snow. oh well. I was an opengl badass instead.

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no me gustan los reruns

entry #928, Sun, March 25, 2001, 03:12 (Life in General)

two nights, two trips to taco bell. oh yeah. today I didn't do much. I aided the economy a bit by being a consumer at best buy (bought a 10 pack of cd-r's and an offspring cd) then went to campus and began work on the graphics program due tuesday. then watched the performances of producing and performing a one-person show, which featured Lisa's show. It was entertaining. And then, saturday night tv. all reruns. oh well.

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m is for munchies

entry #927, Sat, March 24, 2001, 03:39 (Life in General)

today was another wasted day. went to algorithms, then spent the afternoon messing with mime, sendmail, lynx, and php. Didn't figure out some of the mime stuff I wanted to, but did figure out how to send myself a message that would show up in my inbox marked as deleted... also now have php code in place that will take a bit of html, and either email it directly with content-type text/html or send it through lynx -dump and then email it with content-type text/plain. So at some point I want to give log subscribers a choice of which of the two ways they want to receive entries...

Tom Smith and I took a prospective grad student out to dinner. We went to Steak and Ale, where we had good food, courtesy of the cse department. Dan, the prospective, seemed fairly interested in ND. Tom took off after dinner, so I brought Dan to the lab, where we had a game of quake with Cdawg and George.

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Megumi Yasu, who are you?

entry #926, Fri, March 23, 2001, 02:59 (Life in General)

So Mir has been ditched into the ocean. No word yet on whether taco bell owes anyone tacos, but it seems unlikely... Sasha had a fun observation: "I'll bet there's a boatload of enterprising eBayers waiting until dawn breaks right now, then they'll go dive for Mir parts."

So Sasha now has a php-based log: Sasha's Log. Rock on.

I've also added yet another new feature to my log, but it's cosmetic and minor and so we'll see if anyone notices what it was. But I have thought up several other new features I want to add, if I find time at some point...

Just finished a paper for algorithms... didn't do a spectactular job, but it only counts as a homework, and I figure I can afford to slack off on one homework for this class, given how I'm doing so far... and although I did some good procrastinating while writing it, I still finished with plenty of time left to go to sleep, sleep 8+ hours, and wake up plenty before class starts.

left wrist still bothering me, despite week of minimal typing. Should see if I can dig up that wrist protector thingy I got some time ago...

Arun lent me "Zodiac" by Neal Stephenson, and Paul lent me a collection of four H.G. Wells novels. So I've got me some good sci-fi reading to do.

xpenguins. do it.

I really want to code. But too much other stuff has kept me from coding. The only code I've really touched in the past two weeks is the compilers code. icky.

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mmmmm... beer...

entry #925, Wed, March 21, 2001, 20:24 (Life in General)

you know, with this whole giving up alcohol for lent thing, one would think I would have done more "fancy" cooking so far...

Tonight I made pork chops with a mean beer gravy. Blue Moon proved to do well as a gravy base. The whole affair was rounded out with mashed potatoes. mmmmm... I'm still working on coming out of the food daze...

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yay sleep!

entry #924, Wed, March 21, 2001, 16:17 (Life in General)

so after wings last night I went home, watched a token amount of tv, and went to sleep. Woke up sometime after midnight, did some work that needed doing, noticed the internet was broken, watched some tv, and went back to sleep at 2:30. Woke up sometime after 11 this morning. I feel much better, though I still wouldn't mind more sleep.

ND's connection to the outside world has returned. Rejoice.

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what a fool I was...

entry #923, Tue, March 20, 2001, 16:04 (School)

entry 169 ... if only I'd known then what I know now. For now it seems I've got two semesters of 600 level math department courses ahead of me...

From the grad school bulletin of information:
601, 602. Basic Algebra
Standard results in group theory and ring theory; modules, linear algebra, multilinear algebra; Galois theory; Wedderburn theory; elements of homological algebra; introduction to an advanced topic in algebra.

sounds very scary...

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/me hates cse521

entry #922, Tue, March 20, 2001, 03:31 (School)

so very much. This class makes me very unhappy. Such a waste of my time. It wouldn't bother me quite so much if it weren't for the fact that I'm not feeling well at all and it's looking less and less likely that I'm gonna sleep much tonight. I hate software that sucks.

OK, having taken a few deep breaths, I still find myself quite irritated by this whole assignment. I just read over the assignment again, and it still is completely ridiculous. So the introduction starts out with "The goals of this project are to begin the process of familiarization with various ways of designing, building and testing architectures." It goes on to talk about how we'll use DLX and how the work in this project will provide the basis for the next two projects. Then it says "Below are some of the tasks/goals for this assignment:" ... some?!?! ok, so ok, whatever. The first item is "Become familiar with one of the DLX simulators available on the web" the second one is "Make sure that it will do the following things:" and then lists several things. Problem is none of the simulators they list seems to fulfill their requirements (of course, most of them don't meet one of my personal requirements for software either: that it FUCKING compile!). Next item on the list: "Determine the performance of your design using the metrics indicated on the following pages." ok, um, what design? Nowhere else in the assignment does it say anything about designing anything. Then it goes on to describe how the simulator should consist of three parts: Assembler, Simulation Engine/Debugger, and Performance counters. The three parts are then described in detail. The details for the Sim Engine/Debugger say one of the operations it should support is assembling a program. Isn't that what the Assembler is for? Ugh. Then the next section is "What to turn in" ... "The written report should basically present your performance results for the of the programs assigned." blah. Then later "The report must be at most 1000 words in length (typed and spell-checked, of course)" (at least they got one of those two things accomplished in the project description: it was typed.) "with the following sections: introduction, explanations of how you did the simulator," (how I did the simulator? Am I supposed to do a simulator?) later: "Use appropriate methods for calculating averages." wtf? As opposed to the "inappropriate" methods I would've used if they'd not told me that? It finishes off with links to several simulators, followed by a list of programs we're supposed to run through the simulator. So generally, the impression I get from the project description is that we're supposed to download a simulator, run some programs through it, get performance results and write up a report. This is the impression I got the first time I read the project description before break. But I procrastinated until now and just now read it more carefully, and now I still think it says to do what I thought, but there's two things that make me kind of scared. The bit about determining the performance of my design, and the bit about describing how I did the simulator. Those two sentences make it sound as though we're supposed to write a simulator. I didn't catch them when I read over this before break. But nowhere does this thing explicitly say "write a simulator" it does say to become familiar with a simulator, to run programs through a simulator and gather numbers, and to write a report.

But enough whining about the project description. Let's move on to whining about the simulators. One of them, the ftp site is down. One of them I managed to compile, but can't figure out how to make work. None of the rest of them will even compile. One of the errors in one of the simulators was caused because they were manipulating stderr->_flags. You don't do that! FILE*'s are abstract, you treat them like something magical. Accessing fields inside them is purely evil and can't possibly hope to ever be portable. Ugh. K&R code was prevalent among the simulators that didn't compile. I hate software that sucks. I hate this class for failing to have taught me anything new yet and for forcing me to deal with sucky software to do something that won't teach me anything.

But I'm not bitter. I'm just really tired. And my head is all stuffy.

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oh yeah

entry #921, Mon, March 19, 2001, 20:43 (School)

though I feel better, I'm still not feeling nearly good enough yet. But today has been a good day despite any lingering illness: got back the algorithms midterm, which I aced. Oh yeah, I scored a 100. Mean was a 77.5. Also, I got back my regraded homework 3. Instead of the original 50/60 they gave me, I got a 60/60. I knew I was right. Sometimes I amaze even myself. And on good days I might even amaze small fish and young children!

But alas, now I must attempt to focus on the stupid comp arch project due tomorrow. It looks easy, but boring and timeconsuming. Motivation very difficult.

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ick

entry #920, Mon, March 19, 2001, 01:14 (Life in General)

Last night featured some good tv. And two trips were made to taco bell. And the ND fight song was sung on sheena. At 3:30 or so I went to sleep with the intention of sleeping in today. Unfortunately, I was awake by 11:30. I was plagued by odd dreams I can't remember anymore, except two facts: they were menacing and at one point they involved the future workplace of a friend. This semester I think I have remembered dreaming more than in the rest of my life combined. The oversoul must be messing with me.

So the one thing that needed to be accomplished today: I had to finish grading the compilers midterm. I managed to do so while watching a variety of tv and movies. Stripes on comedy central (a great 80s cold war comedy), Mother Night on campus (based on a Kurt Vonnegut novel, I found it very interesting), fox's saturday night lineup, including Lone Gunmen, a great show. And to top it all off, six back to back episodes of the man show on comedy central. What a great show. If for no reason other than Girls Bouncing on Trampolines. "boing" is such a beautiful word if you think about it. Right. So I've got a variety of email I should really get around to responding to, but unfortunately, it looks like that's going to wait until tomorrow. I'm going to make another attempt at getting a good night of sleep.

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oh yeah. random log entries

entry #919, Sat, March 17, 2001, 22:35 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

I don't know why I didn't think of this earlier... it took under 5 minutes to code up: the random log entry feature. Brilliance.

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figure it out yourself

entry #918, Sat, March 17, 2001, 22:14 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)


alias cwdcmd "alias precmd 'cd - ; unalias precmd'"

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Spring Break 2001

entry #917, Sat, March 17, 2001, 01:22 (Travel)

Amazingly, I woke up to my alarm on Saturday. I packed and such and by 9:00 Mamie and I were on the Indiana Toll Road, headed west. The drive to Mississippi felt kind of like driving into spring. We went west on I-80 for a little while, which was uneventful, but then we turned south on I-57 and driving on that was cool, because things subtly got greener as we got farther south. We crossed the Mississippi river twice, caught I-55 at some point, drove through Memphis (and marveled at the bunches of Elvis/heartland signs) and made it to the Trifone's place in Jackson before 21:00 central time. So about 800 miles, in under 13 hours. Stopped twice for gas and once for lunch. So despite only getting five hours of sleep the night before, I had no trouble doing 13 hours of driving. I think I could've easily gone several more hours. I think it's fair to say I'm now very confident in my long range driving abilities.

So we got to see the Trifone's house in Jackson. It's quite nice. And I think they were at least somewhat amused by my hair... Sunday they were nice enough to let me sleep in a while, then I aided in some yard work they were doing, it was nice to spend some time outside. I've had enough of the cold in south bend. Then we went to Barnes and Noble and other such places for a while, then mass. The church here is new and takes a round approach to things, the altar is in the middle, with seating all around. It was an interesting service. The priest at one point was talking about how Abraham was the father of the three largest religions: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. That statement struck me as odd, it seemed like Hinduism or Buddhism might belong in the top three, I'm not sure of exact numbers, but ... oh well... then after dinner watched "Mr Nice Guy" with Jackie Chan. An amusing movie, if nothing else.

Monday, 9:00 central time: leave Jackson, headed for the gulf. Spent some of drive coding on pptms. Found a little oddity in inilib Debug.h that causes g++ to generate a warning. Should make Barrett aware of this...

It was a slow drive, heavy rain, downed trees, and a detour due to flooding. But I enjoyed the drive, this area is really green. We stopped at an Outlet Mall a dozen or two miles away from our final destination. I bought a pair of blue jeans (my only remaining functional pair of blue jeans is nearing retirement...) and a shirt I found for $7. Also picked up an Orson Scott Card book: The Memory of Earth. By 17:00 or so we arrived in Orange Beach, Alabama, which is apparently right on the Florida border. We stayed in a condo that is right on the beach, you walk out the back, across the patio, and you're on the beach. Excellent. So after unloading and such we wandered around on the beach. I immediately realized that wearing shoes was foolish. So despite grey skies and intermittent rain, we wandered around a good while. The water was warm enough to wade in. I certainly thought the beach was cool. But with the rain and the onsetting darkness, it was getting cold, so we headed for the heated pool. Haha. Then dinner, then we watched the new Colombo movie on abc. Not much in the way of plot, but I think Peter Falk is cool, so I enjoyed it. Sophomore year, I used to watch Colombo in the Keenan basement late at night when I needed to wind down before going to sleep.

Tuesday was a beautiful sunny day. I woke up at 8:30 or so, having gotten a good 10 or so hours of sleep. Nice. Got up, had breakfast, and immediately went swimming in the gulf. I must say, I really like the beach. Waves are really cool, I've never been to a beach with large waves before. So Alexandra showed Mamie and I how to use the "boogie board" and I failed to fully master the subtleties of its use, but had fun none-the-less. I got my ass kicked by one particularly large wave and lost the sunglasses I was wearing. Luckily I'd brought a second pair. But those got damaged later the same day. Then after lunch we headed to Gulf Shores, AL, and checked out the shopping scene there. I was unimpressed by the souvenirs (I've never really been big into cheap junk) but came real close to buying one of them surfer style printed shirts. Wednesday is pay day, I may end up buying one, just to have for the hawaii club luau later this month. Then more swimming before dinner. After dinner we went crab hunting. This was an entertaining new experience. Mamie was terrified of the little things but became most proficient spotter. I didn't spot any but caught one someone else spotted. Then I finished up the Card book I bought. More thoughts on that may follow. Saltwater has been doing interesting things to my dreads. Also, the fact that they've been almost continuously wet since we got here tuesday has made them do odd things. Underneath the rubber bands, where the wax is still heavily concentrated, the salt seems to be turning my hair yellow. So I cut the rubber bands out of five or six dreads that were holding together well. Then I rubbed out the large wax buildups and got rid of the stain. The dreads seem to be doing fine without the rubber bands. We'll see how they hold up...

Wednesday I woke after another 10 hour sleep. Nice. It was cloudy again. So we were slow in getting out. But eventually we made it into the water. Much colder than the day before. But still fun. After a while we opted for the warmth of the pool instead. Then after lunch we drove east into florida. Visited some beach in that area. Then visited a few stores. Picked up a Hawaiin printed shirt and a bracelet. At about 15:00 or so it started raining, and did so the rest of the day... It proceeded to rain hard all night. The power went out at some point, alarm clock lights were blinking in the morning. But when I woke up it was sunny.

Thursday featured the biggest waves yet. And it was again nice and sunny. I didn't put in contacts before going to the beach, instead I headed in blind. So without fear of getting saltwater into my eyes, I rode into fullscale battle against the waves. The waves won. But I had fun. Mamie claims to have some good action shots. Then we had to pack up and leave Alabama. We stopped by the Outlet Mall again, I picked up Orson Scott Card's "The Call of Earth" and the Trent Summar cd I've been looking for for a while. So I will be returning from the south with a new country cd, which seems appropriate. We then stopped in Mobile at the USS Alabama museum and toured the USS Alabama, A WWII battleship, and the USS Drum, a WWII submarine. Cool stuff. Finally we make it back to Jackson. We meet up with John and Mamie and I treat the Trifones to dinner at the Maccaroni Grill as a thank you for their hospitality. Then after returning to their place and unpacking and such I do battle with AOL, trying to get it to let me check my mail. Finally I discover that since I'd been connected under Mark's screen name, AOL's parental controls were hosing my attempts to ssh to wizard. So I got Alexandra to log in with her screen name instead and I was able to access my mail for the first time in six days. I think that's the longest I've gone without checking email in quite a while. I don't think I minded the break from email at all.

Friday, after saying goodbyes, we made it out of Jackson by 10:00 central time 13 hours later we were back in South Bend. The last 300 miles of the journey were through moderately heavy snowfall. What a great welcome back to the midwest. I think it should not be allowed to snow in the midwest in any months other than december and january. They lack the mountains to make the snow worthwhile. But alas, I am home. More later.

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break is upon us

entry #916, Sat, March 10, 2001, 01:07 (Life in General)

So finished grading the first compiler question last night, then um. This morning, um. What the hell have I been up to? There was algorithms, Dr Chen was a badass. Began discussing dynamic programming, a subject which I understand very well. We also went over the midterm. It was encouraging, I got answers that corresponded well enough to his, so I'm happy... well, we'll have to see how I score...

drove Mamie around some, she needed to do some pre-break shopping. Discovered she's picked up some neurotic habits. After she got her stuff I decided to go by the mall and do some last-minute searching for a new CD for the trip south. Didn't find what I was initially looking for (wanted to buy a Trent Summar cd, just to be different) so I decided to check if they had the Powerpuff Girls soundtrack. They did. So I bought it. It features tracks by Devo and Shonen Knife, among others. Pretty fun so far, need to listen to it some more, though...

Went to see "Get Over It" the new Kirsten Dunst flick with a group of people. Very entertaining movie. Also featured some hottie chicks and some fire and explosions... what else can you ask of a movie?

Now I'm doing laundry and hoping to get some sleep before too long... then off to Mississippi in the morning.

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happiness is...

entry #915, Fri, March 09, 2001, 00:27 (Life in General)

... when the guy at the taco bell drive thru window tells you your dreads are "pretty tight" ...

oh yeah... so Branden was kind enough to ease the pain of grading compilers midterms by bringing "Enemy of the State" ... a fun movie. And one of the things discussed in my second ever log entry... then on my way home from campus I felt an incredible taco bell urge, so I gave in and got me some 'food' ... and now it's time again to do compilers...

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compiler? I hardly... ah, forget it.

entry #914, Thu, March 08, 2001, 19:47 (Life in General)

Just saw an Apple commercial on tv that featured a song by The Ataris. Yay Ataris! I need to buy some more of their CDs. Especially the one that features the Claire Danes song...

So I shouldn't put too much thought into this whole thing yet, since there's no official word yet, but it looks like there's a chance I could work for IBM in Austin this summer. So since I needed a break from compiler midterm grading, I started looking into what austin is all about. It's about 70 miles from San Antonio (a city I really liked the few times I've been there) and I think about 150 miles from the gulf of mexico. I also found references to 11 microbreweries in Austin. So that might be cool. I've been coming up with a lot of reasons pro and a few con austin, but I don't think I'll worry about it too much until something official happens...

I've graded the first problem on about two thirds of the tests. I need to grade problems 1, 4, and 5... but luckily I don't have to do all of it before I leave...

So last night, despite no intentions to do so, I ended up at senior bar for a while. Was entertaining to hang out there with Arun and Perk. And turns out there really was no need to do any sort of studying for comp arch...

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comp arch midterm

entry #913, Thu, March 08, 2001, 12:12 (School)

I am pretty sure that the test I just took was the most poorly-written test I have ever taken. I am positive that all my solutions are correct, provided that I made all the correct assumptions and stated them explicitly enough. Unfortunately, the number of assumptions I had to make was astronomical, there's just no excuse. I mean, as instructor, you're making your life more difficult by writing such vague questions, since you'll have to work through each solution on each students test to make sure their answer corresponds to their assumptions, since you can't just compare it to a key... yuck. The cover of the test said the test had four problems. There was actually an incomplete fifth question at the end of the test, which had obviously only been half written. Apparently proofreading didn't go so well, if at all. But we were told we didn't have to answer that question after I pointed out its existence. I was silly and forgot to bring a calculator, so I worked out all the equations, then asked if I could go get one. It was an openbook test, so this was fine. So I leisurely wandered over to fitz, grabbed my calculator, ate some cheerios, wandered back, did the calculations, and still handed in my test before anyone else. I'm an arrogant bastard...

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summer

entry #912, Thu, March 08, 2001, 10:40 (Life in General)

hmmm... suddenly there seems to be a chance I may not spend the summer in south bend. Texas has become an option all of a sudden. Now I've got a decision to make. I can't deal with that right now. So I'll forget about it until later...

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food daze...

entry #911, Wed, March 07, 2001, 21:48 (Life in General)

oh man ... somewhere there is an award that is rightfully mine. The sauce I made tonight was fantastic. Maybe not quite deserving of an award, but man. So chicken, mashed potatoes, peas, and this wonderful red wine (doesn't count as alcohol, since the alcohol disappears in the cooking process) sauce. I should do real cooking more often. So now I'm in a major food daze. I think Anne, the other victim of my cooking, went home to take a nap. Foolishly, I went to fitz to try and do some work. I think she chose a much better option than I. I've been unable to do much more than sit here. If things don't improve soon, I think I will seek some caffeine.

So today I finally got two things off my todo list that have been on it for a while: I bought contact fluid to keep at the lab, and I turned in forms to defer my Perkins loan. Things I really should've done a long time ago, especially the latter.

OK, it looks like I've several more compiler questions to answer. They never stop. So since I've been staring at the screen for too long now, I'm off to get me some caffeine...

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algorithms test

entry #910, Wed, March 07, 2001, 15:24 (School)

so, I don't think I can say I firmly kicked the ass of my algorithms test. But it probably would be fair to say I definitely nicked it. And I'm wearing steel-toed boots today, so I'm feeling relatively confident. One of the two recurrence problems gave me a little trouble, but I think I got a good solution for it. For two of the three algorithm problems I think my answers are good. The third I think I came up with a good solution, I just don't know if I described it well enough, and time was a constraint...

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Lola Rennt

entry #909, Wed, March 07, 2001, 02:03 (Movies)

(or Run Lola Run as the American title goes ...)

Arun seems to enjoy giving me movies that utterly destroy my productivity. I need to start insisting that he give me movies that I can watch as background noise, not movies that'll distract me for 80 minutes as was the case tonight.

I have two words, I think, for Lola Rennt. Intense, and Unpredictable. I definitely enjoyed this movie. Very cool. The techno soundtrack was quite awesome, too, it helped build up the intensity right from the start. And, if nothing else, it was fun just to watch Lola run. Right, um, yeah. So anyway, I like watching German movies. My language skills are being neglected. And the two German movies I've watched of late have been quite good. Onwards.

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algorithms

entry #908, Tue, March 06, 2001, 23:32 (School)

or should I say "algo-rhythms"?

So Tom, Rebecca, and I studied algorithms tonight. It was an entertaining process. None of us really knew how to go about studying, so we ended up discussing everything from topology to "right to life" to computability and beyond. Choice quote of the night (there were many good quotes) was, I think "I can see the spreading of the gook." by Tom. I think this was related to topology. So I think tomorrow I will finish copying down formulas onto my cheat sheet. And then testing time. So that's about enough algorithms for one night, I guess....

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stuff, and more stuff

entry #907, Tue, March 06, 2001, 19:04 (Life in General)

I went running today. Woo. First time since the pre-dread era. I couldn't stand not running anymore. So due to time constraints, I only ran a mile or so. But a quick one, I certainly reminded my lungs of their duties. But it's not the distance that matters, it's getting back into the habit that matters... just so I don't let my metabolism slow down...

Went home and fixed myself dinner. Another habit I should get back into: regular meals.

Found out that my entire family is going to be here for a week around easter. So that should be fun. And the Deckers will be here as well.

Got a 100 on my graphics test. Cuz I'm cool like that 'n stuff.

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movie night

entry #906, Tue, March 06, 2001, 02:34 (Movies)

So attended movie night again tonight. The feature for tonight was "Bound" ... basically about lesbians taking on the mob. After about 20 minutes, I realized I'd already seen the movie, but apparently missed out on the first bit the first time I'd seen it. I have absolutely no idea when or where I'd seen it, but I had. So I kinda lost interest in the film, since I knew what was gonna happen, and it really wasn't my sorta movie in the first place. I'm just not a big fan of mob movies...

Then I returned home and watched "Paths of Glory" ... I do enjoy a good anti-war film. A Kubrick film from 1957, it definitely proved to be worth the stuff I didn't get done while watching it.

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fight the future!

entry #905, Mon, March 05, 2001, 21:46 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

take a nap ...

so I've gotten LTFS to compile on Linux 2.4... now comes the important bit: getting it to work... right now the mount process hangs when I try to mount any ltfs filesystem. However, the rest of the system remains responsive. This leads me to believe that I'm not properly initializing a semaphore or wait queue properly somewhere. This is quite likely, since the semantics for both of those seem to have changed significantly between 2.2 and 2.4... Also, it seems that the structures in <linux/fs.h> have changed significantly. I may need to print out a good chunk of this code to have as reading material down in MS. I must become one with it. Thank God for lxr, though...

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ld_preload is cool

entry #904, Mon, March 05, 2001, 18:22 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

I can definitely see, though, why it's had its share of security problems... also cool is the syscall(2) function. Definitely something to keep in mind for future obfuscated code projects. The best thing is that linux has no manpage for syscall that I can tell, and in the solaris syscall manpage the warnings section is nearly twice as long as the description section. So here's something fun to do:

cat > blah.c << EOF
long int read(int fd, void* buf, int count)
{
  printf("read from %d\n", fd);
  return syscall(3, fd, buf, count);
}
EOF
cc -c blah.c -o blah.o
ld -shared blah.o -o blah.so
setenv LD_PRELOAD `pwd`/blah.so

now, in theory, running any program that does a read (cat /etc/resolv.conf if you can't think of something offhand) should give you a little note of what fd is being read from. So I don't remember where I first discovered syscall. I think it was last fall, and I dunno why I didn't play with it until now. I've known about LD_PRELOAD for a while, but never bothered until now to figure out how it works. I've known about intercepting system/library calls for a while, but only through statically compiling replacement calls, not dynamically.

So some fun notes: it'd be a wise idea to unsetenv LD_PRELOAD before removing blah.so. And while we're on the topic of things that lead to badness, this is fun: setenv $HOME to a relative path sometime. launch tcsh. see how long you can go before it aborts...

I should get back to work now...

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"are there monkeys this small?"

entry #903, Mon, March 05, 2001, 14:09 (Life in General)

yay! yay yay yay! I now have a 21" monitor on my desk. It's a thing of beauty. First of all, I like it since it doesn't shut itself off on a regular basis. Second, it's freaking huge!!!! Used to be I had the same resolution on realloc and malloc (and actually liked realloc's screen better than mallocs) but now I have new reason to work in fitz other than the faster network and access to all my books. I'm so freaking psyched. Oh yeah.

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gateway drugs

entry #902, Mon, March 05, 2001, 04:20 (Music)

I think Linkin Park may prove to be a gateway drug to the world of hiphop. I kinda like to consider myself fairly openminded when it comes to music. But hiphop and rap have been one of the areas I'm not very fond of. But I bought the Linkin Park cd, which features scratching and some rapping sort of vocals, but which has a lot of hard rock, and liked it very much. It's very good stuff, I'm very glad I bought it. I was kind of worried it'd be a purchase like the Papa Roach cd. I though Last Resort by Papa Roach was a good song (though I've grown tired of it...), but bought their cd and was really kinda disappointed by the rest of it. So I was hesitant to buy the Linkin Park cd, cuz One Step Closer was kinda similar to Last Resort as far as the style of music. But I bought it and it was very good. Then I encountered the song "Butterfly" by Crazy Town. I definitely categorized this song as the same sort of music as Linkin Park, but it definitely had more of a hiphop influence, I think, than Linkin Park. So after debating for a while, I decided it was time to expand my horizons, and I bought the cd. It's definitely one that may take a little while to get used to, but I like it. Some of the songs I definitely liked immediately, some of them may take some warming up to, but I think I'll like all of it eventually. But once I become fully accustomed to Crazy Town, I think I may find it easier to get accustomed to some more mainstream hiphop sort of stuff. Who knows. But Linkin Park led to Crazy Town, and Crazy Town may lead me further into the world of hiphop. So Linkin Park may very well prove to be a musical gateway drug.

I hope you enjoyed this random 4:20 am musical rambling... =)

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forgive me...

entry #901, Mon, March 05, 2001, 03:57 (Life in General)

I have just returned from a trip to the grotto. My first trip there since graduating, I think. I'm sure there was some odd symbolism in the fact that I had some difficulties finding my way there. It seems I've gone astray somewhere. I had to go ask God for forgiveness for what I have done. That behind me, now comes the difficult part. Making right what I made wrong. I never truly realized before tonight, I think, that I can really hurt others emotionally. The realization of what I had done made me feel as though I'd been kicked in the guts or something. Ow. I only pray I can make things right again.

In other news, K2 hit 4000 miles on my drive to campus tonight.

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Nam Myoho Renge Kyo

entry #900, Mon, March 05, 2001, 02:26 (Life in General)

I've gotten little accomplished today. Or yesterday. Argh. Other than saturday night tv, I really have no clue what I did yesterday. Didn't wake up until 3:30 today. Went to campus both before and after the sunday fox lineup. Accomplished nothing both times. Finally at midnightish I started working on comp arch. Have two of three problems done. So let's review what needs doing this week:

Comp arch hw due thursday ... two of three problems done
Comp arch presentation tuesday ... Dr Uhran asked me to talk about shade. I think I have enough code examples to present. Just need a brief outline.
Comp arch test thursday ... Not really worried about this at all...
Algorithms test wednesday ... I'm not too worried, but I definitely need to do some studying for this one
I think there's a program due for graphics sometime this week
compilers midterm due tomorrow and project due friday ... I'm guessing I'll need to start grading at least the midterm this week

that's all I can think of right now...

called the Trifones to figure out the MS spring break thing. will probably leave early saturday so we can be there by evening. they are looking into getting a trip to the beach arranged, so that'll be cool, never been to an atlantic beach (well gulf of mexico in this case, but close enough) ... though I have been to mediterranean beaches, and those kinda are almost atlantic... definitely psyched to get out of south bend.

Some metaloginfo: I've actually started using the privacy features of the log. Until a couple days ago, the only log entries with privacy levels greater than 0 were entries made simply for testing the privacy code. So now I need to actually go through all the users and set their privacy levels. Fans of the log who don't subscribe to the mailing list may wish to register/login so that they can view entries their privacy level will permit them when they browse the log... there's a few things to work out with private entries: when a list of entry titles is generated (either thru searches or thru "view all entry titles") the titles of private entries are shown. However these entries cannot be viewed when the title is clicked. Need to make title not appear. Also need to add php interface for changing privacy level of users, right now I need to do so inside mysql. I've also created a new log topic: "Random Crap" which will be used for sending out stuff like the blinky pete and xena/gabrielle kiss campaign urls. See http://prijks.esgeroth.org/log/admin/subscribe.php to subscribe to said new topic.

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unavailable entry

entry #899, Mon, March 05, 2001, 01:01 (unknown)

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Lone Gunmen

entry #898, Sun, March 04, 2001, 22:01 (Movies)

Tv, movies, it's all the same thing...

Watched the premiere of The Lone Gunmen on FOX today. It was awesome! conspiracy, humor, hot chick with uzis, the "octium 4" ... etc... this may prove to be a great timesink if it continues to entertain me as much as this episode did. many choice quotes. I only thought to write two down, though: "come on langley, let's go do some real hacking..." or "that's one twisted *69" ... and just the fact that it's called "The Lone Gunmen" is awesome... time now to be productive ...

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hmmm...

entry #897, Sun, March 04, 2001, 19:54 (Random Crap)

This is how I interpret the latest Microsoft commercial I just saw: "Unlike our competitors software, our software is not capable of emotion." ... wonderful.

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I wish I was a player

entry #896, Sun, March 04, 2001, 17:32 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

... I wish I had game...

huh. Just noticed a package in debian on realloc that states it requires a processor with mmx to run. Yet somehow it's present in the powerpc distribution. funky...

my latest project: pptms. Pete's Pipelined Tiny Machine Simulator. We'll have to see how this goes. If all goes well, it could make for some cool optimizations to play with in a compilers project...

I need emacs with a transparent background ... to increase my eye candy experience...

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unavailable entry

entry #895, Sun, March 04, 2001, 04:17 (unknown)

sorry, this entry is not available for you to see.

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xena! gabrielle! kiss!

entry #894, Sun, March 04, 2001, 00:25 (Random Crap)

the bestest thing ever ... well maybe ...

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blinky?

entry #893, Sat, March 03, 2001, 20:33 (Life in General)

OK, this is weird: http://www.braintease.co.uk/blinkypete/

I found this site, because apparently in the guys link section he has a link to log entry 678. how surreal...

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rock it old school, yo

entry #892, Sat, March 03, 2001, 17:44 (Life in General)

After rather a late night of coding I awoke today at 1 or so. Watched tv for a little while, then off I went. Got gas for K2. Went 273 miles on the last tank of gas, which makes about 25 miles per gallon, which is up from 24 miles per gallon on the last tank. I'm hoping as the weather gets warmer, I'll begin approaching the 32 mpg I'm supposed to get in the city... but I'm definitely spending much less on gas than I had budgeted whenever I actually decided to buy a car. Then I took k2 to get a bath, since hopefully the city of south bend is nearing the end of this year's cycle of polluting the roads with salt. Now k2 looks all pretty and clean and saltless. You'd think that if sand works well enough in CO it'd work well enough in IN. oh well. Then I made the mistake of driving on grape on a saturday. But made it to best buy to pick up a crazy town cd. Good stuff so far. More on that later, probably. Made it to campus and will now attempt to be at least kind of productive...

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unavailable entry

entry #891, Sat, March 03, 2001, 05:11 (unknown)

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nun attack!

entry #890, Sat, March 03, 2001, 01:33 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

wow. I just found a notebook that I bought in Belgium when I was there during my senior year of high school. In it are many pages of code I wrote for a game I was apparently going to call "Nun Attack!" ... written in C with the macos API, I don't think this code was ever typed in, but it looks rather complete. Maybe if I ever get bored I'll see if I can't find a macos compiler and type this in and see if it'd work... but then again, probably not. amusing if nothing else

so I took a five hour or so nap, which makes me feel a good deal better. So now I'm gonna learn readline and begin work on a pipelined tm simulator.

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what I really need

entry #889, Fri, March 02, 2001, 12:04 (Life in General)

so I've decided that what I really need is a pipe organ. one of them huge fill-a-church sort of beasties. I'd have to work out the logistics of how exactly it would follow me around, but it would have to, somehow. Then my life could have a soundtrack of melodramatic old school horror sort of pipe organ music.

the other option would be to get some sleep. last night didn't work out so well.

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oh yeah

entry #888, Fri, March 02, 2001, 02:25 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

yes, I must admit that this is true: I am a badass. There's no point in modesty, because it's so blatantly obvious. So I'm reading through my compiler I wrote last year and am very amused by some of the comments I'm finding... I'll share a few that made me laugh out loud:

// we want to find the offset (blah, blah, where's my attention span?)
// doh!
// dear lord, this is ugly ... but hey, it compiles! and works!

But by far the best was a random comment in the middle of the code:

  // read this sometime:
  //http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/manuals/3000/007-3511-001/html/bentley.html

It was separated by several newlines on each side, so wasn't associated with the code, I don't think. So I went to the URL mentioned and it's this page called "Bentley's Rules from Writing Efficient Programs" and it seems like rather a good read. Unfortunately, I'll have to continue to keep it marked as a "read this sometime" cuz it's about time I got busy doing work. But I do wonder how I ended up throwing that url into the code...

So engineering at its best: I brewed a pot of coffee at 2 am. Then asked Brian to wake me before he leaves in the morning, if I've gone to sleep by then... so now it shall begin.

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Sigue Sigue Sputnik ... it takes the edge off

entry #887, Fri, March 02, 2001, 01:20 (Music)

argh. Wasted about an hour and a half dealing with the ice9 compiler. I found two new bugs. Every time I go back and look at the code I wrote last year, it looks prettier. More and more I want to write a really good ice9 compiler and give it to Dr Freeh as a gift. So now it's past 1 am and I'm just now beginning to type up my algorithms homework. oh well.

You see, it's all good. cuz music makes life worth living. In this case, Paul lent me a tape by this band called "Sigue Sigue Sputnik" ... oh my god, was it good stuff. Some odd sort of 80s rock/electronicish stuff. Very fun. Very very fun. Silly, ridiculous, and fun. But now the tape has ended. And since we're finding more evil oddities in the ice9 code, Brian and I are now playing linkin park: One Step Closer. Except Brian says he's already broken. ugh. But anyway, the point is, everyone should go listen to Sigue Sigue Sputnik. It's funny, though, I tried to listen to this tape last night and couldn't, my tape player doesn't work. I've never actually used it, I inherited it from Jeff, it came attached to the cd player I use. Tapes are now actually almost kind of foreign to me, I've become so accustomed to digital media. Interesting...

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woo

entry #886, Thu, March 01, 2001, 22:43 (Life in General)

when we last heard from our noble adventurer, he was procrastinating instead of working on algorithms. This proved to be a trend for yet a while longer... and then he realized third person really don't work so well for log entries.

So Rebecca Weber and I then decided to have a go at the algorithms together. So much foolishness went on for about an hour, but by the end of it, we had solutions to all three problems. We also discovered that road kill is star-shaped. Definitely the least time I've put into an algorithms assignment yet. So now I need to type up the answers, then finally get working on some mona stuff.

Watched 2001: A Space Odyssey tonight. Presented by the CSE department, as part of some freshman thing. Well, the turnout was low. Four of us. No cse freshmen intents. But the movie was fun, and I got free pizza, so all is well.

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procrastinating

entry #885, Thu, March 01, 2001, 14:19 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

so I'm taking a break from algorithms and messing around with C++. I discovered, to my great joy, that this code compiles (in g++, CC, and KCC) and works as I expected it to:

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

class foo {
public:
  void a() { cout << "haha!" << endl; }
  void b() { cout << c << endl; }
private:
  int c;
};

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
  int q = 420;
  void* j = NULL;

  ((foo*)j)->a();
  ((foo*)&q)->b();

  return 0;
}

Now this is fun and all, but the real question is, how can I use this knowledge to my advantage? That is to say, how can I use this knowledge to really irritate abstraction purists...

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the answer

entry #884, Thu, March 01, 2001, 02:43 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

I have decided that the answer, basically, to everything, is binary search. So what this means, in the long run, is that 42 must somehow be related to binary search. I'll need to work on discovering the exact relationship between the two.

Just finished my second viewing of Shanghai Noon. What a brilliant film. And Lucy Liu as definitely very attractive. Oh yeah.

But the real news is that I've spent very little time on algorithms. I think total time spent actually working on algorithms is about 15 or 20 minutes. I've gotten one of three problems worked out. So I'm doing ok, I guess. Tomorrow's gonna be busy though, since I'll need to finish up algorithms and do a bunch of related work research for mona. And see 2001. So I think what I shall do now is read over the remaining two problems again and hope that having them fresh in my mind will allow my brain to do that weird thing where I wake up with a solution to one or both of them. Not a great strategy, but it's worked before for this kinda stuff. Oh, and the answer to the one problem did involve a binary search. B1: apply a binary search, B2: set of points. jah, man.

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scopin'...

entry #883, Thu, March 01, 2001, 01:10 (Life in General)

NDLUG meeting: some talk, some elections, and some pizza. yay pizza! Then I headed to Paul's place, hung out there with Paul, Rob, Alice, and Adrienne. Entertaining time. Then returned to campus and headed to senior bar. George and I did some scoping. A good time. There was also a band playing. They definitely get credit for the name: Bethany's Sports Bra. And though the band itself was decent, the singer was not so good. So I stayed much longer than intended, but had fun. So now I've returned home, am watching Shanghai Noon again, and am about to embark on an algorithms adventure.

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for naked midgets...

entry #882, Wed, February 28, 2001, 17:16 (Life in General)

... that they may find both growth and clothing, we pray to the lord ... (Keenan Revue... freshman year, I think)

So yesterday I managed to somehow wake up at 8 am. By "wake up" I don't mean "enter some state x, where consciousness(x) > 0" instead, it's more along the lines of "manage to get out of bed and to campus without accidentally committing vehicular homicide" ... consciousness came later. But Dr Freeh was rather surprised to see me on time for a 10 am meeting. So we discussed the compilers midterm, then I went to comp arch, then I realized that mesa sucks and I had to rewrite significant portions of my graphics project in order for it to work with suns opengl. So barely finished that off, and went to class. Went home, spent a while finishing up the compilers midterm, including working through all the problems myself. Posted that, then had a pre-lenten celebration by watching shanghai noon and drinking beer. Woke up at 11:45 or so today. oh yeah. So I think I got a good 9 hours of sleep. Went to algorithms, which was painfully slow today, then went to compilers to talk about their midterm. Dr Brockman was giving the main lecture today, and I got there for the tail end of his talk, he was doing stuff with lego robots, it was kinda cool to watch. So now lent is upon us, and I've got algorithms due friday. So I guess I'll start working on that...

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Shanghai Noon

entry #881, Wed, February 28, 2001, 00:18 (Movies)

So at about 10ish, I mean 22ish, I decided I'd done about as much as I was willing to do today. It seems that I don't do quite as well on three hours of sleep as I used to. Getting old, I guess. haha. So since it's looking like I won't be doing any of this beer thing for a while, I bought a six pack of blue moon, some chips and some salsa, and I picked up "Shanghai Moon" at blockbuster. So now Brian and I are watching this delightful movie, and both of us have decided we need to purchase it. This movie is hilarious. And it's got great action sequences and seems to have had rather a good budget, too. I'm very impressed, it's one of the most fun movies I've watched in quite a while... should try to watch it again before we have to return it...

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ahead of schedule

entry #880, Tue, February 27, 2001, 03:36 (Life in General)

Seeing how I'm well ahead of schedule, this seems like a good time to make a log entry. So I went to see dr strangelove at movie night. Definitely a fun movie. A good break. Then I returned to work. Got most of comp arch completed (all that remains are parts e and f of one problem) as well as most of graphics. I got all the "hard" parts of the graphics project done, along with most the easy parts. So after comp arch tomorrow I'll finish up graphics, since alls I need to do is tell it to draw some more shapes on the screen. Fair enough. I'll have three hours between comp arch and graphics. So for the remainder of tonight I shall write down answers for comp arch e and f (this will take, I'm guessing, less than 30 minutes, because I'm not gonna put too much thought into them) and finish up the problems for the compilers midterm. I'm meeting with Demian and Dr Freeh tomorrow at 10:00 to go over the midterm. So sleep is gonna be on the shorter side tonight. But that's ok, at 20:00 I was thinking I wasn't gonna be sleeping at all tonight, and now it looks like I may get as much as four hours of the stuff! So before I move on to doing work again, some random thoughts and observations

The dreadies are definitely coming along well. I'm finally starting to get comfortable with them, I can finally lean my head back against something without it being very uncomfortable. Yesterday I also managed to fit one of my camo shirts over my head, which is about the smallest shirt I've got as far as neck size goes, so that is good. I think I'm still gonna wait another week or so before I start working out again, though, I don't think I want to sweat into the beasties quite yet.

The Pietasters are really good. I dunno why I've not listened to Oolooloo in as long as it's been since I listened to them last. But an amusing feature of their cd is that although the number of tracks on the cd matches the number of tracks listed on the back, the tracks don't map one-to-one onto the songs. Two songs are on one track, and another track holds only the last few seconds of another song. I always thought this an odd flaw of the cd, and when I played it in malloc's cdrom drive, cddb came back with a track listing that matched the quirks of my cd, so mine isn't unique... oh well...

official caffeine count for today: six 20oz bottles of dew, one 12oz can of dr pepper.

lent has managed to sneak up on me this year. I'm thinking of giving up alcohol this time around...

my stomach don't feel so good. i'm gonna go try to appease it with some food.

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it's badass time

entry #879, Mon, February 26, 2001, 19:07 (School)

Woke up sometime after noon today. (oh, and my solution for problem e, the brute force approach, worked. cuz I rock). Headed to campus and managed to be relatively unproductive for most of the afternoon, got a little bit of comp arch done. Then loitered, then went home for dinner. Returned to campus to have a suspicion confirmed: I've got a graphics project due tomorrow. Oh yeah. So I've quit pine, put in Queen II and entered badass mode. The objectives:

Finish comp arch due at 11:00 tomorrow
Finish graphics due at 15:30 tomorrow
Finish up compiler questions for 10:00 meeting with Dr Freeh tomorrow
No matter what, watch Dr Strangelove at movie night tonight

I can do it, for I am Pete. Which reminds me, apparently in compilers today, Dr Freeh was quite complimentary of me. yay, ego boost! hahahaha!

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it's 4:20 am...

entry #878, Mon, February 26, 2001, 04:33 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

it's 4:20 am, do you know where your horn section is?
I did some research on saturday night, and apparently 420 is not a police code for anything related to marijuana anywhere. But I found various other entertaining possible explanations for how the 420 term came into use...

After 20 minutes of trying to fall asleep, I am struck out of the blue with a revelation: "use brute force, you fool!" ... So I've been playing with wr94's problem e for a few days now. I actually started laying out some code for it today. The basic problem is solving mastermind. You're given a series of guesses and what the corresponding hint was, and are then supposed to say what the number is or if it can be determined. So I've been working up a nice solving sort of approach, and I think I may or may not have been able to reduce this into a working solution. But this is foolish, and I don't know why I never thought of the alternative. So in this particular case, we've four positions, each of which can be 0-9. So there's only 10^4 possible combinations. So anything O(n) on the number of combinations will easily run in a few seconds of CPU time. We're told that the number of guesses given us will be less than 10, so to cycle through 10 guesses for each combination and see if it is a possible solution is trivial. Why didn't I think of this long ago? I've no clue.

But in thinking about this problem, I did some research on the whole mastermind thing online. Turns out that it is proven that (some particular permutation of) mastermind can always be solved in five guesses or less. And Knuth himself actually wrote some paper about an algorithm that would solve mastermind in six guesses or less, but with a lower average number of guesses than the algorithm that had the five guess worst case. Fun stuff. I don't think I've actually played mastermind since before moving to the US...

oh, and no, I did not finish comp arch...

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pardon me, it seems you've swallowed my socks

entry #877, Mon, February 26, 2001, 00:32 (Life in General)

So today I woke up at two or so and my alarm clock was blinking. Good thing I'd not set it... I love power outages. But not nearly as much as esgeroth does, I'm sure. Headed to fitz and got 1.5 compilers midterm questions written, along with completing some other tasks. Then returned home to have food and watch the fox sunday lineup. Simpsons was quite amusing. Then back to fitz (I lead a very hectic lifestyle...) where I don't know what I did for a while, then I went to the O'Neill mass with Cdawg and George. So I've improved my mass attendance this semester over last semester, I've gone at least once. Woo! But I've dreadlocks now, so I'm already closer to God. Returned to CP, called home, talked to the ol' family. Found out that Susan Hoffman was killed in an avalanche today, which is sad to hear. It's been snowing a lot back home, so there've been quite a few avalanches recently. She was a teacher at the CB elementary school and taught both Annie and Diana when they were in fifth grade. She was also involved with RMBL and river watch whenever I participated in that. So I'll have to keep her and the first grade class she was teaching this year in my prayers. Must be awful hard for her class. How on earth do you inform a bunch of firstgraders that their teacher died?

Random trivia I've discovered today: CB was recently named the #1 most romantic ski resort in the US. So I really must've been doing something wrong whenever I've been skiing there. And Branden pointed out that www.linkinpark.com runs apache/php4 on a linux server. Excellent.

So now I've got me some coffee, I think it's time do some comp arch. The homework's due tuesday, and should be easy, but will likely take rather a while, since it's a bunch of busy work. But thanks to Dr Chen I've no class tomorrow, which means I intend to stay up long enough to get at least most of this out of my way.

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doh!

entry #876, Sun, February 25, 2001, 16:28 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

so here's something fun that took me a second to realize what was going on. Compiling, with g++, some code that uses STL stuff, and using "-I." on the command line, I got a funky error:

In file included from /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i386-linux/2.95.3/../../../../include/g++-3/stl_algobase.h:52,
                 from /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i386-linux/2.95.3/../../../../include/g++-3/stl_tree.h:56,
                 from /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i386-linux/2.95.3/../../../../include/g++-3/map:31,
                 from blah.cc:1:
/usr/lib/gcc-lib/i386-linux/2.95.3/include/new.h:6: directory `new' specified in #include

After a "huh!" and a second, I realized I had a directory called "new" in my current directory. Moving it, the error went away. But after some experimentation, neither CC nor KCC seem to have this problem. So whatever.

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saturdayriffic

entry #875, Sun, February 25, 2001, 02:40 (Life in General)

"I'm trying to picture George singing like a black woman." -- Bad Andy

My room is cleanish, I've found most of my cds again, I've gotten some compilers stuff finished, and I'm watching saturday night tv. Today's been good.

Woke up 11ish today, spent most of the afternoon doing laundry, cleaning my room, listening to punk rock, and watching basketball and gymnastics on tv (muted, of course). It was a media-rich cleaning experience. Most of my floor is now visible, for the first time in forever. Excellent. Then at sixish or so, I headed to campus, didn't get much done there, but got most of the tasks on my compilers todo list done. Then, while waiting for bad andy to show up, Perk, Cdawg, and I played doom. First time in probably a few years that I've played doomarena on the sparcs. Cdawg kicked our asses. Andy finally showed up (too late for us to see voyager) and Perk, Branden, Andy, and I hit taco bell and then trecked to my place for sat night tv. We got 18 items, but due to weak eating by Perk and Brian, this averaged to only 3.5 items each. Weak. Back to tv.

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hmmmmm

entry #874, Sat, February 24, 2001, 22:27 (Music)

here's an interesting question: why don't I listen to the clash more often? The best answer I can come up with is that I'm a fool.

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godsmack, punk, and beyond

entry #873, Sat, February 24, 2001, 16:16 (Music)

Branden lent me a Godsmack CD a few days ago, so I checked that out. It's a fun, angry sort of rock. Definitely good coding sort of music. This will probably make it onto the "to buy" list, but that list is currently very long, and I lack the resources to shorten it. So unfortunately, Godsmack isn't likely to make it to the top of that list anytime soon...

So between reggae week, linkin park, and various other things, the amount of punk I've listened to of late has dropped significantly. So today I've entered punk mode. I've listened to The Clash, Civ, Hi Standard, The Queers, and Rancid so far. Good stuff, mustn't forget to regularly listen to it. It's definitely perfect background music since I'm spending today primarily doing laundry, cleaning my room, and catching up on gnucash entries.

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dread head happiness

entry #872, Sat, February 24, 2001, 02:34 (Life in General)

so I think that ever since I've gotten my new hair do, life has pretty much been perfect. Today's been another fun day. Woke up at 11, went to algorithms, then had a meeting about the mona freenix paper. I am supposed to investigate domain, wrapfs, filters/pipes, hurd translators, and preload libraries as related work. Should try to do that soon, need it by friday. Then went to a cse seminar, about ADAPT, which is a framework for adaptive runtime recompiling. Was a neat talk. I actually understood just about all of it, too. Then at 6 I headed over to SMC to hang out with Mamie for a while. We went to taco bell to get food and had a ridiculous experience there, between the time we entered taco bell and the time we left, 30 minutes elapsed. I think just about all the people working behind the counter were under the age of 15, except the woman at the register. I don't think they got a single order right, despite taking forever for each order. Oh well. Then we went to see Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale at washington hall. Performed by the Actors from the London Stage group. It was pretty good. They took the ultra-simplistic approach, using only 5 actors for like 30 parts, which got confusing at times, so since I have trouble with shakespeare to begin with and I'd never read or seen this one before, I had a hard time following the plot at times, but it was still quite amusing, and generally well done. Then I dropped Mamie off at SMC and headed for fitz. After bumming around a bit, I discover that Brian has taken the Bring It On dvd home, so Branden and I head for there and watch Bring It On. I'd somehow managed to go this long without seeing it, but finally I have. It was quite entertaining. An amazing piece of movieness. Oh yeah.

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ltfs port-o-rama

entry #871, Fri, February 23, 2001, 00:00 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

So I'm trying to get LTFS to compile under the 2.4 kernel. This is proving to be nontrivial. I've decided to take notes on where I'm making changes in my code and why:

in most of my code:
it seems they've gotten rid of the struct wait_queue in favor of a wait_queue_head_t. This affects various variables and how I initialize them. struct wait_queue*'s got initialized to NULL. You need to use a special macro to initialize wait_queue_head_t's. I'll need to make sure I properly initialize all of these guys, because I had an evil bug a long time ago when I didn't properly initialize one of these... this also affects semaphore initialization, since they contains waitqs...
in module/module.h:
Had to change current->signal.sig[i] to current->pending.signal.sig[i]. Apparently they decided they needed an extra layer of abstraction.
in module/super.h:
Apparently struct super_operations has ditched the notify_change member. This is fine with me, since ltfs_notify_change was an empty function anyway.
in module/ku_if.h:
Apparently the struct file_operations that is used by device drivers to indicate what functions are applicable to their device nodes has changed a bit. Most notable, to me at least, seems the addition of the owner field which is of type struct module*. I'm curious as to what this is used for, but I've discovered the convenient macro THIS_MODULE and thus I won't be concerning myself with this.
in module/super.h:
It seems that the write_inode member of struct super_operations has a new prototype. Instead of just taking a struct inode* as an argument, it now also takes an int argument. I'll need to investigate what that's for, I just changed my prototype to get it to compile, but never use that int.
in module/super.c:
d_alloc_root now only takes one argument instead of two. But the second argument I used to pass it was NULL, so I just ditched the NULL and will hope that that works...
in module/super.c:
the prototype for the statfs member of super_operations has changed. Seeing that ltfs_statfs is currently an empty function, this doesn't affect me ...
in module/super.c:
they've gotten rid of such things as chrdev_inode_operations and blkdev_inode_operations. Instead, there's now a function init_special_inode, which is actually quite nice as it eliminates some common code out of all the filesystems. So I'll use it in mine, too! The only problem is that the third argument to init_special_inode is int rdev, and ltfs filesystems tend to not have devices associated with them, so I'm not quite sure what to pass for that. So for now I'm going with 0.
in module/file.c:
so the prototype for filldir seems to have changed, they've added an unsigned int argument d_type, which apparently is supposed to be used to pass the file type back to the kernel. This means adding a bit of extra code to figure this bit out, so for the time being, I'm just gonna pass DT_UNKNOWN. That looks like what ext2 is doing. If they wanna know what kinda file it is, they can use stat, just like everyone else!
in module/inode.c:
it seems that lookup_dentry is no longer defined. The fun thing is this is used in symlink code, which is funny, since I don't remember ever implementing symlinks. But I'm beginning to vaguely recall having them working, which means I was cooler than I thought. I'm not sure how to fix this right now. So I'll label this ltfs_follow_link as broken for now. I just want LTFS to compile...
in module/request.c:
oh, god. request.c generates dozens of errors. I think I'm gonna call it a night!

unrelatedely, it seems that with recent binutils (at least in debian), the assembler generates some interesting warnings when compiling modules: "Warning: Ignoring changed section attributes for .modinfo" ... preliminary research indicates I can hopefully ignore those messages for the time being. More info at http://lists.insecure.org/linux-kernel/2000/Nov/0068.html or at your favorite kernel mailing list mirror.

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i rule!

entry #870, Thu, February 22, 2001, 21:55 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

hahahahaha! take it, debian! I have defeated your cunning plans against me. realloc appears to have finally returned to a stable state. To do so, I had to fight an epic struggle. I had to remove a plethora of packages. Then I had to download the debconf .dsc file and install, by hand, all the packages it depended on for running and compiling. Then I had to compile a debconf .deb from source (apt-get source debconf --compile) and then install that. Then I waas able to reinstall the rest of my system. I am now able to, even after a reboot, start x and enlightenment, compile and run gnome and opengl code, and run emacs. So all seems to be right with the world again.

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yay!

entry #869, Thu, February 22, 2001, 18:01 (Life in General)

I think today qualifies as a good day... I utterly failed to wake up for my research meeting or for comp arch this morning. But I managed to get to campus by noonish, so I was here for my second scheduled meeting with Dr Freeh, the one about compilers. I have to write two questions for the compilers midterm...

Then spent most of the afternoon "studying" for graphics. Then the test. It turned out fairly easy, finished it in 30 minutes or so. yay! a few questions I don't think I answered as detailed as I probably should've, but that's ok.

Then the day got even better: I found out I'm getting an $1100 tax refund. I dig that. Verily. Then home for dinner (food is good) and then my triumphant return to fitz. Nothing due tomorrow, so I plan to use tonight to get ahead in various projects. Need to do a few things for compilers. Then I want to get LTFS running on 2.4. Then I should poke around with monad a bit. We'll see how all this goes. I may end up just wasting the night away, since nothing's due until tuesday...

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huh

entry #868, Thu, February 22, 2001, 01:06 (School)

so today I made it to algorithms and handed in the homework. Dr Chen immediately asked us about our solutions to the second problem. Some people said they'd gotten O(n log n) solutions to the problem. Chen immediately criticized that as being too slow. From the reaction of the class, it seems most of us had gotten O(n log n) solutions, including me. Well Dr Chen went on to confess that he'd made the second problem a trap for us. Blah. Oh well. Got the first homework back, 45/50, I'd messed up some stupid math (forgot a -1 somewhere) and thus was imperfect. Then worked on comp arch for a while until I got email from Dr Uhran that the due date's been postponed from tomorrow until next tuesday, which is excellent, since I've got this graphics test to study for and such. So I went on to try to compile LTFS on 2.4. Didn't work. They seem to have changed how signal information is stored in struct task_struct in sched.h, so I'll need to do some kernel source reading to figure out how things work now... which means some fun conditional compiling, because this stuff also got changed between 2.0.x and 2.2.x...

Brian and I went shopping, which was definitely necessary.

Watched tv a little while, then began reading graphics. got through about half the reading, then decided to go to campus and install mesa and such on realloc so I could mess with some opengl code at home. turns out debian decided to fuck me over, so I had to leave realloc on campus in a rather unstable state (but I can now compile and run opengl programs on it!) ... came home and read more graphics (one more chapter left to read) then realized I have a meeting with Dr Freeh at 9:45 tomorrow morning, so I gots to get up early. So I think I'll call myself done with graphics for tonight and worry about the rest of it tomorrow.

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interesting...

entry #867, Wed, February 21, 2001, 01:47 (Life in General)

today's definitely been satisfactorily productive. I actually woke up to my alarm, got up, Brian was in the shower, so I checked my email, watched some tv, and then decided that since Brian was still in the shower, my only option was to go back to sleep. It made sense at the time. Woke up again at about the time my comp arch class was ending. Excellent. Call home to help Mom with a computer problem, then head to campus to finish up the grafix homework before class. Then go to grafix, and, thanks to having brought along a programming contest problem to play with, manage to stay awake the entire time. Then wings, we had a decent showing, nine people I think. Then after returning to campus I realize I need to go home to pick up some of the headphones of the sort that plug into your ears, because the kind that cover your ears no longer fit on my head. Returning victoriously to campus, I finally manage to be productive for a while. I get my algorithms homework for tomorrow written up, get some compilers stuff done, and get debian installed on a vm. There's still a few bits of software I need to install on that, then it'll be time to put the vm into non-persistent mode so I can beat the fuck out of it, knowing a reset will return me to a happy clean state of being. Then at midnight we do a quarterdog run. Arun, George, Branden, Joe and I spend nearly an hour at lafortune, discussing grad school, the department, and various less serious things. A good time. Now I've returned home and am preparing to read a few chapters of graphics in preparation for this test thing I've got coming up thursday.

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amazing

entry #866, Tue, February 20, 2001, 21:51 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

it amazes me what people seem to consider reasonable parts of a base system these days. I'm installing debian on a vm in order to have a system I can test kernel hacks on. Well, I don't want X or any such things on this system. Just basic development and network stuff. So I told it to install its predetermined C development package and that's about it. I ended up having to tell it not to install things such as various X and gnome libraries, ppp, esound, telnetd, and various other silly and unnecessary things of that sorts. I don't think it understands that I want to use as little disk space as possible. Why, I remember back when I installed my first linux system, you didn't have to deal with this sillyness. heheheh. But I shouldn't complain, I'm still doing much better than I would if I were installing red hat or another distro of such bloatedness...

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it's official: i've got dreads

entry #865, Tue, February 20, 2001, 04:13 (Life in General)

Most of this entry has been tape delayed in order to maximize the shock of the new hair.

Friday, an entertaining time. Spend most of the afternoon doing contest coding, then played some freeciv with George. Then Rubin and Ed at my place. So Perk, George, and I pick up beer and taco bell, then hit the Rubin and Ed showing. Joe Taylor and Branden Moore were there too. I love this movie. It's been far too long since I've last watched it. Good stuff, very surreal and amusing.

Saturday: hair day. Go to fitz for a while. Briefly help in the making of an engineering week banner. Then Perk and I take off. We hit Osco for a few more products, bummed a hair dryer off Anne and begin. So neither of us really knew what we were doing. We just started following the instructions. It took a long time. About 10 hours or so. It also involved a lot of pain. It hurt a lot. By the end it also involved a lot of alcohol. It was suggested as a pain reliever, and in the end perk and I were taking shots of rum between each dread. So after we finished dreading, perk needed to remove some hair in a few spots, so we had to find my clippers. Perk succeeded. They were in bad shape, though, and the only lubricant I was able to find was vegetable oil. But perk says it worked, so I'll take his word for that. Other memories from that time are vague. At some point I took off my shirt. Then later we decided to go outside, and my head hurt too much to put a shirt back on, so Perk took off his shirt in a sympathy move of sorts, and we went running around outside. I don't think we were wearing shoes either. Must've been cold. I think Perk hugged a pile of snow. At some point I ended up asleep in bed, but I don't remember going to bed. Woke up still wearing my contacts, which means I'd not taken them out two nights in a row, so I took them out (accidentally throwing out perks contacts, he'd decided to store his in my contact case) and went back to sleep for a few more hours. So now I have dreads. Mad props to perk for doing them for me, I owe him bigtime. Thanks also to Brian for helping out (and making a taco bell run for us) and such, and thanks to Anne for lending us the hair dryer. The dreads will probably need a while before they're fully developed...

So didn't really get up until 3:30 or so sunday. Cleaned up the mess from the dreading fest, then headed to campus. Participated in the engineering banner process for a little while, then headed home and watched the wonderful sunday night fox lineup. Then wasted the rest of the weekend away, figuring that I'd not done anything productive so far, so why start?

so monday I actually managed to be sorta productive. realized I have a graphics program due tomorrow, so put some work into that. Had some odd issues with openGL. I was trying to draw a star as a GL_POLYGON. Well, it seemed to ignore some of my points or something. If I used the same set of vertices in a GL_LINE_LOOP, I got a star. But as a GL_POLYGON I got a messed up thing in which some of my points got skipped so I got some star/pentagon hybrid. So I finally just did star as a pentagon and some triangles. This happened both in suns opengl and in mesa on linux. Also had an interesting issue with mesa in which if I exited the program on a mouse down event, the mouse up event would be passed to the window underneath. Easy way to fix that: change the program to exit on mouseup instead. Also did some work on algorithms with maddog. We got stuff figured out, so I'll need to write stuff up tomorrow. Also attended movie night: army of darkness. much fun, I've now watched it twice in less than two weeks. After that, George, Bad Andy, and I made a taco bell run. mmmm... taco bell... now I think I'm gonna give sleep a try...

Dr Freeh's comment upon first seeing the dreads: "Did you lose a bet?" ... heheheh.

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me love you long time

entry #864, Mon, February 19, 2001, 16:29 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

s/love you/write code that run/g

at some point (probably friday) I started up my revised solution to wr94 problem c using time to time it. The first time I ran it on the huge input values, it ran through everything and then segfaulted at the end. I found and fixed the bug and my solution ran and I forgot about it until just now when I noticed it had printed out the correct answer (wooh!) after, according to time, 1 hour, 15 minutes. That would be 3965 seconds of CPU time. I need to modify my solution so it'll run in under 5 or so seconds of cpu time. oi. But not right now. Right now I need to work on the graphics program I realized is due tomorrow.

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oh man!

entry #863, Sun, February 18, 2001, 04:21 (Life in General)

'i have not been this drunk since freshman year." -- Perk

oh man! I am fucking wasted. perk, brian, and I have had a fun time preparing my hair. but brian stayed sober. i've had p-robably 5 or 6 shots of rum, plus four or five beers. perk's had probably as much rum, plus some beer. in his own words: "woah, i am really dizzy." ...

i'm having a difficult time making the letters be in focus. we finished my hair, brian went to sleep, and perk and i went running around. now it's time to finish up. woah... yeah!

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I rule

entry #862, Fri, February 16, 2001, 19:29 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

problem D of wr94 has been defeated! My solution involves 250 lines of commented code and took me rather long to write. But it works! So there's two possibilities: either this is actually kind of a hard problem or there's a simple solution that I'm just not thinking of. My first guess would be that it's the latter. I'm thinking of actually asking Dr Chen about this one sometime. I should do some complexity analysis on my solution sometime. By the end of my coding binge for this problem I was naming variables after sailor moon characters (the original japanese names, mind you) ... and some of the comments are quite amusing. I wonder how long it would take me to figure this code out again if I were to come back and look at it in like two years.

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friday, sweet friday

entry #861, Fri, February 16, 2001, 14:15 (Life in General)

14:00. Realize I could've probably gone to algorithms and made it back in time for UPS. Oh well.

"If you can't be kind, at least have the decency to be vague."

I've failed to keep reggae week pure: I'm listening to Operation Ivy. But I think Op Ivy is true to the spirit with which reggae week began.

I slept really well last night. Between the gentle buzz of three Blue Moons and the reggae beats of Bob Marley, I was asleep by 12:30 or so. I'd set my alarm for 11 am, but woke up before at 10:30 or so. Haven't felt rested like this in a while.

UPS guy just arrived. If I'd been at algorithms, making it back in time would have been tough. So I guess I chose properly. Now time to grab a dew, a blanket, and have a quick hacking session. Looking at the code produced yesterday for problem d, it seems I broke my solution into the following steps (and stated those steps in comments):

// read in the points
// sort them by x value
// compute distances between all the points
// create graph of all possible paths
// compute edge weights
// compute shortest path
// und endlich, das output.

I've filled in code for all but steps 5 and 6. 6 is easy. 5 will be made my bitch today. oh yeah. For I am a coding badass. Especially when I've slept.

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yet another thursday

entry #860, Thu, February 15, 2001, 23:40 (Life in General)

so today's been ... tired. Had to (and actually managed to) wake up early to make it to campus for a 9:45 meeting with Dr Freeh. Tho I actually managed to fall asleep within an hour of going to bed last night, which is unusual. I can appreciate that. Then comp arch, which was a waste of my time. Then several hours of working on contest problems. Finally at 8ish or so I gave up, my brain just wasn't working. So Brian and I hit Osco's and pick up some rum (our supply was running low) and some blue moon. Then blockbuster where we pick up Titan A.E. Definitely enjoyed vegging on the couch, watching a fun movie, and drinking beer. Titan A.E. still impresses me. As previous entries detail, the plot is mediocre, but the cgi is amazing, the soundtrack is fun, and the plot is enough to make the entire experience entertaining. I think this is definitely a movie I could enjoy owning on dvd, it's good background noise, and very impressive visually. And speaking of dvds, we watched some of the special features on the titan dvd. A few deleted scenes, but nothing great. I think now I may give the whole sleep thing a try. UPS left a note on our door saying they tried to deliver a package for me. They're gonna try again tomorrow between noon and 3. So I think I'm actually gonna skip algorithms, the only class I don't want to skip, in order to receive this package. Glad to see the goods will be here in time for the weekend.

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walking zit

entry #859, Thu, February 15, 2001, 14:02 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

The song "One Love" by Dr Alban features a sequence where he repeatedly sings "what is it?" and the female backup singers respond "One Love" ... but various members of my family used to be under the impression he was singing "walking zit" and not "what is it" which was rather amusing when I first informed them of the real lyrics. This anecdote courtesy of reggae week.

on to the important business: contest coding. The second two problem of wr94 are much more difficult for me than the first two were. The third is one of those where the valid input range is 0 <= l <= u <= 1,000,000,000 and 0 <= u -l <= 10,000. My initial solution to the problem seems to work, but for the maximum input range, it's been running for 30 minutes and is about halfway done. Which is even worse than my complexity analysis predicted, I was expecting it to take about 5-10 minutes. Need to do some careful thinking about this one. Problem D looked real easy, but my solution fails, and I've realized I was making stupid assumptions. So it looks like I'm gonna have to rewrite it as some planesweeping graph algorithm of sorts. Which means sorting. Maybe I'll use some fancy STL structure to do the sorting for me. I think I have the afternoon pretty much planned out now. And I'm really tired.

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contest coding

entry #858, Thu, February 15, 2001, 00:30 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

So not really feeling like doing much else, I found myself some programming contest problems to hack on. I found the problem set for the 1994 western european regional acm programming contest. Did the first two problems tonight. Problem A was simple enough, took an hour, but it was fun to play with C++ string manipulation, since I usually do such things with C strings. but it's all pretty much the same thing over all. The second problem was slightly trickier. It involved parsing a language that describes a data type that can be made up of arrays, strings, enums, records, and such. So I wrote a recursive descent parser and a lexer to do this. An hour to write the code, another hour or more spent debugging. It all mainly came down to me having some issues with iostreams. If I'd have done this one in C, it seems likely I'd have gotten it right the first time through. I'm thinking of rewriting it in C, but maybe later. It was fun, though, to write a lexer from scratch. Woo. Need to do more of this later. But now I must sleep.

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wah!

entry #857, Wed, February 14, 2001, 20:36 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

SGI moved their STL reference page! They provide a link informing you of the fact, but still... that url is so strongly imprinted in my head. woah. change. scary.

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ahead of schedule, again

entry #856, Wed, February 14, 2001, 17:13 (School)

so I've finished comp arch now, which was my schedule for most of this evening. So I actually have time to do fun stuff. Or I could start working on stuff due next week, but I have a hard enough time working more than a day ahead, how can I be expected to work a week ahead?

Oh, and in algorithms today, we learned that Michael Jackson is NP-complete. I love Dr Chen.

The mean for the compilers project ended up being a 66. Yuck. I've had several questions today about grades. I'm wondering how many more are yet to come.

A primary source of entertainment for tonight could be to get a new vm running. I've been trying to clear up space on malloc, the hd's become rather fullish. While doing so I noticed that the mysql files for pete's log occupy a mere 900K of space on malloc. But I realized I should really start backing this stuff up to afs from time to time, I'd hate to lose 26 months worth of log entries... I think I'll go make a backup right now...

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woo! done!

entry #855, Tue, February 13, 2001, 22:46 (School)

woohoo! I'm done grading! Kinda... there's a small chance I may feel guilty and go back through and regrade a little friendlier. But it took much less time than I thought because many more people than expected either didn't do the ast thing or did it poorly enough that it failed every case obviously enough to take little time to grade. It's nice to be done, but I'm not sure if I'm happy about the reason I'm done. The mean grade for this program may end up rather low...

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bitching... by pete

entry #854, Tue, February 13, 2001, 20:45 (Life in General)

today, let's see. comp arch was a waste of my time. graphics was a waste of my time. so that sums up classes. most of the rest of my time today has been spent grading compilers. ugh. the easy part was testing the syntax checking. the hard part is testing the syntax trees the students generate. I've noticed something: Demian's code includes all this nice line numbering functionality so that line numbers can be stored in the syntax tree (they're necessary for proper error messages later on...) ... but it seems somehow the students were never informed they'd need to fill these in. argh. I could take the blame for this, if I'd been smart, I'd have realized they should know about this. But the end result of this all is that none of the ASTs are gonna be diffable. Along with various other issues in the ast code, this pretty much forces me to go through all this by hand. yuck. 30 students * 8 test cases. Oh well. Also had wings tonight. 8 people showed up. Fun time. I had a chicken quesadilla, it was actually rather good. The rest of the night is likely to be occupied by compiler grading ... unless I figure out a quicker way of doing this... I'm strongly considering wasting some time next summer just writing a quality ice9 compiler from scratch (well, sorta: I'll base it off the one I wrote last year, I think) and giving it to Dr Freeh as a present.

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legend

entry #853, Tue, February 13, 2001, 19:50 (Music)

Oh man. In an ultimate act of dedication to this being reggae week (a move that features no hints of anything resembling financial responsibility) I bought the Bob Marley "Legend" cd. It's odd, I used to hear this so much in high school, it's odd to not have heard it in as long as I have. It also seems odd that I didn't have this yet. It's kinda mainstream and overplayed, but it's still really good stuff. yah, man. reggae man.

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oh yeah...

entry #852, Tue, February 13, 2001, 10:47 (Life in General)

the goods have been ordered. they should be here in a few days.

Which has led me to the decision: the official theme for this week is reggae music. It's thus kind of unfortunate that I don't own more reggae. So I'm gonna sub in as much old school ska as I can get away with. But I've a feeling the few reggae cds I do own are gonna see a lot of playing time this week...

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Life Is Beautiful

entry #851, Tue, February 13, 2001, 00:48 (Movies)

So I've been hearing for quite a while that I should see this movie. Mom and Annie have especially endorsed it. So finally I got around to seeing it. It was shown at movie night tonight. I gotta say it was pretty intense. Very good movie. It was cool to see it in subtitles. The italian sounded really cool. And I knew all the languages they didn't subtitle. I think that's all I'll say. It's good. It's beautiful.

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loitering

entry #850, Mon, February 12, 2001, 17:46 (Life in General)

I think, in what is sure to be a bastardization in truest form, loitering has become a scheduled event. Today Perk, Arun, Branden, George, and I loitered in the southwest corner of 3rd floor fitz for a while. We definitely turned the hallway into a "bad area" for a while. Oh yeah.

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i rule

entry #849, Mon, February 12, 2001, 14:02 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

oh yeah. So the solution I came up with for the algorithms problem turned out to be the exact solution Chen wanted and gave us in class today. This just goes to show that I am amazing. But it turns out this thing I was calling "inverse binary search" is actually called "exponential search." But Dr Chen had the following to say about exponential search: "People usually underestimate the power of exponential search." ... oh yeah, that's what I'm saying. Dr Chen is my hero. Oh, and I'm slowly actually finding myself enjoying math again. This is definitely a good thing.

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fun will now commence

entry #848, Mon, February 12, 2001, 01:33 (Life in General)

So since Anne was looking for entertainment, and I had finished up algorithms, we watched a Freddie Prinze, Jr. flick called, I believe, "Boys and Girls" ... it was quite amusing. "Your name is Steve?!" ... then we went to Nicks. mmmm... bagel. with cream cheese. I should try to wake up relatively early tomorrow. I don't entirely feel like wasting away the whole morning. I'm beginning to think I should try to get some things done. I should probably begin grading compilers soon, too.

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algoriffic

entry #847, Sun, February 11, 2001, 18:59 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

first off, big props to perk for doing a sanity check on my math for me... yay perk!

so here's fun things to always keep in mind when doing algorithms problems... 1: can you optimize the algorithm for the average case without penalizing the worst case? 2: can you use a binary search or an inverse binary search?

binary searching is cool. never forget that, and never take that for granted.

inverse binary searching (if that's not the correct term, it is now) is also cool. I need to remember to think of it more often. I need to start approaching algorithms from a different angle. It's not so much an issue of "how can I solve this problem?" as much as it's an issue of "how can I reduce this problem to one I know how to solve?"

So basically, I think I've finished an algorithms assignment well before midnight. I think just finishing before midnight is a first for me. This whole "going to class, paying attention, and taking notes" thing is working very well for me in this class. Much better than my "Rarely go to class, and when you do, pay little to no attention" approach for undergrad algorithms. Amazing.

And it seems that somebody has set up some sort of cron job or something that causes one of the machines on the far end of my office to play the ND fight song at random intervals. These intervals have ranged from 30+ minutes to 30 seconds.

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unproductive

entry #846, Sun, February 11, 2001, 03:36 (Life in General)

Today has been an extraordinarily unproductive day. I mean, wow. I woke up noonish, did nothing for a little while, then headed to campus and pretty much hung out in the undergrad lab until 10ish, playing freeciv, messing with various random worthless projects, and doing little of value. Then shortly after 10, George, Branden, and I headed to taco bell and bought some of the delightful food they sell there. Then we head to my place for several hours of delightful saturday night tv. So I'm pretty much worthless. Oh well, it was fun.

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oh yeah

entry #845, Sat, February 10, 2001, 16:24 (Life in General)

So pretty much, I figure that it all boils down to one simple fact... I am not a very emotionally mature individual. But that's ok, I don't really care anymore. I think that for the duration of my stay at ND, I'm gonna just stick with this approach to life. Find happiness in antisocial geekness, and avoid anything that involves emotions other than "this is fun" or "that's fucking cool" or "that's hilarious!"

In other news, I finally cleaned out my inbox. I'm down to about 25 messages. This makes me happy.

George and I have begun hacking freeciv. We've checked out the freeciv source code and are messing around with it. Well, actually, George started messing with ruleset files and I'm compiling the latest cvs version for solaris, but a preliminary look at the source code looks like it'd be a lot of fun to read and mess with ... unfortunately, it seems freeciv only compiles with gcc/gmake. I could possibly try to fix that, but don't feel quite up to that right now... the code also compiles with a good number of warnings. yuck.

Other fun: I've made some mindor aesthetic changes to my journal code. A few changes I've been meaning to make for a while: the front page now shows the latest entry, and I fixed an aesthetic bug on the search page if the results were requested as a long listing... I've a few more things I want to change in the code: I want to add a digest sort of feature to log entry mailing, so that subscribers can choose to receive entries only once a day or once a week or something like that.

And other things to do today: install various software on realloc. ooh... freeciv finally finished compiling. onwards.

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algorithms inspires

entry #844, Sat, February 10, 2001, 03:28 (B1B2N)

Blank 1: find a common tangent between
Blank 2: convex hulls

algorithms was neat today. I wish I'd taken notes. But I was to busy being angry. Saw some neat issues where I'll need to be careful about making assumptions about running time. Algorithms homework is due monday. Will need to work on that some more this weekend...

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come my lady...

entry #843, Sat, February 10, 2001, 03:26 (Life in General)

come, come my lady, you're my butterfly, sugar, baby.

Yet another band to investigate: Crazy Town. So after leaving the cad/cam lab, we headed to osco and picked up a variety of quality beers. Then we (= George, Branden, Doc, Perk, Anne, me) head to my place, watch six string samurai, and drink beer. Then Anne and Perk leave and we watch Army of Darkness, which is brilliant. Now it's 3:30 am. And I find myself thinking I should really figure my life out. I definitely don't qualify as a stable individual. Oh well.

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six string samurai

entry #842, Sat, February 10, 2001, 03:21 (Movies)

Perk first told me about this movie. He said it struck him as a Pete Movie. He was right. I thought it was beautiful. I need to watch it again sometime when there's not a constant stream of whispering going on. Very surreal sort of flick. Too much analysis of this movie will ruin it for me.

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ugh

entry #841, Fri, February 09, 2001, 21:29 (Life in General)

Today's not been so good. Had a hard time falling asleep last night, had a worse time waking up this morning. And then I checked my email. And the day proceeded to get worse. I pretty much knew immediately that compilers was gonna make my life hellish. And there was little else to make life any better. So I played Linkin Park, really loud, on my drive in and figured I'd just go with the whole anger theme for today. I've not done that in a while. So I went to algorithms, which was good, it may have inspired a log entry to come, we'll see. Then I spent the rest of the afternoon dealing with compilers. Answering questions and discovering bugs in the code. Ugh. But I did at one point buy and consume an entire pint of ben and jerrys ice cream, as a therapeutic sorta thing. Then at 5:30 an acm meeting. Interesting event. Had chinese food. Then freeciv in the cad/cam lab. Now it's time to look for bigger fun...

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entry #840, Thu, February 08, 2001, 19:18 (Life in General)

Apparently some teen in Mississippi on trial for drug charges was found to have marijuana on him when he showed up for the trial. Incredible.

Today's been pretty good so far: I was told twice that I'm wonderful. Beyond that, I've been rather lazy today. Though I did get up rather early. But after comp arch I realized that I have nothing due until monday, and my graphics course this afternoon got cancelled. So I pretty much loitered in the undergrad lab most the afternoon. I did answer various compiler questions, though, so I wasn't completely worthless.

This whole compilers thing has me kinda sad. I mean, it should be a really cool class, but this whole code thing is just making life miserable for people. I was looking at my code from last year. My ast had 8 node types, including the base type. The code given to the students this year has 25. There's just too much complexity here, I think. Yet again I've found myself thinking of the concept of actually going into teaching. Sometime in the long term future. Because I think I could be good at it, given some practice and some instruction and such. Which of course puts me back to thinking about the whole idea of getting a Ph.D. I guess eventually I will want one of them things. But in the meantime, I'll just keep answering compiler questions.

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and then I said...

entry #839, Thu, February 08, 2001, 01:02 (Life in General)

So today's been fairly productive. Had a research meeting with Dr Freeh this morning. Then algorithms, which was kinda interesting, mainly played with variations of merge sort to show various divide and conquere concepts. Dr Chen continues to crack me up. Today he described how the basic operation in sorting is letting the numbers fight. The bigger numbers win. Most people refer to this as "comparison" but Chen gave us the inside scoop today. Algorithms are sure to make much more sense now.

I then moved on to actually spend some time being "productive" which was impressive. Got graphics for tomorrow done (easy enough) and got various things sorted out for compilers. Had dinner at BK then held a compilers review session. A few people showed up (including Anne and Perk) and asked questions. I think I was able to answer them all well enough. Except for perk's question about the math department or something.

Then I went running. Let's see ... running was ... um... pathetic? well, yeah, but the real word I'm looking for is painful. After about half a mile my body let me know in no uncertain terms that I was not to eat BK anymore, especially if I wanted to do any kind of working out that same day. So I only ran two miles today.

Next a quick trip to Meijer, I now have an ample supply of contact fluid, so that's one less thing to worry about. And milk, lots of milk. Called home, discussed some tax issues and presented my road trip idea to mom. She was encouraging and even offered to give me one of the tents we have at home (apparently they've gotten little or no use since I left) which is excellent. In other good news, apparently the Archdiocese of Philadelphia has purchased four of our porcelain plaques for a museum they're starting. This is cool cuz 1. money is good and 2. this seems like a cool place to sell the porcelains to. They bought all religious themed ones, it's gonna be some museum of catholic heritage or something, so that's cool.

Then wandered over to Anne's, watched some television. Good stuff. Now onwards to whatever the rest of the night may bring! It looks like, if nothing else, I've got some compiler emails to answer.

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summer

entry #838, Wed, February 07, 2001, 16:51 (Life in General)

so I've suddenly found myself procrastinating... imagine that... and am looking into some summer plans. Here's a few basic facts:

I'm gonna spend most of the summer in South Bend
I'd like to be in South Bend for senior week
I'd like to be in Crested Butte for Annie's graduation
I'd like to make a brief stop at Fort Awsome [sic]
I'd like to spend at least two, preferably three weeks away from indiana

So, for whatever reason, here's an idea that's beginning to form in my mind:

Drive from South Bend to Crested Butte, on I80
this is a quick way to get to CB and I could possibly stop in omaha and visit bj
Spend some time in CB
Drive from CB to berkeley, along a straight-ish route, possibly stopping and camping somewhere cool like zion
spend a few days in berkeley
drive south to los angeles
I'd need to look into figuring if I can find anywhere to spend a night down there
drive to chicago along route 66
this would be really cool. I could stop in albuquerque and visit oma & papa. Then I could figure out where else along the way to stop
make way from chicago back to south bend where indiana will once again begin to crush my soul

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oh my god!

entry #837, Wed, February 07, 2001, 12:22 (School)

Something strange is going on. The OIT has finally closed my two clarify cases about the spin nodes. I opened these cases exactly 16 months ago, on october 7, 1999. Way to go, OIT. The funny thing is, of course, that the spin nodes left campus within a few months of me filing that case. I need to find some new things now to file clarify cases about, so that I can have some more open, it'd feel odd not having open clarify cases. Luckily there's still a few cases open right now...

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oof

entry #836, Tue, February 06, 2001, 23:05 (Sports and Athletics)

So it's been quite a while since I lastwent running... this due to 1: the death of my old running shoes and 2: whatever bug has been inflicting my throat. But today I finally made it to the schlappy for a run again... unfortunately my lungs are still not back to 100% so I only ran 3 miles. But it felt good anyway. I finished the run off with a sprint that felt really good. Except I couldn't breath by the end of it.

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what a day

entry #835, Tue, February 06, 2001, 18:41 (Life in General)

god bless engineers ...

so today's been kind of ... slow ... I had intended to wake up around 8 or so... instead I finally woke up at about 4 pm. Wow. That's some good sleeping. Like 13 hours worth. I'm amazing. And still, I feel slightly fatigued. Heh. So I arrived on campus, feeling all inspired to be productive. 1: I would have to beg to turn in the comp arch assignment that was due today, since I missed class. 2: I was gonna skip wings to get work done. Well, what really ended up happening: 1: the comp arch assignment was given an extension until thursday, and 2: I found out at the last moment that Jeff was in town and going to wings, so I ditched everything and went to wings with Jeff and Brian. So so much for my plans of being productive today. I might just go home, get some running gear, and go running. But need to wait a while till food has digested...

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movie night n stuff

entry #834, Tue, February 06, 2001, 00:55 (Life in General)

So movie night tonight featured "High Fidelity" which is a fun movie. I'd already seen it before, but it was still fun to see again. I can almost relate to the main character, despite one blatant difference: I've never broken up with anyone before: mainly because I've never had a relationship. So I guess my top five list would be top five girls I wish I'd asked out but lacked the courage to. heheheh. but life is more fun when filled with regret. heheheh. but I do like to make mix tapes (well, haven't made any in quite some time, due mainly to mp3s) ... tho I want to make some mix cds primarily for use in k2. anyway, definitely an amusing movie.

so let's see. have homework due in comp arch tomorrow. haven't started it yet. so I guess that's my plan for the rest of tonight. woo. I should also make sure I don't have anything due in graphics tomorrow. ooh, and tomorrow is wings night!

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lecture-rama, loitering, and pizza

entry #833, Mon, February 05, 2001, 20:25 (Life in General)

So I proved yet again that I'm definitely not the smartest person on the planet: I left all the code and notes I wrote up for my compilers lecture on realloc, at home, and had to run home quickly before the class started to pick those up. So some additional preparations I'd intended to do were left undone... oh well.

Wow. I'm still amazed at how long an hour is when you have to spend it talking to a class. So after an hour I figured I'd said enough and let the class out early. I brought water, but forgot to drink it during said hour, so I was rather thirsty by the end. I think I managed to do alright. Compilers 'n me have this understanding...

My compilers office hours were from 4:15 to 5:15. Shortly after they began, George and Branden wandered by, so we ended up loitering in the hallway. Arun joined us for a short while, and Brian joined us after a while as well. But before either of those clowns showed up, some papa johns guy walked by with pizza, and thus the craving was instilled in George, Branden, and I. So along with Brian, who hadn't been there when the papa johns guy walked by, but who was up for pizza nonetheless, we head for Bruno's pizza. But alas, it is monday, and thus this place was closed. So we drive all the way back to campus, then head to our apartment, where we order papa johns and drink beer. So all turned out ok in the end. Watched some good tv, too!

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epic chess battle

entry #832, Mon, February 05, 2001, 00:37 (Life in General)

so today was pretty much spent entirely doing compiler stuff. I did watch a good amount of tv in the process, though. So it's all good. I was able to talk Anne into a game of chess tonight. Gotta have some fun on sunday nights... after nearly an hour or so of battle, I won, but only because Anne was unaware of a rule. So it's not entirely a clean victory... a good game, tho. Now I should try to go to sleep soonish. Tomorrow I shall spend more time going over notes in order to be prepared for this class thing I'm teaching. I am the king of top down parsing. Yeah, baby.

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black magic: recursive-descent

entry #831, Sun, February 04, 2001, 18:00 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

So I'm teaching class tomorrow for compilers since Dr Freeh is out of town. This should prove to be an interesting adventure. The fun thing is actually reading the chapter in the book on top down parsing, I never read it when I actually took the class. Top down parsing is one of those things that just clicked for me, it immediately made intuitive sense, so I just wrote my parser for 443 last year without ever bothering to read the chapter. But I figure if I'm gonna lecture on the subject I should have a better clue as to the official lingo of the business 'n such.

As part of the preparation, I've written a few recursive-descent parsers for a simple expression grammar. recursive descent rocks. It's such an amazing bit of black magic. It's extraordinarily simple, yet so powerful. Granted, you can do more with bottom up parsers, but they lack the simplicity. Rarely are bottom up parsers written by hand, they're mostly generated by tools like yacc. So three versions of the same parser: one that just verifies that the input is valid. A second that will compute the value of the input expression, and a third that will create a simplistic syntax tree of the input. syntax tree. woo.

but thinking about parsers and syntax trees and grammars, I'm almost kinda tempted to go back to the parser I wrote for my OS shell project and rewrite it as a recursive descent parser, possibly adding lex for tokenizing. The parser I wrote for that is a bastardization ... but it works...

the whole field of compilers is cool. I really dig this stuff. I really wish there was an advanced compilers course that covered all the cool optimization techniques out there. but compilers is definitely an excellent course, just because it pulls together so much of the stuff learned in previous courses. data structures, automata, os, and so on... so here's hoping I don't screw up tomorrows lecture too bad...

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exploding toilets

entry #830, Sun, February 04, 2001, 04:28 (Life in General)

woo. what a fun night. the tv was excellent, our toilet was not. it's been having trouble of late where the tank won't fill and the water just keeps running. this happened again tonight after I took a piss, but this time the toilet decided to not let the water run thru, and instead flooded our bathroom floor. which was plenty of fun. luckily there were three engineers on hand, so we quickly had the problem contained, but we're still waiting for CP maintenance to come fix it. our toilet hates us. I wonder what Grignr would do...

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the big hit, the keenan revue

entry #829, Sun, February 04, 2001, 01:06 (Life in General)

It's been a fun weekend. Friday night we had a bunch of people, including Jeff Squyres, show up at our place to watch the Big Hit. I'd forgotten how funny this movie is. And since we got the dvd, we got to watch some deleted scenes, which were quite amusing. Jeff brought a lot of beer, and we had a decent amount ourselves already, so I did my part in consuming... memories get kind of vague towards the end of the night. Spent most of today recovering from last night. Then: Keenan Revue time. My first revue not in the dorm. Sordi got me on the VIP list, it was awesome. The show was quite good. The wheelchair bit was definitely funniest. Afterwards George, Branden, George, and I hit taco bell (mmmmm...) and then after dropping George off at campus (he has to fence early tomorrow) Branden and I returned to my place for the wonders of saturday night tv. Woo.

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brilliant literature

entry #828, Sat, February 03, 2001, 17:34 (Books, Writing, n such)

"When I think of logic, I think of three names: Descartes; Spock; Grignr."

this has to be one of the funniest things ever...

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woo

entry #827, Fri, February 02, 2001, 18:43 (Life in General)

My Keenan Hall hat showed up in the mail today, I forgot it in CB after break. But Mom shipped it back to me, yay! I really like that hat. And my big task for today: figuring out why my monad code didn't work but the older monad code did work? Finished it off in about five minutes, when I realized that the code they were using actually was my code, they'd confused the two files. So I rocked that scene.

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good morning

entry #826, Fri, February 02, 2001, 14:45 (Life in General)

Today I had a remarkably good morning. I actually managed to wake up within 30 or so minutes of when I wanted to. So I had a couple hours before I had to be on campus. So I was able to do a morning abs workout (been meaning to start doing this some time ago so that I can fit two abs workouts into the day), have breakfast, check email, take a long shower, and still show up on campus 30 minutes before class. I should investigate getting up early enough to do all that on a regular basis. It's amazing to think back on the days when I used to be a morning person... long ago... Woo. Chen's class was fun again today. I love that man. He's added an extra 10 minutes to the class period due to him missing class several times later this semester, and yet when he finished up, I was at the point where I figured there was probably still 20 minutes of class left. Wow. And I paid attention the entire time, too! So I think I'm relatively well rested, and yet I still feel kinda tired. I am having trouble focusing. So I think I'll need me some caffeine.

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recursion fucking rocks, man

entry #825, Fri, February 02, 2001, 01:25 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

nuff said.

Actually, I'm finding myself pondering issues with memory usage in an algorithm. Another cool thing about recursive algorithms is that the space on the stack can be reused. So how do I take advantage of this? I don't know yet. And my current solution for this algorithm we're supposed to come up with isn't recursive anyway. I need to develop a better intuition for graph theory. I think a good way to do that would be to actually write real code to implement various graph algorithms. pseudocode just doesn't quite do the job...

I wonder if I'm gonna win a grammy this year... only three more weeks until I find out!

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algorithmics

entry #824, Thu, February 01, 2001, 14:09 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

I think I've made a realization, that, tho far from profound, is definitely interesting to me... I think my true area of interest in CS is algorithms. The problem is I am much less intelligent than people like Dr Chen, and thus I'm not well suited to the straight forward investigation of algorithms. I think I'm more of an applied algorithms sort of person. I love spending time trying to design the perfect data structure for my task, I love neat little hacks that increase performance. So I think I like operating systems because it's a really cool place to do applied algorithms. I dunno if that makes any sense, but it kinda affects what I want to focus on. I think I'm really gonna enjoy algorithms this semester. I think I could have done really well in undergrad algorithms if I'd simply gone to class. Algorithms this semester is really making sense so far, recurrence relations and such now almost make intuitive sense to me. And the math is becoming easy too. I think I need to rememorize some formulas and the math will be no problem at all. I'm also now more determined than ever to take the graduate algebra sequence. I also need to spend more time doing programming contest problems for fun...

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i fear for the human race

entry #823, Thu, February 01, 2001, 02:26 (Life in General)

this is hilarious, but this makes me really sad: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/p/nm/20010131/ts/imdf07662.html

Made a brief appearance at senior bar tonight. I think I might start skipping that scene. It's less fun without alcohol.

My abs hurt.

I don't know why I don't go to sleep. I really should. On the other hand, I worry about what my brain will start thinking about if I start letting it idle...

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where's the scene?

entry #822, Wed, January 31, 2001, 21:36 (Life in General)

I'm tired. I feel this general sort of fatigue that just isn't good. I think I'm gonna start referring to it as the Indiana Syndrome. I feel great in CO and all it takes is a few weeks in IN to wear me down. It's all good tho. I can endure a few more years of being tired. Maybe.

For a brief while I was determined to file my own taxes this year. Just wanting to prove that I'm financially independent. Well, turns out that due to my (rather small) partial ownership of Rijks Family Gallery, Inc., I can't fill out one of the simple tax forms, I gotta fill out one of the longer ones. So since it won't cost them much extra to have their accountant do my taxes along with the rest of theirs, my parents are gonna get mine done for me again. I'm really hoping for a fat refund check. My cash flow is hurting. Once I catch up to having bought a car, I don't think it'll be bad, these next few months are gonna be a little tight, tho, I think.

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yay sleep!

entry #821, Wed, January 31, 2001, 18:08 (Life in General)

fell asleep at 2:30 am, woke up at noon. A good night. Algorithms was fun as usual, Dr Chen is awesome. I almost wish I'd regularly gone to algorithms as an undergrad, I never realized how fun it is. The only problem is it hurts to laugh right now, my abs are just a little sore... but it's all good. Finished hw2 for graphics today, was rather easy. Went by health services since I've had a sore throat for a few days. They say it's nothing to worry about, but they took a throat culture just in case. Illness is rare for me, I get worried easily when it strikes. They gave me some non-prescription cough type syrup. I suppose I could have picked up something of the sorts without troubling the health services people, but I have little trust for medicine... but I've not had any cough syrup stuff I don't think since I was rather young, so the taste is an odd sort of reminder of europe... heheh.

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i don't practice santeria

entry #820, Wed, January 31, 2001, 02:15 (Life in General)

i ain't got no crystal ball...

midnight trip to meijer: all mission objectives succeed. Woo. Bought a large bag of apples, which makes me happy. Bought some darg german beer, which I'm hoping will be an effective insomnia cure. haha. Bought a pair of shoes for 22 dollars.

Dr Uhran talked to me after class again today. He handed me the shade reference manual and asked me to learn shade so I could help him teach the class about shade (apparently he's not used it in previous years) ... well, I was able to tell him that 1. I knew shade, 2. I'd used it for the homework assignment I'd just turned in, and 3. I had the reference manual. Cuz I kick ass. So this should be interesting...

bw3's tonight was a fun time. the trivia was evil. we didn't do well. but we had a decent turnout, including two new sophomores Tony dragged along. The mean age at bw3's keeps getting younger, and what with me being the only grad student regularly attending, it's definitely not quite the same crowd it used to be, but it's still fun. I sent out today's bw3s email in german (with a brief translation that didn't do the german any justice) and got quite a few responses to that. apparently people here prefer I communicate in english. whatever.

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oh man...

entry #819, Tue, January 30, 2001, 21:28 (Life in General)

my abs hurt. what a wonderful feeling. I've decided that I mustn't let a day go by in which they're not sore until I'm happy again with the shape they're in. I also in theory may get paid tomorrow. So I think at midnightish I'll check key online and see if the money's showed up in my account yet. If it has, I'm off on a quest to find cheap shoes suitable for running. My shoes right now are just completely destroyed. Beyond all this, I let my brain have the evening off. Enjoyed some tv: simpsons, drew carey, that 70s show, titus. more of that later, maybe. I refuse to do any work today and I refuse to get near any caffeine. I have some program due thursday, but that's not tomorrow. So all is well.

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insomni-o-rama

entry #818, Tue, January 30, 2001, 10:52 (Life in General)

woo. another fun night. last night I think I actually fell asleep before 5 am, tho, so not too horrid. Of course, we had a power outage this morning, which could have meant certain doom for my attempts to wake up, but luckily whenever the power came back on, my vcr made some loud noise that awakened me, allowing me to notice my alarm clock blinking, so I was able to reset it. Woo. Somebody was looking out for me, since I actually need to make it to class today... so we'll see how today goes, since I'm really rather tired... again...

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stuff

entry #817, Tue, January 30, 2001, 01:54 (School)

comp arch homework: finished, mostly. need to make some transparencies tomorrow morning to talk about the computer problem in class. compilers: graded p1, posted source tar ball for p2 and beyond. graphics: haven't done this homework yet, probably won't do it until before class tomorrow.

a fun idea for more to do with the comp arch kernel module thing I was doing... turn off interrupts before doing the timing. for even more accuracy! woo. oh yeah, and remember to turn interrupts back on afterwards...

need to consider sleep sometime soon.

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adventures in hacking

entry #816, Mon, January 29, 2001, 19:41 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

oh man. what a trip it's been. Lessons learned:

whatever version of vmware I'm currently running does not play nice with my current X server. X crashes once I exit vmware. grrrr.
get_random_bytes will cause a kernel oops if passed a buffer that was allocated with kmalloc(GFP_KERNEL, ...) ... for reasons I don't understand. Solution: statically allocate buffers instead
when using vmware, if one accesses the rdtsc register, it's the live register on the processor, so instruction counts get heavily skewed by vmware overhead. for this reason, the code must be run on a real system to get good results.
instruction counts: quicksort: 2068908, bubble sort: 596170874.

overall, a fun adventure...

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excursions, continued

entry #815, Mon, January 29, 2001, 17:30 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

First issue encountered: no libc in the kernel. So to populate our array with random numbers, we'll need to include our own pseudo-random number generator in the module. Woo. Or something. We'll see. Maybe not: in /usr/src/linux/drivers/char/random.c we find the following function available inside the kernel: void get_random_bytes(void *buf, int nbytes); This gives us random data from the kernel entropy pool. Yeah, cuz my experimentation definitely needs truly random data. Haha.

damnit. I suck. I'm glad I ran my module in vmware, cuz it kernel oops'd first time around. Because I was a silly fool and did a kmalloc in init_module and then tried to access that memory in cleanup_module. This don't work because the process in which the module is inserted (and in which init_module is thus called) is no longer live when cleanup_module gets called. I feared as much, but figured I'd try this anyway. So I'll just shove all the code into init_module...

try two: I crash vmware. Only one option remains. Run it on a live system... woooo. So I'll submit this now in case malloc doesn't survive...

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excursions into whackiness

entry #814, Mon, January 29, 2001, 16:45 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Perk is my official hero of the day: he's providing me with caffeine I can't afford myself.

More progress is being made in the arena of proving that I am a sick fuck. So for CSE 521, I am supposed to write programs that implement two search algorithms (I chose quicksort and bubblesort so I can get a wider spectrum of results). Then I am supposed to do various things, including instruction counts on x86 and sparc. Well, sparc is easy. Cuz shade rocks. x86/Linux lacks such a tool, to the best of my knowledge. So after some thinking I realized I'm running a pentium system (woo! non-portable assembly!) so I can use the rdtsc register the pentiums feature to get an instruction count. The only problem: these programs run for non-trivial (greater than 1 quantum) so they'll be preempted and thus the instruction counts will be skewed. So how does one avoid preemption? One runs inside the kernel. Hahahahaha! So, what better way to get my instruction count than to compile my sorting programs as kernel modules and count instructions within the kernel? This is sick. Sick, I say! I love it. We'll see how this goes.

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damn you, sleep

entry #813, Mon, January 29, 2001, 13:47 (Life in General)

sleep mocked me miserably last night. I think it was probably about 8:30 am by the time I fell asleep... doh! and I realized that I've two assignments due tomorrow so I should maybe actually do some work...

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4:20 am eternal

entry #812, Mon, January 29, 2001, 04:59 (Life in General)

the title for this log entry is freaking hilarious. Well, sort of.

I've realized that this past week has been the first week I've lived in the US without Bill Clinton as president. Haven't noticed any big difference... but it's still interesting.

insomnia is sucking tonight. I actually fell asleep around 11ish. But woke up around 3ish. And have been unable to fall asleep since. So I'm avoiding the depression that prolonged insomnia is known to cause by playing around online and watching CMT. MTV was playing some good music for a little while but then started playing Madonna and Jennifer Lopez. So CMT it is now.

I had various random thoughts I wanted to record, but while writing all this up today's top 5 list showed up in my inbox, and by the time I'd finished reading it, I'd forgotten most of those thoughts.

It's almost 5 am. And "Goodbye Earl" by the Dixie Chicks just started. This song is awesome. So I'll watch this and go to sleep (or try). I should investigate purchasing a Dixie Chicks cd. But on the other hand, I should investigate the concept of being fiscally responsible...

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stuff, bowl, more

entry #811, Sun, January 28, 2001, 22:30 (Life in General)

Today is the 15 year anniversary of the challenger explosion.

The super bowl today was less than exciting. The ravens finished off the giants rather definitevely, but it was far from an exciting game. But it was somewhat amusing. Returned home and by 22:15 I found myself with little in the way of entertainment. Could go to sleep early but that's not gonna happen...

Some random K2 news: I had to finally get more gas. Of course, I forgot to keep track of the exact mileage when I last gassed up, but it was somewhere right around 3200 miles. So I've done something like 240 miles on this tank of gas. So about 24 miles a gallon. Not nearly as good as the highway gas mileage K2 gets. I'll need to see how this does in warmer weather. I also set one of my trip odometers at the gas station so I can better track gas usage now. Woo. And thanks to Anne, I now have all the local country stations preset on K2s radio.

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woah yeah

entry #810, Sun, January 28, 2001, 03:14 (Life in General)

another fun saturday. after general laziness for quite some time, Perk suggested I go to the ND student film festival. I've been to these, I'm fairly sure, every year I've been here. But I may have missed a year. So this is my 4th or 5th ND student film festival. We picked up Branden and George too, as they were in fitz. So the four of us enjoyed the film festival, it was rather amusing. From there we proceeded directly to taco bell and ordered ourselves some good stuff. Then we head to my place and settle in for some good ol' saturday night tv. Saturday night tv is at least twice as fun when George is around. It all started out with George asking us if we were prepared to sing along to the cleopatra 2525 theme song. He was. He also sang along to the jack of all trades theme song. George rocks. Now I should probably go to sleep.

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Fear Nothing

entry #809, Sat, January 27, 2001, 17:26 (Books, Writing, n such)

So today I finished up "Fear Nothing" by Dean Koontz. I read it based on a recommendation from my Mom. One of the things I trust most in this world is book advice from Mom. And this turned out to be another fun one. Basically, Christopher Snow has some rare genetic disorder that makes him vulnerable to light and thus he is nocturnal and such. And he witnesses some disturbing incidents that lead to a big mystery thing. A very captivating book. As is the norm with books of this sorts, my reading speed grew exponentially, from a chapter a day to half the book in a day. The book was definitely creepy at points, and rather apocalyptic. And it lacked predictability most the time, which was quite good. I don't know if I'd call the story "believable" in any way, but it was definitely fun. And there's supposedly a sequel out there.

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log rearrangements

entry #808, Sat, January 27, 2001, 15:50 (Life in General)

Today I dropped several topics from my log and merged them into the Coding, Hacking, & CS Stuff topic. I did this to simplify things because I never used them (the three topics I dropped accounted for under 40 entries, none of them from within the past several months). I also created a books topic. It seems almost silly I didn't have one, since books are so much fun. But then I realized that I didn't do any reading for fun at all last semester and that was when the topic system was introduced. So it all makes sense, I suppose. But now that topic has been added. Subscribers wishing to receive entries made to that topic will have to login and subscribe to it, I don't currently have any system set up to automatically subscribe people to new topics.

What a wonderful lazy saturday this is looking to be. I've spent the past five hours reading. Now I've got many more hours of laziness ahead of me.

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yay friday night!

entry #807, Sat, January 27, 2001, 03:09 (Life in General)

so today at fitz didn't work out so well, so eventually I just gave up and went home. Here I spent some time coding, some time hanging out on IRC for the first time in ages (I actually had to "download" an IRC "client" on realloc in order to do so), some time reading (I'm definitely captivated by the Dean Koontz novel I'm currently reading: Fear Nothing), and some time eating. Then at 9:30 or so I'd had enough of all that, so Anne had to be consulted. We ended up renting "The Hurricane" which was fairly good, based on a true story but with a good amount of hollywood thrown into the mix. I still don't understand why anyone would want to voluntarily box, tho. Don't seem like much fun to me. Now I think I'll be unwise and stay up unreasonably late, reading more Koontz...

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dagnabbit

entry #806, Fri, January 26, 2001, 14:42 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

the hell with it all. so this whole IR thing I've spent countless hours developing over the past couple weeks? It's not a half-bad piece of code. Well, it's worthless. It's not gonna be used in cse 443 this semester. Dr Freeh has decided he wants to put less emphasis on optimization then originally planned, and thus an IR becomes less useful and thus my code gets scrapped. I'm not particularly happy about this.

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life is fun when...

entry #805, Fri, January 26, 2001, 02:33 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

you get booted off the OIT modem pool because you've been connected for 8 hours... and then spend another hour coding after reconnecting...

I've finally been able to really dive back into pgtc again. I'm kinda re-architecting the entire program from scratch. The old one was buggy in various odd ways. And it wasn't very well-designed. So I'm having fun. I'm borrowing a lot of code from the old pgtc, of course. But a lot is being rewritten. So the biggest change: pgtc is gonna come in two flavors: pgtc, which will now be a regular gnome application, and pgtc-applet, which will be a gnome panel applet. Both will share a lot of code. So far today I've written up a good amount of code:

a function that returns the idle time of the x display.
This code was actually primarily stolen from gaim (credit given, etc... yay GPL!) and is very simple (maybe 20 lines or so). But I had a pgtc user request a feature where one can set an idle punchout time so that after a certain idle period the user will be punched out automatically.
about dialog box. mainly stolen from old pgtc. important stuff
pgtc application window with menus
this is all new code. I was quite impressed with how easy it is to create menus in gnome apps these days. I remember long ago creating menus by hand like a fool. Then I discovered the gtk itemfactorys or whatever they were called. and now this, which is even cooler. it's so easy.
pgtc preferences system
preferences are saved and loaded using gnome_config, and can be edited through a gnome property dialog window. some of this code stolen from old pgtc.

much more remains to be done. I'm very happy with the preferences system now, it works rather well, and I actually spent the time to read a good deal of gnome and gtk docs to figure out the right way to set this up. Of course, there's only two configurable options right now. But I think I may have more later.

as I write this, there's been yet another download of pgtc 0.2.0.

ok, maybe another 30-60 minutes of coding, then it's sleepy time.

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semantics and beyond

entry #804, Thu, January 25, 2001, 21:36 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

memory terminology just struck me as interesting or ponderable. C++ we delete data structures. in C we free() memory. An insignificant difference in terminology, but the C terminology strikes me as friendlier. In C++ the data is destroyed when we're done with it, in C it is simply freed, it returns back to the higher plane where data normally lives. heheheheh. Three cups of coffee in rapid succession will lead to this kinda thinking.

So how did I find myself pondering memory terminology? Because I finally added destructors (evil destroyers of data, I should say) to all the IR classes.

anyone who has gnu make in their path before sun's make on the cluster sparcs should be shot. Repeatedly.

oh my god. I just ran bcheck -all on the ice9 code. It was scary, man. Scary. Really frightening. I've fixed the leaks and such that can be blamed on me. So I'm gonna run away for the time being. Play with some gnome code for a little while. In the happy world of C code. Where all the .c and .h files in `pwd` were written by me and me alone.

hyperactivity is fun. and for various reasons I now listen to music in my room with headphones when I'm hacking or such. Which means if I leave the room, I need to stop the music so it doesn't play on without me. Well, the reasonable thing would be to hit pause. I hit stop cuz I'm not reasonable. Sooo, I've been only making it about three or four songs at max into the CD before I stop it to do something. And I keep starting it from the beginning when I return to the code. The CD? "Pocket Full of Kryptonite" by the Spin Doctors. Aw yeah. I wonder if I'll ever make it thru the entire cd before the night is over...

Enough with this log entry... time to go make another pot of coffee. buahahahaha... hahaha! Ahhhh hahahahahahahahaha!!!!

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pinky & the brain

entry #803, Thu, January 25, 2001, 18:25 (Life in General)

heheheh. tv is fun sometimes. Brain is dressing up as a sumo wrestler. Brain discusses how he has modified his suit to be strong enough to flip a 600 pound man. Pinky: "but won't you need an awful large spatula?" I love this show.

Today I failed once again to wake up on time. So I missed comp arch. Then we had an hourlong compilers meeting. Woo. Then an afternoon mostly wasted, then graphics, then home. Time now to get something done...

"Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?" "I think so, Brain, but who wants to see 'Snow White and the Seven Samurai'?"

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coding fun, senior bar non-fun, chess fun

entry #802, Thu, January 25, 2001, 01:42 (Life in General)

So I got the IR code for compilers pretty close to finished. It still leaks memory like a bad habit, but that can get fixed tomorrow. The main thing is it passes all the test cases. After finishing that up I sat around and started considering compilation CDs to make. I think I want a few of those. Then I headed to campus to hit senior bar at 11, but half an hour of hanging out alone and I decided to leave. Ran into people in fitz. Hung out there a while, then Anne and I headed to my place and played chess. We had a good game, in the end neither of us had many pieces left. But finally I did win. I think winning against Anne is gonna become increasingly difficult, tho. Now I've cleared the piles of CDs off my bed and am considering this whole sleep thing. Maybe a few munchies first, tho.

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my brain hurts

entry #801, Wed, January 24, 2001, 18:02 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

ow. So I've been doing battle today. Battle versus the IR code for compilers. And I've been holding my own, so far. 67 test cases. When today began, six of them failed. I've reached the point now where only two fail. It would be no exaggeration to say that I am a badass. But yet again, I've reached a stage where making the test cases work requires no little feat of black hacking. Already, I've annihilated various abstraction barriers.

Let's take a brief break and review algorithms today. I am a little less worried about this class now. I had some difficulty in undergrad algorithms, but have discovered that since I am actually going to class for grad algorithms, stuff is already making more sense. Bueno. Chen gave us this advice today: "don't be the slave of formulas." He also told us that he doesn't like it when he explains something to the class and they then look at him as though he's killed a rabbit. If that happens, he says he will try to keep explaining it until the class only looks at him as if he's killed a fly. And finally, a lesson I personally take out of today's class: When in doubt, take the log of both sides.

So back to the IR. Problem 1: recursion. One of the test cases that fails does so because of recursion issues. The solution: quit being stupid, Pete. Implementing solution: still working on that, may take a while. Problem 2: naming issues with fa loops. The solution: variable renaming. Implementing solution: still working on that too, tho it should be easier than the solution to problem 1. And now, it's implementin' time.

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the battle rages on

entry #800, Wed, January 24, 2001, 01:21 (Life in General)

So I headed to campus at 10ish because various pieces of software I wanted were not installed on realloc. So I arrive on campus and begin the epic struggle known as a "debian update" ... various version conflicts prevented me from succesfully installing what I wanted under "woody" so I switched my apt sources.list to use "sid", the new debian unstable. woody is now classified as "testing" ... anyway, with sid I was able to get most of what I wanted. So the battle didn't go too poorly. Then went to Nicks with Anne. They've got new menus there. Woo. Yay Nicks. Then returned home only to discover that X wouldn't start up on realloc. Maybe the battle didn't go so well after all. And all sorts of evil nfs daemons were running as well. So I shut those down, got X working again (only took about two minutes, cuz I fucking rock!) and am now finishing up business for today. Next I may find myself going to sleep before two am. Who'd've thunk.

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checkpointing, completion, shadelessness

entry #799, Tue, January 23, 2001, 21:59 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

so I've done my share of reading about checkpointing of late. It's neat stuff. There's some interesting OS issues involved. The basic idea is easy enough: save the state of a process into a file so it can be restarted later. One cool thing I thought was that several userlevel checkpointing systems use setjmp/longjmp to save the stack and such. Which is a cool use of setjmp. I knew it was a cool thing, but never considered using it across process lifetimes. So I think sometime soon I wanna write up a little program that stores itself to a file. If invoked with some command line option, it'll restore itself from said file. Just to begin playing with this stuff. Then add fun things like open files. Of course, there's a lot of open source checkpointing code out there that I will likely want to play with at some point, but first I wanna play with it a little on my own. The next fun thing is kernel-supported checkpointing. This seems rather easy to me, cuz the kernel (at least in linux and other such os's) already does a good deal of what checkpointing does: when processes are swapped to disk.

So I finally got around to doing something I've been meaning to do for a while: I played around with the tcsh complete builtin and created a .complete file that gets sourced by my .cshrc. I foresee that this file will grow a lot as I discover more completions I want done for me. tcsh rocks.

comp arch homework: 4 book problems and one programming problem that is simple stuff like instruction counting. but we're supposed to run this both on solaris and on linux. Solaris I can use shade. linux I can't. This saddens me. But I've been asked to give a brief 5 minute presentation in class next tuesday on how I went about doing the programming problem. So I wanna do an extraspecialgood job. Cuz the motto for cse 521? "Dr Uhran, this is personal." ... I have an interesting way of exacting revenge.

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and thus, a sigh of relief

entry #798, Tue, January 23, 2001, 20:44 (Life in General)

So I was supposed to get 4 hours of sleep last night. I ended up getting about that, plus two more hours of semisleep. I didn't do very well getting up this morning and barely made it to comp arch on time. I got lucky in two ways: first, thanks to Anne I realized that comp arch was at 11 and not at 11:45. Second, at the last minute I remembered that I had homework due. Luckily I'd already done the homework, I just had to pick it up from the ssr. So after a silly start to the morning, the afternoon went better. Helped Dr Freeh some more with the proposal, then went to graphics and slept through most of that. Then BW3s, only four of us today. But the proposal has been submitted and thus all of a sudden I find myself feeling caught up with everything. And that despite having been assigned homework in both my classes today. Woo. So we'll see what I do with some of this free time now.

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classical music and apples

entry #797, Tue, January 23, 2001, 02:32 (Life in General)

woo! Movie night was fun tonight. Better Off Dead. I love that movie, it's hilarious. And it's got skiing. After movie night I returned home to spend more time reading up on checkpointing and process migration.

I've rediscovered two joys of life: classical music and apples. First a brief ode to the latter: apples are awesome. They're just a perfect food. And fun to eat, attempting to get as much of the apple from around the core. I wouldn't be surprised to one day find myself eating all but the seeds. I come pretty close already. I used to eat lots of apples, but haven't in quite some time. Dunno why. But I've rediscovered that joy and now intend to consume more. More! More! Classical music. This is good stuff. I only own a few CDs but I really like them. It's not good music for coding, but it's definitely good for reading or for sitting around. I wish I had money to buy more of this stuff. So having not listened to the CDs I do have in a while (blame the stupid cd binder) I put them all into the cd player tonight. Fun fun fun.

Enough talk about the little joys of life. I've got work to do. Snaffu!

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california strikes against my apartment

entry #796, Mon, January 22, 2001, 20:33 (Life in General)

I didn't wake up until after 11 today. Wonderful. Turns out we had some kind of power outage (I blame the california ISO) last night which caused my alarm to witness a mission-critical failure. So I head to campus, hours later than intended, just in time for algorithms, which was spent covering the wonders of big O notation. It's a good thing we covered that again, it's not like it wasn't handled in various prerequisite classes. Blah. So wizard today also witnessed technical difficulties on several occasions, due to OIT adding its IP to the pool of available IPs for dhcp. So on several occasions people brought dhcp machines up on the network and those caused wizard to disappear. But things seem to be working again, more or less. Woo. Spent most of today doing more literature searching. Immensely fun. There's actually some cool stuff out there. Andrew Sordi is cool, he's gonna put me on the Keenan Revue VIP list. Which means I can show up on saturday night with a group of friends and get seated in the VIP area. Woo. That's awesome. Other fun news: Dr Freeh says I can go to Mississippi over spring break, he doesn't need me here. And the Trifone's are cool with me showing up then too, their kids have spring break at the same time, so much fun can be had. So Mississippi is looking like a go for spring break. Woo.

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stupid neurons

entry #795, Mon, January 22, 2001, 02:28 (Life in General)

My brain's been acting up again today. Spent most of today doing literature searching for Dr Freeh. Found lots. Kind of overwhelmed. Not sure what to do with what I've found. Briefly attended an NDLUG meeting. Made stir fry for dinner. Anne came over and we watched Coyote Ugly. Decent movie. Definitely entertaining if nothing else. I need to relax. Only one week of school and already I'm stressing out. Hopefully I'll be done with some of these larger tasks soon and will be able to settle into the semester.

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productive day

entry #794, Sun, January 21, 2001, 02:36 (Life in General)

So today's been a rather productive day. I have the IR working to a very good extent. Only 6 of 67 test cases still fail. The issues to be resolved: function return values and a name scoping issue with fa loops. The latter is actually only a problem when I want to print out the IR in c code format, due to differences in how C and ice9 do scoping. So I'm gonna be happy enough with that for today. I also discovered a bug in the ice9fe parsing code (which I didn't write) that causes some precedence errors. So I fixed that too. Cuz I'm effin brilliant. Had a few diversions in between coding... had dinner at Reckers with Arun and Brian and watched the brilliant concept known as saturday night tv between 11 and now. But other than that today was pretty much non-stop coding. And I actually did more coding than tv watching tonight. TV's just kinda nice background noise... I think sleep sounds like a good next move, followed by spending tomorrow doing mainly literature searching...

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compile it, yo!

entry #793, Sat, January 20, 2001, 16:49 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

so one of the things I need to write is methods that print out the IR I generate as compilable C code. Easy enough. But I want the C code to look pretty. So it wants to be indented so this isn't anything particularly novel, but I thought it was fun: I created an "indenter" class which has methods to increase and decrease the indentation level, and then I wrote an operator<< for the indenter so that now I can have code that looks pretty when I output code.

indenter indent(0);
//...
cout << indent << "int main(int argc, char* argv[])" << endl;
cout << indent << "{" << endl;
indent.Right();
cout << indent << "return 0;" << endl;
indent.Left();
cout << indent << "}" << endl;

Just another one of those small things that makes me like C++... it's trivial, yet it makes the code look so pretty... imho, at least...

frustration sets in again as I realize I don't have access to data structures I need access to. Blargh. Punt for now.

I've been promised a 21" monitor if I am willing to wait a few months. Sweetness. This monitor I use now is el suckage royal. Or is that royale? It's hard to know the gender of made up words in other languages. I've not a clue what I'm talking bout.

this STL concept is sheer brilliance. Unfortunately my code for compilers is gonna contain a lot of hand-coded linked lists. Not exactly my choice, but oh well. It's all good. good progress is finally being made on the IR. I should have it done this weekend. Hopefully with time left over to do a literature search for Dr Freeh.

This IR code I'm generating is funny. A few simple optimizations would cut it significantly in size. But in its current state it's a bit better suited for use during code generation...

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napping... brilliant!

entry #792, Fri, January 19, 2001, 23:35 (Life in General)

So I didn't wake up until 11:30 or so today. Very nice. Headed to campus, went to algorithms, then went running. Outside. Very nice, first time I've done that in a while. I love this campus, it's very nice for running. Only problem I encountered was that altho St Joes lake was runnable, St Marys lake wasn't. So I had to walk part of the way around it. Then I did a few small errands around campus, went shopping, and headed home. Intended to be productive this evening, ended up sleeping on the couch and watching some tv. It was nice. Napping's never been a strong point for me, I have a hard time falling asleep in general. But despite 8 hours of sleep last night I managed to sleep several more this evening. And I napped yesterday too! Woohoo. Brilliant. So I've gotten no real work done so far today. Considered going to an ultimate party when I woke up but then I suddenly felt kinda guilty about having done nothing, so I decided to stay here. I cleaned out my car instead (something I've been meaning to do since I returned to SB a week and a half ago). Then in a stroke of productive brilliance, I moved a lot of CDs from my binder back into jewel cases. This makes me quite happy. Now it's time for more work.

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Finding Forrester

entry #791, Fri, January 19, 2001, 02:52 (Movies)

So went to see Finding Forrester with Anne. Very good movie, I enjoyed it. It was quite humorous, but also just had a fun, heartwarming sort of story. The acting was good, the music was very good, I thought, and I just had fun. My only main problem with the movie was some of the camera work. Especially during basketball scenes, they would just zoom in way too close and make things a bit more confusing than they needed to be. But beyond that, fun. Makes me want to start writing again...

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disconnecting

entry #790, Fri, January 19, 2001, 02:50 (Life in General)

So I was feeling a bit tired and such today, so I did the only rational thing. I disconnected. Went home, downloaded the compilers code onto realloc, disconnected the network, and turned on the tv. Spent a good several hours watching random stuff (mainly disney channel, cmt, and network sitcoms) and spent part of that time asleep on the couch. Also got some coding done, but in a very relaxed manner... A very happy experience. Interrupted only at about 9:45 when Anne called. But by then I'd had plenty. Of course tomorrow I'll have to play catch up.

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things to think about...

entry #789, Thu, January 18, 2001, 13:06 (School)

So Dr Uhran talked to me after comp arch today. Basically, he said he thinks I don't have to take the course, so he said if I want to drop it, he'll make sure I get it excused from my degree requirements. That's kinda cool. The other option he gave me was to substitute going to class for just doing some extra projects. That might be fun too. So the problem with dropping this is I need to do 9 credit hours this semester... I'd need to find another class. I'm kinda leaning towards the skip class/do extra projects options. Depending, I think, on what options I have for projects... we'll see how it all goes...

oh, and the paper I wrote last night, causing me to leave senior bar early and go to sleep late, turned out to not be due today after all, even tho the assignment paper said it was. Maybe I should've paid more attention in class on tuesday... oh well. At least I've got it done now...

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hahaha

entry #788, Thu, January 18, 2001, 02:06 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Tony sent me this link to a list of Things to Say When You're Losing a Technical Argument. It's freaking hilarious. It's hard to choose a favorite out of the 70, but good ones include "If you make this change, I will fork the code." and "Yes, I believe that's the approach Windows NT is taking." ... and "Well, yes, but it really reduces to the knapsack problem in that case. Do you have some kind of heuristic, or are we dealing with an NP-complete case? " along with the classic "That won't scale."

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senior bar, yo.

entry #787, Thu, January 18, 2001, 01:51 (Life in General)

So tonight we had the first senior bar experience of the new year. It was a pretty good one, we got Cdawg to go, and Jeff was in town so he showed up. Many others did too, it was a good showing. Now I have to write a paper due in comp arch tomorrow. Woo.

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what?

entry #786, Wed, January 17, 2001, 18:37 (Sports and Athletics)

Running today didn't go great. The schlappy was incredibly full. So I quit after two miles. The weight room was packed, too, every single thing I wanted to do was in use, so I just left. But I'm down another pound, under 163. I'm starting to be a bit concerned, I don't want to be losing the weight this fast, I don't think. Need to start doing more weights or something. Also, I'm thinking I might start doing some small amount of upperbody work. Brian gave me some good reasons to do so...

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algorithms

entry #785, Wed, January 17, 2001, 17:58 (School)

well, as expected, algorithms looks like it's gonna be a tough class. Today Chen gave us a quiz (that's not gonna be graded) just to figure out how well we all knew the prerequisites, so he could tell us what he had to catch up on outside of class. The quiz was much harder than I expected. I got three out of five questions no problem, left 1.5 blank, and got a sketchy answer for the other .5. I'm proud. Oh well, it's definitely stuff I want to understand and know well, so it'll be good for me.

I also made a brief appearance at compilers today so as to be introduced to the class. Woo.

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dazed, confused, and pickled

entry #784, Wed, January 17, 2001, 02:18 (Life in General)

So tonight I ended up hanging at Anne's place. We watched "Dazed and Confused" ... funny movie. I'd seen it before, long ago, in that place called high school. But I didn't really remember it at all. While watching it today there were scenes that I recognized, so I know I've seen it before (as I had thought), but it was basically like watching it for the first time. It was fun. Now I shall sleep, I think, for the other option is to stay awake, and I don't like the sounds of that.

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wings and beyond

entry #783, Tue, January 16, 2001, 22:38 (Life in General)

woo. First wings night of the new semester, and a good showing, too. I'm so proud of us. I was the only grad student present, tho, which was oddish. Oh well. Onwards goes the struggle.

Spent a good hour helping bmoore with sshd woes. The solution eventually became: replace openssh with good ol' regular ssh. Cuz openssh sucks. Yeah. Rock on.

Motivation... hard... to ... find...

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computer graphics

entry #782, Tue, January 16, 2001, 22:15 (School)

So I darted into computer graphics and went to it today. I'm still not 100% sure, But I'm thinking I'm pretty likely to stick with it as my third class. So long as I keep the right attitude, I think I'll have fun with it. My only problem I had with the lecture today is that I got the impression Surma was dissing "Pong" which I just can't put up with...

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comp arch

entry #781, Tue, January 16, 2001, 13:04 (School)

Dr Uhran cracks me up. He showed up late, I'm sure, to comp arch today. He then proceeded in silence to rearrange things to his liking before addressing us. His main concerns: no auditors and no food or drink. It's looking like this class is gonna be easy, there's several students who've not any comp arch background, so the class is gonna start pretty much from scratch. On the other hand, I think I will get something out of it, it looks like I'll need to give several presentations, which will be good for me, and I think we write a simulator at some point, which should be fun... Dr Uhran and I have a fun history. He's basically the reason I'm still in computer science. I was toying with the idea of switching to government until my sophomore year when he told me I was more suited to be an A&L major than an engineering major. To prove him wrong I stuck with CSE. And now, as my final act of defiance, I shall ace his class. Buahahahaha. Scott Hampton, having returned to ND, is gonna be the TA. So that's cool. I've also decided that other than his habit of pronouncing RISC as risik, I like Uhran's voice for lecturing. I should be able to pay attention when (or if) I need to. Finally, an amusing anecdote: he was trying to figure out people's backgrounds and so was asking if people had programmed in assembly. One kid he was talking to somehow managed to state that he'd programmed in Visual Basic instead. I found that mighty amusing.

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aber ich habe den morgen noch nicht gesehen!

entry #780, Tue, January 16, 2001, 01:16 (Life in General)

So I ran into Tony talking to Dr Freeh in the hall. Among the things they were discussing, apparently Tony extolled my skiing, which amuses me. Worked on compilers a bit, but the net in the SSR was sucking so that became painful, so I left. Picked the wrong time to leave campus. The women's basketball game against UConn (which we won, 92-76, woohoo!) had ended 30 minutes before then, so I had to sit in traffic for a while. That was cool, tho, since I'd decided to play a ska compilation cd (first wave, yo!) that I've not listened to much, so I was having fun. Returned to campus after dinner for some more compiler work, followed by Real Genius at movie night. Very funny movie. Enjoyed it. I skipped Eraserhead and went running instead. Good workout, did more leg weights and such. Legs felt very much like jelly by the end of it. Weight also dropped another pound to 164. Brian and I bought a coffee maker on our way home from campus. Yay.

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woo woo?

entry #779, Mon, January 15, 2001, 18:58 (School)

Today's been one of those busy unproductive days. I got nothing done, but at the same time I got a lot done. Had various meetings about compilers, which is good, I suppose. Went to a cse grad student whine session. Basically there's a group of grad students who are trying to get the department to improve things in various ways. Main complaints were lack of pay, lack of recruiting, lack of courses, lack of faculty, and lack of communication. A good thing to see happening, but I dunno if many changes will happen quick. The department is being very slow as far as making changes, it seems to me, which is bad. It seems there were various other topics I had to discuss, but this department business has me all a-fluster. I doubt that's a word, but eetz all gooood.

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schedule

entry #778, Mon, January 15, 2001, 12:54 (School)

woo. I darted into a preliminary schedule. I'm definitely taking Complexity and Algorithms (taught by Chen) and Computer Architecture (taught by Uhran, in Oshag of all places). Comp arch I'm imagining will be easy, but algorithms will be nontrivial. So my current plans are to take a third class that'll be easy A. I darted into the graduate computer graphics course for the time being, though I may change my mind. From what I'm told it's an easy A, and the projects are supposed to be kind of fun. And I could easily pick up OpenGL on my own, but I won't, at least not anytime soon. So that may be fun. But I may still change my mind... I also need to figure out when to schedule TA hours for 443...

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life is good (break in review)

entry #777, Mon, January 15, 2001, 00:34 (Life in General)

I think the best way to sum up the last few weeks of last semester is that I'm embarassed by my behavior. And beyond that, it's over. Break has come and gone, and it's been a good one. Life is good. Over break I managed to find an inner calm, a sense of balance, like I've not felt in at least a long time, if ever. I think it's at least partly due to the purchase of K2. For the first time ever, really, I feel something resembling freedom. Over break I decided to go places, and went. To be able to do so was an amazing feeling. I'm already planning road trips for this semester and next summer.

So let's summarize: I bought a car, put 3200 miles on it. Visited several fun places. Skied. Snowmobiled. Enjoyed good food and drink. Successfully hunted down a tree in the wild. Did much more fun stuff, I'm sure.

I think life immediately took a turn for the better when I just got out of Indiana. But I think an important part of what's allowed me to find balance is that I think I've started listening to God again. (no worries, though, I'm still far from being a conservative christian sort... those scare me...) I also found my faith in humanity restored over break. I've become much more openminded again, and much more patient. I'm laughing and smiling more. Life is good. On the other hand, I'm finding myself losing some of my convictions. I don't think I'm Libertarian anymore, really. I think I'm moving closer to the center of the spectrum, but mainly in that I'm picking up an attitude of the "I don't know the answers" sort... but I think I'll continue to vote libertarian, at least for the time being. I'm happy with this though. I don't want to find myself ever locked into a belief system too strongly to realize its faults.

I owe a great debt of gratitude to many people. So much fun has been had over break, and so many people have done so much for me to make that possible. I am infinitely grateful to my family: Oma & Papa for allowing me to visit them in Albuquerque on such short notice. The Sissons and the Trifones for allowing me to join them for a night in Red River. The Rozmans for all the fun we had at their place over break, and Donna for allowing me to stay with her in manhattan. My immediate family for their love, support, and presence ... it was a great joy to spend time with them again. Thanks to Mom and Dad for sponsoring my ski rentals so I could ski in CB. Heaps of thanks are also due to Tony and his family for allowing me a fun excursion to Breckenridge. Thanks also to all the hitchhikers I picked up along the way for sharing the journey with me, especially Rich, he was cool and had good general advice for life. Thanks to Brian and Anne for coming out to CB, it was tons o' fun to hang out with them and ski with them. Thanks to Perk for housing me during my eastward treck and for joining me for a fun trip. Thanks to all the liftops for their trivia. Thanks to everyone who smiled at me. Thanks to everyone else, too. I've surely forgotten many. And thanks to God, for showing me the way again, and thanks to Fr Jim for reminding me how to listen.

So over break I've put a lot of thought into the future, short term and long term. This is the first time, I think, that I have new years resolutions. And that's just coincidence that new years just happened. I have strong intentions of doing much more running. Running is good for me. It relieves stress like you wouldn't believe. And being in shape is a good thing. I want to try to speed up my metabolism. To do so I'm gonna try to eat a good breakfast every morning, drink at least 80 ounces of water per day, and, of course, work out regularly. And (hahahaha) try to get regular sleep. I also intend to cut back on alcohol. Just for health reasons, ya know? I'm gonna try to switch over to coffee as my primary source of caffeine... less sugar, and cheaper. I want to quit eating when I'm not hungry (as much fun as that is: true luxury is when you eat not from necessity but just because you can. It's an obscenity, really.). I want to start going to mass again, at least semi-regularly. Perhaps I'm simpleminded, but the rituals help calm me, even if I don't quite believe in much of it. I want to quit accepting the status quo... if I see a chance for change, even if its small, I want to go for it and suffer the consequences if necessary. I'm smart enough that I won't do anything stupid. I want to do more coding for fun. I want to get to know my friends better. I want to pick up conversation skills. I know some who say small talk is stupid, and I used to agree, but I think the ability to keep a conversation going, even by talking about nothing, is a good one. I've discovered I enjoy interacting with people after all. It's what life is all about. I want to quit judging people and become less prejudiced. I want to diversify my musical tastes. I want to become known as master of the road trip. I want to damn the torpedoes and go for the glory. I want to maintain a high GPA. I want to start looking for cool jobs in the west (preferably CO). I want visible abs again. I want to fall beneath 160 pounds (and then gain weight back again as I replace fat with muscle). I want to always have a song in my heart and a smile on my lips. I want to maintain this sense of balance and develop it into a true feeling of inner peace. I want to be the most zen driver the road has ever known. I want to be me.

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argh!!!!

entry #776, Sun, January 14, 2001, 20:41 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

ok, this sucks. I've now discovered the symbol table code I've been given to work with is potentially useless. It seems that as soon as you pop a certain scope, it's gone forever, if you try to push a scope with the same name again, you can't get back at the names you inserted in that scope. Which makes the symbol table completely worthless for a multipass compiler. Let's see how to go about fixing this. So much time being wasted fixing other code instead of working on my own...

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compile-o-rama

entry #775, Sun, January 14, 2001, 13:53 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

My code I'm contributing to compilers now includes a bizarre comment that few will understand. But if they look for it, maybe Arun and George will get it, and possibly even appreciate it. But that assumes they'd want to look at this code.

I'm not exactly happy with how this code is gonna turn out. But circumstances beyond my control are at work here. But one of my goals is to make the code compile with compilers other than g++. At this point I don't know what varieties of g++isms are in this code right now, since I've not looked at much of it, but maybe when I need a break from real coding I will work on it.

So my current task is to write a translator from Demian's (a)AST to an IR. Original plan was to adapt the IR in the tiger book to suit my purposes, but Dr Freeh wants a rather high-level symbolic IR, and Appel's is quite a bit lower than that. So I'm adventuring in the realms of creating my own IR while trying to figure out how Demian's frontend compiler works. I'm very proud of myself for my compiler last year, turns out that a year later I can still read the code easily. It's not great code in some places (design decisions during earlier phases proved to make later phases do some silly things) but it's readable, and it works. And having that as a reference is proving quite valuable.

I'm also being majorly affected by the fact that I've not hacked any C++ (beyond 232 stuff, which ain't C++) since before last summer. So I'm trying to elevate myself from my usual C coding practices back to the world of C++. Ain't trivial. Ain't too bad neither, tho.

Rumors are Dr Freeh may have some money to spend. I should beg for a new monitor. This one suX. With a capital X.

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gloom-o-rama

entry #774, Sun, January 14, 2001, 11:55 (Life in General)

Today is yucky. The weather is making the campus look gloomy. A great day for students to return for the spring semester.

Cdawg showed up yesterday afternoon. He and I went shopping to feed the masses staying at our place last night, then discovered that both of us played Magic. So we did that a while. He beat me four times. Perk and Arun showed up for dinner: tacos. mmmmm... After dinner and such Anne and Frick showed up as well. The apartment was happening. We watched The Big Kahuna (sp?), which was good, Dick, which I got for free from Pepsistuff points, and Drop Dead Gorgeous. I was unimpressed by the last. Mamie's flight got cancelled, so she came in on the bus. Picked her up from the airport at 2:30 am. Had to take her back there at 9 am this morning, so I got about four hours of sleep. We had seven people sleeping at our apartment last night. A record. Now I've made it to campus, I've got coffee, and the time has come to code.

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happiness is a good run

entry #773, Sat, January 13, 2001, 11:24 (Life in General)

Went running yesterday, woo! Also did various leg weight exercise, and abs stuff. Very short workout, but gotta start out slow, I suppose. I'm very set now on the idea of getting my legs real strong, along with abs and back. My goal as far as strength exercises are concerned is to get in good shape for skiing. I also was pleasantly surprised to find my weight at 165, a good 5 pounds less than I was expecting...

Watched Das Boot with Arun, Perk, and Frick last night. Every time I see that movie I like it more.

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the semester draws near

entry #772, Fri, January 12, 2001, 15:17 (Life in General)

today i've worked on various random presemester activities. Went to the bookstore, got, among other things, a ND College of Engineering window sticker for K2. Talked with Dr Freeh for a while. It's looking like there's gonna be some coding this weekend. Code-o-rama. Need to get myself back into that mindset. Noticed that esgeroth.org expires in like five months. Need to make sure I have money handy before then to renew the domain. I can't believe I've had the domain for that long already...

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the victorious return home

entry #771, Fri, January 12, 2001, 01:04 (Travel)

I shall one day be described as master of the road trip. Until that day, I shall strive hard to earn that title. The final leg of my trip to south bend went well. A fun trip it was. Perk and I left his place at 10:25 am, central time. I gave Perk the official duties of navigator and recorder. So we have detailed notes of our trip. This was also the first trip that I've taken where someone warned me not to kill any Amish. So our first goal was to find Devil's Den. Perk gave me 40% odds that he would be able to find the place. I asked him how much time we would lose if he couldn't find it (I didn't care too much about lost time if we did find it). His estimate: 50 minutes. We go for it. As we drove in search of Devil's Den, I was told of Perk's shady past. Apparently he was once almost charged with resisting arrest. Impressive. So we find a place along KK that Perk finds promising, so we park the car, hop a fence, and hike around in the woods for a while, with no luck. So we give up, and begin heading east. Just as hope was at its lowest, at 11:28, Perk spots another spot that looks familiar. So again we park, hop a fence, ignore a few no trespassing signs, and find the Devil's Den. A very cool place. Most excellent. So finaly at 11:40 or so we're back on the road again, passing landmarks such as the Free Will Baptist Church, Butterflies Unlimites, and Amish. By noon we've realized we need some supplies: A compass, a map of Indiana, whores, duct tape, and floss. At 1:19 pm, we find the engineering museum at some army base in missouri, we spend a good 50 minutes there, it was awesome. All about the army corps of engineers and such. On our way off the base we got lost, but found our way again. 2:25 pm, we order a medium pepperoni lovers and a medium supreme (both thick crust) at the St. Robert, MO pizza hut. Finally, by 3:37 we leave the St. Robert walmart with 3 of the 5 items we were looking for. We failed to find a map of IN or whores. At 4 pm we witnessed Ameritech invading Rolla, MO from the southwest. 4:14 pm, we resolutely decide that we will mail perk's libertarian party membership at the first chance we get outside St. Louis. At 4:20 pm: it's 4:20!! At 6:04 pm we made it out of St. Louis, but not quite unscathed: we missed I70 (and thus a chance to visit Urbana-Champaign) and instead decided to take I55 and go through Springfield, IL, home of Abe Lincoln. Perk also realized around exposure #50 on his camera that he didn't have any film properly loaded in his camera. We exit I55 briefly at Hamel, IL 62046 for gas, and Perk dropped off his libertarian letter at the post office. Perk and I independently noticed that the bathroom in the gas station had an oddly large amount of hay on the floor. 7:30 we arrived in Springfield, right on schedule. The plan was to find a microbrewery. I had had microbrews in Manhattan, and Sprinfield, MO, on the first two legs of the trip, had to continue that trend. So we stop at a gas station and ask if they know of any such place in town. They don't, but start calling people for us to figure out if there is one. Finally they suggest we go to this place called the Barrelhead and ask there. At about this time some girl had come into the place to pay for gas and offered to lead us to the barrelhead, so we got in the car and followed her across town. At the barrelhead we inquire into microbreweries and are given directions to another place called The Spot. This turned out to have a microbrewery that went out of business six years ago. So we just had some Killians Red there and began heading out of town. But we were amazed at how friendly the people of Springfield, IL, were. It was amazing. But Springfield, IL had no microbreweries, which gives Springfield, MO a distinct advantage in coolness. So 9 pm we leave Springfield and continue north on I55. At 10:29 pm, on mile 187 on I55 north, K2 hit 3000 miles. Woohoo! Perk celebrated by sticking his head out the window and screaming like a window. Stopped at a rest area shortly thereafter to call home and let parents know we'd not be in SB before late and thus wouldn't call them till morning. Made it to Castle Point at about 2:45 am (eastern time, we went through a time change). Nobody home at 2217, so we head to LSC, find Arun, and I reclaim my key from him. Go home, hang out a bit ("and it means one of two things: either he has a low sperm count... or he missed"), go to sleep. Wake up about noon, go shopping with Barrett. Then go get oil changed on K2 (Gates Chevy world is amazing, it was very quick and only cost $24, which seems fair to me), get ND parking sticker for car. Waste rest of afternoon.

So, Linkin Park became my theme CD for the drive. Between CB and Perk's place I played it probably about every third or fourth CD. And Perk and I played it a good five or six times as well. In Springfield, IL, we put the CD in just as we passed Lincoln Park. We were amused. Our motto for the trip was "We never go back! ... well, not unless the whore is really cheap. Mileages: K2's total mileage is now about 3200. I put on about 1700 miles between CB and SB. Drove 690 miles from CB to Manhattan, 310 miles from Manhattan to Perk's, and 620 miles from Perk's to SB. Drove various other amounts at the two places I stopped. A very fun trip. More on that later.

Tonight's fun was a trip to Mishawaka Brew Co with Brian, Arun, Perk, and Frick, followed by Brian, Arun, and I going to Vertical Limit. Still tons o' fun the second time around.

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100,000 sperm, and you were the fastest?

entry #770, Wed, January 10, 2001, 02:51 (Life in General)

perk thoroughly impressed me with the amount of fun to be had in the springfield area. After dinner we headed to Xians place and played foosball (on the way I saw the spot where perk hit a cow). Then we went to see Vertical Limit, which I've been wanting to see for some time now. It was all I hoped for, and more. I found it very amusing (to the chagrin, probably, of other people in the theater: I kept laughing out loud during the most dramatic scenes). It featured excessive drama, various funny lines, and a cool scene with exploding blood. What more can one ask from a movie? Then we went to the Springfield Brewing Company. Which means every night of my crosscountry treck I have sampled local microbrews. Cuz I'm cool like that. Perk and I played pool at the brewco. Then we wandered around town, hit steak and shake, and then returned to perk's home, where I had cheesecake. mmmm... cheesecake. life is good. tomorrow the journey continues.

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rogersville, ho!

entry #769, Tue, January 09, 2001, 18:09 (Travel)

woohoo, I've made it to beautiful Rogersville, MO. And they even have computers here, so I've been able to check email and such. Packed up and got out of CB by 9 am monday. In Gunnison I had a brief adventure because I had to find where the motor vehicle registration people were, they weren't in the building they were supposed to be, they'd moved across town. But eventually I got plates: 059-BMZ. Then off to Manhattan, KS. Took 50 east, then 96, then some brief trip on some unimportant highway to catch 40 east, then I70. Kansas was tons o' fun. The sunset was actually real impressive, due to the lack of anything, shadows got real long, and the sky turned a cool purple color in front of me. The full moon rose due east as well, in the middle of this cool purple color. It was neat. Then darkness hit, and I proved just how stupid I am. I was on a nice empty, fourlane, straight stretch of I70 and got pulled over for doing 88 in a 70 zone. That's a $80 ticket. Fuck! that's a lot of money. But I deserved it, I did get a warning less than two weeks ago and hitchhiker Rich had given me some great advice: "just go the speed limit, set the speed control, and enjoy the scenery" ... so alls I could do was laugh at myself. Good thing is I have until march to come up with the money. Made it to Donna's place by 9:30 central time, so about 12 hours driving time. Her place is quite nice. She took me to dinner at a manhattan brewing company. Had a really good bacon cheddar burger and a good kansas microbrew. This morning I visited the K state campus. Saw Donna's studio, it's neat, and she had a lot of cool stuff to show me. Then toured the campus, it looks nice. Left manhattan at about 11 am, had an uneventful drive to perk's place, made it here in about 5 hours. My impression of MO: lots of trees, pretty in that rustic sort of way, and shitty roads. And I'm still wondering where the term "turnpike" comes from.

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bum-o-rama, day 2

entry #768, Sun, January 07, 2001, 22:43 (Life in General)

today's been yet another lazy day. Woke up at 8, went to mass. After mass I helped prepare breakfast for the people who removed the christmas decorations from the church. Then we returned home, and I watched football all afternoon (interrupted only by brief periods of time spent asleep). Then Richard and Tommy came over for dinner. Dad made mexican food. Now I'm doing laundry, packing up, and preparing materials to guide me on my treck. Perk's made me a nice map for how to get to his house, and Donna's given me directions to her place in manhattan.

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bum-o-rama

entry #767, Sun, January 07, 2001, 00:24 (Life in General)

today was the first day in quite some time where I had nothing to do. So that's what I did. Actually, I woke up at 7:15 to see Brian and Anne off. Then I set up some gnucash stuff with mom's help. Then I wandered over to the CD asylum with Annie and Diana, they were picking out their gifts from me. Diana ended up getting Now 5, Annie got a Sinatra cd. I ended up liking 4 out of 19 songs on Now 5, so I guess there's a little hope for popular culture. Sinatra's fun, I guess. I also picked up Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park. I like it. Richard, Tommy, Annie, Dad, and I went to the belgian bakery for a drink. Then I called perk, need to start looking into leaving. Still need to get license plates for K2. I then ate dinner with Richard and Tommy, Richard made some really good, big cheeseburgers. Watched The Rock, which is a fun movie. Now it's time for sleep, I think.

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oh yeah

entry #766, Sat, January 06, 2001, 10:42 (B1B2N)

here's a bunch that I've collected over the past while...

Blank 1	Blank 2
hash	process id's
demistify	opposite sex
use the SAP feature on	tv
jetison	lunar module
tap	rockies
measure	gas mileage
set off avalanches	ski slopes
explore	mountains
sponsor	halftime report
save	woodchuck
adjust	ski bindings

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ski vacation

entry #765, Sat, January 06, 2001, 10:37 (Life in General)

So Anne and Brian arrived Saturday, December 30. Since then we've been on an unstoppable roller-coaster of fun. Haha. So Saturday we just kinda explored town and such, didn't do much at all. Sunday, a.k.a. New Years Eve we went to mass, then had brunch and watched the Broncos lose miserably to the Baltimore Ravens. Stupid Baltimore. At 8 pm or so we went to the Rozmans for their new years thing. Hung out there for a while, saw a bunch of people. At 10:30 or so we headed to town. We bought tickets that let us into both the Eldo and the Idle Spur all night. Juice was playing at the Eldo, Kung Pao and Sucker were playing at the Spur. All three bands were quite good. So we had a fun night. The next morning we began our first day of skiing. We stuck mainly to Paradise lift runs but headed over to keystone and did greens at the end of the day. That night we went to the Rozmans for yet another miserable football game. This time ND lost miserably to Oregon State in the Fiesta bowl. After that we returned to the gallery and watched Mulan. Tuesday Tommy came skiing with us. Well, he boarded, we skied. We also encountered Mark and Evelyn on the mountain. We had food out at the condo and watched the sugar bowl. Sugar! Then Wednesday BJ skied with us. Skied the bumps on resurrection, did well and had fun. Also found Craig Hall on Tony's Parking Lot, so we took a run with him and then he demonstrated Rocket's search skills by burying himself and having Rocket find him. We went to the condo for Diana's birthday and such and watched the Orange bowl. Sooners won. Then we returned to town and hit Talk of the Town and Kochevars. So I think Anne and Brian have seen the highlights of the CB bar scene now. Thursday's skiing was much fun. I ditched Anne and Brian for a while and skied some twister trails. They were way too rocky, but I did hit the west wall a few times off the silver queen on my way to the twister area. That was fun, the snow was decent and I got to do jump turns. The bottom of west wall features a rock area that can't be avoided and must thus be jumped. I managed not to kill myself doing so. Come about 3, Anne and Brian decided to head to keystone and do a few easy runs before heading in. So I went to the top and found Craig Hall. We did a run on headwall. The traverse in was quite amusing, we had to traverse a ways through trees to get to the run. I see Craig go around a corner and then suddenly hear loud laughing. I come around the corner and see Craig hanging from a tree, covered in snow. The trail had collapsed under him and he'd popped out of one ski and flown off the trail. So as I was standing there while he gathered himself, someone else came around the corner and ran right into me, knocking both of us to the ground. My bent poll got bent even more. Then we finally made it to the trail. It was fun. Steep, decent snow, good small bumps, and longer than any other double blacks open right now. I skied it well, I was proud. Then Craig had to sweep lower gallowich, so I came along for that. Doing that I met Phillipe, some French exchange ski patrolman. He told us fun stories about playing checkers as a drinking game with Norwegian girls. For dinner we went to Donita's. Haven't been there in a while. Food is still excellent. I managed to eat my entire meal, I was quite proud. Then we adventured around town on the bus in an attempt to buy a disposable camera, beer, and gum. We were successful. Then we watched Lost In Space, but I fell asleep for most of it. Then Anne and I played chess. I love that game. Anne warned me she wouldn't be any good, but she did much better than I would've expected, given her warnings. I still won, but it took a while. Friday was the last day of skiing. We stuck to easy stuff. Annie and Nina Madden joined us in the afternoon for a while, so that was fun. Then after returning our gear we returned to town. We were immediately greeted by Mom who informed us of reservations at the Gourmet Noodle. So we had dinner there, which was excellent, as usual. Then we watched Stargate, which is always fun. Then drove to the condo, picked up the Barrett's Tahoe, and returned to town for more fun. Anne and I hit Kochevars again, although the atmosphere was a bit different than the previous time. Then we played another game of chess. And that's pretty much it, Anne and Brian took off at 8 or so this morning. All in all, a very fun week.

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qotd

entry #764, Sat, December 30, 2000, 01:12 (Life in General)

"There's lettuce in my beer! Oh, no, never mind, it's just the lime." -- Mom. We were having Corona with dinner. I made egg rolls. Yay me.

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breck-o-rama

entry #763, Fri, December 29, 2000, 15:48 (Life in General)

Breckenridge! Woo! Woo! Made it out of CB at about 2:50 on wednesday. Gassed up in Gunnison, then picked up Rich (I'm pretty sure that's what his name was) on my way out of Gunnison. Rich is probably the coolest hitchhiker I've ever picked up. But the journey out of Gunnison didn't start out too well. Within a few minutes of picking up Rich, I got pulled over for the first time in my life. For going 77 in a 65. Doh! Rich commented that having picked up a hitchhiker my karma should be better than that. But karma turned out pretty good, I only got a warning. Woohoo! Thank you kind cop lady. So onwards goes the journey. Rich was much fun to talk to. He was born in Britain, lived in Belgium a few years, and moved to the US when he was 13 or so. He lives in north carolina, but had hitchhiked to arizona to visit his daughter for christmas. He was on his way back east when I picked him up. I was the eighteenth person he was driving with on his way back east. He rode with me all the way to Breck. He used to live in Silverthorne, apparently. The drive to Breckenridge took about three and a half hours. Breckenridge itself was crazy, mad traffic all over the place. I had to drive more agressive than I did in Albuquerque. But I made it to the Hagale's place fine. They've got a nice place here. Met Tony's family, they were quite good to me. Brian, one of Tony's brothers, asked me if it would be ok if he killed me. I told him to wait until after I skied on thursday. The Hagale's and a whole bunch of their friends took me along to this place called Bubba Gumps. Had a good salmon there. Then we returned to their home and I played Tekken Tag Team or some such on their playstation 2, Tony and I versus his two brothers. I think I did alright for having never played before, but I've never been good at any of them combat game things.

Woke up the next morning at 7 only to discover that somehow during the course of the night I had managed to pull or strain something in my right groin. I was worried it'd make skiing impractical. But it turned out not to be a muscle I really use for skiing, so it didn't bother me too much. Went to the rental shop and picked up skiing gear for me. Tony definitely qualifies as my hero of the day and as the coolest person alive. Not only did he get me a free pass for thursday (one of the benefits of his ski instructor job), I also got a 10% discount at the rental place because Tony is a ski instructor. So made it to the lifts by nine or so. The mountain was pretty empty at that time. So I started off cruising on the blue and black runs off the colorado and rocky mountain lifts, since the lines weren't too bad at the time. Once lines started forming I moved on and began exploring the rest of the mountain. Breckenridge is pretty big. And kinda confusing, it's got several peaks. But I figured out my way around. But by 11 or so, the lift lines were getting pretty bad, so chair E became my friend. This is a small chair that goes to the top of peak 9 from somewhere in the middle of the mountain. It had some fun double black terrain under it, and never had lines. So that's where I spent most of my day. Finally returned to the Hagale's at about 3, feeling a bit tired. My lips hate me, I forgot to take chapstick to the mountain with me, and it was quite windy, so they got horribly chapped. Since I was skiing alone at Breckenridge, I rode the singles lines in the lifts. That's always fun, you get to meet people on the lifts. Had various interesting conversations. Unfortunately, I didn't meet any skibunnies. Tho I did see quite a few on the slopes. mmmmm... skibunnies...

After dinner Mrs Hagale drove Tony, Brian, and I to Keystone for some night skiing. We only got in two runs, but they were relatively long, and I was already pretty sore, so that was probably enough. We took the "flying dutchman" down both times, since some guy I rode up on the lift with in Breck told me it was the best night run at keystone. The runs on Keystone were really kinda icy, though. Then we watched U-571. But I fell asleep during the movie. I was quite worn out.

Overall, I'm content with how I did skiing. I caught some good air, and I handled the doubleblacks well enough. But my legs are definitely not nearly in as good as shape as they were in high school. I need to work on that. But they were also in better shape than when I went skiing last year. Whenever I have gone lifting over the past semester (not particularly often) I've done mainly upper body exercises. I should forget about those and focus more on leg strength. The only parts of my upper body I need to have strong are my abs and my back. My arms have always been weak, but none of the sports I really enjoy doing require arm strength...

Woke up with a very sore back this morning. The rest of me feels ok. Left Breckenridge shortly before 10, made it back to CB in slightly over three hours. In Gunnison I picked up three mexican hitchhikers. Two guys and a woman. The woman sat up front, but after about a mile or two she got kinda agitated and was saying stuff I didn't understand. The guys finally told me she wanted me to stop. So she got out and walked back towards Gunnison. After she had left the car, the two guys explained to me she wasn't a friend of theirs, she just worked with them. The two mexican guys were George and Mike. Mike spoke decent english, George didn't. So Mike and I were discussing various things, such as music and movies and mexico and Mike would translate the interesting parts of the conversation for George.

I'm very happy with how K2 did on the trip. The odometer now reads just over 1300 miles. My main reason for getting a standard transmission was that they're more fun to drive. But standard definitely was nice to have going over monarch pass. And it's nice to have in general for winter driving in CO. Like hitchhiker Rich said: "automatics suck!"

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und nun?

entry #762, Wed, December 27, 2000, 14:53 (Life in General)

Last night at dinner Mom pointed out to me that my hairline had started to recede. And so I checked this out and it has, ever so slightly. I always knew it was gonna happen, but I never figured it would bother me too much. And it doesn't bother me too much, but I am surprised that it is affecting me a little. Mainly I'm amused... here I am, reading the chronicles of narnia, something I feel I missed during my childhood, and I'm being confronted yet again with the fact that inevitably, I'm an adult. But if God doesn't want me to have the hair, so be it. I kind of view this as a challenge to have fun with it while I still can. So we'll see what we can do.

My car insurance bill showed up yesterday. The premium is actually about $60 less than I was expecting, which is a pleasant surprise. It's still a lot of money, though.

Failed to wake up to go to Rotary today. But I've been productive today. Got ski tickets, took care of some other things. I'm leaving for Breckenridge in about an hour or two. Heard from Brett Jones, he was looking for help with his computer, and also informed me that Kung Pao is playing new years eve. So that might be fun.

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sled-o-rama

entry #761, Tue, December 26, 2000, 23:33 (Life in General)

So I was supposed to head over to the Rozmans at 9ish this morning to do some snowmobiling and such. Well, they called and postponed the event a little, since it was -9 degrees or so at 9 am. So at 10:30 I headed over there and got to play on a snowmobile. Fun stuff. Tommy built a jump on the side of the hill and so I hiked up to where he was (he'd gotten a ride up to the top of the hill and boarded down) and got plenty of exercise for today. Watched him go over the jump a few times. Then he hooked a rope to the back of the sled I was driving and (after getting the snowmobile stuck on our first attempt) I pulled him back to the ranch, him doing waterski-style snowboarding. Fun fun.

I've almost finished the first book of the chronicles of narnia, so I went out and bought books 2 and 3. Good stuff.

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Merry Christmas!

entry #760, Tue, December 26, 2000, 01:34 (Life in General)

Woohoo. It's christmas. And stuff! Woke up earlyish for christmas mass, then headed home for breakfast and presents! And fire, I got to play with our fireplace. I got some good stuff. Annie gave me an icescraper for the car. Got a dune book from BJ. Got the first book of the chronicles of narnia. Been meaning to read those for a while. Got a chess set and a stuffed penguin from Mamie. Now I own four chess sets. Was a good christmas day. Watched a bunch of football and played a bunch of chess and ate a good meal. The Rozmans came over. Annie is the only person who played me in chess today who didn't end up with a losing record against me. She used a brilliant tactic the first game we played: she'd get really upset whenever I took one of her pieces, so I was distracted and made stupid mistakes and stuff and lost. I finally talked her into a rematch and was very vengeful: I took all her pieces before checkmating her, and lost only three pawns in the process. I'm cruel. But the final record between us is a tie. I need to play chess more, it's so much fun. I especially enjoy losing, it forces me to learn more about the game. But I also love winning. BJ handed me a good defeat today. But then I beat him three times. I have a book about opening moves for chess. I should read that. I should also investigate purchasing other advanced chess books. And I should find people to play chess with. Perhaps Perk will be interested in four simultaneous chess games now that I've got four sets. And Paul and Rob have started playing chess, I think...

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room with a window

entry #759, Mon, December 25, 2000, 01:18 (Travel)

So between Saguache and CB, alls I listened to was Operation Ivy, over and over. It was good. And although I've declared "responsibility" by MxPx to be my theme song, I think "Sound System" by Op Ivy is still one of my overall favorite songs. And thus my triumphant return to CB.

I had a fun little excursion to New Mexico... K2's odometer now reads 930 or so miles. The total mileage for this trip was 795. My measured gas mileage was also quite good: 410 miles on 10 gallons. Most of that is highway, but does include some city miles inside Albuquerque.

So the Tifones arrived in Albuquerque on Friday night. It was good to see them again (and the Sissons as well). Then Saturday morning I helped Oma and Papa load their truck for their trip to Lamar, CO. They went to the Peacocks for christmas. So I certainly only got to see them a short while, but I'm glad to have gotten to visit them for a little while. Then I returned to the Sisson's and helped them pack up for the trip to Red River. K2 was loaded with a bunch of their stuff as well. Bob and Linda claim they wouldn't have been able to make it to Red River without my added cargo space. They had a lot of stuff. Luckily a lot was groceries, so they should be able to make it back to Albuquerque without my assistance. So at about 1:30 we left Albuquerque and convoyed to Red River. Ryan Sisson and Nathan Trifone rode with me. Ryan played a punk-o-rama cd and a Devo cd. Excellent road music. Then we played We Are Not Devo. Fun. Arrived in Red River with no trouble. Had a good dinner here, then later played Taboo. I was amused when one of the words that came up was "Fiesta" the clue that whoever had the word first came up with was "Notre Dame is gonna play in the blank bowl" ... and immediately the word was guessed. Then after watching some TV, headed to bed. Woke up at 9 or so this morning, had a nice relaxed morning. Drove to town to meet the Trifones for lunch after their morning snowboarding lessons. None of them had ever been snowboarding before, so after eating, we were demonstrated their progress. They were doing well and seemed to be having fun. Returned to the Sisson's cabin (which is very nice, btw, I'd never seen it before), watched some football (Broncos won yesterday!), watched the Sissons procure a tree, and then left for CB at about 4:30. Got back to CB at about 9.

I definitely love driving. I picked up a hitchhiker friday on my way out of Gunnison. He was only going about four miles, so I didn't have company for very long, but it's always fun to talk to people on the road. I love having an open road before me, the vastness of God's creation stretching ahead of me. I love having a car. And the Trifone's have told me I'm welcome to drive down to Mississippi at any time to visit, so I may try to do that at some point... who knows. But now I have that option. And Bob gave me plenty of advice on driving now that I have a car of my own.

Of course, although I love my family very much, without fail, members of my extended family had to ask if I had a girlfriend. And Bob pointed out to me that he was only a year older than I am when he got married. It seems to be a matter of concern.

And I've always wondered what kind of people would buy one of the Big Mouth talking bass things. Well, the Sissons had one at their cabin. So now I know.

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on the road again

entry #758, Fri, December 22, 2000, 22:05 (Travel)

So the weather cooperated beautifully and I am now in Albuquerque. K2 (I think the name is gonna stick, but we'll see) and I survived our first road trip together. The drive went well. Just over six hours. Icy roads near CB and traffic near Santa Fe (and me missing a turn in Albuquerque) all added a little extra time to the trip. But it went well. K2, it turns out, has two trip odometers, which is perfect for people like me. So I have one measuring mileage since I left CB and one measuring mileage since I filled the gastank. Gas mileage is looking very good, the tank holds 12 gallons I think and I made it to Albuquerque on about 2/3rds of a tank. It's dark out now so I'm not gonna look up exact mileage yet, I'll wait until the tank is empty. I also got a chance to see how K2 handles at high speeds, both on empty stretches of road and on I25 with tons of traffic. I managed to get going 100 mph on I25, with no ill effects, the car rode very smoothly. Traffic prevented me from continuing at such speed for very long, tho.

Oma and Papa seem to be doing well. They took me to dinner at a good mexican restaurant, Pedillas. Good even by new mexico standards, so that's saying something. Very full now. Have been helping them run errands and do various stuff around the house. Current task: making christmas cookies. Much fun. Trifones are due to arrive soon, so we'll be taking off to see them at Bob's soon.

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happy winter solstice!

entry #757, Fri, December 22, 2000, 00:46 (Life in General)

We mustn't forget, either, that today was the shortest day of the year. Darkness is feasting upon us. But I've returned to some of my old habits, it seems. I started out break wearing reasonable gear for the weather, but today I pretty much walked around outside in a tshirt. I see no reason to wear a coat when all it does is add unnecessary bulk. And my ND sweatshirt smells like smoke from that night at the eldo, and I'm perfectly comfortable in a tshirt. And you know, a couple years ago, Greg (drawing blank on last name right now -- high school buddy Greg) recognized me when I was in town over break because I was wearing only a tshirt. So how can old friends recognize me if I wear more?

It's too bad it's cloudy out right now. I'd really like to go look at the sky. See the majestic stars during the night that darkness reigns supremest. I really can get into this solstice stuff. It's almost a shame I'm not a pagan... ooooh, or an animist... that'd be fun.

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college apps and more belgian beer

entry #756, Thu, December 21, 2000, 23:37 (Life in General)

Woke up this morning to the request that I show up at CBCS to help Annie with college applications. So I did so and helped out. Gotta make sure the ND app is in good shape. The rest of afternoon is a blur of unimportant goings-on. At some point we took the christmas tree inside and stood it up so it's ready to be decorated. Then Dad, Mamie, Annie and I headed to the New Brussels bakery again. They only had one Duvel, so I let Dad have that and instead tried a Blue Moon, which is some belgian-style beer made in the US. Very cloudy pale ale. It was decent. Then listened to Dad and Claude (one of the owners of the bakery) talk about Belgian politics and such. My flemish comprehension did well. I love the flemish language, it has to be one of the friendliest-sounding languages I've heard. But that's just my opinion. Now it's time to do laundry and such. If the weather cooperates, I'll be leaving for Albuquerque in the morning...

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car names

entry #755, Thu, December 21, 2000, 00:19 (Life in General)

heheheh. I'm pathetic and shouldn't waste so much time on this stuff. But it's important to me, for God only knows what reasons...

So poking about a bit, I've discovered the following: "kibil" is the Dwarvish word for silver in Tolkien's books. And "Khazad" is the word for Dwarf, it seems. So I'm thinking something like "Kibil Khazad" is definitely worthy of consideration. K for short. Or K2 for short. That's actually kinda cool, too. So there's one option. I think having found that one is enough for tonight. I've got a book to read...

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reading? for fun??

entry #754, Thu, December 21, 2000, 00:08 (Life in General)

Wow. So this morning I started reading "Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg. It's a novel based on an earlier short story by Asimov of the same name. It's really quite good. I'm 235 pages into it and am likely to finish it off before I go to sleep tonight. I don't think I did any reading for fun this entire past semester, which is quite out of the ordinary. It's so much fun to really get into a book again. I'm really enjoying this one. Some of the scientific premises are kinda hard to buy, but it's one of those stories where all you need to do is suspend a little belief and the story becomes very good.

In other news, my odometer now reads 100 miles. 90 or so of those were put on it by me. So I only drove about 15 miles today. I'm definitely figuring out that the car has character. The light system is somehow fancy in some way I don't quite yet fathom. The good thing is that it looks like I'll be unable to leave the lights on accidentally and run out the battery. But it seems that to get the lights to come on all the way at night, you need to put the car into gear or something. But there seems to be more trickery to it than that, and I always get the lights on without more than 10 or 15 seconds of playing, but it's a very nondeterministic process. I could read the manual, I suppose...

Also fun is the fact that the car has no tachometer. So shifting is much more of an intuitive process than anything. So far it's all been alright, but sometime I really should drive around a bit without music, so I can hear the engine and get a better feel of what it wants...

Still haven't figured out a name for the little beasty. I'm thinking that with my personality and all that, something out of star trek or some kinda tolkienesque name would work best. Will need more research time. Will need a bit more time to get to know the car, too, so I can be sure the name is appropriate...

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Kung Pao!

entry #753, Wed, December 20, 2000, 01:49 (Music)

So I ran into Bret Jones, one of my high school english teachers, yesterday. He informed me his band, Kung Pao, was playing at the Eldo. So after scouting out the scene, I figured out that said event was tonight. So I headed over there. It was the first time I've gone to a bar alone, and my first trip to the Eldo. It was fun. The eldo apparently brews a few beers of their own, so I tried one of those, a brew called Pivo, which was pretty good. I even ran into a few people I knew and talked to them a bit. But most of the time I spent listening to the music and sipping at my Pivo. Kung Pao mainly played funk/soul sort of music, but they had one song that was definitely very country and a song that was more metal than anything else. They were quite good, I was impressed. It was fun. I didn't stay particularly long, maybe 70 minutes or so. But the Eldo seems like a fun place to go, especially if I find friends to go with.

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yay!

entry #752, Wed, December 20, 2000, 00:10 (School)

yay! So I checked my grades for the semester. Not only do I have a 4.0 for the semester, but my cumulative GPA is now a 4.0, thanks to the fact that that got reset once I became a grad student. So I guess I'm content with how that turned out. Kogge must've been forgiving of the less-than-great job I did on the final project, and I must've done well enough on the numerical final. OS was a guaranteed A anyway...

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christmas tree hunting and other fun

entry #751, Wed, December 20, 2000, 00:03 (Life in General)

I'm in my second day of car ownership and have now put 75 miles onto the thing. All the little trips I didn't take into account for mileage are gonna add up quick. I've also gotten some good experience with how it handles in slick situations, especially in the Rozman's driveway...

let's see how did today begin? I woke up around 11. I had gone to sleep last night around 11. I don't think I was asleep throughout those entire 12 hours, but I spent most of them asleep and all of them in bed. Excellent.

BJ and Donna showed up as I was waking. Talked to them a bit, haven't seen them in a while... then I ran some random errands (a.k.a. got to drive) and then the time came: we needed a christmas tree. The Rozmans were gonna go hunting, and since it's been a fun tradition for some time now, I tagged along. So drove to the Rozmans and from there caught a ride in Richards truck to the ranch. There we grabbed snowmobiles and went a ways before ditching those and hiking up the side of mt. whetstone. It was fun, I was happy with how well my lungs did, considering the altitude and all. We were hiking up the side of the mountain in snow that was kneedeep at times. So Richard found the tree he wanted, Tommy cut it down, and BJ and Tommy headed back down with their tree. Richard and I hiked up farther until we found a good tree for the Rijks family. Being the only representative of our family, I chopped it down and dragged it down the mountain. We got back to the snowmobiles and were faced with the logistics of how to drag the trees back to the ranch without breaking them. So we went back to the ranch and got a sled and returned for the trees. During this time I got to drive one of the snowmobiles. Woohoo! And Richard has promised me I can come back sometime and put on a helmet and really open one of them things up. Rumor has it they can get going quite fast. Then we had hot chocolate. mmmmmmm... good... with oreos.

Went to town for a while after dropping our tree off at the condo. Picked up Mamie and Annie and headed to the Rozmans for dinner. Good chili. mmm... watched some of Mod Squad (mmm... Claire Danes) before returning to town for an advent penance mass. That turned out to be nice, I was asked by Fr. Jim to do the reading and responsorial psalm, which went well enough. Then I even went to confession, for the first time on this continent, I think. It wasn't anonymous, it was a nice face to face chat with Fr. Jim. He complimented my reading. I got to talk about some of the problems I've had for the past few weeks. He knew the right things to say. God bless that man. Then head home and hang for a while. Now it is time to prepare for a trip to the Eldo.

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another beatiful day in paradise

entry #750, Mon, December 18, 2000, 23:20 (Life in General)

So at Annie's request, I went by CBCS at 10 am or so this morning and helped her figure out some trig stuff during one of her free periods. I remember high school trig. That was back in the days I liked math. I miss those days.

After that, the time had come. Mom, Mamie, and I headed to Gunnison. We stop by John Roberts and Mike Marquez gives me the prizm he's been holding for me to test drive. I think it was God's intention that I drive a prizm. I drove the thing and instantly fell in love with it. The transmission and I had an instant understanding. So we return to the dealership and I fill out an application for financing. Then comes the wait. Won't know until 2:30 if they approve me. So we go to the Blue Iguana for lunch (mmmmm...) and then go by insurance place and then drop off Mamie for eye exam. Finally 2:30 rolls around. And I've been approved. One of the scariest moments of my life. I sign a whole bunch of documents, putting myself into debt. But I get to drive away in a silver 2001 chevy prizm. It's got a cd player and A/C and ABS and front and side airbags for driver and passenger. And it's cute. And I love it. I was worried that getting a new car would get me a car without character, but I think this one does have some. We have a definite understanding. I think I need to name it. But petemobile and esgercar sound stupid, so the obvious choices are out. Will need to think about that one. I christened the cd player with MxPx. I found it delightfully ironic to play "Responsibility" in my new car.

So returned to CB and drove around a bit on errands that were useful, I guess, but really just excuses to drive. Then Dad, Annie, and I go to the New Brussels Bakery, which has opened since the last time I was in town. It's run by some people from Belgium. They have imported Belgian beer. Had a Duvel, which was really good. Dad had two (I had to drive! =)... Annie had a Napoleon, which I stole some of, it was also good, and I had a Creme Brulee which was excellent. Had a great time talking with people there. Haven't used flemish in a while, so it was a bit rusty, but fun to speak in again.

Then home for tacos for dinner and helping Annie with some more trig. Now I've returned temporarily to the gallery. I might make an appearance at the Eldo later tonight, check out the CB bar scene...

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movie-mania

entry #749, Mon, December 18, 2000, 01:32 (Movies)

So I'm looking over a mona paper and watching movies. Watched Apollo 13, which is awesome because it's full of badass engineers. Always fun.

I shouldn't admit to this, but next movie I found in our collection here and watched was "Passport to Paris" which is apparently a recent Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen flick. Main motivation for watching it was absurdity (and I was hoping I'd not pay too much attention to it, thus allowing me to get work done). But as sad as it is, I enjoyed the movie. It was a cheap production, cheesy-ass piece of shit movie, and I loved it. It actually was kinda funny at points, and it had a good amount of mocking the french. There was a quail eggs with artichoke v. macdonalds hamburger and fries battle. The tour of the louvre the twins went on was hilarious, the louvre backdrop they were filmed against was blatantly cgi. haha. And there was blatant American Airlines product placement. And there was an American Airlines commercial during the previews. heh. I'm pathetic. I shouldn't enjoy a movie like that, and I shouldn't admit to it. But fuck, I don't care.

next on my list: "ol' dirty kung fu" ... I love the movies I can find in this place.

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dat is ook helemaal fantastisch

entry #748, Sun, December 17, 2000, 22:00 (Life in General)

Last night I was asleep within 10 seconds of my head hitting the pillow. Then I was awakened by the phone at 8:30 am. Mom reminding us it was time for mass. I made no promises that I would be there and seriously didn't think at the time I would make it. But somehow I managed to wake Mamie and stumble across town. It turned out to be worth it, I think. Got to see various people. And I got to hear Father Jim say "If anyone says anything about the pink, they're in a world of hurt." ... heheh. I love that man. I also realized during mass today that there was a reason he was wearing pink: it's the third sunday of advent. Which makes me wonder, what happened to the first two? I must've missed them. Oops.

Then we had brunch at home. That was good. I gave in and had one cup of coffee, due to the massive headache I was experiencing. But that's all the caffeine I've had today, and my had is again in pain. Stupid physical dependence. Dad and I went to the Rozmans and watched the Broncos lose to the Kansas City chiefs. It was sad. But I got to see Richard and Tommy, which was fun. The raiders somehow managed to lose to the seahawks (!!!) yesterday, and a win today for the broncos would've put them on top of the division. But that didn't happen. The broncos looked awful. But I got to see Jarious Jackson make his first NFL appearance. Frerotte got shaken up on a play, so Jarious got to go in as broncos qb for one play. Not a very good one, it was second and 29. He threw an incomplete pass. But that's better than an interception or a fumble or a sack... After the broncos loss, we stuck around to watch more football, since weather conditions and such prevented us from leaving at that time. I dozed off several times. It was nice. It felt so good to have no concerns plaguing me and keeping me from just falling asleep. Then the weather cleared up enough for us to get home. Dad cooked up some good food for dinner. And now it is time to do some of the things I failed to do before leaving SB.

I had some other random thoughts while flying yesterday that I forgot to record. Our flight from Denver to Gunnison was late but went alright. However, Julie, our flight attendant on that flight, is definitely the funniest flight attendant I've ever had. Quite amusing. I also realized that airports are real pretty at night. Not the inside, but the view from the plane. The runway lights just look pretty, especially as you're approaching and such. I really like flying, it's just the crap you have to deal with in getting on and off the plane. Once we start taxiing, I like it. I think I'd really like to learn to fly someday. But that's yet another one of those goals that may or may not be realized...

