Fith-adelphia

My friend Mike called me today, and when he asked what I was doing I said, "I am walking around my favorite city in the world, and it's fucking awesome." Then I went to his work and actually saw him for the first time in about three years.

I know I'm in Philly because I've already been street-harrassed twice.

I went to my favorite record store in the world today.

Have I mentioned I love it here? I fucking love it here.

Philadelphia!

Posting may be sporadic for the next ten days, as I will be in Philly. (EEEEE! Yay! etc.) If you will be in Philly during that time, I fully expect you to call and/or email me.

Book your Cynthia time now, as it's going fast! I am almost completely out of free nights, but I've got a lot of days left.

Attn Code Monkeys

Has anyone played around with this new language called Ruby? I started messing around with it on Christmas Eve, and so far I think it's pretty neat.

Ruby comes built in to OS X, which makes me want to give Steve Jobs a big hug. I have a computer that comes with scripting languages I didn't even know I needed!

This is what grad school has done to me: made me into the kind of girl who can't make it through Christmas without squirreling away in my room and writing code for fun. And, worse, I've become a Mac person. I keep trying to tell people about the awesomeness of the unix kernel, and no one understands. I need an intervention.

The Long Book Disease

After dragging my entire family to see the new Harry Potter movie last night, I have come up with a new theory about what I have decided to call Long Book Disease.

My theory is this: In every book over 500 pages, either everything exciting happens in the last 200 pages, or there is no ending.

For the first part, see: Harry Potter, Mr. Norrel & Jonathon Strange. For the second, see: Infinite Jest, anything by Neal Stephenson.

I have not yet come up with a book that violates my theorem.

The Harry Potter movie, by the way, I find much better paced than the book.

Also

A great eulogy for D. Boon of the Minutemen, by the Get Your War On Guy.

Not one, but two Cynthia connections: The Minutemen are from my hometown (the very town from which I type this message), and the Get Your War On guy went to my college. Yes, that's right, I go places where cool people also once went.

Linky McLinkerton

(I originally typo-ed the title as "Kinky McLinkerton." You can be the judge of that.)

Someone breaks into the house of the "Girl's Gone Wild" creator and forces him to perform demeaning acts on video. Oh, man, that's beautiful. (link via I Blame The Patriarchy)

Unrelated: The Top Ten Weirdest Case Mods. I will bet you ten dollars that the guy who did the number one case mod has never touched a girl's breast.

The Name of the Rose / I Am Dumb

I finished reading Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose today. This is one of those books that I really wish I had read in a class, because I'm pretty sure that at least half of it (namely the crazy Christian half) went completely over my head. Also, I started reading this book sometime last January. So not a quick read.

Overall, I enjoyed it, and I plan on reading more (hopefully more accessible) Eco. But I am left feeling like I should have gotten a lot more out of the book than I actually did. If anyone knows a lot about heresy and such, especially with regard to this book, feel free to let me know.

Have Cat, Will Travel

The cat and I have been in my parents' house in LA since Monday. Sophie, who usually travels extremely well (so well the person in the seat next to me didn't realize I was traveling with a cat on my flight from Philly), was a bit of a yowler on the drive up. I was torn between being really sad ("Awww, my poor kitty hates being shoved into her carrier and taken in the car, and she's all confused and worried!") and sort of happy ("Awww, my kitty loves her home and doesn't want to leave!").

Fortunately, since our arrival in LA, she has quickly adjusted, and is making sure we all know that she is still Queen of Everything. Especially my parents' dog. She is so the boss of the dog. The poor dog keeps approaching her and being all, "Don't you want to play? Can I sniff you please?" and Sophie hisses angrily and the dog slinks away.

The dog seems to have accepted that she can't get within five feet of the cat without being hissed at, and the animals are getting along about as well as can be expected. As for me, I am sleeping and shopping and watching TV and eating a lot of parent food and drinking a lot of parent wine and am generally as content as one can be with a cat as cranky as mine.

