Code of Death

Oh, kids, this code I am working on, it is killing me. I've discovered a bug that involves an object that I set in one place mysteriously becoming null in another place for no reason I can find - but only sometimes. This code works when I run it with debug lines, and doesn't work without them. Grrrrr, argh, etc.

Have I mentioned that I hate C++?

This Is Why I Haven't Written That Novel Yet

Fussy quotes from a NaNoWriMo email:

The writer Edith Wharton once described novel writing like this:

Yep. The greatest toboggan run in the world is just one week away.

This would be fine if not for the fact that Edith Wharton also wrote Ethan Frome, in which sledding turns out to not be such an awesome idea after all. Is it wrong that I am interpretting this to mean "Writing is really hard and then you and/or your illicit love interest (possibly symbolizing your book) crash into a tree and thus you're trapped in a loveless marriage (possibly symbolizing your day job) forever"? Or does this just indicate my general cynicism and need to over analyze? (Don't answer that.)

Again, Typical

I got to school early this morning so I could make some last minute adjustments to my homework. I got to my office with plenty of time, made some changes to my homework, and saved it. I worked some on another project. I chatted with one of my office-mates about road trips. (He's from Sweden, and looking to check out the US a little before he heads back.) I left for class with plenty of time. I ran into this guy I'd met before at one of the CS grad student bar excursions, and we had a nice chat on my way to class. Right outside class, I ran into my friend Fjola, who was like, "I don't know if I'm going to go to class. I just dropped off my homework, I think I'm heading back to the office."

It was at this moment that I realized I hadn't printed out my homework.

And that's why I got to class twenty minutes late, looking rather frazzled and sweaty. My class had a guest lecture from some guys from the OpenSolaris project today, so I got to actually hand my homework to the professor instead of just putting it in a stack. ("Hi! I'm late! And sweaty! And interrupting lecture! Here's my homework!")

At least no one broke up over it. That I know about.

Typical

The events in this story actually occurred a couple of months ago. Possibly way back in August, before school even started. I went to a housewarming party with one of my roommates, and proceeded to get exceedingly drunk in a very hail-fellow-well-met sort of a way. Also at this party were a gay couple, who we will call S and D, mainly because at this point I have no idea what their names were. My memory gets very blurry as the night wore on, but I have sort of a general feeling of being very new-best-friend with D and laughing and joking and hugging, and also of accidentally pissing off his boyfriend S for some reason.

A couple of days later, I discovered that I had actually done something that had pissed S off to the extent that I was no longer invited to gatherings where he would be present. I had absolutely no idea what I'd done, but I figured the most logical theory given, well, me, was that I had probably made out with D at some point during the night.

A couple of nights ago we were talking about this for some reason, and I actually asked my roommate if I had made out with D. It turns out that not only did I make out with D, but S and D broke up over it.

Apparently, you can not take me anywhere.

It Turns Out You Can Not Go To School On Sunday. Who Knew?

I blew off work today. I was going to go into the office and finish up the homework that's due Tuesday and work on some group projects, but then I had the sudden realization that I didn't want to, and if I didn't do it everything would still work out just fine.

So instead I cleaned the bathroom and tidied up the living room and played Scrabble with my roommate and went grocery shopping and made the fancy baked kind of mac and cheese. (Jill, I put fake bacon on it just for you.) It was everything a Sunday should be.

The Duck

This Thanksgiving, my family told lots of stories about the duck. Apparently, over a period of some years, various members of my family owned not one, but three of these truck/boat hybrids. Many of the duck stories involve run-ins with the police. Like the time they took the duck up the LA River.

At some point in time, virtually my entire extended family was a group of hippies riding around on an amphibious vehicle and taunting the law. This explains everything.

Let's Get Drunk And Take Apart Our Plumbing! Wait, I Already Did.

Wednesday night at around 3 am, I was getting ready to put my significantly intoxicated self to bed. I'm in the bathroom, washing my face, and the little silver ball on my labret piercing unscrews itself, as it occasionally does. And falls down the sink.

You know what's less than fun when you're drunk? Taking apart the u-bend in your pipe so you can fish your piercing jewelry out of it. However, I prevailed, and despite the fact that "3 am drunken plumbing" seems like a really bad idea, there were no major incidents.

However, the stuff in the u-bend? Gross. I doused my piercing in rubbing alcohol before sticking it back in my face.

On a semi-related note, the time we grounded our electricity while high also worked out pretty well.

Thankful

Today I'm having Thanksgiving with the extended pink haired clan for the first time in seven years.

There are a lot of reasons I moved back to Southern California, and at least five of them are pie.