Depending on the weather, we're gonna drive to gunnison tomorrow. And with any luck, I'll drive back in a new car. yay!

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the return home

entry #747, Sun, December 17, 2000, 01:55 (Life in General)

Yay. I'm home. Flights went well enough, I suppose. My suitcase didn't make it here, but that's not out of the ordinary. It's so good to be back here. There's snow. There's less oxygen in the air. The people are friendly. I'm drinking White Buffalo Pale Ale, a CB brew (pretty good, too), with my parents. I got ppp working on my laptop with little trouble, which is excellent. My head really really hurts, due to caffeine withdrawal. But I'll live. Annie has highlights in her hair that look cool. Family is doing well. There's snow. Encountered some kid at DIA that I went to high school with at gunnison high in 93. I'm surprised he recognized me. I spent a while looking at the stars. I'd forgotten just how beautiful they are. Man. What am I doing in Indiana?

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cruising altitude log entry

entry #746, Sun, December 17, 2000, 01:48 (Life in General)

So I think this is the first log entry ever written at an altitude of however many feet we're currently at. So far this flying experience is going better than anticipated. Flight out of SB was delayed, but only by 15 minutes or so. Flight out of Chicago delayed by about 30 minutes. But many other flights are being cancelled and such, so over all I'm content that I'm gonna at least make it into CO. We'll see in Denver how the flight to Gunnison goes.

I've used some of this free time I've had to see if I've got all the support necessary to use the modem in realloc, and it's looking good. The kernel I have installed recognizes the modem as /dev/ttyS0, and I have modules for ppp support that work with the kernel I'm running. So now all's I gots to do is wait until I have a phone line to try this all out on.

I think the meal they served us today is probably one of the better airplane meals I've had. But that's still not saying much. I've also noticed that this is only the second time that I've paid attention to city lights while flying at night. This is due to mainly to the fact that most the times I've flown at night, the flight was going over the atlantic, where city lights are few and far between. But it's kinda fun to check out the lights...

And since I've nothing better to do, I'm reading the tcsh man page to see what new fun features I can come up with. There seem to be some more variables I can set related to tab completion, so I may play around with those some...

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business plan

entry #745, Sat, December 16, 2000, 12:49 (Life in General)

market bumper stickers which say: "Scream if your brake pedal has been corroded by acid snails"

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sleep

entry #744, Sat, December 16, 2000, 09:56 (Life in General)

I had almost forgotten what it felt like to wake up less tired than I was when i went to bed. I just slept for a full 8 hours. Granted, I sacrificed getting some other stuff done, but it was well worth it. My body is definitely confused, tho....

Now it is getting to be time to pack, pick up Mamie, and attempt to make it to colorado. We'll have to see how all that goes.

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happy birthday cdawg

entry #743, Fri, December 15, 2000, 22:20 (Life in General)

attended a cdawg birthday celebration at annes. Now I have returned to the quiet of the ssr and the solace of a 2liter mountain dew.

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yay perk!

entry #742, Fri, December 15, 2000, 20:07 (Life in General)

woohoo. Perk today succeeded where others failed: he made me undepressed. I'm still really tired, but I can deal with that when I'm not depressed. So perk is my hero of the day.

Woke up at 9:30 or so this morning to work on the 232 grades some more. Headed to campus around 11:30. Had lunch with Rebecca Weber. That was fun. I returned her Vapors cd to her and got back an AAA and Shonen Knife cd. We talked about all sorts of random crap. I'm now considering taking the graduate algebra courses in the math department. Two semesters of tough algebra sounds fun. It may help me get over this math bitterness I've got. And I could then take crypto courses and possibly understand what's going on. Yay.

After lunch, my day took a turn for the worse. In addition to the mysql problems I was having on malloc, the debian update apparently also made it so that I could no longer start X. Not good. So I talked to Dr Freeh about compilers, gave Ramzi the 232 tests, and took care of some outstanding grading issues. Only a little longer before I have finished off the 232 work. But it seems Ramzi's been satisfied with my work this semester, which is good. Then went to Anne's where I was supposed to help with some comp arch reviewing and cake making, but turns out I wasn't needed for either of those tasks, so I left, since I felt useless. And then perk saved the day.

I returned to the ssr and got email from perk begging for help on his machine. Since I was feeling useless and such, and since I'm a nice guy, I decided I'd go have a look. So we meet at lafortune, grab food, and head to keenan. We get onto the topic of break, and we realize that stopping by Rogersville, MO, isn't an unreasonable thing for me to do on my way back to SB. So I'm likely to give perk a ride back to SB. That should be fun. Then I fix perk's computer. I accomplished something good today. That makes me happy. Then I hang out in the ballpit a while, a very therapeutic experience, if nothing else. Then head back to fitz. Perk helps me dig out my bike. I think I have proven I should never be allowed to be a parent. I have proven with my bike that I cannot handle the responsibility. I left it outside fitz for a couple weeks, and it got buried in snow. Poor bike. I hope it forgives me. It's now defrosting in the ssr. I'm likely to leave it here over break.

So props to perk for "1: giving me another driving adventure, 2: letting me feel useful, 3: letting me hang in the ballpit, 4: helping me save my bike" ... And life continues to improve, I've now got mysql working again, X on malloc working again, and all the gnome stuff working on realloc again. Freaking amazing how well stuff can work once I'm not utterly frustrated with everything. And I'm listening to Shonen Knife, which is always a good thing.

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stupid debian

entry #741, Fri, December 15, 2000, 19:51 (Life in General)

I wrote this entry last night but was unable to add it, due to debian fucking up mysql. But I've since fixed that and can now add it:

Wow. It's four am and MTV just started playing music. And the first song they play is "One Step Closer" by Linkin Park. I like this song. And I like the video. It's very cool and surreal. The floating dudes somehow make me think of Dragonball Z.

I finally finished grading the 232 final. It took a long time. 25 of the 100 points were one question in which the students were required to write code. Took freaking forever. I need to record the grades for that, plus regrade a few more 232 homework grades that are messed up. Then ship it all to Ramzi. But I think I'm gonna do that tomorrow. The prospect of sleep is very inviting... today has been long. It seems like days ago that perk and I shot some whiskey in 208. But that was this morning.

mysql on malloc broke. So the log is offline until debian fixes that. mysqld segfaults on startup while it is still loading dynamic libraries. Not a good sign.

I've started up a Clair Danes obsession. She's a hottie. I had a Clair Danes obsession briefly some long while ago. Celebrity infatuation of this sorts is fun, and it helps mask any true feelings I may have. But this Clair Danes obsession thing is fun, since I get to set my background image to a picture of her, and I get to repeatedly listen to the song "My So Called Life" by the Ataris, which is a song about being obsessed with Clair Danes and is generally amusing.

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it's so hip to give you a kiss and taste cherry chapstick aahhhh

entry #740, Fri, December 15, 2000, 00:07 (Life in General)

"There is no sincerer love than the love of food." -- George Bernard Shaw

I so failed today. There were various small successes. But overall it was a failure. My biggest regret is the shoddy job I did on my comp arch final project. I was having fun with it last night and was doing well. Then today my progress just stopped. I was making all sorts of stupid mistakes and ended up having no luck at all getting some of the cool stuff I wanted done working.

debian ppc hates me. it has a deep hatred for me. it wants me dead. I'll kill it first.

Had a good talk with Dr Freeh about compilers. I went to tell him I probably couldn't get code done before I leave, and we came up with some good ideas. Will have some work for over break.

Then Brian and I went to Hacienda. It was good. My stomach loves me now, it's the first good meal I've had in forever.

Now I'm grading the 232 final with Brian. We rented Pulp Fiction and watched that. Haven't seen that since high school. Fucked up. But entertaining. Just like I remembered it. Now the movie's over...

Back to work.

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aaahhhhhhhh!

entry #739, Thu, December 14, 2000, 15:29 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

so much time wasted on stupid stupid bugs. I'm about to punt This sucks this is stupid I need sleep I am not in good shape for coding at all.

The moral: if you want function variables to be persistent, you gotta declare 'em as static. See, I was thinking static when I wrote the code. I just forgot to actually type out the word static. Hours wasted. grrrr....

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doh!

entry #738, Thu, December 14, 2000, 13:40 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

hmmm... what do you do when you write a branch predictor that performs horribly? I mean, it does worse then simply assuming all branches are not taken or randomly guessing taken or not. Well, one option, I suppose, is to do the opposite of what your predictor tells you to. Reverse psychology in computer architecture. But seriously, branch prediction accuracy of sub 15% is pretty bad. Especially seeing how as you give the predictor more storage, accuracy goes down!

but let's see ... other fun predictor ideas... opcode based. different ways of storing histories... target based? hmmm... wish these benchmarks ran faster...

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wahh

entry #737, Thu, December 14, 2000, 12:51 (Life in General)

ok, sanity not quite up to par. that's ok, I proved I was the superior to a box of poptarts. Now it is time to play op ivy, drink mountain dew, and get stuff done. I've got 23 hours until I want it all behind me. weehoo doggy.

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it's 10:30 am. is quantum your bitch yet?

entry #736, Thu, December 14, 2000, 10:23 (Life in General)

last night I "helped" perk study quantum by bugging him every hour, on the hour between 7 and midnight or so. Dunno if it helped him, but it amused me. And now he's done with that, so it's time to go have some fun.

Got to sleep at about 4:30 last night. Woke up at 9. So I got some sleep. I'll be happy with that.

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woah

entry #735, Thu, December 14, 2000, 02:43 (Life in General)

so it seems we've finally got us a president-elect. woah. weird. Daily Show on comedy central's been having awesome stuff about this.

So crimestoppers (which does not have caller id) offers cash awards for information that leads to arrest of indictment of criminals. So if you commit a crime, and then report yourself, do they give you money?

Life is amazing.

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hallucin-o-rama

entry #734, Wed, December 13, 2000, 23:10 (Life in General)

oh man, I've consumed way too much caffeine today. started out with 20 oz cup of coffee from lafortune. since then I've consumed more than 100 oz worth of mountain dew, as well as 20 oz of dr pepper. and i had a coke at reckers with dinner and a mr pibb with lunch at lafortune. it all adds up to quite a bit.

I've started hallucinating, I fear. I'm hearing odd sounds and seeing odd things out of the corners of my eyes. It's freaky. Need to get out of here.

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aahhhhh!

entry #733, Wed, December 13, 2000, 22:25 (Life in General)

ok, how did I manage to go from "I'm almost done" to "I'm not gonna sleep until on the flight home" within a span of 12 hours?

blah blah blah. I'm definitely beginning to feel a bit tired.

And I just now discovered that there's some 232 grading left for me to do that I thought I had already done. grrrrrrrrr.... but it's all good. I'm gonna have a lot of work to do, but I'm gonna have a lot of fun doing. fuckin' a!

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consumption

entry #732, Wed, December 13, 2000, 18:26 (Music)

imagine being completely consumed by music. it is pure and the only thing which exists during that time. I think the first 15 seconds of "spiderwebs" by No Doubt accomplish that. But I can't think of any song that completely consumes me for its duration. But I'd like to find such a song...

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oh man

entry #731, Wed, December 13, 2000, 15:53 (Life in General)

break is so close, I can freaking smell it. But now all of a sudden saturday looms as a huge deadline instead of my release date. I've got so much that needs doing all of a sudden. None of it related to classes, I've almost finished that stuff up, all I've got left to do is some comp arch stuff.

I am really hyper. Really really hyper. I feel really good, I'm full of positive energy. And I'm actually being semi-productive today. Had a meeting with Dr Freeh, Paul, and Rob about a mona paper. Had another meeting with Freeh and Demian Nave about compilers next semester.

I really need to go running. Not "need" as in I need to because of fitness reasons. It's an intrinsic need. I'm so full of energy. So anytime I go anywhere inside fitz, I run. Which is fun since my phatty snowboarding pants are loud. Woohoo.

ok. off.

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how'd those lifts get there?

entry #730, Wed, December 13, 2000, 10:33 (Life in General)

so looking at cb grooming reports, I noticed two new lifts I'd not heard of before. So I did a quick count and there were fifteen lifts listed. That's two more than I'm used to. So it looks like they've added a couple. Of course the two new ones are listed as ski school lifts so there's really no added value for me, but hey, CB's expanding...

I need to be careful about listening to the Ataris. They do strange things to my mental state.

So I woke up at like 7 this morning to catch a ride to campus with Brian. He had an 8 am final, and I had to be on campus at 11, so this was when I had to come. Fun.

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oh my god!

entry #729, Tue, December 12, 2000, 22:17 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

oh man. talk about old skool. I don't know what caused me to think of it, but I went playing around in my afs space and found what is quite possibly some of the oldest surviving C code I have written, dating back to March 10, 1994. That was towards the end of my freshman year in high school. It's godawful. But hilarious. If it were a 232 program that I were grading, I think I would have to take off 10 to 15 out of 25 style points. But it's all good. Also found some code from April of 1994 that I wrote for an algebra class. So I first started learning C in fall of 1993, so this is definitely early stuff. I don't think I'll find any earlier C code. I know I've got older code in other languages, but it would all be at home somewhere. I should poke around over break.

Also, while poking around in old afs archives, I was reminded of the days when pete.enemy.org pointed at my machine. Well, turns out, it still does! pete.enemy.org still points at 129.74.136.209 which used to be rijks-1a.student.nd.edu. Of course it's now res80208.student.nd.edu so someone else now responds to pete.enemy.org but it's fun to know the name still exists. I wonder if I could still find the irc servers where the enemy.org people used to hang out. But I'll avoid doing that tonight...

man, I wish I'd had the log back then. Then I'd have a much easier time remembering what the hell I was doing... but at least the code survives.

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suckage

entry #728, Tue, December 12, 2000, 16:57 (Life in General)

man. I was in the fitz cluster, chatting with Lisa, when all of a sudden the room goes quiet. All the machines in the room turned off at once. Pity the people who were doing work. So it looks like the authors and painters rooms were still running, but composers and philosophers were dead. Doh!

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i'm about to break

entry #727, Tue, December 12, 2000, 15:28 (Life in General)

"I cannot take this anymore. I'm saying everything I've said before. All these words they make no sense. I find bliss in ignorance. Less I hear the less you'll say. But you'll find that out anyway."

Late night mtv watching introduced me to a new band called Linkin Park. I like the one song I heard. It's called One Step Closer. The video was also nice and surreal...

"Just like before ... Everything you say to me Takes me one step closer to the edge And I'm about to break. I need a little room to breathe Cause I'm one step closer to the edge And I'm about to break"

Perk, Eric and I witnessed some dude making crop circles in the snow in front of fitz. they're amazingly perfect. The guy is my hero.

"I find the answers aren't so clear. Wish I could find a way to disappear. All these thoughts they make no sense. I find bliss in ignorance. Nothing seems to go away. Over and over again."

I'm kinda psyched. Dr Freeh posted the OS grades. I got 50 out of 50 on the final and a 97.48 for the course. Highest grade in the class, baby! I guess I'm in the right field of CS.

"Just like before ... Everything you say to me Takes me one step closer to the edge And I'm about to break. I need a little room to breathe Cause I'm one step closer to the edge And I'm about to break"

I think I injured my foot today while jumping down a flight of stairs. oops.

"Shut up when I'm talking to you. Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up! I'm about to break!"

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stupid glasses

entry #726, Tue, December 12, 2000, 13:22 (Life in General)

ok, this whole wearing glasses thing is beginning to irritate me. I'll whine a bit (but in unordered list form, so it's all good):

it fucks with my peripheral vision because peripheral vision is out of focus
it fucks with my peripheral vision because I can see the frames
glasses get dirty, contacts don't
when wearing glasses, I can't wear sunglasses, and it's bright out today
glasses try hard to fall off my face when I jump down 10 stairs at once.

I don't quite understand how I used to wear glasses all the time, contacts are so much better...

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campus shuts down

entry #725, Tue, December 12, 2000, 11:12 (Life in General)

wow. so campus has decided to shut down. kinda crazy. but there is a lot of snow. but it turns out it doesn't affect me too much... but there are some who've had finals cancelled...

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skis

entry #724, Tue, December 12, 2000, 01:28 (Sports and Athletics)

so I've decided to take my skis home with me instead of renting. this will save me a good amount of money. so I took my skis out to inspect them. They've been neglected a bit, spent way too long in storage. The base is just dryer than sin. So they need some wax. The edges could also use some sharpening... so I've got the tools to do all that, but won't be able to take those home probably. So most likely I'll need to get the skis tuned somewhere, and I don't think I have any inside connections at any of the ski shops these days. The other option is to try to find a place around here where I could tune my skis before going home. But I dunno where I could do that... Brian thinks we may be able to do this at his place. that may be an entertaining adventure... I haven't tuned a pair of skis in forever. but I think I remember how...

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broncos are in the playoffs!

entry #723, Tue, December 12, 2000, 00:26 (Sports and Athletics)

woohoo! The Broncos beat the Seattle Seahawks on Sunday, 31-24. It was a frustrating game towards the end, seeing how the broncos were winning 24-3 at one point. But they won. And tonight the Colts beat the Buffalos, which clinches a playoff spot for the broncos! yay!

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hrmmm..

entry #722, Mon, December 11, 2000, 23:02 (Life in General)

I've finished the comp arch homework and am working on the simplescalar project. Hopefully I'll finish that up tonight and can then spend tomorrow on the last project.

This semester has been interesting. I arrived in South Bend expecting to move in and settle down for five or six or seven or so years of grad school. This semester feels like it's gone by in a hurry, but that seems a long time ago. Since then, many things have happened. I've had many fun experiences, become frustrated by classes, done little research, and had some other interesting things go on. My short term (next few years) goals have changed significantly. At some point I'll need to sit down and figure out what I want to do with myself...

Last night was interesting. At midnight it was decided I would cook for Brian, Anne and myself. Not because we were hungry, but because we needed entertainment.

I think my immediate short term goals are 1: finish up the semester. 2: have tons o' fun over break. I have the first three weeks scheduled full of fun. Need to figure something out for the last week of break.

Need the fun.

There's a lot of snow outside. And there seems to be some good snow coming down back home as well. Excellent.

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spleen spleen spleen spleen

entry #721, Mon, December 11, 2000, 19:25 (Life in General)

yay! Tim Lieder is definitely my hero for today. He took pity on me for the fact that news.nd.edu sucks and doesn't properly see alt.spleen posts any more and thus gave me an account that I can use to read alt.spleen via other, better, news servers. This makes me very happy. spleen was such a happy part of my life for so long, I've missed it. Yay Tim!

and in other newsgroup related events, the following quote comes from perk: "wow. pete, you have trancended any expectation or image I ever had of you. you are a God. " ... woohoo!

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2 done, 1 to go

entry #720, Mon, December 11, 2000, 17:06 (School)

woohoo, OS final is behind me. It was nice, because Dr Freeh wanted to leave early due to the snow storm, so he decided to make us only do five out of the ten questions he had on the test and had originally wanted us to do all of them. Yay! Now back to comp arch.

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yay perk!

entry #719, Mon, December 11, 2000, 14:51 (Life in General)

Perk finished up some final and thus saw it necessary to come bug me. So we went to lafortune, played in the snow, and quested for the meaning of the gasket tree. A fun time.

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damnit

entry #718, Mon, December 11, 2000, 01:30 (Life in General)

I am slightly not happy. I just realized that my right eye is definitely not seeing things in focus. So the deal is I got new contacts in august and just yesterday got around to switching to a new pair. Well, about the time I put in those contacts yesterday, my head started hurting and I started feeling a bit disoriented. Now I know why. Definitely not happy about this, I'll need to see if I can figure out what the deal is, otherwise it looks like I'll need to go see the eye doctor dude while I'm home...

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yay!

entry #717, Sun, December 10, 2000, 20:41 (School)

yay yay yay! I finished my numerical final. And there's still time left to work on some more comp arch tonight.

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gggghhh

entry #716, Sun, December 10, 2000, 18:24 (Life in General)

I'm not sure how exactly to spell the sound "gghh" but that'll be a close enough approximation.

Life is pain: my NOFX "Punk in Drublic" cd simply will not play in my cd player. I can advance the cd to any spot and it will just skip. And there's no visible damage on the disc. hrmmm... not happy about that, it's a really good cd.

numerical is nearing completion. I've completed 106 points worth of questions. The test is out of 120, but offers another 11 points of extra credit, so I've got to do about 25 more points worth of questions, since I fully intend to do all the extra credit.

I've been in major snacking mode the past few days. I'm not really eating meals anymore, I'm just snacking. Major munchies. You'd think I was a pothead or something.

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yay Annie!

entry #715, Sun, December 10, 2000, 14:08 (Life in General)

Annie amazes me. I talked to her last night, she's survived producing and directing "A Christmas Carol" ... very impressive. Sounds like things went well. Of course, she's now faced with the prospect of actually having free time again. But not to worry, she's now got college applications to worry about. Most importantly, the ND application. But I'm looking forward to seeing the tape of the christmas carol.

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multimedia

entry #714, Sun, December 10, 2000, 13:19 (Life in General)

I am the king of the multimedia experience. My tv is showing a football game, with volume muted and closed captioning turned on. My cd player is playing Dr Alban. My laptop is in front of me, offering me the wonders of netscape as well as the wonders of matlab. And directly in front of me, the numerical book and final. How do I focus, you may ask? Easy. There's so much sensory input bombarding me that my brain can't handle it all. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some eigenvalues to compute.

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hook

entry #713, Sat, December 09, 2000, 22:15 (Music)

I think one song that would definitely have to go on my top (some number) or whatever list is "Hook" by Blues Traveller. With any luck fair use will allow me to quote some of the song. Not like I've ever worried to much in the past:

"It doesn't matter what I say
So long as I sing with inflection
That makes you feel that I'll convey
Some inner truth of vast reflection
But I've said nothing so far
And I can keep it up for as long as it takes"

... I bought the Blues Traveler album "four" at some point a long time ago, possibly while still in high school. And I bought it because I liked the song "Run-around" which was popular at the time. But as usual, I got lucky and found that I liked the rest of the cd as well. But hook always escaped me, I never really paid attention to the lyrics until sometime sophomore year. I was doing calc in the Keenan basement (most likely with Bill and Craig, as was the habit at the time) and another Keenan guy whose name escapes me right now was working in Zaland. I had taken over the cd player and put in four. And he went on about how awesome "hook" was and I actually paid attention to the song. I like it a lot. I need to listen to Blues Traveler more often.

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progress

entry #712, Sat, December 09, 2000, 21:48 (School)

Well, I'm still moving generally in the right direction... I made some more comp arch progress and have completed about a third of my numerical final. I'm gonna work on that for maybe another hour, then call it a night as far as work goes. Star Trek will be on then.

My head really freaking hurts. It has for a few hours now. Too bad amputation isn't an option.

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silly php

entry #711, Sat, December 09, 2000, 15:00 (Life in General)

ok, so I got dates working again on the pete's log webpage. it had struck me as odd that I wouldn't have made dates part of the viewentry layout, but they weren't there. well, turns out that somehow php at some point decided to break the split function and thus I had to rewrite the log_date function to use explode. Now all is well, I can once again see when entries were written. Yay.

Ended up hanging with Arun in the LSC a little while last night before walking home. That was fun, Arun showed me some of his latest silly accomplishments. Then the walk home. Some kind person stopped and offered me a ride, which surprised me seeing how this is Indiana and all. But I declined since I was enjoying the peace and quiet. Well, it was peaceful at least. I was singing Blink 182 and MxPx songs, so it wasn't all that quiet.

I actually managed to sleep in today, until almost 2 pm. That makes me happy. Now I'm attempting to get motivated to do some more comp arch and/or numerical.

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I am fucked up

entry #710, Sat, December 09, 2000, 01:12 (Life in General)

My room has been filled with anger and bitterness. I don't know how it's getting there, but it's making the room a very desolate place. So I did the only sensible thing. I left. I walked to campus... took me about an hour... but it was nice and peaceful. I feel better now.

First stop once I got to campus was the fitz cluster. Stopped and talked to various people there for a while... then wandered upstairs and talked to George for a while. Then we grabbed some juniors from the lab and headed to Lafortune. I bought my first quarterdog in forever. The juniors took off again, but George and I hung there for a while, watched some Jerry Springer. Then we realized we've not played freeciv in forever, so that became our mission. We head back to the fitz cluster and start up freeciv. So that's what I'm doing now.

Need to make sure I remember to start up sshd on malloc before I leave campus.

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yuck.

entry #709, Fri, December 08, 2000, 19:41 (Life in General)

I don't like today at all. But there's good news: it's snowing in CB.

I've gotten more comp arch behind me, but progress is slow. My mind just doesn't want to do anything.

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grrr

entry #708, Fri, December 08, 2000, 02:35 (Life in General)

so I rebooted malloc yesterday (or maybe the day before, I don't quite remember) and just now realized that sshd never came up. So I can't connect. Doh! Will have to remember to fix that next time I'm on campus.

Several hours of comp arching brought me closer to completion. But there's still a long way to go. I'll do some more of that tomorrow.

One thing I intend to do next semester to hopefully make it better than this one is to spend more time on campus, especially at night. Two things will make this plausible: 1. I'll have a car (if all goes according to plan). 2. No 9:30 classes (if all goes according to plan). I'll also need to start keeping contact fluid at the ssr so I can keep my eyes happy late.

I'm listening to the Cardigans. Haven't done so in forever. Very mellow stuff. Not the kinda stuff I usually listen to. But it's fun.

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first, i kill you...

entry #707, Thu, December 07, 2000, 22:44 (Life in General)

... then i kill you again, but with style.

stupid debian. due to some issues with dependencies in a variety of debian packages, I can no longer run gnome-session on realloc. Luckily enlightenment works, but I really liked my gnome-panel. Will need to bug the package maintainers once I've got free time.

So here are the goals: today, tomorrow, possibly some of saturday: comp arch madness. get as much done as possible. saturday, some of sunday: numerical final. hopefully get it finished. sunday: study for os final. monday: study some more and take os final. If I'm motivated and productive, I could potentially be done by monday afternoon. So far instead of being motivated and productive I've been worthless and hung over. But I'm working on changing that...

Some quotes I found stored in random files in my home directory on realloc: "if you're not mad enough to bare-knuckle box, then you're not mad!" and "he's like a cross between terrell davis and ghandi!"

Another file was a list of bands I want to look into, for whatever reason. It's not a very long list: Face to Face and Bonecrusher are the only bands on it. But I discovered that Face to Face is on the "We are not Devo" cd. They do a cover of Whip It. I have no idea how they came to be added to my list of bands to look into (it wasn't because of the Devo cd), but their Whip It cover is fun....

enough procrastination. I'm gonna kill netscape and go into super comp arch dude mode.

I'm a stupid stupid fuck. I just now realized that back a long time ago, whenever I was trying to get my .emacs file just right, I would repeatedly launch emacs trying to read the error messages that flashed by in the minibuffer window. If only I'd have thought to switch to the *Messages* buffer.

The net got taken down sometime while I wrote up this message, which is why I didn't kill netscape when I said I would. But I've been safe from the evil www. And I'm listening to No Doubt. And now the net has returned. adios.

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wow...

entry #706, Thu, December 07, 2000, 11:50 (Life in General)

so I woke up this morning still wearing my contacts. My head really hurt and my mouth tasted like puke. Last night must've been fun.

So yesterday was the last day of classes for the semester. Yay. Classes are done. Did some random wandering around fitz with Tony and Branden, witnessed the phenomenon that is "Bawlz" (or however it's spelled). Then a cse seminar about some distributed shared memory system. I wasn't very impressed. But I got to witness four faculty members lose the battle to not fall asleep. I had some interesting thoughts during the lecture tho about life in general. Will need to continue those thoughts sometime when my head doesn't hurt.

Then I went to lafortune with Perk and Cdawg. That was fun. Perk had invited me to the dining hall, but since I could buy both of us dinner at lafortune for less than dinner at the dining hall would cost, I suggested that instead. And food at lafortune ended up tasting better, too, I'm sure.

Then headed home for a brief period. Then an NDLUG meeting. It was interesting. A bunch of OIT folk showed up. Some good discussion. It'll be interesting to see where this OIT support for linux idea goes.

Then head to Andrew Sordi's room in Keenan with Brian, George, Branden, and Tony. Much fun was had there. They were having a "yay! classes are over!" sort of event. I drank some interesting sorts of beverages, they only had hard alcohol, something I generally avoid. So for a while I chatted and drank. I was introduced to a beverage called a breathalizer that was served in a tall shotglass. Also drank some of a martini and a vodka martini. I think I was the only one present who had had a martini before. They used sweet vermouth, which made for an interesting taste... I don't remember what else I drank. Then I got myself involved in a drinking game, another uncommon occurence for me. It was called "fuck you" and was quite entertaining. Played this with Joe Taylor, Nicole Lopresto, Sordi, and two characters named Mark and Laura that I met just then. Tony joined us for a second round. I didn't do very well, I ended up drinking a lot during this affair. When I had to refill my glass I poured far more jack into my glass than I intended to. But Andy and I had the whole Keenan connection going on so we tried to help each other out when others tried to fuck us. Cuz Keenan rocks. So by the time we left this gathering I was definitely in trouble. Our next stop was Senior Bar. I don't remember anything after leaving Keenan, so that's about where this log entry is gonna have to end. But apparently I finished the night off by puking a couple times. Which puts to end the trend that I will only get sick drinking if Jeff Squyres is around. But then again, there was hard alcohol involved here... so I guess Jeff is the only person who can get me sick from drinking beer. All in all a good night, which I definitely needed. Major thanks to Andy and all involved in the event in Keenan, and major thanks to Brian for dealing with my drunk ass and getting me home.

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samurai pete!!

entry #705, Wed, December 06, 2000, 11:26 (Life in General)

so since I've got two hairbands with me, I discovered I can pull my hair in back into a ponytail and then pull the hair on the top of my head into a smaller ponytail like thing. Paul and Rob thinks it makes me look samurai. Maybe. But I took that out and attempts since then to do it again have failed. Doh. Oh well.

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oh numerical.

entry #704, Wed, December 06, 2000, 10:01 (School)

Numerical is over. Kind of. We got the take home final today. And that's about all we did in class. So now... well, now it's time to do something. I'll figure out what that something is soon enough.

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yay home

entry #703, Wed, December 06, 2000, 01:11 (Life in General)

Called home. Talked with the folks. Annie is in final preparation for her play this weekend. Seems like she's got stuff under control. Best of luck to her. I mean, may she break her leg. I mean, yeah.

Mom's doing some mad writing. Looking forward to reading her latest work when I get home.

And as usual, talking to Dad was fun. Apparently some woman came into the gallery and said something along the lines of "Mr Anderton, I'm sorry to see you sold the gallery." This, because we changed the name of the gallery from Anderton Gallery to Rijks Family Gallery. weehoo.

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i will you to life, fishy!

entry #702, Tue, December 05, 2000, 23:51 (Life in General)

God loves me: trip to lafortune, the huddle mart cash register was out of five dollar bills. which means I've now 7 one dollar bills. Those should prove useful over the next few days...

Helped perk solve all of quantum. All of it. Well, I helped him draw pretty spheres in the gimp. But at least I contributed.

Seems there may now be a chance Lisa will trek out to the Butte with us. Well, I won't be doing the trek, but I'll be at the destination.

We just had a fish emergency... we noticed that we were short a fish... so after some searching Brian discovered the fish in the filter. Poor fish. We returned it to the tank. Only time will tell if it lives...

I noticed that the log webpage doesn't display the date with entries. something to fix sometime...

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yah yah yah

entry #701, Tue, December 05, 2000, 19:05 (Life in General)

I'm pretty sure someday someone will ensure that a "jamaican accent" tag becomes a standard. until then, let it be implied that "yah yah yah" is to be interpreted as tho spoken with a jamaican accent.

had a really good time at wings. probably cuz I got a really good buzz at wings. on the other hand, I've got a lot of work left to do on my shell. Need to test a lot of stuff, since it seems there's a lot of odd issues left. I managed to fix the parser bug Brian found (I hope) and in the process found and fixed a multitude of other bugs. Hopefully I won't find too many more bugs tonight. There's one problem with the nice builtin, but that'll be fixed soon. And it turns out people probably don't frequently do something like "nice 10 nice 12 ls" ... which is where my bug lies. So I could probably get away without fixing it, but I will, since my honor depends on fixing it.

I've decided to subscribe to a few more journals. Since it's fun to keep tabs on people. And it provides me interesting alternative perspectives on life.

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aaaaahhhhhhh

entry #700, Tue, December 05, 2000, 15:17 (Life in General)

"Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle." -- Steinbach

Here's a "process": throw everything that is not a: edible, b: part of my computer or c: breakable off of desk. Add "sort pile on floor" to TODO list. And voila: I can take "clean desk" off my TODO list. Yay!

Amusing quote from Tony's webpage: "Basically, to sum up me and my interests [...]: I'm a computer geek with a beard [...]" ... I kinda blatantly omitted parts to make it funnier.

evil. evil evil evil evil bad bad bad. Brian found a bug in my parser. And in my first attempt to fix it I caused major damage to the code. It was in a state of perfection, I think it thought, and was not gonna let me get away with fucking with it. So I did the only thing possible: took the Ataris out of the cd player, and put in the suicide machines. It's time for the really angry music. anger good.

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today's lesson

entry #699, Tue, December 05, 2000, 12:36 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

the lesson for today, kiddies: signal is evil. Never ever use it. Use sigaction. I learned this some time ago the easy way (a.k.a. reading docs) but today Tom Smith learned this the hard way. I've accidently spent most of my 232 office hours in the undergrad lab instead of in my office like I'm supposed to. oops.

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who let the dogs out?

entry #698, Tue, December 05, 2000, 12:33 (Music)

hahahaha

Perk rocks. He gave me access to resnet. And now I am out of fucking control!!!!

I'm listening to "Who let the dogs out" by the Baha Men on mp3. And I also found "Country Grammar" by Nelly (thanks to Annie Zdrojewski for getting me the name to the song) and listened to that. Life is all about expanding my musical horizons into new dimensions. I'm venturing into an area of popular music I've not spent much time in. It's kinda fun. heheh. Yay!

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sleep...

entry #697, Tue, December 05, 2000, 09:22 (Life in General)

yay. I slept last night. For more than seven hours. I'm so happy. It was still a very surreal night, I woke up several times in the middle of the night, and I had several bizarre dreams, which is unusual. But hey, I'll take what I can get.

I've developed a theory as to why the Rams have been sucking of late: they beat the Broncos. If we look back at the Broncos season, we'll notice that they beat some good teams. But they lost to teams such as the Bengals, the Patriots, and the Chiefs, all of which suck this season. And they lost to the Rams. Which means that the Rams must suck this season. Flawless logic, right? So anyway, I think the Broncos have a good chance of doing well in the playoffs: none of the bad teams will be there, so the Broncos should be able to win their games. heh heh. I love my theories.

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food food

entry #696, Mon, December 04, 2000, 23:33 (Life in General)

so I've been meaning to consolidate some of my log topics into a couple bigger topics. but I also think I need to add a food topic.

So signs of a good meal: 1: It satisfies your stomach. 2: It pleases your taste buds. 3: It opens up your sinuses. The dinner I made myself tonight satisfied all three. I took some leftovers, a scrambled egg, add a bunch of cheese and tabasco and taco sauce, rolled it all up in a tortilla and nuked it. Spicy-rama. I go thru tabasco like a badass.

And now I'm eating ramen.

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BJ!

entry #695, Mon, December 04, 2000, 22:59 (Life in General)

BJ Rozman just called me. Excellent. He's apparently doing well, still doing the whole air force thing, stationed in Omaha, Nebraska. He'll be in CB for a while over break, so I'll get to see him then. Fun fun fun. I can't wait for break. I'll also get to talk to Tommy Rozman about his first semester at Co State. That'll be fun, too.

Other than that, tonight's proven to be worthless. I can't focus at all and am completely unwilling to touch caffeine. La la la la la...

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damnit

entry #694, Mon, December 04, 2000, 15:22 (Life in General)

ok, this sucks. Turns out I have a 5-7 page paper due today that I completely forgot about. And the GSU meeting that I thought was on the 8th (I dunno why) is actually tomorrow and I desparately need to get some things done for that. grrr...

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more tribute to TI

entry #693, Mon, December 04, 2000, 10:55 (Music)

from fortune:

My calculator is my shepherd, I shall not want
It maketh me accurate to ten significant figures,
	and it leadeth me in scientific notation to 99 digits.
It restoreth my square roots and guideth me along paths of floating
	decimal points for the sake of precision.
Yea, tho I walk through the valley of surprise quizzes,
	I will fear no prof, for my calculator is there to hearten me.
It prepareth a log table to comfort me, it prepareth an
	arc sin for me in the presence of my teachers.
It annoints my homework with correct solutions, my interpolations are
	over.
Surely, both precision and accuracy shall follow me all the days of my
	life, and I shall dwell in the house of Texas instruments forever.

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sleep? or food?

entry #692, Mon, December 04, 2000, 02:12 (Life in General)

Hmmm... so they ran into some kinda difficulties deploying one of the solar sail thingies on the ISS. I want them to get it finished so I can go outside and see the space station. It just strikes me as so incredibly cool that I can gaze into the heavens and see a manmade object among the stars. Yay mankind.

I'm considering a second attempt at falling asleep. I'm also considering more food. food is good. comida es bueno. me gusta comer. si!

I think my hands are getting smaller. Maybe it's the cold weather, or maybe it's some evil genetic mutation, but my order of the engineer ring is definitely not fitting as well as it used to. It constantly feels like it's going to slip off.

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break break break

entry #691, Sun, December 03, 2000, 21:34 (Life in General)

I'm getting really psyched for break. Yay break. So the plan goes as follows: Dec 16: fly home. Dec 19: purchase car, let perk win pact. Dec 20 or 21: drive to Albuquerque, visit Oma & Papa. Drive to Red River, New Mexico a day or two later, visit Bob Sisson & family, and the Trifones who will all be staying at Bob's place in Red River. Return to CB on the 23rd or so. Spend Christmas in CB. Then it turns out that Tony will be in Breckenridge, being a ski instructor or some such. So the next item of business is to drive to Breckenridge and hang with Tony. That would be cool. So I'll probably try to do that like the 27th or so. So then Brian and Anne and who knows who else (I'm not involved in planning the trip, I'm just responsible for providing housing) are gonna show up in CB on the 30th or 31st or something. They'll be around for a week or something, which will be cool. Then sometime before the 15th I need to drive back to South bend. So adding up the miles for all the long trips, not even factoring in all the small drives I'm likely to do, I'll have at least 2600 miles on my car by the time I make it back to South Bend. Cracks me up. I'm so psyched for this car thing.

Hunt for Red Octoboer is on the superstation. Time to grade some 232 and watch that for a while.

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blargh

entry #690, Sun, December 03, 2000, 17:55 (School)

what do I do when confronted with 232 students who turn in work that is very nearly identical? Basically the only difference in their code is comments, white space, and some variable names. I wish people wouldn't make me have to deal with this. I guess I'll talk with Ramzi Bualuan tomorrow.

But on the other hand, it'd be interesting to write some kinda code analyzer that strips out whitespace and comments and does some kinda variable renaming such that it can find code that is basically the same thing... I wonder what would happen if I generated assembly code for two pieces of code that seem nearly identical. If the assembly is the same... hmmmm...

mmm... sloppy joes for dinner...

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yay! yay! yay!

entry #689, Sun, December 03, 2000, 16:33 (Sports and Athletics)

The Broncos prove once again how unpredictable they are this season. They beat the New Orleans saints 38-23. And at the same time the Raiders lost in a very close game, and thus the Broncos are only one game behind the Raiders in the AFC. Excellent. It's amazing tho, how Denver can beat good teams like the Raiders and the Saints while they lose games to the Bengals and the Patriots... The Rams also lost in a miserable game against the panthers, which is always fun. They had 8 turnovers in that game, which is how many turnovers ND had all season. Cuz ND rocks.

Speaking of ND football, we're officially going to the fiesta bowl where we will play Oregon State. We moved up one spot in the AP poll (Kansas State fell behind us) so we're now ranked #10 in both polls, which is plenty of fun. We stayed at #11 in the BCS tho, but that's ok.

More proof that football is better than the other popular sports in the US: football has fun games played on holidays such as thanksgiving, christmas, and new years.

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yawn

entry #688, Sun, December 03, 2000, 14:02 (Life in General)

oh man. Why is sleeping in such a struggle? So I fell asleep around six am or so. I vaguely recall being awake for a while around 8:30. Then I woke up again at 9:30 after having awkwardly rolled onto my arm. It was completely numb, I had to use my other arm to manuever it into a healthier position. Then I spent the next few hours sleeping on and off for about a half hour or so at a time.

time now to pretend to be productive.

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life

entry #687, Sun, December 03, 2000, 05:32 (Life in General)

ND women's soccer loses in semifinals to unc. Too bad, really, they were doing so well this year.

But in times of sadness such as this, we can meditate on life and maybe learn something from it all.

This week I've learned a lot about myself. I think. I hope. If not, there's been a lot of grief for nothing. This log entry is really quite long. It may give insight into what Pete is all about. And it may be rather boring.

I'm really unsure of the role of this log in my life. Sometimes I think I should use it only to record technical stuff, and sometimes I think I should record every single last thought I have. I've not found a balance I like. But I certainly regret the "fuck you all" log entry of last wednesday. It demonstrates a clear problem with the internet: by removing the human contact, it makes it much easier to say stupid things. People say things online they would never think of saying in real life. And I quickly learned, long ago, to not send any kind of emotional messages without thinking at least three times. So frequently I'll suspend a message in pine and then end up cancelling it because sending it would be wrong. But last wednesday I had three things going against me: I was sleep deprived, I was depressed, and I was drunk. And the part of me that wanted to write that log entry knew the rational part of me would not want it sent out to subscribers, and thus typed it in and hit "add entry" with amazing speed. And I immediately regretted it and panicked and unsubscribed everyone. But that log entry led to a very surreal week. I went for 48 hours where I ate only a bag of m&m's and a few marshmallows. I did a lot of car research. And I did a lot of thinking.

I think life is finally telling me I'm a grownup. It's scary. All of a sudden I am on the verge of buying a car, and it hit me that I'm independent and need to take responsibility for my actions. It's really scary. As much as I claim I want to go out and see the world, I really want to just live inside a protected little bubble. I want to see the happy parts of the world.

I'm also encountering various other problems with life. I've not accomplished much of what I wanted to this semester. I'm dealing with social situations my brain is ill-equipped to handle.

And then depression hits. So there's a definite history of depression in my family, and I've been told several times by my concerned parents that if I ever did end up feeling depression, that I should not hesitate to seek help, since getting help earlier is better than later. And I acknowledge that genetics are stacked against me here. But on the other hand, the concept that genetics can predetermine my happiness seems wrong to me, and admitting to depression has always seemed like a sign of weakness. So I suffered through some bad depression in high school, and college did not start out any better. But then I made the discovery that happiness is a choice that I actively have to make. And so by choosing to be happy I could battle whatever stupid chemistry was at work in my head. So for the most part, the latter years of my college experience went well. Periodically depression would still sneak up on me but it would only take me a day or two to beat it away. But an overwhelming amount of stuff led to me going into a severe slump last wednesday night:

The realization I've grown up. The fact that I had returned SLC punk to blockbuster (ok, not really, but it was still sad). Realization the semester was about to end. Realization that in a few more months another batch of friends is going to graduate and leave. Many other things like that just overwhelmed me. And having not slept much and being in quiet drunk mode (a dangerous, dangerous thing. I should not be allowed to be quiet when I'm drunk, it always leads to unhappiness) I allowed myself to sink into a major bit of depression. And that led to an interesting log entry followed by an interesting several days. And now it's after 5 am and I've decided to write all this down so that I can have a constant reminder of the choice I need to make: be happy!

It seems that would be the easy choice. But it turns out feeling sorry for myself is a really easy alternative. And feeling sorry for myself never helps me, but it's so easy to do. I need to balance my goals for the future with my desires for the present. I keep letting these vague longterm goals put doubts on my decisions. I need to keep the long term in mind, but I really just need to enjoy the present, because it turns out that that's really all I have. I don't have the future, there's no guarantee it'll be there. But I have now. And all I want to do is enjoy now.

I don't know why I make all this stuff public. I've never really admitted to any of it before. But I want a strong reminder in my life that every day I need to wake up and choose to be happy. It's the kind of mantra I need tattooed on my retina so I can always see it. But that doesn't explain making it public. I don't really want people to feel concern for me... But after the "fuck you all" entry I did have several people ask if I was ok or what the deal was. So I guess what I want to do is offer an explanation of what the deal was. And to apologize for having made that entry. And to state that so long as I remember to choose happiness, I'll be ok.

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it makes me sad

entry #686, Sat, December 02, 2000, 18:50 (Life in General)

so I compiled pine on realloc. And I was immediately happy with the fact that using imap on wizard gave me much less latency than logging into wizard over a modem and running pine there. Good stuff that. But something is configured wrong on wizard, so I can't access any folders other than my inbox. I can create new folders and they'll show up in my afs space, but pine doesn't see them. hmmmm... so much for that idea. Maybe I'll bug Curt, see if he can fix that... and I was so excited to use imap, and now I can't, at least not immediately.

And then I just ripped my athletic shorts. Damnit. I urgently need to buy another pair now (or more, for redundancy) since these shorts get used all the time. They're mission critical.

and to top that all off, I just killed a spider. poor beast. Stupid humans.

Oh well, having now wasted plenty of time with this imap stuff, it's time to move on to other things.

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God, please make it stop!!!

entry #685, Sat, December 02, 2000, 17:10 (Life in General)

ok, they were funny for a while. But the florida recount votes have become way too freaking old. And I've heard way too many of them today. Stupid election. Why can't it just be over?!

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saturday-rama

entry #684, Sat, December 02, 2000, 17:06 (Life in General)

I'm tired, but I've been able to focus. Mainly because I've not been doing anything too intensive. Ran the 232 grading script on hw8 and hw9. For hw9, there was trouble compiling for more than half of the students. A good number of those, however, are due to file name problems. Which in turn can be blamed on the vagueness of the assignment. So there's gonna be a lot of manual grading work. I have so many complaints about how this class has gone, it's not even funny. Sometime if I feel inspired I'll write up a list of improvements needed.

root @ sql.ndlug has been spamming me with irritating frequency. Well, not just me, all of us behind [email protected]. So the plan then is to fix up pine filters. A definite goal for today. Other than that, I'm gonna start the process of manual 232 grading. That will probably take up most of the rest of today. Football is providing good background noise. Army v. Navy was this morning. A very ugly game, but entertaining enough. Now Florida v. Auburn. Later Oklahoma v. Kansas State.

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yeah, whatever

entry #683, Sat, December 02, 2000, 12:06 (Life in General)

so let's see. fell asleep sometime after 4:30... that wasn't too bad. But then I woke up at 11 and couldn't fall asleep again. So that sucks. But it's all good.

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hrmm..

entry #682, Sat, December 02, 2000, 04:08 (Life in General)

So I didn't quite achieve my goal. But I had an evening that was for the most part entertaining. Went to Brandon's Christmas party with Anne and Lisa. Encountered some 232 kid there who recognized me. That was amusing. Then we went to Denny's. That whole affair dragged on a bit longer than necessary, but that's ok.

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mmm... fish...

entry #681, Fri, December 01, 2000, 20:46 (Life in General)

So Brian made fish for dinner. I don't dislike fish, I'm just unaccustomed to eating it. It was good. My first meal since wednesday night.

I'm on a quest to find entertainment. So I've pinged a few people about what they're up to. I'm kinda particular about the entertainment I want. I want plain old fun. Not something absurd. Not anything complicated. Not anything where I want to run home and write up a log entry. Just fun. No promising leads so far. But the night is young.

Been looking more at cars. I like the internet. It's useful for this research. My main concern now is that Gunnison has only two or three dealerships. Which could make life interesting once I want to drive things. There's a good chance I'll just end up buying the chevy prizm.

So if I had a car, I'm pretty sure I'd take off right now. I don't quite know where I'd go, but this sitting at home watching tv thing just ain't good enough. Need to go find people.

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chevy prizm

entry #680, Fri, December 01, 2000, 15:36 (Life in General)

So I've started looking at cars that consumer reports recommends. One of those is the Chevy Prizm. It's apparently made at the same factory as the toyota corolla and is pretty similar. It gets really good reliability ratings (which is key for me) and has decent safety ratings and comfort ratings.

And so I called home to see what the word on prizm's was from the chevy dealer there. And apparently Fr. Jim, priest extraordinaire of Queen of all Saints in CB, as well as of the church's in Gunnison and Lake City, had one for a while, put 160K miles on it, and it still ran great, but he bought a new Prizm. So if it's good enough for Fr. Jim, how can it not be good enough for me?

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fame and fortune are mine!

entry #679, Fri, December 01, 2000, 14:22 (Life in General)

well, maybe just fame. well, maybe not even that. But my picture has been posted outside the cse office. woohoo! No longer am I an anonymous drone working in the cse departement. Now I'm a recognizable drone working in the cse department! The picture turned out kinda blurry, but that's ok, I suppose.

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blinky theme song

entry #678, Fri, December 01, 2000, 11:57 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

oooh, and I wrote a blinky theme song:

    Oh blinky-vim, oh blinky-vim
    You are so blinky, blinky-vim
    And when you beep, you're bleepy-vim
    But when you don't, you're blinky-vim
    Oh blinky-vim, oh blinky-vim
    You are so blinky, blinky-vim

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beepy blinky

entry #677, Fri, December 01, 2000, 11:40 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

ok, so given that I'm feeling kinda sleep deprived and generally sorta less than sane, it seemed like writing a patch for blinky to also beep when the cursor blinks was the right thing to do. So now I have a Beepy patch for blinky webpage. Yay!

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blinky!

entry #676, Fri, December 01, 2000, 10:26 (Life in General)

oh man, Paul sucks.

So I got to teach 232 today. Woohoo. I still have no concept at all of how much material to have prepared for a 50 minute course. I ran out of stuff to talk about at 10:05. But luckily I was able to just say ".ummm... time for tce's!" But I hyped the STL and such.

Paul has written blinkyvim. He has some program that'll make the cursor blink. He uses it when he's in vim. He's very proud of his accomplishment. My lab is going to drive me further into insanity.

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yet again...

entry #675, Fri, December 01, 2000, 02:50 (Life in General)

... insomnia strikes. grrrr... but that's ok, I don't need to be coherent to teach 232, do I?

I have one idea that may solve the current insomnia situation, but actually going thru with that idea could potentially put a friendship at risk.

Looking at web logs, there have been quite a few hits to my log since I turned off email. Something I'd not expected. So I unsubscribed everyone and turned the email back on. If they really need their Pete's Log fix, they can have it. I should instead begin making use of the privacy features of the log.

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music

entry #674, Fri, December 01, 2000, 01:37 (Music)

Music is my savior. I don't quite know what I would do without it. I'd lose the last semblances of sanity I still have. And I'm having trouble holding on as is.

Anne drove me home and made me jello. But it's still not ready yet. Which means the only food I ate today was a package of m&m's. I'm oddly non-hungry. While waiting in vain for the stuff to solidify, I played music. An odd assortment of things intended to make me happy. I'll need to keep working on that.

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entry #673, Thu, November 30, 2000, 20:26 (Life in General)

My head really hurts. I think it's not too far away from exploding. That'd kinda suck.

232 questions have been for the most part fairly easy. Which is good, I suppose. Another 100 minutes to go.

I'm reorganizing my afs space. It's gotten a bit cluttered. We'll see how this goes.

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bike-o-rama

entry #672, Thu, November 30, 2000, 17:32 (Life in General)

I think my bike is sad. I rode it to campus today for the first time in like a week and a half. I think it's jealous of this whole car thing (I've not told it about the car idea, but I'm sure it knows).

TA hours begin in 30 minutes. Hopefully I'll have enough free time during TA hours to come up with a lecture plan for tomorrow.

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hunger

entry #671, Thu, November 30, 2000, 16:09 (Life in General)

I'm really hungry. And I've realized that in a world that can feel so very fake sometimes, hunger is definitely a very real sensation. It's kind of an interesting feeling. I think I'm gonna run with it for a while.

I was thinking to myself as I started contemplating the matter that if I experienced hunger for a while maybe I could understand better how millions (or more likely even billions) of people on this planet feel all the time. But it's not true at all. I still have a kitchen full of food at my disposal. I can choose to eat any time. And I really doubt that some poor starving person somewhere would think "oh yay! some middle-class white american boy is gonna go hungry for a while so he can feel what it's like to be me! god bless him." I'm such a poser.

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chevy cavalier z24 coupe

entry #670, Thu, November 30, 2000, 14:22 (Life in General)

heh heh. So John Roberts in Gunnison has a 2000 Chevy Cavalier z24 coupe. Front wheel drive, 5 speed manual transmission, 150 HP, good gas mileage, a/c, cd player, sun roof, power everything, two doors. 16.5K or so, but I can get a 2000 cash back deal and end up paying like 320 a month. Seems like a good deal to me, especially considering everything I get. And Mike Marquez at John Roberts says that you can fold down the back seat and fit a pair of skis in the car. What more do I need?! Need to do a bit more research, but it sounds like fun to me.

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sleep: interrupted system call

entry #669, Thu, November 30, 2000, 13:27 (Life in General)

It's like this: sleep for me is a system call. A slow system call. And thus by default it doesn't restart when it receives a signal. The context switching time is also pretty expensive. I think falling asleep almost always takes a minimum of at least 30 minutes. Much longer of late. So I got lucky and was able to fall asleep again at like 10 am or so. With any luck I would've slept all afternoon. But somebody called not once, but twice in a row. I wish I couldn't hear the phone from my room. Oh well.

Senior bar last night sucked. But there were a few bright points: first, we saw Father Gary, the Keenan Hall Rector there. Arun and I had a short but entertaining conversation with him. Second, Katie Moor bought me a beer, since she's been saying for some time that she owes me one. Despite having suffered tremendously from too much sensory input last night, I was able to make out some of the early conversation in my vicinity. Anne pointed out that the Neon doesn't have a particularly good safety record. I hadn't even thought of safety. hmmm. But I might look into the Chevy Cavalier. The chevy dealership back home has one that looks like a good deal, except it's a two door. But I may be able to deal with that. You can supposedly fit skis into it with the back seat down, which is a definite plus.

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grrrrr

entry #668, Thu, November 30, 2000, 09:20 (Life in General)

My body hates me. But that's ok, I hate it. I figured I'd sleep in today, and with any luck I'd actually get some sleep. Well, at 8:30 my body decided it'd be a good idea to wake up. I refused to accept this and tried for a while to fall back asleep again. I experienced this surreal feeling during that time. It kinda felt like I'd been cloned or something, and I could feel what was going on in both copies of me. I felt like I was experiencing life from inside two separate bodies. But they were two boring bodies, they were both doing the same thing. But it was kinda trippy. So now the total sleep I've gotten since sunday is up to almost 18 hours or so. So I've got a deficit from what my body wants of only about 14 hours over that period of time. Why did I wake up this morning?!

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unavailable entry

entry #667, Thu, November 30, 2000, 01:40 (unknown)

sorry, this entry is not available for you to see.

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unavailable entry

entry #666, Thu, November 30, 2000, 01:32 (unknown)

sorry, this entry is not available for you to see.

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unavailable entry

entry #665, Thu, November 30, 2000, 01:32 (unknown)

sorry, this entry is not available for you to see.

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unavailable entry

entry #664, Thu, November 30, 2000, 01:23 (unknown)

sorry, this entry is not available for you to see.

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it don't get any better than this

entry #663, Wed, November 29, 2000, 15:17 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Well, two observations: php coding is fun to do when I'm too tired to do other stuff. php coding is easy to do when I'm too tired to do other stuff.

The result: the search page for my log has become even better. Searches can now be limited to certain topics and can also be limited to certain periods of time. So if I want to find all the entries which contain the string "sleep", are in the "travel" topic, and are from before January 1, 2000, I can now perform such a search. I'm a badass like that. The results from said search? Canada!

I found my missing biking glove this morning. How psyched does that make me?!

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semester end

entry #662, Wed, November 29, 2000, 12:46 (School)

Today in numerical we filled out course evaluations. I realized then that I'm now finishing up my ninth semester at ND. That's quite a few semesters. And I'm just getting started. I'm really psyched about this GPA starting from scratch thing. Life is good when they reset your GPA. I am no longer being punished for the mistakes of my freshman (and sophomore to a degree) year. Woohoo!

The last numerical homework has been cancelled and the numerical final has been changed to a takehome. We talked about Runge Kutta methods in numerical today. I vaguely remember those. In fact, I wrote about them in log entry 171. Dr Izaguirre gave me permission to skip class on friday so I can lecture 232. So that may be fun.

All I have left in OS is the final. I've got several comp arch projects, plus the comp arch final. But overall, the end of the semester isn't looking too bad.

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what have I created?

entry #661, Wed, November 29, 2000, 11:20 (Life in General)

I'm getting worried. The latest klue4 hits number (minus my own hits) is now 1927. Now I can blame some 400 or so of those on Tony and another 400 on somebody using some reswxyz.student.nd.edu machine. But that still leaves more than 1000 hits. But as people have pointed out, I shouldn't be surprised that my friends are as easily amused as I am. But I'm surprised at how many unique hosts have hit klue4. 24 unique ND hosts have hit klue4. Even more surprising is that 14 non-nd.edu hosts have hit klue4. Someone at baylor.edu hit klue4 130 times. So I fixed the contribute bug Tony found. I looked at the database this morning. People have contributed a lot of words. There are now more than 300 words in the database. There were less than 100 after I initially populated the dbase with words of my own. So this is proving to be a great source of entertainment. People have added some funny stuff to the dbase. Yay people. There's one problem. The default category that shows up on the pulldown list on the contribute page is "place" ... and people frequently forget to switch the category when they contribute. So I regularly have to remove non-place words from the place category. Oh well. I'm gonna go play some klue4 now. There's a lot of new words to amuse me now.

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life

entry #660, Wed, November 29, 2000, 02:21 (Life in General)

qu'est-ce que je fais? Why am I awake? The easy answer is that the remote for the tv in my room sucks. You see, it's like this: I get home from bw3's and I watch tv for a while. Let's see. Simpsons. Drew Carey. That 70s Show. Titus. Dark Angel. About that time I start thinking about trying to wind down, try to fall asleep early. Yeah freaking right. But let's see how that goes. Watch some show about mount rushmore on the history channel. Begin falling asleep as the show ends. The only thing between myself and falling asleep before midnight is getting my tv turned off. And the remote fails. By the time I get the tv turned off, I'm wide awake again. So here I am, it's over, I'm wide awake, and it's 1:17 again. So I'm watching more SLC punk. Definitely worth purchasing on dvd, I think. We'll see.

But more important things demand my money right now. A car. A motor vehicle. Automobile. Inde-fucking-pendence (on wheels!). So let's see rationally what's the deal. What are my needs? I need freedom. Specific requirements to achieve those needs: need something that does well on road trips. But the primary use is probably gonna be driving between CP and campus. And I want dependable. I can't afford a car that'll fuck me over on a regular basis. So I'm definitely looking at new. Deep in my heart I want a truck. But I have no rational reason for owning a truck. It'd be a less practical vehicle at this stage in my life. It'd be more expensive to buy, and it'd be more expensive to own. So the next idea is SUV. Kinda like a truck but not, right? Well, they cost more. And they're so very poser. I mock others who drive SUV's in places where there's no reason to. Back home there's a reason to. But I'm gonna avoid hypocracy. SUV's are less likely to be considered now than they were during earlier thought processes. So turns out a normal car thing would probably best suit my needs. Good gas mileage and all that. Will meet all my requirements for the next few years or so. And I can throw a ski rack on the top and be able to carry my skis around and be able to feel like I'm still connected to the rocky mountain lifestyle I'm so desparately trying to hold onto. And the several thousand dollars I'll not pay would definitely make a difference.

I'll think more about that later. SLC punk is nearing the end. It's 1:31 am. As is likely at times like this, I'm pondering life. I'm thinking those "deep" kinda thoughts that aren't. I'm only kidding myself if I think I'm anything other than a simple person. And I'm happy with that. Screw depth. But maybe I'll share some of my undeep thoughts.

I called home tonight. It seemed as good a thing to do as any other since I wasn't falling asleep. Got some good input on the car idea from Mom. I was amused to find out that my parents pretty much expected me to decide to buy a car before the end of the semester. I certainly wasn't expecting me to. It's amazing how much better they know me than I do.

Who am I rebelling against? I don't think I ever rebelled against my parents. There was never a reason to. They've been nothing but good to me. But I've always found that being different is, if nothing else, a good way to keep life interesting. Which probably is a sure sign I'm a poser. High school: definite rebellion. Rebellion against my peers. How do I do this? Well, easy enough. I didn't drink or do drugs. That was the easiest way to be different. Other than that, computers, star trek, and sports and other random stuff was the main content of my life. Oh, and I listened to Queen, REM, and the KLF. Since nobody else did. Oh yeah, and since it's good music.

One of the most hilarious parts of SLC punk is in the wyoming liquor shop. The entire scene is awesome. But when, after being told the punks in his store are from england, the liquor store owner asks them in a real slow, well-enunciated voice "you boys enjoying your stay here in the good old U.S. of A.?" I can't help but crack up even more than during the rest of the scene. If you've witnessed this phenomen in real life, you'll know why. The movie ended. I "rewound" to the wyoming scene. It's a dvd. In case you were wondering.

How about college? College is when I adopted the whole punk life style. I discovered punk rock (courtesy Arun), discovered that the lyrics really appealed to me, and found a new way to be different. Which shows only one thing: I'm a poser. But that's cool. I'm happy. But again, punk rock was (still is, I suppose) rebellion against my peers. My parents ended up having absolutely no problem with the mohawk I sported for a while. They probably laughed at me behind my back. Well, actually, I'm pretty sure my dad openly mocked me, and granted, it is a silly look. But it's fun. And that's what matters.

So Ramzi Bualuan has asked me to teach class on friday. I'll talk to Dr Jesus Izaguirre tomorrow to see if I can skip numerical. Friday, if I were to lecture, I'd talk about the STL and I'd do TCEs. Might be an entertaining venture. I'll brainwash the sophomores yet.

So let's see. Not counting hits from me, klue4 has now gotten 773 hits. Tony discovered a bug in the contribution code. I'll fix that tomorrow. But it seems that I'm not the only person who is easily amused. 786 hits now. People must still be awake and wasting time.

So what with this car thing, and everything else going on, I think I'm pretty content with life, even if I don't fall asleep anymore. Maybe I know a reason that's keeping me awake. But I won't worry about that too much. Well, maybe I will a little.

It's 2:20. I've turned off SLC punk. The klue4 tally is now up to 929. I'm out.

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klue4, bw3's, stuff

entry #659, Tue, November 28, 2000, 20:26 (Life in General)

OK, so klue4's gotten a few more hits than I expected. We're at 303 (not counting about 400 more hits from me). I also added a feature to list words in the database, since several people requested it.

Went to bw3's. We had a good showing. Jeff Squyres showed up. I kicked some trivia ass. Mainly because we'd seen all the same questions last week. I was also superhyper. Must be the lack of sleep. Or the colored nails. But those are a result of the lack of sleep. Weehoooo! Let's see what other exciting options present themselves tonight.

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What's wrong with me?

entry #658, Tue, November 28, 2000, 16:32 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Today's been pretty bad as far as focus goes. So what do I do about this? I waste several hours and implement KLUE4. Amazing. But it's fun enough, so all is well. I really don't know why. I can't explain it. But I'm amazed that I got it working as fast as I did... I love php. I need to add a lot more categories and a lot more words, though, before it'll be any fun. But that's ok. I can do that whenever I feel a need to waste time...

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I'm ok...

entry #657, Tue, November 28, 2000, 12:12 (Life in General)

I'm a bad motherfucker, oh yes I am you mothers, come on!

Punk-o-rama. Insult courtesy the Queers. Last night ended up not too bad. I got about five hours of sleep. A definite improvement over the night before. Showed up on campus in punk garb and ready to cause damage. So the obvious way to begin was to go to my advanced comp arch class and learn about branch prediction. Ain't no better way to be a menace to society than by predicting branches. We got back everything we've turned in so far today. Got an A on the midterm and a combined 14.5 out of 15 on all the rest of the assignments. I'm gonna call myself content.

Brian just had to go and find a bug in my parser code. I'm generous and give him my code and he goes and finds a bug in it. Figures. Actually, it was a stupid bug, I was messing up my buffering. But the bug was only exposed when input wasn't line-buffered. A.k.a. when input was from some file instead of from the terminal. Which caused trouble for .ushrc. Oh well. Two lines of code later all is well. We also discovered a fundamental flaw in the general parser design, but one which is present in Dr Freeh's parser as well, and one which is actually a bug not only in the parser design, but the overall shell design both of us chose. It would only require minor reworking of my parser, but would require major reworking of how my shell executes jobs. And since the bug is present in Dr Freeh's parser, I don't think I'm gonna worry about it. So there.

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insomnia leads to...

entry #656, Tue, November 28, 2000, 02:25 (Life in General)

So let's see. Less than 3.5 hours of sleep last night. I've been awake since 8:15 am. So that makes 18 hours of being awake. Now somehow it would seem that falling asleep would be easy. But that seems to rarely be the case for me. So what do you do when it's 2 am, and there's nothing on tv?

The answer should be obvious: you punk out. So I put on some MxPx, painted my nails, and destroyed a pair of pants. I had this pair of black jeans in my closet that I've not worn in forever. Mainly because they had this hole caused by contact with the ground. Not the kind of hole that you put into jeans because you think it'll look cool (but definitely better than the type of hole you get when you jump over a fence when drunk). So I cut off the legs below the level of the hole and now have a pair of shants. So we'll see where all this leads. Perhaps I'll wake up tomorrow and feel inspired to show up on campus in punk mode. But that always requires effort, and one of the more interesting points of SLC Punk was about how putting effort into looking punk is kind of self-defeating. But it's still fun. I was put onto this earth to amuse others. And the easiest way to do so is to look silly.

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tron

entry #655, Tue, November 28, 2000, 00:17 (Movies)

So after years of hearing hype about tron, I've finally seen it. I attended my first movie night tonight, Arun was kind enough to provide me a ride. So the movie was tron. It definitely didn't live up to the hype. But it was entertaining enough. The computer graphics were fun, and considering when they were done, they were impressive enough. The plot was silly and the dialogue funny in that bad sorta way. So overall I enjoyed it. I just wish I hadn't heard as much hype for this movie as I have. Movies are better when they don't disappoint your expectations...

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papers away!

entry #654, Mon, November 27, 2000, 17:45 (Life in General)

Woohoo, paper is submitted, I can stop worrying about that for a while.

Went to Kevin Barker's masters defense. Was interesting stuff.

Had dinner at south dining hall with Anne. It felt very strange to be back at SDH again after this long. And it hasn't even been that long, really...

Time to go home.

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starting the day out right

entry #653, Mon, November 27, 2000, 14:23 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

La la la. Three hours of sleep is awesome. It gives me a uniquely different perspective on stuff. And it makes mountain dew taste good.

So for numerical today, I grabbed a copy of the 2000 Mid-Central European Regional Programming Contest problem set. Worked out the basics of one of the problems during class. A good way to spend my time. It was kind of an interesting one. I'll quote some of it:

Ouroboros is a mythical snake from ancient Egypt. It has its tail in its mouth and continously devours itself.
The Ouroboros numbers are binary numbers of 2^n bits that have the property of "generating" the whole set of numbers from 0 to 2^n-1. The generation works as follows: given an Ouroboros number, we place its 2^n bits wrapped in a circle. Then we can take 2^n groups of n bits starting each time with the next bit in the circle. Such circles are called Ouroboros circles for the number n. We will work only with the smallest Ouroboros number for each n.
Example: for n = 2, there are only four Ouroboros numbers. There are 0011, 0110, 1100, and 1001. In this case, the smallest one is 0011. Here is the Ouroboros circle for 0011:

k	0011	o(2,k)
0	00	0
1	01	1
2	11	3
3	10	2

The table describes the function o(n,k) which calculates the k-th number in the Ouroboros circle of the smallest Ouroboros number of size n. This function is what your program should compute.

So their input requirements state that the given n will be no greater than 15, so I figured I didn't have to be terribly efficient. Turns out I was wrong. I've got a working program, but it's pretty slow once n gets to be about 12 or so. So I'll have to think about this one some more. But later, I think. Now it's time to get real work done.

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old friends

entry #652, Mon, November 27, 2000, 02:47 (Life in General)

Got email from Laura Antkowiak. Good to hear from her. Her email was reminiscing of thanksgivings past, with me cooking in Lewis for a group of us stuck on campus. Fun stuff. She's doing grad work in government stuff at the University of Maryland.

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i am so buying a car

entry #651, Mon, November 27, 2000, 00:58 (Life in General)

So up until now I've been at the stage of "I'm probably gonna buy a car soon" ... well, I'm not at "I'm definitely gonna buy a car soon" ... Brian, after hearing of my plans to bike to campus, insisted I just take his car (Brian rocks) and driving to campus I realized that I need that flexibility. And I need it now, damnit. Now I just need to decide what kind of vehicle I want. More on that later.

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good, bad, whatever

entry #650, Sun, November 26, 2000, 23:36 (Life in General)

Good things going on right now: voyager just unexpectedly started. I apparently don't know our tv schedule well enough.

Bad things going on right now: I need a printer. There are two in our apartment: a laser printer we were unable to get working, and an old apple stylewriter which can only connect to my old powerbook, which I have no way of getting data on or off of. So chances are I might bike to campus sometime soon to print some stuff. Maybe after voyager. But a working printer would definitely be a good thing for the apartment.

I've fixed several more bugs in my shell. I keep finding obscure ones. I should quit looking for them. But I keep looking anyway. But the frequency with which I'm able to uncover more obscure bugs is going down quickly.

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happy birthday, dad!

entry #649, Sun, November 26, 2000, 22:37 (Life in General)

So it's Dad's birthday today. Congrats to him for surviving another year in the harsh rocky mountains.

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go broncos

entry #648, Sun, November 26, 2000, 19:46 (Sports and Athletics)

Woohoo, the broncos pull off yet another close win, beating the Seattle Seahawks 38-31. Brian Griese needs to hurry up and get healthy.

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stupid fox

entry #647, Sun, November 26, 2000, 19:35 (Life in General)

grrrr... I thought fox was better than this. But they interrupted a new episode of Futurama for some fox news special about the election. I don't think they should have news specials until they actually know who's gonna be president. And those news specials should only be on news channels or during regular news broadcasts. I'm not watching futurama because I'm thinking "hey, I really want to hear the latest about the florida recount, but I guess I'll watch this futurama show until fox has a special report" ... I'm watching futurama because it's a funny show that won't require me to think. So now I'm watching commercials on the history channel, since I refuse to watch stuff that I can read about later without wasting as much of my time, and since the history channel is showing me what they promised to show me: historical shows with the occasional commercial break. stupid fox.

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it's not my fault!

entry #646, Sun, November 26, 2000, 17:06 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

woohoo! the ush in ush in bcheck isn't my fault. Turns out bcheck severely limits the amount of memory, and thus processes forked from processes run from bcheck get almost no memory at all. So I got rid of the seg fault by actually checking the return value of malloc everywhere. I shouldn't be so arrogant to assume that ush is small enough to run anywhere. Because turns out it's not.

Lessons learned: Never forget Pearl 3, and never assume it's your fault. Assume everything else is wrong before blaming your own code. Heh heh.

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an important lesson

entry #645, Sun, November 26, 2000, 16:27 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

From time to time it is a good idea to do a "grep PWR: *.c *.h" because as it turns out, I leave myself valuable comments whenever I'm not sure if I'm doing the right thing. And turns out I left one of those comments for myself at the location that I figured out was causing the SIGTTIN when running ush in bcheck. The exact cause of what's causing the SIGTTIN when running bcheck turned out to be a stupid error. I assumed, stupidly, that the foreground process group of the controlling tty would be, at shell startup, the same as my shell's process id. In most cases this is true, since most shells will give forked children a new process group with pid = pgid and set that pgid to be the foreground process of the terminal. bcheck (and dbx, as it turns out) don't. They leave forked processes inside their process group. And thus my problems. So that's easy enough to fix now. And now that that is fixed, I've been able to determine that ush is memory leak free. Woohoo!

One other quick test: do I leak file descriptors? A very likely possibility. But turns out I don't! Woohoo!

The other big problem I was having with running ush inside ush not working has also been fixed. That turned out to be YARC (yet another race condition) that was easy enough to fix.

The latest, greatest problem: any multiple job, foreground pipeline in which the last command is a shell builtin. Turns out I really shouldn't be setting stdin for my shell to the output of some other command. It causes badness. But that's yet another easy fix.

Doh! Yet another problem. This time if I run ush inside bcheck, and then launch ush inside there again, the second ush will segfault. No es bueno. I don't have a clue as to why this is happening. There seem to be some weird things going on with LD_PRELOAD things that bcheck does, as well as with virtual memory... and somehow I've got a suspicion Dr Freeh won't have a test case to see if ush can run within ush within bcheck. So I'm not gonna worry about this anymore...

So having gotten rid of those problems (by either fixing them or ignoring them), and being unable to find any new ones, I am going to hesitantly call my shell done.

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oit sucks

entry #644, Sun, November 26, 2000, 14:05 (Life in General)

stupid oit. Since yesterday, 9 times of of 10, when one of their modems answers when I dial in with esgeroth, it answers with this kinda high-pitched sound that modems don't usually make. pppd on esgeroth doesn't much like that sound either, because it'll panic after a few seconds of it. So dialing in has become something of a pain, since you need to keep trying until you get a modem that's not high on crack. But that's ok, there's a simple solution, I think: don't disconnect anymore.

Been doing some writing for a Mona paper. I still need much work on my technical writing skills.

I would work on comp arch stuff, but it seems most of my comp arch handouts are at school. So I'm gonna figure out the last few bugs in my shell instead. Then maybe bike to school later today. I was watching football, but lost interest, since there weren't any games on that I care about even remotely. And with pro football, after having watched as much football as I have this weekend, I have to care about the game in order to remain interested. College football it's much easier to stay interested even if I don't care. So now I'm listening to Rancid instead.

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SLC Punk! (part 2)

entry #643, Sun, November 26, 2000, 02:13 (Movies)

So the SLC Punk soundtrack looks like definitely worth purchasing. It features, among others, the Suicide Machines, the Specials, the Ramones, the Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, and the Vandals. A bunch of excellent bands. Plus several more I've not heard of, but I liked all the music I heard during the movie, so I can only assume I'll like the soundtrack.

Also of note is that Stevo, one of the two main punks, was portrayed by Matthew Lillard, of Wing Commander and Hackers fame. But despite how utterly hilarious (in the "it's so bad, it's funny" way) those movies were, I thought Lillard did a good job in SLC Punk. He even got some kinda independent film award for his acting in that movie.

Some fun quotes from the movie: "I didn't sell out, I bought in."
Stevo to his parents: "I love you guys, don't get me wrong. But for the first time in my life I'm eighteen and I can say fuuuuck youuu!"
"See, to me, England was nothing more then a big fucking American state like North Dakota or Canada."

Oh, did I mention? This film ain't too friendly to England/Great Britain.

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SLC Punk

entry #642, Sat, November 25, 2000, 22:48 (Movies)

Anne and I rented "SLC Punk" ... I'd been meaning to watch this movie from some time. I originally heard about it because the Suicide Machines apparently have a track on the soundtrack. I wasn't expecting too much, but I was expected to be entertained. I got much better, I thought it was a really good movie. Many hilarious moments, but also a good serious kinda film. And it had a Notre Dame reference! A movie all about two punks living in conservative mormon country: Salt Lake City.

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yay irish!

entry #641, Sat, November 25, 2000, 19:10 (Sports and Athletics)

ND finishes up its regular season with a 9-2 record. Woohoo! We beat USC 38-21. I was a little worried at a few points, but we did well on special teams, and put together a good game over all. There were a few occasions where I thought the refs weren't being quite fair to us, but oh well. We won.

On the other hand, our strength of schedule is going down the drain, I think. BC got killed by Miami. Too bad, really... they had an early 6-0 lead.

Anne showed up to watch the game, but nobody else did. I guess everyone figured that without Brian here, it wasn't worth watching the game here, since there'd be no chance of Brian setting himself on fire. Oh well.

Oh, and I saw the end of an ND basketball game in which we beat Cincinatti by a good margin. They were ranked ahead of us. So yay for that.

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i've got hairbands!

entry #640, Fri, November 24, 2000, 23:40 (Life in General)

woohoo! we went shopping. Along with various things we needed for basic survival (beer, milk, bread) I bought myself hairbands. But not just hairbands. "Ouchless" hairbands. Since my hair is long enough to pull it back into a ponytail, I shall now attempt to do so from time to time. And reliable sources tell me that using regular rubber bands (like I have done in the past whenever my hair was long enough) isn't a good idea.

My shell is kinda done. It works so long as I don't try anything weird. If I run it inside itself, the new shell will fail to execute any programs. Bizarre. I've not quite figured that one out yet. And bcheck still doesn't like my shell. Stupid bcheck. But beyond that things seem to work. I have a feeling that the bcheck and the shell within the shell problems may be related. But then again maybe not. Who knows.

The Reverend Horton Heat made an appearance on the Drew Carey show tonight. Yay Reverend Horton Heat! Yay Drew Carey! Boo TCU for beating up on SMU 62-7. And the fourth quarter is just beginning. At some point you're gonna need to just be nice and put in your third string. But TCU is likely to be unhappy that they're getting no respect from the polls. So they take out their agression on a team that, like most of TCU's opponents, has no chance. Other results: Arizona State beat Arizona. BYU beat Utah, just barely, in an amazing last minute comeback. I don't know if anything else of interest happened. Everyone, especially ABC and ESPN, have been hyping the ND-USC game tomorrow.

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thoughts on trucks

entry #639, Fri, November 24, 2000, 19:08 (Life in General)

Richard Rozman, whom I trust implicitly on all issues related to trucks, had the following observations: insurance for a truck is more expensive, and if I own a truck, I'll be asked to do lots of favors for friends. The latter doesn't really bother me, but the former is definitely worth considering. So I really should be a bit more rational. I really want a truck. I really do. But practically speaking, I don't really need one. And if I can pay less insurance and get better gas mileage for something else, maybe I should get some other sorta vehicle.

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heh.

entry #638, Fri, November 24, 2000, 18:59 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

yuck. Texas beat Texas A&M 43-17. Not exactly an exciting game to watch. Luckily Arizona v. Arizona State is a bit closer, so I've got something to watch.

I suck. A large portion of the bugs plaguing my shell went away in a hurry when I noticed a typo in my SIGCHLD signal handler. At one point I was using the signal delivered to the signal handler instead of the status returned from waitpid. A case of poorly named variables. Sucky sucky. I'm now almost done all of a sudden.

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wow wow

entry #637, Fri, November 24, 2000, 15:39 (Sports and Athletics)

I never thought it'd happen. But Colorado put up a really good game against Nebraska. So the game started out with an early 14-0 lead by Nebraska. Colorado looked awful early. But they looked great in the second half. They scored a late touchdown and pulled off a two point conversion to go ahead 32-31 with 45 seconds left. But Nebraska made a 29 yard field goal as time ran out to win. It was sad, I was so happy for Colorado when they scored, they've had such a bad season. So Nebraska is unlikely to drop behind us, but I guess it'll help our strength of schedule. It was a fun game to watch anyway.

Next: Texas A&M v. Texas. Go Aggies. Help our strength of schedule! I don't want football season to end. This break is proving to be a great football weekend. And football is the perfect thing to watch while coding. Unless it's ND football. Then coding needs to be postponed.

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shell?

entry #636, Fri, November 24, 2000, 14:26 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

So I gave up last night at about 4 am. Here's been my process so far:

Rewrite parser (an afternoon)
Add glob matching to parser (another afternoon)
Mess with tcsh a whole bunch to see what it does in certain situations (many hours)
Keep detailed notes of everything tcsh does incorrectly
Finally sit down and start adding job control to shell

Right now I'm up to about 2100 lines of code, of which more than 600 are my parser. So I'm pretty sure that I can say I've gone about this the wrong way. I'm really quite happy with my new parser, but chances are I wasted too much time on it. I spent too much time figuring out what tcsh does in rare occasions and not enough time worrying about the common case. I thought about all sorts of odd race conditions that could happen, and in the process failed to account for some of the more obvious ones. So now I have a shell with job control that is mostly functional. From time to time it'll kinda hang for a while, and there's an odd variety of error messages that get printed out from time to time. So I think this is the proper place to start over. At least now I know what needs to happen. And I can safely say I understand job control much better than I would if I'd simply started working on the common case. And I know a lot more about signal handling now as well.

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incomprehension

entry #635, Fri, November 24, 2000, 01:39 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

oh man. So granted, it kinda feels like cheating when I use strace to figure out how tcsh does stuff. But on the other hand, how else am I supposed to figure out that it's perfectly normal for a process to receive a SIGTTOU when it sets the foreground process group of its controlling terminal to be its own process group? And that the simple solution to that problem is to simply ignore SIGTTOU while switching the foreground process group. I still don't know why this happens, but it makes things work. So now life is good. Almost. I'm approaching usable job control in my shell. Well, at least as far as infrastructure goes. Still need to implement some of them shell builtins that manipulate jobs. My main problem is that somehow I'm losing a SIGCONT that my shell parent is sending its children. And I don't know why! If I add debugging code around the kill system call, the signal gets sent. So I'm guessing we're hanging out in "race condition land" ... an unhappy place, to say the least. But it's all good, I'm watching Blues Brothers, drinking caffeine, and have a day full of football to look forward to tomorrow.

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mmm... food...

entry #634, Thu, November 23, 2000, 19:53 (Life in General)

So the Barrett family took pity on Mamie and I and fed us. Apparently they had more than enough food, so Brian dragged us along on short notice. Woohoo! An entertaining experience. Watched Detroit beat the patriots, which was appreciated by our hosts. Then we ate. mmm... good food. They played muppets christmas music during dinner. Interesting. Then watched the cowboys lose to the vikings. I enjoy seeing the cowboys lose. I think I was just raised to dislike them.

In thirteen minutes Mississippi State takes on Ole Miss. Should be a good game. So I shall begin coding again when that game starts.

I've realized that maybe a full-size truck isn't currently in my best interest. It'd be a great thing to have, granted. But maybe not quite worth bankrupting myself for. So I'm thinking maybe a compact might not be completely unacceptable. I can always get a bigger truck later. And the better gas mileage won't hurt either. And I've decided that a chevy S-10 with 4wd and a V6 engine is still an acceptable vehicle for me.

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damn you shell

entry #633, Thu, November 23, 2000, 19:33 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

ok, here's an interesting ... behavior. I dunno who to blame. Execute "strace -f -o tcsh.trace tcsh" ... executing any command in the background in the new shell will result in a segfault. I'm not sure if it's tcsh or strace that segfaults. But either way it's irritating behavior...

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huh what?!?

entry #632, Thu, November 23, 2000, 00:22 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

How to know it's time to call it a night: just to check on memory leaks and such, I run bcheck on the current ush code. The result is as follows:

Running: ush 
(process id 14682)
Enabling Error Checking... done
Welcome to the micro shell! 
vangogh% signal TTIN (Stopped (tty input)) in _read at 0xed9386b8
0xed9386b8: _read+0x0008:       ta      0x8

So the first three lines are bcheck output. The "Welcome..." line is due to an "echo" command in my .ushrc. Then comes the prompt, as expected. Then comes the TTIN signal that stops ush, apparently, then bcheck apparently bails. hrmmm. I'm going to sleep. This can wait til later. But it makes no sense. So obviously it's getting stopped when I attempt to do a read. Which happens in my parser code. But TTIN only gets sent to my process if it tries to read from /dev/tty and it isn't in the foreground process group. hmmmmm... so the echo in my .ushrc should be executed without forking, right? Well, I do mess around with process group id's. I must be changing the process group id of my shell, which will remove it from the foreground process group. But why does this only cause SIGTTIN if I run this from bcheck? Well, it'll wait till later. sleep-o-rama!

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selling out

entry #631, Wed, November 22, 2000, 22:08 (Life in General)

Wow. So for some time now I've been meaning to add more content to my web page to serve as a portal of sorts for myself. Links to the comics I read, to cnnsi, to slashdot, to the various other pages I frequent. Well, I found a better solution: my.yahoo.com. I played with it some long time ago, and used it as my default home page for a while, but never got it customized quite right. Now I have. I discovered their bookmarks module, which allowed me to have all the links I want. And the page will show me recent football scores for the Irish and the Broncos, the latest snow conditions at Crested Butte (base is currently 16 inches), new movie releases, headlines, market figures, weather, tv listings and various other fun stuff. All on the same page. And it loads fast and is fairly simple (read: few graphics). I like it. So now I use an internet portal. I'm a sellout. Woohoo!

In other news, I've found another oddity I shall label as a tcsh bug, but it only occurs under linux. So maybe it's a linux bug.

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can't help myself

entry #630, Wed, November 22, 2000, 18:50 (B1B2N)

so with the florida recount going on as long as it has, I can't help myself:

blank 1 = dimple
blank 2 = chad

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mmmm.... reggae...

entry #629, Wed, November 22, 2000, 14:32 (Life in General)

listening to reggae, getting into a groove. About to begin a major shell coding session. play de reggae, smoke de blunts, code de shell. ya man.

I'm having a difficult time resisting the temptation of car webpages. I've been wasting a lot of time at ford.com and chevrolet.com. I should check out dodge. Right now I'm considering a chevy silverado and a ford f-150. I actually gave in and looked at compact pickups. But I doubt those will become serious candidates. first of all, they're not what I want. Second of all, by the time you throw in 4WD and all that, they're almost as much as a real truck. So screw that.

classes are over, break is here. Today: code all afternoon. Rest of break: watch lots of football. And sleep. I've not gotten enough of that of late.

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truck-o-rama

entry #628, Wed, November 22, 2000, 11:18 (Life in General)

I'm scaring myself. I've begun seriously looking into purchasing a truck. And when I say truck, I mean a real truck. So the basic requirements are: manual transmission, big enough bed, 4 wheel drive. Brand of choice: chevrolet. I'm slightly biased towards chevy, because a chevy truck saved my life once in high school. Well, maybe it didn't save it, but seeing how the other car got totaled, I'm gonna assume that having a big chevy truck definitely didn't hurt.

So I've found something I could definitely live with: Chevy Silverado 1500 regular cab. The base model looks good enough: 4WD, 8 foot box, 133" wheel base, Vortec 4300 V6 engine, 5 speed manual transmission. With no fancy features that's about 19K new. Can add A/C for another $800. I think I'll look around at other options, maybe even visit some dealers. Then talk with parents over break...

Pete with a nice big truck. A scary thought. I like it. Transportation beyond just my bike would definitely not be a bad thing. And a truck should last me a good while. Also need to look into insurance costs. hmmmm.

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shell stuff

entry #627, Wed, November 22, 2000, 00:33 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Wow, fixed some more minor bugs in the parser. The new command line stuff I'd added had a few mistakes related to stderr redirection. Oh well, it's fixed now.

Interesting tcsh behaviour (bug?): executing "sleep 5; echo a; sleep 4; echo b; sleep 3" results in a and b being printed after certain delays. However, suspending that job during the sleep 5 and immediately bringing back into the foreground with fg results in the sleep 5 finishing, but none of the other commands executing. So basically the deal is that with any succession of jobs separated by ;, if the foreground job is suspended, the remaining jobs are lost. Odd.

