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Dear gentle reader: this blog has been operating continuously since I was a teenager. The writing below is at least a decade old. In that time every molecule of my body has been replaced, along with many foolish ideas and flighty beliefs. I want to keep some of those things public out of an honesty and humility I owe the world. I trust you to carry that context with you.

Argh.

November 10, 2003 /

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.

* Grammar may not actually be easy.

November 9, 2003 /

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.

November 8, 2003 /

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.

November 6, 2003 /

Context. Ken, DC, Ian and I went to see Revolutions last night. One of the previews was for Punisher, which features Thomas Jane kicking many, many butts in various styles and fashions.

Payoff. Ian, on watching the preview: “Brendan, look! They already made a movie about Sigurdur Petursson!”

Condense, condense, condense

November 5, 2003 /

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.”

—Ira Glass