Older blog entries for nosinut (starting at number 18)

Spent most of my day trying to find the zen of Prolog.

On a similar note, I gave blood today for the first time. They use a friggin' gigantic needle. "Have you eaten today?" Yeah, if you count the nestea I drank on the way to class this morning.

Galapagos

Plans are underway to start hacking on a web-based front end to the Evolution libraries. Not that the groupware-app-over-the-web idea hasn't been attempted enough times, but the current open source implementations suck badly. And a lot of the hard work of abstracting away the concept of mail and folders and the entire calendar interface has been done already by HelixCode folks.

The code base will start from mod_virgule, which is pretty damn cool. If you haven't looked at it, you should.

I was going to call this beast Darwin, but someone already took that name.

Anyway, this is all pie-in-the-sky at the moment. I'll put up a tarball somewhere when I have something worth showing.

Thursday, grandparents came to visit. Saturday, parents came to visit. Much fun was had, much good food eaten.

Made a patch for eog to allow it to load arbitrary uris with gnome-vfs, like:

`eog http://www.ruthschris.com/images/steak_darkbg3.jpg`

Mmm, tasty.

Gore came to speak on campus today. About this year's election, I have to say that I'm not really thrilled with either candidate. I can't help but feel that it's a lose-lose situation.

(But please -- don't tell me to vote Nader. The Green Party is a joke. Dismantle the top 500 corporations? People, corporations do a lot of bad things, but they do a lot of good things too. They are the reason we have such a great economy right now. Baby, bath water, and so forth.)

I guess what it comes down to is this: I dislike Gore less. I'm not a believer in "big government", but I fear the consequences if we elect Bush. Three supreme court justices are a matter too important to be left in the hands of a man who doesn't care about human life.

Remember the second debate? "It's going to be hard to punish them any worse after they get put to DEATH." The quote might have been forgivable if he hadn't been smiling when he said it, like he relished the thought. I just think it's incredibly ironic that Bush can be such a stickler for the rules after his bout with cocaine. Daddy's little boy doesn't have to go to jail, but god-durn-it if someone else gets caught they should get the electric chair.

Speaking of irony, how can one party manage to hold so much of it? Life matters deeply when it's an unborn fetus. But adults, if you screw up, you're marched straight to the gas chamber.

The Republican party just seems to have too many factions that are governed by hate instead of understanding.

I sure wish Gore wasn't such a moron.

Glasses is a homophone, and not a homonym.

Or is it the other way around?

15 Oct 2000 (updated 15 Oct 2000 at 19:14 UTC) »

Exams this week. Feh.

Looked a bit at the new control center, but have yet to get it to compile and run without segfaulting.

Ha ha.

Emily posted her summer stories.

My toe hurts.

I sprinted into a wall.

That'll teach me to "nice" the racquetball process to a lower priority than the common_sense process.

8 Oct 2000 (updated 8 Oct 2000 at 23:38 UTC) »
Sunday.

Hiked through Racoon Creek Park today, the leaves were beautiful. Of course, the weather is a bit on the cold side -- 38 degrees F.

A young tree had fallen across the creek. It was very tempting to try to slide down it -- just to make it to the other side. Two things argued against this course of action, however:

1) the water was colder than a witch's tit
2) the tree looked barely thick enough to support my weight

So I decided that there would be no fool-hardy tree crossing for me.

Ben was of a different mindset. He took off his clothes (Emily, apparently, didn't mind) and went three quarters of the way across before falling to the ice water.

Crazy Californian Apple employees.

27 Sep 2000 (updated 28 Sep 2000 at 04:02 UTC) »

Senior year isn't supposed to be this hectic.

Anyway, I'm on my way out to go clothes shopping. I hate clothes shopping. But I need a suit for upcoming interviews. Lockheed Martin is flying me out to DC, so it would probably make a bad impression if I showed up in jeans and a Copyleft GNOME tshirt.

I applied to HelixCode, but they're looking to hire in the near future -- no we'll-hire-you-for-next-May practices like larger companies. Which means if I really want to work there I'll have to ignore the job offers from everyone else and sit on my haunches until next semester.

I've done a lot of thinking lately about where I want to work and what I want to do, and hacking on GNOME full time comes out near the top of the list. So I suppose I should start proving my worth by sending patches. :)

In other news, the first round of exams were this week. Social psych wasn't too bad, and I kicked ass in poetry. (Lots of "fluffy" courses this semester, I'm finishing up a minor in English Studies.)

I've played racquetball every day this week instead of every-other-day, and it has had a remarkably negative impact on the quality of my game. I wish I could insert a chart here, but basically my energy level is monotonically decreasing.

And I'm incredibly jealous: I missed the Great Race (10k) here last weekend because I was visiting my sister for her birthday, and Melissa ran it in 55 minutes. (It's been a goal of mine for practically forever to get my sedentary butt through a 10k in under an hour.)

Well, I think that's enough senseless rambling for one day.

For a few months now people have been sporadically mentioning to me that I should really go read these books. So last night I suspended all real work for six hours to read the first Harry Potter.

And I'd have more to write in this diary entry, but I'm going to go read the second.

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