Yet another way in which tcsh made me happy: running "fg | less" with some jobs in the background results in the message "no job control in subshells." Yay! that'll make life easier.

So I'm putting major investigation into ensuring the code I write will not corrupt itself. By nature, there's gonna be a lot of asynchronous stuff going on, so my signal handlers are gonna have to be very well-behaved. Need to ensure I don't have any race conditions, and I need to ensure I don't hose a linked list in a signal handler that is being manipulated by the sequential program execution. Asynchronous stuff is fun. Luckily kernel hacking's gotten me well aquainted with it...

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stupid usps

entry #626, Tue, November 21, 2000, 19:57 (Life in General)

Today I got two fun pieces of mail. Both of them related to college loans. The debt I am in frightens me. I owe more money than I can imagine ever having. It's scary.

In other news, with the poor outlook biking is having for the rest of the semester, I'm beginning to think a motorized vehicle may not be a bad idea. So I might look into that a little.

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what was I thinking

entry #625, Tue, November 21, 2000, 16:24 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Odd. My io redirection code for my shell is less than ideal. I'm not sure what I was on when I wrote it. Through strategic advances in parser technology (cuz I rock) and by rewriting some of the io redirection code, I've been able to ditch an entire source file (and corresponding header file) from my shell. I like it when I'm efficient.

Just when I thought tcsh loved me and was gonna make my life totally easy, I discovered this: when you do a glob on a command line for a background job, the background job listing will show the command typed in with the glob, not the expanded command. Which means for compatibility, I'll need to store the typed command line as well as the expanded argv array. I guess this actually wasn't an issue until I added glob matching. Oh well. Such is life. Easy fix: add a string to the command structure that holds the command line as it was typed (with some rearranging, a la tcsh) ... and voila, life is good again.

I have an abstract hurdle I still have issues with sometimes. When doing stuff in C with dynamic strings, where I have to manage memory, I feel like I'm being vastly less efficient than if I were using a C++ string, simply because I have to write more code. I always need to remind myself that the C++ string has to do the same memory management I'm doing, I just don't see it. I think that's the only problem I have when doing hacking of this sorts, I always feel like I'm being inefficient, even tho realistically it's hard to be more efficient without wasting tons of storage and/or risking buffer overflows.

My io code rewrite introduced a subtle bug: it forces shell builtins to be executed in child processes. Which is bad for things like setenv. Need to fix that.

This code could definitely benefit from being printed out and perused on paper. And luckily enough, I've got one class tomorrow which is ideal for such a perusal.

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"jobs"

entry #624, Tue, November 21, 2000, 13:21 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

hrmmm... I guess I should consider myself lucky that ush isn't required to have a concept of a "current" and "previous" job, because I'm having difficulty figuring out how tcsh determines which is which, especially the "previous" job seems to be chosen kinda randomly. So I'm not gonna implement that stuff, because our bg, fg, and other such builtins are always gonna be called with an argument. woohoo.

I briefly considered implementing backticks in my parser. But then I realized that would be a bad idea. It would introduce dependence in my parser code on my execution code, and would thus make my parser code much less suited for distribution to other people. But it was fun to think about how I'd implement that.

My left wrist hurts. I want a direct mind->computer interface. Screw the keyboard idea.

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changes in plans

entry #623, Tue, November 21, 2000, 12:21 (School)

hrmm... seems I spoke to soon whenever I was talking about not TAing next semester. Dr Freeh just informed me that I'm TAing compilers. So that might be interesting. I get to TA Brian and Arun and all them other CS senior types. We'll see how that goes...

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blah blah

entry #622, Tue, November 21, 2000, 01:30 (Life in General)

Redskins beat the Rams. Take it, Rams!

My leg really hurts. And there's a lot of snow outside. And tomorrow there's bw3's. Looks like I'm catching a ride with Brian tomorrow.

Made some shell progress. And actually on parts of the code that are required, unlike most of the work I've done so far. Rumors are that Dr Freeh is likely to use my parser for the course next year. cuz I rock. Brian's probably gonna use my parser this year, Dr Freeh said that'd be all right. I tested it for memory leaks. It has none. And there's even some odd memory ownership transfers going on. I was surprised to learn there were no memory leaks. I impress myself sometimes.

I'm setting up some funky data structures for my shell, since I'm all into optimality. I don't think that's a word. But there's hashing and all sorts of linked list like structures. And all of it in C. That's beauty. And I'm all about constant time inserts and easy sequential access. The hashes are for the random access occasions.

Did some 232 grading. hw7 has been sent out to the graders. Should attempt to work on hw8 tomorrow. Get this stuff caught up. hw9 looks like hell. But it's not due until the 30th. So I won't worry about it until then. I don't think I'm gonna TA 232 anymore. It was a lot of fun last year, I met a lot of cool people. It's not been nearly as fun this year, and I think the sophomores all hate me. I've gotten my TAing requirement out of the way, so there's no more need for me to TA (unless I lose research funding) but I'd like to TA more, I think I need a break from it, though.

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woohoo!

entry #621, Mon, November 20, 2000, 19:55 (Sports and Athletics)

Wow. cnnsi.com called us a good team in this article. I'm impressed.

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OW!!!!!

entry #620, Mon, November 20, 2000, 19:03 (Life in General)

mmm... running. Not a very long run. Breathing still less than ideal. Two miles. Good enough. Forgot to turn off timer on watch, guessing about 15 minutes for the time, tho. Weight 167.

Biking home SUCKED! I took a major spill, caused damage to myself. So much for being healthy. Walking really hurts now. I need to lock myself up somewhere for the next month so that I can be injury-free for skiing. The most irritating part, however, is the fact that people in one of the cars waiting at the stoplight honked at me as I was getting up, then waved and laughed. I hate indiana. 26 more days.

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it's globtastic

entry #619, Mon, November 20, 2000, 17:03 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Alright, that was much easier than expected. In less than 90 lines and less than one hour, I implemented a standalone directory glob matcher. It's even relatively quick, provided you don't let it loose on /afs. Doh! Someday I'll remember that doing a readdir of /afs is a bad idea. Stupid non nd.edu cells. But it handles stuff like /usr/include/*/*.h and /h*/pr*jk*/*/*/*.c without any trouble or too much delay. The latter matched 137 files and took under 0.04 seconds of CPU time to run. So I'll consider it quick enough for my intents.

Adding the stuff to the parser code took a bit more, since there were a variety of issues to deal with other than simply scanning a directory for matches. And of course I made a wide variety of stupid mistakes in merging the two bits of code together. But in the end, victory was mine. My shell parsing code now supports globs. Yay!

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stupid html

entry #618, Mon, November 20, 2000, 14:29 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

As I was saying...

#include <sys/typos.h>

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signals! hai!

entry #617, Mon, November 20, 2000, 14:28 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

well, not so much signals, per se, as globs. but "globs! hai!" just didn't sound good. watashi wa shinkansen desu ka. Philosophical Japanese for the masses. I really need to get back to learning Japanese, I was making good progress for a while, and then the semester started. And now I've forgotten most of what I learned, I fear.

So anyway, today during OS I did several things to entertain myself. I attempted to explain what happens when a process' child gets stopped. I checked my bangs for split ends (heheheh... my hair's long enough to do this now... and no, I didn't find any), and I outlined a recursive approach to glob matching. Which means this isn't going to be efficient at all. We have a recursive directory scan which calls a recursive matching function. Here we go long stack trace, here we go! Let's see, tcsh takes an interesting approach to redirect globs. It is a sensible approach, but it's forcing me to rethink some things.

an amusing typo I made:

#include <sys/typos.h>

I'm easily amused.

So the main problem is that you can use globs for redirects, but only if you match exactly one file. So to efficiently (heh. I'm talking about efficiency) graft this onto my parser, I'm gonna want to tell the glob matcher to bail if it finds more than one match, which kind of violates my current abstraction systems, but hey, abstraction is meant to be tossed out the window. So anyway, it's time to code this sucker up.

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bcs

entry #616, Mon, November 20, 2000, 14:10 (Sports and Athletics)

Well, we stayed at #11 in the BCS. Our strength of schedule took a beating, it's now ranked #19. Grrrr. Stupid Rutgers. And USC ain't gonna help that number either. But we're ahead of BCS #12 by 7 or so points and only behind #10 by about a point and a half. But rumor has it Oklahoma is gonna play Kansas State and that may give us a chance to move up. We'll have to see...

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snow!!!

entry #615, Mon, November 20, 2000, 10:50 (Life in General)

yay! it's snowing more. I kinda didn't really wake up for class this morning, but that's ok. Biking in was fun. I think since I survived today, I should be able to survive biking just about any day. The main problem was that I lost one of my cold-weather biking gloves (grrrr....) so my fingers were kinda hurting by the time I got to fitz. Will need to look into fixing that situation. But it's all good. It's snowing. Now I really want to play some football. Ain't nothing quite like playing football in the snow...

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stupid foodservices

entry #614, Mon, November 20, 2000, 00:01 (Life in General)

OK, so I filled out some survey for ND food services, since it seemed like a good way to waste time. I was rather unimpressed. They had a "brand awareness" section in which they asked about what kinda brand or whatever you'd choose in certain situations, but they only allowed you to choose one option for each question, and there was no "none of the above" option, so for several of those questions I just selected something at random. Their server was also absurdly slow. But then again, the server was fsntserv.foodserv.nd.edu, so I'm guessing that means food services NT server. So what can you expect.

Watched Lethal Weapon 4 on NBC today. Entertaining movie. I think I missed some context, since I don't think I've seen Lethal Weapon 1-3. Finished up the 232 hw6 grading process, began work on hw7. Got rid of a bunch of old email. I should have less than forty messages after I expunge. I also unsubscribed from a few mailing lists. None of them high-volume tho, should make a difference of maybe five messages a day.

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The tempation of Vertical Limit

entry #613, Sun, November 19, 2000, 20:50 (Movies)

Oh man, the more previews I see for the movie Vertical Limit, the more I start to think it may be worth going to see, just because it looks very unintentionally hilarious (a.k.a. godawful). And seeing bad movies in the theater can be a lot of fun from time to time. Wing Commander comes to mind. Of course, I think I'd have to go with the proper company. Need to see if I can talk anyone else into wasting five dollars on the movie.

Other movies that look like they'd be worth seeing: Men of Honor and Finding Forrester.

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stupid broncos

entry #612, Sun, November 19, 2000, 19:47 (Life in General)

oh my good lord, the broncos are really trying to make my life interesting. So I, like a fool, assumed that after beating the Raiders the Broncos wouldn't have much trouble beating the Chargers. But then again, they were playing without several of their key players. So they managed to go down by as far as 17 points, but pulled off a comeback and ended up winning 38-37. Barely. Why can't they just win one decisively? grrr...

Oh well, it is now time to watch the wonderful fox sunday tv lineup and grade some 232 stuff.

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life in the top ten ... kind of

entry #611, Sun, November 19, 2000, 16:45 (Sports and Athletics)

So we're actually ranked higher in the coaches poll than in the AP. I'm not sure what the deal is with that. We moved up to #10 in the coaches poll, but stayed at #11 in the AP. grrrr. And there's not many more games left during which people ahead of us can lose. But at least we're in the top 12, which is all that really matters. I'm curious as to what the BCS will say tomorrow.

ND women's soccer beat harvard 2-0 and will play their ncaa quarter finals game friday against santa clara. Yay them.

Played soccer again. Didn't last long, I only played about 45 minutes, my throat is bothering me so breathing was kinda difficult. But I had a goal, yay! The only goal my team scored while I was there. And my legs are finally feeling good again. I rolled my ankle playing, so it's a bit tender, but not too bad. I'd be psyched if my legs were actually healthy again. Need to get them healthy so I can kill them over christmas break.

The chargers are beating the broncos 3-0. But it's still the first quarter. Hopefully the broncos won't give the chargers their first win of the season. Giving the bengals a win was enough charity for one season.

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french fries

entry #610, Sun, November 19, 2000, 03:27 (Life in General)

So it turns out Lisa was actually at the same showing of The Grinch last night that we were, which is kinda amusing. Didn't see her at all. She had the same opinion of the movie Brian and I did, I think: good but a bit longer than necessary. Good quote from the movie: "The sun is bright and the powder's bitchin'!" (or something to that effect) ... mmmmm.... skiing...

Mamie stopped by briefly during the game today. She dropped off a pokemon toy and some halloween candy. She also showed off her new pokemon shoes. Mamie rocks

So loud music, a lot of water, and caffeine had me ready for more fun by 9:30. So we (Anne, Brian, and I) rented "But I'm a Cheerleader." Watched that, it's an entertaining movie. Then I made french fries. Mmmm... french fried potatoes. Was the first time I made those in our fryer. Fun time. Then we just hung out for a while. Now I'm going to sleep. Oh, and I may attempt to make marshmallows at some point. Sounds like a fun experiment.

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yay irish!

entry #609, Sat, November 18, 2000, 21:11 (Sports and Athletics)

woohoo! ND beats Rutgers 45-17 (i think that was the final score). It was sorta close at first, but then we decided to start beating them effectively and we ended up with a good lead. yay. michigan beat osu, which is good since osu was right behind us. unfortunately, missouri failed to beat kansas state, which is ranked right above us, despite an early 14-0 lead. oregon state beat oregon, so there's some chance oregon will fall behind us... here's hoping... florida and florida state play tonight, but i doubt the outcome of that game will affect us much. I can't think of any other interesting games today. We had people over for the game. Grilled some food, drank some beer. It was fun. I'm currently working on recovering from the six beers I had during the game so that I can attempt to do something fun tonight...

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fish tank, the grinch, cheesesticks

entry #608, Sat, November 18, 2000, 01:34 (Life in General)

Brian and I gave the fishtank a major cleaning today. Major, it was a huge undertaking. Hopefully the remaining fish will do ok, we lost another one today. sniffle. We'll see how it goes.

Went to see The Grinch, starring Jim Carrey. Was a decent movie, not quite as good as I expected. Mainly because it was too long, there were definite parts that could've been cut out. But Carrey was pretty funny, and overall, I enjoyed it.

Made cheesesticks. Went all right. This was complete and utter improvisation, I hadn't a clue what I was doing and I didn't have anything to base my attempts off of, but my Flemish instincts guided me through ok. Made a simple batter consisting of beer, flour, and bread crumbs. Surrounded cheese in said batter. Deep fried the result. Consumed with spaghetti sauce. Not bad. Definite research needs to be done into improving the batter. I think more bread crumbs, less flour, is a definite need. Also, it needs to be less runny and less sticky, since I had an awful time trying to get the cheese fully surrounded by batter. But it was a fun experience, and I've got plenty of batter left over, so I may try making some more tomorrow. And since there are a few cheesesticks left, I may go eat another one now. mmmm... cheese...

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megashopping

entry #607, Fri, November 17, 2000, 18:52 (Life in General)

Brian and I went to meijer. We had a big list. We bought much more than was on the list. But now we're ready for tomorrow. We've got rolling rock, coors, dos equis (special lager), and labatt blue (stupid canadians, they only give you 11.5 ounces of beer in a bottle... what a ripoff). We have two cases of mountain dew and a case of dr pepper. We've plenty of food. Amazing. We also realized that we've never bought beer in cans for our apartment. We've had beer given to us in cans, but we've never bought it. So there's an uptime worth maintaining. Now it's time to figure out if there's anything worth doing tonight other than sitting around and drinking beer.

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legacy glob, triangles, klue

entry #606, Fri, November 17, 2000, 13:58 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

So I'm pretty sure that if there's one part of the whole unix concept that seriously suffers from legacy, then it's terminal drivers. But there's really no way to replace the current system without completely breaking everything. And it seems to work well enough and it's proven to be really adaptable. You just need to keep in mind that the abstractions and interfaces you deal with when coding this stuff were first created when people were logging into unix machines from dumb terminals. So given a chance to redesign the whole system, I really wonder how I would do so. What's a good abstraction for that whole interface? I guess the tty approach works well enough.

So some time ago I wrote a simple recursive-descent parser dealy to match globs. The question is, is it worth my while to implement globbing in my shell? As best I can tell, I don't yet call opendir anywhere in my shell. What kinda shell don't do that? I'm really curious, though, as to how to efficiently do this. It'd have to be part of the parser. Ooooooohhhh.... man, that code would seriously enjoy the added obfuscation of a recursive-descent glob parser. heh. We'll add that to the ush wishlist.

So there was a while during my senior year that I was doing several programming contest problems a week, just for practice. I've decided that that's a habit I need to start up again, it certainly helps keep the brain warm. So to this effect I wrote up a quick recursive solution to this triangle game problem. Feels good to exercise the brain.

So during os today I had my ti-85, and I was running klue2, since paying attention wasn't proving to be all that fun. Basically, klue2 is a semi-obscene random sentence generator. And it turns out I've not matured at all since high school, since I'm just as amused now by the sentences this thing generates as I was then. I made the mistake of looking at the klue2 source, so the ti-85 had to recompile it. That took forever. So now I'm thinking of writing klue4: an online, php/mysql power, user-contributed random sentence generator. That could prove to be a fun web project if I need to waste some time. We'll see. I bet I could pull it off in a few hours. And the klue legacy would live on.

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silly laptop fan

entry #605, Fri, November 17, 2000, 02:37 (Life in General)

Wow. realloc's fan turned on for the first time ever today. All of a sudden I was hearing loud fan noises coming from my laptop and I got really confused. Then I realized that I'd just installed setiathome and my processor was actually forced to do work. So I've turned off setiathome for the time being...

matlab, I'll admit, is a fantastic tool. But it is so freaking counter-intuitive for me. Nothing behaves as I would expect it to. But that's ok, I like frustration, it makes life more interesting. Maybe it's not matlab's fault that it's counter-intuitive. Maybe it's just because I don't have any kind of intuitive grasp of the math involved. So I think I've generated more matlab flops today than in the rest of my college career combined. Well, probably not, actually. But there's been a lot of flopage tonight.

I need to try to get mol running. That'd be cool. Then I could install the macos version of mathematica and not have to reboot. But that'll be a project for another day.

The amount of extra credit I've completed is now greater than the amount of required work that I've not completed. Which means I'm gonna go to sleep, since looking at this stuff is really making my head hurt. Need to wake up early enough tomorrow to print out all my graphs and such and to run my head into a few more of these problems that aren't making sense.

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snow snow snow snow

entry #604, Thu, November 16, 2000, 23:41 (Life in General)

ramen ramen ramen ramen! it's the little things in life. it really is. so it's snowing in south bend. excellent. snow makes me happy. I'm also going to return to one of my fashions from high school. During winter months I was easily picked out of a crowd because I was the only one with bare arms. And I was always wearing a vest. So I definitely predated the whole vest craze of a year or so ago. I set trends. I rock. But I like my vest, I'm gonna start wearing it again. It looks like a fun late night. Yay! Yay! I think I will have consumed well over 1000 calories today simply from caffeinated beverages. I don't think that's healthy. And there's plenty more caffeine to drink. But that's ok. onwards.

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stupid numerical

entry #603, Thu, November 16, 2000, 23:09 (Life in General)

argh. stupid numerical. I was thinking the computer problems wouldn't take long. They're confusing me. And I've not been able to put much time into them at all, TA'ing has been intensive tonight. Oh well. It's thursday night, and we've got a fridge full of caffeine. I'm waiting for Barrett to show up so I can make my escape from the lab. And there he is. I discovered that the C++ book the sophomores are using for class has an entry in the index for "Shakespeare, William" ... interesting. And the cse 232 newsgroup's had several people getting kinda ... confrontational. unpleasant. odd. But that's nothing new.

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i defeat a printer!

entry #602, Thu, November 16, 2000, 17:02 (Life in General)

So as all CS people know, printers are evil. But I actually managed to troubleshoot problems with the printer at home over the phone. So they'll be able to print again. I was worried for a while that they'd have to wait until I get home in a month, but I was victorious!

I think I've had at least four cans of mountain dew today. Not particularly healthy. Stupid numerical. But I'm almost done with the regular problems, So I should be able to do all the computer problems while I ta tonight. Assuming I don't get overwhelmed with questions. We'll see how that goes. So we were told at the beginning of the semester that numerical was definitely not a math class. A lie. Anything that claims to not be a math class shouldn't be assigning homework problems such as "if lambda is an eigenvalue of the nxn matrix A, show that lambda^2 is an eigenvalue of A^2".

Sailor Moon is becoming incomprehensible to me. They're starting to have more complicated plot lines than they used to, so since I don't watch nearly often enough, I haven't a clue what's going on. Not like that really matters, the show serves mainly as background noise whenever I do watch it.

It's Oma's birthday today. Need to give her a call.

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and thus sadness turns to joy

entry #601, Thu, November 16, 2000, 12:47 (Life in General)

alright, so the batteries in my TI-85 have been running on empty for some time now. So today I finally took on the task of replacing the batteries. The last time I replaced the batteries was in high school, and that time the little backup battery failed its duty: I lost all the programs I had stored. And I'd written some fun ones, including a neat game. So I was certain the same would happen this time. So I ran some of my old programs one last time, just to say goodbye. Klue and Klue2, which still crack me up. I wrote those late one night in the dining room of the Crested Butte Academy. BJ Rozman was there, along with some CBA teacher guy, maybe Torrey Carrol, not sure. Then there's dork, which Kevin Cooney wrote during a freshman year physics lecture. So after saying goodbye to the memories, I took out the old batteries and put in new ones. And to my huge surprise, when I turned it back on, the last page of output from a Klue2 run was still on the display. All my programs were still there! The memories survive. I'm amazed, though, at how long those batteries lasted. Probably about five years. And I use my TI-85 all the time, too. That's incredible. Here's to more happy times with my TI-85. God bless you texas instruments!

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stupid maplessness

entry #600, Thu, November 16, 2000, 12:25 (Life in General)

stupid oit. I want map back. How do I figure out what helios machine I can log into to use matlab without bugging someone on console? And since my educational focus has been primarily engineering, I have a hard time pulling the names of composers or authors or painters or philosophers off the top of my head. Need to talk to madness about the map replacement I think he wrote at some point. I think George may have been involved too. But that was a long time ago. I wonder if it still works. I want matlab for linuxppc, damnit!

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class? what class?

entry #599, Thu, November 16, 2000, 11:30 (Life in General)

so much for going to class this morning. my alarm clock is so fired. But it's all good, since now I don't have to worry about the distractions of having to go to campus and I can just spend all afternoon doing numerical. I've finished about a third of it so far, but now I've actually got the motivation of a deadline. Woohoo!

I'm quite dehydrated. Luckily I've got lots of water. mmmm.... water.... apparently I had a pop culture moment of glory last night. Something to do with Nelly. I had a really odd dream last night. Especially odd, since I almost never actually remember dreams. Something about trying to dial esgeroth's modem into a computer back home. It was weird.

plex86 now boots windows95 in full virtualization mode. how freaking awesome is that?! Need to play with that some.

In other fun news, I'm watching mcgyver. I've not watched this show in forever.

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wheeeeeeeeeeee

entry #598, Thu, November 16, 2000, 01:43 (Life in General)

oh man. drunk-o-rama! To quote from perk's journal: "My arm is numb, hair askew, and neck:red. This can mean only one thing: I went to senior bar with pete." I'm so proud. So now I'm drunk and I've got these weird bite-marks on my arm. hrmmmm....

So I called home tonight, again. Apparently there's odd printing problems with our imac. Completely failed to resolve that issue, but had an interesting discussion with mom about religion and prejudice. Mom had the quote "I'm not christian, I'm catholic" which is definitely an interesting observation. Of course, I'm too lazy to offer any kind of context (and too drunk), but we had an interesting conversation.

went to senior bar. got drunk for free. I got brian, perk, and arun each to buy me a beer. Anne slacked, she didn't buy me one. I was hyper. It was fun. Saw Arnie, visited him several times over the course of the night. I also apparently was fairly violent, which shouldn't be too surprising to anyone who's experienced me drunk before. I just wish I hadn't let people bite me.

Oh, and apparently, if I was a little girl and didn't have facial hair, I'd be adorable. I don't quite yet know what to make of that.

And finally, i think stock in me was being wagered on some kind of bets. heh.

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the future of the log mailing list

entry #597, Wed, November 15, 2000, 21:08 (Life in General)

So for some time now I've been considering disabling the mailing list feature of Pete's Log. I doubt I'll do it anytime in the immediate future, because it'd require me to go and alter some code, and because I've done some thinking about the whole ordeal. A vague thought process follows.

December 1998 I first decided to start keeping track of stuff I do. I decided to do this solely for my own benefit, since my memory ain't so great, but like just about everything I do, I set up the log as a set of web pages. I don't think anyone actually ever visited these web pages, and for good reason. My life is pretty boring. So after some time of quietly maintaining my log, others started creating journals (most notably Arun) and thus a craze began. But other than switching to a database backend, I kept my log pretty lowkey, and I was happy like that. But after a year or so, Arun asked me to add mailing list functionality to the log. OK, why not, I'm happy to assist in allowing Arun to be lazy. But then other people started subscribing. I never asked a single one of them to either. And I don't quite understand this trend. I'm not a particularly interesting person.

But I'm beginning to get the feeling that this whole journal craze is becoming an excuse to avoid social interaction. So I know some people that subscribe are people who aren't around, and that's cool, I suppose, if they want to keep tabs on what I'm up to. But the majority of people subscribed spend a good deal of time in the same building as I do.

The other problem I have is that the mailing list aspect of the whole thing alters how I do log entries. The purpose of the thing is for me to keep track of things. So my instinct is to write down just about every last detail I want to remember. But then I am confronted with the fact that every time I hit add entry I am filling up somebody's inbox, and I feel guilty. And that's bogus, damnit. And I've actually gotten complaints about the content of some of my log entries!!! The purpose of the log isn't entertainment. The purpose is aiding my memory. I'll admit that some of the journal's I'm subscribed to are rather entertaining. But I lack the depth, intelligence, and humor to have an entertaining journal. And that's not my desire, either. I'm a very simple person, I listen to music, I watch sports, I run, I code, I cook, I get drunk, I enjoy life. Most of the log entries will reflect that, and thus the log is really quite repetitive, I feel. If I weren't me, I wouldn't be subscribed to my own log mailing list.

So I've come pretty close to turning off the mailing list. But I've decided to postpone that for the time being. I love my log, it's proven to be a great tool for remembering stuff, and if I need easy distraction, I can go back and read log entries from a year ago and laugh at myself. And I chose to make it public, I guess, so that others can laugh at me. And although the mailing list feels different than just having a webpage, I guess there's no real difference between somebody being subscribed and somebody simply checking the webpage daily. I'm just making their life easier (although I doubt anyone would actually check the webpage daily if there weren't a mailing list). But I have also decided to hell with the feelings of guilt at filling someones inbox. They voluntarily subscribed, so they deserve it. So there may be an increase in frequency and/or verbosity of log entries. If any subscribers are unhappy with this, my feelings won't at all be hurt if they unsubscribe. I almost unsubscribed all of them myself.

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stupid mountain dew

entry #596, Wed, November 15, 2000, 17:28 (Sports and Athletics)

I really should know better than to go running within half an hour of having finished a mountain dew. My stomach was really unhappy with me. That combined with the fact that the rolfs track was insanely full caused me to give up after a mere mile. Argh. It's been at least a couple weeks now since I last had a good run. grrr...

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shell shell shell

entry #595, Wed, November 15, 2000, 15:30 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

I think OS would have been more fun today if, when Dr Freeh said "I'm gonna wrap this up" he'd meant "wrap" without the 'w'.

So in my continuing quest to break tcsh, I've found a few more interesting things. First of all, doing something like "setenv b c &" doesn't cause b to be set, which makes sense. The odd thing, tho, is that the setenv doesn't terminate until you bring it into the foreground. I don't quite understand what's up with that. I've pretty much come to the conclusion that all my worries about how to handle job control for shell builtins are for naught, since tcsh apparently doesn't concern itself too much with job control for its shell builtins, at least not in the situations in which it'd be difficult. I think I've figured out enough stuff for now, it's time to start coding.

so in other news, malloc is now running setiathome.

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fame and glory

entry #594, Wed, November 15, 2000, 11:17 (Life in General)

Woohoo, there's gonna be yet another picture of me in front of the cse office. They finally took my picture for the grad student picture wall thing. Jane found a spot from which we could have fitzpatrick and the dome visible in the picture. Of course, it took a little while to get the spot just right, since Jane knew what was up and wouldn't allow the law building to sneak into the picture. Alice and Katie got their pictures taken as well. We all also took one picture with the stadium in the background. Katie did a very good Heisman stance for her stadium picture. It was entertaining. Onwards...

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fun with tcsh

entry #593, Tue, November 14, 2000, 22:18 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

heh. So I'm abusing tcsh in order to figure out how exactly it handles various things (I think out of principle I won't allow myself to look at the source of any other shells until I've finished mine, but I'll definitely be reading the tcsh source when I'm done with this). One thing that concerned me was job control for any sort of pipe that ended with a shell builtin. But turns out that doing stuff of that sorts will mess with tcsh as well. As an example, a command such as "sleep 10 | echo" produces interesting results. The echo will exit immediately, dropping back to a prompt. "jobs" says that "sleep 10" is running, but after 10 seconds, jobs will still say the same thing. So running "fg" will cause sleep to exit with a hangup. Fantastic.

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bw3's trivia kings

entry #592, Tue, November 14, 2000, 19:41 (Life in General)

Brian and I showed up at bw3's. Nobody else was there. So we took up the trivia and kicked ass. We were helped by the fact that there was one computer question and two star trek questions. Our final score was somewhere in the 11500 range. Yay! Branden and Joe showed up right as Brian and I were about to take off. They took over responsibility for the trivia.

Spent most of this afternoon implementing my new parser. It's almost functional. There's one bizarre minor bug that's still harassing me. But beyond that, I think I accomplished all the goals I set out for myself. And in a mere 350 lines of code, compared to the 550 or so lines of code in the provided parser. And I was able to cut out several dozen lines of code from my shell due to the better interface of the new parser. Yay! Finally figured out the stupid parser bug. Yay bcheck! Now I think it's time to reread chapter 9 in the Stevens' unix book. Then onwards!

I watched news radio today for the first time in forever. Wow. I love this show.

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shell-o-rama. woohoo

entry #591, Tue, November 14, 2000, 11:56 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Wow. I got real lucky with OS-p2. I was reading over some of the code for my shell during comp arch today, and noticed a fair number of mistakes. Luckily they're all pretty obscure, and thus none of them were discovered by the test cases used when p2 was graded. Woohoo! Code review is a good thing. I've pretty much concluded I'm gonna completely ditch all my p2 code and rewrite my shell from scratch for p5. I'm also gonna ditch the parser Dr Freeh gave us and write my own. I've decided I can rewrite the parser such that it 1: actually works correctly, 2: has a better interface, 3: is more efficient, and 4: is coded better stylewise and such.

W. Richard Stevens rules. Chapter 9 of Advanced Programming in the UNIX environment is gonna be pretty much the only reference I'll need to add job control to my shell. Amazing. God bless that man.

Another advantage to rewriting the parser would be the ability to do something cool on SIGINT. Currently by just ignoring SIGINT I end up with annoying '^C' characters on the command line when I hit control-c. But I wanna be cool. I wanna do what tcsh does! ctrl-c should set status to 1, kill the current input line, and drop me to a new prompt. Easy enough. But what I really want to figure out is how do I get it to not print out the '^C'? Now one easy thing to do is simply to have the SIGINT signal handler do a putchar(8); but this don't work so well on things like Linux which doesn't echo a '^C' when you type control-c. Hrmmm... I think I've messed with that enough for now, we'll renice that to a lower priority until I've gotten other stuff working.

Hrmmm... playing with tcsh... another 'interesting' shell feature I've discovered. If you do something such as 'foo > a b c' then the output of foo will be redirected to a, but b and c will be argv[1] and argv[2] respectively. Definitely something that'll make parsing more entertaining. I never knew you were allowed to give more arguments after a redirect. hrmmm... and apparently in tcsh it is also legal to do something like '< foo bar' which is the same as 'bar < foo'. Which is yet another thing that Freeh's parser doesn't handle properly. But thinking about it, this actually makes parsing easier, since there's gonna be less state to keep track of.

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yay broncos!

entry #590, Tue, November 14, 2000, 00:32 (Sports and Athletics)

Well, the broncos have made me happy. I was slightly worried, since they're building a new stadium, and mile high is such a nice place since it meets the two requirements that all football stadiums should have: it's got natural grass, and it's open air. So I was worried that Denver might sell out and do either a dome or go with turf or both or something. But their new stadium is gonna be open air and it's gonna have natural grass, so life is good. If you're a mile high and you've got the weather on your side the way you do in Denver, you just need to do go play out in the open on real grass.

The other cool thing is that www.denverbroncos.com runs linux, apache, and php 4. woohoo!

The game against the raiders started out well, we intercepted oakland on their first possession and had a TD within five minutes. Then Griese got injured. Doh! But he came back into the game, but we ended up down 7-10 at halftime. But it's all good. Thanks to an Elam field goal with four seconds to go we ended up winning 27-24. Woohoo!

So out of curiosity I checked to see if there's any ND grads playing for the broncos. The only ND grad on their roster is Jarious Jackson, who's third string QB.

So granted, pro football doesn't hold the same level of interest for me as college football, but cheering for the broncos definitely allows me to feel a connection to home, and I happen to like my home state. A lot. So go broncos! Besides, here at ND when it comes to college football, everyone is cheering for the Irish. With pro football I can at least get into an irrational argument with people about how the broncos are better than whatever team they cheer for.

In other sports news, ND stayed at #11 in the BCS. Next week has two interesting games, Florida (bcs #4) v. Florida State (bcs #3) and Oregon (bcs #7) v. Oregon State (bcs #9). The latter game is more likely to have an effect on our ranking than the former... but both should have an interesting effect on the bcs in general...

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mmmmm... calories

entry #589, Mon, November 13, 2000, 18:20 (Life in General)

wow. on a semi-spontaneous decision we went to martin's on our way home and picked up beer and stew beef. The two ingredients we didn't have for making a good flemish stew (leave me alone, Anne). After purchasing those ingredients I concocted a very calorie-intensive meal. Yet again I ate much more than I should've. But it turned out pretty good. I don't think I'll ever make the exact same stew twice, since so much improvisation goes into this, but the basic idea is always the same: beer, meat, potatoes, other stuff. mmmm.... so many calories.

So now we have a fridge full of beer, a broncos game in less than three hours, my stomach is very happy, and I actually got some stuff done today. Life ain't bad.

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aahhhhhhh

entry #588, Mon, November 13, 2000, 11:09 (Life in General)

bullet four of the hw8 notes proves further that Ramzi Bualuan wants to make my life miserable. Oh well.

ND women's soccer beat michigan 3-1. They play harvard at alumni field on friday. Go Irish.

I'm now all caught up with the userfriendly comic strip. I hadn't read it at all between may and last night.

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humility

entry #587, Mon, November 13, 2000, 10:44 (Life in General)

I think God insists on infusing this much math into my life in order to keep me humble. Nothing makes me feel quite as stupid as trying to understand matrix math. Well, at least not in the academic aspects of my life.

I discovered a weezer cd at Anne's place saturday morning. Ever since then I've had weezer songs stuck in my head. Weezer suffers from the cd binder problem. I've got two of their cd's but don't listen to them very often, simply because I don't see them unless I look for them. This band brings back many memories from freshman and sophomore year. The sweater song was something of an anthem for us at parties for a while. Heh.

Paul rocks. He got our numerical homework due date moved from wednesday till friday. woohoo.

The broncos play the raiders tonight. I finally get to watch a broncos game on tv! yay!

My TODO list is about two miles long. Shall begin working on sorting things out.

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yay! i'm going home!

entry #586, Sun, November 12, 2000, 19:57 (Life in General)

Alright. I've finally gotten plane tickets home. six hundred dollars. Freaking amazing. Luckily I've been promised that the price will be subsidized due to the fact that 1. I was asked to fly into gunnison instead of co springs and 2. various reasons beyond my immediate control caused me to wait this long to order the tickets. But I used travelocity.com, which proved to be a pretty decent site (well, so far. stuff could still go wrong, I guess) but they let you choose your seats (they don't guarantee you get the ones you requested, but they show you which ones are open and such) which is cool. I managed to get emergency exit row seats on three of my five flights, which means extra leg room, woohoo! So the itinerary is: Dec 16: SBN->ORD->DEN->GUC. Jan 13: GUC->ORD->SBN.

So now I'm officialy going home for break, for almost a month! Dec 16 thru Jan 13. I'm so psyched! And speaking of home, I'm now having vague memories of having run into Martha Gibney sometime saturday on the way from Anne's to the hawaii tailgate. I'll need to look into verifying that, it's a rather vague memory.

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ah, the mockery

entry #585, Sun, November 12, 2000, 17:23 (Politics)

man, everyone is mercilessly mocking florida for their vote counting troubles. Watching Green Bay v. Tampa Bay while coding, Tampa Bay lined up 12 men on the field for a play. After the play and the penalty and all that, one of the commentators pointed out that they were after all from Florida and thus it's no surprise they had trouble counting the number of players they had on the field. And pizza hut also ran an ad mocking the florida recount. It may get old eventually, but for the time being, mocking florida's counting process amuses me.

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poll results and sockets madness

entry #584, Sun, November 12, 2000, 16:58 (Life in General)

woohoo, small gain in one of the polls: we're now #11 in the AP, #11 in the coaches.

So my great plans to circumvent the linux accept bug were temporarily defeated by what appeared to be another linux bug. This one, however, is specific to linuxppc. On linuxppc, select suffers from the same signal-caused segfault that accept does on ppc and x86. The good news for linux, i suppose, is that the accept segfault doesn't seem to happen under 2.4-test8. So now I've given up on developing this on realloc and am remotely working on it. Gotta love the fact that arla works well enough over a modem.

But the moral of the story is: I rule. If one of the players gets some kinda signal it'll do the right thing such that all the other players exit cleanly. Which took forever to get right, probably wasn't worth the time I put into it, and won't get me any extra credit. But it was satisfying, I learned a lot, and after a ton of frustration I finally got it right. I won.

Well, messing with this accept stuff some more, I've realized that I can't blame all this oddness on Linux. I'm using sigaction to set up my signal handlers, and I wasn't initalizing all of the members of my sigaction structure (I didn't think I needed to). I guess solaris handles this much more gracefully than Linux does. What a pain that was to debug, though...

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ow!

entry #583, Sun, November 12, 2000, 11:47 (Life in General)

oh, man. I was awakened this morning by uncontrollable spasms in my left leg. My calf had cramped up something awful. A scary way to wake up, it really hurt. Now my leg is really sore and walking really hurts. So it looks like soccer ain't happening this afternoon, which sucks.

So since I've suddenly got all this free time, I think I'm gonna play with my signals concepts for p4 some more. I've figured out, I think, a portable way of doing this right, working around the stupid linux accept bug (which I was able to reproduce in a much simpler program, so it's not just something wrong with my program). Of course it means reworking some of the structure of my program, but it's all worth it for the sake of ... umm... for the sake of... just doing it. yeah, that's right!

I'm watching our taped copy of last night's rebroadcast of the bc game. Fun. Then maybe I'll watch other football. Or something. A good day to be lazy. At some point I should probably look into working on the numerical assignment due wednesday.

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take it bc!

entry #582, Sat, November 11, 2000, 22:33 (Life in General)

OK, so I got really drunk this morning. Headed to Anne's at like 9, spent an hour feeling sorta tired and miserable. Then perk showed up at 10 with my football tix and I finally felt ready to start drinking. I needed drunkeness something bad. So apparently I made a fool of myself over the last while at Anne's. I had seven beers at her place, then wandered over to the hawaii club tailgate. I don't remember much of the last while at Anne's or of the way to the tailgate. Annie and I caught a ride on the back of an rv for a while, which was entertaining, we were waving at the people in the rv, I don't know quite what they made of us. Then I tried to hop a fence and tore up my jeans in the process. After a while at the hawaii tailgate, and after talking to Dan Diemer for a while I followed Lisa around, met some people, saw Blake Kramer, then went to fitz, made a drunken log entry that I don't remember making, then passed out in the engineering student center. Woke up at three, went to the game. I was drunk, loud, and annoying. I've never really experienced the feeling of a dozen or more people turning around, looking at you in disbelief, and laughing. Tons o' fun. I sat with Branden Moore at the game. I think he was impressed I lasted the whole game, given my initial condition. We beat BC 28-16, it was a decent game, I'm happy with how we did. After the game I returned to Anne's, collapsed for a while, then gather my stuff and headed home with Brian. Now it's time to try to recover, I need a lot of water, I think. I completely forgot about running into Blake until I read my previous log entry, so I never returned to that tailgate, which is disappointing. Don't know what I can do about that now, though.

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wow. tailgating rocks

entry #581, Sat, November 11, 2000, 13:55 (Life in General)

so Lisa and I made it to fitz. I really needed to use a bathroom. I'm the most intoxicated I've ever been at 1:50 pm. Wow. So today's been much better than yesterday. Biked to Anne's at 9, showed up for her kegs 'n eggs, which had no kegs, but was fun none-the-less, since I managed to escape after having at least seven beers. woohoo. then wandered to the hawaii club tailgate, where i had more beer, and a pepsi in order to wake myself up for the game. then headed to fitz with lisa. Saw Dan Diemer, which was fucking awesome, that kid rules. We reminisced about fun assigments we did together, and we talked about other fun cse class of 2000 stuff. Then I saw Blake Kramer, he pointed me to where various Keenan class of 2000 people were, so I need to check out that scene. Man, this is the first time I've been drunk for a football game, and it fucking rules, I've seen so many people I've not seen in so long. Fuckin' a, life ain't too bad, despite yesterday. Need to go drink some more now, we take on bc in 1.5 hours. woohoo!

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blah

entry #580, Sat, November 11, 2000, 01:25 (Life in General)

Well, Brian finally made it home at 12:30 or so. So I ended up not making it to the bughaus party, which sucks, but oh well. Now I'm waiting for perk and his relatives to show up so I can go to sleep and make an attempt to go to kegs 'n eggs tomorrow morning.

So let's see. It's November 10 or so. Gives me still more than a month until I get to go home. Other than skiing and seeing the family, I've also remembered that I'll finally be able to see Iron Chef again, and I'll get to see real stars, not the half dozen dim spots you see here.

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argh

entry #579, Fri, November 10, 2000, 23:31 (Life in General)

i'm not happy. today is being officially designated a bad day.

i'm beginning to wonder how many of my classes i would pass if i took off today.

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why must running hurt?

entry #578, Fri, November 10, 2000, 18:42 (Sports and Athletics)

argh. so running was supposed to make life better. instead running hurts too much. I didn't run nearly as much as I wanted to, since my right leg is still hurting from last thursday. So that sucks. Definitely frustrating. Stats: distance: 3 miles; time: 27 minutes; weight: 166

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robust sockets code

entry #577, Fri, November 10, 2000, 15:48 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

hrmm... I'm beginning to get the feeling that writing robust sockets code isn't really possible. My new problem is that, having installed signal handlers, accept is segfaulting (and this time it's not even in my code) when my program catches a signal. hrmmm... so I think I'm gonna say screw the signal handling, fix up the rest of the code, and go running. I have managed to restore the code to a functional state (excluding, of course, the signal handling) so I can at least turn it in and get full credit (in theory), even if I've not accomplished my personal goals for the project. That's ok, the code does work on heterogeneous networks, so I feel like a badass already. Hopefully I won't break anything as I attempt to ungraft all this ugly signal handling stuff from my code. Although thinking about it, maybe I should play with this some on solaris, I wonder if the accept segfault is a linux thing...

woah! It is freaking linux. It fucking works on solaris! Damn. Stupid linux. So here's the tradeoffs: linux gives you 8 times as many file descriptors as solaris, solaris works right. heh. man I feel a lot better now. Except I'm slightly angry that linux has proven to suck.

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god help me

entry #576, Fri, November 10, 2000, 14:04 (Life in General)

today is defeating me. enough so that I've switched from my zen background of some planet rising above some alien landscape to my very immature background of sailor jupiter wearing a very short skirt. We'll see if that improves things any. I also seem to be lacking in music with enough anger. So Blink 182 is the best I could do.

So debian (unstable/woody) recently updated itself to include xfree 4.0. Cool enough. That upgrade was fairly painless, other than having to reset it to use caps as another control key. But today I discovered that alt no longer registers as meta. Which makes my life as an emacs user miserable. escape is too freaking far away. Something needs to be done. So while messing with xmodmap I somehow managed to remap my 'b' key to be another 'c' key which majorly sucked, since I couldn't switch it back. Not like I ever use the letter 'b' anyway... So I figure easy way to switch back is restart X. Well I guess vmware wanted to do me a favor, since it crashed X while I was shutting it down, saving me the time of manually closing all those other programs nicely and restarting by hand. Blah. There's got to be an easy way to make meta work right again. But for now I think I'll try to decipher the notes I took during class on ideas to improve p4. And drink some caffeine. And ignore the outside world a while. At least in my own world I'm a little less small.

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i hate select

entry #575, Fri, November 10, 2000, 12:33 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

select(2) loves to make my life miserable. The first mistake I used to make with select: the first argument to select (int nfds) is not the number of file descriptors you're interested in, but the maximum file descriptor you're interested in. Alright, I know this now, even though I spent forever figuring that one out back whenever I first learned select. Second mistake I still occasionaly make: nfds is actually one plus the maximum file descriptor you're interested in, so after figuring out the max I just need to remember to increment it before using it. Both these two things have caused me headaches and wasted time, but once you figure them out they're easy enough to deal with. But now select has made a true enemy of me.

So for my hot potato program (OS-p4) I've decided to add signal handlers so that if one of the players is interrupted or killed or whatever, it can inform the rest so that they all shut down gracefully. Good enough, right? Should be easy, I hope. Well, select says no. Damnit! How the hell am I getting a segfault while doing a signal handler for SIGINT? Turns out that select will, if you leave the default signal handlers in place, allow a program to terminate upon SIGINT. But if you install your own signal handler, then if you catch SIGINT while inside select, your signal handler don't get called. Instead select returns -1 and sets errno to EINTR (Interrupted system call). Grrr. Just call my freaking signal handler, you bastard system call! Oh well, we can work around this, I suppose. Onwards goes the struggle. Someday I think I'll give in, tho, and learn poll. Assuming, of course, that it lets my signal handler get called.

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oh man

entry #574, Thu, November 09, 2000, 22:40 (Life in General)

All of a sudden I'm real tired. Watched the rest of Das Boot. What an amazing movie. Definitely not a movie to be watched solely for entertainment purposes. The one thing that disappointed me about the dvd was that it was two-sided. I thought dvd's were supposed to be able to hold hours upon hours of video or something. Instead I had to get up and flip the thing over halfway through the movie. Oh well.

I actually have numerical again tomorrow morning. I don't want to have class in the morning. That's ok, I think I'll be going to sleep soonish.

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habits and rain

entry #573, Thu, November 09, 2000, 17:06 (Life in General)

Man, talk about old habits. Used to be I used the XkbOption "ctrl:swapcaps" to make my pc keyboards behave like sun keyboards. Well, turned out I never really used caps lock, so I now use "ctrl:nocaps" to make both ctrl and caps lock act like control keys. But back in the old days, vmware would ignore the remapping, and so you had to use the real control key to hit the control-alt-escape necessary to get vmware to release focus. But that would result in X thinking you'd turned on caps lock. So now with "ctrl:nocaps" I no longer have this problem, but I still out of habit hit the left control key after switching out of vmware, since I think caps lock will be on. And I've not really used vmware in many months. But it's such a subtle thing, it took me a while to realize why I was hitting the control key.

Maximum file descriptors per process in linux: 1024.

It's really wet outside. I might need to bike home soon. I need to figure out if I want to play soccer tonight. It'd be fun, probably, to play soccer in the rain, but it'd also be really wet and cold. And I'd have to bike home to pick up my cleats. Ah, the decisions I face.

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mona ... revisited

entry #572, Thu, November 09, 2000, 16:07 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Oh man, old memories. I've been asked to optimize monad. Code I worked on spring of 1999 or so. So young was I then, and so unversed in the arts of OS code. Well, kind of. It's all relative. I learned a lot back then. I learned even more doing LTFS. So I should be able to do some good. The main problem right now is that mona is being ported to 2.4, and so none of the userlevel stuff is working yet. Which makes this particularly fun, trying to optimize non-functional code. But now I'm actually using vmware again for a purpose other than messing with random boot sectors I write. Long live kernel hacking.

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flemish nationalism, sleep, and more

entry #571, Thu, November 09, 2000, 13:55 (Life in General)

So today I failed to wake up for class. I know I set my alarm, and I know my alarm was turned off when I woke up at 10:45 this morning. grrr... and I only watched about 20 minutes of Das Boot last night, somehow I found some willpower (ok, I was falling asleep, so technically it wasn't willpower, but whatever) to quit watching it.

Arrived on campus shortly after 11 and wandered to Recker's with Anne. My efforts to make her understand the true meaning of the word flemish are failing miserably. My national pride (yes, I'm a Flemish nationalist, not a Belgian nationalist) is at stake. She associates the word flemish with various spitting related activities, or such. I don't quite understand it. So two options I'm considering pursuing: 1. acting really offended at her insensitivity to my cultural heritage or 2. simply start using the flemish words. Vlaanderen instead of Flanders, Vlaams and Vlamingen instead of flemish. There's also the third option of ignoring this entire thing. I mean after all, de Vlamingen have endured occupations by the french, germans, spanish, austrians, romans, and who knows who else. We can endure the oppression of Anne Burns. We also watched some of that fun election coverage during lunch. The question that I'm interested in now is: how long until we know? Chances seem low we'll actually have a final answer after the recount tonight, so will it be november 17 when they're done with absentee ballots? Or will we not know until the electoral college votes or later?

Helped Tom Smith some more with his OS stuff. Adjusted some 232 student's test 2 grade by 12 points, his total had been added up absurdly wrong. The kid seemed quite content with his new grade. I can see that. There is still no homework 8 posted for 232.

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Das Boot!

entry #570, Thu, November 09, 2000, 02:18 (Life in General)

I have got to be the stupidest person alive. I am doing exactly what I knew I shouldn't.

Watched a lot of primetime tv this evening. An interesting experience. Mainly fairly amusing. Then went to senior bar at 11. Hung out there with Anne, Annie, and several of their friends. Fun stuff. Then went to Anne's place where Anne made me some stir fry. We watched a little bit of Office Space, which is a fun movie.

Now I'm at home being stupid. Das Boot arrived today. I knew as I was leaving Anne's that I'd be in trouble if I opened the box. I opened the box. I'm now watching the movie. With any luck I'll turn it off before too long. I really should go to sleep. I need more regular exposure to German, it doesn't quite sound like a natural language to me anymore, it sounds kinda like a foreign language, which is weird. I still understand it fine, but it sounds foreign. What's happening to me? It's really good, though, to watch German movies instead of American movies with German lines, since as a German movie, it actually uses German colloquialisms, which I just don't hear at all anymore. Now I need to find three hours sometime soon to actually watch this movie for real. Since I hope I don't spend three hours watching it tonight. I love the movie tho. Such choice quotes. So dark, so ugly, so real. And the music is amazing too.

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feeling productive

entry #569, Wed, November 08, 2000, 17:34 (Life in General)

So it's likely an unjustified feeling, but today's felt vaguely productive. I think the main reason for this is that I've cut the number of non-new messages in my inbox to 50 from 150. With any luck I'll cut that in half again by the end of today. I also did laundry, cleaned up the kitchen a bit, paid the electric bill, took care of several random 232 tasks, and did a good job in general of crossing out the annoying small things on my todo list. Which means, obviously, that I didn't work on any of the fun big things on my todo list. But that's ok. I think I may go shopping, the fridge is absurdly empty. I'm not entirely content with the status of things food-wise right now, there's more junk food than I could ever eat, thanks mainly to Brian's parents, and there's little food good for making simple healthy meals. So that needs fixing.

cnnsi.com is favoring us against BC. Apparently BC has lost their starting qb. The key stat for the game that cnnsi.com gave is this: "2: Catholic schools in I-A football: these two." I guess that means there's no other interesting stats affecting this game.

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Prime Envy

entry #568, Wed, November 08, 2000, 17:07 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

As promised in log entry 506 I shall share detailed notes from the math department grad student seminar entitled "Prime Envy" ... I think Perk wanted detailed notes, but I lost the notebook containing those notes for a while. But it's been rediscovered, and I hope to decipher my notes well enough to make sense.

October 12, 2000: "Prime Envy" by Chris Monico, ND math department. Rebecca Weber invited me to another entertaining math department grad student seminar. It began as the last math seminar I attended: math grad students trying to order pizza. It was a very entertaining process, there was a very close vote between ordering from pizza hut vs. ordering from papa johns. During this time a few choice quotes came up: "he's just swiss and he's confused." and "You're stepping on the prime number!"

So this Chris character apparently has discovered a prime number which is in the list of the top 5000 primes. So that's cool and all. His prime number is about 20,000 digits long. Lots o' digits. He printed out about half his number or so and put it on a long continous strip of paper that was draped around the room. Cool. So the subject of the talk was ways of finding prime numbers. Probabilistic testing was discussed briefly. There are algorithms that can be used to figure out what the probability is that a certain number is prime. There exist, however, a certain set of numbers known as Carmichael numbers that show up as false positives in these tests, such as 561. But they can be eliminated easily enough, I'm told. The main probabilistic primality test is apparently the Rabin-Miller test, apparently used in RSA software packages. Some more entertaining quotes: "There's no rigorous way to say this ... it has good runtime!" (after attempting to explain the principles the algorithm is based on, and giving up) and "this is just a guy, you call him up?" (grad student who wanted to know how exactly the algorithm worked)

The main part of the talk was about other methods tho. So you can either find primes that fit certain patterns or test arbitrary numbers. Turns out the latter is practically infeasible. For the former there are many different varieties of patterned primes. Some common means are Lucas-Lehman (sp?) which finds Mercennes Primes, Pepin's Test (which finds Fermat primes) and Proth. I've written down a lot of math for each of these methods, but I didn't understand the math at the time, so I've got no chance of decrypting it in my notes now. But of interest is the fact that for encryption purposes, probabilistic primality tests are more secure than the above patterned prime methods, since if you know a package uses only primes of a certain pattern, it's pretty easy to do circumvent the factoring step upon which the security of these systems is based.

Finally there's the primality tests for arbitrary numbers. These are scary. I don't understand them at all. There's the Jacobi-Sum test, which was implemented once in code and took hundreds of thousands of lines to implement. And it turns out to be only probablistically in P. So chances are good you'll get a result in polynomial time, but there's a small chance that the program won't halt on a particular number you give it. There's apparently also some elliptic curve test for testing primality of arbitrary numbers, but I'm missing notes on that.

I'm really bitter that I was forced to waste as much time as I did on math courses that taught me stuff I never used instead of match courses that could have taught me how to really understand the stuff above. There's so much cool math out there that I don't understand. Like the stuff above. grrr... hmmm... all this seems to be lacking in coherence.

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election insanity

entry #567, Wed, November 08, 2000, 12:52 (Life in General)

so last night at about 2:30 I was lying in bed, drifting in and out of sleep, watching election coverage. Then they announce quite suddenly that Bush had won. I was slightly surprised, but they'd decided to give florida to Bush, winning the election for him. So I watched for a while longer, not quite trusting them, since they'd already been wrong about florida before, but they kept going on about it, so I turned off the tv and went to sleep, still slightly skeptical. And lo and behold, I wake up and all of a sudden Bush is no longer president-elect. Man, this election is insane. It's kinda fun.

Being as cool as I am, I finally figured out how to unbreak debian. See, they've updated to a new version of perl, so as part of that process they uninstall the old version of perl and then try to install the new version of perl. Sounds good enough. Of course, there's a slight problem. Various install scripts depend on perl. Grrr... easily fixed tho once I finally figured out what the actual problem was. I'm now also running XFree 4.0. It seems to be working well enough... I want a bigger monitor, tho.

Now I'm late for class, so I guess I'll go ...

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mmm... taco bell...

entry #566, Wed, November 08, 2000, 01:31 (Life in General)

Yay colorado! Harry Browne beat Buchanan in Colorado, which makes me happy. He came in fourth behind Bush, Gore, and Nader. But CO passed amendment 20 to legalize medical marijuana, which is a step in the right direction. This election thing is insane.

Went to taco bell with Perk. An entertaining time. Despite playing my new Buck cd, I failed to convert Perk, he remains an agnostic. heh. But I got him with my watergun, so all is well. I like this not having a 9:30 class thing in the morning. With any luck my schedule will be like this regularly next semester, instead of just a few times a semester. It's kinda too bad that Kogge's variable topics course conflicts with algorithms, otherwise I'd prolly take it. Then I'd actually get to take a course with Perk, something I've not done yet. But it ain't gonna happen. But graphics sounds cool enough, I suppose.

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election-o-rama

entry #565, Tue, November 07, 2000, 23:12 (Life in General)

the latest status: bush has 217 electoral votes, gore has 230. Luckily I don't have numerical tomorrow, so I can stay up late and see if any candidate comes close to getting the 270+.

Several junior engineers convinced me to go to wings after all, despite my earlier intentions to not go. which in turn led me to get Anne to come along. We patiently waited for six pm to roll around at wings so we could buy beer. I got one of the small mugs of beer, seeing how I was driving and all. Today I experienced driving into downtown south bend for the first time. boy, the excitement. Brian's pretty amazing to trust me with his car for a week.

after that I had to go to a gsu meeting. two and a half hours of my life were stolen from me. I'm bitter. How can people spend so much time talking about stuff that doesn't matter? Stupid politics.

Returned to fitz, grabbed my stuff, and headed for home. Am now watching election coverage on tv. Called home. Papa's had a minor stroke, which is scary, will need to keep him in my prayers. I'm looking into the possibilities of driving down to albuquerque to visit Oma and Papa while home over break, it'd be good to see them. Annie did well on the SAT's her second time around, which is excellent. She's also apparently gonna have some part in some independent film being shot in CB in the spring. Rock on, Annie.

malloc's been acting up. I'm thinking of reinstalling debian on it tomorrow. I don't quite trust some of the things it's been doing of late.

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adventures in online music buying

entry #564, Tue, November 07, 2000, 13:58 (Music)

hrmm. So I got two new cd's in the mail today. I had ordered "Dude Ranch" by Blink 182, and "Buck" by Buck. Blink 182 was a safe bet, I like "Enema of the State" and I'd heard they were even better before they went mainstream. Buck I bought because Lisa Marr, bassist and lead vocalist of Buck, sings on one song on "Don't Back Down" by the Queers and I really like her voice. But it seems there is another band out there named Buck that has an album called Buck. Hrmmm. I should pay more attention to what I'm buying. Turns out the CD I got is by a Christian Ska band, which is cool and all, just not what I expected. For them Buck stands for "Building Up Christ's Kingdom" ... and so I figure I'll give them a chance... I'm kinda Christian and I like ska. Musically they're pretty decent. Good third wave ska sorta sound. Some of their lyrics, however, are a bit more Christian than I am. But most of them are decent. So I guess I'll have to make another attempt to get music by the Lisa Marr version of Buck, but now I can say I own music by a Christian Ska band. heh. I'm amused. There's a hidden track at the end that has an interesting rendition of Amazing Grace.

The Blink 182 cd sounds fun. Definitely a different sound than "Enema of the State" ... definitely a less mainstream sound, more of an unrefined punk sound. Definitely harder. The sound kinda reminds of NOFX... I dig it.

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voting, classes, and snow

entry #563, Tue, November 07, 2000, 11:24 (Life in General)

Election day. Should be an interesting day. My vote's in. Has been in for a while. All I get to do now is sit back and watch... an interesting fact I read: apparently this has been the most expensive campaign in history, with an average of about $30 spent for every vote. Insane. The earliest results in at this point show that Bush won in the two New Hampshire towns that opened their polling stations at midnight. In those two towns Bush got 38 votes, Gore got 18, and others got 2. Fun fun.

God Bless America

I just noticed that "The Ever Passing Moment" by MxPx has an enhanced data track. I may need to boot realloc into MacOS to play with that...

Had an interesting chat with Dr. Kogge before class started today. Talked about classes for next semester. The two classes I'm definitely taking are Comp Arch and Algorithms. Kogge said the grad comp arch class should be easy for me, which is good, since Algorithms promises to be a handful. I've been trying to figure out what third class I want to take, and Kogge said that they've found somebody to teach a computer graphics class, which would be cool, so I'll probably end up taking that. I'm definitely more psyched about my classes next semester than I was for this semester's offerings. This semester has been very non-challenging. The only class I'm really enjoying is Kogge's. But oh well. Dr. Kogge and I also talked a bit about skiing. I'm really stoked for skiing this winter. Man, I can't wait. All I can do is pray for snow. Of course to a large extent it's a very selfish thing to be asking of God, but on the other hand, the economy back home really needs a good snow year, so the livelihood of many people depends on snow, so I feel justified in asking for it.

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grade-o-rama

entry #562, Tue, November 07, 2000, 01:16 (Life in General)

woohoo! so tonight we had another 232 grading party. Branden, Joe, and Lissa all showed up to grade cse 232 test 2. I ordered us pizza. Anne showed up as well, since she also had some things to grade. We watched a bit of monday night football, as well as Sneakers. What an excellent movie. It took us about 3.5 hours, but we got the test graded. We rock. And I now have pizza for breakfast tomorrow. Mmmm... cold pizza for breakfast...

Afterwards Anne and I went to nicks. As is the case most times we do this, neither of us was hungry. But we had a real friendly waitress, so Anne felt obligated to order food. I only ordered a milkshake, but got shamed into having part of Anne's burger. Now I'm really full.

I've managed to catch up with all the email of the past few days. I've also realized I desparately need to catch up with the 100 or so non-new messages hanging out in my inbox. But that's something that can probably wait until at least tomorrow.

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woohoo!

entry #561, Mon, November 06, 2000, 19:22 (Life in General)

the network is back! yay! so the first thing I do, of course, is check the BCS poll. ND is ranked #12 in the BCS. Not bad, I suppose. Our strength of schedule fell to #10. Now there are three teams ahead of us in the BCS with better strengths of schedule. So now all I can do is sit back and await the deluge of off-campus email that's bound to be queued up.

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stupid network

entry #560, Mon, November 06, 2000, 16:39 (Life in General)

OK, so I've been able to come to terms with the ameritech outage. But now networking on malloc has decided to screw me over as well. Any connections to localhost have become absurdly slow, which makes working on p4 a pain. On the other hand, I did put the ssr cluster to good use. Running p4 on eight of the cluster machines with 64 players and 12800 hops takes 77 seconds. I can live with that. By the end, the message being sent every hop will have grown to be almost 40K... and I got byte ordering working so that p4 now works on heterogeneous networks. Woohoo! But I think the degree to which the network is mocking me has become absurd enough that I should go home. But it's kinda rainy out so I'm not exactly excited to bike home. Rebooting didn't help the problem on malloc either. The OIT still hasn't fixed the malloc routing problems (the clarify case is now two months old. I should bug somebody...) so I'm wondering if that's part of the problem. The same thing is happening on if (but to a lesser degree) and if has the same routing problems that malloc does...

Wandered over to the post office with Anne. She needed to overnight her absentee ballot to Michigan. Turns out she actually gets to vote in an exciting state, Colorado is pretty much a guaranteed victory for Bush. I was amazed by the number of people at the post office trying to get their absentee ballots mailed in time for tomorrow. Fun fun. This election is actually gonna be rather interesting, I think... yay democracy!

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stupid ameritech

entry #559, Mon, November 06, 2000, 11:59 (Life in General)

So at some point on saturday, ameritech apparently decided to upgrade its facilities in chicago. Well, whatever they were trying to do went horribly wrong. And so now ND is without a connection to the outside world. Which means that Paul and I had to call Rob, who is at home and has a cable modem, and ask him to look up ND's rankings. So woohoo, we're #11 in the AP, #12 in the coaches poll. Amazing. We didn't even play, and we went up four spots. I guess we should be grateful to all the teams ahead of us that lost. The BCS should be interesting tonight.

I think I set a record for slowest bike ride to campus today. The combination of a headwind and me being sore made for slow progress.

Perk says he's gonna start referring to me as a jock. Perhaps I should be proud.

Need to remember to feed the fish, since Brian isn't around...

The broncos actually won yesterday. Yay!

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happy soccer day

entry #558, Sun, November 05, 2000, 18:19 (Sports and Athletics)

So first of all, I was informed by my grandmother last night that Ryan Sisson's high school soccer team took state in new mexico, which is pretty freaking cool. Yay them.

The Big East championship game between ND and UConn was definitely a close one. UConn scored the only goal of the game, but luckily against themselves. So ND goes on to become the 2000 Big East champions! yay! The big disappointment of the game, however, was the fact that they took tv timeouts! hello, this is soccer, there are no timeouts! grrr...

Bought myself a pair of cleats. They were on sale, 20% off, so I chose the right day to go cleat-shopping. I also realized today when I tried to find my shinguards that although I still have both ankle guards, I only have one shin guard remaining, which is odd. So maybe I'll buy another pair of those some day.

Soccer was fun again. Fewer people showed up, the most we ever had was three on three. Thanks to my cleats I did a lot less sliding around, was able to control the ball better, and got three or four goals. Yay! I love soccer.

So it looks like my entertainment for tonight will be the season premiere of the simpsons at 8. I'll probably also be icing my right thigh, I did something to it on thursday, and today it got much worse. grrr... we'll see. Luckily my 9:30 tomorrow is cancelled, so I get to sleep in.

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fun

entry #557, Sun, November 05, 2000, 11:26 (Life in General)

Wow! I feel so bad. After FSU had finished beating up on Clemson (54-7 was the final score) I actually said that there wasn't any more football worth watching. TCU was playing San Jose State. I really wanted San Jose State to win, since I didn't think TCU deserved really to be ranked, what with their lack of a schedule. But I didn't think there was a chance it would happen. How could I have so little faith? San Jose State beat TCU 27-24! Amazing! What a great football weekend this has turned out to be. So looking at the BCS picture, ND has been ranked #14. With the losses by Michigan (BCS #12), Clemson (BCS #13), and TCU (BCS #9), we're looking to be in pretty good shape on monday, despite not having played. The way it looks now, there's a good chance we'll end the season in the top ten. But I should be careful saying such things, we've still got BC ahead of us. It'll be interesting, though, to see what the AP and coaches polls look like this evening.

So Anne came over last night, we watched American Beauty. That movie is amazing. Kevin Spacey rules. I definitely think I need to see it a few more times, this has been only my second time, and it's got so many little things going on... and it's funny. Then, after criticism that I'd not made them in far too long, I made us mashed potatoes. Yummy. Then we watched Jack of all Trades. Then it was time for sleep.

Woke up "early" this morning, dropped Brian off at library circle for his week in Texas at Super Computing. Time now for soccer.

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oh my god

entry #556, Sat, November 04, 2000, 19:46 (Life in General)

wow. Northwestern just beat Michigan 54-51. What a game. Complete offensive shootout. So much fun. And Michigan losing is excellent. Now they've got more losses than ND, which gives us a chance to jump ahead of them in the polls. Yay!

I now have p4 working. I've not stresstested it as much as I'd like to yet, but I've done enough to be fairly confident. I've tested it with 8 players on 4 machines with a total of 1600 hops. I'll do more tests later, I think. Need a break from that code. I also need to add more robustness stuff. Signal handlers and stuff, so that if the master or one of the players dies unexpectedly, all of them die nicely instead of waiting forever.

The FSU/Clemson game just started. What a good football day, I'm getting two good games along with a lot of coding accomplished at the same time. Life ain't too bad. Despite MSU losing to OSU. Texas A&M and Nebraska won, so our Strength of Schedule is in decent shape. And several teams ahead of us lost. I need to decide if I'm gonna do anything else tonight, I think just watching tv and coding sounds like a good way to spend tonight. But the night is young.

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sockets fun

entry #555, Sat, November 04, 2000, 14:20 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

oh man ... someday I will fully understand sockets. The entire sockets interface is just full of so much legacy and strangeness. I finally forced myself to figure out something I've been meaning to figure out for some time now. The generic sockets code that everyone sees in OS courses and socket sample code isn't quite right. I've always seen something of this variety:

  /* get our local host name */
  gethostname(host, sizeof(host));
  if (!(hp = gethostbyname(host))) {
    exit(1);
  }

  /* create a socket here */


  /* set up address and port */
  sin.sin_family = AF_INET;
  sin.sin_port = htons(port);
  memcpy(&sin.sin_addr, hp->h_addr_list[0], hp->h_length);

  /* bind socket to address */
  if (bind(s, (struct sockaddr *)&sin, sizeof(sin)) < 0) {
    exit(1);
  }

  /* listen or something */

Well, this causes all sorts of trouble when you're trying to do a generic listen on a bound port, because if you try to do a connect to localhost, you're gonna fail, since the socket is only listening on the address returned by gethostname. But for a lot of things you want your listening socket to accept connections to any address associated with your host, such as localhost. Well, how do you figure out how this works? grep. grep is my best friend. So reading some of the sshd source code (since I happen to have it local) and after browing through some of the code in /usr/include/ I finally figure it out. It's fairly simple, but definitely not intuitive, given the above code. The main thing is to do this

  sin.sin_addr.s_addr = INADDR_ANY;

instead of the memcpy above. Confusing, mainly, because sin.sin_addr isn't treated as a struct in the above memcpy. I love C, because who cares about types, anyway? It's all memory. So now I think I'm gonna try and figure out what all the various options are you can use with setsockopt. And here I was thinking I had a decent understanding of sockets. There is an absurd amount of stuff about them I don't know. If anyone can recommend a good book about this stuff, I'd appreciate it. Reading man pages, header files, and sample code has gotten me a long way towards knowing how most of this stuff works, but a book would probably go a long way towards greater intuitive understanding. The more time I spend playing with this stuff, the more I start thinking I might want to start focusing on network stuff. I just don't have any idea what kind of research I'd do in that area. I just know I really like this stuff.

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soccer and football fun

entry #554, Sat, November 04, 2000, 12:47 (Sports and Athletics)

Yay soccer. ND women's soccer beats BC 3-0 in the Big East semifinals. Watched most of the game with Anne and Annie. It was a decent game, we dominated, fun to watch, some of our players have amazing skills. We now play UConn for the Big East championship at noon on sunday. Go Irish! In other soccer news, I'm really sore today. But it's a good sort of sore, the kind of sore that makes you feel alive. With any luck I'll have recovered enough by tomorrow for more soccer action.

No ND football today, but a few games that could affect our rank. Florida State plays Clemson today. Hopefully FSU will win, giving Clemson two losses, giving us a good chance of getting ranked higher than them. Michigan State is playing Ohio State, and our strength of schedule is something we always like to see improve, so go MSU. I feel kinda dirty ... today I'm rooting for FSU and MSU. But it's all for a good cause. ND football. And of course I'm hoping for San Jose State to pull off some kinda miracle and beat TCU, but it ain't gonna happen, I don't think. TCU seriously needs to play a real team.

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biking fun

entry #553, Fri, November 03, 2000, 17:12 (Life in General)

Woohoo. Anne and I got her bike working. Finally. Her dad got her properly sized tires and such, so we got everything replaced, made some adjustments to her brakes, and her bike seems to work well enough now.

Biking home I pulled a dumbass move, I leaned into a turn too aggressively while pedaling and scraped my pedal against the ground. I did this a few days ago as well, but this time I actually did non-trivial damage to my toe clip. Doh! Oh well, the clips are still functional...

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mmm... cookies..

entry #552, Fri, November 03, 2000, 13:51 (Life in General)

Oh man. Here's a new way of confusing the grader: naming your Makefile Makefile.txt and instead of turning in .cc and .h files turning in .cc.~1~ and .h.~1~ files.

I'm feeling much more tired than I should. I got at least seven hours of sleep last night. But then again, I didn't feel tired until after numerical, so I'm gonna blame it on that class.

The nice thing about grading is it's an easy thing to do when focus is lacking. And since my script rocks, the manual part of grading is proving extraordinarily easy. Quote from Branden's message informing me he'd finished his portion of hw6: "Done. 01:39 - 00:50 = 49 minutes. Thank you SO much for your script!!!!!!!!"

details on the whole indiana pi fiasco ... the story was actually a bit more complex than I'd always heard, but definitely scary.

Dr. Freeh gave Brian and I cookies today, in exchange for us lending him the air force tape. We'd originally suggested he give us extra credit, but cookies are probably better, since I don't think we actually need the extra credit. Of course, it'd be even better if I actually felt like eating them, my stomach's still being kinda whiny.

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sore-o-rama

entry #551, Fri, November 03, 2000, 08:31 (Life in General)

Wow. I woke up actually able to move. Granted, I can only move slowly, but I'm much less sore than I thought I would be. Which is still pretty sore, I guess. Now I'm gonna go have breakfast. My stomach is being cooperative. Last night I managed to have a piece of bread. Needless to say, I'm starving.

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soccer: pain, glory, goodness

entry #550, Thu, November 02, 2000, 23:01 (Sports and Athletics)

oh my God. Let's see... I got kicked in the stomach, kneed in the stomach, drilled by the ball many times, I had one mediocre head ball, but man does it feel good after all these years: my brain's been getting a bit too comfortable, got taken down hard probably a half dozen times, slipped and fell of my own doing plenty more times. My lungs were burning. I'm feeling very sore already, have huge blisters on my feet, my legs and arms are brown, I'm pretty disgusting. I'm really glad I hadn't eaten anything between noon and soccer, because I don't think my stomach would have been at all content trying to deal with food and being kicked. I'm really hungry, but don't know if I'm gonna be able to get myself to eat anything anytime soon. Man, that was awesome, so worth the hype.

We played four on four. Due to my lack of playing over the past four years, and because of my lack of cleats, I didn't play very well. So instead I played real aggressive. I definitely had a few fouls. Oops. Good thing we weren't keeping track of that sorta thing. I had quite a few good breaks on the goal, but due to my inability to stop myself never converted. That's ok. I think I'm gonna buy cleats. I had so much fun. Definitely gonna do it again. And I guess I played well enough, I was encouraged to come again on sunday.

Wow. I so need to get my abs into better shape, they so did a lousy job of protecting my guts. I'm even more psyched for the women's soccer game tomorrow. Soccer is so much more fun to watch when you can remember how much it hurts, you respect the players so much more.

Now it's time for a nice long warm shower. I'm really kinda scared of going to sleep, tho. Tomorrow I'm gonna wake up in a world of pain.

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3 more hours till soccer

entry #549, Thu, November 02, 2000, 17:01 (Life in General)

Grrr... none of the three comics I read regularly got updated today. Bummer. But I defeated both my awful short-term memory and a slower-than-(...) ppp link and managed to get my latest and greatest p4 code uploaded to afs. Which means life should go on without too much trouble today. Still need to do more work on 232, gsu, and such. Rumor has it, tho, that we'll be getting a new 598a project next week, which should be cool, since I need stuff like that to work on. Yay. There's a cse seminar this afternoon. I'll probably do that whole scene. I've been kinda disappointed in the seminars this semester. I can only remember going to about five of them, which seems like an awful low number, it seems there should be more. But c'est la vie, no? I think I'm gonna skip out on running today, I've got to be in good shape for soccer. So I guess this means I have no excuses to not code. No, never mind, I've got plenty.

"Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian." -- Robert Orben

Oh man, I freaking rock. My rewrite of the 232 grading script rocks. Of course, chances are it'll be obsoleted again by homework 8, but I'm quite happy knowing that my "generic" grading script will actually work for two consecutive homeworks. Well, I'm assuming it'll work for homework 7, but we'll see...

Damnit, never mind that last paragraph. Time to take a moment and enjoy Lisa Marr's voice on "I Can't Get Over You" by the Queers. Word has it the Buck cd (which features Lisa Marr as bassist and lead vocalist) should be arriving soon. It's a shame I haven't found more good punk bands with female vocalists... ok, moment over, time to figure out where I messed up.

Oh, good Lord, I suck. ... ok, seems to work now. In other news, test 2 has been taken by the sophomores, which means it's time for another 232 test grading party sometime soon. Woohoo!

Went to lunch with Brian. mmmm.... subs.... seems he rocked the GRE, which is excellent. Yay Brian!

I've officialy cancelled my lab hours for tonight. Now there are no obstacles remaining between myself and soccer. I did realize, tho, that I no longer have any cleats, which is too bad. I don't actually know where mine went. But I should definitely look into investing in a new pair. I doubt, tho, that cleats would make any significant difference tonight...

Spent an hour helping Tom with sockets stuff for p4. Sockets are definitely tricky bastards if you've never used them before. And p4 requires i/o multiplexing, which, if nothing else, takes a little getting used to.

"Responsibility? What's that? Responsibility? not quite yet. Responsibility? What's that? I don't want to think about it, we'd be better off without it." -- "Responsibility" by MxPx. I think I'm gonna officially make that my theme song. Since people keep asking me what my theme song is, and that's definitely been one of the primary candidates for some time now. "I'm still young and I'd like to stay that way, cause growing up won't make everything ok. I'm still young and I'd like to stay that way. I've got a voice and I've got a lot to say. I've got a lot to say..."

Paul got a chess set in the mail, and it needed breaking in, so I volunteered for a quick game. Since we had to go to the seminar, we didn't have much time, so I played real aggressive, which proved to be my downfall, Paul won. But it was fun. Must have rematch.

The seminar was interesting. It was by the lead developer of KAI C++ and he is much smarter than I am, so there was a good deal I didn't unterstand. But that's ok. I'm fine with that.

Turns out I never did any work on p4. But I did other stuff, so it's all good.

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senior bar-o-rama

entry #548, Thu, November 02, 2000, 01:20 (Life in General)

So whenever I said I didn't think I was gonna go to senior bar, I was lying. Obviously.

Went to senior bar with Anne, Annie, and Matt Walsh. Encounter more of their friends there. Also talk with Goro a bit. An entertaining time. Anne continues her mission of getting me aquainted with popular culture. I was able to recognize the blink 182 song they played. Yay! It was definitely one of the more surreal senior bar trips I've had... but it's all good.

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mmmm... stir fry...

entry #547, Wed, November 01, 2000, 20:20 (Life in General)

So a recent hit to my webpage was referred from a google search for '"latex"+"peter william"' ... so I did that google search, just curious as to what else would show up. Nothing of interest, but my page is the first result that comes up, and, the part that I found most odd, was that the category google matched all this against was "Arts > Animation > Voice Actors > Cast Lists > Cartoons > Thundercats" .... hmmm... who knows...

232 ... *sigh* ... so things to deal with in grading homeworks 6 and 7: changes in file naming conventions. writing a new main to test their classes. The good news is that if I properly rewrite the grading script, I may be able to make life easier for the undergrad graders. This is gonna require a little bit of thought. Not much, but some.

Oh man, major attitude adjustment, and just barely in time, too. Thank God for that run, I think it saved me. Stupid chemical imbalances. Stupid genetics. Yay endorphines, yay aquabats, yay against all authority! With any luck this'll mean fewer of these self-indulgent, whiny log entries I've had of late. Although I did think that the incoherent one from this morning was quite amusing, especially reading it a few hours later when I was more awake. Not like I care if anyone dislikes whiny self-indulgent log entries... it's my freaking log, you fools all chose to subscribe, I never asked you to. I just don't wanna look back and see myself as some whiny self-indulgent fool. =)

Oh man, I finally fixed a really stupid bug in my 232 grading script. If I'd have discovered this earlier, I could have probably saved several hours of manual work over the course of the semester.

It seems that when it comes to ergonomics at home, I have a choice between being good to my wrists and being good to my back. I'm leaning towards favoring my wrists these days. I'm really scared about what kinda shape I'll be in at 30, between the abuse I do to myself (especially my knees) and the abuse that typing does to me, something's gonna go wrong somewhere...

Mmmmm.... stir fry... so good. Well, ok, not quite as good as the last time (I didn't get the meat tender enough, I don't think) but still pretty good. This time we also threw mushrooms into the mix. I made way too much, but luckily Anne stopped by and saved the day by helping us eat the ridiculous amount of food I made. So it's all good. Now I think is the time to play more loud music and get on with returning the kitchen to an acceptable state, it's gotten pretty bad.

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running and hair coloring

entry #546, Wed, November 01, 2000, 15:08 (Life in General)

quick running stats: distance: two miles; time: 14 minutes, 50 seconds; weight: 167. cool feature to implement in log: ability to graph stats like that over time... so in order to come in under 15 minutes, I ran my last lap in 30 seconds. And I was thinking about that... 30 seconds per lap implies 4 minutes per mile implies 15 miles per hour. How do people keep up speeds like that for an entire mile? It's insane! I wish I could do that...

my hair has grown out enough that it's really looking brownish again. so a decision needs to be made... do I dye it black again? do I let it return to natural? I definitely think I want to keep growing it out, but we'll see.

time now to grade 232 stuff, work on p4, and work on gsu stuff. but first i think i need a shower.

digimon, digital monsters, digimon are the champions!

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incoherence at its fucking best

entry #545, Wed, November 01, 2000, 12:03 (Life in General)

blah. The plan: drink mountain dew, do stuff. Stay busy. I'm battling ssh on malloc. I've gotten utterly sick of openssh. It's worthless, in my HUMBLEST of opinions. So a process which I've done many times before is not working today. Download kth-krb4. Configure, compile, install. Download ssh 1.2.27, apply afs patch. Configure, compile, install. Why won't krb4 compile? Argh. Have to edit makefiles by hand. Man, don't I love it. Hopefully I'll get this figured out before too long. I think I finally got krb working. Now if only ssh would compile. Wait, something's happening. In the meanwhile, I'm working on more gsu stuff. People finally quit ignoring me it seems. Up until yesterday I was getting no response at all to my requests for information. It seems the gsu president doesn't even realize who I am or why it is in his best interest to answer my questions promptly and usefully. Thank God for Jo Blacketor being back in town. ssh finished compiling. make install. woohoo.

I didn't get much sleep last night. Tried to go to sleep at midnight. Didn't fall asleep until 2:30 or so. blah. insomnia sucks. Paul is teaching OS today. I'm considering ditching. I made a real dumbass move. I downloaded the p4 source local to realloc to work on it last night. Guess what I forgot to do? Yeah, upload it to afs so I could work on it today. I think I might skip social activities tonight. Go running soonish, go home so I can actually work on p4, clean the kitchen thoroughly, there's some items in the fridge that shouldn't be there any more. Maybe cook something good. Anyone up for stir fry? Food tastes better when shared. Fuckin' A. ssh with token passing works on malloc. how psyched am I, that took way too long.

Seems that Super Computing 2000 is gonna have a non-trivial effect on my life. (I think effect is the noun. affect is the verb. I should be able to remember this stuff). Brian's gonna be gone for a week, so I'm gonna be all alone at 2217 coachmans trail. Numerical's been cancelled next monday and wednesday. I'm probably gonna need to drive Brian to and from the airport.

"Your institutions are corrupt, your way of thinking sucks, we've had enough but our voices go unheard. and if we all screamed 'fuck the system' well it's just a dream if our actions never speak as loud as our words... louder than words" -- "Louder Than Words" by Against All Authority

Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to energy. Energy leads to productivy. Productivity leads to .... code.

I think today is one of them christian holidays. All souls day or All saints day or something. I think we used to get today off from school in germany, provided we went to mass. Or something like that.

Man, incoherent tired log entries are even scarier than incoherent drunken log entries. "i grab my skate, and catch some, i'm grinding my life away but i don't care, skating for me is more than a feeling....." SK8 Rock, AAA.

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focus? who needs it?

entry #544, Tue, October 31, 2000, 22:43 (Life in General)

"a shocking crime ends with the torture of a cat." ... the headline story of fox 28 news tonight. I mean, sad as it is, but is it worth going on about for five minutes?

Today I made it up the cleveland hill in my highest gear. No more room for improvement. I guess I can live with that. But I guess that's it for this little game.

Made some more progress on p4. Slowly but surely. I'm having a hard time focusing. Have been for at least a week now. Luckily there are no pressing things due anytime soon. Maybe I should do some for-fun reading. I've done almost none of that this semester. And since my mind seems to have more important things to think about than computer science, I might as well admit I'm losing.

I got paid today. So I ordered "Das Boot" on dvd. I find it slightly amusing that when I did a search at bn.com for "Das Boot" it found no matches, but doing a search for "The Boat" gave me "Das Boot" as a search result. Heh. It's silly. But being a dvd and all, I can watch the movie in english, german or spanish, and can have subtitles in english french or spanish. Obviously the proper way to watch it is in german (optionally with english subtitles on if some of my non-german-speaking friends are around.) Yay! This is also going to be the first dvd I own. I'm moving up in the world. And I think "Das Boot" is definitely quality enough to be a good first dvd. I'm psyched.

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bw3s, stalking, and other random stuff

entry #543, Tue, October 31, 2000, 18:38 (Life in General)

Made some decent progress on p4. I'm having fun building up a good network infrastructure. I think I'm gonna make this guy much more robust than it needs to be. After a while of work on that I decided to go sit out on the quad for a while, which was fun. After half an hour or so I saw Eric Blair walking across the quad, so I stalked him. He finally noticed me as I entered Fitz behind him. Then hung out in the undergrad lab a bit, talking to a variety of entertaining people. Heard more stories from the infamous senior bar night after finding out about getting into grad school. I don't think I'll ever quit hearing stories about that.

Went to BW3s with Brian, Arun, George, and Tony. Was entertaining. Several junior engineering types showed up shortly before we left. I'm really full. It'll be fun to see how long that lasts.

I have discovered something I would consider getting a tattoo of: the flemish lion. A tattoo's never been a priority or a desire, and I never really thought of anything I'd actually want tattoo'd on me, but I've realized the flemish lion dude is pretty badass. So it'd be nationalistic and badass. So if I ever find myself needing to get a tattoo for some reason, at least I now have a candidate for the artwork.

Donna Rozman seems to be doing well at Kansas State. A piece of hers is pictured in a Kansas State Collegian article.

Time now to go home and find something to do. Should probably continue work on p4.

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soccer soccer soccer

entry #542, Tue, October 31, 2000, 12:07 (Life in General)

Talked with George C in the undergrad lab, leading me to a new conclusion. This week I have but one primary goal. I shall do everything in my power to accomplish it. I will play soccer on thursday. Nothing else matters. Except maybe the soccer game friday against BC. I feel I must play soccer in support of our women's soccer team. Must play soccer. Must play.

I finally managed to see Toy Story 2. Anne came over last night so we made up for the failed attempt last friday night. It was a phenomenal movie. The animation was just utterly amazing. So many times my jaw just almost dropped in awe. I want their rendering farm. The plot was also cute and pretty funny at times.

I think I need to set some sort of productivity goal. Something I need to get done before I reward myself with the physical abuse of soccer on thursday. Maybe I'll make OS-p4 be that goal. I can do this. I can be non-worthless.

I'm considering ditching campus. Maybe go running and return home and code. Campus has too many distractions for me. But I've got office hours until one. So a decision has been avoided for the time being.

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yay bcs!

entry #541, Mon, October 30, 2000, 19:35 (Sports and Athletics)

woohoo! ND is ranked #14 in the latest BCS poll. Our strength of schedule is now ranked #8, which surprises me, since it was #10 last week, and nebraska and stanford lost. But purdue and A&M won, which helps, I guess. Only two teams ranked above us have higher strengths of schedule. I really think TCU needs to lose. They're undefeated, but their strength of schedule is ranked #111, which is absurd. Can't they play a real team? In professional football news, Brian Griese got arrested for DUI. Stupid. I miss Elway, I miss the broncos doing well. But that's alright, they're still my team. And I actually get to see them on tv soon, they're gonna be on monday night football in a week or two. Yay!