Reader Gallery

Check out the awesome squiPods that reader Jann made using my pattern. As far as I know, this is the first time someone has made something using my pattern, and I'm very excited. Also, check out how great those eyebrows are!

Hey Subconscious, Could You At Least Go For Linus Torvald Next Time?

Last night I had a dream in which I got it on with Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation. He's not even attractive.

I miss my sex dreams about indie rockers.

I need to do something not computer science related.

In other tech related news, "Analog Hole" sounds dirty.

At Least I Went Outside

Well, it's official. It's ten days into break and I've turned into a crazy cat-lady hermit. Today, as I was going out the door, I turned to Sophie and said, "Mommy's leaving the house. Ooooh, exciting."

I'm wearing the same clothes I wore yesterday. It doesn't matter, because I didn't leave the house yesterday, and thus no one saw them.

Also, every time I try to go Christmas shopping, I just end up buying myself CDs. So far I've gotten the new Detroit Cobras, the new Silver Jews, and The Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.

Adjusting To Life On The Outside

Have I mentioned how weird it is to go abruptly from working approximately 12 hours a day to working 0 hours a day? I feel vaguely guilty, and yet there is nothing I should be doing. I'm not going to lie to you, it's pretty awesome. Yet also sort of disconcerting.

I've been to school five out of the nine days since my last final. It's like I'm tapering off my school addiction.

Today, however, I haven't even left my house.

Make Out!

I saw Brokeback Mountain tonight. It was actually quite a good movie, and very sad and touching and all of that. But it was hard for me to concentrate because inside my head I was shouting, "Gay cowboys! In love!" over and over again throughout the entire thing.

Perhaps They Won't Kick Me Out, After All

I checked my grades on the web today, and according the internet I got straight As this quarter.

I hereby apologize to everyone I know for being incredibly neurotic and whiney about my grades. I extra apologize if you said something like, "Cynthia, I am sure you will do just fine," and I said something like, "You don't know that! How can you know that?" You were right, I was wrong.

This almost makes all those hours I spent in my office worth it.

Sicky McSickerton

I am sick. I have some sort of cold thing that is resulting in copious amounts of snot and me not getting out of bed until noon. I'm actually not minding too much, since I don't have that much to do and have plenty of time to sleep and drink orange juice. (Time flies when you nap for half of the day.) I'm also very relieved this happened now and not during finals, as I would have had to shoot myself in the head if I felt this way during finals.

In the good news category, I found out I've gotten As in both Compilers and Operating Systems. Now I just have to wait to find out about Computer Architecture.

Linkage

1. Cute Overload. I think the name really says it all.

2. You can order the penis bones of a wide variety of mammals on the internet. Sometimes I think we as a society have gone to far.

Observed While Driving

Driving on PCH today (I was in LA visiting my parents), I passed a store selling reptiles. On its roof was a statue of a tyrannosaurus rex holding the American flag.

On La Jolla Village Drive, I was behind a vehicle with a license plate holder that said, "Silly Boys, Trucks Are For Girls." It was a Honda Civic. I was so confused. Was the driver a boy who felt strongly anti-truck? They were ahead of me, so I couldn't find out.

Geek Tattoos

Many thanks to Feanor for the Geek Tattoo links.

My favorite is this tattoo of the symbolic representation of a Turing machine. So far, all the CSE grad students I've surveyed think that is a fucking rad idea, and would like to get one.

(Don't worry, Mom, I'm not planning to get another tattoo for at least a couple of years. But when I do, you can rest assured it will involve either computers or knitting.)

squiPod Pattern

I've been meaning to do this for like, a year, but here's the squiPod iPod cozy pattern. You can download it as a pdf, or read the rest of it below the cut.

The SquiPod iPod Cozy

Yarn:
Brown Sheep Nature Spun, worsted weight, color 115 Bit of Blue, less than one skein.
Tiny bit of misc black sport weight yarn for eyes.

Needles: Size 4 dpns

Gauge: 5 stitches per inch

Pattern:

Body:
Cast on 32 st.
Join for knitting in the round.
Knit 5 inches of stockinette.