Girls Rock (Except When They Don't)

The notebook I use for my computer architecture class is glittery, has a cartoon of a pink woman on it, and says "girls rock*" across the top of it. Just like that, "girls rock*" with an inexplicable asterisk. I keep thinking that it's a footnote of some sort, like :

"girls rock*"

"*except if they're dumb bitches."

I'm not entirely sure that's what the manufacturers of this product intended.

Wendy Lady

Wendy is visiting me, and last night we celebrated by going out to the bar with a bunch of cs grad students and telling approximately ten billion Oberlin stories, many of which I'm hoping everyone was too drunk to remember. Apparently, our college years were filled with an abnormal number of wacky hijinks compared to everyone else. (Although Paul did tell a story about how he once left a live chicken in someone's room as a prank. We definitely never involved poultry in our winsome japes.)

I told Wendy to kick me if I ended up talking about CS crap, but I managed to restrain myself except to mention that I am totally going to kick this one TA's ass because his homeworks are ruining my life.

What Computer Science Graduate Students Talk About While Drinking

1. The distribution of drinks required vs length of game in the drinking game we are playing. We determine it is a quadratic equation. We also calculate the best and worst case number of drinks.

2. Whether "unique" is binary or not. (I'll admit to starting this one. It doesn't take a modifier, people.) Ordinary Language vs. Prescriptivist Grammar. (Insulting remarks with regard to the French language academy.)

3. Whether "hotness" is binary or not. Whether we'd "hit it" with the girl from Mythbusters. (We would.)

Ankle Stigmata

I wear through my shoes at an absurdly fast rate. I'm not sure why, although it's probably some combination of the fact that I walk an insane amount, buy cheap shoes, and have the tendency to wear the same pair of shoes every day. The shoes I've been wear the most often recently, my black chucks, have reached the stage where I've worn through the sole in several points and now when it's wet my shoes imbibe water.

The other day I was like, "Fine, I have like, fifteen pairs of shoes, I'll just find another pair and wear them until they wear out," and I put on a pair of shoes that for some mysterious reason I had never quite gotten around to wearing and walked out the door.

Halfway to the bus stop, I realized that I probably hadn't been wearing these shoes due to their tendency to rub my ankles raw. Of course, by that time it was too late to go home and change shoes.

Have I mentioned that I walk a crazy amount in my daily life? So by the end of the day I'd developed a bleeding wound about the size of a dime on the back of each ankle, thanks to the Evil Shoes of Doom. And now even when I wear non-evil shoes, they rub against my poor sore ankles.

It's the most annoying kind of wound possible. It's like a burnt tongue. It's not dignified, it's not serious, it doesn't require percoset, it's just there being slightly painful and irritating all day long.

And I still need new shoes.

I'm Not Just The President, I'm Also The Only Member

Me + Iron-On Letters + Friday Night = More Nerdy Fun Than You Can Shake a Stick At

If asked, I plan to claim that Dijkstra is a Norwegian death metal band.

Monkey Attack!

Have I mentioned how totally obsessed I am with this story about Paris Hilton being attacked by her pet monkey? God bless America people, because this is news.

The best part of all of this (other than the monkey clawing her face) is that she then just tied the monkey to a cabinet and spent $4,000 on underwear.

Nerd

For one entire day today, I did not have an Operating Systems group project to work on. Project two was turned in Tuesday, we don't get project three until tomorrow. Today I was free! Free like a bird!

So I worked on my Compilers group project for six hours.

(Today when I saw the words "type casting" in an article, instead of thinking "acting" I thought int i = (int)list.next()) (Also, I was just sort of startled that Safari didn't do automatic parenthesis matching as I type.)

Jonathon Strange & Mr Norrell

Last night I was totally up until two am reading the last 150 pages of Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrell. This book is like a cross between Jane Austin and Harry Potter, and also 780 pages long. I've been reading it before bed for months now, but last night I hit the really super exciting part and couldn't put it down.

Not to post any spoilers or whatever, but for those of you who have read it: Whoa! I did not expect that to happen! Any of that!

Those of you who haven't read it: Dude! Read it now! It is like the opposite of Infinite Jest! And by that, I mean that it is super long, but does not totally suck. Afterwards, you will not want to beat David Foster Wallace about the head and shoulders with a hardback copy of his overly long book! Instead, you will want to find Susanna Clarke and beg her to read you a bed-time story.

The Over-Caffienation Probably Isn't Making Me Any Less Insane, Either

I've been drinking way too much coffee since starting grad school. (Although not all that much. Probably somewhere between two and four cups a day.) Today, I realized why: with coffee, I'm alert, on task, and contribute intelligently to the conversation. Without coffee, I have the attention span of a gnat.