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oh man... GOOD run

entry #540, Mon, October 30, 2000, 16:01 (Sports and Athletics)

Wow. So I decided to go for a quick two mile run. Nothing special. Well, after running my usual two warmup laps, I decided to add a few more stretches to my normal routine. And wow, my muscles haven't enjoyed a stretch like that since high school. They felt so good. So I decided I couldn't waste such a good stretch on a mere two miles. So I ran four miles in 45 minutes, nice and slow, feeling completely at peace. It was wonderful. But after those four miles I decided to pick up the pace and ran another mile in 8 minutes, for a grand total of five miles in 53 minutes. It felt really good. And apparently my metabolism has switched into a higher gear recently, because 1. I've been constantly hungry for the past several days and 2. I've apparently lost four pounds over the past five or so days. Insane.

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yay paul!

entry #539, Mon, October 30, 2000, 10:46 (Life in General)

Paul is my official hero for today. He discovered the little springy thing that fell off my watch on the ground in front of the ssr. So now I can wear my watch again and be all happy and stuff.

Got my numerical midterm back. Did well enough to be content. I need to contest a couple points that got taken off that I don't think should have been. We'll see how that goes.

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most boring lab hours ever

entry #538, Sun, October 29, 2000, 22:19 (Life in General)

they're almost over. 45 minutes to go. wish they would end. among the things I've done to entertain myself are playing xgalaga and staring at a screensaver for several pathetic minutes.

ND women's soccer beat miami in their first post-season game. The next game is against BC at alumni field, at approximately 7 pm on friday, nov. 3. I think I shall attempt to make an appearance at that game.

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yay benevolent polls

entry #537, Sun, October 29, 2000, 17:44 (Sports and Athletics)

Woohoo! ND is ranked #15 in the AP, #16 in the coaches. We may actually make it into tomorrow's BCS poll.

I've arrived on campus. Caught more air than I ever have on my way in. Most excellent. I may have broken a speed record too, but can't prove that since I didn't have my fancy bike-o-meter thing. Oh well. Now I need to waste 75 minutes before my ta hours start. So onwards goes the struggle.

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Thoughts on Punk

entry #536, Sun, October 29, 2000, 13:49 (Music)

"The first step that I needed to take was giving God control
That's a struggle for me everyday and I'm letting you all know
There's a willingness that comes alive
When you begin tearing down the wall
But the first step is so very hard if you take a first step at all"
-- "It's Undeniable" by MxPx

I've been throwing around some thoughts on punk rock in the back of my head for a while now. So I've decided to try to express some of it. These observations seem to reflect general life views of mine as well. We'll see where this goes. I've decided to break punk down into three general categories. So obviously everything that follows is generalization and should, of course, not be taken too seriously. My categorization is not a musical categorization. As far as musical style goes, punk is punk is punk, right? To quote from the movie "Up In Smoke": "Hey man we don't have to do rehearals, man, besides, it's just punk rock, man, you know you don't have to know how to play, all you just got to do is be a punk, we can do that" and of course I can always fall back to the common observation that punk isn't a style of music, but a way of thinking. So here we go.

Three categories. The first is easy, I won't talk about it much. There's a lot of punk songs out there that lack any kind of serious message. This is just fun silly music that I do enjoy listening to, but doesn't really make you think. Fair enough, fun is good.

The second two categories are the important ones. First we have political punk rock. This has, for a long time, been my favorite sort. Bands like Against All Authority, Operation Ivy, NOFX, Propaghandi, and such produce music heavy with political opinion and social commentaries. Music with a real strong message, music with real anger over stuff that matters. Some of it, like Propaghandi, has political opinions with which I can't agree hardly at all, but it doesn't matter, they're out they're spreading their message through punk rock. This stuff rocks. This is music.

Then we have music by bands like the Ataris or MxPx. This music also has a strong message. But it's much more localized message. The message applies much more to the individual than to society at large. I'm not entirely sure how to exactly express my point. But for a long time I didn't want to like this as much as I liked the real political stuff. There was almost a feeling of guilt involved in being able to associate with the lyrics of songs like "Angry Nerd Rock" and such. I shouldn't feel sorry for myself, I should be listening to music that'll make me feel sorry for people in Sudan or something, they're more deserving of my pity than I am. But I think I've gotten over that. The catch phrase "Think globally, act locally" comes to mind. We must change the world, but we must start with ourselves. And so I've realized that maybe both of these two categories matter. So maybe this is why I've been listening to so much MxPx of late. I can finally admit that I like them as much as I like AAA and Op Ivy.

I think that's about enough of this. Pointless observations that don't really mean anything. Make of them what you will.

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football and more

entry #535, Sun, October 29, 2000, 12:26 (Life in General)

I just realized I've not watched any news in three or four days, which feels odd, I'd been feeling so oddly in touch with the world this semester, simply because of the variety of news channels our cable lineup offers. Seems nothing has significantly changed.

Yesterday I didn't wake up until 12:30 or so. So I've still not managed to do any kind of pre-game activity this year. However the BC game should hopefully break that streak, I recall promising to show up to some kind of event. The game itself proved frightening. I can't believe we won that game, but more importantly, I can't believe we almost lost that game. I blame the freshmen, they had no business trying to start a wave when they did, and their attempts correlate to about the time the momentum turned. Of course, the officials tried hard to make us lose as well. But what can you do? In the end, we won, so it's all good. And some other games had good outcomes: Texas A&M beat #8 Kansas State, which is good for our strength of schedule (which is gonna suffer from the Nebraska loss) and which also gives Kansas State as many losses as us. Clemson lost, which doesn't have a direct effect on us yet (although they do play florida state next week, which could potentially give them as many losses as we have) but Clemson has been, in my humblest of opinions, highly overrated. I think their strength of schedule is ranked like #100 or so. Stanford lost, which is too bad, since they looked like they were gonna win, and that would've helped our SoS as well. But it turns out that Glenn Earl, who blocked the last-second air force field goal attempt, wasn't actually supposed to jump. He was supposed to watch for a fake attempt. God bless him for jumping instead.

After the game Brian and I went to eat with a huge group of friends of his family. They had reservations for a party of 40. We ate at Parisis. It was quite entertaining. I had lasagna. It was good. It was the first significant meal I'd eaten in two days.

Today I've got TA lab hours at fitz from 7 to 11. Other than that today may prove best spent being lazy. Or maybe I'll do some reading or something. We'll see.

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Pay It Forward

entry #534, Sun, October 29, 2000, 01:28 (Movies)

So a last-minute decision was made tonight to see Pay It Forward, starring Kevin Spacey and Helen Hunt. It was really good. I was amazed. It wasn't at all what I expected. I'm really glad I did see it. That's about it.

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I love Anne's car, and I love my new biking gloves

entry #533, Sat, October 28, 2000, 04:45 (Life in General)

Woohoo, I've made it home for the night. It's now 4:30, which is much later than I expected when I biked to campus at 9. But it's all been worth the while.

So first we go to the hypnotist thing. Anne and I show up at 9:45. Apparently some of our friends had decided to get there at 9:15, so we ended up sitting in the second row from the front. Perk accomplished his goal and got up on stage, but failed to get hypnotized. About fifteen people apparently did, tho. It was amusing, albeit a bit longer than it should have been, it got a bit repetitive after a while. That's ok.

Midnight, show up at 329 keenan. Chaos. A ballpit that was on the verge of losing structural stability. A bunch of drunk people. A lot of engineers. Some good music... I decided to remain fully sober. It was fun. I got to observe a lot. I enjoy observing people. I still don't think I'll understand them anytime soon, though. 2 am rolls around. Parietals. What a weird place the dorms seem after living off campus for half a semester.

But more entertainment was needed, it seemed. Anne wanted to watch Toy Story 2. So when she learned I can drive a stick, it was decided that I'd play designated driver guy (a new role for me, since I'm usually neither designated nor a driver) and drive us to and back from castle point. So George, Anne, and I set off to watch Toy Story 2. Anne fell asleep fifteen minutes into the movie, and George was fading fast too, so I drive them back. Drop George off, drop Anne and her car off. Anne's car is awesome. It shifts so well and stuff. It's been a few years since I've driven a stick, I'd forgotten how much fun they are. So then I walk back to fitz from turtle creek. I was having a nice peaceful walk (so rarely can you have those around here, most of the ones I've had were back to keenan from fitz after an almost-all-nighter). But it was not to last. Three girls walking back to campus behind me decided I was a hottie and that they needed to discuss me in very loud voices so that I would hear them. "Check out the hottie walking in the blue shirt and jeans" ... "I'd definitely hook up with him." ... "Is that a bowling shirt? I think it is. That makes him even hotter" ... and so on. This was all a new experience to me, so I found myself without a clue of what to do. So I turned around, gave them my best smile, and then continued my walk. Finally I made it to fitz, changed into biking gear, and returned home. Now it is time for sleep.

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adventures in bike repair

entry #532, Fri, October 27, 2000, 19:14 (Life in General)

"Win Ben Stein's Money" today had a Notre Dame football reference in one of their categories. But none of the contestants chose it. Silly them. That's ok, the winner only got $650. I really wanted to see what the question was going to be.

Today started out fairly slow. Brought realloc to campus to assist in the quest for music for the party tonight. Classes were boring. After OS I find a bunch of people in the lab. George, as usual, was reading Sluggy Freelance. Anne decides we should finally try to fix her bike today, so I head over to her place. After figuring out the necessary dimension for her tire, we head to proform. Her tire was 26x0.75. The guy gives us a 26x2.10 tire and inner tube. I tell him we needed 0.75, but he says it'll fit. So ok, whatever. I also pick up a pair of cold weather biking gloves. Now I need some cold weather so I can give them a try. Anyway, we replace the tire and tube on Anne's rear wheel, only to discover that it will no longer fit her frame. Stupid proform guy. So we look for smaller tires at Meijer. The smallest they have is 26x1.75. No luck. So Anne is going to continue the search for a tire that'll fit her bike. It was amusing, though I'm sure frustrating for Anne. I also picked up a pair of sunglasses. $12. Not a great pair, but they'll keep me going until christmas when I can buy a pair at CB shades. So turns out I'm going to this hypnotist thing tonight at 10. Word has it I'll get to see Perk get hypnotized. So we'll see how that goes.

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waffles!

entry #531, Thu, October 26, 2000, 23:41 (Life in General)

Never underestimate the power of a recipe that starts out with three sticks of butter.

Some people are adrenaline junkies. I'm an endorphine junkie. I'll do all sorts of abuse to my body for that euphoric feeling in the back of my head. Although adrenaline's pretty good too. Today on my way home from campus I used a higher gear than usual to go up the cleveland hill. Just now I biked the hill again and got into yet another higher gear. Not much longer and I won't even need gears on my bike anymore. Yeah, right. But I was rewarded for my efforts.

I spent a long time cooking today. While playing loud music. It was good. I made egg rolls for dinner. They turned out pretty good. Very filling. I made too many, but that's alright, now I've got food for tomorrow. Then I moved on to waffles. Good, yummy waffles. They turned out alright, although I was too full to eat an entire waffle.

Brought Anne and Annie a few waffles. I think my efforts were appreciated. Watched ER and Drew Carey with them. ER reminds me of the whole first responder certification process, I used to watch it on occasion in those days, but haven't watched it since. Attempted to rescue Annie from a menacing ladybug that was hanging out on her wall, but it foiled my attempt by hiding behind her bed. But I've noticed (and Anne agrees) that ladybugs have been really kinda agressive this year, as absurd as that sounds... the biking to and from was fun. I took the "cocky, flippant, and arrogant" approach to biking. I finally regained enough confidence in my balance to attempt a non-trivial turn while riding hands-free. Pulled off a 180 turn no problem. I'm amazing. Then on the way home my front light decided to quit serving its purpose, so while biking up one of the empty roads behind the athletic facilities, I took the thing apart and fixed it. The best thing is there were several NDSP officers at the end of this road and I bike up to them with my hands occupied with something entirely unrelated to their primary duty of steering the bike.

Emeril Lagasi (sp?) is my hero. I wish we got the food network.

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entry #530, Thu, October 26, 2000, 17:05 (Life in General)

"The intelligence of any discussion diminishes with the square of the number of participants." -- Adam Walinsky

"Some would say tomorrow is just one step closer to death. I'd say tomorrow is just one step closer to life." -- MxPx

"Thank God for endorphins" -- Pete Rijks

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oh where, oh where has my little sleep gone?

entry #529, Thu, October 26, 2000, 14:40 (Life in General)

Perk has asked the following question:


now that pete is no longer a poor undergrad, and now an afluent grad
student, has our pete exchange stock gone up at all?  


can i cash in now?

Which is an interesting question. The main issue is I have no idea how much the stock was worth when I was an undergrad.

Today has been bad. I'm really tired, I'm frustrated, and I forgot to bring music with me. Kogge's class went alright, turned in my midterm and homework 2. I think I can place the maximum possible guess at how much sleep I got last night at four hours. Grrr. Next I wander about for a bit. Squyres is in town, so chat with him briefly. Then go get lunch with Brian, but my stomach, despite huge hunger, refuses to accept more than half a sub. So then we throw a disk around for a while, which was fun enough. Then run in to Tom and then Perk. Talk with Perk a while, then help Tom with some sockets concepts. Now I'm wasting time in the SSR. There's no way anything good (productive) will come of today, I'm too tired to focus. And theoretically I've got CSE 232 office hours tonight. But their next program is due wednesday, so I think I'll postpone office hours until sunday night or sometime more practical for them and for me. We'll see. Other agenda items include making waffles. I don't think I have any choice in the matter, I will be making waffles tonight.

I seriously can't wait to go home. I need home right now. I've realized that for the first time in years I'll be able to afford more than two days of skiing in CB. So the plan is to try to kill myself over christmas break. If I don't do structural damage to myself over break, I will have failed. Ski hard, ski often. Hopefully it'll actually snow enough this year to let them get the extremes open before I return to Indiana. I think it's been at least three years since I've skied a real double-black run. Must ski. Ski hard, ski often. I think I'll also rent some shaped skis for the duration of my stay. Shaped skis are awesome. I want out of here!

I need to work more on overcoming prejudices. I have way too many of them. Screw the status quo.

Now I must go find something to do between now and waffle time. mmmmm..... waffles... Maybe I'll make egg rolls for dinner. That'd be fun. Go home, play loud music, and make egg rolls. That sounds therapeutic.

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many random thoughts...

entry #528, Thu, October 26, 2000, 04:40 (Life in General)

Looking at my latest VISA statement, I noticed my credit limit has been increased by $200. Which is cool, I suppose, except I never maxed out the old limit, and I've not used the card in close to two months... oh well, it's nice to have.

Plex86 now boots Linux, which is excellent. It still has quite a while until it is a full-featured as vmware, but it's good to see them making progress. And to top it all off, it looks like they're offering some emulation modes in addition to the virtualization stuff, which may prove useful to us kernel hacker types.

Did laundry today. mmmm.... clean clothes.... but somehow it seems appropriate to be doing laundry while working on a test about pipelining...

This courtesy of "Kevin":
There once was an EE named kevin
Proper email formatting put him in heaven
He demanded it so
But pete dicked him o'
And now he's regretting his actions

In yet another entry in the "playing CD's I've not listened to in forever" category is "Smoke 'em If You Got 'em" by the Reverend Horton Heat. Anytime I hear the term rockabilly, this is the CD I think of. It's fun. Brilliant guitar work. And tons o' fun. And track 10, "Eat Steak" is just classic... Also listend to a Spin Doctors CD which was good fun. Reminds me of my first summer living in the US.

History Channel's been playing a series on the hitler youth this week. It's pretty scary. It amazes me what they were able to get people to do. I remember during a trip to Belgium during my sophomore year at ND Dad took me to a German WWII cemetary in Belgium. It was an experience. You could climb stairs to the top of the entrance structure and look out over the place. An uncountable number of crosses stretching into the distance. Then you walk among them and more often than not the age of the person buried in front of you was less than your own. War is truly evil.

Dad is apparently going hunting tomorrow with Richard and Rudy Rozman. Of course, he says he's only going along for the walk. The only person who may shoot at anything is Richard. I remember having elk jerky from an elk Richard shot some time ago. Very good stuff. Dad should have a good time.

Went to senior bar. Was an entertaining time. I think I had more to drink than I intended to and was in less than good shape for the political discussions I proceeded to have. grrrr.

Some choice quotes of unrelated origin:
"Destination: unknown, ruby, ruby, ruby, ruby soho!"
"You just can't mess with a man's salad." -- "word up"

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paul and rob suck

entry #527, Wed, October 25, 2000, 10:48 (Life in General)

stupid soccer-haters. They will suffer. Apparently I'm the only person in 355S who likes soccer. But I can take comfort in knowing they're wrong. Paul even went so far as to say that soccer is more boring than baseball!! How can anyone think this? Baseball is the most boring sport on the planet! argh. So anyway, ND women's soccer has finished off the regular season undefeated with a win over michigan. Due to a tie against uconn, their final record is 17-0-1. So go Irish!

day three without sunglasses. God is merciful again. It's foggy.

Went to Nick's with Anne last night. Turned out I wasn't very hungry. But we had a good discussion about grad school. It was fun.

Paul and Rob gave their presentation in numerical today. They found out they were doing so about five minutes before class, their presentation was supposed to be friday. Dr. Izaguirre came by at 9:30 and asked them to give their presentation today. They did well considering the lack of warning...

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run, run, run

entry #526, Tue, October 24, 2000, 22:49 (Life in General)

I love running. I went running today before going home. Today was the first time I got to stress test my new lap-counting "algorithm" ... since I am unable to keep track of laps in my head if I run more than two of them, I've been trying to figure out a good way of keeping track. But simply counting them on my fingers was annoying, it made running less comfortable. So I developed a way of counting laps on my fingers which is comfortable. So I now keep track of laps on my right hand and miles on my left hand. The overflow level for this means of counting is eight miles. I'm not going to worry yet about hitting that overflow. Today I ran three miles. I decided to also do more speed laps. Usually I'll make my last lap be a quick thirty second lap, but I've decided that's not enough. So today I ran two at that tempo. Of course, the second one was a bit slower, and I had to insert a slow lap between the two of them. But I really like doing the fast laps, because I enjoy the speed and the pain they involve. And when I'm going that fast my brain truly shuts off and I am left with only one thought: "need ... more ... oxygen!"

Yesterday's zen moment, courtesy of comedy central's The Daily Show, was footage of Madeleine Albright "dancing" to some music being performed by north korean kids. Luckily being able to dance isn't a requirement for a good secretary of state...

One of those things in life I don't really understand is web sites that set a test cookie to see if your browser supports cookies. Because all of the sites I've seen that do this always try to set more cookies afterwards regardless of whether or not you accept the test cookie. And additionally, you won't have that cookie set the first time you go to the site anyway, so how do they really know anyway?

I listened to my Civ cd today. I've not listened to it in some time. It's quality punk. I really like it. But it has the misfortune of being in my cd binder thing. And there's a much lower probability that cd's that are in the binder will get played. Which isn't a good thing, because among the things that I bought long enough ago that they made it into the binder are two rancid cds, an op ivy cd, a suicide machines cd, a less than jake cd, several bosstones cds, and much more really good stuff that I should listen to more often than I do. I need to go buy jewel cases and start migrating cds back out of the binder.

after a long time of good stability, netscape has crashed on me six times today. of course, each time was when I attempted to access a specific page, so it's not like six random crashes, but it's still frustrating.

I'm nearly complete with the mandatory portion of the comp arch midterm. So soon I can begin work on extra credit. Woohoo!

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day two

entry #525, Tue, October 24, 2000, 12:54 (Life in General)

day two without sunglasses: God is merciful again. Overcast.

Went home yesterday with the intention of getting work done, but little happened for some time. Watched some monday night football, dolphins were beating up on the jets, then head to campus with Brian to pick up some stuff I wanted to work on. We run into Anne, who returns to castle point with us for beer, football, and work. We end up having a really good political discussion, which is interrupted occasionally due to an excellent fourth quarter of football. The jets have a huge comeback and end up winning in overtime. It was amazing.

This morning waking up didn't happen according to plan. I did wake up after hitting snooze a few times, but then my door wouldn't open. Very bizarre. Finally I force it open, but by that time I'd decided that it had been a sign that I was not yet meant to leave my room (or my bed) ... so I ended up sleeping until 11. Victoriously I finally arrive on campus, and shall attempt to turn today into a productive day.

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Walt makes an appearance

entry #524, Mon, October 23, 2000, 15:18 (Life in General)

It's funny cuz Walt Tuholski made an appearance at the ssr today. Scitor has him out here doing recruiting/interviewing. It's not fair that classmates of mine come back and tell me all about how cool the real world is. But it gives me something to look forward to. Seems he's enjoying life in california.

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stupid daystar

entry #523, Mon, October 23, 2000, 14:49 (Life in General)

blah. I accidentally stepped on my sunglasses last night. now they're broken. this makes me sad. luckily God had mercy on me. today was an overcast day.

I'm having trouble motivating myself to do stuff. In part, I think, because I got about 4 hours of sleep last night. Stupid insomnia. During a political discussion with Brian last night, the following question came up that neither of us really knew the answer to: why are there so many people that are anti-abortion but pro-death penalty? It doesn't make much in the way of sense to me. But then again, people don't make much sense in general. Oh well. Time to try and get motivated to do something. I think that may require going home, since that's where I have ready access to pre-paid caffeine...

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socialising and cars

entry #522, Mon, October 23, 2000, 00:49 (Life in General)

Anne has victoriously returned from Boston. She stopped by our place and hung out for a while. An entertaining time. Many issues discussed. I now have to make up a social calendar I said was already made up. But that should be fairly easy-ish.

Brian and I had an entertaining discussion on cars. Big cars in specific. And on driving in less than ideal circumstances, which both of us have done our share of.

Classes start again tomorrow. I'm really not ready to deal with those again. Of course, this means that the problem I've had this week of naturally waking up between 8 and 9 will go away and waking up will become a horrible obstacle again. we'll see.

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stupid cincinnati bengals

entry #521, Sun, October 22, 2000, 15:32 (Life in General)

ND rises in the polls again: #19 in the AP, #19 in the coaches. Woohoo! But a sad day for the broncos. They lost to the bengals, 31-21. The freaking bengals! What? And not only that, going into this game, the broncos had the #2 rush defense in the nfl. And they gave up more than 400 rushing yards to the bengals. silly broncos. argh.

Break is nearing its end. Mamie stopped by today, she's returned from washington dc. she brought me a sailor moon manga and a huge sailor moon wall banner. Mamie rocks. And it seems she had a good time in washington.

Grading cse 232. Not exactly fun. At least I can watch tv while I do so.

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nd wins; other fun games aren't

entry #520, Sat, October 21, 2000, 23:45 (Sports and Athletics)

Notre Dame beats West Virgina 42-28. Yay! Go Irish. I was really worried about this game for a while. But then Howard ran a 80some yard touchdown run (a thing of beauty) and we dominated for a while. Then we started playing conservative defense (stupid coaching staff) and allowed WVU to score two more touchdowns. And the officiating crew didn't help as much either, there were some really bad calls in my humblest of opinions.

in other college football actions, a lot of games that promised to be interesting upsets ended up not being so. Syracuse led Virginia Tech 14-3 for a while, and North Carolina was beating clemson for a while, but those games turned around. There were several other games that witnessed similar fates. But oh well, ND won, and that's all that really matters.

now it's saturday night tv time. woohoo!

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funky green plant thingy

entry #519, Sat, October 21, 2000, 01:04 (Life in General)

so I really should add some automatic means of gathering referal data, since most of them are fairly uninteresting. but then you get people doing searches for stuff like "funky green plant thingy" and you just gotta wonder what the hell they're expecting to find, but they find your log. hrmm...

Went to dinner tonight with Lisa, George, and Chris at Parisis. Decent food. An entertaining time. Lifted with George before that. George is evil. We did three different varieties of bench presses. I'm hurting, and it's only gonna get worse.

So I've decided to name my OS project "OSKSI" ... other candidates were "pwrOS" (or maybe "powerOS"), "LTOS" (a not-so-clever play off another os project of mine), "SOS" (semi-operating system), VeritOS, "CAOS" (Cool Ass OS, suggested by George), and "FOS" (Fast OS, suggested by Lisa). OSKSI and CAOS were the two best candidates, but I decided against CAOS because OSKSI amused me greatly and because I found two separate KAOS projects (both of which thought "Kick Ass OS" was a good project name).

After some frustrating 232 grading work I added comments to my 542 p3, and decided to begin work on 542 p4, the hot potato. This promises to be fun and even kinda challenging (with any luck), so naturally Brian and I decide elevated consciousness is needed for our respective projects, so Captain Morgan is now one of my resources listed for p4. Woooohoooooo!!!

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happiness

entry #518, Fri, October 20, 2000, 14:03 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

I've become really excited about an idea for the first time in a while. Paul and I talked to Freeh about him teaching a class in which basically he tells us to write an OS and we do. I've found myself very excited by this idea. In general I have, I believe, a good feel of what an OS is doing. But it's not fully intuitive yet. I understand things fairly well, but not having implemented a lot of that low-level stuff I can't say I truly grok it. And thus doing this will prove to be very beneficial to me, I think. Freeh seemed interested in the idea. And Paul sent me some links that look like good resources as well. I hope this happens. I want to write my own OS. I think I need to figure out a good name. Suggestions are welcome.

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iron chef south bend strikes again

entry #517, Thu, October 19, 2000, 20:34 (Life in General)

oh my god. i am so freaking full. so today for dinner i figured we should have rice with something. so realizing we have most of the ingredients for a sweet and sour sauce, we go to martins and pick up meat, stir-fry veggies, and sherry. i kinda picked a sherry at random, mainly just looking for one that wasn't too dry and that wasn't too cheapish-looking. it turned out to be a decent sherry. so anyway, we made stir fry. I made a sweet and sour sauce that proved to be, for lack of a better word, divine. And I was wise and allowed the meat to simmer in this sauce for a long time. The meat was simply fantastic. It was a great meal. I ate more than I perhaps should have, but I don't care. So for the sake of posterity, I'll share my process, as best as I can remember. First I browned the meat a bit, and added sherry after a while and let that simmer with the meat a while. Meanwhile I mixed pineapple juice, oil, vinegar, soy sauce, pepper, and brown sugar. I added this to the meat after a while and let this whole mix simmer for a while while we made rice. Then I added carrots, snow peas, pineapple slices, and sprouts. So good. So tasty. So filling. mmmm....

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lincoln-o-rama

entry #516, Thu, October 19, 2000, 17:02 (Life in General)

So today I actually did something. Amazing. Went to the Northern Indiana Historical Center with Rebecca Weber to check out the Lincoln exhibit they had there. It was pretty cool, they had some cool stuff, including a handwritten copy of the gettysburg address thingy. I found the political cartoons from the time to be the most interesting. I am really frightened by the democratic party of the time.

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near death experiences and other goings-on

entry #515, Wed, October 18, 2000, 20:36 (Life in General)

Stupid Indiana drivers. Today I biked home from Rolfs after doing some running and such (the knee's doing better, thanks). Being a reasonable fellow, I try to keep on or to the right of the white line on the side of the road. But on juniper this is tricky, since the pavement ends immediately to the right of the white line. But I was still well enough to the side of the road for cars to easily avoid me. Well, today some bastard in a rusty truck honked at me and immediately proceeded to pass me with less than a foot of clearance. Now normally somebody passing me that close wouldn't bother me too much, but he honked at me. And it's awful difficult to keep going in a straight line when somebody honks at you from a few feet behind you. Especially if they then come within a foot of hitting you. So that sucked. But I lived.

Spent most of today battling gsu.nd.edu. I think I emerged fairly victorious, stuff is looking much better now. Had baked potatoes for dinner. mmmmmm.... goodness. And rumor has it that Sunny's Korean Patio is the best ethnic restaurant in the michiana area. And it's supposed to have decent prices too. So I'll need to check out that scene.

Notre Dame's women's soccer team is now the only undefeaten team among the nation's 274 Division I women's soccer programs. They beat syracuse to improve their record to 15-0. Woohoo!

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japanese food, fish replenishment, and mexican beer

entry #514, Wed, October 18, 2000, 00:21 (Life in General)

Ate at the Tokyo restaurant in South Bend with David Rink and Lisa. It was interesting. The food was decent, tho not nearly worth the price I paid. George and Chris ditched the event to study for the gre's. After biking home I noticed I've brought my average speed up to 14.9 mph, which is impressive considering I went uphill on cleveland. I think I want to try to keep my overall average above 15 mph.

Brian and I went to Meijer to pick up some supplies. We also picked up a new fish to replace the one that has left us. We will forever miss that white goldfish that briefly touched our lives. But we must move on. And now we once again have seven goldfish. While at Meijer I saw Modelo Especial in the beer aisle. I remembered having had a Modelo Negro over the summer and thinking it decent, so I decided to pick up a sixpack of the Especial. It's decent. Curious thing is that its effects felt rather strong, and the alcohol content is not detailed anywhere on the can. So who knows...

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geeking around and musings on growing up in europe

entry #513, Tue, October 17, 2000, 15:49 (Life in General)

Today I wore my new RSA shirt. I encountered Dr. Lumsdaine in the Cushing hallway, and he asked me if I was wearing a munition. I was amused.

Today's Top 5 List was titled "The Top 17 Things Heard at a Magic Convention" ... the sad thing is that I saw "Magic" and interpreted it to mean "Magic: The Gathering" and then was baffled at why I didn't get any of the items. Then it dawned on me. I am a sad pathetic human being.

During the process of working on www.gsu.nd.edu I realized that I can't stand using anything less than new, so I switched it from running debian potato to running debian woody. Of course, that switch lasted about seven minutes short of forever (Note that due to some funkiness in complexity theory this does not mean that forever is several hours plus 7 minutes, despite what you may think).

Biking to school today I set a new maximum speed: 34.5 mph. I think the 35 mph barrier can be broken. The 40 mph barrier is still a long ways away... I also caught some good air (relatively speaking), which is amazing, since normally catching air and setting speed records aren't things that happen at the same time, since catching air tends to kill momentum...

I cleaned up my desk at the SSR today. I'm proud. I forgot to bring music with me today, which is a bad thing. But luckily I was able to temporarily steal some punk CD's from Arun. And thus life is good.

Had a good talk with Dr. Freeh about research ideas (mainly relating to PIM runtime and distributed stuff in general). I definitely want to find a good masters thesis soonish, so I can hopefully get the research out of the way next summer.

Interesting quote from fortune:
'On this point we want to be perfectly clear: socialism has nothing to do with equalizing. Socialism cannot ensure conditions of life and consumption in accordance with the principle "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." This will be under communism. Socialism has a different criterion for distributing social benefits: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work."' -- Mikhail Gorbachev, _Perestroika_
I remember Perestroika. I remember the fall of communism. I lived it. OK, not really. I was a young geek in west germany at the time. Of course, I was in middle school at the time, and like any young idealist, I had socialist tendencies of my own. But a friend of mine at the time had managed to move to our town from east germany with his family, by means of the newly opened czechoslovakia/west germany border. It was interesting to hear about his experiences. I was definitely anti-communism. I remember so many things I experienced in my youth that I didn't understand very well, that looking back upon are quite remarkable. I can't believe how comfortable I've allowed myself to become in indiana. I need to experience life again. Indiana is a comfortable place to so many people, I think, because it buffers you from a lot. I remember when I was really young (about 8 or so) there was a period of time where we weren't allowed to play outside. Looking back, I now realize that this was when chernobyl happened. I love fortune sometimes. It can actually cause you to think from time to time.

the plan for the rest of today: japanese food for dinner. no running, need to go easy on the knee.

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free shirts and sky surfing, voting and memoirs

entry #512, Tue, October 17, 2000, 00:28 (Life in General)

woohoo, the free RSA shirt I ordered forever ago finally showed up. I'd given up on it ever showing up. It came with some kinda marketing letter that I think I'll be ignoring, but the shirt's kinda cool.

Watched some x-games on espn2 today. One of the events was skysurfing, which looks like a lot of fun. Main problem I see with it is that it's probably rather expensive... but one thing that I found interesting was that it's a team sport. A team consists of the guy doing the surfing and a guy doing camera work. The judges see only what the camera guy's camera sees, so it's an interesting challenge to coordinate the movements in the air. Pretty cool.

My absentee ballot showed up in the mail today. Which is fun. There's actually a lot I need to vote on. Some of it is fairly straightforward, like president and such. Then there's some amendments and referendums to vote on as well, such as legalizing marijuana for medicinal use. Finally there's all the other offices that need electing, which will take some research. So now I have something to do over break. They also sent me this really tiny pencil. Just looking at the envelope you wouldn't have known it contains a pencil... So the parties with presidential candidates on the colorado ballet are republican, the democratic, libertarian, natural law, green, american constitution, freedom (which is odd -- this is the party pat buchanan is running for, did they change their name? need to look into that), prohibition, socialist workers campaign, and socialist. Other than the presidential election, there's libertarian candidates for four other positions. some of the interesting referendums to be considered are legalization of marijuana for medical use, some abortion issue (i think the pro life vote on this issue is 'yes' but it's some minor issue that's oddly worded, so i'll need to doublecheck). there's also some guncheck issue and something about multistate lotteries, along with quite a few less interesting items...

My grandfather sent me a draft version of his memoirs. I am to read over them, because I am someone interested in them, but someone who won't know all the names mentioned, and am thus in a good position to point out places that need elaboration. So far they've been a fun read. Stories of him growing up on a ranch in Colorado, stories of ancestors, stories of medical school and military service, stories of travel to all sorts of places. Many funny anecdotes. It is a good thing that he is writing these down, they're inspiring. A sample anecdote, talking about an early automobile he owned: "Friends named it 'religion,' because it shook the devil out of you." It's amazing what the man has done in his life. I think I would consider myself lucky to do half as much in my life as he has done in his.

Brian's parents visited the apartment today. I think they were entertained. They brought a penguin cookie jar that makes noises at you when you open it.

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Up in Smoke

entry #511, Sun, October 15, 2000, 17:53 (Movies)

I'm watching Cheech & Chong's "Up In Smoke" on comedy central. It's quite amusing. The best part is I now know where the quote "Pass the word along. Tell the Men it's time to shoot the moon" comes from. That quote is featured on the song "Shoot the Moon" by the Voodoo Glow Skulls. Later today Comedy Central is playing Half-Baked, which I may watch as well, since I feel that maybe I should get in touch with the drug movie scene. Or maybe not.

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drug laws, speed, football

entry #510, Sun, October 15, 2000, 16:08 (Life in General)

So the history channel has been playing documentaries about illegal drugs of late. I've found it very interesting that a lot of drug laws were originally created because of prejudice. Opium was banned in San Francisco because they thought that chinese immegrants were using it to seduce white women. Marijuana was banned in the southwest during the great depression, because mexican immegrants used it and the southwest wanted to have excuses to deport them, since the need for cheap labor was no longer there during the depression. Cocaine was banned in the southeast because people believed it made black workers have superhuman strength and caused them to rape white women. An interesting trend I knew nothing about.

Went running at rolfs again today. Improved my maximum speed while biking to campus to 33.5 mph. I don't know how much better I can get it... it's a short hill... I had to pedal pretty hard to get past 32 mph. I think my maximum speed ever was riding down gothic road from mt. crested butte to crested butte. I think it was freshman year of h.s. I got above 40 mph, but I don't remember by how much. It was fun. My stupid knee is bothering me so I only ran for fifteen minutes today. Now I'm icing it, in the hopes that I can get it to resubmit to my will.

ND remained at #20 in the AP poll, but jumped to #22 in the Coaches poll. The broncos are playing the Browns, but it's once again not on tv here. Stupid local programming.

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go irish!

entry #509, Sat, October 14, 2000, 14:17 (Sports and Athletics)

woohoo! ND beats Navy 45-14. What fun. It's good to just see our team just get a chance to run up the score. I don't think Navy was able to score until after we put in our third string. Well, at least their second score was definitely against our third string defense.

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cateye mity 3 cyclocomputer

entry #508, Sat, October 14, 2000, 10:47 (Life in General)

last night, after my victorious return home, i made myself dinner while talking to my family on the phone. it was fun. i made scrambled eggs, because that seemed easy enough to do one-handed... woohoo

after dinner i installed the cyclocomputer on the bike. then i rode to campus. the distance from the apartment to cushing hall is apparently 2.89 miles. Despite being sore, I managed to maintain an average speed of 15 miles an hour. My max speed was 31 miles an hour, which should have been higher, but my lock was improperly attached to the bike and came loose during the big downhill. fun fun fun.

then i wandered around fitz and campus in search of people, but didn't find anyone. so i went to the last 30 minutes of the women's soccer game. ND beat BC 2-1, improving their record to 14-0-0, setting the team record for best start to a season. then i searched campus for people again, to no avail. so i head home, watch some tv, eat some more food (i was really hungry) and then fall asleep while watching tv (i was really tired).

now it's time for football. go irish!

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really long workout

entry #507, Fri, October 13, 2000, 19:05 (Sports and Athletics)

wow. today, in what has probably been one of my most successful attempts to relieve myself of stress to date, i decided to go running as soon as i got the chance. i figured it'd be just your average sort of run, but it ended up being much much more...

i got to the "schlappy" feeling fairly unenthusiastic about the whole idea, but after running a few warmup laps and stretching i was already beginning to warm up to the idea of a long run. so i decide to run for half an hour... and off i go. well, after fifteen or so minutes i decide that half an hour isn't enough. so in the end i ran laps for an hour straight. i started out taking about a minute per lap, but in the end i was taking about a minute, 20 seconds per lap. except for my last lap. that one took my about thirty seconds and nearly killed me. but damn, i gots to say, somewhere i seem to actually have some reserves i never imagined possible.

then i did some more stretching and did george's infamous ab workout. i only did 20 of each element, but there were a total of 10 elements, so i figure after an hour of running i was justified. then i stretched some more and ran a final victory lap. then i biked home.

i feel really really good now. and my bike computer showed up! woohoo!

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why is it never over?

entry #506, Fri, October 13, 2000, 14:33 (Life in General)

argh. the numerical midterm is finally behind me...

yesterday after this whole comp arch experience, I went to lunch with Anne, then we threw a frisbee around for a while. We got into a zone for a while and were superb. But that ended after a while. No pedestrians were injured. Maybe that's a good thing. Then I studied numerical for a while. I started out writing down all the equations I wanted to memorize. Then I studied with Katie and Damon for a while. It was a good studying session. I felt ready, I just needed to finish memorizing, an easy task for me. So then I went to a talk about some MPICH design stuff. I went from feeling fairly awake to being devoid of energy in a hurry. So I picked up some caffeine and rode over to the math department for a talk on prime numbers. Details on that adventure will follow. Went home, watched history channel, did some more memorizing, Anne came by and drank beer with us and watched some more tv. Then went to sleep at some point.

Wake up, it's numerical time. The test went alright. There were 22 or so points worth of extra credit throughout the test. I know I missed one ten point problem, but I did 19 points worth of the extra credit. So there's reason to be optimistic.

Today has dragged on and on and on. I'm tired of it. I have to go to some talk at three, and then, with any luck, I can screw everything and start today over. I think I'll do that by going running. Then maybe I'll go to the last regular season ND women's soccer home game. Then I think I'll sleep.

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senior bar-o-rama

entry #505, Thu, October 12, 2000, 08:41 (Life in General)

So, yet again, my adventures take me the way of senior bar. It was an entertaining time. Brian and I showed up rather early and were joined after a while by Tim and Rebecca and some guy whose name I forget. Rebecca thrilled us with her interprative dance of the integral sign, which, apparently, she also did in front of her calculus tutorial once. Then Arun, Jeff, George, and Anne show up. All sorts of entertaining stuff is discussed. However, at some point Anne told me all about the seventeenth floor of fitz, but said I'm not allowed to go to that floor, which made me sad... but somehow that conversation resulted with me having more clutter on my keychain. hmmmm....

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tests and stuff

entry #504, Wed, October 11, 2000, 18:34 (Life in General)

the oit dude the gsu made me meet with tried to convince me to switch all the gsu stuff from www.gsu.nd.edu to www.nd.edu/~gsu. i doubt i will, just because that seems like more work to me... the meeting was mainly a waste of my time. so i bought poptarts, encountered anne, who almost convinced me to skip my os midterm, but finally i headed to the test, barely on time. and then i forgot my poptarts in the classroom where i took the os midterm. doh!

well, the os midterm is behind me. which is good and stuff. the test went ok. it could have gone better. the main problem was the focus of the test on facts. there's not a concept covered in that class that i don't understand. but there are plenty of facts that i don't have memorized. so i had to make up a couple things for a couple of the answers. so whatever.

frustrated by this whole memorization thing that's been plaguing me lately, i wandered around fitz for a while, then played loud angry music (Against All Authority) because I'd rather be angry than frustrated. Besides, AAA makes me angry at the real injustices of the world instead of just frustrated at the minor inconsequential problems of my life. while playing loud angry music, I downloaded the source for gnu sh-utils and read through some of that, just for the hell of it. because why not?

then Katie Moor invited me to go over some numerical stuff with her, Alice, and Stephanie. Alice was late, so Stephanie taught us some chinese characters and such, which was cool. She showed us a chinese math book that belonged to her dad, which was also interesting. One interesting thing (at least to me) was that it was all written in chinese characters, but they used roman characters for variables. then Alice showed up and we went over chapter 12 of the numerical book: fast fourier transforms. i went in not having much of a clue of how they really worked but came out with a much better intuitive understanding of the subject. which is good. then i went to rolfs and ran a bit and did some abs work and then biked home. physical activity makes me happy.

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blah

entry #503, Wed, October 11, 2000, 11:47 (School)

Turned in numerical today. Woohoo. What was initially supposed to be a short lecture ended up going almost 15 minutes over time. But the good news is I understand cubic splines now. Stupid boundary conditions were confusing me earlier. So my only remaining worry for the midterm on friday is DFT's and FFt's... maybe I'll bug some of my smokepacking friends...

I have to meet with some OIT and GSU types at 12:30 about the gsu webpage. My plan: tell them that their stupid computer broke and that I was unaware that I'd need to put as much time into it as I've had to, since I had to rebuild the stupid thing. Then maybe I'll kick them. Luckily I have an excuse to leave after ten minutes: OS midterm at 12:50. Then I think I want to waste away the afternoon, but who knows. I think I'm gonna try to go running at fiveish. Then maybe senior bar. Who knows. Only time will tell.

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more bike gear and some pointless statistics

entry #502, Tue, October 10, 2000, 19:29 (Life in General)

So since I discovered today that I actually have more money that I thought I did (a rent check that I didn't think had gone through yet has actually already gone through), I decided to buy the Cateye Mity3 - CC-MT300 Cyclometer off rei.com. It cost me 27 dollars and weighs 0.92 ounces. It will keep track of current speed, average speed, maximum speed, total maximum speed, trip distance, total distance, it has a stop watch, a clock, automatic on/off, and is waterproof. I had a similar toy in high school and had much fun with it, so I figured I'd get a new one, since I no longer have the old one... I also wanted to procrastinate from numerical methods, so rei.com seemed like as good a means as any... it should be here monday or tuesday. I also found it amusing that when you go to look at your shopping basket on rei.com they have what can only be called an impulse buy section kinda like they have at the checkout lanes in supermarkets. they offered things such as powerbars and socks. i managed to resist the great temptation of the socks.

so today i got another amusing hit to the log: somebody had done a search for "kung fu skirt fighting" and found the log. and since i'm getting probably two hits a day now for star trek porn, i checked yahoo. if you put those terms in quotes, i'm like the fourth site that comes up (out of seven) ... so inspired by this and by The Sluggy Freelance Statistics Page, I did a count on the log. The entire log has about 65000 words in it. The word "porn" shows up 20 times. "Star Trek" shows up 24 times. "skirt" shows up twice. fighting shows up once. I think maybe I'll try some kinda more sophisticated analysis of this. And I'm also considering parsing referrer url's in order to automate keeping track of the amusing searches that hit my log. perhaps over break... now i must return to numerical...

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Ghost in the Shell vs. The Matrix

entry #501, Tue, October 10, 2000, 12:29 (Movies)

Ghost in the Shell. What a brilliant bit of anime. First time I saw it was freshman year (Simon, my roommate second semester freshman year, had it) and I was just awed. It's probably one of the main reasons I seriously got interested in anime. Then several years later comes The Matrix. I also really enjoyed that movie. The next time I watched Ghost in the Shell after seeing The Matrix I was surprised to notice several similarities that I'd not noticed when I first saw The Matrix. So today I find this in the slashdot quickies section: Scene by Scene comparison of Ghost in the Shell and The Matrix. It's rather good, it points out quite a few things I didn't notice (it also has spoilers so be warned if you've not seen both movies). I'm now positive that The Matrix was, to a good degree, inspired by Ghost in the Shell. I think I need to watch Ghost in the Shell again soon. And all of you that haven't seen it yet... go watch it! It's awesome! It's very well drawn, it's rather surreal, and it's just beyond description by mere mortals like myself.

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random musings

entry #500, Tue, October 10, 2000, 10:37 (Life in General)

So I'm stuck at fitz until 1 due to this whole "office hours" thing. I think I may decide to leave, tho. And I need to figure out this whole food thing since I thought I'd be going home sooner... but it's all good. Niemier taught advanced comp arch today. It was entertaining. He pointed out a few good types of problems that could appear on quals. I definitely think that OS and comp arch problems are the least of my worries on this whole quals thing.

Working on numerical last night I realized that all the stuff I was doing was stuff I learned in numerical last year. The fact that I need to relearn most of it shows just how much use I've had for it since last year, since I've apparently forgotten all of it. So given that fact, what are the chances that I'll be using it again anytime soon after this class? Other than quals or such things?

I want to try some extended bike rides. I'm definitely at a point where I feel good and warmed up and ready for more after biking between campus and home. So tack on a dozen more miles and there's room for plenty o' fun. Need to figure out some good indiana back roads to ride on. I've also rediscovered another huge advantage of having a well-lubed chain. Not only does it make riding easier and happier, it decreases delays when your chain comes off. It doesn't actually seem to help prevent my chain from coming off (I still need to adjust my front derailleur) but unlike before, I can now convince the chain to go back to where it belongs without getting off my bike. Shift away from the side it came off of, give it some gentle pedaling, and I'm set. Try that with a stiff chain and you're likely to break it.

I wonder if anyone's gonna show up for my office hours. There's no homework due until after break... oh, and apparently this is log entry K/2. woohoo!

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chow mein, bike grips, numerical, and tv blackouts

entry #499, Mon, October 09, 2000, 18:09 (Life in General)

I have rediscovered one of my favorite snack foods: chow mein noodles. I used to eat a lot of those in high school but haven't had any in a long time. They're good. Of course, eating half a cup of them will increase your cholesterol by at least 10%, but that's ok. it tastes good.

i really like my new handle bar grips. they've proven to be better than the ones they replaced (and not only because they're not falling apart like the previous ones were) ... they give amazingly good grip. i could probably dip my hands in grease and still be able to get a good grip on these things. it's the little things in life that make me happy.

i've managed to complete about half the numerical that's due on wednesday, which isn't bad. i've still got this evening and tomorrow. i'm trying to enforce a tv blackout so that i actually get things done. today i did fairly well, i only turned on the tv for half an hour to watch sailor moon. the reason for all this is that i spent all of last night watching the history channel. i love the history channel... but it's a true productivity killer.

we just discovered a leftover egg roll in the microwave. i remember putting one in a couple days ago, but i thought i ate it. apparently not. that's kinda amusing. tacos for dinner. mmmmm... tacos....

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The Butterfly Effect: ThoseLightsWeCallStars

entry #498, Mon, October 09, 2000, 13:05 (Music)

I've had the priviledge of seeing the Butterfly Effect live twice. Once in the Keenan basement, once at senior bar for the whole battle of the bands thing. Both times I enjoyed the performances. So on friday when I was at the Larry Augustin thing, I was sitting next to Ron Garcia, c++ dude extraordinaire, and bassist of the Butterfly Effect. So I don't know what caused me to think of it, but for some reason I remembered that I'd heard rumors that there was going to be a Butterfly Effect CD. So I asked Ron about it, and so today I purchased one from him. It's called "ThoseLightsWeCallStars" (or maybe there's spaces in there, I dunno). A very good deal: 8 dollars, 15 songs. So now I'm listening to it. They play a kind of pop punk. At least that's how I'd describe it. It's quite good. Kinda mellow, but that's not always a bad thing... Musically I really like it, and I can't imagine they had much of a recording budget, so I'm impressed. The lyrics are also quite good. And all the songs on the CD are original. So now not only have I supported a local band, I supported a fellow CS grad student. So everyone go buy one of these!

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stupid lack of soccer

entry #497, Sun, October 08, 2000, 16:45 (Life in General)

So I bike to campus, all psyched to play some soccer, and to my great disappointment I am unable to find the people who were supposed to be playing soccer. grrrrr.... so I went to fitz and answered a couple 232 questions and bugged Brian and George. Then there was a fire alarm. I convinced Brian and George to kick the ball around with me a little while we waited for the fire department people to let us back in. so that was fun. then i biked home again which was fun. it rained for the first half of the trip, and it was rather cold out, but damn the torpedoes, i was gonna enjoy some physical activity today. so i did. i'm slowly beginning to feel good effects from this biking several miles on most days thing. i think i'm gonna try to start hitting the "schlappy" for a half hour or so before going home in the evening.

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silly polls...

entry #496, Sun, October 08, 2000, 14:00 (Sports and Athletics)

well, in the good news category, ND is now ranked #20 in AP. But we fell 4 points shy of being #25 in espn/coaches poll. Which is the biggest discrepancy between the two polls I can remember, tho my memory is short... but oh well, whatever... ND women's soccer improved it's record to 12 and 0 with an 8-0 win at georgetown on friday

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more tv

entry #495, Sun, October 08, 2000, 11:35 (Life in General)

Wooohoo, we now get the history channel. Anne somehow discovered last night that we've now got several more channels in the 46-55 range. Among these are the history channel, vh1, comedy central, and tlc. This makes me quite happy. I just watched a commercial for some kinda car which involved several guys attacking several bears. At the bottom of the screen was the message "Do Not Attempt." which cracked me up. So now if only we got food tv, all would be good.

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various stuff

entry #494, Sun, October 08, 2000, 02:33 (Life in General)

so this morning i woke up and finding myself without any particular options for tailgating, I decide to just stay home until game time. Watched various random football games, had a good sandwhich, then got my gear on and headed for campus. Dropped the bike off at the ssr and then went to the game. Fun game. ND beats Stanford 20-14. Take it, tree. There were several occasions where the officials didn't call stuff against Stanford where I thought they should have, but then again, there was that one occasion with the inadvertent whistle where we got lucky. Our defense did well most of the time, and our offense looked really good during our first drive. Then they just managed to not suck too bad. But we had no turnovers, which was very good. Then I headed home, hung out for a while, replaced the grips on my handle bars, then went to "Remember the Titans" with Anne, George, Brian, and Jill. I found it to be pretty good. A plot which, having been based on a true story, made you think at least a little. Some good football action. And a good number of humorous lines. I enjoyed it. Then we got some beer and food and watched some of the rerun of the ND game on tv. There have been a frighteningly large number of hits to the log tonight from people searching for various hentai-related subjects. But I guess it's saturday night and people need things to do.

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drunken log entry

entry #493, Sat, October 07, 2000, 00:29 (Life in General)

I sobered up enough to bike home. And thus concludes my day. But it's been an entertaining one. I think it started out with me showing up for numerical. Which wasn't fun. Then I talked to various people in the fitz cluster. Talked to Tom Smith about classes and such, talked to Anne Burns about something or other, and I'm sure I encountered some other people. Then at noonish plus a half hour I headed over to debartolo with some people to witness Larry Augustin give the first installation of the ND engineering distinguised lecture series. It was entertaining. Not much more, but that's good enough. Then I wandered aimlessly around fitz for a while, then met with Freeh to talk about some of that research stuff I hear about. Also helped him get his wireless pcmcia card recognized so he can get into the wireless crowd in the department. Then went to proform and picked up a helmet (since i don't trust indiana drivers), a portable air pump, and new grips for my handle bars, just because I can and because my current ones are beginning to deteriorate. Then I hung out at home for a brief while before heading to Rob's. The flag football team I played with for a game was having a celebration of their season. They ended up with a perfect losing season, so some kinda celebration was in order. I learned that I should never try to outdrink Paul Schermerhorn, since he arrived two hours later than I did and still managed to pass me after less than an hour. The trip to Rob's was amusing. I copied down the directions wrong, so I found the street he lived on, but didn't find his house, and was wandering around, and some guy was watching me out of his window, then he went onto his porch and watched me from there for a while. Finally he got onto a bike and rode up to me to ask me what I was doing. "ummm... looking for 19552," I said. He looked at me blankly. "I'm looking for Rob Minerick's house. And, um, Adrienne's" .... so finally he figured out who I was talking about, and apparently decided I wasn't some kinda crook (despite being dressed in all-black bike gear) and pointed me towards their house. I played a lot of darts. I won one game of 501, and lost quite a few other games of various sorts. One of the games I lost I was playing against three other people. All of them were named Rob. So there was a 3/4 chance that Rob would win. It wasn't fair. Office Space was on tv in the background. That movie is amusing. I had a couple hamburgers at some point. Then I played ping pong against Rob 2. (Rob Minerick is Rob 1. Rob 0 is a Rob whose last name I don't remember. Rob 2 is a british post-doc. I think there may be a Rob3). I lost 21-3 in this game of ping-pong. It was sad. But fun anyway. So after convincing people I was ok to bike home I did so. And that's the story thus far. And thus I take my leave.

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The Crested Butte Libertarian

entry #492, Fri, October 06, 2000, 18:17 (Politics)

My parents sent me a copy of Volume I, Number 1 of the Crested Butte Libertarian. It's quite amusing, it makes fun of the stupid socialist politics that prevail in CB. At one point it analyzes the Crested Butte Town Ordinances definition of refuse, which is "Refuse is all putrescible and nonputrescible wastes[sic], ..." and so one of the comments is "The use of 'putrescible and nonputrescible' adds nothing to the definition, but surely opens the way for consideration of 'copacetic and noncopacetic, ...,' as well as for total disrespect for the Law-as-an-Ass." Even better is when the guy uses the term "bureaucRATS" which is funny because the republicans got in trouble for 'sublimnable' messages. So anyway, I'm amused. And happy to see that there's some libertarian types in CB...

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The Ataris: ...Anywhere but here

entry #491, Fri, October 06, 2000, 18:04 (Music)

My new cd arrived! woohoo! It's "...Anywhere but here" by the Ataris. The cover art is a map of part of indiana, centered on indianapolis, with the "...Anywhere but here" across it. I found this amusing. Featuring songs such as "Angry nerd rock" and "Four chord wonder" how can it be anything but good? It features fairly standard simple punk, but i think the bass is pretty good. it's amazing what good bass will do... take rancid. i think they've got really good bass. but anyway, back to the topic at hand... I really like the lyrics. I can definitely associate with them, having been a geek in high school. One song of theirs, which isn't on this cd, is titled "The Last Song I Will Ever Write About A girl" features the line "... and girls are fucking evil" which pretty much sums up my social life in high school (luckily there was skiing, biking and coding so i didn't need a social life) ... so anyway, good lyrics, good music, and the notes include the line "the ataris read 2600" after the thank yous .... mmmm.... geek punk...

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biking gear, lunch, and thoughts on math

entry #490, Fri, October 06, 2000, 12:09 (Life in General)

Got email from Nikki Johnson. Fun to hear from her again.

Today I broke out some of my biking gear. It's starting to get cold and wet, and I think it'd be better if I wore reasonable stuff to bike in and brought a change of clothes with me. So I think I'm gonna go by proform and pick up a helmet (if they have them) since I don't think I am willing to trust indiana drivers in winter conditions. And while I'm there, I might pick up a pump I can attach to my bike frame. I'm also considering looking at how much clipless pedals are. My toe clips are getting to be quite worn. And if I buy the shoes for clipless pedals, I should be able to, in theory, use those if I go home or wherever and rent a real bike. But maybe I should just look into how much new toe clips would cost.

Today for the second straight day I remembered to bring lunch. I wonder where this trend will take us.

I've been thinking about math of late and the process of math education. I'm very disappointed in my math education. I've been taught a lot of stuff that I've forgotten since I've never used it since. And the more I think about it, the more I think that the math I understand best is the math I had to use (and basically learned) in non math classes such as physics and circuits. For some reason applying math makes it easier to learn. I wonder why. But I wish I'd learned more of the math that matters to me. Calculus beyond stuff I learned in calc 1 and 2, and differential equations beyond what I used in circuits have never proven useful to me at all. So if those classes could have been replaced with cool logic, set theory, complexity, or algorithm type classes, I think I'd be much happier with my math education ... grrrrr....

saw George C. yesterday. talked to him about their little soccer games. looks like I'm gonna get to play soccer once or twice a week, which will make me very happy.

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Larry Augustin Rocks

entry #489, Thu, October 05, 2000, 18:08 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Today NDLUG met with Dr. Larry Augustin of VALinux Systems. He's here at ND visiting and giving some lecture tomorrow about software development and the internet. But NDLUG was given 40 minutes of his time, which is cool. It started off well, he immediately told us if we want anything to just ask for it. The rest of the time was spent mainly listening to cool anecdotes and stories of his. Stories of how VALinux began, stories of how sourceforge began (originally they had a project called cold storage. as soon as things showed up on freshmeat, they went into cold storage, or at least that was the theory. get it?), and stories of his time at ND (including rioting because they banned beer on campus). All in all a fun time, he seems like a really cool guy.

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entertainment...

entry #488, Thu, October 05, 2000, 02:37 (Life in General)

so sometime after eight i bike back to campus. woohoo. hang out around fitz for a while, harassing various shady characters... also spent some time looking at obfuscated code with branden moore. fun. then head over to senior bar with arun, perk, george, and bad andy. we run into anne in front of bar. inside, i see arnie! so arnie and i talk it up a bit, catch up on stuff. fun fun. then i find rebecca weber, and we talk pirates for a little while before moving on to discussions of infinity and other fun subjects. then i go to nick's with anne, which was fun. i'd not been to nick's all semester, so it was good to see the place again. and it's always fun to hang with my gymnastics coach. afterwards i helped her remember to get gas and remove a flyer from her windshield. all in all a good night, i think. and my bike is still functioning. i think that's the first time in a while that it's survived a round trip intact. woohoo!

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the bike story continues

entry #487, Wed, October 04, 2000, 18:01 (Life in General)

blah blah blah, flat tires... so today we stopped by proform. i picked up a new tire, a new inner tube, a set of tire levers, and a set of hex wrenches. the last two items were impulse buys of sorts. so i replace my tire and put the new inner tube in. i'm actually ashamed. having no direct comparison until now, i hadn't realized how bad my treads were. but comparing them to the new tire, they're awful. so i think i'm actually gonna replace my front tire too... just because it's the right thing to do. i also realized, when i used my new set of tire levers, what a fool i'd been for not buying some sooner. i used to have a set, and man, they're awesome. they work so much better than the alternatives. so tonite i'm biking to campus for the whole senior bar experience, so we'll see how that goes. i've got a few hours so maybe i'll do some adjusting to various parts of my bike... since i've now got a set of hex wrenches... woohoo!! i think i may need to actually mount my bike lock to my frame so that the pouch i have under the seat can be used to hold tools and such, like it used to before i lost all my old tools... i shall restore this bike to its former glory... yes, i shall.

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mmmmmm..... egg rolls....

entry #486, Wed, October 04, 2000, 17:28 (Life in General)

drool... i made egg rolls for dinner tonite... i love egg rolls... of course, i failed to find sherry at martin's, and i really wanted sherry. any kitchen i regularly use shouldn't be without sherry, but ours is. so i was slightly disappointed in the flavor, because of the lack of sherry. and i should've used more sugar, i didn't compensate for the lack of sherry sweetness. silly fool i am. but that's ok, they turned out good anyway. and we even have soy sauce. so i'll prolly eat a few more later tonite...

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more on them labels as value things

entry #485, Wed, October 04, 2000, 14:18 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

wow, i hadn't actually read the entire details of those labels as value things and didn't notice this until after sending the last entry: "Another use of label values is in an interpreter for threaded code. The labels within the interpreter function can be stored in the threaded code for super-fast dispatching." which strikes me as amusing, because that's exactly why I thought they may be useful. But I think I'll still feel unclean using them...

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obscenity and perversion

entry #484, Wed, October 04, 2000, 14:13 (Life in General)

today i taught cse 232. it was interesting. four juniors showed up and sat in the front row, just because. i got more response than i was expecting which was good... people actually seemed to be paying attention, if nothing else. at one point, when i wanted to demonstrate emacs looking pretty, i pulled open a random piece of code. the first one that came to mind as being big enough to look pretty was execute.c from my shell for os. so i page down to a bit that looks interesting and talk about how pretty the colors are. well, pretty quick i hear people laughing, so i take a closer look at the portion of the code displayed and realize it contains the following comment:


/* fuck fuck fuck i hate the way pipes are handled by the parser */

so i hit page down once more and move on... it was silly, but amusing. i propogandized ndlug, i answered questions, and i got to wear one of them debartolo microphone thingies.

while doing some poking around for some things (mainly trying to figure out this forth thing) i discovered the following gcc extension to the c language: Labels as values... it is an obscene perversion. it is wrong and evil. it may prove useful.

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3rd party debates, 2nd party debates, log stuff, and more

entry #483, Tue, October 03, 2000, 21:55 (Life in General)

last night i saw some 3rd party debates on cspan. harry brown was there, but what really amused me was that John Hagelin, formerly Pat Buchanan's opposition for the reform party, is now the candidate for the natural law party. So the debates last night were between the libertarian party, the natural law party, and the constitution party. it struck me as odd that after all their whining about not getting to participate in the main debates, Nader and Buchanan weren't at these debates. But whatever. i actually saw Buchanan saying something about how if he had as much money as the other guys and if they let him on the debates, he'd be a very viable third candidate, because he has a strong appeal for middle america. i'm not quite sure if i buy that. so on our cable lineup (35 channels or so), 8 channels are playing the presidential debates. that's a lot.

a couple people have asked for the source to my log, so i sent it to them, and have also begun work on making it releasable code. that may take a while, tho... the following log referral was particular amusing. somebody did a yahoo search for "fish tank UFO" and found my log.

Dark Angel is proving to actually be kind of entertaining... I'm impressed. Not enough, tho, to forgive this cameron character for titanic.

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why c++ sucks.

entry #482, Tue, October 03, 2000, 15:09 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

C++, the language that was supposed to bring about world peace, has failed us. Well, ok, by "has failed us" I mean "doesn't let us recursively call main". But g++ allows you to do so, as do all the C compilers with which I've tried to do so. So g++ allowing me to do so is probably yet another thing g++ does wrong (according to the standards, at least) but, the fact that C compilers let me do it is so very right. But does this mean that I've found an instance where C++ is not back compatible with C? And I really don't understand why they would not allow you to recursively call main. In the words of Rich Murphy, "It's just a function. A very, very special function..." ... amen! In other words of Rich Murphy, he asked if anybody had ever called me a pervert for trying to call main recursively. I said not yet, so he says "Consider it done... and a compliment." so I am feeling greatly honored right about now. woohoo!!!

And because they're kinda interesting, here are the error messages when I try to compile this code:
int main(int a, char** v) { return main(a, v); }
CC: Error: Cannot have a recursive call of main().
KCC: error: function "main" may not be called or have its address taken
g++, gcc, and cc all compile the above code without any complaints...

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obfusc8ion, pirates, crypto stuff, arla, forth and wings

entry #481, Tue, October 03, 2000, 13:54 (Life in General)

woohoo! version 2 of yesterday's code is now functional. it features improved pseudo-randomness (thank you discrete math book) and is now 8 lines long instead of 9. I figured most of it out during comp arch but managed to still pay attention. I must say, I think Dr. Kogge uses transparencies better than most. His handwriting is slightly hard to decipher, but that's forgivable, considering how cool it was to derive a superscalar simple 12 architecture in class today. I showed my obfuscated code to a couple juniors and told them my plans for tomorrow. They both decided they'd show up for 232 after seeing the code and what it does. Amusing, that. The new version, along with other obfuscated goodness, is at http://prijks.esgeroth.org/stuff/o/obfusc8/.

Quote from an email from Rebecca Weber that amused me: "... having a conversation with my sister about turning an old Buick into a pirate ship, and boarding other cars at red lights. Arrrrr." She also informed me that the math department may have a cool grad student seminar next week about crypto stuff...

wow. today a cse 232 student came to my office hours for the first time ever. she had some issues with her hw4 grade, but of course the answer, as usual, was "sorry, but the style document says how to do this, and you did it wrong."

helped Dr. Freeh install arla on his machine. arla is goodness. i like arla. talked with him a bit more about forth.

it's tuesday again, which means bw3's! rumor has it my gymnastics coach may even show up. heh heh.

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obfusc8! obfusc8!

entry #480, Mon, October 02, 2000, 21:34 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

the results of 1: pseudocoding during os and 2: implementing during sailor moon are as follows:


void ___(int* __,int _){*__=(3371*_+8773111)%5-2;*__=(*__==_*2)?-_:*__;}


void ____(int *_, int __){*_=(__<=0)?1:-2;}void q(int p,int l){for(;l>0;--l)


putchar(p);}int main(int a, char** v){int m,n,x=(a-1)%19,y=((int)v[0]+1)%19,


i=(a)%3-1,j=(a+2)%3-1,k=0;q(0x08,24*80);q(32,24*80);q(0x08,2480);while(1)


{q(32,1);q(45,19);q(32,1);q(10,1);for(m=0;m<19;++m){q(124,1);for(n=0;n<19;++n){


if(m==x&&n==y)q(42,1);else q(32,1);}q(124,1);q(10,1);}q(32,1);q(45,19);q(10,1);


if(x<=0||x>=18){____(&i,x);___(&j,x-y+j+i);}else if(y<=0||y>=18){____(&j,y);

 ___(&i,k+y+x-i-j);}x+=i;y+=j;if(x<0){x=0;i=(j==0)?1:0;}if(x>18){x=18;i=(j==0)


?-1:0;}if(y<0){y=0;j=(i==0)?1:0;}if(y>18){y=18;j=(i==0)?-1:0;}q(0x08,4280);


q(++k-k,98765);}return 0;}

so hopefully i formatted that properly... eventually maybe i'll add a preview function for adding log entries... so anyway, my plan is to put that on a transparency, put it on the overhead at the beginning of 232 on wednesday morning, point it at a side wall, and tell them if they get bored with my lecture, they can try to figure out that code instead. and maybe point out to them the value of good style.

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woohoo! football!

entry #479, Mon, October 02, 2000, 20:35 (Sports and Athletics)

Well, football was fun. Interesting. I really have no comparison for how this game is supposed to be played, but apparently it was much more physical than it was supposed to be. All the football I've played has been either tackle (which I think is the most fun, but I enjoy abuse) or fairly physical two-hand touch with little rules. But the rules for this game (which were never fully detailed to me) were designed to make this very non-physical. And the other team apparently violated a lot of the rules and played more physical than they should have. So we ended up losing 48-0. But that's ok. I had fun. I need to do this kinda stuff more often. And I got to meet some cheg grad students. I think the team was half cheg grad students and half cse grad students (Paul, Rob, Mike Niemier, and I).

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argh

entry #478, Mon, October 02, 2000, 15:16 (Life in General)

well, after os there was enough pressure left in my tire to make it to the pump at the north end of campus. so after filling my tire there, i was able to make it home. we'll see where this goes from here.

so upon arriving home i start watching "Tony Hawk's Skateboard Tour" on espn2. The show is pretty cool. Tony Hawk, of course, being a god of skateboarding. I've watched a few of these, and they're kinda fun. But they play a lot of music, some punk, some rap, and they always show the name and artist of the song they're playing, which is cool. And they played this really cool punk song today, it was real good, and doh! i wasn't paying attention when they showed the name of the song (they show the name at the beginning of song, before i know that i like the song), so now i want to find a rerun just so i can figure out what that song was.

so the california auto connection (which oddly enough is located in indiana) had some ad on tv, and at the end they showed their address and phone number, along with their little catch phrase: "where the son always shines" which, unless i missed something, is rather amusing, because people really should proof read. The observer had a similar thing today. They used the word "whole" instead of "hole" ... don't they pay people to proofread?

this afternoon: sailor moon, laundry, and some obfuscated code experiments (mainly with ascii characters < 32) because i've not done any of that in a while, and obfuscated code is very therapeutic... then later tonight: flag football. i've allowed myself to be talked into playing for a team that could actually benefit from my presence. normally i'm not a great asset in the game of football, but this team is apparently 0 and 5, and is witnessing a significant player shortage... so we'll have to see how that goes...

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present-o-rama

entry #477, Mon, October 02, 2000, 10:53 (School)

Woohoo! My presentation for 513 is behind me. It went relatively well. As far as speaking goes, it was probably my best public presentation dealy. I think I also had a fairly good organization. But there were a few questions asked to which I didn't know the answer, which sucked. But that's ok.

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what have i done?

entry #476, Mon, October 02, 2000, 07:58 (Life in General)

Where did I go wrong? How have I failed? Why have I lost the favor of the god(s) of biking? Seven years they treated me well. It mattered not what kind of terrain I chose, my bike would survive. It mattered not how bad a spill I took, the injuries were always superficial. But now, they have forsaken me. Four flat tires in two weeks. Before two weeks ago, I think I had a flat tire once. Maybe twice. And now this. This time the hole was very minute, however. Upon waking up and trying to leave, I discover my rear tire is half full. So since it's only leaked half a tube of air, I decide to pump it back to full and to ride to campus, because I need to be on campus. So I make it to campus, and will have to deal with my bike when I'm done here. Grrrr... I think it may be time to replace my rear tire. Every time I've examined it. I've not found anything stuck in it that could be causing this. But at this point I'm convinced there's gotta be something stuck in the tire. So I'll have to see. But now it's time for work.

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the wedding...

entry #475, Sun, October 01, 2000, 22:00 (Life in General)

So the big wedding has finally happened. From what I hear it went really well. A lot of the family showed up. I really wish I could've gone. It's been a long time since I last saw Jenny. So she and her husband are gonna live in CO Springs. And apparently Matt and Mark Peacock will as well. So CO Springs is seeing an increase in the number of Sisson descendants. Interesting. And seeing how it's one of those cities that I'm considering as places to eventually live, that's kinda cool. But this definitely puts a higher weight on the Springs as a place to fly into over Denver. Granted, it's easier to connect to gunnison from Denver, but it's prolly good to have an excuse to see people. And CO Springs isn't too far from CB, relatively speaking... but back to this wedding business. In an email from Alexandra Trifone, she wondered who would be next. Age-wise, I'm third (Jenny's first, then Matt, then me, then Mamie, then a dozen or two more), but I doubt we're gonna follow a strict ordering by age. In fact, I'm almost positive we won't. Maybe everyone except me will... but I'm curious to see who is next ... I think most of us are too young for any weddings to be coming up soon.

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weekend-o-rama

entry #474, Sun, October 01, 2000, 17:44 (Life in General)

it's been a rather nice relaxing weekend. didn't accomplish much, but it's been fun. Anne showed up yesterday after Star Trek and we went to taco bell and then watched american pie.

i also spent a good amount of time yesterday working on my bike. the new patch is holding up, it seems, but i'm not very trusting of my rear tire just because there's been that trend of late. i also cleaned my chain and relubed it, which makes for much better riding. my front derailleur seems a bit loose, tho, i may need to tighten the cable a bit, switching into higher gears is a bit slow. i think i also might readjust my brakes, i think they may be riding my rims just slightly... so more work remains to be done.

I'm really disappointed in the ND bookstore. they don't have transparencies. what's with that? is there no demand for those? oh well, whatever.

broncos are losing to new england. stupid patriots.

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take it rutgers!

entry #473, Sun, October 01, 2000, 15:12 (Sports and Athletics)

woohoo! irish women's soccer is now 11 and 0. They beat Rutgers 2-0. The first half was rather uneventful, Irish were playing against the wind (it was really windy), had no goals, and only 12 shots on goal. Second half was much more fun. We completely shut down Rutgers, they had no shots on goal, Irish had around 30 total shots on goal. The second half was extra entertaining, since I had the added bonus of two middle school girls who were on some local soccer team sitting behind me, giving a very verbose commentary of the game. I actually learned a few things from their comments, which was kinda cool. with the amount of soccer i've watched of late, i'm really beginning to want to play again. need to look into finding people to play with...

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my bad

entry #472, Sat, September 30, 2000, 15:45 (Life in General)

I would like to apologize to germany for my lack of faith in their patch kits. turns out the patch held. actually, it seems there is now another hole in my inner tube. grrrrrr... what is the deal with this? i've checked the rim and the tire carefully. very carefully. i don't see anything that could be poking holes, so i can only assume i'm having very bad luck. but it makes no sense... grrrrrrr.....

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more bike woes and the bathroom protocol

entry #471, Sat, September 30, 2000, 14:33 (Life in General)

Argh. On the way back home last night, it seems my patch gave out. It really doesn't surprise me, since I was amazed that it held in the first place. The instructions in the patch kit were in german, which means it was at least 7 years old, but probably closer to 9... and it's a patch kit designed for road bikes. Mine is one of them mountain bikes. But the patch did at least meet its one real requirement: it allowed me to get to and from campus on friday. Woohoo.

Well, I needed a break from my forth reading, so I decided I needed to do some coding. So I figure I'll do project 3 for OS (which isn't due until october 23). The problem: design a shared memory bathroom which uses semaphores to keep out people not currently allowed in. Time spent: under two hours. I still need to try a few more stress tests, but I think it works. So now I've done one productive thing for school, which I think is my limit for saturdays.

So we went to meijer yesterday evening. in addition to the lasers, I also bought yet another new inner tube, a new patch kit, and chain lube. So the plan for this afternoon is to do more bike work. Hopefully this trend will quit soon. Then tonight I think will witness the wonders of saturday night tv, along with beer and possibly taco bell. Unless I hear of anything better going on.

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lasers! lasers!

entry #470, Fri, September 29, 2000, 21:44 (Life in General)

Woohoo! Lasers! So today I got paid. So at our latest trip to meijer I finally gave in. There are now two lasers in our fish tank. They're awesome. And supposedly they're even good for the fish. But that doesn't really matter. They're lasers. will our fish tank ever reach an even plateau of coolness? or will it just keep getting cooler? only time will tell.

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woohoo! yay ponytails!

entry #469, Fri, September 29, 2000, 21:37 (Sports and Athletics)

Woohoo. Brian, Jill, and I witnessed another ponytail victory! It's gonna be awful hard to compare tonight's game to last sunday's game. As far as the actual soccer is concerned, tonight's game was awesome. We definitely outplayed our opponent (us: 34 shots on goal. them: 2). But our opponent (Seton Hall) was, in my opinion, actually a better team than Pittsburgh. In fact, Seton Hall is 6 and 5, Pittsburgh is like 3 and 7 or something. But that turned out to be their undoing. Pittsburgh didn't even try to play offensive soccer, they kept their entire team in front of their goal. So we had a tough time scoring. Seton Hall, however, had this concept it may be able to do something on offense. That opened up their defense, and allowed us to score six goals on them. So ND is now 10 and 0. Excellent. Other things that worked in favor of this being a good game is that I got a free ND women's soccer poster. However, there were a lot more people at this game than at the last one. Including a lot of young kids. And the kids were entertaining, but it made for a lot of noise. So the game was less relaxing, despite the added entertainment value. And there was a constant long line at the refreshment stand, so I didn't get the hot dog I wanted. grrrr... but I got a poster. For free. So I think I'm really getting into this whole women's soccer scene. I'm gonna try to go to the rest of the home games. woohoo!

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I Win!!

entry #468, Thu, September 28, 2000, 23:01 (Life in General)

epic bike battle
air escapes quickly from tire
pete wins in the end

i think that works... but i'm not too concerned about it either way. so i find patch kit, and begin to look for hole in tube. can't find it. so brian brings home arun's pump (thanks to both of 'em) and i am able to inflate the tube enough to finally find the hole. after three attempts, i give up on trying to patch the tube, it just don't work. bad hole position. so i grab the tube that popped a week ago, find the hole in it, and realize that the hole in that tube is smaller and better situated. the first patch i apply appears to be holding. excellent. we'll see how it does in the morning. but i think i need to pick up another patch kit, i kinda obliterated the one i have. i did a very thorough search of the rim and the inside of the tire and have found no pokey objects, so this entire ordeal seems very suspicious to me but maybe it's just bad luck. or good luck, since i got to spend tonite watching tv (including skateboarding on espn2) instead of being in the lab. woohoo, i looked on the bright side! but the conclusion? i won! i freaking rock!!

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and then life sucks even more

entry #467, Thu, September 28, 2000, 18:08 (Life in General)

argh!!!! so for the second time in two weeks my rear tire has gone flat. Time now to do a super careful search for evil pokey thingies hiding inside the rim. and with any luck i still have a patch kit. otherwise i need to buy yet another tube. grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr... i didn't need this at all.

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cheap energy and abortion pills

entry #466, Thu, September 28, 2000, 16:26 (Politics)

FDA approves abortion pill. The entire concept really scares me. Argh. I don't know what to say beyond that...

I actually saw something on tv (CNN or fox news I think) about alternative energy sources. And then I see these guys advertise coal as a sensible alternative.

I need to try to watch the political debates. Even though (perhaps to the chagrin of a certain proponent of the two-party who reads the log) I plan on voting libertarian, I still want to see what the two guys who actually have a chance of getting elected have to say.

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Pierre!! and more forth.

entry #465, Thu, September 28, 2000, 14:01 (Life in General)

Got some email from Pierre Choucroun today. Excellent. Had some brief correspondence about studying habits and such. Always fun to hear from him.

Apparently the gtk-- api has changed significantly since a year ago. Thusly my forth interpreter no longer compiles. sniff. sniff. but that's ok, i need to tear off the gui anyway. One of the books Kogge lent me is "Threaded Interpretive Languages" and is quite dated. Example: "An operating system or monitor which supports program generation and mofification is presumed to be available." But it is well written and looks to be a good read. The concepts haven't really changed that much. And I do want this interpreter to be small and fast, so what could be a better resource than a book that assumes you have at least 8Kbytes of programmable memory available?

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forth, gigs, laughing, and weddings

entry #464, Thu, September 28, 2000, 13:01 (Life in General)

forth. threaded, interpreted goodness. it makes me feel all warm inside. well, maybe not. but it has been my friend. Dan Diemer and I wrote an interpreter for Programming Languages a year ago. Fun project. Multithreaded (well, a gui thread and an interpreter thread, so only kinda sorta multithreaded), gtk frontend, and the infamous first instantiation of the segfault instruction. Now I am beginning to relive that code while I look into this whole kernel forth interpreter idea. I asked Dr. Kogge about notes from the Prog. Lang. class, and he asked what I was doing, and when I told him he exclaimed "Neat!" which is cool. Dr. Kogge rocks. He gave me three forth books.

ftp.ndlug.nd.edu continues to set records. The 25 gigs on monday seemed like a lot. Well, tuesday we moved 49 gigs and yesterday we moved 50 gigs! wow! yay ndlug!

walking back from lafortune with arun, I was enjoying his explanation of how the Bonanza theme is the chemotherapy of songs, when we heard this girl we were passing start laughing. she'd apparently overheard him and was also quite amused. laughter is good. Loud laughter is better. Really loud laughter is best.

Jenny's wedding is this weekend. Best of wishes to her. Wish I could go. Just about the entire family is going to be there. It'd be fun to see them all again.

And, to improve my mental health (which I've mistakenly allowed to drop below prime), I ordered a cd by the Atari's off cdnow. Yet another band I became familiar with thru mp3's. This cd offers to be very relaxing, featuring songs such as "Angry Nerd Rock" ... mmmm... punk rock... it's funny, tho, because I was talking with Arun about them, and I'd said something about them being a fun little band, but then I realized I didn't know if they were really little or not, so he asked if they were all short, and lo and behold, the Ataris are on a compilation cd called "Short Music for Short People" which is (at least to me) an amusing coincidence... or is it?!?!

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aboriginees and hi-res timing

entry #463, Wed, September 27, 2000, 14:38 (Life in General)

Interesting trend: ever since Cathy Freeman won the 400m at the olympics, I've had several referals to my log from web searches for "aboriginee"... kinda neat.

i'm beginning work on my presentation on the matrix template library for numerical on monday. Luckily I'm allowed to focus more on code and less on math, which is a good thing.

rumors have it that a paper with my name on it is getting published in a journal. cool.

New project (well, fine, revived project) ... high resolution timing stuff. i'm tired of trying to remember which is the best way on architecture x to get hi-res timing. so i think i'll implement c and c++ things that will give me a uniform way of doing this cross-platform. i wrote a c++ class to do this sometime ago, but it only supports solaris and linux/x86.

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blah.

entry #462, Tue, September 26, 2000, 22:55 (Life in General)

argh. afs sucks, and thusly my grandiose plan for "doing stuff" has failed me. so while i wait patiently and watch "afs: Waiting for busy volume 2037869737 (user.ccse_lums) in cell nd.edu" messages (translation: "wank off") scroll by, i waste time reading this "phd" comic which arun was evil enough to send me the url of. And to add injury to insult (literally), my left wrist is finally beginning to cross the threshold from "uncomfortable" to "unbearable" ... i think i need to take a week off from typing. yeah, like that'll happen.

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oit sets a (good) record

entry #461, Tue, September 26, 2000, 13:18 (School)

wow! so earlier today I was corresponding with Annie via email, and she's trying to access ND's online application form, but it's giving her an error. So, being a good big brother (not the 1984 variety, obviously, and definitely not the cbs variety), I file a clarify case. Within an hour, the case was closed, the problem fixed. I am really freaking impressed. Apparently there is still some hope as far as the OIT is concerned... maybe... tho I do have two cases that are about a week and a half short of their first birthday. Which happens to fall on a saturday. hmmm... yeah, like I need an excuse for celebration... On the other hand, it is good to see Annie actively working on the whole application thing. It'd be a lot of fun to have her out here next year. And Alexandra Trifone says ND is her first choice as well. So the second generation of the Sisson invasion of ND may soon begin in full force. Since '94 there has been at least one of us here, two of us since '96, but next year, there could be four of us (counting Mamie at SMC) ... excellent...

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soccer, ftp data, and mac os x beta

entry #460, Tue, September 26, 2000, 11:59 (Life in General)

I love Lesea broadcasting. Channel 46 on the air, channel 11 on the local cable lineup. All Televangelism, almost all the time. It is one of my cures for insomnia. It works well in general. Last night before I went to sleep, I was checking if there was anything cool on tv, and noticed that channel 11 wasn't preaching at me. They were playing the ND women's soccer game from sunday. So of course I had to watch for a while, at least long enough to see the goal we scored. But it was interesting, the stats showed just how much we dominated. We had about 30 shots on goal (I think the exact number was 27 or 28...) while pittsburgh had 1. It's pretty amazing that we only scored one goal.

ftp.ndlug.nd.edu moved more than 25 gigs of data yesterday. A new record by far. The reason for this download feast? RedHat 7 was released yesterday. I suspect today may witness some big stats as well.

I've installed Mac OS X beta on realloc. It is really cool. I'm very impressed. Yay Apple!

CSE 232 has its first test today. Which means grade-o-rama time!!!

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korn sucks! and other thoughts about life

entry #459, Mon, September 25, 2000, 17:47 (Life in General)

I don't hold many grudges. In general, I'm rather forgiving and patient and stuff. But Korn has almost no chance of me ever liking them. It's been four years now since my nd.edu account got mailbombed. I managed to get unsubscribed from almost everything within a day. It wasn't a particularly good mailbombing... but one of the lists I was added to was a Korn mailing list. And I have been unable to get unsubscribed from that list. Part of the problem is I've had trouble figuring out which email address got subscribed to that list. The other part of the problem is that this mailing list is some kind of "mutating" list. From time to time I successfully unsubscribe from some Korn list, but then begin getting mail from some other Korn list. Today I got yet another message from Korn. This one, however, had an unsubscribe link with some sorta key value that uniquely identified which subscriber I was. I hit the link, and a webpage, after asking me to verify my decision, informed me it had unsubscribed me. Only time will tell if it worked. Stupid Korn. I will never enjoy a Korn song, simply because their mailing lists suck. Why did I get mailbombed? Good question. It dates back to my IRC days. For some reason I don't recall, I got banned from a channel, and much to the chagrin of the channel ops, I managed to bypass the ban several times. So they mailbombed me.

Today was a productive day in a non-cs kinda way. I got a visa payment into the mail, and I got some loan deferment forms turned in. The loan thing has been a low-priority thing that's been bugging for some time. I think I'm at a point where paperwork concerns are all taken care of, for now. Which means life is good, because I don't have those nagging worries in the back of my head.

I think tonight's schedule is grading 232 to a background of either monday night football or olympics.

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microsoft is worthless

entry #458, Mon, September 25, 2000, 14:09 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

so just once i am actually trying to do microsoft a favor and use one of their products. you'd think with all the money they have they'd make it easy for me to do so. But no....

Basically, I want to download IE 5.0 for MacOS, just to have it around. But every time I try to download it, the first 5 or so megs come down in under a minute, and from there download speed just falters until the connection just goes bad and I get an error. Just doesn't seem right to me. grrrr..... wasting my time, too. but that's ok.

Dr. Freeh amused me today by drawing a histogram in class to help explain the concept of "optimizing for the common case." I'm not sure at what point that became necessary....

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goooo ponytails!

entry #457, Sun, September 24, 2000, 19:30 (Sports and Athletics)

I decided today to go watch an ND team that is doing well. Irish Women's Soccer team is ranked #1. Actually, a main reason for going was just to spend some quiet time outside. Anne Burns showed up at the end of the first half. We discussed soccer and high school sports and such.

I was rather impressed by our team. They dominated the game. They played Pittsburgh, and the ball spent most of the game on the Pittsburgh side of the field. The only problem I saw was that we have this tendency of kicking the ball straight into the hands of the other team's goalkeeper. But that's ok. We ended up winning 1-0. Our score could've been much higher. So now the Notre Dame women's soccer team is 9 and 0. Props to them. I think I'll try to see a few more of their games.

I'm enjoying watching soccer again, I've seen quite a bit of it lately. The whole olympics thing has given me a good chance to see some, and then the ND game. However, I'm still holding a grudge against the ND men's soccer team. I had some less than ideal experiences with members of that team my freshman year (including my first roommate) and even though they're probably all graduated by now, I'm still not willing to go to their games. Besides, the women's team is #1, the men's team isn't.

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minesweeper is np-complete

entry #456, Sun, September 24, 2000, 19:14 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Rebecca Weber invited me to a math department graduate student seminar. The talk was titled "Minesweeper is NP-complete" and was pretty cool. It started out pretty funny, because I got to witness thirty-plus math grad students try to figure out how many pizzas to order for themselves. It was very amusing. The guy then began his talk. He first went over P, NP, and NP-completeness, then briefly talked about minesweeper. Then came the cool part: the proof that minesweeper is NP-complete. He defined the general minesweeper problem, and then, in the math/algorithms equivalent to a cool hack, reduced the boolean satisfiability (SAT) problem (which is NP-complete) to the general minesweeper problem. Basically, since all logic gates can be represented by AND and NOT, we show how to use minesweeper boards as logic circuits. First, the minesweeper wire (or identity circuit or whatever):

000000000000000
111111111111111
 1  1  1  1  1 
111111111111111
000000000000000

So what we do is the middle line is the one that matters. The first 1 in the middle line is the "input" 1 and the last 1 is the "output" 1. So we define false as left of the 1, and true as right of the 1. So if you work out, based on the rules of minesweeper, where the bombs are, the above minesweeper board just propogates a truth value. Next, a NOT gate:

00001110000
11112*21111
 1  3 3  1
11112*21111
00001110000

I won't bother trying to draw an AND gate, because it is obscenely large minefield, but basically, it was a cool presentation. minesweeper is np-complete.