Head:
On the first round, bind off 16 stitches – the stitches on needles 3 & 4.
On the next round, Cast on 16 stitches to replace the stitches you just bound off.

Switch to the following decrease pattern:

Rnd 1 – Needle 1 – k1, k2tog, knit to end of needle
Needle 2 – knit to last 3 stitches, ssk, k 1
Needle 3 – k1, k2tog, knit to end of needle
Needle 4 - knit to last 3 stitches, ssk, k 1

Rnd 2 – knit

Repeat rounds 1 and 2 until 8 stitches remain.
Bind off in purl.

Back flap:
Pick up 16 st above where you cast off for the head.
Knit in stockinette for 2 ¼ inches.
Bind off.

Tentacles:
Sew together the cast-on edge of the body, using back stitch.
Mark with safety pins 4 evenly spaced places on both the back and the front for the legs (8 places total).
At each marker, pick up three stitches and work in I-cord for 2 inches.

Eyes:
For the eyes, I placed the cozy on my iPod, marked the center of the front, and then spaced the eyes so they were each two stitches out from the center.
I duplicate stitched the eyes using the black yarn.

Finishing:

Using sewing thread, sew a snap on the back of the cozy and the wrong side of the back flap, so the cozy can be snapped shut.

Please feel free to ask if you have questions about the pattern, and if anyone makes it, I would love to see pictures of how it turns out.

Born To Be An Indie Geek

Kill Rock Stars is releasing a Tarkio compilation (Tarkio being Colin Meloy's old band) on my birthday. I think I know what you can get me.

She's Crafty Like Squid Have A Lot of Legs

It is squid-themed crafts! Two things that I like, and they are friends!

I am knitting this Squid as soon as I am done with dumb ass Christmas knitting.

Linky Linkerton

Top 10 Weirdest USB drives. These are just awesome. I kind of want all of them. (Except the really small one, which I would immediately lose.)

It's Over

My final yesterday started at 7 pm, and when the final period was over at 10 pm, the professor gave us another ten minutes because most people hadn't finished the test yet.

I actually feel pretty good about it. It was a crazy hard test, but I felt comfortable with all of the material. Also, I'm hoping all of the undergrads fail.

I got home at 10:45 pm, dropped off my bag, hopped in my car, and was drinking with my CS boy posse at 11 pm.

Sometime around 1 am, I was on the beach, drinking cheap champagne out of the bottle and drunkenly dancing around to demonstrate my glee at the quarter ending.

In Case You Were Wondering What I Do With My Time

Today's Schedule:
8:00 - 8:30 am: Ignore the alarm, snuggle with the cat. Bed is warm.
8:30 - 9:45 am : Wake up, shower, make breakfast, eat breakfast, discover the burning smell is due to my forgetting to turn off the burner and turning the egg residue in the frying pan into charcoal.
9:45 - 10:20 am : Walk to the bus stop. Wait for the bus. Take the bus to school. Buy coffee at the coffee cart on the way to my office.
10:20 - 11:20 am : Study for Compilers final.
11:30 - 1:15 pm: Take Compilers final. Harder than the practice final, but not too bad.
1:15 - 1:45 pm: Lunch.
1:45 - 7:30 pm: Study for Computer Architecture final.
7:30 - 8 pm: Dinner.
8 - 9:15 pm: Study for Computer Architecture.
9:15 - 10 pm: Wait for bus. Catch bus. Walk home from bus stop.
10 - 12 am: Hello house! Hello cat! Hello internet!
12 am - indeterminate: The sweet release of sleep.

Tomorrow's Schedule:
8 - 9:15 am: Wake up, etc.
9:15 - 9:45 am: Bus.
9:45 - 7 pm: Study for Computer Architecture.
7 - 10 pm: Computer Architecture final.
10 pm - indeterminate: Hello whiskey!

Hello! It Is Self Pity!

You know the last three years, the ones in which I did not have any finals? I am beginning to think those three years were not so bad. Looking back on it, I am finding myself using words like "fool's paradise" to describe those years.

