is a blog by Brendan
Fun With Iteration
Jon once proposed that Will Smith produce a franchise of songs in the same vein as “Miami,” ranking each city in order of preference:
“Miami, my second home!”
“Los Angeles, my third home!”
“Dublin, my… 467th home.”
More Fun With Iteration
This morning, TARCing in ten minutes late to my advisor appointment, I managed to correctly get his office extension by picking a known number down the hall and trying each subsequent number.
The day went very well, actually. Object-Oriented Software Development is going to be hard and a lot of fun; AI and Algorithms are going to be hard and… well, basically just hard. I managed to buy my books and a lunch and backpack. Oh! That’s a great excuse for a gimmick, because I was actually buying said backpack for Maria, and I had biked to class and had only one way to carry it. That’s right: for a few hours, mine was a metabackpack.
That biking was the first time I’ve ever actually done a real bike workout, and it was pretty cool. (It’s also longer than I thought; now that I’ve scouted the route, I think I’ll mostly TARC it.) At times I felt like an escapee of TRON, whizzing through lightfields with limitless dexterity. At others, such as when I ran into a chain link fence within five minutes of leaving my apartment, I did not. And at still others, I tried to stop, ha ha, whilst riding with a misaligned brake pad and fifty pounds of new textbooks. The other thing I learned today is “inertia.”
Also! I returned Sumana’s call and ended up talking to Leonard, who was gentle and solar-powered, the way I imagine dimetrodons. I babbled a lot, at one point, I think, engaging in extended discourse on the subject of avocados.
Yeah. I lived through one day, and tomorrow it’s already my weekly Hump Day Vacation, wherein I do nothing but hang out with Ian and get excited about secret projects. Also, try to find a longer CAT5 cable so I can get Yellow Puppy out on the interweb. Ph34r! My… vastly underpowered new computer!
Sumana recommended weeks ago that I read “In the Beginning was the Command Line,” a very long essay by Neal Stephenson about operating systems and Disney World and nuclear weapons. I’d heard of it before, and I like Stephenson a lot, although his direct-address form is so clear and dry that I spend a lot of time wondering if he’s making fun of me.
Anyway, today I got bored at work, and I read it (213k of plain text; I was very bored), and it got me all excited and I went home and dug out my reject iMac and now, a few hours of downloading later, I’m watching it brainwash itself with Yellow Dog Linux. This is way too easy. I want it to hit a snag now, so I won’t be won over.
You hear me? I won’t be won over!
I don’t know why I have such a grudge against Linux. Maybe it’s because my first experience with it was being thrown into the cold water of a bad implementation of Debian–a hacker’s imp, done by my hacker of a first professor, running chill and unfriendly in the basement that was the old Centre CS lab. (The new lab was still in the basement, it just ran Red Hat instead. I was shocked to realize Linux could do 24-bit color.)
Or maybe it’s just because I’ve been using Windows for such a long time, and I hate admitting I was wrong. Bleagh. Oh well.
The install’s 18% done, and I think I’m going to crash soon and let it run while I sleep. In the morning I should just about have a Linux box, as is only fitting for my first day of CS grad school.
The only problem now, really, is figuring out what I’m going to use it for. I’ve got my desktop publishing and image processing pretty well taken care of on this old warhorse (my PII), so I didn’t install any of that, but do I try to set up a friendly ftp server? Learn to write Xwindows apps? Run a MUD? Suggestions are welcome.
Pork-barrel entry-end tagalongs: I baked my first batch of chocolate chip cookies from scratch this evening, waiting for Yellow Dog to download. And they’re GOOD! I’ve been strutting around all night thanks to that. Also, The Devil’s Dictionary does in fact have an RSS feed, and its author, a Mr. Kn____, is apparently some kind of referral-log ninja. And I owe Maria big for letting me download and burn like a gig and a half of computer-geek stuff on her shiny new laptop, since my CD burner is still dead. Thanks, Maria! Get a blog!
I had two fears come true in the last twenty-four hours. This morning, I wasn’t looking, and for the first time ever I got on the wrong bus for work. It took me another three hours just to get back to where I started. I don’t know how late I’ll be here tonight.
And last night my fish finally winged his way to The Land Where Fish Are Eternally Blessed. I don’t really know why–this was about the best his life has ever been. I’ve been changing his water regularly, feeding him once a day, and he hasn’t been moved in weeks.
When he first started acting oddly, Maria and I googled frantically for betta diseases, and checked him for all the symptoms. There was a little while when we thought he had a fungal infection, but we proved ourselves wrong. For all appearances, he was a perfectly healthy fish, except didn’t swim around–he just hovered at the top or sank to the bottom of the bowl. He was still breathing when I left for work yesterday morning, and he wasn’t when I got home.
I never liked the idea of flushing fish, so we gave him a burial, in a small cardboard box lined with paper towels. Maria suggested putting some of his things in with him, which we did: some of the red glass stones from the bottom of his bowl, and the little ceramic tank goblin.
We closed the box, said thank you and goodbye, and slid him into the trash chute. I think it came open on the way down, because it made a lot of noise, like stones hitting the walls. I was proud of this; he went out like a rock star.
He was only a fish, but since I’m a human, I ascribed to him more importance than fish usually get. He was a constant in almost-a-year of rapidly changing roommates. He was a dependent at a time when I very much needed to take care of something, as a means of being okay again myself. This was something Amanda knew, magically, empathically. In three years of gifts, he was the best she ever gave to me. I very nearly named him Hope.
I might get another betta eventually, but not until I have a bigger tank, a heater and a water filter. Some of the stuff I read while I was looking for symptoms the other night made me wonder how he lived this long at all (but then again, I’ve wondered how he lived through a lot of things).
He only started really flaring at a mirror a week and a half ago: he was learning to stand up for himself. When I had loud music on near him, he’d dance to it, out of time. He was quite a lot like me, or what I’d like to be: shy, red, beautiful, effortlessly able to forget.
Coincidentally, my farewell lunch was scheduled for the same day as Emma’s, and my last day would have been the same too–except I’m not leaving after all. I’m going to keep working here part-time, Mondays and Fridays, with class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I’m counting on that break in the middle of the week forcing me to get some work done.
This wasn’t a decision lightly reached. I talked about it to three people I respect a great deal–Sumana, Maria, and (the other) Emma (from GSP 2001)–and finally came around to staying after a lot of thought. This isn’t my dream job, but it’s a good job. My next best option would be a possible opening at The Great Escape, a really neat comic / music store on Bardstown Road, but a) it’d pay less, b) I’d have to have a driver’s license and c) it wouldn’t look nearly as good on my resumé.
So I’m going to get to know the people here a little better, and I’m going to pay my crap-programming dues, and I’ll be able to breathe a little easier financially. I’m going to be putting a big chunk of my pay into a savings account every month, and that account is going to be reserved for exactly one thing–Amtrak, California, Comic Con, Stephen Maria Lisa Will (Ian?) Sumana Leonard Graham next summer. You gotta believe!
I’ve been lucky to have automatic deposit for my paychecks from work, because ever since we moved into the new apartment I’d been kind of worried. Living with DC, my Fifth Third branch was only a block away, but downtown I didn’t know where to find one. Eventually we learned that there was an ATM for my bank at the Kroger, maybe a couple miles away. I figured I’d just have to use that.
Then, a couple nights ago, I was looking out the darkened window of my room and finally realized what I’d been looking at for a week–the bright logo on the skyscraper that is Fifth Third’s regional headquarters, maybe a block away.
It takes me a while to catch on, sometimes, yeah.
I hated “Too Little Too Late” for a long time. After he picked up the album at Sam Goody in what, September?, Jon left it in his stereo most days; since it doubled as an alarm clock, we’d both wake up to that raucous opening riff every morning, puffy and tired and grouchy. I really resented that guitar, and even though I loved the album, I had to skip the first track to listen to it.
That was the Autumn of Sleepovers, when everyone in our little accidental clique ended up in bed together in some kind of combination. It was all very innocent, except when it wasn’t. And it was all very intimate, and a little desperate, in ways we couldn’t see at the time.
We never had any intention of becoming as self-involved as we did, but that’s the way structures function in small, overeducated, post-adolescent Western society. It tightened until it snapped, and after that we were both more free and more disparate.
I never had any intention of going through an experience like that, either, but I did. I learned a lot when I didn’t think I had much left to learn. I came out the other side still angsty, of course, but I’d grown; I’d also learned how to express myself in cartoons and small sentences. A year later I started this journal, in the small warm shelter of a dorm room shared with Jon and Amanda and sometimes Ken, and the urge to write had some of its origin in the fall of 2000.
I listened to Maroon for the first time in months today, which maybe wasn’t the wisest idea. I’m still at the office, and it’s all very vivid now: nostalgia, unfulfillment and ache.
Amanda, Tara, Lauren, Alison, Rachel, Darren, Ken, and most of all Jon: Forgive me this outburst. I miss you. Come back.
Once upon a time there was a king, and his name was David the Flora.
And King David WAS a good king, and his minions, they DIDST love upon him; and David the Flora was well pleased with them.
And his minions did ENJOY his presence; such that at certain times they WERE unable to keep from WRESTING him to the floor; and that at others they DIDST pile themselves upon him.
And there was among these minions ONE whose name was Alison.
And it CAME to pass that on a night in Virginia, David Flora DID bring himself unto Alison; and she held in her hand a long, flexible plastic lily, which she HAD stolen from a restaurant.
And Alison said unto David Flora, in a calm voice: “I’m gonna hit you with this.”
And David Flora DID smile, so that his eyes SEEMED almost to disappear.
And Alison said unto David Flora: “It’s probably gonna hurt.”
And David Flora SMILED again; for he WAS drunk on whiskey.
And Alison DID hit him with the flower, which was like unto a whip; and David Flora FELT greatly hurt.
And Alison DID hit him a second time; and both of these were in the top part of his breast.
And David Flora WAS in incredible pain, and he wept, and he was like unto a woman. And yea, Brendan Adkins did laugh so hard he almost WET himself.
Lord. That WAS so goddamn funny.
The End.
I got about seven hours of sleep last night, and today I feel AMAZING. For the first time in weeks I didn’t fall asleep on the bus in to work, and I have no urge to hide under my desk and nap now. I even want to actually do work more than usual. I honestly can’t remember what it was like to regularly get more than four hours, even on weekends; was it always this good? Man, I must have been spoiled.
I joke about it a lot, but the fact is I’m pretty thoroughly and seriously sleep-deprived, and I’m starting to actually believe it affects my functionality. The problem is that, with travel time added in, I spend almost twelve hours a day preparing for or actually at work. I have one hour in there, during my lunch break, to do anything that doesn’t involve staring at a screen–and of course, when I get home, I do even more of that. I want to do other things, running and drawing and working out and cooking, and I only get from 1800 hrs to whenever I go to bed (ideally, 2200 hrs; realistically, 0200 hrs) for them.
Genuine insomniac Maria will probably blame herself for keeping me up, but it really has little to do with her. It’s been this way all summer, and in fact during most of senior year. Actually, the whole thing probably started junior year; sophomore year was the last time I remember regularly getting eight hours.
Man, this post kind of got away from me. All I meant to do was note that I felt really good after a good night’s sleep. I really am looking forward to school starting, because for the first time in my academic career, I’ll have no classes that start before 1100 hrs.