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really long log entry

entry #455, Sun, September 24, 2000, 18:25 (Life in General)

So apparently that last log entry didn't get mailed out because I was mistaken in my assumption that the domain name had returned. So since I haven't heard from Tony in some time, so I've switched back to using the register.com servers. The reason I initially switched away from those was the whole lack of an interface to edit mx entries, but those have been added since then. So there's no reason not to use the register.com servers. Hopefully all will be well once the change propogates. In the mean time, if the log readers want to read about why cartoon porn has fewer levels of indirection than real porn, they'll have to check the webpage for entry 454.

Sailor Moon yesterday witnessed a huge battle between good and evil. It was interesting. The plot has been building up to this for quite some time now. Today's episode wrapped up the rest of the plot line, so I'm curious to see where the show is going to go after this. One line that amused me particularly for some reason was "You give up yet your non-highness?"

A box arrived yesterday from home. It included various random things I forgot/didn't have room to pack. Among them, my copy of the first three volumes of Knuth and a supersoaker watergun. Yay!

TA'ing wasn't all that exciting, although there were a lot of questions. After locking up the dropbox and so forth it seems that there were a lot of late nights for the sophomores. After TA'ing Brian and I went to meijer and bought supplies for saturday. We also picked up string cheese and threw a few of those into the deep fat fryer which worked less well than we hoped, but was still fun.

Watched some rollerblading on espn2. I found it rather amusing that one of the tricks the bladers were doing was apparently called the "pornstar" ...

This whole oil thing is interesting to me. It doesn't affect me very much, at least not directly, but it really strikes me as odd that people aren't looking at non-oil based solutions more than they are. I think that there is especially an undeserved paranoia of nuclear power. We are too dependent on other countries for oil, and nuclear power, in general, seems to me to be cheaper, cleaner, and more efficient. But we've not built any nuclear plants in a long time. But what do I know? I'm just a computer scientist, not any sort of political or energy expert.

And, to keep up on the news that really matters, I figured I'd include a few news briefs that I found rather amusing:

Clinton, others guilty of war crime
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) - A Belgrade court found President Clinton and other world leaders guilty of war crimes and sentenced them - in absentia - to 20 years in prison for NNATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. The four-day trial was held in an attempt to resurrect anti-NATO sentiment here and win votes for President Slobodan Milosevic ahead of Sunday's elections. Belgrade's district court pronounced Clinton and 13 other leaders and NATO officials "guilty as charged" and ordered warrants be issued immediately for their arrest. Court-appointed lawyers were hired to represent the defendants. As each 20-year sentence was read out separately, the crowd behind a row of 14 empty chairs bearing nameplates of the accused, stood and applauded.

Bees could help in alcoholism fight
STILLWATER, Okla. (AP) - Honey bees and humans have at least one thing in common: They both drink alcohol, and researchers want to know whether the insects can be used to test drugs designed to curb alcoholism. Some animals have to be injected or tricked into consuming alcohol, but not bees. In studies, honey bees harnessed on a small metal holder consumed solutions with various levels of ethanol. "We can even get them to drink pure ethanol, and I know of no organism that drinks pure ethanol, not even a college student," said Charles Abramson, a comparative psychologist at Oklahoma State University. Research could determine within a few months whether bees are suitable subjects that would allow drug companies to use fewer vertebrates in the first line of drug testing, Abramson said.

Dying prohibited in Riviera town
PARIS (AP) - Renowned for its breathtaking scenery, pine trees, rocky coastline and a clear blue Mediterranean Sea, the Riviera town of Le Lavandou is drawing headlines for a new local law that makes dying a grave offense. The town's only cemetery is full, and the project for a new one near the coast was rejected earlier this month by a regional court, which ruled that the plan violated a law on sea shore constructions. Facing the lack of cemetery space, Le Lavandou, 25 miles east of Toulon, on Tuesday passed a law: "It is forbidden without a cemetery plot to die on the territory of the commune." Currently, 19 people are awaiting a final resting place.

And finally some humor from fortune: "How do I love thee? My accumulator overflows."

An interesting friday night follows. After watching olympics for a while (platform diving is really cool) I go to Anne's and have milkshakes and watch "High Fidelity" with her and Annie. It was a rather amusing movie, had some very good moments. After that I went to some party on St. Pete's street with them. That was kinda interesting. Lisa showed up at that so I talked with her a bit... returned home at about 1:30 am.

Saturday: game day. Wake up, watch some football on tv, do some cleaning. People show at 2:30ish. Lisa, Dog, Arun, Siek, Katie Moor, Jill and a friend, and Anne all showed up. Other than the outcome of the game, everything went well. Dog and Brian had fun with the grill. I won't speak about the game.

Bummed around a while, then headed to Anne's birthday party. Hung around for a little while, but Brian and I were really not into the whole party scene, so we returned home. My neck is apparently out of shape: it's really sore from the small amounts of "hardkore" dancing I did last night.

with the esgeroth.org name having returned to functionality, I've been seeing a lot of log hits again, most of which were, as usual, referred by various searches related to "hentai" or "porn," including a very disturbing search for "Harry Potter Hentai" ... but there were also a few less disturbing searches for things such as "notre dame cheerleader pictures," "Sisson Family Virginia," "'sheet music' 'american beauty' download piano'," "Horrid Bills," "water gun fight bikini fun," "Cambodian dessert," "Denver and Stupid," "tube train video download," "log books for truck driving," and many more... My log has certainly proven to be a good source of entertainment for me, if nothing else.

olympics: women's soccer... usa beats brazil 1-0. USA! USA! USA! the best part about watching the game was they've showed the clip from the world cup with Brandi Chastain taking off her shirt several times already...

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stuff

entry #454, Thu, September 21, 2000, 12:29 (Life in General)

So the death toll for the whole Firestone tire thing has been adjusted from 103 to 101. Apparently two of the deaths in the higher number were pets.

due to some dns problems, esgeroth.org has been unavailable since tuesday. grrr... but not it's back and i can write more worthless stuff.

The whole bw3's thing was interesting on tuesday. Chris Sanabria and David Rink were among the legions of us that showed up.

I've been enjoying the whole olympics thing, even if it isn't live. i find the gymnastics especially entertaining. unfortunately the american gymnasts haven't been doing so well...

Em stopped by tuesday night, checked out the fish and the rest of the place...

wednesday morning didn't start out to well, had to deal with a student lecture in numerical. the slides were written in a 12 point font, which made them pretty much impossible to read. grrr...

Things got better after that as I headed over to industry day. Found Em at the scitor place and got some toys from her. Didn't get many other toys... got a motorola tshirt and a weird ibm thing. Had promising talks with IBM, HP, and Motorola... I only had three resumes with me ... but I definitely want to do some kind of internship/real world thing after i get my masters...

then got lunch at lafortune with Paul and Alice, then went to OS, then decided to go home to do laundry. As I was getting ready to leave, Paul pointed out that I was in fact probably going home to watch Sailor Moon. So of course I admit that it's certainly a motivating factor. So somehow Rob and Paul got talking about Sailor Moon being cartoon porn, and Rob starts trying to explain how cartoon porn adds another level of indirection. He starts drawing on the dry erase board explaining his theory:

             .--------------.
     .------>| cartoon porn |-------.
dude         `--------------'      .v-----.
     `-----------------------------| porn |----> woman
                                   `------'

well, Paul doesn't agree, because he says cartoon porn doesn't point at real porn, because it doesn't represent a real woman. So he modifies the drawing:

             .--------------.
     .------>| cartoon porn |
dude         `--------------'      .------.
     `-----------------------------| porn |----> woman
                                   `------'

but this doesn't seem quite right to me, so I take my turn at the whole thing:

                                               .-- Forms --.
             .--------------.                  |           |
     .------>| cartoon porn |------------------+-.         |
dude         `--------------'.------.          |  -> woman |
     `-----------------------| porn |-> woman--+-'         |
                             `------'          |           |
                                               `-----------'

So, using Plato's whole theory of forms thing, I managed to prove that cartoon porn actually had less indirection than real porn. Paul, having a masters in philosophy and all, agreed that I was right. So I won. It was a rather worthless way to spend some time, but it was entertaining.

So anyway, I came back home, did laundry, watched sailor moon, watched and kind of participated in some weird interactive thing the cartoon network was doing. it was kinda cool, it involved shockwave, but i lost interest after about 5 minutes...

Senior bar was entertaining. There were a lot of people there. Em and I arrived shortly after 10, it was empty. A little later we find Tim (physics grad student) and several friends of his. So we talk with them for a while, which was fun. Then Jeremy Siek and Mike Niemier show up, followed by Arun, Perk, Brian, Lisa, and I don't know who else. Then George C., Tim Brick and a bunch of other people from that crew show up, including Rebecca Weber. Her and I spend quite a while discussing various fun math and computability stuff, along with discussing life as a TA and such. Fun. Finally at about 1 Brian and I took off. Biking home was fun.

Today I failed to wake up. doh! oh well. I need to be here between noon and 3 because today is the last time UPS is going to try to deliver a package. Then tonight I need to TA. we'll see how that goes...

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broken bikes and comic strips

entry #453, Tue, September 19, 2000, 12:19 (Life in General)

from the "i totally forgot to mention this" section: my stupid bike got a flat tire. I rode it to the game on saturday, and when i returned to it (i left it in the ssr like i always do on game days...) its rear tire was flat. grrrr... so i walked it to the air pump on the north end of campus, filled it up, and managed to get home before the tire was empty again. so we went to meijer and i bought a new tube and life seems to be back to normal now...

due to the fact that 1. i'm really tired, 2. i need to be in the ssr right now for office hours, and 3. my left wrist hurts so i don't want to type much, i have started reading internet comics again. arun sent me the link to exploitation now, which amuses me to no end with lines like this one: "Oh sweet baby Jesus, I'm a female anime-type character and I'm being attacked by tentacles!! That means there's only one thing that could happen next!!"

cse 232 grading was much easier this week than last, and i think the sophomores will be slightly happier with their grades. next week looks painful, tho, as far as grading goes.

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log updates

entry #452, Mon, September 18, 2000, 18:50 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Vast improvements have been made to log functionality!! Well, sorta. I've finally implemented a "privacy" feature. Each entry has a privacy level associated with it (0 being public) and every user has a privacy level. Then whenever an entry is made, it is only mailed to those users who have privacy level greater than or equal to the level of the entry, and those entries only show up on the webpage for users who are logged in and have a high enough privacy level. I don't know how often I'm going to use this feature, but it's fun to have around... All current subscribers of the log have been given privacy levels greater than 0 (but less than the maximum), so they can consider themselves honored if they like.

the other new feature is comments. registered users can now add comments to log entries if they feel so inclined. why? because i can. currently a web interface is the only way to add comments, but i'm planning on adding a means by which subscribed log users can respond to log mailings and have those responses show up as comments... but i think i'll set it up so that the default action upon a response to an entry is still to send the response to me, only after the user adds some kinda magic line to the response does it add it as a comment instead...

so now there are two new benefits to being a registered user beyond the mailing list. . ...

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arla rules

entry #445, Sun, September 17, 2000, 14:42 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

it should be well known to just about everyone that i'm a rather lazy person. so typing passwords isn't something i like doing when i can avoid it. which is why i love ssh-agent so much... but the problem with ssh and afs is if you don't have a token locally you have to klog at the other end if you want to use afs. well, on realloc i run arla when i'm in fitz and have high speed networking... but i don't want afs mounted when i'm at home, because that'd be slow. but i want an afs token so i don't have to klog when i log into afs machines... so Brian and I think about it a bit, and using arla, if you insert the arla module and start the arla daemon, but don't actually mount /afs, you can klog locally and have a token that ssh can pass to other machines. which makes life good. very good. laziness is awesome.

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more comments on the game

entry #444, Sun, September 17, 2000, 13:35 (Sports and Athletics)

a few more comments on the game that i forgot to make: although not quite as loud as at nebraska, i think the student section did well. it was also nice to see the rest of the stadium holding more nd fans. and finally, i think every student on this campus owes Nick Setta a beer.

In general, I think the student section is doing well this year, it feels a bit more energetic than it has in some of the previous years. Which is good. I don't know who #90 on defense is, but he's quite good at getting the crowd into it. The team definitely needs that.

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stupid code tags

entry #443, Sun, September 17, 2000, 13:09 (Life in General)

Ahh, life ain't so bad. but i have decided that its in my own best interest that i don't anger the u.s. women's swim team. having been watching some of the olympics, i've seen just how huge those women are. they could all easily kill me.

the code in that last log entry came out mangled because i forgot that the code tag doesn't behave quite like the pre tage. oh well. look at the source if you want to see it properly formatted.

Anne and I went and bought forties yesterday. Then at four we were dissapointed to be the only people to be there at four, but we went forward. Brian and Arun showed up late, bearing a table, and George finally showed up at close to five. I greeted him with "It's forties at four! not forties at four-fifty!" ... but we had fun... later we ordered pizza and watched the olympic opening ceremony. the director of the notre dame band arranged and composed the music for the parade of nations, which is really cool. then we wandered over to Lisa's place for a birthday celebration of sorts. it started out slow, but Em showed up which was really cool. My head wasn't feeling to well though, and caffeine didn't help much, so I left fairly early... was asleep before two, and failed to wake up until after 11.

The game: get there later than usual, but find Paul and Rob and Adrienne and get seats with them. What a game. The first quarter was so much fun... blocked punts, interceptions, recovered fumbles. But since our offense wasn't doing much (mainly because the coaches were being way to conservative) the defense ended up spending way too much time on the field and just started looking tired... but they closed down the purdue offense just enough to allow us to kick a fieldgoal as time runs out to win the game. wow. silly freshman decided to rush the field. I didn't think the game was quite that critical or whatever, but whatever makes them happy... The halftime show was pretty cool, they had excerpts of the olympic music written by our own band director guy. the coolest thing is that he missed the opening ceremony at the olympics to be at nd to do this halftime show. that's love.

We went to meijer and picked up a grill! so we're grilling for the michigan state game next weekend. after that i spent the rest of the evening watching all sorts of fun college football. Southern Mississippi (#25/NR) beat Alabama (#15/#13) 21-0. Amazing. Alabama, now 1-2, has since dropped out of the polls, which opens up room for us. Stanford, not ranked at all, beat Texas (#5/#6 at the time, #15/#15 now) in an amazing game. Stanford still isn't ranked, but they did receive points, and this helps our strength of schedule quite a bit, since right now the only ranked opponents we have left are michigan state and usc. Michigan State barely escaped from Missouri, which is good, because they stayed ranked. But they didn't look good at all, which gives me hope for next weeks game. In other fun news, UCLA beat Michigan. Take it Michigan!

ND goes up in the polls! We are now #16 in AP, #18 in ESPN/USA Today/Coaches. Purdue dropped to #21 in AP, #21 in Coaches. They really didn't look to impressive in their first real game. They made a lot of mistakes. They finally were able to make plays against our defense simply because our defense spent almost 20 minutes of the first half on the field without much in the way of breaks... and they had the officials on their side.

today looks like another typical sunday: football on tv, and homework. today's focus: numerical methods.

Jane (CS grad secretary) informed me a few days ago that her mother lives in 2219 Coachmans Trail, which is right next door to us. So she informed her mother that the guys living next to her are nice cse student guys, so today Jane's mother came over to say hi and brought us cookies. She seems like a very nice woman. We told her if she ever needs help with anything to come by. She also says that we've not been too loud or anything, which is good to know.

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stupid bind.nd.edu

entry #442, Fri, September 15, 2000, 14:20 (Life in General)

so bind.nd.edu once again lost the esgeroth.org domain names for a day. so because of this a log entry made yesterday didn't get mailed out.

ta hours yesterday were unexciting, i got my block size counter stuff finished for comp arch, and i made a good deal of progress on my shell. i made the unhappy discovery that unsetenv, which is a handy-dandy library call in linux, apparently doesn't exist on solaris. so, i had to replace this line of code:


 unsetenv(c->args[i]);

with this:


 for (i = 0; i < c->nargs; ++i) {
   for (j = 0; environ[j]; ++j) {
     for (k = 0; environ[j][k] == c->args[i][k]
                 && c->args[i][k] != '\0'
                 && environ[j][k] != '=' 
                 && environ[j][k] != '\0'; ++k);
     if (environ[j][k] == '=' && c->args[i][k] == '\0') {
       t = environ[j];
       while (environ[j+1]) {
         environ[j] = environ[j+1];
         ++j;
       }
       environ[j] = environ[j+1];
       free(t);
     }
   }
 }

Of course, there may be an easier way, but I couldn't find it...

Went to cheers with arun and george. Katie Moor had asked me as I was leaving to have two beers for her (she was too busy with her shell to have them herself). Naturally I had to have at least one for myself. Arithmetic tells us that I need to drink at least three beers. Sometimes I love arithmetic. Especially when it tells me to drink. Of course, we only spent about an hour at cheers, so I had to be quick. At about midnight we return to fitz, and Brian, Katie, and Tom Smith are still working on their shells. I help out a bit, cuz I'm a nice guy, even when buzzing. Then we return home.

Numerical this morning was not exactly fun, because I was tired. Then I return to the ssr, do some 232 stuff, and finish up my shell. Well, I still need to stress-test it. Milky Way and Dr. Pepper for lunch, encounter Tom in the lab, help him some more with shell stuff, talk about life as fresh cse grad students. go to os. Lisa now has green contacts. Nifty.

Anne and I are attempting to arrange some kinda celebration of olympic dreams. So I must go awaken her in the student center now. We'll see how that goes...

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angering the sophomores

entry #441, Thu, September 14, 2000, 14:47 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Wow... my decision to use a float as an input test for the timecard program in the latest 232 assignment has really created an uproar amongst the sophomores. It amazes me how much whining they are doing about three points. But what can I do but reply to each inquiry and tell them they're not getting the points back...

I wish they would realize I'm doing them a service by teaching them a lesson: don't make assumptions about your input. So many bad things happen because of assumptions about input. But it seems that people are more concerned about their grades than about actually becoming good coders...

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senior bar and such

entry #440, Thu, September 14, 2000, 01:33 (Life in General)

blah blah blah... listening to the de_css mp3 again. it cracks me up.

the shell is almost done. need to implement nice, fix unsetenv (stupid solaris not having the unsetenv library call), and where. yeehaw.

brian and i went to senior bar tonight. nobody else showed up, but now we've got this years cups. with the cups we've inherited from jeff, we should have quite a collection of senior bar cups by the time we finish off this whole school thing.

We ordered a notre dame flag for the apartment. woohoo.

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dramatic readings of code

entry #439, Wed, September 13, 2000, 19:18 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/ ... wow, it amazes the formats that people have thought up for spreading the decss source code. I listened to the "dramatic reading" of the source and was quite amused. and impressed by the patience of whoever read that. perhaps dramatic readings of code will catch on as an art form... probably not, tho.

The shell has come alive. It's amazing how well progress goes when you sit down and actually code. I have gotten most of the builtins working (and, in the tradition started by dan diemer and i in our forth interpreter for programming languages, added a "segfault" shell builtin), basic command execution, and i don't know what else... right now i'm being frustrated by the parser Freeh gave us and am still considering writing my own... but it's probably not worth my while...

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woohoo! welcome back dagger

entry #438, Tue, September 12, 2000, 23:33 (Life in General)

now dagger is back up. which means i'm likely to be flooded with email. so i figure i'd help the situation by throwing more mail into the spool. then i will go to sleep. but the damage to my trust in dagger.nd.edu has been done.

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the reform party saga

entry #437, Tue, September 12, 2000, 23:08 (Politics)

wow. The FEC has apparently decided that Pat Buchanan is the Reform Party nominee and are giving him the money, 12.6 million dollars. Does this mean the end of the reform party? Probably not. I doubt tho, that they're gonna find themselves elligible for the money next time around. I think we may also see a new party start. Possible names? "The Reformed Reform Party" ... "The New Reform Party" ... "The Real Reform Party" ... who knows... Of course, there's gonna be appeals. I think the only real important result of this is how it will affect the two main candidates. With 12 million dollars, Buchanan could do some damage to Bush.

In other news, the two main candidates are being silly. The recent "Rats" ad is kinda funny, but it also amuses me how strongly the democrats are reacting.

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232 fun, oit non-fun

entry #436, Tue, September 12, 2000, 22:49 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Fun fun fun. Today I hacked atlantis.cc a bit, adding some extern "C" wrappers for some of the functions so that it doesn't generate warnings with CC. The warnings were scaring the sophomores.

Grading today took too long. And there's still some issues. Need to talk to Ramzi tomorrow.

Need to begin the process of the whole kernel forth interpreter. Two main issues I need to think about: how to load the forth code into the interpreter, and how to make it do streaming stuff. I'm not sure how well forth actually lends itself to that. But either way, I'll write a simple forth interpreter for the kernel first, and even if those ideas don't go anywhere, I can still put that up on a webpage somewhere just as a cool hack.

The OIT is seriously having a bad day. ns.nd.edu was down a long time. dagger.nd.edu is apparently hosed and won't be up until at least tomorrow. now the good news is that i forward all my mail to wizard, so i can still check my mail. the bad news is that mail that gets sent to [email protected] can't get forwarded because, well, dagger is down. But anything sent to [email protected], prijks@*.helios.nd.edu, [email protected] and other such addresses is fine. So I've changed my pine setup so that my "From: " line says [email protected] instead of [email protected]. Now I'm going to update webpages and such and replace [email protected] with [email protected]. Just out of principle... I want less dependence on the OIT. So if any of you log subscribers have a pine alias for me or something, I ask that you change my address to [email protected] ...

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lots o' music

entry #435, Tue, September 12, 2000, 00:10 (Music)

Perk has apparently experienced a less than ideal day. Sorry perk. Today's been decent for me. I woke up in a panic, thinking I was going to be real late for class, but discovered that I had somehow managed to set my alarm clock forward an hour while half asleep. The rest of the day was mediocre, although I did get arla running on realloc. Then the day took a significant swing towards good: my CD's came. I now have eight new cd's. On the other hand, our microwave we inherited from Squyres died yesterday, but we've already picked up a replacement. We also went shopping and got egg roll wraps! yay!

Now I'm playing the excellent "trying to get stuff done" game. But it's slow going because it took 20 or so minutes to finally get dialed into nd. grrrr... but I'm listening to my new music. And so it goes:

"Reggae Dancer" by Inner Circle. This CD was a complete impulse buy. I've been meaning to increase the amount of Reggae I own, but all I knew about Inner Circle was that they were responsible for the theme song for the television show Cops. This cd doesn't feature that song, but I was initially excited to see a track called "Whip It" but it turned out not to be a cover of the Devo song of the same name. But the CD is a nice collection of mellowish Reggae. A good buy. I don't really have much more to say about it.

"Ska Island" ... a compilation by Island Records that I knew little about. It features The Skatalites, The Toasters, Fishbone, Hepcat, The Trojans, and many more. A good mix of ska. It's pretty mellow, but you need some mellow ska from time to time. There are several songs with interesting non-language vocal effects.

"Tragic Kingdom" by No Doubt. I already have a lot of the songs off this CD on mp3 and have been meaning to buy it for quite some time. I like a lot of the songs on this one... I also have their first CD, which is good, but I have a hard time listening to, it somehow fails to hold my attention. But this one doesn't have that problem. I do feel rather concerned for the band, tho. Their latest album, off of which I've only heard a couple songs, shows signs of musical maturing, which is rarely a good thing. But that doesn't affect the quality of this CD.

"Modified" by Save Ferris. This CD gave me a serious scare. Track one starts out with some scratching. Next, I see in the credits something about "Strings arranged by..." Am I imagining this? strings? scratching? Has Save Ferris done the whole musically maturing thing? Say it ain't so! But although their style has changed some since "It Means Everything" (a VERY good CD), I think I can deal with it. There are a few songs that aren't really ska (or reggae) at all, and their beat on the ones that are is in general more reggae-ish. I think a few more listens and I will really like this CD. I mainly just need to overcome the shock. It has some really good songs that I liked immediately, and some songs that should grow on me.

"Enema of the State" by Blink 182. Wow, popular music. But as usual, I don't want to let popular culture effect my choices, and to that effect, I won't like something because it's popular, but I also won't dislike something because it's popular. Or at least that's what I try to do. This is a fun CD. Good punk, tho frequently "mellow." Some songs with lyrics that may actually have significance, a lot of songs that are just kinda fun and silly. Mamie has this CD, and I've got several songs off it on mp3, so I already know it pretty well, but I'm glad to finally own it myself. "What's My Age Again" is just a brilliant song. It cracks me up.

it's sleepy time. so a quick summary of what's left: The singles collection by The Specials. Good CD. Haven't listened to this one yet, but I've already heard it before. It's good second-wave ska. mmm... two-tone. "Slowly Going the Way of the Buffalo" by MxPx. More fine MxPx music. They never disappoint. Rhyme, Rhythm, and Reggae ... this one was a freebie, and I have no idea what to expect from it. Only time will tell...

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silly pete

entry #434, Mon, September 11, 2000, 11:50 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

so of course i forget that if i send stuff in text/html, newlines won't show up. need them pesky <> thingies...

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mmmm.... doughnuts

entry #433, Mon, September 11, 2000, 11:45 (Life in General)

The deep fat fryer has been christened, as such. I made doughnuts yesterday. They turned out pretty good, I was worried that my use of nutmeg and cinnamon had been... excessive... but they are yummy. I didn't have any powdered sugar or i'd have made a simple glaze for them as well... oh well.

props to arun for a cool mailx hack. of course, since my log talks directly to sendmail, i don't need to be as hackish as he does. i've set up the log to be mailed out as text/html for now, i apologize to those who don't have text/html-enabled mail readers. i'm working on a text/plain solution using lynx -dump. keep your eyes open for that.

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no!!!!!!!

entry #432, Sun, September 10, 2000, 17:34 (Sports and Athletics)

Battle may be out for the season.

not good. not good at all.

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they love us!

entry #431, Sun, September 10, 2000, 15:16 (Sports and Athletics)

wow, so apparently if you can manage to be tied with the #1 team in the country after regulation, you can go up in the polls despite a loss. In the coaches poll we went from #25 to #23, in the AP poll we went from #23 to #21. that's not at all bad...

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responsibility

entry #430, Sat, September 09, 2000, 23:32 (Music)

a burger king commercial just played. i'm disappointed with how long it took me to hit the mute button, i had to listen to at least 3 or 4 seconds of backstreet boys. argh.

but not all music that's coming out these days is crap. my new mxpx cd arrived. "the ever-passing moment" ... the dudes have been making their sort of punk rock for like 7 or so years now. and although i'd heard the song "responsibility" before getting the cd, and found the song to be quite good, i was worried that, since i saw the cd prominently displayed at best buy, mxpx had done some sort of "musical maturing" which is always a BAD thing. so i was worried i wouldn't be happy with the rest of the cd. but my worries were unfounded. the cd proved to be more of the mxpx i know and love. the same mixture of "mellow" punk songs and energetic punk songs like responsibility, and the same mix of songs with social commentary and songs about love and such. although it does seem to me that the ratio of social commentary songs to love songs is higher on this disk than on previous. overall, i'm quite happy with the cd. it's good you can still count on some things like MxPx.

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so close... and yet so far...

entry #429, Sat, September 09, 2000, 22:50 (Life in General)

it's been an interesting time... Woohoo, thursday night I finally gave in: Iron Chef South Bend (Arun coined the term, Rich approved it, so I feel justified in using it) now has a deep fat fryer. Purchased at about half past midnight, along with various other random things. then i returned home and made waffles. soon, tho, i shall have to make donuts so the fryer can be put to use.

friday was an interesting day. had a few meetings, had a few classes, got x working better on malloc, dealt with oit bogosity on networking issues with malloc, then picked up alcohol from brian's parents. then went to lafortune, where i learned that the nrq show had been cancelled due to weather. that was a definite bummer. so i met Linda and Alexandra, showed them the ssr, then went to pep rally, which was entertaining. then the event at our apartment. it was entertaining. some violence. anne and i had an odd session of gymnastics outside followed by a discussion of various things that was ended by a desire for waffles. i finally make it to sleep at about 4.

saturday, game day!! wake up after noon, head for campus. didn't see any of the ssr grad students i'm supposed to sit with at the stadium, but found branden moore somewhere close to where my seats are supposed to be, so i sat with him. the game...

we lost, but the game was freaking awesome!! i mean, we were tied with the number 1 team after four quarters! my throat hurts. but it was a lot of fun. the crowd was awesome. when i first entered the stadium i was quite worried by the number of red shirts... i think the alumni and students who sold their tickets to nebraska fans need to be tracked down and shot. traitors. but it wasn't so bad after all, it just looked it because red is so ... primary...

but i must say, davie angered me. first of all, we've made like two passes all game, and on fourth and one we throw??? what?!?! and then what was that whole deal with having a minute and a half left, two timeouts, and we let time run out? argh! our offense didn't impress me much, but defense and special teams just rocked! wow.

saw laura antkowiak on my way out of the stadium. fun. met linda and alexandra again after the game. grabbed some food at lafortune, then went to the jacc and watched the volleyball team play ucla. then went back to smc with them, visited mamie, and, after fixing some things on her computer, returned home. now i'm watching voyager, and am looking forward to the goodness which is saturday night tv. and i need to read all the email that's gathered since last night.

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it's all about mocking perk's sunglasses

entry #428, Thu, September 07, 2000, 22:37 (Life in General)

Questions asked while TA'ing tonight: 4. One of which was about printing. The OIT is kinda (well, more than just kinda) screwy, and LPDEST wasn't being set on the machine the guy was logging in to. I dunno what's up with that... Other things accomplished tonight: bugged perk, updated cse 232 style doc and web page, played with the atlantis thingy, did some work on shade stuff for adv. comp. arch, added some minor pointless features to the log web page. Also realized that I've not gotten my ACM newsletters/magazines in some time, so I went to acm.org and updated my mailing address so they quit sending them to keenan hall.

Linda Trifone (Aunt) and Alexandra Trifone (cousin) showed up in South Bend today. Alexandra is doing the whole prospective freshman thing, which I'm sure will be fun. They're going to the game on saturday. they've also invited Mamie and I to dinner friday night. They're going to meet me at fieldhouse mall at 5 tomorrow, which should be interesting. I wonder what their impression of nrq will be.

8 of the cd's i've ordered shipped yesterday. those are: "Reggae Dancer" by Inner Circle, "Rhyme, Rhythm, and Reggae" by various artists, "Ska Island" by various artists, "Modified" by Save Ferris, "Slowly Going the Way of the Buffalo" by MxPx, "Enema of the State" by Blink 182, "Tragic Kingdom" by No Doubt, and "The Singles Collection" by The Specials. The last three are albums I have heard and know I like, the MxPx and Save Ferris ones are ones I've not heard, but by bands I like, and the first three are pretty much random purchases, all I know about Inner Circle is that they do the song "Bad Boys" which is featured on the television show "Cops." I'll post detailed reviews once those cds arrive.

It seems a "party" or "social gathering" of some sorts will occur at our place on friday. it promises to be interesting, if nothing else. this is looking like a decent weekend: nrq show, relatives, party, football game, and whatever else ends up happening...

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afs space galore!

entry #427, Thu, September 07, 2000, 18:44 (School)

The OIT, for once, has proven to be quick and efficient! I put in my request today for more space, and within a few hours I got a message saying that my request had been granted. I have now triple the space I used to, I've gone from 400 megs to 1.2 gigs! yay! instead of 96% full, it's now 32% full. Woohoo!

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bike-o-rama

entry #426, Thu, September 07, 2000, 16:59 (Life in General)

Woohoo! Today I woke up at 9:15. My Kogge Arch class started at 9:30. So, I took a shower, and biked in. Ten minutes late to class, but I made it, so there! Of course, my original intention had been to go back home right after class to sleep some more, so I didn't bring realloc. Oh, what a mistake that was, for today I have been busy, and shall not make it back until at least 4:45 or so. And I TA at 6, so I need to be back by then. Maybe I'll just eat dinner on campus.

Went to the GSU office to get the GSU AFS password. Then had lunch at Huddle with Brian. Then went to CCMB to request more AFS quota. Then to Pasquerilla East to help Rosemary Gibney with her new ibook, which finally arrived. Poor girl, having to deal OIT bs so early in her ND career. She apparently went by the solutions (not!) center two days ago, they told her it wasn't in yet, she returns to her room, and there's a voice mail from before she stopped at the solutions center, telling her her computer is in. She goes back, and it's there. Wow. But she already had it set up and working, she just had a few general questions about stuff. It is a cute little machine. I wouldn't wanna trade my g3 powerbook for it, but it has a neat space-age looking metallic trackpad. So I spent more time just discussing school and such with her than actually helping with the whole computer thing.

Next mission: Brian and I decide to bike to Best Buy. I need to look at hard drives for the gsu, and he wants music. So, we leave at 13:40, stop by CCMB to drop off my filled out afs form, and off we are on our way to best buy. We manage to get there in under 20 minutes. Nice. I pick up headphones, look at hard drives, then we get a new mouse for esgeroth, stand in line for a few hours, and finally bike back to campus, arriving here shortly before 15:00. Not bad at all, except I'm a bit warm now.

I am now apparently getting several hits a day to the log from people who did searches on google-powered search engines for various things involving hentai. The apparent culprits are log entries 374 and 391. And now this entry, too, I suppose. About two thirds of the hentai hits are searches that also involved the x men, but there have been ones involving Daria, batman, and computer animation. There have been a bunch of amusing ones over the past several weeks that don't involve hentai: "flemish stew," "x-men erotic gallery" (which i guess sorta fits into the hentai category), "Bose McDonalds France," "php chess," "bobby flay fan club," "perko compass," "geriatric violence" (that one cracks me up), "tharco," "mcdonalds nudity," "watergun pictures," "'star trek' 'the voyage home' script kidney," "nuclear alameda," "tokyo red street girls" and many more that were less interesting. I love my log, especially the fact that so many of the people that find it are looking for nudity or erotic or hentai...

Just came back from a talk about Scout OS by some guy from Princeton. Kinda interesting. Talks about different ways of scheduling and stuff...

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magic: the gathering

entry #425, Wed, September 06, 2000, 23:23 (B1B2N)

so, since magic is making a huge comeback, i must do this:

blank 1	blank 2
gather	magic

so, not only did i see magic on espn2 earlier today, i just saw a magic commercial on mtv. something odd is afoot. good thing i still have my magic cards, this way i'm "in" once this new world order takes over.

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stupid head.

entry #424, Wed, September 06, 2000, 23:04 (Life in General)

my head hurts. i want it to end. my policy to this effect has been to drink lots of water: drown a cold, right? i think my total cups of water today is definitely double digits. since I was already feeling less than ideal yesterday, I went to sleep at like 10:30, and still failed to properly wake up this morning. grrr.

I've split my time today between sleep, working on my shell for OS, and watching tv. the tv today has been interesting. there was the mandatory sailor moon, along with several other cartoons. apparently they've replaced the thunder cats slot on cartoon network with a show called silver hawks or something like that. it looks a lot like thunder cats, except with hawks instead of cats. i found espn2 playing the "Magic: The Gathering" team world championships, held in Brussels, Belgium. The US beat Canada, 3-2. The commentators cracked me up. I also saw some guinness world records show that featured some woman on a unicycle, tossing bowls from her foot onto a stack on her head. at one point she stacked six bowls on her foot, kicked them up, and they all landed on the stack on her head. it was quite impressive. she managed to grow the stack to 31 bowls, which got her the record in "unicycle bowl stacking". amazing. I also watched the movie "Stepsister from Planet Weird" on the disney channel, which was a mediocre disney movie, but i found it amusing. among the great moments were a brief clip of a guy rolling down a mountain, wearing roller blades, and later, the same guy saying "This might be the only planet in the entire universe with, like, 18 flavors of potato chips. You gotta think of that!" Finally, I watched the 1958 championship game on espn2, the baltimore colts v. the new york giants. apparently this was a huge game. it was the first game in nfl history to go into overtime... i love football.

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tank.fishes += 3;

entry #423, Mon, September 04, 2000, 23:08 (Life in General)

alright! we've got three more fishes in the tank. we've rounded out the number of goldfish to seven, and picked up a bottomfeeder. The bottomfeeder is a "chinese something-or-other," i forget its exact name. But it's cool-looking. So now we can name the fish. The seven goldfish are gonna be named after the seven ND heisman trophy winners, and we're considering "Rudy" for the bottomfeeder.

Watched Broncos v. Rams on monday night football... Rams won 41 to 36 ... grrr... very, very close. Denver definitely needs to learn how to tackle, but did get a nice triple of interceptions, one returned for a touchdown. Terrel Davis got injured again, which is kinda scary, but Olandis Gary picked up the slack nicely. The whole Dennis Miller things is kind of interesting... but it was a fun game to watch...

Southwest airlines is playing some funny football ads. i like funny ads... if my tv is gonna be interrupted, the interruption should at least be entertaining...

need to get a deep fat fryer, looked for one at meijer today. saw rice cookers and was very tempted. i think if they're good enough for iron chef Morimoto, they're good enough for me. I think I might pick up one of those too, but not until after I get the deep fat fryer. I looked for egg roll wraps too, but didn't find any. Will need to try some other places, or find a recipe for making the wraps. I want egg rolls!

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Sailor Moon!!! Where are you?!

entry #422, Mon, September 04, 2000, 15:29 (Life in General)

Argh. So I get home, looking forward to watching Sailor Moon at 15:00. And what is Cartoon Network playing? "Reboot", some crappy ass show about these "guardians" inside a computer that are battling this virus named "megabyte". At one point they ask some old sage for advice, who tells them about some ancient README file. blah blah, stupid commies. Luckily, it seems Sailor Moon will be on at 15:30. Here's hoping. In other news, the Broncos play the Rams tonite at St. Louis. We'll have to see how that turns out... one of the reboot characters just used the term "kluge" ... which is kinda cool, but not nearly enough to redeem the show. and now it's over. which means: yay! sailor moon!

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bizarre cartooning

entry #421, Sun, September 03, 2000, 23:49 (Life in General)

Presently I am watching a rather odd cartoon on cartoon network that features some odd elderly overweight guy who is trying to come up with the nerve to ask some elderly overweight woman for the pleasure of her company. in the end he does so, and it turns out she's been stalking him as well... so they cover up the goldfish bowl, close the curtains, and the rest is, i suppose, left to the imagination. odd european-style animation, i think is what i'd call it, but i think it was produced in the us. kinda amusing. the guy had a picture of a giraffe hanging in his hallway.

ND is ranked 23 in the ap poll! yay! yay! let's see how that turns out next week.

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Win one for the Gipper

entry #420, Sat, September 02, 2000, 22:28 (School)

So while doing the whole cse 232 grading thing, I'm watching "cool runnings" which is a silly but amusing movie, based, i believe, on a true story. so anyway, i've seen it several times, always on the disney channel, and this time i noticed it has a nice "win one for the Gipper" reference, which is always fun.

so my cse 232 grading script survived its first real use, and tho there's a few bugs to work out for the next version, it went fairly well, nobody's homework got deleted. the biggest problem i encountered was the fun case of the infinite loop. i think i'll need to use (u)limit in order to prevent silly people from messing with my script. beyond that things work well, i think... onwards i trudge, but i leave you with this quote from cool runnings: "that's what the swiss do to psyche themselves up" "they also make those little pocket knives and i don't see you doing that!"

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Go Irish!!

entry #419, Sat, September 02, 2000, 15:52 (Sports and Athletics)

Woohoo! ND beats Texas A&M 24-10! That was a kickass game! My main complaint with the team is pass defense, but beyond that, they're looking pretty good. yay! What fun. go irish football!

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punk rock girls

entry #418, Sat, September 02, 2000, 01:24 (Life in General)

George is on our gold couch, rather intoxicated. The latest quote: "punk rock girls are fucking yummy. yeah dude." heh. so the gibney's are in town. they rented out a dining room at the morris inn, and mamie and i were invited to eat with them. excellent. free food of decent quality. afterwards i return to the apartment and arun, perk, and lisa show up with alcohol. george shows up soon thereafter, followed by anne. many exciting things are discussed, and george, lisa, and perk have a decent number of drinks. anne leaves, lisa and perk go out to smoke, and george analyzes the music being played. a fun night in all respects. football game tomorrow. woohoo! go irish, beat aggies!

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virtual memory experimentation

entry #417, Thu, August 31, 2000, 00:17 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

os program 1: fun with vm. basically, our task is to learn about the unix virtual memory system thru experimentation. so, in good spirit, i wrote a program that uses a sigsegv signal handler to determine the end of the stack. end of stack is determined by recursing until segfault. but the tricky part is that there needs to be enough stack left to run the signal handler. but that was easily solved. now i've begun playing with malloc, one of my best friends, along with realloc. so i found the source code for the glibc malloc, which referenced the following page: http://g.oswego.edu/dl/html/malloc.html, which was quite informative. That page also linked to the paper "Dynamic Storage Allocation: A Survey and Critical Review" which will probably be a fun read. Of course, I should probably quit messing around and just get the assignment over with, so I can beginning work on my shell...

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linux 2.4, wings, beer and activities night

entry #416, Tue, August 29, 2000, 21:32 (Life in General)

alright, today has been far too long. Started out with having to wake up early in order to go to a cse 232 TA meeting. That went alright, I suppose, tho it was unexciting. Then Kogge's class, which was a struggle to stay awake during, since I was very tired, and he was still reviewing pipelines. Then return to the lab, steal Rob's XF86Config file, and XFree 4.0 finally is forced into working condition. Yay. Then I had a very long, frustrating battle with linux-pmac-devel, a.k.a. linux 2.4.0-test7 with some patches by the powermac developers. Unlike the stock 2.4.0-test7 kernel, it compiled fine. it even booted fine. my keyboard just didn't work, but i could ssh in. so i realized i had to turn on support for usb keyboards and mice. so i do so, recompile, reboot, and init fails to run any scripts since bash can't run, since shared libraries fail to load. argh!!! so after experimenting for some time, i narrow the issue down to the usb core input mouse driver, which, when compiled into the kernel, causes shared library problems of all nasty varieties. kinda bogus if you ask me. so i decide to stick with 2.2.17 for the time being. next i battle with the hardware clock for a while. i shouldn't mess with such things when i'm tired.

citibank has sent me six separate things, which all arrived the same day, all about loans. need to work on deferring those.

wings: Arun brings the large penguin to fitz, then Brian, George, Tony, and I pile into Arun's car and head for wings. Kyle shows up as well. A fun time, although we've lost a significant number of people. But we're actively recruiting new participants.

Next: activities night. NDLUG showed up in force, with large penguin and three laptops. Arun, upon seeing Katherine Ball stop at their booth, started a fight with the speech and debate group across from NDLUG. all ended up for the best, tho, since George and Arun signed up. After getting more than a page of names, we decided to call it quits. I did see Rosemary Gibney wandering past the NDLUG booth and called out to her, she seemed amused, tho slightly frightened by the NDLUG exhibit. I got some mail from the Gibney's, it seems they're going to be in town for the Texas A&M game this weekend, which should be fun. They've invited Mamie and I to various events. I am quite tired.

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unstable goodness

entry #415, Mon, August 28, 2000, 23:46 (Life in General)

wahoo! So today I wake up bright and early and do that whole class thing. Then I got Rob first of all to help me got ybin properly working. After getting his ofboot.b, and using ybin 0.17, things went fairly well, and I can now dual boot linux and macos without having to go into open firmware. Downloaded and compiled XFree86 4.0. Very exciting. Had no clue where to install it without pissing debian off, so after OS I headed for home, had a sandwich, and watched anime for three hours. During that time I switched to the unstable debian distribution (woody), just out of principle mainly. However, the five hour download time made me decide to wait until returning to campus to do that. Made another beer stew for dinner, it turned out quite good, very filling. Then returned to campus. We stopped by martins and Brian's parents' house, then went to the bookstore where we failed to find a large ND flag, but picked up a cd of ND music. Woody took about 5 minutes to download at the ssr. Then I figured I may as well switch to the 2.4.0 test series of kernels, but 2.4.0-test7 didn't even come close to compiling properly, so now I'm giving 2.4.0-test6 a try, and it seems to be doing much better. Watched Eddie Izard with Arun in the engineering student center. good stuff, that, tho i slept through some of it. have to get up early tomorrow to meet with Ramzi about 232. yippee.

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colorado steakhouse? yeah right!

entry #414, Sun, August 27, 2000, 23:02 (Life in General)

So i'm not entire sure how they can legally call themselves "colorado steakhouse" without having coors on tap, but they manage.

Rich Murphy is in town. Went to Colorado steakhouse with him, his brother, Jeremy siek, Arun, Mike Niemeir, Mad-Dog, and Katie Moor. Was a very good time. I had a margarita, several biscuits and some onion thingy for appetizer, then a 23 oz four horsemen, and a top sirloin steak with a baked potato, followed by cheese cake. the food was good, the service was kinda ... absent-minded ... much fun, tho, many good stories and such... regarding the upcoming election Rich came up with the quote "I have a choice between a redneck and a plant."

Afterwards arun (who was driving me) and Mad-Dog sorta raced on cleveland. kinda entertaining.

latest greatest search that discovered the log: "papa went fishing"

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the zen of numerical methods

entry #413, Sun, August 27, 2000, 16:25 (School)

by far i think that the largest problem i have with math is my attention span, especially when it comes to reading mathematical texts. fortunately, the textbook Jesus Izaguirre chose for the numerical class seems to hold onto my attention span better than most math books. i think one improvement i can make for mathematical reading, tho, is learning the names of ALL greek letters. I know several of them, but when I encounter math formulas with ones I don't know, I tend to either skip them entirely, or to read them as "f of that thing equals the derivative of g of that other thing" which really doesn't help my comprehension too much. need to find table of names of all greek letters. i do like the explanation that the book gave on how errors are relative: "For exampe, an error of 1 is much less significant in counting the population of the Earth than in counting the occupants of a phone booth." Now I must return to my reading.

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yay fishies!

entry #412, Sun, August 27, 2000, 02:02 (Life in General)

alright! the tank is looking better... george showed up. so we went to meijer where he bought beer and we bought some green fake plant thingies and some more blue rocks and some cool translucent blue, green, and gold (well, more orange than gold) rocks. then we went to taco bell. mmmm... taco bell. we returned to the apartment, fixed up the tank, ate taco bell, and are now watching the wonderful thing that is saturday night tv. i think saturday night tv is aimed demographically exactly at me. i love it.

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the fish have arrived

entry #411, Sat, August 26, 2000, 19:24 (Life in General)

We now have five goldfish in the tank. They are all distinguishable, so we're likely to name them. We're thinking of "ND Heisman Winners" as a naming scheme. The UFO kinda had them nervous for a while, but they seem to be getting used to it. We definitely need more decoration in the tank, it's still kinda plain. Nothing as active as the UFO, but a few cool things for the fish to swim in/around and some plantlooking things.

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fish! well, almost

entry #410, Sat, August 26, 2000, 16:23 (Life in General)

Woohoo! Brian and I finally picked up his fishtank from his house. We also picked up a few fish supplies from meijer. i spent ten dollars on this cool ufo thingy that plugs into the air pump and goes up and down and such. it was so worth ten dollars, it looks even cooler than i expected... well worth the money. we will pick up more supplies later, including the fish. more blue rocks for the bottom of the tank, perhaps another bubble moving thing and anything else we may decide to impulse buy. i think i'll like this whole fish tank thing... of course, we're going for an ND color scheme ... blue rocks in the bottom, and goldfish.

the log is still getting lots of hits despite the downtime. most are referred from google-powered search engines. most are searches for either iron chef related stuff or for "hot girlies pictures" and variations. of course now that i've written that, there's gonna be even more matches after the next time google archives the log. one of the more interesting ones i've had since bringing the log back up (other than the search for "knuth tattoo") is "armored mothra" ...

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drunken undergrads

entry #409, Sat, August 26, 2000, 03:32 (Life in General)

haha. so despite my better judgement i returned to campus instead of just playing on my new toy all night. there was a planned event of us taking the hooka to wherever SUB was playing rudy on the quad. george was kind enough to pick me up at castle point, since i don't yet have a light for my bike. so we arrive at cushing, find arun, perk, and c-dawg, and head off in search of rudy. entertaining it was to sit there and watch a hooka being smoked with rudy in the background. then it was decided we should follow the masses towards turtle creek for the whole "ralley in the alley" affair. that proved less exciting than hoped, because there just seemed to be far too many people there. but the evening had its moments, such as anne and perk doing some kinda odd dancing thing. also talked to madness and ryan mcgee. and saw various other people i know or recognize. went to 329 keenan and hung out there a while, then george drove me home again. i made ramen for us. mmmm.... ramen. we watched some of the x-games... some rather impressive feats those people accomplish. now i think i shall sleep.

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more fun with realloc

entry #408, Fri, August 25, 2000, 19:42 (Life in General)

I played SimCity 2000 for the first time in many years. I love my new powerbook... it's awesome... I copied all the files from esgeroth that had been in stuffit archives since I installed mklinux on esgermac. many fun games...
also tried out the whole dvd thing, watched some of the matrix... it was good, sound and video quality are much better than i expected, and it's really cool in fill screen mode.

the linux struggle continues. i finally got the linux partition to boot again. now i'm battling yaboot. i have openfirmware recognizing the yaboot partition and booting it, but there's something wrong with the yaboot script, since i can't get it to boot macos, so currently i need to go into open firmware to boot macos. i think i may just live with that until monday and then copy rob's ofboot.b file...

time to play more games... then maybe go to campus provided i can get a ride...

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realloc has arrived!

entry #407, Fri, August 25, 2000, 15:39 (Life in General)

today is a good day. a very good day. expecting the worst, as usual, i went by oit solutions (not!) center again, and asked about my new g3 powerbook! they had it! so before os i installed the ram and after os i repartitioned, got macos reinstalled, and began installing debian for ppc. that process is going well, but i'm going to need to get a new kernel and i'll have to install the whole xfree86 4.0 thing... but i'm happy, it's here!

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bizarre...

entry #406, Fri, August 25, 2000, 01:27 (Life in General)

hit to log from following referrer:

http://www.google.com/search?q=knuth+tattoo&safe=off&start=10&sa=N

basically, what this means, is that somebody was using the search phrase "knuth tattoo" which is pretty bizarre. then they found my log.

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finishing up the night

entry #405, Fri, August 25, 2000, 01:20 (Life in General)

Just about done. Caught up with most log entries that needed entering... a few things i forgot in previous messages:

Arun showed up on wednesday august 16 or something like that. he didn't sleep in my closet, but gave the living room a try. was a fun time with him and perk staying here. he and perk moved out by the weekend. their room this year is rather impressive.

Monday, august 21, we managed, despite the whole football ticket mess, to have a number of people over to our place for food. i did good, we bought steaks, and i made steaks in a red wine sauce of sorts, with onions, carrots, and mushrooms and a variety of cool spices in the sauce. also made mashed potatoes. the kitchen took a bit of a beating, but i enjoyed the food a lot, and, unless they lied to me, others did too. i like cooking, i just wish i was as cool as the iron chefs.

i've realized that i should add a "change password" feature to the log, since the random passwords that got mailed to users are likely to be undesirable for longterm use. but enough of that for now, it's time for sleep.

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my last resort

entry #404, Fri, August 25, 2000, 01:07 (B1B2N)

blank 1	blank 2
expunge	inbox
dragonball	z
use	maternal instincts
refine	pores
tap	rockies

i'd also like to use this opportunity to plug the subscription features of the new log system: you can specify which topics you want to receive mail from, so for example, if you get frustrated by these messages, you go to the log page, login, and unsubscribe from messages with the b1b2n topic. enjoy! =)

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reform party, anarchists, libertarian advocacy

entry #403, Fri, August 25, 2000, 00:55 (Politics)

Brian and I elected to get cable at our apartment. This is cool. Unfortunately, castle point doesn't have digital cable available, which leaves me without sci-fi or history. but i'll survive, i've got cartoon, which means sailor moon! woohoo! but we also get cnn, fox news, cnn headline news, and c-span! this makes me happy. i'd watched the libertarian party convention on c-span earlier this summer, lots of fun that, but not nearly as amusing as watching the reform party convention. i am really quite curious to see if the reform party survives. i certainly am curious as to how the fec is going to handle this and who, if anyone, is going to get the money...

i also watched c-span coverage of this rather paranoid bunch of people calling themselves the august something or other. i kinda forget. but basically they were anarchists... or so they claimed. they had this entire anti-authoritarian outlook, but it didn't make much sense. they were against any hierarchy or authority, governmental or commercial or religious or whatever. i'm not sure how they propose to enforce this lack of hierarchy or authority. they also talked a lot about protecting the environment, which is nice and all, but seems to me you need some kinda authority for that. they seemed like a silly bunch in general.

libertarian fever is kicking in with the election thing coming up. i'm looking into buying various libertarian propoganda items from www.harrybrownstore.com and www.lp.org/services/store/. that may be fun.

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New MxPx CD!

entry #402, Fri, August 25, 2000, 00:39 (Music)

So one night about two weeks ago I was checking out the late night tv scene, and managed to catch conan right at the part where he announced that MxPx was the musical guest that night. So I stayed up to watch that bit. Conan introduces them saying they're playing something off their new hit cd. Not knowing that MxPx had released a new cd, and rather surprised that it was a "hit" i made note to investigate. the song they played was pretty good. So I think I'm gonna buy their new cd, since they're a good band in general and the song I heard was pretty good. I still am curious about the use of the term "hit" because other than conan and mxpx.com, i've not heard anything about their new cd.

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A (not so brief) summary of the past two weeks

entry #401, Fri, August 25, 2000, 00:27 (Life in General)

Downtime has affected regularity of log entries, but fear not, I've been keeping track of stuff in a "plain ol' text file" which has been kinda odd, but it works, i suppose. Due to the whole new "topic" concept, there will probably be several entries to follow, covering such fun topics as the reform party convention, anarchists, and mxpx.

Friday, August 11: Got an invitation from George Coppinger to play a game call Diplomacy at the house of a guy call Nathan. Brian got invited as well, but was busy, so I got picked up by George, taken to Nathan's place, and taught in the arts of diplomacy. Basically, you have a map of europe from around the turn of the century, seven powers, and a lot of territories. you move armies and fleets around, but you don't take turns, instead, everyone writes their moves down and they are then all executed at the same time. so to be able to figure anything out, you have to talk to other players. you can make any kind of deals, but there's nothing holding you to any of the deals, the rules of the game only dictate how troops move and attack, etc... it was a lot of fun. I decided to be nationalistic and be the FLELF (Flemish Liberation Forces) ... and so I took control of the german forces in order to be the Flemish empire. the first game we played was George, Tim, Nathan, and I, with me being the only newbie. That game lasted until others (Virgil, Meg, and Rebecca) showed up. By that point I had liberated belgium and annihilated france. the next game i was again germany (under control of the flemish), george was france, tim was turkey, nathan was russia, rachel (nathan's sister) was austria-hungary, virgil was italy, and meg and rebecca were england. i had a brief dispute with george over belgium, but he soon released it to my control in exchange for a non-aggression pact on the franco-german border. i then mainly stayed still, except for helping england take sweden from russia, and an attempt to take warsaw from russia that failed. it was a lot of fun... i ended up with five armies, which put me right about in the middle as far as ranking... we are considering starting up a long-term game in which we do maybe two turns a week (tonite each turn took about 30 minutes on average, since there was so much negotiating) which would be a lot of fun, i think. we also are making plans for anime at our place... tho i don't think brian will be here...

random thought from saturday, august 12: the ruling is officially in: sailor jupiter is my favorite sailor scout. cool webpage: tokyopop.com ... i can order a sailor jupiter scout guide from there... may do that sometime.

anime fest: saturday night. perk and anne arrived an hour early. we unloaded perk's stuff from anne's car, then had spaghetti. i then made waffles for the anime fest. at 7ish Meg and Virgil arrived, followed by Rebecca, who brought cherry pie and coke. we waited for quite some time for george, who was supposed to bring the vcr, before finally grabbing anne's vcr out of her car. once we got it hooked up and ranma started playing, george and tim appear, with dr. pepper and a vcr. so we watch the subtitled ranma 1/2 o.a.v. that i'd bought in berkeley, which was enjoyed. then we watched my dubbed ranma 1/2 tape with the catfu episode ... and then, being out of ranma, we watched my subtitled sailor moon movie, which was enjoyed by some and served only to frustrate others (Anne) ... a fun time. anne left the next morning. perk sleeps in my closet.

perk dyed my hair black. a subtle, but very non-trivial difference. unlike arun.

Monday, August 14. Mamie is scheduled to arrive at 5:20. Perk and I are on campus, my laptop isn't. We walk home, takes us 40 minutes, longer than anticipated. No sign of Mamie. Brian shows up with pork chops and corn. I cook up the pork chops while Brian and Perk take care of the corn. I throw some beer into the pan and after the chops are done, improvise a beer gravy of sorts that turns out pretty good. Finally Mamie shows up several hours late, but sporting a pokemon toy from burger king.

Thursday the OIT tells me my laptop showed up at the warehouse on wednesday. Friday they tell me it's not available yet, it's not yet been received. But Friday I did manage to get both enrolled and registered for classes.

Saturday, August 19th: leftovers... we've had one cooked porkchop sitting in the fridge since monday, and some baked beans from last saturday. time to do something about the situation: boil two cut up potatoes until somewhat tender, replace half of water with beck's beer, add cut up porkchop, salt, pepper, garlic powder. let boil until potatoes about done, add beans, mustard, tabasco, more salt & pepper, and sugar. wait a little longer, add milk & flower. serve with bread. turned out pretty good, tho i think next time i'd leave out the tabasco... it didn't really add much flavor... and it would've probably been better if i'd had more meat, not just one leftover porkchop... mmm... beer...

Monday: August 21. Still no laptop. Hate 'em. Kill 'em later. Get new student ID. First attempt fails: their machines are broken. blame oit again. Second attempt, no problem. Run into Matt Leblanc (i think that's his name) who informs me that Chris Araman has decided to stay at microsoft instead of returning to school.

Tuesday: first episode of advanced comp arch with Kogge. should be a fun class. I'm the only person taking the grad version of the class, there are four people taking the undergrad version. Bike arrives, woohoo! free food on quad, Ramzi Bualuan's band plays, arun and perk bring the hooka.

Wednesday: OIT confirms laptop has been received but is still at warehouse. I tell them (for the 295th time) not to install resnet on it since i'm wiping the hd anyway (and living offcampus to boot). This time they seem to have at least managed to not lose my phone number.

Thursday: woohoo! free food courtesy gsu.

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Entry 400! A Milestone not just in roundness

entry #400, Thu, August 24, 2000, 22:46 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

After two or so weeks of downtime, Pete's Log is back again! I've been spending the time well, tho, working off and on to bring Pete's Log to a new level of Glory! With any luck, all the features necessary to consider the log functional again have been implemented. So, this message is sort of part of the debugging process....

Many things remain to do. HTML tidy or some such device needs to be added to the entry addition function. Also, I want to give users the option of having html tags stripped/replaced for their mailings. I'm considering using lynx to do that, since it can probably generate prettier-looking text than I could. All I would do is replace <br> with a newline and just drop everything else. lynx -dump would do a much better job. We'll see. I have most of the work done for user comments. I've found that there are sometimes amusing responses to log entries, and (assuming the commentators are willing to share with the world) i'd like those to be added to this site.

finally, some thanks are needed: Rich Murphy gave me a very useful sendmail tip that has been implemented in the log code, and i stole some style sheet ideas from perk. thanks, guys!

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B1B2N as an excuse to test the log...

entry #399, Thu, August 24, 2000, 13:39 (B1B2N)

So there were still a few bugs in the "Add Entry" facility, so hopefully I've fixed them now, but I need an excuse to add an entry to test this again... so:

Blank 1	Blank 2
repeat	process
predict	branch
rename	register
insert bubbles into	pipeline

those are all inspired by the advanced comp arch class i'm taking this semester...

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The Log Lives Again!

entry #398, Thu, August 24, 2000, 13:33 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Woohoo, Pete's Log is finally nearing stability again. I have spent way too much time over the past few weeks redoing the entire log system. But I am very happy with the way the new log is looking. It has a much cleaner (imho) interface, cleaner code, and lots of cool new features.

I still need to get entry mailing working, along with comments, and user editing facilities... But at least I can now finally add entries again! woohoo!

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Log Entry 397

entry #397, Wed, August 09, 2000, 17:25 (Music)

configuring esgeroth as a sendmail null host? bad idea. anyway, it seems that there's been some changes made to sound configuration in the kernel since 2.2. instead of compiling the irq, io, and dma channels into the kernel, in 2.4(-test) you specify those on the kernel boot command line. definitely a more flexible way of doing things, but kind of a pain, since it took me a little while to find where they say this. oh well, sound is once again working.

The lead vocals on "I can't get over you", along with backup vocals on some other song on the album "Don't Back Down" by The Queers are by Lisa Marr, who is apparently the bassist and singer for a poppy punkish band called Buck, who have apparently toured with The Queers and with The Mr. T Experience (tho not necessarily at the same time). neat.

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Log Entry 396

entry #396, Wed, August 09, 2000, 16:14 (Life in General)

i should go back to sleep. today was the first time all summer i've managed to sleep in past noon. the high point of my day sailor moon at 3. the low points have been all attempts to interact with computers. esgeroth has been bouncing messages to [email protected] which is not making paul russell happy. i hope i've fixed that problem. on the other hand, i did finally manage to get emulate3buttons working. stupid communists. and "I Can't Get Over You" by The Queers just started playing. good song. must figure out who the girl singing is, i love her voice. i think i may begin work on pete's log version 2. first order of business: make it compatible with the new version of mysql.

i am managing to resist the temptation of Martha Land Fox, CEO of lastminute.com ... our relationship didn't start out very well, lastminute.com tried to set about 3,968 cookies, and popped open an annoying window, which, due to my unfamiliarity with the default debian fvwm2 setup, managed to evade being closed for quite some time. i shall leave any mlf obsessions up to arun.

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Log Entry 395

entry #395, Tue, August 08, 2000, 23:16 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

and then again, maybe mail does appear to come from [email protected] after all. =)

must get emulate3buttons working, or find a 3button ps/2 mouse that doesn't crash x on esgeroth.

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Log Entry 394

entry #394, Tue, August 08, 2000, 23:15 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

well, i've not managed to find an option to mail to make mail seem to originate from [email protected] instead of [email protected] ... so instead i messed with esgeroth's /etc/hosts to make mail come from [email protected] ... which currently points nowhere as well... oh well. the blue "modem on air" light is now functional, it lights up as soon as a connection is established, and turns off when the connection is dropped. nice. we're considering some sort of network semaphore, so that we don't accidently hang up if someone else is still using network. brian got iptables working, so he can now use networking on the gremlin. hopefully realloc will be able to comfortably use the network when it arrives. need to talk to dog about dhcp at the ssr.

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Log Entry 393

entry #393, Tue, August 08, 2000, 14:56 (Life in General)

well, after a long, heated battle, esgeroth can now talk to x10 devices in the apartment, including a pair of blue lights which are to be used to indicate a modem connection. for some reason, the old 3com 509 had decided to hang out on irq 3, which conflicted with the serial port we needed for the x10 stuff. of course, we couldn't use the other serial port, since the modem was there. and i know that i used to use that serial port, since i used to have a serial mouse hanging off there... mysteries... anyway, we once again took the 3com out, until such time as we get broadband and need the card again, at which point we shall reinsert it into esgeroth, download the 3com thingy to change the irq the card uses, and hopefully find ourselves happy...

got cable today. unfortunately, i don't think the south bend cable lineup has food network. doh! made more progress in my room of rooms... i think everything that needs to go on the wall is on the wall, and there's room left, which can be reserved for the posters i have in a tube back home that my parents will be shipping me soonish, i hope...

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Log Entry 392

entry #392, Mon, August 07, 2000, 18:40 (Life in General)

being back in geekland, i have returned to a need to regularly read slashdot. however, my first time doing so i found sad headlines at the top: Alec Guinness is dead. See Arun's journal for a much better tribute than I could give the man.

i have begun trying to shape order out of the chaos which is my room. i, personally, and solely, am fighting the battle against entropy. watch out thermodynamics, here comes pete! i have placed my few pieces of furniture in what i believe to be the best possible locations for them (except for the bookshelf, it is in the second-best location for it, the best location for it would have caused it to block a vital cable outlet ... and some electric sockets i may have need for later...). the bed is underneath the window, but about a foot away, enough room for a little stool to fit between the bed and the wall to hold a lamp and my alarm clock. the entertainment center we got from jeff (which was too small to hold brian's tv, so it got transferred to my room) is across from the bed so i can lie in bed and watch my little tv. next to the entertainment center, but about two or three feet away is the bookshelf. the gap, tho annoying at first, may work out to be in my best interest, since it opens up some interesting wall space to decorate. already my diploma has found a happy home there. between the door into my room and the door into the gargantuan closet is a chest of drawers, also pilfered from jeff's place. on top of this chest i built my shrine.

since my dad worked for many years at a large international catholic charity organization, i've met many catholics from all over the world. these people had a tendency of giving me exotic religious items. however, when i left for college, i left behind just about anything of value because 1. i didn't trust for their safety in a college dorm environment, and 2. i would have to move every 9 months. so now that i have a place where there's a good chance i'll be living here for several years, i've decided to bring with me all my odd cherished items. and the top of the dresser and the wallspace extending above it have become the designated home for all the items with spiritual significance. well, most of them... the tv goes on the entertainment center...

went to campus... stopped by oit solutions center, picked up info on their deals for powerbook g3's. they looked pretty good. went by fitz, talked with paul and rob... saw Dr. Freeh, talked with him and paul and rob about machines, looks like i'll probably be getting back the machine formerly known as gemini. i can deal with that. however, the ssr has decided to go with a uniform naming scheme for all its machines: C keywords. So, my desktop machine shall be malloc, and my laptop shall be realloc. went back by oit, ordered powerbook g3/500 mhz with an extra 128 megs of ram for a total of 256 megs o' ram. for the first time ever, i believe, i have ordered for myself a machine that makes me drool at the thought of it. we went by target, picked up answering machine, went by radio shack, picked up stuff to hook cd player to entertainment center and parts to make our "on air" light for esgeroth.

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Log Entry 391

entry #391, Sun, August 06, 2000, 23:08 (Life in General)

weehoo... installing netscape so i can more easily read documentation... i'd use lynx but there are too many lynx-unfriendly sites. besides, with netscape i can look at hentai whenever i need a dynamic renewal of purpose... er...

went to meijer and walmart. we were unsuccessful in our attempts to find drapes/blinds/curtains for the windows. but we found christmas lights, i got some hangers, and tabasco sauce, since we have eggs, and scrambled eggs just ain't right without tabasco. we also got a lamp for the living room. esgeroth is now playing mp3's thru the sound system, which sounds a lot better than my cheapy walmart speakers ever did... next project is to get a dhcp server running on esgeroth so that brian's machine (a.k.a. the gremlin) can connect to esgeroth and thus have a chance at connecting to the outside world. also, we need to get a small lamp with a dim, colored light bulb that can be x-10 controlled and thus used by esgeroth to indicate whether or not the modem is connected... since this is something we've deemed necessary so that we don't pick up the phone when the modem's dialed in... something we've already done a few times...

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Log Entry 390

entry #390, Sun, August 06, 2000, 20:24 (Life in General)

it seems that my journal database system is in need of urgent fixing, since after updating the debian install on esgeroth, it's been barfing at me for having a column named "when" in the script. so since i'm waiting for some more packages to download (56K isn't sufficient for my needs) i figure i may as well see if i can still create new log entries... it seems only things that explicitly mention the "when" column fail.

the mouse we stole from ftp doesn't seem to work, so esgeroth is now using its original mouse from long ago ... two buttons... not ideal, but it'll do. i've gotten x working after the battle with the other mouse. at one point x would completely freeze esgeroth when i started it, due to the mouse, since when i told it to not use the ps/2 mouse, that stopped happening... grrr...

i think i've gotten the sound card working again. i really need to write down all the irq's and stuff so i don't have to do this experimenting every time...

the 10 card is back in esgeroth, since 1: we're having trouble getting the 10/100 working and 2: we'll need it eventually anyway since we're going to hopefully get broadband...

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Log Entry 389

entry #389, Sat, August 05, 2000, 20:18 (Life in General)

we have moved into the apartment. kind of. there's still much to do, and lots of crap all over... the apartment is pretty good-sized... and in good condition... we grabbed everything out of jeff's apartment... so an era has ended. it took us three trips using two large vehicles to get everything. the last thing we took were the christmas lights... the uptime ended. along with a bunch of furniture jeff left us most of his kitchen supplies. we found a large stash of plastic cups, mainly notre dame football cups, some of which date back to 1993. we filled up the dishwasher with plastic cups for one load, then had probably half a load of plastic cups left over. so we've got plenty of cups. the entertainment center is set up, we still need to get a vcr, and we still need to get esgeroth properly set up. but i accomplished something tonite, i got esgeroth to dial in to nd. hopefully we'll be getting broadband soonish tho. tomorrow we need to continue work on the VAN (very absurd network) and get esgeroth talking to the other machines in the place. we bought a 10/100 5 port switch, and a 10/100 ethernet card for esgeroth. esgeroth's old 10 isa card is gonna go to ndlug, since ndlug needs a couple of those. we also grabbed a bunch of brian's stuff from his place and most of my stuff that was in storage. monday ups should be delivering 9 boxes of my stuff... luckily i have a large closet. and we went by meijer to buy enough food to last us thru the weekend. time now to get some rest.

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Log Entry 388

entry #388, Sat, August 05, 2000, 04:21 (Life in General)

i have arrived in good ol' south bend. brian and i have purchased ourselves a 10/100 5 port switch and a 10/100 ethernet card for esgeroth. went to bw3's with jeff and brian, a good way to start out the new school year, then went to "chuck's place" and had beer and cigars. i don't like cigars. mine made me ill. stupid communists. the great process of moving into castle point will be starting very soonish, as soon as they open up.

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Log Entry 387

entry #387, Thu, August 03, 2000, 06:23 (Life in General)

"macrosse plus", "hawaiin luah", "24 hour roadside resistance lyrics" ... i think with the number of searches that find my log, i'm gonna have to start only archiving the good ones...

c.b. has been oddly hazy of late, due, most likely, to forest fires... i blame the ones near grand junction...

mom and dad woke me up nice and early (sarcastic emphasis on the "nice") to have breakfast... it was a good breakfast tho. i then tried to go back to sleep only to have castle point people call me. so i gave up trying to get any more sleep... i think all things financial have been taken care of, so all i need to do is get the castle point lease signed by dad and then pack and be off.

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Log Entry 386

entry #386, Wed, August 02, 2000, 20:02 (Life in General)

"anime hardkore", "iron chef video download", "new york battle hill" and "snood register code" are all roads that lead to pete's log.

godzilla 2000 comes august 18.

had dinner at the doak's tonite. was fun.

got 77% right on rich murphey's politics quiz. well, closer to 78%... 77.777, or 14/18 ...

tonite is my last night in cb. tomorrow i leave for co springs. friday i fly to south bend.

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Log Entry 385

entry #385, Tue, August 01, 2000, 12:03 (Life in General)

ok, i'm not sure how, but my journal is getting found a lot all of a sudden, and it seems google is to thank/blame, since all the searches comefrom www.google.com, google.yahoo.com, and search.netscape.com/google.tmpl. anyway, the latest: "HOT GIRLIES", "perk esgeroth", and "iron chef" ...

i think i need to focus on which languages i wanna know well... currently i know english well, my german is still fluent but rusty, my flemish is in a similar position, french and spanish i can still use enough to be a tourist... and my japanese vocab is about 100 words. i think i wanna know english, german, flemish and japanese well.

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Log Entry 384

entry #384, Mon, July 31, 2000, 20:53 (Life in General)

more searches that have found the pete journal: "colorado lost lake crested butte photo", "star trek porn", and "bobby flay signed book" ... how entertaining...

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Log Entry 383

entry #383, Mon, July 31, 2000, 20:48 (Life in General)

forest fires in the us this season have consumed more acreage than is contained in the entire state of connecticut.

the thread that nevers ends is becoming absurdly long. i want to stop, simply because it would be the friendly thing to do, but i can't!! i need more! more! more!!!

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Log Entry 382

entry #382, Mon, July 31, 2000, 16:25 (Life in General)

today i packed up 8 boxes to be shipped to south bend. i think i may box up two (or more) tomorrow. plus all the stuff i have in storage in sb... makes for a lot of crap i'll be moving into the apartment...

went to the gourmet noodle with the family. i like that place, it's good. had an italian beer called "moretti" or something like that. it came in light and dark versions. the light was real good, the dark, which was a double malt if i translated the italian properly, was ok, but a bit too dark for my tastes. had a chicken picatta for dinner, it was superb, excellent sauce, very tender chicken. also had a good tomato soup. and the bread was very good.

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Log Entry 381

entry #381, Sun, July 30, 2000, 19:45 (Life in General)

poking thru apache logs some more, i've discovered that people have found my log by using the following searches: "Convert Happy Birthday from binary to hexidecimal" and "whale posters" and "gunbuster rm" and "hedge diving" and "United States early radio history" ... kinda cool. i can think of specific entries that would lead to those last two searches being successful, but the first especially is kinda odd. but not as odd as the bathroom query...

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Log Entry 380

entry #380, Sun, July 30, 2000, 19:41 (Movies)

more iron chef greatness last night. perk saw this episode. his first. taste is more important than presentation. the challenger made a soup with duck feet, and one of the tasters had a great quote which i am unfortunately only able to paraphrase: "well, at least this will make a great conversation piece for dinner: 'hey! we're eating duck feet!'"

church this morning followed by brunch at the gibneys. rosemary gibney will be a freshman at nd this fall. dr. and mrs. gibney said something about dinner when they're out there. mmmm... food...

went on a short hikeish thing in the direction of some beaver (heh. perk should be thinking of taxidermists right about now) ponds up on whetstone mountain. had dinner at rozmans. watched "scary movie" afterwards. it was decent, fulfilled my expectations... luckily i'd seen some of the movies it was mocking and knew enough about the others to get most of the jokes. it also had a scantily clad girl running through sprinklers...

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Log Entry 379

entry #379, Sat, July 29, 2000, 08:29 (Life in General)

since noon yesterday we've had about 1500 rubber duckies in our living room, most of which have now been arranged into armies of 100. we're in the process of sorting them for the rubber duckie race next weekend (which i don't get to see). we need to make sure that there aren't any numbers missing, else someone who buys a ticket and doesn't win could complain that his duck may not have even been in the race. fun stuff.

yet another episode of iron chef last night. good fun. they had some japanese baseball player doing the opening chop of the year (it was the first episode of 1999) which was kinda silly....

rented clerks and chasing amy, watched clerks last night.

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Log Entry 378

entry #378, Fri, July 28, 2000, 12:21 (B1B2N)

blank 1	blank2
prefer	legal system
explore	internet

credit where credit is due: the first one is arun's.

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Log Entry 377

entry #377, Thu, July 27, 2000, 22:23 (Life in General)

so whenever i was last home over christmas, i helped dad frame up this huge australian aboriginee piece. well, since then, this piece has been sitting in the gallery waiting for a chance for us to deliver it to its owners. today came that chance. richard brought his truck and tommy. mom brought cardboard. i brought myself and a keen sense of humor and adventure. we discovered that the best way to do this deed was to stand the picture up against the back of the cab and then have tommy and me hold it steady. the picture in question was 62 by 72 inches. we put down a layer of cardboard in the bed of the truck and against the cab. then we lifted the painting into the truck, put more cardboard around, and we were off. slowly we made our way towards gothic road and up the mountain. about a mile out of town we encountered a traffic jam and about 5 or 6 vehicles with flashing lights up ahead. so after some time we finally started moving again. the reason for all the commotion was a really nasty-looking accident. both cars were beat up pretty bad on the front driver's side, and from the positions of the cars we couldn't tell which one had been going which way. one thing was obvious, tho: one (or both) of them had been going way too fast.

so after passing the accident we made our way up washington gulch road, and found the place we needed to deliver the picture. after our second hanging attempt, the owners were content, and we were on our way again. on our way down we threw some pennies at some cows. i think there are worse things in life than sitting in the back of a truck, driving in scenic colorado. the cops were still busy cleaning up when we passed them on our way down.

afterwards i went to carolina's kitchen with tommy, then headed to the rozman place where i helped him put together a stereo box for his willys jeep. he'd already measured and cut boards, we just had to screw them together and cut holes for his 12" speakers, the tweeters, the input, and the four plastic pipes that let the air out (and the names of which i cannot remember). we then spraypainted the box "tractor red" and after letting it dry mounted all the parts in it. we then hooked the amp up to his battery and such. tommy had all that stuff figured out. finally we took the deal out for a test drive. it worked fairly well, tho there was some annoying squeaking at loud volumes. we've not yet detected the source, so after the paint and caulk dry some more we'll mess with it more. all in all a fun project.

i believe that the song "cookie day" by Shonen Knife is the happiest song i know, and possibly the happiest song in existence. any attempt to add more happiness would simply fail and instead make the song annoying. yay shonen knife!

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Log Entry 376

entry #376, Thu, July 27, 2000, 08:15 (Life in General)

went to the eye doctor this morning. my left eye has worsened slightly. they've given me these new and improved contacts that are made of some magical space-age material that is supposed to be friendlier to the eye and not dry out as fast. my eyes are healthy, tho.

saw the ferret this morning that we had released from under our house on monday. good to see it managed to survive this long...

got the titan a.e. soundtrack with a gift certificate i was given. it's decent. probably good background music for coding.

brian signed us up for power and phone service. our phone number will be (219) 247-1674.

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Log Entry 375

entry #375, Tue, July 25, 2000, 10:36 (Movies)

some more notes on "fantastic planet": the video we watched was both dubbed and subtitled. but the subtitles must have been translated by someone other than the person who translated the dubbed lines, since frequently they were quite different. same general idea, but different expressions, and sometimes even different names...

found some interesting comments about the movie on imdb:


A very interesting political parable, apparently intended as an
allegory on Czechislovakia's struggle against the Russians. But like
any good allegory, it works as a statement on any struggle to topple a
giant.



...


As an interesting final note, the theme of knowledge overcoming
power, and particularly the use of a "knowledge machine" suspiciously
appeared later in L. Ron Hubbard's "Battlefield Earth", giving us one
less reason to retain any respect for the man.

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Log Entry 374

entry #374, Tue, July 25, 2000, 10:28 (Life in General)

arun has updated my biography:


Pete "Zampolit" Rijks    

                                                       
                                                                                
The cold wastelands of Russia have produced two things of worth - Coal          
and Peter (Piotr native Russian) Rijks (Rijks in his native                     
Russian). An initially promising career in the Soviet Navy (missile             
submarine division) was cut short due to "extreme buoyancy problems."           
This lead to his doubt and eventual disgust with the entire Soviet              
Political scheme.                                                               
 

                                              
Imprisoned as a dissident in the now famous Gulag, Peter used his               
time wisely, gathering his forces around him and honing his special             
form of Kung-fu (a mix of traditional Chinese techniques and Belgian            
Cooking). When the Soviet regime eventually collapsed Pete was                  
perfectly poised to become the most powerful man in the Russian                 
Mafia. From here he used is vast knowledge of Japanese culture to               
become the most feared of Yakuza bosses.                                        
 

                           
Special Mutant Powers:                      
                                    
                - Super sensitive teeth     
                                
                - Armored armpit (right side only)                              
 

                        
Bibliography:
                                
                - Article, Hentai Examiner, September 1985                      
  
      - Interview, 20/20, January 14, 1999                            
    

                                                            
Notable Accomplishments:    
                                                    
                - Iron Chef South Bend    
                                      
                - Perfect attendance record, PS 45, Moscow                      
 

                                   
Typical Quotes:           
                                                      
                - "I will live in Montana. And I will marry a round             
                  American woman and raise rabbits, and she will cook           
                  them for me. And I will have a pickup truck...                
                  maybe even a 'recreational vehicle.'"
                       
                - "Terrorists, Sam. They've taken over my stomach and           
                  they're demanding beer."

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Log Entry 373

entry #373, Tue, July 25, 2000, 10:21 (Life in General)

another movie that i saw yesterday afternoon was one called "fantastic planet" ... it was recommended to mamie by a friend after a conversation about anime. it's french, from the early 70's, and supposedly won the 1973 cannes film festival. it was quite trippy... an animated sci-fi fantasy. there was a plot, but a large portion of the movie was dedicated to random scenes of funky alien stuff... i wasn't too impressed by the animation, but i think perhaps i'll watch it again, maybe i'll make more sense of it next time...

woke up bright and early this morning to go to the dentist. they needed to replace a filling that was making flossing difficult. of course, it was in the bottom back of my mouth, a spot that is notorious for not going to sleep. so they gave me a shot, it started feeling kinda numb, they started drilling, and it quickly became quite painful. i'm accustomed to dealing with some degree of pain since those teeth are rarely if ever fully asleep, but this time they were barely numb. so, three shots later, the entire right side of my face is numb (which made blinking a very funny sensation), but my teeth are still only about 95% or so asleep. i could still feel the drilling, but not enought that it hurt... so hopefully my face will wake up eventually so that i can eat.

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Log Entry 372

entry #372, Mon, July 24, 2000, 23:10 (Life in General)

well, i have now survived 22 trips around the burning ball of gas we call the "sun." yay! so to start my 23rd trip off right:

blank 1	blank 2
deposit	mineral
plant my tree	garden
license	plate

i spent most of today working at the gallery. we had several people over for a barbecue sort of affair tonite. i got a variety of odd gifts, including a set of the 2000 state quarters, a sailor moon movie, several pokemon spinning tops, and a miniature harley davidson. food was good, since dad cooked. afterwards i went to the rozmans with annie and tommy, and we watched "american beauty" which i had not yet seen. it was pretty good. kevin spacey was quite impressive.

after that we drove up brush creek road and talked about various things. it's now after 3, and i'm watching my new sailor moon movie. yay.

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Log Entry 371

entry #371, Sun, July 23, 2000, 17:28 (Life in General)

today was fairly warm in cb. so when i was sitting around in the living room, thinking "i'm warm" i decided to finally take up diana on her standing invitation to have a watergun fight. i filled up my supersoaker while she went outside to wait for me. bad move on her part. i went out onto the balconey, saw her waiting in ambush for me, and ambushed her from above. woohoo! i then went outside and managed to do fairly well against her. until she found reinforcements. the condo next door is being rented out to some people from texas, and diana has apparently made friends with two sixth-grade girls who are staying there. soon the tides were turned. i did fairly well for myself, but ended up much more soaked than i had anticipated. the worst part was that they didn't let me near the refilling faucet. grrrrr....

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Log Entry 370

entry #370, Sun, July 23, 2000, 14:57 (B1B2N)

several hours at the gallery, during which everything i framed was done with conservation clear glass, prompted this:

blank 1	blank 2
score	side

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Log Entry 369

entry #369, Sat, July 22, 2000, 20:52 (Life in General)

the more i think about it, the more i realize that "release the tabbies" just isn't as intimidating as "release the hounds"

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Log Entry 368

entry #368, Sat, July 22, 2000, 20:45 (Life in General)

iron chef ends, pete finds himself lacking in entertainment, arun saves the day with this piece of literary excellence that i shall now help him spread:


Inspired by the heros from the 'X-men' and wanting to make my life and the      
lives of my "friends" sound more exciting, I did some research and have         
written up short biographies of some of my friends and aquaintances.            


                                                                                
Perkindifrawl "Perk" Hennessy                                                   
 

                                
After his daring escape from a white slave ring in 1976, Perk has               
burst onto the local EE scene. His exact date and place of birth are            
unknown, but radio carbon dating seems to indicate he sprung to life            
somewhere in the Yellow River of china sometime in the 3rd                      
century. Preliminary attempts to pin down the exact date buy cutting            
him open and counting the rings have met with strong resistance from            
animal rights activists.                                                        
     

                                                                                 
As the 20th Century draws to a close it is widely accepted that only            
one person can save us all from our own petty vices: Perk. Combining            
the wisdom of Buddha with the coffehouse charm of a young, blond,               
Stalin, Perk has demonstrated time and time again that he knows which           
side the cookie crumbles on.



Special Mutant powers:
                                                        
                - Immune to "your mamma" jokes
                                  
                - Electric Kneecap
                              
                                        

                                        
Anne "Laser Girl" Burns                                                         


                                 
Born in the year 2036 in the new Lunar Colony, Anne's immediate family          
(except her siblings, parents, and pet cobra "fluffy") were killed in           
a tragic accident at the zero-gravity marshmello plant. Since this              
fateful day, she has sworn revenge on the snack food industry and has           
in recent years begun a rain of terror on marshmello consumers and              
producers alike.                                                                



Though hailed as a savior by most of humanity and dentists everywhere,          
Anne has been the target of criticism levied by several parents                 
organizations for the hard-drinking, hard-smoking, hard-hitting                 
lifestyle she leads. Recent studies has linked her with increases in            
teen smoking, geriatric violence, and falling resale values of Menudo           
CDs and cassette tapes.                                                         


                       
Special Mutant powers: 
                        
                - Ability to light tobacco products with her mind

                - Bionic ear lobe

                                              
                                                                                
George "Minister of Defense" Viamontes                                          
 

                                        
The end project of years of genetic manipulation and cybernetic                 
enhancements George (codename GV-31415) as activated in a secret                
government lab buried deep within the foothills of Ohio on July 4th,            
1972. Created too late to turn the tide in the government's secret war          
against the Grey Aliens, he was turned loose upon a society with only           
the simple command "go forth, and multiply"                                     


                                  
Special Mutant power:
                                 
                - Laser Spleen
                                           
                - Iron Molars

                                              
                                                                                
                                                                                
Pete "Zampolit" Rijks                                                           
 

                                                     
The cold wastelands of Russia have produced two things of worth - Coal          
and Peter (Piotr native Russian) Rijks (Rijks in his native                     
Russian). An initially promising career in the Soviet Navy (missile             
submarine division) was cut short due to "extreme buoyancy problems."           
This lead to his doubt and eventual disgust with the entire Soviet              
Political scheme.                                                               


                                                   
Imprisoned as a dissident in the now famous Gulag, Peter used his               
time wisely, gathering his forces around him and honing his special             
form of Kung-fu (a mix of traditional Chinese techniques and Belgian            
Cooking). When the Soviet regime eventually collapsed Pete was                  
perfectly poised to become the most powerful man in the Russian                 
Mafia. From here he used is vast knowledge of Japanese culture to               
become the most feared of Yakuza bosses.                                        


                                                   
Special Mutant Powers:    
                                                      
                - Enhanced Stuble  
                                             
                - Armored armpit (right side only)                              
                                                  

                              
                                                                                
The Skirt (aka Lisa)                                                            


                                                         
The exact details of The Skirt's origin are a secret which will die             
with her and her along (and Gary Coleman, but that's another                    
story). Suffice to say, the next time mothra attacks Tokoyo we will             
all be looking to Lisa for guidance and protection.                             


                                         
Her present whereabouts unknown, Lisa was last seen in the New York             
Area, hoarding soft coal in a soho apartment complex and climbing the           
corporate ladder.                                                               



A bold crusader for the poor and impoverished, Lisa has sworn conserve          
fabric by keeping no more than 40% of her body clothed at all times.            


                     
Special Mutant Powers:            
                                              
                - Gyroscopicly controled ankles
                                 
                - Titanium Toothpick  

                                          
                                                                                
                                                                                
Chris "C-dawg" Sanabria

                             
                                                                                
A rugged cowboy from the old school, C-dog was born and raised on the           
ranch. He was breaking broncos and shooting bullseyes well before he            
could walk, and in still the only living man to win the coveted                 
"Silver belt buckle" for actions above and beyond the call of a Rodeo           
clown.                                                                          


                                  
After losing his hit HBO series "Dawg's Haus" due to network politics,          
Chris turned to religion, starting his own cult. Though he has as many          
as 1400 followers in 3 time zones, the popularity of the cult began to          
wane as c-dawg began to lose interest in religion as a means to fill            
the existential void and began to turn to a variety of drugs such as            
PHP, TI-85, and FFTs.                                                           
     

                                 
Hitting rock bottom in the late 80s, and ruined by the collapse of the          
Soy and pork belly market, C-dog chose to reinvent himself by                   
embarking on a bold new career - Pimpin'. Aw yeah....                           
 

                           
Special Mutant Powers:
                           
                - Bat smell
                                                     
                - Ability to communicate with cows                              
            

                                 
                                                                                
Brian "Bri" Barrett                         


                                                            
Born Brian Barthomew Zipnord, Brian was worshiped as a God in his               
native Africa. He is both blessed and cursed by his telepathic                  
ability. Blessed due to his ability to read minds and thus exhibit              
amazing empathy and outwit his foes, and cursed because he hangs                
around Arun who is usually thinking REALLY disturbing thoughts almost           
all the time. It is for this reason that Brian is often seen with a             
look of utter disgust on his face.                                              
 

                             
In the late 80s Brian founded the cable channel USA networks as a               
medium to showcase his hit TV series "Wings" which presently shows              
24/7 on the network. Presenly, Brian devots most of his time to                 
ensuring communism will never surface north of the 42nd parallel and            
making sure that the Mason-Dixon line remains strong. Brian's greatest          
stress is that he must live the dual life of a millionare playboy and           
mild-mannered bank teller.                                                      
 

                                
Special Mutant Powers:
                           
                - Turnip Detection
                                           
                - Suprisingly fast eyebrow twitch  

                            
                                                                                
Arun "Fritz" Rodrigues                                                          
 

                                
Born in the Lower Danube river basin, RNR was wisly abandoned by his            
parents at birth. Sadly, he was found and raised by a roving band of            
dung beetles who taught him to play his first instrument: an electric           
kazoo. In the mid 1940s, a chance meeting with Tito lead to his                 
joining the Partisan Movement and rapidly rising through its                    
ranks. Later however, he became disillusioned by the image of a                 
socialist utopia and began to embark upon the noble mission which is            
still his guiding light: To make tons of money and meet women from              
good gene pools. He presently resides in an isolated shanty town just           
outside of the Notre Dame Campus where he is presently majoring in              
Geek Studies with a possible minor in "fireman".                                
         

                                                                       
Special Mutant powers:
                          
                - Ability to shake exactly 2 aspirin out of a bottle

                - retractable adamantium toothbrush shoots out of his elbow

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Log Entry 367

entry #367, Sat, July 22, 2000, 20:15 (Life in General)

figured out that, in theory, ben stein could keep all $5000. i could be wrong, tho, i've never seen a 3-way tie.

tonite, the world pasta champ took on iron chef morimoto in a porcini battle. no memorable quotes tonite, but the italian pasta champ donned a mask, goggles, and gloves, and then proceeded to release dry ice on his marble working surface to make his pasta. turns out the outfit was due to allergies, and the dry ice was for temperature control, but it was rather surreal either way...

watched x-men again today. caught a couple more minor plot points, and still enjoyed the movie. paid closer attention to the chess game. it really was checkmate.

finished chapter 2 in the japanese language book.

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Log Entry 366

entry #366, Fri, July 21, 2000, 20:08 (Life in General)

"did you think a pig's bladder was this big?" ... iron chef at it's finest. today's iron chef episode came from xmas 1998. iron chef japanese morimoto squared off against a french-trained challenger. theme ingredient: turkey. very strong christmas theme. the entire affair seemed kinda un-japanese, since christmas isn't really a holiday over there, and turkey is a rare food to see in japan, from what i understand. but it was a great episode, with some memorable quotes, such as "they'd better have high cholesterol at that price." the show also offered other inspirations:

blank 1	blank 2
use	special device
watch	instant replay
battle	turkey
brighten up	kitchen

with my limited japanese vocab, i have begun forming less than useful sentences: "watashi wa gakusei desu. shinkansen wa. atana wa shinkansen ja arimasen ka." which translates to "i am a student. what about the bullet train? aren't you the bullet train?"

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Log Entry 365

entry #365, Fri, July 21, 2000, 16:45 (Life in General)

my attempts to learn japanese are starting out well. i'm not at all worried about their alphabets right now, and pronounciation is at a low priority, but i managed to complete the first set of exercises in the book with flying colors. it's a fun language, it's so completely unlike the other languages i know.

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Log Entry 364

entry #364, Fri, July 21, 2000, 13:29 (Life in General)

spent about six hours today driving things from town to the storage unit and from town to the condo. i'm sick of driving. watched my new ranma 1/2 video this afternoon, it was quite excellent. diana is already more than 300 pages into her new harry potter book and she only started this morning. and has taken frequent breaks to watch anime. i assume she must be enjoying it.

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Log Entry 363

entry #363, Thu, July 20, 2000, 21:14 (Life in General)

going thru apache logs, it seems that somebody found my journal by doing a search on alltheweb.com for the phrase "He needs to find a bathroom." how surreal my life has become.

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Log Entry 362

entry #362, Thu, July 20, 2000, 21:11 (Travel)

first, the cult of pete's journal wishes to extend a big welcome to perk.

i am back in crested butte. too soon, it seems: arun's discovered a place that serves a variety of local beer and has hottie waitresses. Spent my last morning in berkeley doing more shopping: bought a Hi Standard cd (Hi Standard being a japanese punk band) that is quite good. bought a few books of piano music by tchaikovsky for annie. bought ender's game for myself. the korean place i wanted to eat lunch at wasn't open, so i tried a mexican place instead. it was pretty good. then took off for the airport. flights went quite well, and i finished off ender's game by the time i was at the hotel. excellent book. i'll need to check out some more of the books from that series.

Blank 1	Blank 2
listen to	in earnst
be	number 1

slept in at the hotel. then took off. first stop: tharco. dad told me it was at the intersection of I-70 and I-25. easy enough, i got the address and headed off. got off I-70 at I-25 and drove around for an hour before calling tharco and discovering that they were by the intersection of I-70 and I-25. silly dad. and the fact that denver is a silly city didn't help. denver seems to really love changing the names of streets for no reason. so navigating was rather difficult. next i made my way to santa fe pottery. i checked the map, figured out a route that looked simple, and headed off. part of my route called for me to take Alameda west for some distance (coincidence?) and then turn north on santa fe. well, after some time, it happened again: i saw a sign that informed me that alameda was now cherry creek north. grrrrrr... but i found my way there. then off to applejack to buy some beer and wine (since it costs like 40% less in denver). finally, at 5 pm, i headed for home. again, i decided to take I-70 west until leadville. at buena vista i decided to go over cottonwood pass instead of monarch. cottonwood is actually shorter, but only one side is paved. the border between gunnison and chaffee counties is at the summit, and gunnison doesn't want to pave its side. so the descent on the far side is slow driving. but i took cottonwood anyway. then i grabbed jack's cabin cutoff (i as amazed i found it, since it's not marked and i'venot been in that area for several years) and managed to return home by 9. 4 hours is good time for the drive from denver. and that's less time in the car than i think i spent in denver today. stupid denver street system.

looks like we'll be having arun and perk crashing at the apartment. and mamie will be there one night too. that should prove to be entertaining. i think it'll all work out so long as there's beer in the fridge.

my typing is off. arun's stupid ergonomic keyboard forced me to hit the 'b' with my left hand, where i usually do it with my right hand, so now i keep hitting 'v' instead of 'b'. arun will pay.

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Log Entry 361

entry #361, Tue, July 18, 2000, 19:43 (Travel)

OK, Arun lied to me, it's Chicken "Vindaloo," not "Vandooli."

After the Cambodian restaurant, we went by McDonalds since I wanted a Vanilla milkshake for dessert. Once I got to order, I asked for "A Large Vanilla Milkshake" ... the girl says "What kind of drink do you want" and I say "Vanilla" and she says "Oh, you want a milkshake" so I'm starting to be a bit suspicious. She tells me my total is "4 dollars and 60 some odd cents" and I know this can't be right and tell her so. She says it's so, and so the manager comes over and they ask "Oh, you didn't want the large frys?" and I tell them I didn't, I just wanted a large vanilla milkshake. I'm kinda skeptical that large fries cost three dollars, tho. So the new total is four dollars and twenty some odd cents, so I try to figure out what they want me to pay for. Finally I figure out they were trying to sell me a number 3 value meal. Things are straightened out and I leave with my milkshake.

While wandering around Berkeley afterwards, Arun decides I need to start telling people I got a tattoo, and then when they ask to see it, tell them I can't show it to them. Then they'll assume it's in a "private" spot. Once the rumor gets big enough, I conclude, the FBI will probably add this info to their file on me. So when I get arrested I can tell them, "no, I'm not the real Pete Rijks" and then pull down my pants.

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Log Entry 360

entry #360, Tue, July 18, 2000, 19:34 (Travel)

Once again, Arun had to work. So today was "Adventures in Public Transportation" day. First a word from our sponsor:

"Blondie's The Name Of The Band" -- Arun

And a quick note on yesterday's Indian chicken: Arun reminded me that I had "Vandooli" chicken.

Anyway, we will start out with some background info. One of my favorite movies for some time now is Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. To sum up the plot, our hero's travel back to 1980's San Francisco for reasons of little importance. Two of them, Chekov and Uhura, are searching for nuclear-powered naval vessels. They figure out that they are in Alameda and start asking people on the streets of SF if they know how to get to Alameda, where they keep the "nuclear wessels" ... so I decided that I had to go see these nuclear vessels in Alameda. After waking myself up and such, I headed for the Berkeley BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station. The map informed me that both Lake Merrit and Fruitvale stations were near Alameda. So I figured I'd get off at Lake Merrit and see how things go from there. I purchased my ticket and off I went. Once at Lake Merrit I got onto the first bus that promised to take me towards Alameda. This was #62. After about 20-30 minutes of meandering, it arrived at Fruitvale station. So I guess I coulda stayed on the subway for a few more minutes and saved some time. At Fruitvale the bus driver took a break for some time, during which I had to get off the bus. Then the bus driver switched the bus to be #50, and I was allowed back on the bus. I stayed on this bus until it was no longer heading west. At this point I was fairly close to the southern end of the island Alameda is on. I walked west until I found the bay. I found myself on a beach and decided to take some pictures. I followed this beach north for about 30 or so minutes, which was a fun walk. Then I found that private property prevented me from following the water any farther, so I headed inland a bit. Walked by the Alameda Federal Center which was fairly large, and which had a Marines recruiting office, but no Navy recruiting office. So I continued my trek north. Finally I found myself walking along side what I figured to be the Naval base. I kept walking north, past the entrance to the base, thinking the entire time that it looked like a rather shoddy base. Finally I came upon a sign that informed me that the base was no longer being maintained by the Navy as an operational base. sniffel... no nuclear vessels... So I headed farther north to find the SF ferry. When I arrived there I discovered that the last ferry had left 10 minutes before. So I decided to head back to the base entrance, 8 blocks in the direction I'd come from, because there'd been a donut shop across the street from it, and I was starving. I arrived there, had a good bacon-cheeseburger, took a picture of the sign that explained the status of the base, and headed back to the ferry. The ride across the bay was quite nice. Took several pictures. Arrived at Pier 41 and wandered around the whole fishermans wharf area some more. Bought a knife sharpener and a vanilla milk shake. Hung out and took some more pictures. Walked along the entire harbor stretch all the way to pier 1. Then headed to the BART station and returned to Berkeley. A fun excursion, despite the lack of nuclear vessels. I managed to go by subway, bus, ferry, and foot. Lots of foot. Since a lot of the walking I did was in a northerly direction, I ended up with sunburns on the backs of my legs. Oops. It was a tiring excursion. I'm very impressed with myself for not getting lost. Very impressed.

Went to Cambodiana's (a Cambodian restaurant, believe it or not) for dinner. Had a beef dish. Arun had a chicken curry. Both were quite good. Went to Rasputin and bought a CD by The Queers. It's quite good.

Blank 1	Blank 2
Wipe	Windshield
Feeler	Noodles
Misuse	Adjective

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Log Entry 359

entry #359, Mon, July 17, 2000, 18:50 (Travel)

Today I was on my own: Arun had to work. But I managed. Spent late morning and early afternoon wandering around telegraph and a few other areas in berkeley. Bought a couple comic books. Bought the latest Harry Potter book for Diana, since she wants it. Looked at sheet music for Annie but didn't find what she wanted. Bought an Op Ivy t-shirt. Bought the cheapest pair of black pants I could find at Goodwill. Paid four dollars for them. I even like them more than any of the 50+ dollar pants that all the other clothing stores had. Had pizza at Blondies for lunch. Bought used Shonen Knife and Voodoo Glow Skull CD's and an Against All Authority CD. Spent some time in the apartment reading and listening to music. I felt safer inside since that way I wouldn't spend any more money. Changed into my new outfit, wandered around some more, wandered around the Berkeley campus some more, it's quite nice. Hung around on campus playing yo-yo and watching people. Arun showed up shortly before seven. We went to an Indian restaurant for supper. I had a really spicy chicken dish which was very good. It also opened up my sinuses pretty good. Had an Indian lager, Taj Mahal, with dinner. It was quite good, but again, not as exotic as I expected. Afterwards I was stuffed.

Jeff Squyres was the first to send me Happy Birthday wishes. He's getting married next weekend, so he figured he'd get it done now before his life goes crazy.

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Log Entry 358

entry #358, Sun, July 16, 2000, 19:00 (Life in General)

arun just received an email containing "hello kitty" info. he's ecstatic. we've been wondering about hello kitty. there's a store on telegraph that sells only hello kitty merchandise. and the encyclopedia of japanese pop culture didn't mention it (at least not in what we've examined so far) despite having a hello kitty picture inside the cover.

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Log Entry 357

entry #357, Sun, July 16, 2000, 18:28 (Travel)

Day 3 in Berkeley. woohoo. After calling home and such we went to a Thai restaurant for lunch. I tried a Thai Ice Tea, which was interesting, but kinda too strong for me to enjoy it regularly, I think. Had a really good spicy chicken with basil on rice. Not only was it good, it also helped clear up my sinuses a bit. On our way back to Arun's place, we spotted the leather lady, so we picked up Arun's boots (and the Iron Chef tape) and went by her stand. Arun ordered some custom boot work done, and I bought a little leather and metal wrist thing. We then headed for the South Bay area. On the drive, we saw corporate campuses for several companies, like Sun, Oracle, and SGI. Bummed around Palo Alto (had some ice cream) and got a brief glimpse at the Stanford campus. It had palm trees. Next we headed to the home of Arun's sister. Kamala and her husband Matt were nice people. Talked with them a bit, then we watched a bit of Iron Chef. Arun, Kamala, and Matt were all quite amused by it. Matt then gave us directions to the biggest Fry's in the area, and we were off again. Fry's was incredible. It was huge. It was gargantuan. Started off looking at the various Apple computers they had, including the model of G3 powerbook I want. Then we wandered off in search of digital cameras. After looking at those, some guy talked us into watching some Bose demo. That was kinda neat, they fit a lot of sound into these really little speakers. Well, tiny speakers aided by a hidden subwoofer of sorts. Then we wandered around some more. Saw many many kitchen appliances of various sorts and was tempted to buy them all. Finally after seeing a lot, we wandered towards the exit. I didn't escape without buying a yoyo (very good one) and a laser pointer. Finally we headed back to Berkeley. We ate dinner at the Blue Nile, an Ethiopian restaurant. Ethiopians aren't into the whole utensil thing, so you just get a big plate full of food, and then some of this bread stuff that you use to scoop up the food and put it into your mouth. Very fun. The food was quite good. Good spices. Good vegetables. I also had some Tej (or maybe it was Sej), which is Ethiopian honey wine. It was pretty good, too.

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Log Entry 356

entry #356, Sat, July 15, 2000, 21:37 (Travel)

arun's insight from the submarine tour: "Took a tour of a US WWII submarine. There was a typewriter on board which didn;t have the "1" key - as many olden typewriters didn't I hear."

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Log Entry 355

entry #355, Sat, July 15, 2000, 20:53 (Travel)

Day two in Cali. I feel I should add a notice to yesterdays log entry: The movie "But I'm A Cheerleader" is not pornographic. I realized after Arun sent out the same disclaimer that I probably should as well. The movie is rated R, and has sexual content, but no nudity.

Started today out bumming around Telegraph some more. Arun failed to find the leather lady, and I purchased some anime. We then ate at the Mandarin House. I had egg rolls, which were quite good. Much more uniformly colored than the ones I make. They also held in heat quite well, which caused me several brief moments of pain.

Next we took off for San Francisco. We drove in on the Bay Bridge. Drove along the San Francisco harbour, and parked near Pier 39. First order of business: I bought a one-time use camera. Looked at Sea Lions and took pictures. Looked across the bay at Alcatraz and took pictures. Wandered thru a bunch of stores. Bought chocolates at "The World's Best Chocolate Store" to take home for Mom and Dad. Saw some people dressed up and painted entirely silver doing some kinda mime act. Saw several punks posing with people for pictures in exchange for donations. They were doing fairly well, although there were some people taking their pictures without giving donations. We then wandered along some more. Came upon a WWII submarine that had been turned into a National Historic Monument. The USS Pampanito (SS 383) was open for tours, so after taking some pictures, we went aboard and toured and such. Was a lot of fun, pretty neat to finally see the inside of a submarine and get a real feel for how crowded it was in there.

We then returned to the car and headed inland. I was amazed by the streets and the hills and such. Traffic was challenging, but we made it to Haight street. We were about half an hour early, so we wandered around some. I bought a pair of boots. I've been wanting to for some time. Black leather, steel toe. We then returned to Kan Zaman where we met Emily Merkler for dinner. Tried a few different appetizers and then had Beef Shish Kebab. Also tried a Lebanese beer call Almaza. It was a light pilsner and was pretty good. I was kinda dissappointed, tho, because I'd been hoping for something slightly more exotic from a Lebanese beer. After dinner we went to the bar where they had Hookas. We ordered one with strawberry tobacco and smoked it a bit. Interesting kinda thing. Arun's gonna buy one, he says. Afterwards we wandered around Haight some more, then said goodbye to Em. We then made our way back to Berkeley. I discovered that the pants I packed don't fit me, and most likely belong to one of my sisters. So my boots look kinda silly with shorts, but I put them on anyway, just to start wearing them in. I like them, though.

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Log Entry 354

entry #354, Fri, July 14, 2000, 20:36 (Travel)

where to begin... i am now in berkeley. it is great.

Left Crested Butte at about 14:00 yesterday. The ride was very silent. The two spanish people didn't talk at all, and I wasn't about to ruin the silence... Since we would need to get onto I-70 in Denver anyway, I decided to forgo US 285, which is how we normally get to Denver from Salida. Instead I continued on past Salida, thru Buena Vista and Leadville and grabbed I-70 behind Leadville and took that into Denver. I don't think I'd ever taken that route before, it was kinda neat. Very scenic. The drive took about 4.5 hours, but it took an additional 30 minutes to find the hotel... after checking in, I took the spaniards to McDonalds so that they could have a good american meal before leaving. Then watched some tv and fell asleep.

The next morning (today, actually) I woke up bright and early and caught the shuttle to the airport. Flight left on time. I was quite glad to be on delta, since the complimentary copy of the Rocky Mountain News that microtel gave me had an article about all the cancellations United was having... Arrived in Salt Lake City. That city has now joined London, Washington D.C., Cincinatti and several others I've forgotten on the list of cities where I've only seen the airport. The SLC airport was decent, tho, I found my way around there easily. The next flight to San Francisco left on time as well. Woohoo! Got a good look at the SLC area as it left. Saw (what I can only assume was) the great salt lake. My impression of that area of Utah: less vegetation than colorado, much more salt. Upon approaching SFO, I was dissappointed to see that I couldn't see the pacific due to tons of clouds. I had hoped for a nice grandiose approach. Instead I had to wait until we were almost on the ground and broke thru the clouds to see the pacific underneath me. But now I've finally seen the pacific.

Arun was at the airport, as was my suitcase. We headed to Berkeley. Drove across the Bay Bridge, which was kinda unexciting, since you couldn't really see the bay. But San Francisco was cool to drive thru/by and see. Arriving in Berkeley, we dropped my stuff off at Arun's apartment and then headed to LBL to see the lab. Met cubicle mates of his, saw the pc and alpha clusters they use, and peered thru glass at T3Es and J90s and drooled. Saw Dr. Lumsdaine. Went to lunch with Jeremy Siek and Arun. Fun to see Jeremy again. Went to some mexican place, had a large wet burrito, was quite good. Afterwards we wandered up and down Telegraph and other streets in that neighborhood looking in stores. Many cool things. Will probably buy a decent amount of stuff later... So far I bought a "encyclopedia of japanese pop culture" and a "learn japanese in 3 months" book. excellent. We went in search of a theater at which to watch the new x-men movie. the first place we went didn't have it, but they were just about to start a showing of "But I'm A Cheerleader" which is showing in about 4 theaters nation-wide, and which Arun highly recommended, so we watched that. It was brilliant. Hilarious. It was about a badass lesbian cheerleader. I enjoyed it very much. Afterwards we stopped by Blondies Pizza and grabbed a quick dinner. Then it was onwards to find the new x-men movie. We found it at Oak Theater. It turned out to be pretty entertaining. Arun and I found it to be lacking a definitive "badass transformation" scene, but it had good effects, a decent plot, and some good humor. Definitely worth seeing again. We are now back in the lab, doing the whole email thing.

when i drove over monarch pass on the way to denver and crossed the continental divide, i thought of a new argument for the whole mountain/hill issue: divides. all the water out east goes to the same place. in the rockies, it goes to both the atlantic and the pacific. in the alps it goes to the north sea and various spots in the mediterranean. water probably doesn't ever leave the himalayas, but if it did, it probably would go to both sides of india and who knows where else...

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Log Entry 353

entry #353, Thu, July 13, 2000, 08:29 (Life in General)

great quote by dad last night: "there are only two belgians: the king and the cardinal. everyone else is either flemish or a walloon"

leaving for denver soonish. taking annie's spanish friends to the airport for their return to spain. spending the night there. flying to berkeley early the next morning. should be fun.

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Log Entry 352

entry #352, Wed, July 12, 2000, 19:55 (Life in General)

i've discovered yet another mexican beer i like: Negra Modelo. of course, i only had one bottle of it, so i'll need to try more at some later point...

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Log Entry 351

entry #351, Wed, July 12, 2000, 11:57 (Movies)

more x-men mania! slashdot lists several sites related to the new movie. one review linked has the following quote, which i thought was quite good: "There's more honest interaction between characters -- between fully formed people -- in any given five minutes' worth of X-Men than in the entire extended homo-erotic dance party that was Batman and Robin." that review is available at "http://www.dailyradar.com/reviews/movie_review_213.html"

Stan Lee is my hero.

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Log Entry 350

entry #350, Tue, July 11, 2000, 18:44 (Movies)

woohoo! saw a special on fox about the new x-men movie. the movie looks really freaking cool.

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Log Entry 349

entry #349, Tue, July 11, 2000, 15:57 (Life in General)

interesting place: http://www.space-access.org/ ... another group of people trying to make space travel cheaper and more readily available. from some of their writings it even seems like they're relying more on the private sector than on government, but i didn't read too much. either way, i wanna go into space. their front page has a Robert Heinlein quote: "Reach low orbit and you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System." yay Heinlein.

looked at different long distance plans for the apartment. will need a decision in next few days. right now i'm leaning towards mci/worldcom.

discussing plans for berkeley with arun. should be bunches o' fun.

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Log Entry 348

entry #348, Mon, July 10, 2000, 19:19 (Life in General)

today was unexciting. i did however send perk a brief list of uses for function pointers. and i informed alexandra trifone that a message she forwarded me was a hoax. so she says she'll check with me before she forwards any more messages of the sorts to the entire family...

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Log Entry 347

entry #347, Sun, July 09, 2000, 15:08 (Movies)

got another pgtc bug report in the mail today. kinda cool to see people are using the thing and willing to give me feedback. although i will probably have less use for the thing in grad school, i hope to do a lot of improvement on the beast come august and my return to south bend.

saw the movie "the patriot" this afternoon. i enjoyed it. it was very hollywood in many ways, and the plot was sorta predictable in many ways (such as: the americans win the revolution... =) but it was a nice reminder of the sacrifices made for our independence. historically, i think it missed some aspects of the war and such, but it's not a documentary, so can't really complain about that. i did like the battle scenes, i think that they were probably fairly accurate portrayal of how a lot of those battles were fought, and it was interesting to see that... it was also fun to have mamie there, i think she probably saw about half the movie, the rest of the time she was peaking from between her hands or looking down. i don't think she liked the gory parts...

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Log Entry 346

entry #346, Sat, July 08, 2000, 20:24 (Life in General)

arun has offered me payment of one dollar if i respond to somebody saying "I'll cram this ___ up your ass!" with "ha! oh no you don't! My digestive system was compiled with --non-reentrant!" i think i shall attempt to do so.

taped more iron chef tonite, this episode featured an epic battle between cantonese and szechuan cooking. spoiler: ........... szechuan one. take that cantonese.

s/one/won/g

tonite i cooked food. i prepared coq au vin (chicken braised in red wine), rice boiled in chicken stock, cranberry salad, and angel cup cakes with a pineapple/apricot sauce for dessert. turned out well, i think. dad helped some since i'd never cut up a chicken raw before, and was slightly confused and its greasiness didn't help matters any...

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Log Entry 345

entry #345, Fri, July 07, 2000, 19:45 (Life in General)

the crested butte mountain theater is doing a production of "the water engine" by david mamat (sp?). annie is doing sound effects for this play. i went to see it tonite with mamie, since tonite was "pay what you can night" which means they'll let you in so long as you give them a token amount of us currency. well maybe even non-us currency, if that's all you can pay. anyway, i didn't find the play terribly exciting... the acting was good, but the story was kinda long and not well-suited for us of short attention spans. also, tho some may say that the play had some kinda meaningful message about our society, i found it to be a rather typical message about how lawyers and corporations are evil..

i've been informed that arun bought ("snagged" is the term he used) a copy of "we are not devo" which makes me happy. arun also informs me that there are two comic book stores and one anime store in close proximity of his quarters, so mamie is giving me a list of things to pick up for her.

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Log Entry 344

entry #344, Thu, July 06, 2000, 15:33 (Life in General)

the debian ppc 2.2 distro arrived on two cd's from brian today. except the cd's didn't survive shipment. they kinda got stuck together and peeled off each other's little metal layers and also did this weird sorta bubbling thing. oh well. went to el dentisto today, which was fun as always. i might be o ordering my powerbook on monday. that way it'll hopefully be here by the time i get back from cali. yay. once the powerbook arrives, i think i'll have plenty to keep me occupied. among other things, i want to work on my journal script, primarily i want to improve the search feature... i think i may also change the way the database is set up, to make it more efficient. so i'll need to write some sorta scripty to port all the entries to the new db format. jeff and arun have done journal work, arun has apparently improved his, and jeff has created one that is kind of inspired by my conceptual designs of mine...

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Log Entry 343

entry #343, Wed, July 05, 2000, 20:06 (Sports and Athletics)

rode snodgrass this morning with donna rozman and mark diamond. was fun, but very tiring, i did a full loop, rode into town and met donna and mark there, then rode all the way up gothic road past the mountain to the trailhead. there we decided to take the singletrack instead of the road to the (almost) top. the downhills made the climbs worthwhile. my muscles felt gelatinous afterwards... had lunch in town before riding back to the condo. fell asleep on couch there.

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Log Entry 342

entry #342, Tue, July 04, 2000, 19:36 (Life in General)

today was rather interesting... if nothing else... woke up early and went into town. early means 7:30, which was actually too late for running in the 1/3rd marathon, so i failed to do that... worked at the gallery until 11, then we closed up to watch the parade thingy... it was fun, tho much longer than the last time i saw it. the usual water wars erupted on the return trip. wandered around, found tommy, got food... after deciding that totem pole park was unexciting we returned to the gallery and sat out there a while, until some random guy walked by and squirted us with a water gun. tommy and i decided revenge was needed, and went out in search of water guns. we didn't know the guy, but he thought we needed to be wet. so after failing at mcdells and true value, we were successful at pooh's corner. on our way in, we saw diana walking out with a water gun, which was a clear sign of trouble. tommy bought a supersoaker, and i bought a cheapo gun, plus another cheapo for mamie. we then got into tommy's jeep and went off in search of the offender, to no avail. so we returned to the gallery, where we were ambushed by diana. however, in the end she and mamie were soaked, while tommy and i were only slightly wet. we then drove mamie and diana to the condo, returned to town, and sat around some more, until annie showed up with some more spanish friends. we were introduced, then we soaked annie a little... she then bought a supersoaked, and i went along to get one as well, since i was dissappointed by my cheapo gun. we then went by the bagel shop, and kinda sat around there for a while with a bunch of people i may have known at some point. and some spanish people. i left after some time. the gallery closed soon thereafter, and tommy and i drove around some more in search of victims. finding none, we decided to search for food instead, and were victorious at the rozman ranch. johnny and marylin rozman were having a barbeque of sorts. johnny found some 30 year old fireworks he smuggled out of mexico at some time and set those off. tommy and i showed our gratitude for the food by soaking joe perko, and donna and richard rozman. it was us or them, tho. we then went to pick up annie and her friends to go see fireworks. we watched them from the town park, and they were decent. we failed to find anything cool to do afterwards, tho... so i returned home and watched voyager. all in all, good celebration of independence...

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Log Entry 341

entry #341, Mon, July 03, 2000, 19:13 (Movies)

worked a bit at the gallery, spent most of it getting more stuff ready for shipping to south bend. wandered around town a bit with annie, danica, and her spanish friends. it's kinda sad that the only people close to my age that i have to hang out with in cb are in high school. oh well. we watched mallrats, funny as usual... jay and silent bob are my heros. i really want a trench coat. also watched wizard of oz. i'd never seen it before. now several common cultural references finally make sense... also watched a few episodes of battlestar galactica, which is a show that has always been entertaining...

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Log Entry 340

entry #340, Sun, July 02, 2000, 19:17 (Life in General)

started boxing up a bunch of stuff to be shipped out to south bend. my room is going to finally feel like the haven i grew used to in high school, full of many bizarre items. i cleaned out my belgian mining lamp and got it working fairly well, although i think it may need new flint. dad says it's probably 80 to 100 years old. i had previously guessed 50. the thing was only used for safety, tho, not for real light...

the gallery was open today. we brought in a good amount of money. had brick oven pizza for lunch. when i went over there to order, i asked the two girls behind the counter for some sort of "pizza carrying device" because i wanted my food to go. they mocked me for using the term, but they were cute, and we actually had something resembling conversation, so i'm happy. when they gave me change, one of the dollar bills was in horrid shape, held together by tons of tape, and with the name david somethingorother written on one side, and the words "gay money" on the other. i decided that dollar would become part of their tip, because they had gone to such a long way to point out how crappy a dollar bill it was.

had a whole bunch of people over for a barbecue tonite. good food, good people, good beer. i may go on a bike ride with mark diamond and donna rozman on wednesday. maybe snodgrass.

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Log Entry 339

entry #339, Sat, July 01, 2000, 20:32 (Politics)

watched some of the libertarian national convention live on c-span today. was neat. yay libertarians! the presidential debate between the four libertarian candidates was fun to watch, they were all actually nice to each other, the debates between republican or democratic candidates all seem to be full of animosity... i received the following email from oma and papa which seemed appropriate both to the libertarian deal and the upcoming fourth of july:

REMEMBERING INDEPENDENCE DAY                                                    
                                                                                
Have you ever wondered what happened to                                         
the 56 men who                                                                  
signed the Declaration of Independence?                                         
                                                                                
Five signers were captured by the                                               
British as traitors, and tortured                                               
  before they died.                                                             
                                                                                
Twelve had their homes ransacked and                                            
burned.                                                                         
                                                                                
Two lost their sons serving in the                                              
Revolutionary Army; another had two                                             
sons captured.                                                                  
                                                                                
Nine of the 56 fought and died from                                             
wounds or hardships of                                                          
the Revolutionary War.                                                          
                                                                                
They signed and they pledged their                                              
lives, their fortunes,                                                          
and their sacred honor.                                                         
                                                                                
What kind of men were they?          

Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists.                                           
Eleven were merchants,                                                          
                                                                                
nine were farmers and large plantation                                          
owners; men of means, well                                                      
educated. But                                                                   
they signed the Declaration of                                                  
Independence knowing full well that the                                         
penalty would be death if they were                                             
captured.                                                                       
                                                                                
Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy                                           
planter and trader,                                                             
                                                                                
saw his ships swept from the seas by the                                        
British Navy. He sold his home                                                  
and properties to pay his debts, and                                            
died in rags.                                                                   
                                                                                
Thomas McKeam was so hounded by the                                             
British that he was                                                             
forced to move his family almost                                                
constantly. He served in the Congress                                           
without pay, and his family was kept in                                         
hiding. His possessions were                                                    
  taken from him, and poverty was his                                           
reward. 

Vandals or soldiers looted the                                                  
properties of Dillery, Hall, Clymer,                                            
Walton, Gwinnett, Heyward, Ruttledge,                                           
and Middleton.                                                                  
                                                                                
At the battle of Yorktown, Thomas Nelson                                        
Jr, noted that the                                                              
                                                                                
British General Cornwallis had taken                                            
over the Nelson home for his                                                    
headquarters. He quietly urged General                                          
George Washington to open fire.                                                 
The home was destroyed, and Nelson died                                         
bankrupt.                                                                       
                                                                                
Francis Lewis had his home and                                                  
properties destroyed. The enemy jailed                                          
his wife, and she died within a few                                             
months.                                                                         
                                                                                
John Hart was driven from his wife's                                            
bedside as she was                                                              
                                                                                
dying. Their 13 children fled for their                                         
lives. His fields and his gristmill                                             
were laid to waste. For more than a year                                        
he lived in forests and caves,                                                  
returning home to find his wife dead and                                        
his children vanished. A few                                                    
weeks later he  died from exhaustion and                                        
a broken heart.                   

Norris and Livingston suffered similar                                          
fates.                                                                          
                                                                                
Such were the stories and sacrifices of                                         
the American                                                                    
                                                                                
Revolution. These were not wild-eyed,                                           
rabble-rousing ruffians. They were                                              
soft-spoken men of means and education.                                         
They had security, but they   valued                                            
liberty more. Standing tall, straight,                                          
and unwavering, they pledged: "For                                              
the support of this declaration, with                                           
firm reliance on the protection of the                                          
divine                                                                          
providence, we mutually pledge to each                                          
other, our lives, our fortunes,                                                 
and our                                                                         
sacred honor." They gave you and me a                                           
free and independent America. The                                               
history books never told you a lot about                                        
what happened in the                                                            
Revolutionary War. We                                                           
didn't fight just the British. We were                                          
British subjects at that time and                                               
we fougnt our own government! Some of us                                        
take these liberties so much for                                                
granted, but we shouldn't.   

So,take a few minutes while enjoying                                            
your 4th of July holiday and  silently                                          
thank these patriots. It's not much to                                          
ask for the price they paid.                                                    
                                                                                
Remember: freedom is never free!

sandy fails and her family joined us for dinner... we had chinese food. i made more egg rolls and won tons. they turned out even better than the previous batch... we then watched sound of music, i stuck around with nothing better to do. the movie has its moments. at one moment some character, i think captain van trapp, said "you were right" and i couldn't help but think "tell your sister, you were right"

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Log Entry 338

entry #338, Fri, June 30, 2000, 12:20 (Life in General)

i don't like the new colorado license plates.. the issues of centralization aside, they are now green on white instead of the old white on green they used to be. i liked the white on green. and with the old system, you could safely assume that a car with a white license plate was from texas or california... no longer... grrrr.

i am allowed to call arun a chekist bastard so long as he gets to call me zampolit pete. sounds like a fair deal to me.

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Log Entry 337

entry #337, Thu, June 29, 2000, 21:38 (Life in General)

i am increasingly becoming of the opinion that when a band has "musically matured," it means they have lost their youthful energy. but i could be wrong.

finished reading tom clancy's "the cardinal of the kremlin" and found it to be fairly enjoyable. i think i need to start using the term "chekist" more often. examples: "some checkist scanned cse.nd.edu" or "arun, you checkist bastard."

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Log Entry 336

entry #336, Wed, June 28, 2000, 19:37 (Life in General)

today i made egg rolls and won tons. both turned out well. definitely something to make again in the future... they're fun to make, and they taste good.

annie's spanish homestay sister and her uncle showed up today. should make for an interesting few weeks.

bought plane tickets out to cali...

elian gonzalez is finally back in cuba, i hope this means that news people will finally get a life...

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Log Entry 335

entry #335, Wed, June 28, 2000, 08:11 (Life in General)

for some reason, which is so far unknown to me, the number of xxx spam i get has increased dramatically in volume. i used to get maybe one such email a month, for the past week or so, i've been getting one or two a day. which is odd, since i've not posted to usenet since before the end of the semester, and i've kept a generally low online profile of late... oh well...

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Log Entry 334

entry #334, Tue, June 27, 2000, 12:27 (Life in General)

the tattoos that perk and anne got turned out to be fake. those fools.

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Log Entry 333

entry #333, Tue, June 27, 2000, 11:46 (Life in General)

today at work i spent most my time reframing several of my pictures that have been in storage since high school. the glass broke on one of them, and it had a shoddy frame, anyway, so i put a ready-made 8x10 frame on it. it looks pretty good. two others had been matted with non-acid-free matboard, which had turned an odd yellow/brown color in its core, instead of the white it had once been. so i picked new mats which were acid-free. i adjusted the colors slightly to something i liked more, and they look good now. i am a master framer. i rule. the frame and mats i picked for my diploma also look quite excellent. if the computer industry ever goes belly-up, i have a backup career waiting...

sent perk a sympathy email for his sunburn... i've had plenty of similar experiences to know what he's going thru. he also got a tattoo, as did anne. i think its a conspiracy, all my friends are getting them...

estonia has declared war on nd, it seems, some computer over there scanned some machines in cse.nd.edu ...

arun sent me this link about some belgian doctor whose domain squatting. i say the belgians are still perfect, this just happens to be the exception that proves the rule.

began the process of purchasing plane tickets for the trip to berkely, so it looks like this might actually happen...

tony hagale might use ltfs to do some benchmarking for his work this summer...

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Log Entry 332

entry #332, Sun, June 25, 2000, 17:15 (Life in General)

iron chef new york battle is over. i got all two hours on tape. it was glorious, it was magnificent, it was excellent. skip the rest of this paragraph if you don't want to know the result yet... after a fierce competition between iron chef japanese and bobby flay, the iron chef reigned victorious.

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Log Entry 331

entry #331, Sun, June 25, 2000, 13:49 (Life in General)

i'm aiding george with some shoe troubles. have to see how that turns out. i had a great new excuse to try to use, but forgot it before i was able to write it down. i think it was inspired by the daria marathon mtv had today. 1.25 hours until iron chef new york battle!!!!!

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Log Entry 330

entry #330, Sat, June 24, 2000, 19:30 (Life in General)

iron chef is on. i am taping it for arun. it rocks. tomorrow at 7 mountain time the iron chef new york battle is on, so i shall tape that as well. yay!

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Log Entry 329

entry #329, Sat, June 24, 2000, 17:53 (Life in General)

so i've gotten a bunch more stuff out of storage. some of it is going back into storage, but quite a bit is gonna come back to school with me. posters i have rediscovered: a star trek: tng poster of the enterprise, a star trek: tng poster of the crew, a german movie poster for star trek VI, a couple whale posters, a poster advertising the new intercity express by the deutsche bundesbahn, a rmbl poster featuring a great photo taken by the late dennis johns, a few crested butte posters that the gallery screwed up and gave me, a topo map of the aspen/crested butte/gunnison area with circles around three mountains i've climbed, a few framed pictures of kronberg, several religious icons... i've also discovered a belgian mining lamp i got from dad some time ago. many other random things. a comic i once drew called "the flea-circus zone" which rocks and needs to be scanned. much more...

went to the gourmet noodle for mom and dad's 23rd anniversary. they've got very good food there.

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Log Entry 328

entry #328, Sat, June 24, 2000, 10:16 (Life in General)

today, while finishing up a framing job at the gallery, i did battle with the #3 wire and lost. so i ended up using the #4 wire instead. dad showed me quite a few more old maps he has. most of them are from brussels. the oldest one was from 1795, showing western europe. the rest were in the range of 1811 to 1857, some of europe, some of america, most of them real cool. there was one rather boring map of spain, but the rest of them were quite interesting. dad says if i ever find myself with a lot of wall space, i can pick one or maybe more of them to fill said empty wall space... i also went through pictures of the porcelains and found the ones i liked best... additionally, discussed shipping with dad, since there's gonna be a lot of stuff that needs to be shipped out to nd...

arun tells me he knows of a good tattoo place out in cali in case i want to visit one while i'm out there... he says he's pretty certain they would do anti-swastika tattoos...

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Log Entry 327

entry #327, Fri, June 23, 2000, 19:43 (Life in General)

so the rest of our visiting family is leaving early tomorrow morning. new catch phrase: "happiness is discovering a forgotten bottle of dos equis hidden in the fridge." discussed french matting with dad. working on figuring out what i need to bring back to school for the apartment. among other things, several world war i/ii mortar shells.

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Log Entry 326

entry #326, Fri, June 23, 2000, 10:57 (Life in General)

wingspanbank.com had a commercial in which a guy is playing snood. yay snood. dad's making flemish stew tonight. it involved boiling beef in beer. i'm writing down the recipe so i can have it at school.

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Log Entry 325

entry #325, Thu, June 22, 2000, 07:13 (Life in General)

the peacocks left this morning. they gave me a neat tool kit for graduation. it's got a hot glue gun, so now i can finally compete with arun. the wackers left as well, due to a lack of working transmission on their car, which is kinda too bad, i'd have liked to have done a few more rides with them. oh well.

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Log Entry 324

entry #324, Wed, June 21, 2000, 16:06 (Sports and Athletics)

went with a whole bunch of family up kebler pass to lake irwin. pretty stuff, that. seven of us were going to do the dyke trail that starts up there and goes down to the other side of kebler pass. before heading out, bruce drove me in the wacker's suburban to pick up my bike. its transmission kinda decided to make life difficult, and so we ended up taking the taurus up as well so that we could have backup. drove shuttle with sam and bruce, and then we were ready for the ride. it was a lot of fun. i got quite muddy, there were many little streams that crossed the trail. the uphill that we encountered at the bottom of the actual dyke was quite gruesome. i got out of breath just pushing my bike up the thing. but the downhills made it all worth while. the next mountain bike i buy will have shocks, even if i have to sell a kidney in order to afford them. went swimming afterwards to cool off and relax. talked with bruce about cs grad schools, pointer arithmetic, nasa, and various other fun topics.

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Log Entry 323

entry #323, Tue, June 20, 2000, 20:04 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

i also got mail from some guy in new zealand who uses and likes pgtc. he submitted a few suggestions... kinda neat, that...

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Log Entry 322

entry #322, Tue, June 20, 2000, 20:02 (Movies)

glenn hung out at the gallery this morning, so work was a bit more entertaining than usual. went swimming this afternoon with a bunch of little people that i'm related to. played more racehorse rummy. fun game. won a game fairly well, including one hand that i won the first turn i had. yay!

went to see titan a.e. again since tommy wanted to see it. was fun, the cgi is truly amazing. during the scene in which akima is jetisoned from the dredge ship, and kale yells "akima!" i have been very tempted both times i saw the movie to yell "tetsuo!" another bonus with that movie is that it has the x-men preview. i wanna see that movie. patrick stewart, a.k.a. jean-luc picard, is gonna be professor (or is it doctor?) xavier, so that should be cool.

arun got the lam logo tattooed on his arm. kinda amusing. i think he's upped the ante as far as absurd goes. tattoos seems kinda cool in some ways, but i don't want any distinguishing features, in case i need to hide from the man (not entirely unlikely.)

it's real dark out, but clear skies. i think i might go look at stars for a while. although the moon may be coming out soonish...

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Log Entry 321

entry #321, Mon, June 19, 2000, 19:33 (Movies)

mom & dad went to salida this morning so i was in charge of the gallery. nothing exciting happened. tried to organize a bike trip on snodgrass this afternoon, but weather (rain with lots of lightning) kinda put an end to those plans. but we really need the rain, so it was good to have. kind of watched the movie "the red violin" ... it was kinda interesting, but it was a bit too emotional for my tastes, and the ending i found to be rather dissappointing... oh well.

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Log Entry 320

entry #320, Sun, June 18, 2000, 19:10 (Movies)

church this morning. afterwards had pancake breakfast. saw the thompsons for the first time in forever this morning...

went biking with bruce, margie, david, mark, clay, and jane. we took the new whetstone vista trail which branches off the upper upper loop. that was fun. afterwards we went to see titan a.e. the plot was decent, the music was pretty cool, and the animation was phenomenal. i really enjoyed it. i think i might see it again on tuesday with tommy rozman. it seemed to me that a lot of the plot was written with the idea in mind that they wanted to show off cool computer animation. it was also sorta humorous.

had a barbeque tonite with just about everyone over. talked to bruce for a while about c, c++ and java. bruce is cool, he originally taught me hexidecimal back during my freshman year of high school.

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Log Entry 319

entry #319, Sat, June 17, 2000, 19:32 (Life in General)

wackers and peacocks have arrived in crested butte. fun to see them all again. bruce is now an "internet engineer" at mci, which, if nothing else, sounds impressive. it seems his job now involves trying to hunt down his boss to figure out what his job is.

iron chef is on. haven't seen it in several months. it is good. i don't have a blank tape on hand to record it for arun, but i'm wondering if he deserves my recording it for him...

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Log Entry 318

entry #318, Sat, June 17, 2000, 14:34 (Travel)

well, i have victoriously returned to the pacific side of the continental divide. stupid arun.

had breakfast with oma and papa in their backyard this morning. was quite nice, many birds visited us. i think i need to become better at identifying birds... missed the exit on i-25 for the santa fe bypass, so i ended up driving thru downtown santa fe, but it wasn't too bad, traffic was light. stopped in alamosa for lunch at mcdonalds again, this time i did not throw away the dinosaur game pieces. i have to give the people of the monte vista, co, area credit for originality. as you head north out of monte vista, all the roads that intersect highway 285 are called one mile road, two mile road, three mile road, ..., ten mile road. when i reached the top of cochetopa pass, the supersized drink i had at mcdonalds was pressuring my bladder, so i pulled off the road. there was a sign that warned about extreme forest fire danger (where in co/nm isn't there extreme forest fire danger? probably wherever there aren't forests...), so i found a particularly dry tree and helped make it a bit less dry. i've done my part, smoky bear. dad had dos equis for me when i arrived home. thoughtful of him.

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Log Entry 317

entry #317, Fri, June 16, 2000, 20:04 (Travel)

arun is a traitor to the west. but that's ok. he'll get his.

went with oma and papa to compusa. actually got to take a look at the g3 powerbooks. i definitely am gonna get one, they're too cool. based off web research and asking some dude at compusa, it seems i can't get the 400 mhz model with a bigger drive, so i think i'm just gonna go with the 500 mhz model and the bigger drive. i noticed one flaw in the g3 powerbook, tho: it only has one mouse button. but i can suffer thru that i spose... after compusa we went to walmart. bought sheets to take home to mom. i guess she needs some. started looking at gas stations in the area. regular unleaded ranges between $1.45 and $1.50 around the albuquerque area. i guess that's about as low as they come these days.

helped fix various things for oma and papa. their answering machine is now functional again, as is a tv remote control. found the problem in a vcr, but was unable to fix it due to a lack of parts to replace broken ones. they're gonna buy a new one i think.

i think i'll be lucky if i do have as much travelling in my life as oma and papa have done in theirs. need to work on that.

i need to remember that i like pears. i always enjoy eating them, but always forget that i do. they're quite good.

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Log Entry 316

entry #316, Fri, June 16, 2000, 09:59 (Travel)

went to eat lunch with bob, stephanie, and ryan at some tavern place. food was quite good, i had beef enchiladas, some of the best i've had in a while. it's good to be in the southwest again where they know how to make mexican food. i did rather well driving around albuquerque, i kinda remember the general layout of the town... but it has grown a lot, and zuna is now located in a new commercial area that didn't exist a year ago...

i found a fact sheet about the sandia peak tramway, and some of the facts are neat, and since i know i'll lose the sheet, i've decided to record some of them facts:

SANDIA PEAK TRAMWAY was originally manufactured by Bell Engineering of Lucerne, Switzerland. Construction was from 1964 thru 1966, at a cost of two million dollars. This is a double reversible jigback aerial tramway. It spans over 2.7 miles with two towers. It took over 5000 helicopter flights to build and Sandia Peak Tramway opened on May 7, 1966.
Total Horizontal Length: 2.7 miles
Total Vertical Rise: 3819 feet or 1163 meeters
Elevation of Lower Terminal: 6559 feet or 1999 meters
Elevation of Top Terminal: 10,378 feet or 3163 meters
Hourly capacity: 220 passengers at 4 trips per hour
Average number of passengers per year: 275, 000
Normal Speed: 12 m.p.h or 20 feet per second
Number of tram cars: 2
Track cables: four - each with a diameter of 40 mm , each weighing 47 tons
number of haul ropes: one haul rope and one counter rope
diameter of haul ropes: 32 mm, each weighing 17 tons
main power unit: 600 h.p. d.c. electric winch motor
auxiliary drive: 250 h.p. ford gasoline motor

yay engineers!

arun asked for suggestions for a theme for this summer. my suggestion was: "the pacific side of the contintental divide rules, and for arguments sake, eastern colorado and new mexico are on the pacific side even if they aren't."

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Log Entry 315

entry #315, Thu, June 15, 2000, 19:18 (Travel)

took the tramway to the top of sandia peak with oma & papa this morning. was neat. the sandia peak tramway is the world's longest tramway and is quite an engineering feat. it was rather amazing. on the albuquerque side of the mountain (the west side) the terrain is definitely dessert, very arid. once you get to the top and look down on the east side, it looks almost like you're in colorado, it's dense foresty terrain. but off in the distance you can see desert again. we had a good guide on the way up the tram. he pointed out various things to us. one of the canyons on the way up was called twa canyon, because in the fifties a twa plane crashed into the mountain and most the debris fell into this canyon. we saw some of the debris through the trees. it looked small, but we were 900 feet or so above the ground... supposedly the plane had taken off on a very foggy/cloudy day and it's compass turned out to have been off byy 18 degrees, and its altimeter off by about 1000 feet. at the top we ate at the high finance restaurant. our waitress turned out to be a notre dame student. francesca is a native of albuquerque and is going to be a senior architecture major at nd next year.

i hung with ryan sisson after he got off work. helped him put a bikini top on his jeep. it was, in his words, "a chore and a half" but we were victorious.

been watching some fun history channel shows. mainly occult stuff. a few episodes of "ufos: then and now" and an episode of history's mysteries that covered the devil's triangles: the bermuda triangle and something in the great lakes and some show about hitler and the occult. i believe there is going to be a show about the history of the internet in about 45 minutes. that should be fun.

esgeroth was down for a while earlier this week. sniff. but paul saved the day and rebooted it. apparently a power outage made esgeroth unhappy...

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Log Entry 314

entry #314, Thu, June 15, 2000, 04:38 (Travel)

we picked up the cat from the vet on tuesday. turned out it was already neutered, so we didn't have to do that after all. kinda odd. finished the colorado microbrew sampler that night and played more racehorse rummy. i was rather unimpressed with the remaining selection...

as of yesterday i'm in albuquerque, new mexico. i stopped at mcdonalds on the way here in alamosa, co for lunch. since lisa seemed so excited by the dinosaur game, i got a few game pieces, but then promptly threw them away with the rest of my trash. oops. had dinner with oma, papa, and the bob sisson family. good to see all of them again. helped oma get the camera hooked to her imac working. now i need to teach her how to use it so she can start sending people pictures. also helped out with other various things.

it seems gas prices are highest in the midwest (brian) and lowest in texas (cdawg). but not everyone has answered my survey yet.

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Log Entry 313

entry #313, Mon, June 12, 2000, 19:55 (Life in General)

i am in serious pain. ow. and my throat is sore from breathing so hard. but it was all worth it.

mom returned from cuchara/la junta. she brought with her knowledge of a new card game called racehorse rummy. it is rather complicated, but quite fun. dad bought a colorado microbrew sampler. fun. so far we've tried three varieties. both of us liked one a lot, one not so much, and found one to be acceptable. more tomorrow. the box claimed that colorado is coming to be known as much for its microbrews as for its mountains. i don't quite buy that yet, but there are quite a lot of breweries in this state. i think i should insist on living only in places with a certain number of breweries per capita. like colorado or belgium.

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Log Entry 312

entry #312, Sun, June 11, 2000, 16:09 (Sports and Athletics)

went on my first ride of the summer with mark and evelyn diamond and some friend of theirs. i don't remember their friends name, but i remember that her husband is a commercial fisher in alaska. we rode strand hill, which has always been a favorite of mine. i've not ridden it since high school, tho, so my memories were kind of vague. i remembered that it had a fairly tough climbg at the beginning, but in high school i had always been able to make it up that climb no problem. so, we ride out brush creek road, pick up cool spring water (mmmm...) at the spanne ranch, and head for the trail head. before we arrive evelyn is kind enough to remind me to switch into low gear. thank god for that. what came next were the toughest two miles of my life. i don't think i ever breathed that hard in my life. i had to take breaks regularly, just to keep my lungs from exploding (stupid not being adjusted to life at 9000 feet (and above since we rode uphill)), but with only about 7 or 8 stops i made it to the top. i think my pulse maxed out at about 150. luckily i had nice spring water to cool down. then came the downhill. luckily i'm still in decent technical form, so i kept up/lead the pack down. i made it down almost all the challenging technical downhills, except one where i wimped out because i wasn't yet read to ride off/over a huge rock that spanned the trail. but that's ok, i'm quite happy with that. i also made it up some good technical climbs that were scattered throughout the downhill. so overall it was a success. of course, i forgot sunscreen, so my arms are in quite a bit of pain (which is ok, itt masks all the other pain my body is in). towards the bottom was a largish creek that used to have a log across it, so i got to the bottom of the downhill approaching it and started looking for this log instead of powering thru the stream. oh well, i made it halfway without any momentum, and i would've gotten wet either way.

i decided along the way that mountain biking was a great engineer's sport. you have things like gears 'n stuff, and you have to worry about fuel (water) consumption, and weight distribution is key, as is knowing how to use your body as a shock absorber (my wrists hurt badly). so i'm hoping to do many more rides this summer.

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Log Entry 311

entry #311, Sat, June 10, 2000, 10:04 (Life in General)

due to the fact that ben stein rocks, i joined his fan club. it turns out that he has an email address and likes to hear from members of his fan club, so i sent him a message and he replied within a few hours, which makes him even cooler. yay that.

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Log Entry 310

entry #310, Sat, June 10, 2000, 09:51 (Life in General)

last night the cei kids had some sort of dinner at our house. they made themselves pizza. the diamonds came over as well, since they were involved in that ordeal. i stayed outside by the grill with dad, mark, and the beer. we had us some good meat. later we somehow got onto the topic of france, and mark asked the question that most of us have asked, i think: "does anyone like the french?" we also talked about the euro, and about how dad defended his language in his youth by refusing to speak french to any belgians, despite being fluent in french. and i think law does say that public officials have to be bilingual. he also told a great story about he and his friends pulled the emergency brake on a busy commuter train in belgium because the conductor didn't speak flemish. their excuse: the conductor was speaking to them in a strange language (french) and they got scared. the next time they rode that train the conductor was bilingual. excellent.

glass sort of fascinates me. we framed a 32x48 artist proof print today. it wanted conservation glass, so we had to cut a 36x48 piece of that down. and that task was left to me, which scared me, but i managed to not break anything. the biggest problem with a piece of glass that size is that you can't hold it horizontally, because the weight of the glass wil cause it to shatter. so that made cleaning and fitting a bit more challenging. and then when we had it all put together, we found a rather obnoxious piece of dirt stuck to the inside of the glass.... grrrr...

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Log Entry 309

entry #309, Fri, June 09, 2000, 19:34 (Life in General)

well, it is 11:30 pm, and dad is playing snood. which means only one thing: i have finally managed to get my entire family hooked on the game. i think i'm gonna mess around with writing a gtk-based clone of snood once i get my new powerbook. i've already some ideas as far as how to do so...

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Log Entry 308

entry #308, Wed, June 07, 2000, 17:30 (Life in General)

today i was a complete bum. oh well, it was good. it's kinda depressing to hear about all the cool code people are writing over the summer while i just bum around. but oh well.

george sent me the following link: http://www.maximonline.com/girlfriend_of_day/index_jeri_ryan.html and i'm grateful to him...

mmmmmm... seven of nine... i realized that since i just saw the first episode of voyager with seven of nine, that all the episodes that the local upn will be playing on weeknights this summer will feature her. yay!

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Log Entry 307

entry #307, Tue, June 06, 2000, 17:10 (Music)

i've had the spider man theme song stuck in my head for a couple days now, and it got to be irritating, mainly just because i only knew the first two lines. so i've been working on memorizing it in its entirety:

Spider-man, Spider-man
Does whatever a spider can
Spins a web, any size
Catches thieves, just like flies
Look out! Here comes the Spider-man!

Is he strong? Listen, Bud!
He's got radioactive blood.
Can he swing from a thread?
Take a look overhead.
Hey there, there goes the Spider-man!

In the chill of night,
At the scene of the crime
Like a streak of light
He arrives just in time

Spider-man, Spider-man
Friendly neighborhood Spider-man
Wealth and fame, he's ignored
Action is his reward

To him, life is a great big bang-up
Wherever there's a hang-up
You'll find the Spider-man!

went lifting and swimming today. didn't get much swimming done, because again people were trying to get me underwater. this time annie and danica had robin to help them, and again they failed. but now three of my toes are bleeding. oh well, i won.

i actually got to play customer at the gallery today, we came up with a cool framing scheme for my diploma. i figure since i can get cheap framing and since i put four years of work into this piece of sheepskin and since i'll (hopefully) have two more like it, it is worth framing.

i have decided to create an inspirational book for myself which i can turn to for renewal of purpose. it'll probably contain wise quotes, pictures of the mountains, pictures of hot girlies, and whatever else i find. that way i don't need to waste time when in need of renewal of purpose, i can simply open the book.

looks like i'm going to drive down to albuquerque, new mexico some time next week. i'm hoping to take some kinda cool scenic detour. who knows.

i got my bike ready for summer. i hope.

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Log Entry 306

entry #306, Sun, June 04, 2000, 18:16 (Travel)

worked another half-day at the gallery yesterday, dad and i made some progress on a 17-piece, $3000 framing order. i wish i had that much money to spend on framing.

also found myself watching "the real world" on mtv for some reason (i think the initial reason i didn't immediately change the channel was that i saw some good-looking girl.) that show is kinda odd, i think they cast people for that show that they know will be at odds with each other. oh well, not my problem.

went hiking today with dad, mamie, annie, and diana. we drove past blue mesa dam, past the famous parking lot where the cba week-long bike trip began (fun memories that), to hermit's point. from there we hiked down into the black canyon of the gunnison river (which has some kind of record, like biggest depth to width ratio or something... it's deep, and it's steep, and it's narrow) to a lake that was created by some smallish dam. we walked down an hour and a half to this lake, and saw a snake along the way. at the bottom we ate and looked at the water and such. then we headed back up. the way up took about two hours. i lagged behind with mamie, since she wasn't quite ready for such a hike. we saw a couple deer, one of which jumped onto the the trail we were on and starting running at us, but we won the game of chicken, for it jumped off the trail before it got to us. i apparently didn't put enough sunscreen on the back of my neck and have now become a redneck. oh well. aloe will at least make it hurt less...

i finally saw the episode(s) of voyager where they pick up seven of nine and ditch kess. i knew the basic idea of what happened, but it's good to see some details. mmmmm.... seven of nine....

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Log Entry 305

entry #305, Fri, June 02, 2000, 15:47 (Life in General)

well, i've apparntly been selected to be one of the elite few who will become the next generation of the internet. yay. i love spam.

i've now worked two days at the gallery and have still not injured myself yet, which is nothing short of a miracle.

i think i should start up a new religion whose basic premise is that if you lead a good life, you are reincarnated as a cat.

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Log Entry 304

entry #304, Thu, June 01, 2000, 15:40 (Life in General)

worked at the gallery today for the first time this summer. was kind of entertaining... we had some artist guy come buy who wanted the gallery to look at his work. we did some framing. we cleaned up a bit. dad has a cool new toy: an air compressor. it plugs into this device that does some sort of framing stuff, but it also has a nozzle that can be plugged into it to blast compressed air at high speeds at things. apparently the cat isn't too big of a fan, but i thought it was cool. dad also told me that it's always best if you can beat a system from the inside...

i'm looking into the possibility of going to berkely. it would be fun, i hope i can make it happen.

i love the history channel...

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Log Entry 303

entry #303, Wed, May 31, 2000, 09:07 (Life in General)

woohoo! brian and i have an apartment! brian thinks that it is 2217 Coachmen's Trail. But whatever it is, it's good to know we have it...

finally, for the first time ever, iron chef is coming to america!!!! on june 25th, the iron chefs come to new york to do battle against food network's bobby flay (sp?)! a great moment indeed.

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Log Entry 302

entry #302, Tue, May 30, 2000, 16:34 (Life in General)

well, i've finally found evidence of the plot arun and yahoo have against me: http://www.nd.edu/~arodrig6/yahoo/

in yet more proof that all my friends are geeks, lisa has also created an odd webpage: http://www.nd.edu/~lpellegr/mcdonalds/dinocontest.htm

i'm starting to lean more towards the 500 mhz one powerbook, since i want the bigger hard drive. however, if i can find a 400 mhz model with a bigger drive, i might go with that...

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Log Entry 301

entry #301, Mon, May 29, 2000, 15:12 (Travel)

i made supper tonite. potato soup. it turned out quite good, although i just barely made enough. i did a good deal of improvising with the recipe, and i'm pleased with the result. another meal i can add to my list of reliable recipes. i threw in sauteed carrots and leftover bacon. celery salt also added to the flavor. figured out a few more cool places that i might check out over the summer. some are feasible day trips, others are more like multi-day trips. i'll have to find my camping gear.

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Log Entry 300

entry #300, Mon, May 29, 2000, 09:21 (Life in General)

a sure sign of something: annie is studying vocab for her spanish final, and one of her vocab items is "navigar la red" which means "to surf the net". of course, i may have misspelled the spanish version, but that's ok, it's not my final.

i'm looking at powerbooks. in specific i'm looking at two g3 powerbook models. both of them have a 100 MHZ bus, 1 meg of backside level 2 cache, support for up to 512 megs of PC 100 SDRAM, a 14.1" active-matrix display, a 6x dvd-rom drive, a 56K v.90 modem, ATI rage 128 with 8 megs of video sdram, 16 bit audio and stereo speakers, support for airport, 10/100 Base-T ethernet, a slot for one PC card, Two 400Mbps FireWire ports, two independent 12Mbps USB boards, and mac os 9. i'm quite happy with those specs. one model has a 400 mhz g3, 64 megs of ram, and a 6 gig drive, and costs about $2500. the other has a 500 mhz g3, 128 megs of ram, and a 12 gig drive, and costs about $3500. i can definitely afford the 400 mhz, but i may be able to get the 500 mhz, and i definitely like the idea of more ram and disk space, the cpu speed is of less concern to me. i'll have to decide soon, since i want to make some use of this machine over the summer...

went to memorial day mass at the crested butte cemetary this morning, it was a nice ceremony, a whole bunch veterans marched around and fired a salute at the end, and the view from the cemetary is very good. i was kinda surprised at the number of wwii vets... but god bless 'em.

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Log Entry 299

entry #299, Sat, May 27, 2000, 18:21 (Life in General)

oma & papa are in town for tommy's graduation. ate dinner at rozman's with them last night. remembered afterwards how awesome stars are. another reason i couldn't live in indiana for longer-term than grad school. today i went swimming with diana, annie, and danica. annie and danica spent about half an hour trying to get my head underwater, but failed. but it certainly gave me some exercise. the altitude is still hurting me. oh well. it's getting better. went to rozman's for dinner again tonite. richard and papa went fishing today, so we got to feast on the spoils. dad helped to cook the trout to perfection. good stuff. i'd forgotten how much fun fishing could be. perhaps i'll try to go fishing sometime this summer. richard talked about the latest water rights issues in the valley. bizarre stuff. i need to figure out if cleopatra 2525 and jack of all trades are played locally and at what time...

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Log Entry 298

entry #298, Fri, May 26, 2000, 11:06 (Life in General)

well, since mom threw out the apple cd/dvd driver on her imac, it no longer reads cd's. this is especially grave, since this means they cannot play zumbinis. or zoombinis. or whatever it is. so now that i have returned, i can save the day. since i have no idea where the original macos cd is that came with the machine, i have decided to download the upgrade to macos 8.6 in the hopes that as part of the upgrade, it will reinstall the cd driver.

my parents were super-generous and gave me volumes 1-3 of Knuth's Art of Computer Programming for my gradutation. They also mentioned something about getting me the remaining volumes when they come out. neato. so i started reading the first volume. good stuff. in addition to those 3 volumes, i want to finish Bach's design of the unix os, and various other papers i brought home.

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Log Entry 297

entry #297, Thu, May 25, 2000, 21:00 (Life in General)

well, i have returned to the butte. we arrived yesterday at 7 pm mountain time after about 21 hours of driving. along the way we stopped at offut air force base to visit b.j. who is now stationed there. it is good to be back in the mountains, i feel at home again. of course, i'm still a ways from being used to the altitude, so i'll have to take it easy for a few more days. hopefully i'll be able to start running and lifting and biking soon, i've got about 5 or 6 weeks until the first race i want to run.

graduation was fun, we had a lot of bishops at the commencement mass, and kofi annan (sec. general of UN) gave our commencement address. the cse ceremony was kinda nice, we got order of the engineer rings. i didn't really like the fact that a lot of the awards given out were ones for specific classes that were elective/cpeg classes that i didn't take. so i felt some of my time was wasted. but oh well, people seem to like awards. the order of the engineer ring is pretty cool, it is a completely undecorated stainless steel ring worn on the little finger of the working hand. much more information is available at http://www.order-of-the-engineer.org/.

i was quite happy to finally find my "Battle Hymns" cd by the suicide machines. it had been missing for quite some time, and ranks among my favorite cd's.

am enjoying access to the history channel again. good stuff, that. barbecue at the rozman's tomorrow to celebrate richard's birthday. oma & papa will be here for that and for tommy's graduation.

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Log Entry 296

entry #296, Mon, May 22, 2000, 13:03 (Life in General)

i wrote up a nice happy journal entry about graduation and suicide machines and engineering and stuff, but someone killed my x server, so i lost that. oh well, i'll try to recreate it from memory at some later date, maybe.

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Log Entry 295

entry #295, Sun, May 14, 2000, 02:41 (Life in General)

well, just about everyone is gone. and i'm slacking. been catching up on the latest trolling trends on slashdot. played more freeciv. also took a portion of my webpage, used babelfish to translate it into french, then back, then into german, then back, then into spanish and back, then into portugese and back, and finally into italian and back. the results were quite interesting and actually remotely resembled the original. i've posted the results here.

went to hacienda with brian and em, then went to see U-571. good movie. it went along with what i've always said: "i've never seen a submarine movie i didn't like." afterwards there was the usual saturday night tv. i think i need to write up an analysis of why submarine movies are so appealing to me.

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Log Entry 294

entry #294, Fri, May 12, 2000, 23:38 (Life in General)

ndlug open house went well today. a variety of important people were impressed by our setup.

went to this place called Damon's with chris, george, george's mom, and george's mom's boyfriend. was fun. food was quite good. watched voyager afterwards.

need to use the following phrase more often: "he couldn't count to 21 if he were barefoot and without pants." ... well, then again, maybe not... but maybe this one: " Couldn't find two Saint Bernards if they were in the same telephone booth with him." or "Couldn't tell which way the elevator was going if he had two guesses." or even "Couldn't write dialog for a porno flick."

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Log Entry 293

entry #293, Fri, May 12, 2000, 03:45 (Life in General)

well, i woke up earlier than expected, and remembered i had to help move stuff out of the ssr. thus i missed martha stewart living this morning. and i'll miss it again tomorrow. moving out of the ssr was chaos at its best. but the only casualty was a clock... i spent a good deal of time today playing freeciv. i also discovered two other fun games: glines and gattax. (or maybe gataxx).

read on slashdot about the new lara croft model (british) who said the following: "I'd been in South Africa on a modelling job and they'd told me to lose weight. I didn't fancy that so I was on my way home. And that was when I got the call telling me I was the new Lara. It was such fantastic news. It's such a high profile job - and one of the few that lets you keep your boobs and bum."

brilliant.

went by 208 cushing and talked to enrique blair for a while. we discussed how cool the west is... he's from oregon and has a similar perspective to my own on american geography. he's into the whole submarine scene. perhaps we'll attempt to go see u-571 over the weekend.

watched the movie "Clue" again. it's excellent. the last line makes it perfect: "I'm gonna go home and sleep with my wife!"

NDLUG open house tomorrow. exciting.

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Log Entry 292

entry #292, Thu, May 11, 2000, 02:12 (Life in General)

several posts on alt.spleen actually propogated to news.nd.edu in the past few days. of course, there have been about 20 posts in the past couple days, and about four of them made it to news.nd.edu. stupid "legitimate requests for porn"

remy posted about his rats: http://www.cnr.colostate.edu/~remy/Rats/ratscollage.jpg

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Log Entry 291

entry #291, Thu, May 11, 2000, 01:24 (School)

i'm done. i have finished up my undergraduate career at notre dame. the full effect hasn't yet hit me, i don't think. but then again, it's not quite as signficant for me as it is for those who are done with school for good.

i have set my alarm to wake me in time for martha stewart living tomorrow at 1 pm. i can't let my life go to waste by sleeping through it.

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Log Entry 290

entry #290, Sun, May 07, 2000, 01:48 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

new ratio for the optimizer: 56%. i am content with that. i should now go to sleep.

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Log Entry 289

entry #289, Sat, May 06, 2000, 05:47 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

well, i got two of the four things on my itinerary for today done. i put a lot more work into my compiler than i thought i would, and i went to don pablo's with arun, brian, and helped grad students who finished their quals celebrate. ate a lot, too, which was nice. i didn't get around to reading smashing the stack for fun and profit, and poker night got cancelled. did get to see voyager, tho.

made good progress on the optimizer. considering i started it at about 1 or 2 this afternoon, and took several large breaks, i'm pretty content with the progress i've made. i've implemented dead code elimination, jump chaining, dead register elimination, arithmetic optimization, elimination of redundant load/stores, replacement of push/pops with use of free registers, and inlining of single-block procedures. there may be more, but i forget. anyway, run on the phase4 vsuite, i get an average speedup of 34.1% (that is, programs execute, on average, only 65.9% of the instructions they used to). i can live with that, tho i wanna see if i can get it any better...

today is mom's birthday. happy birthday, mom! i need to remember to give her a call.

one thing i was thinking about on my way back to keenan is the fact that non-geeks really can't have a true appreciation for some of the stuff us geeks do... they can see that what we do isn't easy, and that it takes a lot of time, but they can't appreciate the elegance or cleverness of something. not like a non-artist can appreciate a piece of art, or a non-musician can appreciate music. oh well.

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Log Entry 288

entry #288, Thu, May 04, 2000, 23:52 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

two interesting vulnerabilities came across bugtraq today. not interesting in what is vulnerable, but interesting in that the authors detailed the process by which they found the vulnerability. some of these people are quite smart... and just a short while ago i was thinking that i should reread "smashing the stack for fun and profit" .... so i think i'll do that tomorrow...

also, today the loveletter / iloveyou worm caused millions of dollars of damage on the internet. jon furgeson got a copy. somebody put a lot of time into that thing... kinda sad, since that time could've been put to much more productive use... oh well... i really wish somebody would sue microsoft for releasing products that allow things like this to happen. oh well, that's why i use unixish operating systems... and pine, which nobly refuses to execute messages sent to me.

so the plan for tomorrow: wake up around noonish. work on compiler project for a few hours (or until i hit 20% average speedup), then read smashing the stack ... then perhaps work on ltfs tutorial for a while... 5 oclock going to eat with grad students celebrating having their quals behind them. poker night later on. will have to tape voyager.

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Log Entry 287

entry #287, Wed, May 03, 2000, 02:12 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

i am currently listening to Sandinista! by the Clash. it's interesting. i don't think it can be classified as punk, tho. i bought it a while ago, but only listened to one of the two cd's once. silly me.

my leg hurts.

i spent a good portion of today doing battle with code for compilers. i have discovered that i am not nearly as cool as knuth and cannot (repeat: cannot) release code and say that i've proven it correct without testing it. oh well. i wrote a cool shell script that scans a tm assembly file to see if it does any input. if it doesn't, it'll run the tm, collect its output, and generate a tm file that simply prints out that same output. the hardest part was getting my optimizer to execute this shell script. i am a dumbass, i always forget that i have to give a program i exec its argv[0] in addition to its path. argh.

am currently coding up some turing machine stuff. its fun, but hard to concentrate on. i think there's several reasons for this: 1. it's the end of the semester. 2. i am not nearly as hyped up on caffeine as i should be. and 3. it's not the kind of coding i am accustomed to doing, as it involves abstract stuff that i need to regularly look up, instead of stuff that i fully understand.

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Log Entry 286

entry #286, Tue, May 02, 2000, 01:14 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

i hate my insomnia. i think that it's been worse than average this semester, and it's been one of the main productivity killers. anyway, i'll quit whining. i've come up with what i think is a cooler method of doing the whole ram-tm thing. i'm hoping to spend tomorrow coding up a tm-to-turing coder. that way i can compile ice9 programs into tm, and then convert those into turing machine code. i think if i feel a need for a break from that, i might code up a little thing to convert a k-tape turing machine to a single-tape turing machine. i just read a fun article on signals in linux. apparently the signal stuff in the linux kernel has been benchmarked to be the fastest among the leading unixes. that's kinda cool. i really need to learn an assembly language so that i can start poking around in the deepest depths of linux.

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Log Entry 285

entry #285, Sun, April 30, 2000, 03:59 (Music)

watched voyager, xena, cleopatra 2525, and jack of all trades with george and brian. then went to fitz and watched the movie rushmore with arun and anne. was quite funny. on way back to keenan i hade my first hedge diving experience. it was quite good, despite the fact that i lost some skin on my elbow. for further reference, i present a song by operation ivy, called "hedgecore":

"what happened to your bush? it's not the same. something in your hedge made a violent change. we come, we see, we dive, destroy. annihilating shrubs is what we enjoy. hedgecore. hedge dive. hedgecore. we're doing hedges to stay alive. it's anarchy night every night of the year. chaotic mayhem is what keep your bush in fear. terrorist assasins of creative gardening. fucking up your hedge is what we sing. hedgecore. hedgedive. hedgecore. we're doing hedges to stay alive."

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Log Entry 284

entry #284, Sat, April 29, 2000, 21:00 (Life in General)

"you'd look so pretty with your head on fire" ... i love those lyrics. they are from the song "24 hour road side resistance" by Against All Authority.

the mutiny celebrations last night went well. one key to success was that we had more lighters than people in the room. we watched the movie "mutiny on the bounty" and we watched some british transvestite comedian, and we listend to a variety of punk and ska. i believe the quote "engineers are the reason that notre dame has a fire department" was spoken. mamie pointed out that she spent more than 10 hours hanging out at nd. she had fun. afterwards perk and i hung out in the hallway and i think some of our actions were rather worrisome to some people.

spent most of today working on network management presentation. made good progress.

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Log Entry 283

entry #283, Fri, April 28, 2000, 02:30 (Life in General)

i am considering this as my new motto: "When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout."

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Log Entry 282

entry #282, Fri, April 28, 2000, 01:22 (Music)

i have come to the conclusion that i need to do some research into which musicians the hardcore reggae fans consider to be good. the musicians which have not sold out reggae, but have remained true to the music and the movement. then i need to get some music by these people, listen to it, and then be all snooty whenever i hear reggae that's made it into the mainstream.

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Log Entry 281

entry #281, Thu, April 27, 2000, 17:50 (Politics)

the latest linux journal seems to have a good article on signal handling. i should give it a read, i might actually learn something new (and if not, it never hurts to refresh) ...

i've fixed ltfs such that if a daemon child responsible for a file system dies, the file system call active at the time will no longer hang, and additionally all new file system requests will now fail immediately. this should improve stability by enough to make ltfs usable outside of vmware.

from the advocates from self-government:


   Dear friends,



   Did you see this shocking news story, dated April 20?



   * * *



   Gun Ban Results In Tragic Deaths



   BOSTON -- National guard units seeking to confiscate a cache of
   recently banned assault rifles were ambushed on April 19th by elements
   of a paramilitary extremist faction. Military and law enforcement
   officials estimate that 72 were killed and more than 200 injured
   before government forces were compelled to withdraw.



   Speaking after the clash, Massachusetts Governor Thomas Gage declared
   that the extremist faction, which was made up of local citizens, has
   links to the radical right-wing tax protest movement.



   Gage blamed the extremists for recent incidents of vandalism directed
   against internal revenue offices. The governor, who described the
   group's organizers as "criminals," issued an executive order
   authorizing the summary arrest of any individual who has interfered
   with the government's efforts to secure law and order.



   The military raid on the extremist arsenal followed widespread refusal
   by the local citizenry to turn over recently outlawed assault weapons.
   Gage issued a ban on military-style assault weapons and ammunition
   earlier in the week. This decision followed a meeting earlier this
   month between government and military leaders at which the governor
   authorized the forcible confiscation of illegal arms.



   One government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, pointed
   out that "none of these people would have been killed had the
   extremists obeyed the law and turned over their weapons voluntarily."



   Government troops initially succeeded in confiscating a large supply
   of outlawed weapons and ammunition. However, troops attempting to
   seize arms and ammunition in Lexington met with resistance from
   heavily-armed extremists who had been tipped-off regarding the
   government's plan.



   During a tense standoff in Lexington's town park, National Guard
   Colonel Francis Smith, commander of the government operation, ordered
   the armed group to surrender and return to their homes. The impasse
   was broken by a single shot, which was reportedly fired by one of the
   right-wing extremists.



   Eight civilians were killed in the ensuing exchange. Ironically, the
   local citizenry blamed government forces rather than the extremists
   for the civilian deaths. Before order could be restored, armed
   citizens from surrounding areas had descended upon the guard units.
   Colonel Smith, finding his forces overmatched by the armed mob,
   ordered a retreat.



   Governor Gage has called upon citizens to support the state/national
   joint task force in its effort to restore law and order. The governor
   has also demanded the surrender of those responsible for planning and
   leading the attack against the government forces. Samuel Adams, Paul
   Revere, and John Hancock, who have been identified as "ringleaders" of
   the extremist faction, remain at large.



   * * *



   Oh, I forgot to mention the year - that was April 20, 1775.



   (Thanks to New American magazine, where we first saw this, and to
   George Schwappach, who reminded us of it. Author is unknown.)

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Log Entry 280

entry #280, Wed, April 26, 2000, 17:08 (Life in General)

slashdot trolling taken to the next level: http://hotgrits.org/. beware, that link is not under my control and is likely to offend.

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Log Entry 279

entry #279, Tue, April 25, 2000, 21:56 (Life in General)

look out cessium clocks, pete rijks is the newest development in super-accurate timing devices. well, ok, maybe not, but i just surprised myself... i was checking what time it was, so i hit enter on an idle term (my prompt has the time in it) and encountered the following:

[20:51:44] prijks@esgeroth:ttyp2 [~] (0)
                   prompt-fu => 
[21:51:44] prijks@esgeroth:ttyp2 [~] (0)
                   prompt-fu =>

i hit enter exactly an hour after the previous prompt had been displayed. exactly!

since i'm not getting anything done right now, i decided i'd slack off and read the linux source some more. some choice excerpts:

/*
 * Now, we have to map the power management section to write
 * a bit which enables access to the GPIO registers.
 * What lunatic came up with this shit?
 */

(that quote is from arch/i386/kernel/setup.c .. gotta love x86)
anyway, it is now voyager time.

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Log Entry 278

entry #278, Tue, April 25, 2000, 19:26 (Life in General)

mozilla: relatively stable, open source, handles cookies much better than netscape, but draws fonts muy crapily, doesn't put something into global cut/paste buffer when i select it, lacks java/javascript, and in general feels incomplete.
netscape: does the things listed above that mozilla doesn't, but crashes frequently.
i'm alternating between the two quite a lot. when netscape crashes, i start up mozilla. when mozilla pisses me off i quit it and start up netscape.

and the media distorts the truth.

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Log Entry 277

entry #277, Tue, April 25, 2000, 02:32 (Spirituality)

tomorrow i must do laundry, shave my hair, do more work on ltfs, and enjoy life. my hair is far too long at this time. long hair weighs me down. physically, by being a pain... it takes longer to shower, i have to worry about at least towel-drying it, etc... on the spiritual plane i simply feel restricted. perhaps my aura has a hard time escaping the dense matt of hair that surrounds my brain.

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Log Entry 276

entry #276, Tue, April 25, 2000, 02:28 (Spirituality)

tonite i sent out a call for roofers. the cry went as follows:

as we wallow away in the misery generated by bit misalignment, set associativity, (insert smokepacker misery-causer here), and the woes of the ftp protocol, we must come to the realization that life is too short, and there remain too many unexplored roofs on this world of ours.

and thus the decree: fuck this. all of you can -- and must -- afford a break from whatever it is you're doing, for the health of your soul is at stake. it yearns for the joy of discovery. you mustn't neglect it.

so thusly we met and went onto the fitz/cushing roof again. arun, perk, anne, george, drink, and i explored and thus gained spiritual growth of some sort, i'm sure.

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Log Entry 275

entry #275, Tue, April 25, 2000, 00:02 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

ahhh, what a silly fool i am. for the read function for the ftp file system module for ltfs, i was telling the ftp server to go to type i (binary) for transfers, which is most likely the right thing to do, since text files tend to come across ok like that. unfortunately, i failed to remember that the ftp server would also send directory listings across in binary mode, and this was causing my directory parsing to go askew. but i've fixed that, and now all is well. the next thing to do at this point is to make it quicker (directory listings are painfully slow -- not entirely my fault, i wanted to keep the socket open for directory listings so that i could pull entries off as i needed them, but noooo, stupid ftp protocol doesn't allow control connection to be reused while data is being sent across data connection. what's the point in separate connections anyway?) and to implement symlinks (or at least ensure that the kernel doesn't oops when one attempts to follow a symlink).

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Log Entry 274

entry #274, Mon, April 24, 2000, 19:31 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

note to self: don't follow symlinks in the ltfs ftp module until after symlinks have been implemented. at this time following a symlink causes a kernel oops. doh!

on the other hand, at this point i have managed to get readdir and read working to a good degree, so ltfs now has a reasonably functional read-only ftp file system.

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Log Entry 273

entry #273, Mon, April 24, 2000, 17:38 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

i hate the ftp protocol.

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Log Entry 272

entry #272, Mon, April 24, 2000, 04:01 (Movies)

the read-only ftp thingy for ltfs is nearing usability, which is nifty. i think it'll be done tomorrow. we watched lawrence of arabia. it was quite good. it was about 3 hours and 40 minutes long, and it still amazes me that my attention span held out. that right there is proof that it was good. perk and i returned to keenan and discussed why lawrence held my attention span, yet fight club didn't. then we watched dr. katz. now i'm tired and am going to sleep.

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Log Entry 271

entry #271, Sun, April 23, 2000, 17:20 (Life in General)

yesterday one of my goals for before graduation was achieved. i made it onto the fitz/cushing roof. it was glorious.

ltfs is now going well. i rewrote the ftp_command function and tossed out some beautiful pointer arithmetic code. oh well, it's been replaced by something better, a readline function that'll buffer stuff. i'm fairly content with that. now i need to figure out if this number i'm getting as a mode is just in need of being converted to octal, or if something is actually going horribly wrong...

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Log Entry 270

entry #270, Sat, April 22, 2000, 16:05 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

i need to remember to apologize to esgeroth when i return to keenan. i've been rather abusive of it, since i'm using its ftp server for all my testing. the emails that logcheck generates are a bit shorter now that ltfs no longer goes into infinite loops reconnecting to esgeroth, but i'm still generating some non-trivial traffic, but it's now down to about 8K worth of log entries per hour instead of 43K. (those are numbers of characters per entry, not actuall number of entries... but still a lot... ok, i'm making no sense at all, abort, abort, abort!!!)

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Log Entry 269

entry #269, Sat, April 22, 2000, 16:01 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

as long-forgotten c hacking skills slowly begin to rise back to the surface of my brain, replacing the weakness that c++ has instilled there, there is but one conclusion that can be drawn: I RULE!

the ftp module for LTFS now connects to an ftp site and gets all of that jazz into working order. reading files should be trivial. the only thing that may take some time at this point is listing files. but i am sure that the greatness which is me will have no trouble figuring it out.

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Log Entry 268

entry #268, Thu, April 20, 2000, 23:45 (Life in General)

brian and i just watched american pie, followed by an episode each of star trek the next generation, star trek (the original), and star trek voyager. then i read some more of time enough for love. now i'm going to sleep for a long time. i believe this will conclude the laziness that i need in order to prepare for getting some good work done over break.

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Log Entry 267

entry #267, Thu, April 20, 2000, 06:28 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

well, my compiler is now fully functional, however, i still want to do a number of optimizations. in particular, my array indexing and proc calling seem to be rather inefficient at this time. i'm pretty sure i know why too, and it shouldn't be too hard to fix, but right now i'm going to go sleep.

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Log Entry 266

entry #266, Wed, April 19, 2000, 23:59 (Life in General)

george and i attempted to rally the troops for a trip to senior bar for object-oriented stammtisch, but nobody was to be found, other than perk, who begged out. but what can you expect from a smokepacker? i feel this bizarre desire for quarter dogs, and will probably soon find myself in search of quarters so that i can afford one or two...

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Log Entry 265

entry #265, Wed, April 19, 2000, 21:09 (School)

well, i just received my official letter of admission to grad school at notre dame. i'm getting a full tuition scholarship worth about $23,000 for the 2000-2001 academic year. i'm also getting a "taxable" stipend of about $12,200 a month. doesn't seem like a bad deal to me.

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Log Entry 264

entry #264, Wed, April 19, 2000, 18:14 (Life in General)

life is going well these days. i intend to stay up as late tonite as is needed to finish my compiler. not a problem. i talked to Ramzi Bualuan about being a grad TA for cse 232 next semester, he seemed enthusiastic about that idea.

i'm currently listening to less than jake's losing streak album. how could life possibly be better? i'm coding and listening to great music. i'm so happy the protons within the atoms i am composed of are becoming charged.

also, mutiny.esgeroth.org.