This morning (while caffeinated to the gills), I paid attention during both of my discussion sessions and was slightly overly excited while learning about file systems in unix. I even supplied the correct answer to a question in my Architecture discussion. (Although I did get really fidgety and need to go to the bathroom really badly towards the end.)

This afternoon, sans caffeine, I started making up haiku about my exes after an hour and a half of a meeting in which I was supposed to be familiarizing myself with a code base. During my evening class, I suddenly realized that I hadn't been paying attention for the last three slides. Isn't there a way I can stay on task and still have the option of going to sleep at a reasonable hour?

(A sample haiku about someone who doesn't read the blog:
Catholic, neurotic,
called me on drugs to say
he was gay. Bye, Joe.)

This Weekend in Numbers

Hours Spent At School: 16
Hours Spent Drinking: 15
Hours Spent Sleeping: 10
Hours Spent Knitting: 3
Discoveries of Cat Vomit on My Blankets (while sleeping under them): 1
Rage-ometer Reading: 14.5

Tired

You know that thing they say about grad school, the whole "Study, Sleep, Social Life: Choose Two" thing? Well, I have four hours of sleep that says they're right.

Usually I choose sleep & studying (if I want to make friends, I can knit them), but this weekend it's all drinking, all the time. Unfortunately, this means that while working on my group project today, I was filled with burning rage and all I could think was, "These people are keeping me from napping. I could be napping now. Let's get a move on people, it's nap time!"

Quotes From Several Conversations Amalgamated Into One To Make Me Seem Clever

Paul: How are you?
Me: Well, I haven't killed anyone.
Paul: You know it's a bad day when the upside is not commiting a mortal sin.
Me: Hey, I didn't say that. I just said I hadn't killed anyone.
Paul: Warn me before you start killing, okay?
Me: I can give you rage-ometer updates. Today, the rage-ometer is on six.

(icon maker found via Sarcasmo.)

Bitchslapping the Govenator

Oh, California, you annoy me with your persistent sunniness and beaches (ick! sand!) but then you do something like vote down every single one of the Govenator's propositions, and you win me back. You had me at "Vote No on Prop 73," California.

You will be happy to know that I voted, especially if you are my mother, who called to make sure that I was going to vote. I did get completely lost and disoriented on the way to my polling place, but I eventually found it, and then got a very long lecture on how to vote from a very old man, and then put my vote into a Diebold voting machine. Then I got a sticker. Then left my polling place, and was all, "Oh, I'm sure if I just follow this road, it will curve around and take me to my house." Which was sort of true, but it curved around a lot further down than I would have liked. Also, all of the houses in my development look exactly the same, none of the roads travel in a straight line, and half of the streets are named "Caminito Sonoma."

So, do you guys like to think of the message that California sent Arnold as a "Oh HELL no," or more as a "Oh no you di'int"?

Inside My Head

Between the pirates and the lesbian cheerleaders, the outside world is beginning to look a lot like it does inside my head. It's a little weird.

Yesterday, my friend Ian was wearing a shirt on which there was a drawing of a girl with long dark hair wearing a sort of old fashioned dress, holding a bird in one hand. In her other hand, she's hiding a knife behind her back. The knife has blood dripping off of it. Naturally, we were all discussing what could be going on in this tableau. Someone said, "Why does it have to be bad? Maybe she fought of a cat that was attacking the bird." Ian said, "Maybe the bird is magic, and she fought someone to get it." Paul said, "Maybe she's hungry."

I said, "I think that she's going to slice open the bird and read the future in its entrails."

Apparently, that's not a normal thing to think when presented with that particular stimuli.

Cat; Compilers; Knitting

I thought I would post this gratuitous picture of my cat, just so we all know where we stand in terms on content quality around here.

Dudes, I am taking this Compilers midterm tomorrow, and it is going to kick my ass. I am beginning to wish that I could somehow find it within my soul to care deeply about Top-Down Parsing. Unfortunately, I am finding that the only thing my soul feels parsing theory is a deep and abiding desire for it to go away.

I'm knitting the Leaf Cardigan from the Winter 2003 Intweave Knits. Last night I got to the end of the back of it, and was like, "Huh, these armholes look really short. I'm fairly certain something is wrong here." Sure enough, there was a correction up on the website when I googled it. Unfortunately, the correction didn't really make a ton of sense when taken in context of the pattern as written. So I've given it my best interpretation, but the armholes still seem rather short, and I am torn as to what to do. (I also think my row gauge is off. Actually, all of my gauge might be off.) My original plan was to experimentally block the hell out of the back piece as soon as I was done knitting it, but now I'm torn about whether I should knit it as written, or head off into Knitting Experiment land. Plus, if I head to Knitting Experiment land, I'll presumably have to adjust the front of the sweater as well. Life is pain.

