Older blog entries for nosinut (starting at number 9)

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.

Ok, things have been crazy this last week.

I ran the Regent Square 5k on Saturday but it sucked. I was completely unprepared and hadn't run any for the past three weeks (hey, I was on vacation). So I guess I should be lucky that I didn't cramp or injure myself embarassingly.

Andrew Gnome builds are progressing nicely. Our hope is to create a complete Gnome environment for andrew here at Carnegie Mellon, maintained by the computer club. Which basically means that we're adding a GNU environment (rebuilding EVERYTHING) for the Solaris boxes. But it will be way cool when it's done, and lots of good karma for the cclub's membership drive.

This morning I went to church for the first time since Easter. The church (the "Ecumenical Church of Light") was definitely non-mainstream sect of Christianity. Anyway, I think it's probably healthy for an atheist such as myself to go to strange churches every now and then. It helps me remember the strengths of religion (which are all too easy to forget) -- the self-empowerment that church-goers receive from being told that they belong and are wanted and are inherently "good", the enhanced social safety net.

School starts tomorrow (woohoo!).

Returned to Pittsburgh. USAir cancelled my flight back, then put me on a non-stop that arrived sooner than the original schedule was due. Go figure.

The beach was fun, lots of good reading done. Finished Henry Miller's Sexus and finally got around to Lolita (Nabokov).

So many incredibly cool announcements the past month! Gnome 2.0 on all Solaris machines, Sun assigning 50 engineers to work on Gnome. Mozilla relicensed to the GPL. Man this is a cool world to live in.

Hm, I wonder what it would be like to work at Sun? That could be slick, a job at Sun hacking Gnome. Well, next semester is resume fun time so I'll see if I get any bites.

Another anatomy test coming up. Just when I thought I could get in a few minutes for Sophomore again, hmf.

Been really busy; the past week has disappeared out from underneath me. Went to Jersey to visit my mother. Spent most of my time there shopping or ssh'd back to Pittsburgh via modem-based AOL connection. Very painful.

Andrew Gnome builds are progressing nicely. Very nicely, in fact. Won't everyone be pleasantly surprised to find out that their favorite desktop environment is now depoted to every campus computer? :)

Most of the hard AFS work was done by John Bucy, I just had to screw around with smake a bit. No, not skeleton make -- shadow make, another obscure Andrew environment utility with inadequate documentation. I've heard rumors of the existance of psmake, smake rewritten in perl.

Flying to Norfolk tomorrow to begin Outer Banks vacation with father & co.

Just drove like a maniac to get back to Pittsburgh from Fairfax, VA. Visited my dad there for the weekend and unpacked all of my books that had been lying in boxes for going on 5 months now. Also had an epiphany: "home" -- a concept which has been sadly uncertain the past few years -- seems to be the place that houses my books, which are the largest John-nostalgia containers around.

Time for a 30-minute essay writing session. This is quality work, folks; you can tell by the hastily misspelled words and information-in-a-list style of writing. PSMT had better appreciate me.

Bought the new Matchbox 20 cd, played mercilessly on repeat for four hours on the road. The first half is much better than the second half, but the whole CD is sadly a step down from their first.

Henry Miller kicks ass. From the first book in the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy:

"As for Kronski, the moment he laid eyes on her he dropped his leer and banter. Even more impressive was his silence. Usually, when I presented him to a female, he became garrulous and made a sort of fluttering noise with his invisible wings."

He makes me laugh.

Listened to Have You Seen Me Lately. Sam Kinison has to be the most distasteful comic ever. Homophobic, misogynistic, pro-drinking-and-driving, loud, arrogant, and generally nasty.

But he can be funny as hell.

"Jesus, God that's the sickest most disgusting joke I've ever seen on stage. Wrong! I can top it." (insert joke about leper whores) "Just when you think it can't get any worse ..." (insert joke about homosexual necrophiliacs) ... and so forth.

The summer has gone by so quickly! It's hard to believe tomorrow is my last day of work.

Speaking of work, LRDC was shut down today because of a water leak. That seems so odd -- that a building can be shut down just like a machine. I suppose it is just a people machine, swallowing them up and grouping them and storing them and then spitting them out at the end of the work day.

Well, we were spat out early today. So I came home and watched Dead Man Walking on DVD. The first time I watched this movie, I remember coming away with that dazed "wow that was a good movie" feeling and thinking that the death penalty was immoral. Maybe I was feeling cranky, but when I watched it today I just thought he got what was coming to him.

I've been reading Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Damn I wish I could write like that.

Pain is the ultimate karma-steroid. Want to jack your empathy for your fellow man? Fail out of school, get a divorce, lose your job. The most soulful people have been through the toughest shit.

It was such a beautiful day today. I got up early to go running -- we ran through South Side to Station Square and then through downtown. It was incredible: perfect sunny-yet-cool weather through deserted streets on a Sunday morning.

But damn I'll be sore tomorrow.

Today I rammed my head against gtk-doc. Three hours and one headache later sophomore internals are gtkdocified. Woo!

Sophomore is now over 6000 lines of code. And it still doesn't actually do anything. :) But the TODO before 0.1 hitlist is now down to 4 measly little items, maybe a few days hacking. Sophomore will be sooo cool one day. Everyone will use it and they'll hire me at HelixCode and girls will flock to me and I'll be rich and famous.

Time to take a break from hacking and go to Matt's party.