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Log Entry 263

entry #263, Tue, April 18, 2000, 00:24 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

found out my grade thus far in network management: a-. I can live with that.

compilers is going well, I've implemented expressions, do loops, if expressions, break, read, write, exit, global non-array variables. need to do procedures, arrays, fa loops.

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Log Entry 262

entry #262, Sun, April 16, 2000, 17:52 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Alright, I've finally gotten myself into code generation for ice9. It's rather fun, and I've several ideas for cool things to do. I've already added three new command line options to the compiler:

-u, for Unoptimize, which turns off optimizzations
-r, for Rolled, turns off loop unrolling (bbut leaves other optimizations)
-l, for Loop, allows specification of how bbig loops can be before they don't get unrolled

My loop unrolling approach is going to be very simplistic, and I think it will only apply to fa (for all/each) loops. Basically, if the upper and lowed bounds of a fa loop are constants, and are within a certain "distance" of each other, I'll really simplistically unroll the loop. I think this could actually have a decent performance boost, especially for tight loops, because tm is simplistic enough to make loops kinda expensive.

I also intend to come up with a good register allocation scheme, better than the accumulator scheme that Dr. Freeh suggests we use. tm has 8 registers, of which one is the PC, and I'm using two more for frame and stack, so I have 5 registers. It seems kinda wasteful to me to use one of those as an accumulator and the rest just as temporaries. I wish I could find a good resource on register allocation, but for now I'll just wing it, since it really doesn't need to be optimal at all.

Dead code elimination is also a goal. This should be easy for simple cases. For example, during semantic analysis, I can keep track of which procedures get called and which don't, and simply not generate code for those that don't. That won't catch something like having proc a calling proc b, but nothing calling a, since that'll eliminate a, but not b, unless I do the semantic pass multiple times, which seems wasteful. At least I'm not writing a just-in-time compiler or something.

Dr. Freeh told us we don't have to worry about nested procedures:

proc a(b: int)
  proc b(c: int)
    ...
  end
  ...
end

because that makes the frames a good deal more complex, but I think I might give that a try later...

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Log Entry 261

entry #261, Sat, April 15, 2000, 11:53 (Life in General)

yesterday was a relatively good day... went to Rich Murphy's masters defense, which was the first defense i've ever witnessed. then went lifting and played frisbee with george. then went to mishawaka brewco with squyres, brian, arun, and some other grads to celebrate Rich Murphy's new masters. then went to dogma with a bunch of people. it was a rather entertaining movie.

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Log Entry 260

entry #260, Fri, April 14, 2000, 04:08 (Life in General)

rumor has it that i apparently chased a security guard last night. i have no recollection of this, and honestly wish that i did, because it sounds rather amusing. perk apparently chased after me and wrestled me away from trouble before the guard noticed. it seems that i finally tried to fight the man, but was prevented from doing so. oh well. apparently i also defeated a tree last night, which must have been glorious. either way, i believe i need to adhere to a "no drinking unless i've had at least 5 hours of sleep" policy. also, i should go to sleep now.

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Log Entry 259

entry #259, Fri, April 14, 2000, 00:13 (Life in General)

ok, i was rather mistaken about the time frame of habitat, it was actually done around 1985/86. oh, and it's cool because it uses the term Avatar when referring to the online character representations of players.

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Log Entry 258

entry #258, Fri, April 14, 2000, 00:10 (Life in General)

hmmm, I've found myself reading a paper about "habitat," some mud-like online game done by LucasFilm in the late 80s or early 90s. it's quite interesting and has a great quote as to the inspiration for the game:

Habitat was inspired by a long tradition of "computer hacker
science fiction", notably Vernor Vinge's novel, True Names
[1], as well as many fond childhood memories of games of
make-believe, more recent memories of role-playing games and
the like, and numerous other influences too thoroughly
blended to pinpoint. To this we add a dash of silliness, a
touch of cyberpunk [2,3], and a predilection for
object-oriented programming [4].

yay objected oriented programming! anyway, the paper is here

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Log Entry 257

entry #257, Thu, April 13, 2000, 14:14 (Life in General)

every once in a while, sXe doesn't sound like such a bad idea...

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Log Entry 256

entry #256, Wed, April 12, 2000, 00:56 (School)

wooohooo! i've been admitted to grad school at ND with full financial support. yay!

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Log Entry 255

entry #255, Tue, April 11, 2000, 02:49 (Life in General)

Well, I finished up a webpage for goose, my ex-roomie. He wanted to compensate me, so for payment we agreed on a sixpack of beer. My specifications for the beer were that it be a lager that is not super-cheap. I trust goose to make a good choice.

I think the following rumination describes something I should try in class sometime:
"I think a good technique to stay awake during boring meetings is to imagine everyone as animals. Talking people are boring, but talking animals -- now there's something you don't see everyday. Especially taking notes." (Dustin Hotz)

Today was a good day for ruminations:
"My favorite part of school used to be making cut-outs from colored construction paper and pasting sprinkles on them. It was fun, it was creativity in its purest form, and I was too young to care that some faculty members deemed it inappropriate for a masters thesis." (Larry Hollister)

ruminations is at www.topfive.com

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Log Entry 254

entry #254, Sun, April 09, 2000, 16:23 (School)

well, i survived the programming contest.

last night george and i went to the hawaiin club luah with anne. that was entertaining, the food was quite good (well, most of it, they have this purple pasty thing called "poi" that's kinda shady) and we got to watch girls dance on stage and call it culture. afterwards we went to lia's place for some party thing. at midnight george and i left for meijer to have george buy beer legally for the first time. i bought an 8pack or so of lighters. then we went to taco bell and discussed politics for a while over chili cheese burritos and wild chalupas. then we returned to the party thing. i had a little more alcohol than i should've and was up a bit later than i should've been, waking up for the contest wasn't too fun, since 6 hours of sleep doesn't entirely rid the body of that drunken feeling. but a bag of pretzels, a powerade, and two sprites had me ready for the contest. 7 teams showed up, a total of 13 people. not bad. we soon discovered that contestants were unable to run their programs, when they attempted to do so, the environment would crash. doh! luckily this was limited to c++ programs, and i fixed it within 40 minutes of the start of the contest. then the server crashed on a random segfault, but luckily jeff put a recovery mode into the server, so we were able to continue unharmed. also, our testing output for one problem was wrong, but that's ok. in the end it was fun, tho exhausting. george and tim brick ended up winning. they got 4 of 5 problems, and were minutes away from a solution to the 5th. every team solved at least two problems, so that's good.

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Log Entry 253

entry #253, Sat, April 08, 2000, 15:59 (Life in General)

I now own a waffle iron. woohoo!

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Log Entry 252

entry #252, Fri, April 07, 2000, 19:59 (Life in General)

I am soooooo tired..... I was up until about 7 am working on getting the contest environment ready for the programming contest on sunday. spent a good deal of this afternoon doing more work on it. it's now finally in a usable state, tho there are still a few bugs that want to be worked out. There are now 6 teams officially signed up. I need to come up with one more problem... oh well, shouldn't be too hard. george and perk and i are supposedly going to go lift some weights now...

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Log Entry 251

entry #251, Thu, April 06, 2000, 15:51 (School)

alright, there are now four teams signed up for the contest, two teams that intend to participate, but haven't signed up yet because they're busy thinking up team names, one team that is likely to sign up, and one team that might sign up. i've got five problems written, need one more. i think i'll add another easy-ish one.

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Log Entry 250

entry #250, Wed, April 05, 2000, 20:59 (Life in General)

well, there are now four teams signed up for the programming contest. and I know of two more teams that will probably sign up. I think I've got an idea for another problem for the contest.

got little coding done today, due to the whole class thing, and since i was over at smc to visit mamie. oh well. now it is time to go do weights and maybe a little running, followed by a trip to senior bar to initiate brian to that whole scene.

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Log Entry 249

entry #249, Wed, April 05, 2000, 01:19 (Life in General)

well, george and i got a basic socket stream class working, it wasn't too difficult, much easier than i expected, actually. of course, there's a lot more that wants doing, but that's just icing on the cake.

i just filled out my 2000 census. yay.

I wouldn't mind having the following quote on my tombstone: "Nobody is totaly useless. They can always be used as a bad example." (It's a rumination by Paul Jeffrey...)

I've got four problems ready for the programming contest. need at least two more.

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Log Entry 248

entry #248, Tue, April 04, 2000, 01:29 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

alright, well my first attempt at a read-only ftp module for ltfs is failing miserably, so i'm gonna give up on that and try again when i'm not having trouble getting my eyes to focus.

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Log Entry 247

entry #247, Tue, April 04, 2000, 00:11 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

well, george and i have begun work on a c++ socket stream class. we've figured out (to a degree) how streambuf's work and have implemented a sockbuf that currently only does output, but now that we know how, input shouldn't be hard. once that's done we'll implement a sockstream that uses the sockbuf. at that point we'll have a simple sockstream implemented, and we can see where to take it from there. wmwb didn't play voyager at 11 tonite, so i'll have to figure out what's up with that, it might have to do with that time change thing that the rest of the country did. today was mamie's birthday. happy birthday mamie!

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Log Entry 246

entry #246, Mon, April 03, 2000, 04:33 (Life in General)

well, got some turing stuff done, that was good. then i moved on to smoking coffee grinds, it didn't work very well, but was entertaining none-the-less. either way...

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Log Entry 245

entry #245, Mon, April 03, 2000, 01:59 (Life in General)

alright, so my problem of recent is that whenever i return to keenan in order to "recharge the ol' batteries" a.k.a. sleep, i end up watching tv for several hours, which isn't so good. so i'm thinking i should start staying in fitz until after the shows i watch are over, thus spending that time productively. unfortunately, star trek voyager is a must, and that's at 11, so maybe i can start watching that in the eg student center, but i dunno...

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Log Entry 244

entry #244, Sun, April 02, 2000, 22:14 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

woohoo, semantic analysis is done! took slightly longer than intended due to 1. frequently stopping coding in order to read lyrics from new AAA cd, 2. x-files, and 3. my changing the overall type of a node in the AST without changing the base type (int/bool) of the node. doh!

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Log Entry 243

entry #243, Sun, April 02, 2000, 13:40 (Music)

well, my new Against All Authority cd arrived yesterday. I am currently enjoying my first listen to it. It is quite good, so blindly buying any CD by them has been a good policy for me thus far, I'm three for three.

I am now attempting to finish up semantic analysis, all that remains is procedures. The plan of attack is as follows: implement forward, implement proc, then implement procedure calls.

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Log Entry 242

entry #242, Sun, April 02, 2000, 03:27 (Movies)

got most of the semantic work on my compiler done today. then went to see skulls with brian, george, anne, and lisa. then we rented dick and watched that, it's quite amusing. then we went in search of someplace for brian to buy alcohol, since he turned 21, but we didn't find anything that was open. so we brian, anne, and i made our way back to keenan, stole some beer, and had a little toast for brian. then i watched jack of all trades, and am considering sleep, since i should do more work tomorrow.

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Log Entry 241

entry #241, Sat, April 01, 2000, 01:16 (Life in General)

ok, so i don't really remember what i've been up to of late, but nothing of any real value, i don't think. well, i did teach george socket basics today, and i think i might have done some coding on something. mainly i think i've watched a lot of tv.

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Log Entry 240

entry #240, Thu, March 30, 2000, 01:50 (Music)

today i was a lazy bum. it was good. i did nothing all day. then i went running and then to senior bar. afterwards i went by fitz and helped lisa with some sql stuff. then perk showed up. we went to lafortune and found ourselve at wvfi, and performed Estes Kefaver live on the air. It was, unless I'm mistaken, the first live performance by the Profiteers.

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Log Entry 239

entry #239, Sun, March 26, 2000, 13:31 (Music)

well, against all authority released a new album, "24 hour roadside resistance" on tuesday. i was gonna order it directly from hopeless records, but they didn't have an encrypted version of their online store, so i went to cdnow to see how much it was there, and discovered i had a credit on my account so i got the cd for $1, which i can't complain about...

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Log Entry 238

entry #238, Sun, March 26, 2000, 02:39 (Life in General)

i bought a lighter today. finally my pyromania can live again. it's been too long since i regularly played with fire.

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Log Entry 237

entry #237, Sat, March 25, 2000, 23:28 (Life in General)

alright, i'm really sore. the moshpit took its toll, and we did some more hardkore dancing when the butterfly effect played, and then some more at the party we went to afterwards... arun and perk went to cheers after no redeeming qualities, but george and i returned to nazz for ron garcia's band the butterfly effect, and then met anne at a party. it was quite entertaining.

spent most of today staring at emacs, unable to code... and i wasn't even trying to procrastinate, i simply failed to produce code. well, i produced a little... i wrote up a solution to the matrix-chain problem for the programming team, and i started playing with some neural net code for pete's index.

now george and i are watching a new episode of voyager, which is quite cool, involves cool klingon stuff, including tuvak being a badass. after that come xena, cleopatra 2525, and jack of all trades.

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Log Entry 236

entry #236, Fri, March 24, 2000, 22:38 (Music)

well, just got back from nazz, saw j's band "no redeeming qualities" play. it was great, there was an awesome mosh pit, it was quite stress relieving. i'll be sore tomorrow but it will have been worth it. george and I are heading back to senior bar for more nazz at midnight, ron garcia's band "the butterfly effect" is playing at 00:20. in the meantime, we're gonna watch voyager while i recuperate.

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Log Entry 235

entry #235, Thu, March 23, 2000, 20:00 (School)

just got back from the engineering teacher of the year award meeting. i am not permitted to discuss any of the events that happened there.

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Log Entry 234

entry #234, Thu, March 23, 2000, 00:15 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

survived yet another exciting episode of stammtisch. arun showed off dynamic_cast and typeid, i brought some ltfs code.

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Log Entry 233

entry #233, Wed, March 22, 2000, 20:07 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

woohoo! ltfs_read seems to be functional. at this point i believe it is possible to implement read-only file systems with ltfs, so i might have to write a read-only ftp module for ltfs just to test that theory...

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Log Entry 232

entry #232, Wed, March 22, 2000, 19:00 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

well, the 'new and improved' ltfs is now to the same point that the old one was when i started rewriting the request structure. Unless I'm completely wrong, the new mechanism should be slightly faster, since we now only copy as much as necessary between user and kernel space, instead of an entire ltfs_request structure regardless of how much of it is used. I might try to come up with a better request packing mechanism, since it does do memcpy's, but I was doing those extra copies anyway whenever I was individually setting pieces of the ltfs_request to various values. I think I'm gonna go watch star trek now.

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Log Entry 231

entry #231, Wed, March 22, 2000, 00:54 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

did more ltfs work, I am in the process of reimplementing the request structure that gets passed between the fs and the user-space daemon, the new method should be slightly more generic and stuff. I'm also going to reimplement how the daemon talks to the shared object modules that implement the various file systems.

talked to mom on the phone a while, she's leaving for europe on friday with annie and several other kids in annie's class. that ought to be interesting...

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Log Entry 230

entry #230, Tue, March 21, 2000, 01:10 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

i figured out why whenever a program tried to open(2) a file on an ltfs file system it would get an EBUSY error, without my open fs function ever being called. It turned out that the function ltfs_open that I was registering with the VFS was actually the open function for the ltfs device driver, which returns EBUSY on any attempt after the first to open it. That was kinda stupid. The function I wrote for ltfs open was actually called ltfs_file_open ... but now life is better.

my leg really freaking hurts, running didn't go so well tonite...

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Log Entry 229

entry #229, Mon, March 20, 2000, 00:59 (Spirituality)

buddhism: follow the eight-fold path:

1.Right Understanding 2.Right Thoughts 3.Right Speech 4.Right Action 5.Right Livelihood 6.Right Effort 7.Right Mindfulness 8.Right Concentration

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Log Entry 228

entry #228, Sat, March 18, 2000, 16:46 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

alright, here's the new plan: compile a new kernel with an ultra-verbose vfs layer. that'll show 'em.

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Log Entry 227

entry #227, Sat, March 18, 2000, 16:08 (Life in General)

Played with gimp some yesterday, made a space picture and then spent a while figuring out bump map. Added a gimp art section to my webpage. This morning I finished up the gunbuster series. The last one is kinda disappointing, mainly because the animation is really shoddy... apparently the animation studio ran out of money. it's in black and white, and the big battle in the middle isn't even animated, it's just pictures of things blowing up. Oh well. Work now continues on LTFS. Later tonite is dedicated to some turing machine stuff, followed by vampire hunter d.

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Log Entry 226

entry #226, Fri, March 17, 2000, 00:00 (Movies)

spent this afternoon working on some php code for the ssr webpage. went running this afternoon and put up a pitiful performance, my muscles just refused to cooperate. so i spent a lot of time stretching afterwards. watched Akira tonight, great anime, that.

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Log Entry 225

entry #225, Thu, March 16, 2000, 10:43 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

woohoo! ltfs_lookup now works. i can now actually cd into a directory that is an ltfs mount point, and see directories and cd into them. the dream is now much closer to realization.

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Log Entry 224

entry #224, Thu, March 16, 2000, 09:10 (Movies)

watched october sky last night, wasn't a bad movie... did more work on ltfs, currently am trying to figure out the lookup filesystem call. had a good workout last night, we ran for 25 minutes and lifted weights for probably more than 30 minutes. including time spent on a warmup and cooldown jog and stretching, we were there for like an hour and a half. i really wish i had time to do that on a daily basis.

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Log Entry 223

entry #223, Tue, March 14, 2000, 15:27 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

i rule! i finally figured out how to make readdir work. finally ltfs can move in a forward-ish direction.

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Log Entry 222

entry #222, Mon, March 13, 2000, 07:52 (Life in General)

ok, so since i woke up at 6 and have been unsuccessful in my attempts to fall back asleep, I decided to hunt down the answer to yet another question that has been plaguing me for a long time: "Why do stations east of the Mississippi have call letters beginning with W, while stations west of the Mississippi have call letters beginning with a K?"

Well, the first thing I found was verification that this was a fact, not just a trend or tendency. On November 15, 1940, Broadcasting magazine ran an article describing a proposed call letter plan for FM broadcasting that had been developed by the FCC. In it is the following sentence: "In devising the new system, the department feels it has given actual meaning and significance to the call combinations. All W prefixed stations would be located east of the Mississippi and all K stations west." So at least I wasn't imagining this. But the article gave no reason as to why this was. So the search continued.

A refined search on google for "FM radio call letters" yielded me the jackpot: http://www.ipass.net/~whitetho/3myst.htm

I shall summarize:

Call signs date back to the early usage of radio, namely when it was employed on ships. Since morse was used at the time, they needed short identifiers that could be quickly broadcast. However, there were no standards at first, and chaos reigned. Three letter call signs became standardized, and some international body handed out blocks of signs to various countries. The USA got the blocks beginning with K, N, and W. (Actually, Germany owned a small portion of the K block for a while, but later gave it to the US.) N was reserved for military use, and is apparently still in exclusive use by the U.S. Navy. So the decision was made that ships in the Atlantic would use call letters starting with K and that ships in the Pacific would use call letters starting with W. Land stations on the coast would use call letters that started with the 'opposite' letter of the ships they would be communicating with, in order to avoid confusion of whether a station was a land or a sea station. So, east coast stations had call letters beginning with W, and west coast stations had call letters beginning with K. As radio began to move inland, it was realized that a boundary would have to be drawn between the W's and the K's. Originally this boundary was along the New Mexico/Texas, Colorado/Kansas, Wyoming/Nebraska borders, but in 1923 it was decided that this border should be moved to the Mississippi (presumably to balance the K and W stations, since the east had many more stations than the west). However, the few stations that were in between the old and new borders were allowed to keep their W call letters. These are stations such as WKY Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, WOI Ames, Iowa, and WHB Kansas City, Kansas. Later on it was realized that the three letter call signs would soon be insufficient in number to handle the needs of stations in the US, so call signs were extended to be four letters long, but existing three letter call signs were allowed to continue.

Some random trivia: no call sign may have the same three letters in a row, so the first four letter call sign that was assigned was WAAB.

So now I've solved another of the great mysteries that plague my life.

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Log Entry 221

entry #221, Sat, March 11, 2000, 22:11 (Life in General)

Spring Break is here. Life is continuing to beat me into submission. Someday perhaps I will accept that it sucks. Until then I'll struggle onwards.

NDLUG finally has an IP block of its own. Exciting. We're still busy configuring routing and such...

Watched Macrosse this afternoon. Cheesy, but good. Mamie left me a variety of anime selections to watch over break. So that oughta be fun.

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Log Entry 220

entry #220, Wed, March 08, 2000, 13:39 (Life in General)

well, it looks like i won't be going to colorado for spring break, which really blows, but oh well, i guess i'll save a bunch of money plus be able to make more working. but still...

expression checking for the ice9 compiler is done. it was quite trivial, only about 50-60 lines of code. i'm feeling generally unmotivated in general...

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Log Entry 219

entry #219, Tue, March 07, 2000, 01:29 (Life in General)

despite not being prime (it's factors are 3 and 19) 57 is still my favorite number. I found some cool mister t xperience music today. section mates just spent a whole bunch of time looking at some stalkers page devoted to his stalkee. scary. commencement info came in the mail today. also scary.

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Log Entry 218

entry #218, Mon, March 06, 2000, 21:18 (School)

Art History test went ok. I think I said enough to get a decent grade. Finally got NDLUG thank you letter to dean done. Brian did a good job cleaning the room for tomorrow while I was in class. NDLUG is participating in the freshman indoctrination festival tomorrow, which is called "explore your options" or something by the powers-that-be.

I spent a good amount of time throwing a frisbee around today. That's always good. Played with the compiler a little, got bored of it, started playing on acm webpage. PHP rocks. I need to figure out how to safely compile and run a program that somebody uploads. I want to be able to check a program's output for a problem against known good output. However, I don't want people uploading programs that do stuff like 'system ("rm -rf /");' and similar. I'm thinking of cutting out all #includes, adding permitted ones, and then removing any instance of 'system,' 'fork,' and any variation of 'exec'. Additionally, limits on cpu time and memories must be instituted to prevent any sort of DOS attempts.

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Log Entry 217

entry #217, Mon, March 06, 2000, 12:32 (Music)

I've discovered the greatest band ever: Shonen Knife. They are, in their own words, a "super-eccentric-pop-punk-cult-band-shonen-knife!" which is probably the best way to describe them. Anyway, they're from Japan, they're three girls, they've been together since December 1981, and they claim to be influenced by the Ramones and the Beach Boys. They're great. I also discovered a band called the Ataris, and they've got this song called "Angry Nerd Rock," which, combined with their name, makes them a great geek band.

Other than that, I've got my art history midterm in about 90 minutes, and I'd study, but I've got a shonen knife song stuck in my head...

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Log Entry 216

entry #216, Sun, March 05, 2000, 16:14 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

today I got spammed by some guy running for Keenan Hall senator. It really doesn't bother me too much, but it does a little, and I was kinda bored, so I responded telling him I wouldn't be voting for him.

I've made some progress on the compiler, but I've also realized that it would be a bad idea to write too much code for the semantic analyzer without sittng down and really thinking up a good design. I might do that during class monday.

Art History test tomorrow, I'm rather unconcerned. Though I do need to sit down and actually memorize some dates. Not a problem.

I need to read up some more on RAM Turing Machines. The automata book talks about them some, but I don't like their implementation. The plan is to write a program that converts RAM TM assembly into actual turing machine state transitions. I think I'm gonna make it so that the RAM TM assembly is very von neuman-esque. I'll use one tape for input, one tape for output, several tapes as registers, one tape as a stack, one tape as general memory, and then add some scratch tapes for use by the "ALU".

The spamming senator candidate just responded, apologizing. Perhaps he's learned a little lesson. I think all it takes is a little common sense and a bit of education. Perhaps netiquette will someday be as much part of our society as regular etiquette.

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Log Entry 215

entry #215, Sat, March 04, 2000, 23:22 (Movies)

alright, watching star trek iv with subtitles turned on is proving to be very educational. I learned that I've been understanding a line wrong in a non-trivial way. I was hearing a 'but' when Sarek was actually saying 'while'. Also, apparently the computers on the klingon ship apparently say "wrooo".

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Log Entry 214

entry #214, Sat, March 04, 2000, 23:14 (Movies)

and while I'm on the subject of Star Trek IV, the subtitles have now informed us that the alien probe is actually saying "[screee]". I wonder if that's from the same language as "gwwaaahr"

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Log Entry 213

entry #213, Sat, March 04, 2000, 23:11 (Movies)

well, Brian and I are once again watching Star Trek IV on dvd. It is such a great movie. Due to the wonders of subtitles, I have finally solved the greatest mystery that has plagued all my life. At the end of the opening scene, whenever the president tells the klingon ambassador that they won't extradite Kirk, and then the Klingon says there will be no peace as long as Kirk lives, there's a loud disembodied voice that says something I've never been able to understand. Well, now I know what it says. It says "You pompous ass". I can now die happy.

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Log Entry 212

entry #212, Sat, March 04, 2000, 16:51 (Life in General)

well, today I participated in the hydra install fest, we upgraded processors and ram on 32 machines. took only about 2 hours. kinda fun...

Additionally, I'm now actually reading a bond book, "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" ... there's an excellent quote: "Bond's mind ticked and whirred, selecting cards like an IBM machine." Also, there's a part where some guy is telling Bond about his family history, and at one point he tells him that his family motto was "The World Is Not Enough," which I thought was kinda interesting, given the name of the last Bond movie... and I don't think that fact was mentioned anywhere in the movie. But reading a Bond book is great, since Ian Fleming actually manages to write with an english accent.

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Log Entry 211

entry #211, Fri, March 03, 2000, 23:34 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Brian and I moved the rest of our stuff from the ssr machine room to the ndlug room today. we also got six new sparc station 1+'s. so our room is coming together nicely. currently we are making ethernet cables and watching voyager. freshman indoctrination day is march 7, so we're hoping to get the room ready for that...

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Log Entry 210

entry #210, Fri, March 03, 2000, 10:56 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

alright, well I have absolutely no clue how it happened, seeing how no debian packages have been updated since last night, but the mysql module for php4 is now working again, so my log is finally back online. I did restart apache for unrelated reasons, tho, so i wonder if that somehow caused it to sort itself out.

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Log Entry 209

entry #209, Sun, February 27, 2000, 05:49 (Life in General)

arun insisted that i add new functionality to my journal, and of course i seem to have trouble keeping it working right. so this really is kinda a bogus entry.

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Log Entry 208

entry #208, Sun, February 27, 2000, 05:48 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

well, i woke up today at about 2. i read about pim for a while, then headed to fitz where i spent a while working on my compiler, then added an obfuscated code section to my webpage. then i spent a long while adding new features to pgtc. then we went to reckers to entertain anne, and stayed there for quite a while. now it's 5:46, and i seriously should go to sleep

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Log Entry 207

entry #207, Sat, February 26, 2000, 17:32 (Life in General)

one thing that will never ceise to amaze me is the number of people i see in the lab using the fvwm2 configuration i created long ago during my sophomore year. These are people that are sophomores, juniors, and seniors (and possibly even freshman) that are from all the various fields of engineering, that I do not know. I certainly hope they find that stuff useful. And I guess I can take comfort in the fact that the time I spent learning fvwm2 wasn't wasted.

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Log Entry 206

entry #206, Fri, February 25, 2000, 22:57 (Movies)

i'm really tired. today i was involved in the indoctrination of sorts of prospective students. i also went looking at apartments with brian. i also threw a frisbee around a bit, and watched fight club. it had an interesting idea, but it's implementation was just not for me, it was about 27 times longer than my attention span, i actually found myself contemplating trying to fall asleep to make it go by faster.

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Log Entry 205

entry #205, Fri, February 25, 2000, 04:38 (Life in General)

well, today i once again woke up late. then i worked on my compiler a bit more, followed by a meeting with Freeh in which i told him i'd done nothing. Arun and I watched the engineering week eggdrop contest, which turned out to be quite unexciting. my webpage redesign has gone well, and such, so i'm happy about that.

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Log Entry 204

entry #204, Thu, February 24, 2000, 03:06 (Life in General)

today was interesting. i was asked to be the computer science representative to the committee that is to determine the professor who will win best engineering teacher for this year. I also spent more time on the compiler project, which was fun. i think senioritis is manifesting itself in me by making me spend time coding instead of doing all the other stuff i need to do for classes. Arun and I went to senior bar for object oriented code night. arun ended up having half a pitcher of beer spilled on him, but we valiantly carried on. we've renamed the event to Object Oriented Stammtisch, and I've created the mandatory webpage.

got a valentines card from the parents, mom signed it "Teresa (Mom)" just in case I don't know who this Teresa woman is. I also got the eating disorder survey in the mail today, which I filled out just to let them know that there are a few of us on this campus who do eat normally...

I think I definitely need to reorganize my webpage again, it's become unwieldy., I'm quite happy with the way it looks, but the php code is sub-ideal. I like the dynamically generated navbar, but I don't quite like how to deal with global stuff that is common to the whole page. i do it, but it's far from elegant... Additionally, my newest goal is to write something for the acm page where people can upload c or c++ code to have it verified for the practice problems we do...

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Log Entry 203

entry #203, Wed, February 23, 2000, 00:41 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

well, today i did more work on that compiler thing... my new code base is now as functional as the old code base that i turned in for the parsing phase...

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Log Entry 202

entry #202, Tue, February 22, 2000, 11:08 (Life in General)

well, i'm in the process of doing laundry... and so since i can't yet head over to fitz, i'm watching daytime tv, which is really quite absurd, but currently this show called "the view" is on, and they showed the audience, which is like 99% women, and for some reason or other they were cheering, but there was this old guy sitting toward the back, looking utterly miserable. i pity the guy. that is all

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Log Entry 201

entry #201, Mon, February 21, 2000, 23:12 (School)

well, today was yet another exciting day (tm). i got my first art history quiz back, got an A-. have decided to start the whole compiler project for cse 443 from scratch, because i'm not at all happy with the state of the current one, the code base we were given is not at all elegant. plus, i think i'm gonna make mine a multi-pass compiler. this semester's theme is after all "engineering: lust for glory"

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Log Entry 200

entry #200, Sun, February 20, 2000, 13:44 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

well, since the afs cache is no longer getting updated, it's time to reboot esgeroth in order to make them updates to my webpage actually show up... oh, well, esgeroth's only got 18 days of uptime...

you know, now that i think about that, that's kinda amazing that i am now at a point in my life where i can use the word "only" when i say "18 days of uptime." unix (and friends like linux) rock

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Log Entry 199

entry #199, Sun, February 20, 2000, 11:32 (School)

alright, well, i finished up the network management lab that's due tomorrow and the day is still young. i did some fun little packet traces, but beyond that the lab was straightforward and rather easy. i think i will now move on to either doing more work on the dynamic programming paper or maybe doing some php coding or maybe some more work on the tm class. so many options, so little caffeine in my blood stream...

oh, and the recursive thingy has now amassed 850 cpu minutes. that's 14 hours and 10 minutes of cpu time!

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Log Entry 198

entry #198, Sun, February 20, 2000, 09:10 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

ok, in that previous entry, whenever i said 600 CPU seconds, I meant 600 CPU minutes. there's a little bit of a difference...

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Log Entry 197

entry #197, Sun, February 20, 2000, 07:30 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

well, apparently dynamic programming is really cool. i implemented a recursive solution to the gone fishing problem, which took about .1 CPU seconds on the small sample input that the dynamic programming solution took 0.01 CPU seconds to solve. big deal. well, on the really huge data set that the dynamic programming solution takes about 4.5 CPU seconds to solve, the recursive solution has been working for about 600 CPU seconds thus far and still does not yet have a solution. nifty. plans for today: do network management lab, finish up paper on dynamic programming, and hold programming team meeting.

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Log Entry 196

entry #196, Sat, February 19, 2000, 18:19 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

i love php. i just implemented a cool feature for my prijks.esgeroth.org pages so that when the navbar on the left is generated (dynamically, of course, i implemented that a while ago) it checks if a variable is set, and if it is, will add a subnavbar to the navbar entry corresponding to the current section of the page being viewed. the code is rather ugly, i'll definitely have to do some major cleaning up at some point, but it's still cool. perhaps I should learn good object-oriented php, and then redesign the entire structure of the site from the bottom up. yes, perhaps i will.

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Log Entry 195

entry #195, Sat, February 19, 2000, 17:06 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Well, I've rewritten my turing machine simulator in a more object-oriented manner. only problem is that it now segfaults. and i'm not in the mood to figure out why. so perhaps i'll spend some time learning a little more about streams.

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Log Entry 194

entry #194, Sat, February 19, 2000, 13:55 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

well, we began moving into the ndlug room last night. quite exciting. we bought shelves and assembled them, and now most our servers are up and running down there. We got a 4-processor sparcstation 330 from curt. supposedly it's not supported by linux, but the install went flawlessly, and it recognizes all four processors. sweetness!

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Log Entry 193

entry #193, Fri, February 18, 2000, 02:44 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

let's see, what have i been up to? i gotta start doing this more frequently.

anyway, today i wrote a makefile that was also a valid c program and compiled itself. kinda pointless. last night i wrote another obfuscated program to print out my name, but this one takes command line parameters... kinda. I also wrote a turing machine simulator that handles multiple tapes, with the number of tapes being determined at runtime. that got finished today, but it still needs some testing. i finished the parser for my compilers class, it was rather simplistic. parsing is kinda fun. rewrote another, simpler, parser from c into c++ for the c++ group meeting tomorrow. did some research on how to create iostream-derived classes, since i want to write a socket stream class. i'm gonna be getting more involved in the whole pim thing, cuz that's definitely cool stuff. Dr. Freeh has given me permission to write a multiple-pass compiler instead of the single-pass one that the class requires, i need to look into that. i'm no longer secretary of the acm chapter, seeing how i'm a senior now and all and won't be eligible next year. read the books of ecclesiastes and judith, due to insomnia not presenting with anything better to do. somehow it seems i've actually accomplished some things over the past few days, but it really doesn't feel like it, i feel rather overwhelmed with work at the moment, not sure why, this is supposed to be an easy semester. insomnia has plagued me all week, and that's been putting me in a less-than-ideal mood.

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Log Entry 192

entry #192, Wed, February 16, 2000, 03:58 (Life in General)

I finally solved that pesky programming contest problem (problem G off the 1999 East-central regional contest), so i'm pretty happy about.

also collected a variety of poems together into an online poetry page: link, since i've found myself actually writing verse again... fun stuff. my two most recent creations are called "octothorpe" and "The folly of the elven general: an interpretive dance in verse form" so they're not all that serious...

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Log Entry 191

entry #191, Sun, February 13, 2000, 23:04 (Life in General)

just got back from mass at Keough. was interesting, their songs were almost, but not quite like the ones i know, so that got confusing at times...

gave a talk on dynamic programming to the acm programming team group today. went ok, tho i suppose i coulda been a little more prepared. set up a page for acm stuff, mainly programming contest stuff...

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Log Entry 190

entry #190, Thu, February 10, 2000, 23:15 (School)

argh. gemini has died yet again. looks like power supply this time... so all the great stuff i had planned to do today didn't happen...
on the other hand, i've got some good reading material on pim.

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Log Entry 189

entry #189, Tue, February 08, 2000, 23:09 (Life in General)

went running again today... i realized that i misused the scale at rolf's last night. so it turns out that instead of weighing 190, i weigh 170. so i'm quite content, since that means i lost 5 pounds since december instead of having gained 15. woohoo! so this whole getting into shape thing is working...

i'm getting into the whole acm programming contest thing again.. i wanna help train a good team for notre dame, since in the long run, it's all about how well notre dame does, because notre dame rox.

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Log Entry 188

entry #188, Mon, February 07, 2000, 23:01 (Sports and Athletics)

argh, went running today for the first time in a long while... was rather painful... i managed to last for 30 minutes tho... and i have no idea how far i ran..

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Log Entry 187

entry #187, Sun, February 06, 2000, 23:13 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

panarchoss has become a real project of sorts. that is, there now exists some code. and plenty of ideas. so now it's just a matter of finding time to write more code. stupid school always getting in the way of coding...

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Log Entry 186

entry #186, Sun, February 06, 2000, 01:41 (Music)

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Log Entry 185

entry #185, Tue, February 01, 2000, 23:01 (Movies)

mmm... watching star treK: the motion picture. what a fun flick. v'ger! (points)

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Log Entry 184

entry #184, Tue, February 01, 2000, 15:41 (Life in General)

i dunno why, but i've been finding myself really tired of late. so i'm taking today off. not having tue/thur classes is nice like that. a phrase that i need to work into conversation more often: "the State's counterfeiting apparatus" ... well, i guess that's more a term than a phrase, but same idea. ban the federal reserve!

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Log Entry 183

entry #183, Sat, January 29, 2000, 21:24 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

well, after a major coding session today, pgtc has arrived at its first usable version: 0.1.0. there's still some features i want to implement, but they can wait... anyway, more info at http://prijks.esgeroth.org/puters/petesoft/pgtc/.

didn't go skiing today, unfortunately, cuz i didn't feel all that well. kinda sucks. but i got stuff done and i saved money, so all's not lost. time to be lazy.

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Log Entry 182

entry #182, Fri, January 28, 2000, 13:24 (Life in General)

argh. progress on pgtc is slow, but hopefully it'll be finished within a few days. saw 'american pie' last night. was rather funny. plans to go skiing in CB over spring break are coming together. also prolly gonna go skiing tomorrow somewhere in michigan or something...

rewrote my solution to 8 queens problem to actually be kinda generic for a change. then translated it into ice9 as a test file for my compilers class.

NDLUG had its first meeting last wednesday. went ok. grad school app is completed and turned in. should probably hear within a two or three weeks...

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Log Entry 181

entry #181, Sat, January 22, 2000, 23:06 (Movies)

well, i just watched part of starship troopers, and was quite disappointed. turned it off halfway through, it disgusted me so much, it totally butchered the book. the only thing the movie and book had in common were the names of some of the characters and the fact that they fought bugs... argh.

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Log Entry 180

entry #180, Tue, January 18, 2000, 11:02 (Life in General)

Well, got back from Crested Butte last sunday night. It's good to be back. This semester is looking to be fun. CB was good. I mainly just slept and watched tv. Went skiing once, which was better than not at all. There wasn't much snow this year, but at least it snowed the night before I went, so I actually got some freshies... went to albuquerque for a couple days to see Oma & Papa. Bought a suit at the mall there, my first suit since first communion. On the flight from Chicago to Denver on the way home I met a woman who works for Red Hat in sales or something. That makes two Red Hat employees I've met, the other one being their CEO who showed up at an ND football game.
In other news, it seems I don't have a roommate. Kinda nice.

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Log Entry 179

entry #179, Sat, December 18, 1999, 12:47 (Music)

operation ivy rocks hardkore. their song 'sound system' has got to be one of my favorites. for your enjoyment:

Sound System

Sound system gonna bring me back up (yeah)
One thing that I can depend on.
Sound system gonna bring me back up (right)
One thing that I can depend on.
Try to describe it to the limit of my ability:
It's there for a second
Then it's given up what it used to be.
Contained in music somehow more than just sound,
This inspiration coming and twisting things around
Because you always know that it's gonna have to go.
You always know that you'll be back in the cold.
Point of departure sublimated in a song
It's always coming to give me that hope for just a second
then it's gone, but!
Sound system gonna bring me back up (right)
One thing that I can depend on.
Sound system gonna bring me back up (yeah)
One thing that I can depend on.
Static pulse inside of music bringing us escape.
It's always temporary, changing nothing in it's wake...
Just a second where we're leaving all this shit behind.
Just a second but it's leaving just this much in mind:
To resist despair, that second makes you see...
To resist despair, because you can't change everything...
To resist despair, in this world is what it is to be free.
Sound system gonna bring me back up (right)
One thing that I can depend on.
Sound system gonna bring me back up (yeah)
One thing that I can depend on.
Wake up turn my box on,
Bust the shade, let the sun in.
Times getting tougher 'bout time to start runnin'
Box in my hand music by my side,
Skankin' to the rhythm of the music by my side.

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Log Entry 178

entry #178, Fri, December 17, 1999, 21:30 (Life in General)

Arun, erm, I mean Santa, got me some kickass op ivy cd. From the inside: "Mastered from 7 year old cassettes. What you hear is what you get." I dig it. We had some 208 goodbye ceremony. It was silly.

Tomorrow I shall be back in good old colorado. I can't wait. I need out of Indiana.

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Log Entry 177

entry #177, Fri, December 17, 1999, 04:03 (Life in General)

so i'm like majorly crushing on some girl for the first time in a long while. it's almost kinda annoying because it's distracting me from work that needs doing.

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Log Entry 176

entry #176, Thu, December 16, 1999, 21:48 (Life in General)

i really like stairs. it's sad that my life has come to the point where i get my adrenaline fix by jumping down stairs. but since i've chosen to dedicate this portion of my life to computer science, i've little room in my schedule to go out and get real adrenaline fixes. so i jump down stairs. stepping on any of bottom four stairs in any set is something done only when doing otherwise would endanger the life of somebody at a lower potential energy (i.e. farther down the stairs than i am). usually i'll jump down the last half of the steps, but from time to time i'll take an entire flight of stairs in one leap. of course, i usually injure my ankle doing that, but that heals within a day or two. i've learned that the key thing is to go up and over, not to go for horizontal momentum, because horizontal momentum will kick my ass at the bottom, seeing how there's usually very little room to manuever. going up stairs is kinda fun too, just because i like physical activity for some odd reason. if i find time, i could start my own workout program: running up and down the stairs in fitz/cushing... and the basement of fitz is huge, i could start running laps down there instead of dealing with the crap music they play at rolfs.

apparently next semester i'll be doing some research into neural networks. that'd be quite cool. this is on top of/after i do some of that turing machine stuff. hopefully i'll come up with some cool software tools...

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Log Entry 175

entry #175, Wed, December 15, 1999, 15:05 (Life in General)

well, automata is done, finals are done, life is good. kinda. i'm really tired and burnt out and the only thing keeping me running is a large amount of caffeine... i can't wait to get home. be able to sleep. tho i'm not looking forward to dropping the caffeine habit. i foresee some major headaches the first few days at home... oh well..

apparently Charles Schulz is retiring. that's kinda sad, but the guy definitely deserves a rest. I guess here's as good a place as any to extend a "thank you" and "get well soon" to the guy. he rocked pretty hardkore.

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Log Entry 174

entry #174, Tue, December 14, 1999, 06:40 (Life in General)

wow, the acm.org digital library is awesome. i could seriously waste a lot of time downloading papers... the membership is definitely worth it.

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Log Entry 173

entry #173, Tue, December 14, 1999, 05:07 (School)

Well, I'm finally getting around to getting an acm membership. The main inspiration to do so is their online archive of journals. good for research and such. and i figure that if i'm the secretary of the notre dame chapter of the acm, i should probably be a member...
gonna try to finish up prog. lang. paper and automata final this morning... soon i can sleep again...

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Log Entry 172

entry #172, Mon, December 13, 1999, 22:45 (School)

well, numerical methods final is behind me. algorithms coming up tomorrow morning. currently i'm hoping that denver can pull out a win against the jaguars...

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Log Entry 171

entry #171, Mon, December 13, 1999, 11:59 (School)

I love the term Runge-Kutta. It offers me what promises to be never-ending amusement. It's just so much fun to say. Runge-Kutta. Runge-Kutta. In general I am a big fan of abbreviations, but I have to make an exception here. Why would anyone want to say "rk method" when they could say "Runge-Kutta method"?

In case you are wondering, Runge-Kutta methods are a class of numerical methods used to solve ordinary differential equations.

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Log Entry 170

entry #170, Mon, December 13, 1999, 05:28 (School)

Nearly finished with Prog. Lang. Final for tomorrow. Studying for numerical methods has gone fairly well thus far. Yet again I am unable to sleep.

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Log Entry 169

entry #169, Sun, December 12, 1999, 23:13 (School)

well, i am currently studying for my numerical methods final. when this is all done, i will have completed my last math class ever. kind of. if i end up going to grad school, i'll probably have to take a graduate numerical methods course, but such a course would be taught within a cse framework, so in that respect, i'm done with math department courses. woohoo!

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Log Entry 168

entry #168, Sun, December 12, 1999, 19:09 (Music)

woohoo, my new aquabats cd arrived yesterday!

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Log Entry 167

entry #167, Sat, December 11, 1999, 23:02 (School)

Well, I'm grading 232 homework again. I wish some of the people would have realized that there is no need to clear a white screen to white.

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Log Entry 166

entry #166, Sat, December 11, 1999, 18:00 (Life in General)

ahh, the benefits of leaving unfinished bottles of mountain dew lying around. I just got a free caffeine hit because apparently some time in the past I didn't feel like finishing a dew. the carbonation's gone, but the caffeine is potent as always...

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Log Entry 165

entry #165, Sat, December 11, 1999, 05:40 (Life in General)

How do I tell Sharon that I do want to keep the Libertarian-Creating Machine running but that at this time I do not have the funds available that this postal card indicates I would need in order to tell her this? Somehow I get the feeling that Sharon wouldn't read the card anyway. Some of her minions will add my contribution to their funds, mark me as "willing to pay," or "gullible," or "mr money-pants." and I will get more mail from Sharon Harris and her amazing Libertarian-Creating Machine.
This LCM, as I shall abbreviate to save time, sounds rather remarkable. I only skimmed through Sharon's letter, but it had some picture of people walking into this big machine, looking kinda disgruntled, and walking out the other end, wearing statue of liberty costumes and looking quite happy indeed. My guess is that the LCM injects its subjects with some variety of euphoric drug. Legalization of drugs is one of the things the Libertarian Party wants, and what better way to convert people to that point of view than to inject into them some euphoric drug that they will want more and more of.
It has been ingrained in my mind through the process of education that drastically changing the subect in the middle of a written work is generally considered poor form. So if you will ignore the fact that I had already drastically changed the subject from the LCM to meta-writing, I will insert into this monologue a global or meta subject which will make the transitions between local subjects smooth and enjoyable. I shall call this global subject foo and will initialize it to be "Sweatpants -- comfort and style" and encourage you to remember as you read that I am very comfy in my sweatpants right now.
At this point you are probably wondering "Why didn't colonial North America have a stable British-like society?" Well, the answer is simple. First, the wide cultural diversity present in North America made stability difficult. Second, there were large amounts of land available, which did not allow for a hierarchical society like that of Great Britain, because anyone unhappy with their position in life could simply move west until they found themselves happy... or dead.
But I would like to finish with the following analogy by Ed Quillen, which, although not relevant, summarizes my point nicely:
"It's like telling Women, 'unless you pay $10 a year to put your name on a list of people who prefer not to be raped, then the law will assume that you are making yourself available.'"

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Log Entry 164

entry #164, Sat, December 11, 1999, 03:27 (Life in General)

Well, I finally have a working gpg key. gotta love encryption.

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Log Entry 163

entry #163, Wed, December 08, 1999, 23:05 (School)

well, finals are definitely beginning to make life interesting. But with any luck I will live to tell the tale of this coming week

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Log Entry 162

entry #162, Tue, December 07, 1999, 16:56 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

well, esgeroth seems to be up and running again.

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Log Entry 161

entry #161, Mon, December 06, 1999, 04:56 (Life in General)

it's always fun when you realize that setting your alarm to go off at noon will allow you to get 7 hours of sleep... and of course noon is a bit late to be getting up when there's class at 9:30... i wonder if i'll make it...

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Log Entry 160

entry #160, Sun, December 05, 1999, 23:03 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

the GUI for the SKI stuff is done. I am currently working on optimizing. I'm battling with deciding when to drop the '()' surrounding an expression. For example, if I am taking the car of (K y) is that K y or is that K? I am pretty sure it should be K, but am running into times when I want it to be K y. I think I need to draw out a tree of what I want to do and then do that. But I'm having way too much fun just hacking at it.
I'm listening to Sublime. They rock. Mucho gusto, me llamo Bradly...

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Log Entry 159

entry #159, Sun, December 05, 1999, 15:38 (Movies)

Saw Bond (The World Is Not Enough) last night. Good Flick. Now it is time to finish up this SKI stuff for programming languages.

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Log Entry 158

entry #158, Fri, December 03, 1999, 23:45 (Sports and Athletics)

woooohooo!!! go ponytails! #5 Irish Women's soccer team beats #1 Santa Clara by a score of 1-0 to advance to the NCAA finals!

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Log Entry 157

entry #157, Fri, December 03, 1999, 23:13 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Notre Dame women's soccer is on TV. It's the NCAA semifinals. ND against Santa Clara, it's currently 0-0. Go Irish.
The SKI Development Suite is starting to become a usable application... kinda fun... Soon I'll have to sit down and write SKIM and G machine simulators... so I wonder how that's gonna turn out...

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Log Entry 156

entry #156, Wed, December 01, 1999, 00:00 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

I am so tired... need more sleep...

scour.net tried to connect to esgeroth's smb service again today. If it happens again, I'm gonna go find somebody to help me write them a really nasty letter. I really don't like the fact that they leach off people's computers without asking. luckily i've got smb access turned off for machines off campus. but still.

the gui frontend to the programming languages final project is making steady progress.

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Log Entry 155

entry #155, Tue, November 30, 1999, 02:05 (Life in General)

Life is good. Dan and I have finished both the lambda calculus to SKI compiler, and a basic SKI interpreter. That is pretty much all the mandatory work for our programming languages final project. So now we have more than a week to do crazy-mad extra credit... we got an A++ with a blue star sticker on the last project, we're hoping for at least an A+++ or two blue stars on this project.
Brian and I finally had to move our running inside. We decided that after the first snow was a good time to do so. I actually weighed myself since they've got scales at Rolf's and I seem to have lost nearly five pounds this semester.
Am currently listening to my CD of greek music. Excellent stuff. Back to algorithms homework.

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Log Entry 154

entry #154, Thu, November 25, 1999, 23:05 (Life in General)

Well, I can only go so long before I feel the need to add something to my webpage which relies on a php/mysql backend. So this time I coded up a cool guestbook. Feel free to sign it.

I spent most of today at Rich Murphy's place for thanksgiving. It was fun. Several CSE and EE grad students were there, and I brought Mamie along. Now I'm just kinda poking around in the undergrad fitz cluster. considering becoming productive...

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Log Entry 153

entry #153, Wed, November 24, 1999, 23:41 (Life in General)

today i "broke" into perk's journal twice... the second time i had figured out how to get the password before he even changed it. now he owes me caffeine. but i showed him how to make it secure. or at least more secure. secure enough that any effort to break into it isn't worth it, since it's only a journal and not some important kinda site.

i discovered today that i'm actually published twice. kinda. my name is on two tech reports from the ND cse department. kinda cool.

i compiled several old versions of my webpage together into a kind of historical tour. kinda neat.

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Log Entry 152

entry #152, Tue, November 23, 1999, 23:02 (School)

well, today the cse department here decided to waive my graduate admission application fee. so that's pretty cool. not much else going on. began work on the SKI machine for programming languages.

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Log Entry 151

entry #151, Mon, November 22, 1999, 03:00 (Movies)

well, today i watched "Y2K: The Movie" and was rather disappointed. I mean, I wasn't expecting it to be factually accurate or exciting or anything, but I was expecting it to be amusing, and it really wasn't. Oh well... at least the united states were saved from disaster at the end of the movie... the fact that apparently sweden was left with a major nuclear meltdown really had no effect on the lives of any of the major characters, so the movie was able to safely end happily.

Mamie proved again how much she rocks by giving me a tape full of Sailor Moon and daria and simpsons. excellent. I taped most of a voyager episode tonite, since my star trek collection hasn't grown any since high school. I've noticed that even though I find the plots to be silly, the "technobabble" to be ridiculous, and the political views to be naive at best, I still love star trek. it entertains me, and does anything else matter?

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Log Entry 150

entry #150, Thu, November 18, 1999, 01:32 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

well, let's see, what have i been up to of late? LTFS is slowly making progress but I keep running into snags. i spent a good deal of today and yesterday figuring out why ls was getting a ENOTDIR error even though the inode it was trying to read was in fact a directory. turned out to be a stupid copy and paste error.. oh well.

spent most of tonite doing programming languages homework and will probably be working on that and algorithms for a while longer...

oh well, all is well, since news radio is on now.

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Log Entry 149

entry #149, Mon, November 15, 1999, 18:23 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

woohoo! the inode cache for ltfslib for the ltfs modules seems to be functional. it's amazing... i've been putting off writing that code for a while, but once i sat down and just started coding it only took an afternoon + half an evening to get done.

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Log Entry 148

entry #148, Sun, November 14, 1999, 19:54 (Life in General)

some of the best advice i've heard in a while:

Don't fool with recombinant DNA technology unless you're really sure you know what you are doing.

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Log Entry 147

entry #147, Sun, November 14, 1999, 18:07 (Life in General)

arun and perk's party which was held last weekend has a webpage. it now has pictures of the party. see it at http://fritz.esgeroth.org/party/.

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Log Entry 146

entry #146, Sun, November 14, 1999, 03:15 (Sports and Athletics)

argh. now i find out that while i was in canada notre dame lost today. now the football team is at 5 and 5. hrmmm...

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Log Entry 145

entry #145, Sun, November 14, 1999, 03:10 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

well, just got back from the acm programing contest in waterloo canada. the stats are currently available here. Brian Barrett, Jeremiah Willcock, and I formed team Notre Dame Irish Blue. although we were in third place for a good percentage of the contest our final ranking ended up being sixth, but that's still pretty good, methinks. either way it was fun. i also got a fancy space age pen out of the deal that supposedly can write underwater and in space and in all sorts of other weird conditions. woohoo!

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Log Entry 144

entry #144, Thu, November 11, 1999, 23:04 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

well, LTFS is doing well. leaving for waterloo, canada tomorrow morning for the programing contest.

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Log Entry 143

entry #143, Mon, November 08, 1999, 00:49 (Sports and Athletics)

well, yesterday we had a game of tackle football... various cse and ee grad students played, as well as brian and i (perk and arun wimped out). the game was tackle football, two completions for a first down, etc... i am now *very* sore. the fact that i went to arun and perk's party last night probably didn't help, since i think i aggrevated the injuries.

notre dame lost to tennessee last night. not unexpected, but still less than ideal.

on the other hand, denver won... i only got to see the first half, but it's good to see the broncos doing stuff right again...

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Log Entry 142

entry #142, Thu, November 04, 1999, 01:19 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

well, the oompi paper is finally done. it shall be technical report #99-14 of the ND CSE department.
other than that, not much is going on...

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Log Entry 141

entry #141, Wed, November 03, 1999, 18:04 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

woohoo! perl is working again!

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Log Entry 140

entry #140, Mon, November 01, 1999, 23:04 (Sports and Athletics)

well, brian and i got rained out tonite... no running... but i guess we've been pretty lucky this semester... this is the first time weather has interfered.

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Log Entry 139

entry #139, Mon, November 01, 1999, 01:06 (Sports and Athletics)

well, just got back from running. brian and i did our regular route in 19:55, which meets our goal of doing it in under 20 minutes by next friday. woohoo! amazingly enough, when i first started running this route at the beginning of the semester it was taking me 30 minutes to do it... wow.

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Log Entry 138

entry #138, Sun, October 31, 1999, 23:19 (Sports and Athletics)

well, notre dame is now ranked again! woohoo! #24 in AP poll. neato.

algorithms is making my life difficult again. mamie brought me a sailor moon tape. broncos lost yet again... that's about all that's going on these days...

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Log Entry 137

entry #137, Sun, October 31, 1999, 04:50 (Life in General)

well, the url i gave for the observer is totally bogus. it is in fact located at www.nd.edu/~observer even tho i could swear that they had an observer.nd.edu site...
oh well... i think it is time to go to sleep... ndlug servers need more maintenance tomorrow...

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Log Entry 136

entry #136, Sun, October 31, 1999, 04:39 (Life in General)

I just submitted the following letter to the editor at the observer:

I would like to share with you a disturbing
observation which I have made over the course of
this semester. I have always appreciated the hard
work and effort which Notre Dame Food Services
puts into ensuring that I have food on my plate.
But a serious oversight has been made by the
management of the Dining Halls. The choice of
colors in the jello desserts made available has
always been a poor one following Notre Dame home
football games. On any regular week day I can
enter the dining hall and choose any color of
jello that I could possibly desire. But on the
weekends only a limited selection is available.
This is fine for normal weekends, but utterly
unacceptable on football Saturdays. After every
home football game I try to have my food match
the love I feel for my school, and in order to
do so, I try to find jello in our school colors:
Gold and Blue. But these colors are never both
available on weekends. Sometimes I can get one
or the other, other times I have to settle for
green, but never have I been able to have
Blue and Gold jello after a home football game.
This is an outrage! I hope whoever is in charge
of jello color selection at the Dining Halls
can see the errors in their ways and correct this
gross oversight.

i feel i have made my contribution to absurdity for today.

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Log Entry 135

entry #135, Sun, October 31, 1999, 04:37 (Travel)

Arun's webpage about the trip to canada we made yesterday is here.

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Log Entry 134

entry #134, Sat, October 30, 1999, 03:39 (Travel)

An exercise in absurdity

Today's entry is gonna be a long one... It's been an interesting day... we just recently decided that we were going to see the Suicide Machines live in detroit today. For future reference, "we" refers to arun, perk, and I.

So, preparations started last night, perk shaved my hair all nice and punkish and stuff. today got ready and we left around noon-ish for detroit. arun and i had some interesting discussions on various methods of doing computer architecture, and on stuff like writing a simple language and compiler that would generate C code out of a description of a turing machine... after several hours of driving, arun found himself starting to doze off, so we pulled over at some rest area... we used the various facilities available, and perk and i met up again at the car thing. after waiting a while for arun, we decided he wasn't showing up of his own will... and then we realized that some person asleep on a bench was actually arun. so we woke him, and perk drove for a while. we got to a taco bell and picked up food and such. i believe this was in the ann arbor area. home of our enemies, the wolverines... we quickly continued on our way to detroit.

so we enter the city of detroit and find ourselves stuck in an area of very slow-moving traffic. a stretch of pavement that took perk and i about 5 minutes to walk the length of took us about 30 minutes to drive. so perk and i talked to some dude who was in a stretch limo stuck in traffic ahead of us and to some punks who were also on their way to suicide machines... they tried to sell us cd's of some local punk band, but since i'm a poor college student i had to say no...

so we finally we make it to saint andrews hall (after concluding that all parking attendants in detroit are indian and that this is probably why arun has a parking attendant obsession) and discover that the concert is sold out... DOH! so we bum around outside for a little while until perk decides he needs to find a bathroom... so we wander around detroit, carefully avoiding red wings fans (there was some sorta hockey game going on, which i believe the red wings eventually lost) until we find some sports bar, at which arun seizes the sole male bathroom and perk, being impatient, enters the women's bathroom, only to allow hilarious antics to ensue... so we head back over to saint andrews hall and enjoy watching punks milling about and listening to the concert we can kinda hear going on inside. eventually we decide we won't be getting in, so we decide to go to canada.

so as i'm writing this i discover that test.ndlug.nd.edu (the sql server) has decided to run out of memory... and www.ndlug.nd.edu is running out of disk space. luckily maintenance is scheduled for tomorrow night.

onwards. after spending more time enjoying wonderful detroit traffic, we make it to the tunnel to canada. there was a definite mass exodus going on... quite amazing... canada seems to be the place to be. so we park at the windsor casino and go inside. amazing. the place is huge-ish. slot machines span into the distance. i wasted two canadian dollars on slot machines before the whole gambling thing grew boring. arun and perk did about the same. we then wandered about the casino for a little while. it was really kind of sad. there were a lot of old women sitting at slot machines, looking utterly unhappy, feeding coin after coin into these slot machines. gambling seems like a very sad addiction... and casinos look like they make a lot of money by taking advantage of people who are not good at math. granted, i am against regulation against ... well ... anything, but i just don't see how the people that run these places can live with themselves... to quote the NOFX song "Perfect Government," which although out of context is in the spirit of what i'm getting at: "How do you sleep at night?"

so next we wandered around the town of windsor, canada. it was entertaining, since i had never been in canada, and since it's been a while since i've been in any kinda city... we found a bar, and entered, and perk and i ordered beers, and once again we were carded... i look very young when i shave ... so i had to deal with a lot of disbelief in my age. oh well. anyway, we play a game of cutthroat at one of the many pool tables in this bar, then i buy a second round of beer (since perk bought the first) and we play two more games of pool. perk won the first, arun the second (by pure luck) and perk won the third.

now we wander around windsor some more, and eventually decide to have pizza at some local (proudly canadian) pizza place. perk claims the water in the toilet at this establishment spun the other way, but it didn't when i tried it. yes, i would like to remind you that we are engineers.

at this point we decide to leave, seeing how we don't want to ruin what had been an excellent time in canada. so we go through the casino one last time, find the car, and are on our way back to the tunnel (after arun nearly gets us lost in residential windsor) and back to the usa and freedom, sweet freedom. we drove pretty much straight back to ND, listening to various punk rock tapes arun had, including a tape of a radio show he did his freshman year. funny stuff.

not much more can be said about today, except perhaps that i used bathrooms in two states and a province ... in two countries ... in two timezones ...

wow.

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Log Entry 133

entry #133, Thu, October 28, 1999, 23:04 (Life in General)

well, i finally picked up my membership card at senior bar... i bought it like in mid september... so that was fun...

turing machines are cool. but you already knew that. and other than that, all i can really report is that i need to learn how ptrace works...

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Log Entry 132

entry #132, Tue, October 26, 1999, 23:47 (Life in General)

notre dame's network has been painfully slow today... stupid oit. oh well...

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Log Entry 131

entry #131, Mon, October 25, 1999, 02:43 (Life in General)

well, classes start tomorrow, and i really should have been asleep a long time ago... ah well... once i get back into my caffeine habit, 6 hours of sleep is all i'll need...

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Log Entry 130

entry #130, Sun, October 24, 1999, 22:19 (Life in General)

i would just like to state that perk is officialy my hero of the day for answering a matlab question that i wasted too much time on trying to figure out for myself...

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Log Entry 129

entry #129, Sun, October 24, 1999, 01:13 (Life in General)

wow. just started looking at the paxmoondi webpage again... i am going to have to reread the constitution, since i have no recollection of what it says...
maybe i should make a nice mysql/php backend ... so that the paxmoondi government (me) can be more automated...
i'll have to look into it...

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Log Entry 128

entry #128, Sat, October 23, 1999, 23:06 (Life in General)

ok, apparently star trek isn't on tonite... i'm beginning to get worried, i need to figure out when star trek plays around here... i need my fix!

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Log Entry 127

entry #127, Sat, October 23, 1999, 16:58 (Life in General)

well, i just finally got around to getting rid of a whole bunch of old clothes that have done nothing but rot in my closet... most of them were way too small and i honestly don't know why i still had them... i now have much more space to keep important stuff... like ramen!

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Log Entry 126

entry #126, Sat, October 23, 1999, 01:46 (Movies)

hmmm... well, the 2.2.13 kernel doesn't seem all that excitingly different from 2.2.10. but esgeroth is happy, so all is well... today i spent a while updating and adding to the linux afs document. played with my webpage a little. brian's parents took perk and i (and brian) out to dinner. mmm... pizza... watched star trek iv, a.k.a. the whale movie. one of three movies in my triumvirate... great flick! (in case you don't know, the triumvirate is the set of three movies that if i could have no other movies, these would be the ones i want. they are Rubin and Ed, Star Trek IV, and Donald in Mathmagic Land)

worked on some acm contest programs... need more practice... especially in the speed area... oh well... time for ramen or something...

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Log Entry 125

entry #125, Thu, October 21, 1999, 23:47 (Life in General)

just spent 4 hours off-campus. got free food, but i think i need to stop leaving my room, context switches are getting harder and harder and i have so little time left...

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Log Entry 124

entry #124, Thu, October 21, 1999, 13:17 (Life in General)

ok, found the address for the previously mentioned "the score" page: fritz.esgeroth.org/score/

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Log Entry 123

entry #123, Thu, October 21, 1999, 03:05 (Life in General)

woohoo! i just got added to "the score" page. i still don't actually know the url of said page, but hey, i've got one point, which is good enough to not be in last place. perk nominated me for this honor after i mocked lisa because baseball sux.

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Log Entry 122

entry #122, Wed, October 20, 1999, 23:06 (Music)

ripped more mp3's... i now have 12 hours of my music collection in convenient electronic form... i have little recollection of anything else happening.

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Log Entry 121

entry #121, Wed, October 20, 1999, 03:38 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

well, went running today for like the first time in 5 days. was sorta painful... ran some errands and was in general productive for the first time since thursday or so... not a bad beginning for fall break. brian and i looked at some problems from past acm programming contests. solved one of them thru the miracles of recursion, saved the rest for some other day...

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Log Entry 120

entry #120, Tue, October 19, 1999, 18:59 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

finished up the kickass php frontend to the journal deal... well, some work can still be done on the search feature, but it kinda works...

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Log Entry 119

entry #119, Tue, October 19, 1999, 02:49 (Life in General)

well, last night i finally finished the cryptonomicon. great book. i definitely wouldn't mind a sequel
i woke up at about 15:00 this afternoon... think i'm getting close to catching up on sleep...
went to Dismas house to cook supper for the people there, so i got a nice free dinner. very excellent... it had been a while since i'd done any sort of community service...

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Log Entry 118

entry #118, Sun, October 17, 1999, 23:01 (Life in General)

argh!! star trek wasn't on tonite.

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Log Entry 117

entry #117, Sun, October 17, 1999, 01:56 (Sports and Athletics)

well, ND just barely beat USC, but we won, so all is well. other than that, i've been fairly lazy today, simply enjoying the opportunity to take it easy for a change...

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Log Entry 116

entry #116, Sat, October 16, 1999, 01:13 (Movies)

hmmm... fall break is here. time to sleep ... woo!
watched mad max. fun movie. perk didn't get it. poor fool.

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Log Entry 115

entry #115, Wed, October 13, 1999, 23:04 (Life in General)

sooo tired... need sleep

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Log Entry 114

entry #114, Tue, October 12, 1999, 23:02 (School)

grading cse 232 assignments today was fun... yeah... did more work on oompi stuff... have algorithms test tomorrow that i'm studying for...

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Log Entry 113

entry #113, Tue, October 12, 1999, 14:59 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

well, got enlightenment 0.16 running. excellent stuff. esgeroth's hard drive (well, the /usr partition) flaked out a bit. had to reboot and do major manual fsck-ing... not fun.

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Log Entry 112

entry #112, Tue, October 12, 1999, 03:52 (Life in General)

wow. i'm actually sore from running today. which means progress is actually being made.

i began reading the ping source code today. interesting stuff. must grok.

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Log Entry 111

entry #111, Mon, October 11, 1999, 23:03 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

newest hobby: gnome stizzuf. plan: write a gnome panel applet to monitor network stuff.

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Log Entry 110

entry #110, Mon, October 11, 1999, 00:43 (School)

just got back from running... fun. wish i understood numerical methods. in my humblest of opinions, numerical methods should be a cse elective for those actually interested in going into scientific computing...

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Log Entry 109

entry #109, Sun, October 10, 1999, 23:40 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

excellent. the journal system has now been updated to be "automatic" -- that is, it now has a database backend and a perl script front end for me to add entries... and soon it will have several php3 front ends for people to view the log thru the web... fun fun fun!!!
in other news, i have three tests next week... not so much fun.

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Log Entry 108

entry #108, Sat, October 09, 1999 (Music)

just returned from running and such and was playing mp3's (using xmms) and i was reminded of when i used a combo of amp and a shell script i wrote in order to get a good random mp3 thing going on. i was reminded because a particular op ivy song came on that had been somehow "favored" by my randomness generator. it didn't get played at a more frequent interval than other songs, but when it did get played it always got played at least twice in a row, usually three times, and sometimes four times. this was a definitely reproducible behaviour, and i've always meant to look into it, but since then i've updated to a different version of awk (which played the key role in said shell script) that no longer works properly with the script. which is one of the reasons i now use xmms and no longer get to witness some of the quirks of pseudo-randomness... oh well.. peace out.

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Log Entry 107

entry #107, Fri, October 08, 1999 (Life in General)

i have just returned from the nd class of 2000 computer science vs. computer engineering keg race. cpeg won, but only because they cheated. =) anyway, they think they're cool, but eventually they're gonna realize that they just can't handle the abstraction!!!

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Log Entry 106

entry #106, Thu, October 07, 1999 (School)

well, i only got 2 hours of sleep last night, but i turned in a kick-ass forth interpreter. today was long tho... two classes, three meetings, and my TA hours in the lab from 7 to 11. of course, between 7 and 9 i was asked barely any questions, but the sophomores managed to keep me busy from 10:30 to 11:30... almost missed news radio! oh well. time for some algorithms and then maybe a little sleep if i'm lucky.

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Log Entry 105

entry #105, Wed, October 06, 1999 (Sports and Athletics)

well, went to the women's soccer game today... ND beat michigan 4-1. go irish! brought my automata book and got a good amount of reading done ... getting away from computers is a good thing from time to time... and what more need i say other than "mmm... ponytails..."

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Log Entry 104

entry #104, Mon, October 04, 1999 (School)

programing languages test tomorrow... woohoo!

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Log Entry 103

entry #103, Sun, October 03, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

set up procmail and such. created an automated mailing system called pap, which is short for "procmail automated pete". it's svelte. for more info, send a mail to [email protected] with a subject line of "pap: help" (without the quotes, of course)

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Log Entry 102

entry #102, Thu, September 30, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

actually began work on the backend of the forth interpreter... woohoo!

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Log Entry 101

entry #101, Wed, September 29, 1999 (School)

spent most of this afternoon grading cse 232 tests... fun!

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Log Entry 100

entry #100, Tue, September 28, 1999 (School)

I think I'm gonna die. Way too tired... oh well. more oompi perf doc work, did various other stuff that i simply can't remember doing. in automata today, which is a 75 minute class, i started work on the automata homework. after 25 minutes of class i had finished the assignment. marty notices this and looks over and sez: "so what're you gonna do for the next 50 minutes?". realizing he had a valid point i got very depressed, for the lecture was boring.

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Log Entry 99

entry #99, Mon, September 27, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

discovered important lesson: numerical methods is much easier to do if i read the instructions correctly. had a good weekend of coding tho.

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Log Entry 98

entry #98, Sat, September 25, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

redid the forth interpreter frontend in c++ using gtk--. it's shaping up well, much better interface and object orientedness is cool. must now watch star trek.

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Log Entry 97

entry #97, Tue, September 21, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

did more design work on ltfs. fixed more stray broken pages on the NDLUG site. will probably be playing this game for a while still..

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Log Entry 96

entry #96, Mon, September 20, 1999 (Life in General)

Well, have done more lam work, broke the NDLUG web site for several hours, got it working again... ND is now 1-3 ... *sigh*

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Log Entry 95

entry #95, Thu, September 16, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

well, most of the gtk frontend for the forth interpreter is done. and it's multithreaded, too!

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Log Entry 94

entry #94, Wed, September 15, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

well, pgp.ndlug.nd.edu crashed hardk0re today. the disk that / was mounted on died. amazingly, the machine kept running, and since the pgp key server depended only on files in /usr/local, which was mounted on a separate disk, it continued to serve. of course, couldn't log in to the box at all. so found new hard drive for / and am reinstalling linux on that. *sigh*

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Log Entry 93

entry #93, Tue, September 14, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

began work on a forth interpreter for cse 431. gonna go all out and give it a gtk front end. woohoo!

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Log Entry 92

entry #92, Sun, September 12, 1999 (Life in General)

mmm... sleep... and algorithms homework... and more running than i've done in weeks...

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Log Entry 91

entry #91, Sat, September 11, 1999 (Life in General)

hrmmm... what the hell happened to the irish today? argh. now we're one and two. oh well. coded more php3 for www.ndlug.nd.edu and got a postcard signed by several ndlug members to send to rasmus at php.net.

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Log Entry 90

entry #90, Fri, September 10, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

got a sparcstation 1 (mmm... old, slow sun hardware) running linux. got ssh to run after major overhauls of the makefile. got pksd to compile. it is now ndlug's pgp key server. fun fun fun.

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Log Entry 89

entry #89, Thu, September 09, 1999 (Life in General)

well, the world didn't blow up, surprisingly enough. but i did get the r00t password to my "new" aix box. fun fun fun.

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Log Entry 88

entry #88, Sun, September 05, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

LTFS work is progressing. I've gotten the whole dlopen thing working, which is sweet. Deadline for having all my data structures figured out is thursday. i think i can do that...

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Log Entry 87

entry #87, Thu, September 02, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

first night of cse232 lab hours. went well. homework they have due tomorrow is easy tho. having all sorts of silly problems with the dlopen stuff, not because i can't do the dlopen stuff and such, but because i'm having all sorts of problems with snprintf... i suck sometimes...

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Log Entry 86

entry #86, Tue, August 31, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

well, NDLUG had it's exciting booth at activities night. we had a giant penguin, three laptops (one of which ran out of batteries before the JACC was opened to the public) and *way* too many fliers. we were begging people to take flyers by the end of the night, just to get rid of them. i also "inherited" an old AIX box, an IBM POWERstation 320, which spends a good 5 minutes cycling through diagnostic codes on an LED panel before even displaying anything to the screen. very cool. i believe it runs on the Power architecture, a precursor to powerpc. i love it.

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Log Entry 85

entry #85, Mon, August 30, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

wow. changing fonts in emacs is hard to do when under pressure. oh well. emacs really isn't the sort of thing that can be learned in a study session. it needs to be learned by coding in it...

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Log Entry 84

entry #84, Sun, August 29, 1999 (Sports and Athletics)

silly broncos lost again today. but that griese guy looked pretty good. maybe brister will shape up too...

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Log Entry 83

entry #83, Thu, August 26, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

have 2.2.12 running. encounted troubles with vmware. filed incident reports.

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Log Entry 82

entry #82, Tue, August 24, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

classes have begun, i think i can finally return to coding. the whole moving into the dorm thing took way too long...

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Log Entry 81

entry #81, Sat, August 21, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

the whole moving into the dorm thing is progressing well. esgeroth is being returned to its natural state...

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Log Entry 80

entry #80, Wed, August 18, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

have several of the important data structures in place, plus the daemon meta structure (stuff like disconnecting from controlling tty, etc) is in place.

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Log Entry 79

entry #79, Sun, August 15, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

pimps has been renamed to ltfs... work is progressing well...

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Log Entry 78

entry #78, Sun, August 08, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

New project: "Pimps" -- a bitching new file system for linux ... pimps stands for pimps is a modular phile system. probably won't be the official name, tho...

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Log Entry 77

entry #77, Sat, July 24, 1999 (Life in General)

woohoo! i'm 21! yay! woohoo! mmm... beer...

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Log Entry 76

entry #76, Wed, July 14, 1999 (School)

circuits is evil.

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Log Entry 75

entry #75, Mon, July 05, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

well, seems the new lam rpm is working well... excellent.

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Log Entry 74

entry #74, Sun, July 04, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

mail.esgeroth.org has finally become the default mx entry for esgeroth.org ... about time!

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Log Entry 73

entry #73, Wed, June 30, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

learned how to make rpm's. not fun. also brian and i got a cool perl thingy going that downloads slashdot articles into our sql server every 30 minutes. fun.

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Log Entry 72

entry #72, Mon, June 28, 1999 (School)

xena died again... we're putting her to rest for good now, i think.

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Log Entry 71

entry #71, Sat, June 26, 1999 (School)

did a lot of EE homework. argh.

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Log Entry 70

entry #70, Fri, June 25, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

hmmm... worked a bit more on xena and medusa-2 today. got the 3.5 afs client for linux to work properly, thanks to some help from bbarrett

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Log Entry 69

entry #69, Thu, June 24, 1999 (School)

three hours straight of theology is gonna start becoming a painful experience, i think. the teacher seems cool, but my attention span simply is not that long ... in fact, i think it's not even a third of that time...

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Log Entry 68

entry #68, Wed, June 23, 1999 (School)

well, classes have begun. exciting...

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Log Entry 67

entry #67, Wed, June 16, 1999 (Life in General)

hmmmm... i don't think i did anything today... cool.

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Log Entry 66

entry #66, Mon, June 14, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

hmmm... just registered esgeroth.org ... stay tuned...

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Log Entry 65

entry #65, Sun, June 13, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

work on yanck is going well. url and command line parsing seems to be in order. basic sockets stuff is working. gonna modularize the heck out of this thing, maybe there can be yanck and yancklib. heheh. working on data structures now. stack, priority queue, and doubly linked list. that should suffice for now.

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Log Entry 64

entry #64, Sat, June 12, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

revived yanck

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Log Entry 63

entry #63, Fri, June 11, 1999 (Movies)

saw Austin Powers: the spy who shagged me. good film, tho not nearly star wars. more lam timings and browsing linux kernel mailing list archives for what might be the cause of all this weirdness...

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Log Entry 62

entry #62, Thu, June 10, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

grrr. spent way too long messing with lamboot suddenly refusing to work.

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Log Entry 61

entry #61, Wed, June 09, 1999 (Movies)

Saw star wars for the sixth time! also got a new job: lsc recycling dude. yay!

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Log Entry 60

entry #60, Tue, June 08, 1999 (Life in General)

more lam tcp/ip performance testing... arun got back. life is back to a more routine, crazy, state of being. good.

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Log Entry 59

entry #59, Mon, June 07, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

working on tracking down some tcp/ip performance problems with lam on linux... also ran more oompi performance tests...

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Log Entry 58

entry #58, Sun, June 06, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

worked on oompi performance tests... tested it for linux...
also, more work on ndlug webspace...

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Log Entry 57

entry #57, Sat, June 05, 1999 (Movies)

saw star wars episode 1 for the fifth time last night.
check it

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Log Entry 56

entry #56, Wed, June 02, 1999 (Movies)

Saw Star Wars Episode 1 for the fourth time today. Yay!

Also played with vmware a bit. Cool stuff...

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Log Entry 55

entry #55, Mon, May 31, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Got logins and user creation working in the php3/mysql thing that we call ndlug web v2.0. well, we don't call it that, but that's what we might call it. if we ever find a need to call it anything at all.

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Log Entry 54

entry #54, Sat, May 29, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Got debian installed on test.ndlug.nd.edu. set up an sql server on it. began creating ndlug databases. coding php3 front end...

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Log Entry 53

entry #53, Fri, May 28, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Worked some on the OOMPI performance paper. Also got the root password for the bee boxes. Unfortunately, hive has root logins disabled, but i can still log into the bee machines remotely. They're pretty screwy. AIX is scary enough as is, and this is AIX on some really weirdly built boxes. Hopefully I'll get this sorted out. They are all already running rc5 though, giving me 13 more boxes each doing 118 kkeys/sec. weeee...

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Log Entry 52

entry #52, Thu, May 27, 1999 (School)

Set up the SSR printer to be on tcp/ip and many other chores...

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Log Entry 51

entry #51, Wed, May 26, 1999 (School)

Well, when I say running, I mean kinda working... but it's getting there. SSR cleaning was yesterday, the hall was filled with goodies and people scavenging. Also, we turned on the cluster of PPC boxen. and it kinda even works! now we just need passwords to them...

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Log Entry 50

entry #50, Tue, May 25, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Brian and I got a box running to serve as another NDLUG server. More work on that tomorrow...

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Log Entry 49

entry #49, Mon, May 24, 1999 (Life in General)

Back from CB for the summer. Got back just in time to help finalize the paper for MonA. fun.

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Log Entry 48

entry #48, Thu, May 06, 1999 (Life in General)

Wow, much work, no updates. Happy Birthday Mom!

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Log Entry 47

entry #47, Fri, April 16, 1999 (School)

Met Dr. Cohn today. Very smart man. My favorite quote: "I don't care is a perfectly valid answer in academic computer science."

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Log Entry 46

entry #46, Thu, April 15, 1999 (Life in General)

so, got your taxes done?
well, spent a lot of today asleep

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Log Entry 45

entry #45, Wed, April 14, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Wrote a static huffman tree maker, and did some more file system stuff, plus debugged some vhdl, and worked on that socket dealy some more...

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Log Entry 44

entry #44, Tue, April 13, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

work on a sockets program for OS, plus more work on tha filesystem.

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Log Entry 43

entry #43, Mon, April 12, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Yup, you guessed it... more work on the filesystem. also more work on the sql stuff.

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Log Entry 42

entry #42, Sun, April 11, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

More work on the filesystem. Also, got some cool stuff working with mysql and php3. Plus some work on other small stuff needing and doing. Oh yeah, and some work on oompi. autoconf is cool...

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Log Entry 41

entry #41, Sat, April 10, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Well, I have the GRE's behind me. yay. I also got a good deal more work done on CSE341fs. My implementation of a hierarchical file system is already functional. Cache is working. So the low level stuff is just about all done. Now I just need to interface it to the high-level function calls...

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Log Entry 40

entry #40, Fri, April 09, 1999 (School)

More fun work on CSE341fs. also, GREs tomorrow... woohoo!

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Log Entry 39

entry #39, Thu, April 08, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Working on my filesystem for OS. mmm... adding hierarchical directory structure and buffer cache, just for the hell of it.

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Log Entry 38

entry #38, Wed, April 07, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Finished the stupid java program for OS. no more java ever! weehoo!

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Log Entry 37

entry #37, Tue, April 06, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Spent much time battling mysql, but now it seems to be working properly. next step: getting it to interface with php3. *sigh*

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Log Entry 36

entry #36, Mon, April 05, 1999 (Life in General)

Another lazy day. Helped install Linux on yet another computer. Lesson learned this time: mwave cards are the spawn of the devil.

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Log Entry 35

entry #35, Sat, April 03, 1999 (Movies)

Went to the Olive Garden to celebrate Mamie's birthday. Fun. Also saw the movie The Matrix. Excellent flick. I recommend it.

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Log Entry 34

entry #34, Thu, March 25, 1999 (Life in General)

decided to give dvorak a try

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Log Entry 33

entry #33, Sun, March 21, 1999 (Life in General)

mmmmm.... sleep is nice...

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Log Entry 32

entry #32, Sat, March 20, 1999 (Movies)

Used signal stuff I figured out to redo monad... again...
saw Wing Commander. Hilarious movie. don't think they'd intended it to be... they didn't show the star wars trailer tho... i was upset...

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Log Entry 31

entry #31, Fri, March 19, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

figured out some neato signal stuff...

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Log Entry 30

entry #30, Thu, March 18, 1999 (School)

survived 3 tests and yet another ndlug meeting

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Log Entry 29

entry #29, Tue, March 16, 1999 (School)

1 test done, 3 to go...

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Log Entry 28

entry #28, Mon, March 15, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Interviewed with CCC for ndlug funds... have a comp arch test tomorrow...

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Log Entry 27

entry #27, Sun, March 14, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Got most of my stuff for NDLUG FAQ v1.1 done. waiting on others.
did some work on os assignment.

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Log Entry 26

entry #26, Sat, March 13, 1999 (School)

Did some more work on various projects for classes. school is more fun when i get to pick what i wanna do...

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Log Entry 25

entry #25, Fri, March 12, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Made monad -k work.

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Log Entry 24

entry #24, Thu, March 11, 1999 (Life in General)

Level 12 on actofwar... also went swimming, and watched some movie by that funny guy, can't remember his name. oh yeah... woody allen.

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Log Entry 23

entry #23, Wed, March 10, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Got afs-aware ssh binaries compiled. did some mona benchmarking...
made level 10 on actofwar with a new character.

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Log Entry 22

entry #22, Tue, March 09, 1999 (Sports and Athletics)

Played a nice game of snow football. Ate some good lasagna. Not much else...

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Log Entry 21

entry #21, Mon, March 08, 1999 (Life in General)

Talked to Rich and Dr. Freeh about things and stuff to do...
picked up more heavy things and put them back down...
got to level 12 on actofwar.

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Log Entry 20

entry #20, Sun, March 07, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Got some more work done on schedulenix... it's coming along nicely...
Also gained several levels on actofwar (actofwar.com 4000)

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Log Entry 19

entry #19, Sat, March 06, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

yes, i suck. yes, i can't update a webpage on a regular basis. leave me alone

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Log Entry 18

entry #18, Tue, February 23, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Made more oompi graphs, and also did some kernel patching. it'd be nice if i had a simple little diff file... *sigh*

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Log Entry 17

entry #17, Sun, February 21, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Update various parts of my webpage

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Log Entry 16

entry #16, Sat, February 20, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Spent most of today at LSC, working on various things. Got a good deal of database program done.

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Log Entry 15

entry #15, Fri, February 19, 1999 (School)

Went to a lecture on Partial Typing... a network theory of trust versus verification, and combining the two.

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Log Entry 14

entry #14, Wed, February 17, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Another NDLUG meeting

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Log Entry 13

entry #13, Sun, February 14, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Wow, ever since I got my palmpilot, there's been little need for this page. anyway, esgeroth is down. *sniff* and perhaps i'll start updating this page again.

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Log Entry 12

entry #12, Wed, February 03, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

NDLUG meeting!

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Log Entry 11

entry #11, Fri, January 15, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Enjoyed my first lsc lunch.
Got www.ndlug.nd.edu fully configured... with much help from squyres. about time this got finished.

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Log Entry 10

entry #10, Thu, January 14, 1999 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Got a usable version of schedulenix working.

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Log Entry 9

entry #9, Sat, December 12, 1998 (Life in General)

Helped Perk install linux on his machine. about time this happened.

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Log Entry 8

entry #8, Fri, December 11, 1998 (School)

Presented cse321 final project. got 440/400. can't complain about that.

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Log Entry 7

entry #7, Wed, December 09, 1998 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Began messing around with dikuMud. fun.

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Log Entry 6

entry #6, Sun, December 06, 1998 (School)

Passed the Red Cross written test! I'm now a certified first responder!

Helped various people with data structures program.

sort of a boring day.

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Log Entry 5

entry #5, Sat, December 05, 1998 (Sports and Athletics)

passed the State of Indiana written exam for first responder. almost there!

played ultimate. i'm very sore.

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Log Entry 4

entry #4, Fri, December 04, 1998 (Travel)

Went to chicago. Got stranded on Indiana Toll Road, because somebody forgot to get gas... we were rescued by a friendly police officer and the toll road maintenance.

did nothing of any cool computer nature. i missed esgeroth tremendously. ;)

saw the movie Brazil. weird. but cool.

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Log Entry 3

entry #3, Thu, December 03, 1998 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Did more work on the CSE321L final project. weee.

More ndlug work:

fixed up the constitution with the recommendation from student activities
fixed all the ssi-html so that hopefully there are no more broken penguins.
got room confirmation from Dr. Freeh, and mailed the list.

woohoo! i passed the first responder practical exam. two more written tests and then i'm certified!

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Log Entry 2

entry #2, Wed, December 02, 1998 (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)

Major ndlug work:

redid ndlug.jpg with better font
made www.lsc.nd.edu/index.html and www/index.html point at the same place.
added (r) to penguin.gif in order to appease the powers-that-be.
mailed announcement about ndlug meeting... mailed Dr. Freeh re room.
html-ified the constitution.

esgeroth got some new software: compiled xemacs and the xpm library.
argh ... went running today... stupid reality.
Saw Enemy of the State... good flick.

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Log Entry 1

entry #1, Tue, December 01, 1998 (School)

For some perverse reason, I woke up at 5 am this morning. Did a silly cse331 assignment, hand-coded a longish test file, posted it for class use. felt oddly productive. something's not right.
Am now officially in CSE499R for next semester. kick ass. still no word from the silly epics people... ah well, maybe i'm not good enough for them.

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