not falling down

Xorph has now been immortalized in (blasphemy and) ink, pixels, three dee, cookie dough, human flesh, hot glass (still can’t believe that), and now, thanks to Maria, a pumpakin. I have the greatest fans ever! There should be a grant for this kind of thing.

I chewed on my mouth light until it started leaking. Tasted awful. I was hoping my tongue would glow in the dark, but it doesn’t. What the hell, man? I’m going to die from glowing poison now and I don’t even get a luminescent tongue!

Kentucky: home to Davy Crockett, birthplace to Abraham Lincoln.

Kentucky: where rests the body of Secretariat, greatest athlete of all time.

Kentucky: where you can work in an office building filled entirely with grownups and walk into a bathroom to find the stall-door assertion that “Tom is A Asshole.”

I know it’s Halloween, but it’s still a little surreal to walk into the break room for a cup of water, see a guy washing his hands, and do a double take when I realize his hands are full of HUMAN EYEBALLS!

Work is tricked out today. It’s pretty ridiculous. There’s your standard decorate-the-office / costume contest, and the offices (most of the floors in this building) have your standard dress-up: lots of spiderwebs, inflatable witches, light-up pumpkins and general knickknackery.

Over here in the software division, though, we have Duygu. Duygu is a competitive swimmer (and recently married to Sevket), and she likes to win contests, so she arranged to organize the decoration of our quadrant…

All our cubes and the entire hallway between cube floor and office walls are swathed in black plastic sheeting, top to bottom (I had to stand on a ladder and tuck it under ceiling tiles). The hallway is festooned with the most glorious fire hazard I’ve ever seen–vertical green and black streamers about every two feet, lit by Christmas lights (all the ceiling panels have been turned off), and neon green spiderwebs in the “entrances” and “exits” to our “world of scary computer bugs.” You have to find doors cut into this sheeting if you want into an office or cube, or in or out of our division. There’s a fairly strong Matrix theme kind of mooshed in (thus the green streamers–they’re lines of code), and one of the walls is covered with printouts of REAL Matrix code, colored with green highlighter and illuminated by a large blacklight so they fluoresce. Everybody’s dressed in all black, and we have white masks and glowstick mouth-lights so we glow inside them. At each corner of the rectangle that this all covers, there are two “scary computers,” one a posterboard “keyboard” and “screen” (also blacklit and covered in Matrix code), the other a cardboard triptych covered in green rope lights and with circuit boards from dead peripherals taped all over it.

I really meant to bring my camera, but I forgot it–I’ll try to get duplicates if anyone else gets pics. I want to be able to prove I’m not making this up.

Update 1454 hrs: We won!

Then again, I’d probably also date George F. Will.

You know, I’d date Condi.

I think there’s a Muse of Incompetency, and the University of Louisville computer system is her masterwork. It is so fiercely and proudly retarded that I eventually gave up on even trying to check my U of L email, and thus missed the opening of spring registration by a week, which means I have to put off taking Software Engineering (basically the course for which I came to grad school) and Compilers again, for a term and a year respectively. Because they’re full.

Since I don’t really know anything about the way scheduling works here (what professors to take, what course numbers mean, et cetera), I ended up feeling like Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer when I tried to put together a schedule without the two classes I’d really counted on taking. Maria, lucky roommate, got to see me in full HATE SMASH TECHNOLOGY mode while making that attempt the other night. She also talked me down from it and told me to go see my advisor, who was actually really helpful considering he didn’t know my name.

So in the spring I’ll have Networks, Evaluations, Internet Application Design (Java whee!) and, after a frighteningly long time, Prob ‘n’ Stat. I really should have taken that last one, like, decades ago, but it wasn’t a requirement and I never had room as a double major.

For a while, Blizzard was looking for somebody to write statistics code for Battle.net–a job I bet I would have loved if I’d ever, well, learned anything about statistics. I mentioned how this made me want to take PnS at Centre to Jon, who laughed in my face and told me that one undergraduate course wouldn’t qualify me anyway.

I’ll show you, Jon. You hear me? Your world frightens and confuses me, but this caveman will show you all.

P.S. Fuck the registrar!

I just got through my third project-based all-nighter this semester. I’m astoundingly stupid for doing this again, but on the other hand, I’m turning into a fucking Java monster.

Variations on state-space search in the Eights Puzzle, if you were wondering.

Maria eats buttered toast with a fork.

Yeah, slow news week.