The secrets of Acid Zen Wonder Paint revealed!
Month: November 2003
Work has been a tomb this afternoon–those of the developers who aren’t out with new babies are out watching Master and Commander or just avoiding the gloomy weather. I, as one of those unfortunates who’s still paid by the hour, don’t get to sneak out early, and I can’t do anything else on my project right now until somebody who’s gone gets back to me.
I’m kind of stuck for content on here lately, because it’s a strongly routined November so far–time passes quickly, but there’s not a lot of excitement or danger to be had. At work I run queries, wait on those queries, try to fix those queries so they won’t fail again, and repeat; at school I learn useful things, but they’re about as enthralling as you’d expect from a graduate comp sci schedule that’s heavy on algorithms. (Well, I had fun with string search, but I’m not going to write an entry about it.) And on Wednesdays I play Grand Theft Auto.
When I’m twiddling my thumbs waiting for mean ol’ queries to yell at me, though, I keep finding myself at William Wu’s Riddles (via vitanuova). A lot of the riddles there are the kinds of problems I was given as “fun” challenges at Gifted Student stuff when I was younger, and at which I was completely horrible. I find that now, at 22 (and without a competitive atmosphere), I actually consider them fun and worthwhile. I still expend lots of time and effort on solving even the stuff in the easy section, but it’s a great payoff when I get one. The only letdown is that I immediately want to show this off to somebody, but a) that’s lame, they’re easy and b) that kind of defeats the point of a riddle site.
If I get a little more motivation under me, though, I hopefully will be able to reuse some of this knowledge in the next six weeks, as I insanely try to design an RPG system. Those of you nerds who read this but not Crummy: want in?
Man, Blizzard rocks. I didn’t realize they made The Lost Vikings AND BattleChess too, back in the day, under a different name. It doesn’t surprise me, though.
Note: Brendan Adkins and Xorph Conglomerates Ltd. do not in any way endorse the practice of writing code while your wife is giving birth to your daughter. Unless you’re, like, right in the middle of something.
I’ll tell you what’s embarrassing.
What’s embarrassing is watching C-Span and cracking jokes about how the way Jean Chretien talks looks ridiculously, stereotypically French, just like Mike Myers did him on SNL, because he’s only talking out one side of his mouth. And then having your roommate point out that he has Bell’s Palsy.
The Emperor-Priest of Goulash basically trumps the real site with his own three grouphugs. (Did you know grouphug.us doesn’t even HAVE A Google PageRank? Not that I mentioned this.) They’re beautiful.
CONFIDENTIAL TO CODY POWELL: Thanks for giving me something to regurgipost, Your Worship, otherwise I’d have to confess that I had the most boring day in the world. I ate Easy Mac for lunch, that’s how boring it was. And then I watched TV.
Argh.
COMPUTER SCIENCE IS HARD.
I’m trying to grasp the math involved in Fermat’s Little Theorem as an end to understanding the proof of PRIMES Is In P, so okay, more precisely math is hard. So this is really the same complaint I’ve been making since fourth grade. I’m doing it in the interest of my CS education, though, so that’s really that about which I feel the need to complain.
See, grammar is easy.*
Anyway, I wasted like half an hour looking up that thing in the popup text over “Fermat’s Little Theorem,” so I guess I should get back to work.
Allilea rants at length about usage of “fuck.” “Fuck the registrar’s office,” she says, is an appropriate usage. She is correct.
Fiddling with Layla today, I finally (accidentally) broke off the little grey tip on the antenna that allows you to extend / retract it easily. Elapsed Prediction Time: 5 months, 10 days.
Last week, I got out of class and went to the glass-walled bus stop, where somebody had put a shopping cart through one side and left it where it stopped. I wish I’d had my camera, I could have won something. It was a whole story in itself: shelter, cart inside it, pile of safety shards.
Actually that probably wasn’t the whole story, but still.