My final today was hard. And not good. And I am sort of letting it bum me out, which is bad because I need to just get over it and focus on my two finals yet to come.

I am just so frustrated, because if I don't get a B+ I'm going to have to take these classes over, and while I feel like overall I'm learning a lot from my classes, and sort of enjoying them despite the fact that they're super hard, it's not like they're so nice I want to take them twice. And I don't think I'm going to learn more if I have to take them twice. It's just become this huge thing hovering over my head all the time and totally stressing me out. Will I do well enough to pass these classes? And if I don't, what will I do?

And then I get all depressed and ridiculous and I'm like, "I'm going to spend the rest of my life taking the same three classes over and over again and I'm never going to get through them and they're going to kick me out of grad school."

I'm just working so hard. I work all the time, and I try really hard, and my tiny little brain whirs just as fast as it can. And yet there's this very real possibility of failure. And I've never really dealt with that before, and it makes me want to curl up into a little ball and hide from the world.

Better Living Through Chemistry

Have I mentioned how much better my life was before I was required to know that the number of tag bits required for a cache is 32 - log 2 number of entries - log 2 block size in bytes? I'm sure that before this, I was happier, better adjusted, funnier, prettier, and had a shinier coat.

The upside is that a recent study indicates that caffeine helps your liver. Which means that my near constant coffee intake should totally balance out my near constant beer intake. (Also: Rum and cokes should be a zero-sum game.)

Procrastination Nation

• Bought new shoes. (Now my feet will no longer get wet when the ground is moist!)
• Went grocery shopping.
• Did my laundry. (I wasn't even out of underwear.)
• Bought craft books on Amazon. (Because I needed more craft books. Really.)
• Made a quinoa\fake ground beef\bell pepper & onion chili thing for dinner.
• Wrote this list.

Signs of Christmas in Southern California

1. The other day, one of my fellow CSE grad students was wearing a sweater featuring golfing Santas.

2. Wandering around my housing community, I found a house with light-up animatronic deer in front of it.

3. I was recently shanghai-ed from my office and forced to perform in the graduate student skit at the CSE Christmas party. The less said about that, the better.

4. It is rather chilly at night. Sometimes, I wear a sweater even when I am inside the house.

Personally, I am in denial of the existence of any and all winter holidays until my finals are over.

The Compiler Socks

(I realize that it looks like I'm some sort of sock wearing nudist in this photo, but I was wearing a skirt that didn't get included in the photo. You just have to trust me on this.)

I knit these socks on my road trip to Arizona, and in my compiler's class. I finished them up on the last day of class, and I plan to wear them to the final. I feel like wearing hand knit socks is lucky, somehow. I realize that's strange, but I find it comforting to wear things that I make myself, so maybe the socks will give me the edge I need to ace the final.

The yarn is Opal sock yarn in the Flamingo colorway. I bought it on a whim in my new local yarn store, purely because it was pink! pink! pink! I really liked the Opal coloring and pattern, and the fact that the yarn label is in german. (It's "sockenwolle.")

I knit the socks up on size three needles. (My size three needles at this point are a mixture of my three remaining Lantern Moon needles, and two Crystal Palace bamboo needles, and I think the Crystal Palace are .25 mm bigger. So far it seems to be okay, though.) The sock pattern I just sort of made up as I went along, based heavily on my "socks don't have to be perfect, they're just going on your feet" philosophy. These are classic Cynthia fraternal-twin socks.

The cat seems to appreciate them.

Almost Done

My last day of classes was today. I can believe it's over already. (The quarter system is wacky. And by wacky, I mean completely shitty and dumb.) I have finals on the 6th, 7th and 8th, and a group project that needs to be done by Sunday, but is pretty much done already. (I kicked that code's ass today. When I finally got the bug fixed, I threw my arms in the air and shouted, "I win!" and everyone in the office stared at me.)

I can't believe the quarter is almost over. I'm still not really adjusted to being a grad student. It all feels unreal, still.

I just hope I survive finals and don't have to take any of these classes over.