The secrets of Acid Zen Wonder Paint revealed!
Category: Pulverbatch
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.
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.
Condense, condense, condense
Via Sumana:
“It’s like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that’s written or anything that’s created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity. It’s all tending toward mediocrity in the same way that all atoms are sort of dissipating out toward the expanse of the universe. Everything wants to be mediocre, so what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such a f***ing act of will.”
Me and Stephen? We’re all four Bob the Angry Flower book buddies.
He didn’t say anything about how cool my name is, but he did claim that I a) rock, b) rock and rule, and c) rule. So that was happy.
I just read my favorite girlsarepretty ever. I think the reason I like it so much is it’s like the best parts of GAP, plus choice morsels of Stephen, Leonard and Cody Powell. I want to write like that.
Homestarloween!
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.
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!