Fair and Balanced

I was out at a bar last night with five other CSE grad students. We were talking about how we missed having a balanced life, and I said, "I feel like my life is still pretty balanced, I just no longer have a social life." I think it's pretty true. I'm still managing to write and knit and read, but in Philly I was going out almost every night of the week, and here I'm lucky if I go out one night a week. I no longer have the energy to do anything except watch Buffy on DVD and knit on most weeknights.

Which is to say, in a very roundabout way, that I apologize for this blog becoming a sort of photo blog of knitting and quiche, but the only other things I have to share with you are insights on Compiler Design, and not even I am all that interested on whether parsers are LR(1) or LL(1).

Also, these words actually came out of my mouth today, "You can park for free on the weekends. It's my favorite part of going to school on Saturday."

Warning: Hung-over Marines

I found this note while cleaning my coffee table this afternoon. It reads, "Warning. There may be three hung-over Marines downstairs."

Pirate Kitten

In lieu of an update, here is a picture of me and Naomi's kitten. (Now a big huge cat!)

Birthday

Happy Birthday to my Daddy, who is very, very old today. (No, really, older than that. No, older. OLD.)

The Days All Blend Together

1. I have to be at school at 10 am tomorrow to work on an Operating Systems project. I didn't go to school on Saturday last week, and it was the first day in two weeks I hadn't been to school. Possibly three weeks. Everything kind of blends together when I never go anywhere that isn't UCSD or my house.

2. I have already started knitting another project from the Jess Hutch booklet. I would tell you about it, but it's Secret Christmas Knitting. You know how every year I totally pretend I'm not going to do Christmas Knitting this year, and people can knit their own damn scarves if they want them, and then come the week before Christmas I'm frantically knitting twenty hats? Yeah, there's pretty much no reason to think it won't be like that again this year. Because I'm against the idea of me doing Christmas Knitting, but I also really want to make stuff for my friends, because they're my friends and they deserve awesome knit stuff.

Pink Haired Travel Plans

I will be in Philadelphia from December 27th to January 5th. Hopefully by then SEPTA will be running again.

(I will get to wear coats and scarves and pink boots and hats! There might be snow! It will be cold! I will get to see my friends! I will eat at Kingdom of the Vegetarians and get a tofu hoagie at Fu Wah and buy cds at Spaceboy and go to the Mutter museum and Walnut Street and South Street and Baltimore Park! Philadelphia, I miss you so!)

In Which I Brag A Little

Well, I've gotten back two out of my three midterms (I haven't taken the third yet).

Operating Systems: I got a 92. The high was 94, and the average was 78.

Computer Architecture: I got an 83. The high was 94. The average was 60. (I actually might end up with an 86 or 87 on this, because I think the TA graded one of the problems wrong.)

Sadly, instead of curving the fuck out of the architecture midterm, and thus saving my totally craptastic grade in that class, the professor has decided so that at the end of the quarter, either your midterm counts for 25 percent and your final counts for 40 percent, or your final counts for 65 percent, whichever is higher. Which, um, really doesn't do much for me, since I have to get a B+ in either the class or on the final, or take the class again.

So, yes, I am feeling a little bit less like I suck at this whole school thing. Unfortunately, since I'm taking all competancy requirements this quarter, I have to get B+s in all of my courses (or their finals) or else repeat them. Have I mentioned how much I hate that rule?

The Adventures of Robot At Home

Someone drank a large coffee before her 6:30 pm midterm last night. (Coffee makes me smart!) Someone was up until 1:30 am last night finishing up her knit robot. Someone possibly should chill out with the obsessive crafting.

This morning, I discovered my knit robot (who I have named Robot) exploring his new home. Photo essay below.

(Don't worry, Robot recovered from his run-in with the Large Furry Beast What Pokes At Robots.)

(Sophie contines to plot.)

As you can see, Robot turned out great (and surprisingly sentient). My seaming job left a lot to be desired, but in my defense, I can't actually remember the last time I had to seam something, I've been so all about the lace and the socks and the small projects for the last year or so. If anyone says anything, I plan to claim that a rabid monkey burst into my apartment, stole the unseamed Robot pieces, and seamed him. And threatened to bite me if I undid his handywork. Yes. That is exactly what happened.