is a blog by Brendan
Apparently there was a wave of layoffs and transfers this morning, but I wasn’t one of them. I feel like I dodged a bullet–it’s kind of a financial crunch right now, and I’m not exactly a crucial resource. Then again, there are people within ten feet of me who make my annual pay in a week, so I guess my value still outweighs my cost.
Yeek.
Update 1246 hrs: Okay, two weeks. Still.
I lived through my exams, and I did get an A in the other class, so BAM: school is done for Brendan. This is still weird! I don’t have classes for like a month!
In case you’re still in classes and are wondering if that was intended to make you hate me: yes. Also, “[redacted].” (Hey, [redacted]! Get a blog!)
Today, I wrote the Hardest Query Ever.
That’s all.
(I almost forgot this, pokéblogged yesterday morning at 1106 hrs:)
We have a guest lecturer in AI today–one of the students in the class, who may be the most Mediterranean person I’ve ever met. His opening:
“Hello everybody. My name is Andreas. I am here today to talk about the topic of: rowboats.“
“Robots,” actually. Still the coolest lecture intro ever.
I experienced a surreal and Sumanaesque moment upon the sudden realization, tonight, that I have a LiveJournal! No, wait. I knew that. Stephen gave it to me. What was surreal was planning to set up another account, with the aim of syndicating NFD, and then discovering that a certain kind somebody had already done so!
LiveJournal: A neverending font of generosity. If you’re Brendan.
I really hate remedy medicine. I actually don’t like taking drugs at all, though I make mild use of caffeine and will choke down / vaporize / intravene something if, you know, I’ll die otherwise. But decongestants, antihystamines, painkillers, soporifics… bleagh. I don’t like to think about treating symptoms instead of causes. I can live with symptoms! Fix the root problem!
Nevertheless, living with an iron-willed roommate who happens to be a med student will eventually weaken you on the placebo-effect front. I’ve been taking Robitussin for about 24 hours now, which is why I was functional enough to sit in a VERY COLD ticket booth and run sound for PI Sketch with only one slip-up. It was a good show. The crowd liked it. I touched Yale inappropriately and got to meet Allilea, who differs from most other celebrities in that she’s taller in real life.
Tomorrow I crash hard, and try to get ready for my last homework and last exam on Tuesday. Then Thursday, then finals, and then the semester will be over. This is very weird. Who the hell gets out for finals on December 4th? U of L, that’s who.
Yea, I go to bed to rest my fevered brow, and to cough until the Robitussin kicks in. It’s not like this is unusual, I get sick about once every winter, but I start to worry about my brain health when I notice that I’m subtracting 230 from 1830 and coming up with 1400.
Incidentally, the reason I’m posting at 0230 hrs on a morning when I have no business being up is because I just got back from teching the Project Improv (scripted) show, PI Sketch, available for your viewing ONE NIGHT ONLY in about fourteen hours. Anybody who doesn’t mind a little raunch with their humor should get there between 1830 and 2000 hrs and stay until 2200, as there will be a carnival with a duck pond, and also rock songs and jokes. I’m running sound.
Unrelatedly, I’m sick. And use too many adverbs.
There’s these two people named Sara Baase and Allen Van Gelder, right? And they wrote an algorithms textbook, and basically, fuck them. It must be nice to live in a frilly, golden fantasy world, where everyone has a pony and arrays are indexed from one instead of zero. You know, just like no computer in the world has ever done.
Yeah, I’ve been up for a while. Stupid projects. Last day of classes before MY MOM GETS MARRIED.
I don’t know, is it still cool to like Weekly World News? Are they pre-post-hip or something? I don’t know. I can’t keep up. What I do know is that a couple of years ago I used them as my very first GSP hall theme, including stringing up multiple copies in the stalls for Quiet Reading Time, and it was a smash. I think that’s when I really fell in love with them.
And I know one other thing, which is that even when their headlines are ambiguous, they’re still some of the most refined brilliance commonly available for what, two dollars?
I went upstairs to the thirteenth floor (dun dun DUUNNN) (actually it’s called 14A, so maybe not) to return a borrowed book. Up there they’ve clearly had some personnel cuts, and most of the minicubes are defragged, which leaves a fifteen-foot-wide corridor between two banks of them. There’s exactly one occupied desk on those two banks. My thoughts on noticing this: